Thrasymachus

by C. E. M. Joad

In the second place the Bill authorizes grave interference with personal privacy. The officers and inspectors charged with executing its multifarious provisions are given unlimited powers of search, and authorized in certain cases to arrest without warrant. Even if a bill of this kind were to be administered by angels or sages, the opportunities for espionage and surveillance which it bestows would be sufficiently offensive. Since, however, its provisions will in fact be enforced by inspectors and constables drawn from the lower middle classes, who will be only too willing to denounce as flagrant immorality whatever transcends the experience of Clapham, the measure stands revealed as an attempt to endow the herd with increased powers of interference and control over the private lives of those who venture to stand outside it.

Encouragement would also be given to malevolent and offensive persons who wished to do harm to their neighbours by laying information against them. In general, liberty would be diminished, offences multiplied, and the individual rendered more subservient to public opinion than is the case to-day.

Another expression of herd feeling will be a growing tendency to enquire into the private lives of those who hold public appointments. The herd, that is to say, will increasingly demand of those who fill positions of eminence and authority in the land that they shall conform in practice, and profess to conform in belief, to the code of prejudices and preferences which it pretentiously calls its morals. Even to-day, at the end of half a century of individualist thinking, fitness to perform a particular job is one of the least important qualifications in a candidate. What is important is that he shall be a member of a recognized religious sect, such as the Church of England or one of the sub-sects of Nonconformity, that he shall live with one wife, avoid divorcing and being divorced, and display studiously temperate habits. He must also exercise discretion in his public utterances, be judiciously but not violently patriotic in his sentiments, eschew extreme views in politics, refrain from supporting unpopular causes, and on all occasions give the herd the answers it expects. Thus in Wales it is difficult if not impossible for a man to hold any public appointment unless he is a member of a particular chapel, and at English Universities many teaching posts are reserved for those in Holy Orders. Given the capacity for reflecting the opinions and flattering the prejudices of the many, men of acknowledged incompetence may successfully aspire to the most responsible posts. There is indeed no post in the country a man cannot hold with credit, if he can only succeed in holding his tongue.

Conformity rather than intelligence is more particularly required of those who seek to instruct the young. A man’s ability to demonstrate the differential calculus or impart the facts of history would not, it is true, appear to be lessened by his having passed through the divorce court. Yet there is no doubt that such an event will cast a blight upon his career as a teacher. People are too satisfied with their own ways of thought and habits of conduct to wish for their children anything better than that they should think and act as they do themselves. What is demanded of the teacher, therefore, is that he should transmit to the children the same beliefs as those which are held by their parents. He must hold up to their admiration those things which their parents consider to be admirable, such as God, vaccination, monogamy, the Treaty of Versailles and the capitalist system, and speak with scorn and contempt of Bolshevism, atheism, Germany, free love and agitators, whom parents consider to be evil. When the teacher does this he is what is called a safe man. He inspires confidence and obtains preferment. Provided, in short, that he guarantees not to teach anything new, his capacity to teach anything at all is not seriously questioned. And, since the best minds of every generation, being in advance of their time, would prefer not to teach at all rather than to perpetuate the dogmas in which they have ceased to believe, the successful teacher is not always remarkable for intelligence.

In any event, whether intelligent or not, he must conform, and will have to do so increasingly. The herd morality which drove a statesman of the calibre of Dilke out of public life because it disapproved of his private life, is, after a temporary relapse, increasing in strength, and in the immediate future nobody who does not profess the morality to which the middle classes adhere will stand any chance of public office. If a man’s actions belie his professions he must be careful to conceal them.

One of the results of this development will be an increase in hypocrisy. To-day the agnostic don at Oxford worships regularly in the College Chapel, and men will be driven increasingly to give lip-service to ideals and shibboleths which in their hearts they despise. In general, the gulf which separates public profession and private practice, a gulf which has made England a byword for hypocrisy, will grow wider. Driven to profess the beliefs of shopkeepers, men will rely increasingly upon their private judgment as a sanction for their conduct. Hence the attempt to impose a uniform standard based upon an obsolete morality upon our public men may lead to a revival of that unfashionable organ the private conscience, and those from whom an unwilling conformity is exacted in public, will insist that they and they alone are the judges of what is right and wrong in private.

I have taken the Offences against the Person Bill as a typical instance of the kind of legislation in which the new Puritanism may express itself. It indicates a return to the Greek conception that men can be made good by Act of Parliament. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this conception was regarded with disfavour. As the result of the individualist thinking of the preceding fifty years, the idea that there was one good life which all men ought to lead had been abandoned. The individualist view was that there were different kinds of good lives for different men, as many in fact as there were men to live them, and that it was, therefore, impracticable to establish by law a positive standard of ethical conduct to which all must conform. In so far as law had any function in the matter, it was, by prohibiting violence and the cruder forms of robbery, to guarantee to the community a certain background of order without which no good life was possible. Since the mere process of obeying the law did not make a man a good man but only restrained him from certain unappetizing kinds of vice by which no decent upper or middle class citizen was attracted, it followed that the function of the law was negative merely; its object was to prevent citizens from so conducting themselves that nobody could be virtuous, not to define virtue or to tell men how to attain it. The definition of virtue was a matter for the individual’s insight, and the attainment of virtue a matter for the individual’s conscience; provided, therefore, that a man abstained from the grosser forms of anti-social conduct which were prohibited by law, the question of what he ought to do, and what refrain from doing, was one which he alone could decide.

I believe that this nineteenth and early-twentieth century libertarianism in matters of thought and conduct is decreasing and will continue to decrease. The cult of uniformity is hostile to the liberty of the individual, and in order to secure the performance of conduct of which the herd approves, the legislature is likely to assume a more positive control over men’s lives than has been customary in the past. We shall, in other words, revert to the conception of one good life for all men, or rather for all poor men, a good life which it is conceived to be the business of the State and of public opinion to promote.

Summing up, therefore, we may predict the immediate future somewhat as follows: Coming into contact with the increased facilities for freedom of action to which reference has been made, the new itch to regulate men’s lives will lead to persecution and heresy-hunting. Men will be hounded out of public life because of their private morals, and acceptance of certain habits of belief and codes of conduct will be made indispensable to the holding of public appointments. Instead of choosing for a post the man who is best qualified to do the job, we shall choose the man who most nearly reflects the habits of thought and conduct of the selection board, that is to say, of the herd who elected the selection board to represent them. The growth of Puritanism will bring a growth in hypocrisy, a fruitful and invaluable offshoot of Puritanism. There will be an even greater disparity between men’s practices and their professions than there is at present, and their professions will tend increasingly to condemn their practices. The world, in short will become a paradise for the average man and a hell for the exceptional one.

So much we may expect during the next fifty years. If, however, I am asked which of the two opposing tendencies I have attempted to describe in this book will ultimately prevail, my answer is that it will not be the bourgeois Puritanism whose apparent victory I foresee in the immediate future. Nor, indeed, do I think that that victory will be more than apparent.