Professor William James asserts that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which civilization suffers, paralyzing their ideal force. “Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation.”[116]
If these considerations do not keep us from greed, it is because most of us have only flashes of the higher ambition. We may believe that we could reconcile ourselves to poverty if we had to—even that it might be good for us—but we do our best to avoid it.
For the ill-paid classes, certainly, the desire for money does not mean “materialism” in any reproachful sense, but is chiefly the means by which they hope to realize, first, health and decency, and then a better chance at the higher life—books, leisure, education and refinement. They are necessarily materialized in a certain sense by the fact that their most strenuous thought must be fixed upon work and product in relation to material needs. It is in those who are already well-to-do that the preoccupation with money is most degrading—as not justified by primary wants. “Meat is sweetest when it is nearest the bone,” and it is good to long and strive for money when you have an urgent human need for it; but to do this for accumulation, luxury, or a remote security is not wholesome. This cold-blooded storing up in banks and tin boxes is perilous to the soul, often becoming a kind of secret vice, a disease of narrow minds, feeble imaginations and contracted living.[117]
In modern life, then, and in a country without formal privilege, the question of classes is practically one of wealth, and of occupation considered in relation to wealth; the reason being not that this distinction really dominates life, but that it is the focus of the more definite and urgent class controversies. Other aims are pursued in peace; wealth, because it is material and appropriable, involves conflict. We may then accept the economic standpoint for this purpose without at all agreeing with those who regard it as more fundamental than others.[118]
FOOTNOTES:
[115] Walden, 89, 91.
[116] The Varieties of Religious Experience, 368.
[117] I will not here discuss the question just how far it serves a useful purpose in the economic system.
[118] If the reader cares to know my opinion of that doctrine—sometimes called the economic interpretation of history—which teaches that economic conditions are in a peculiar sense the primary and determining factor in society, he will find it in the following passages:
“The organic view of history [which I hold] denies that any factor or factors are more ultimate than others. Indeed it denies that the so-called factors—such as the mind, the various institutions, the physical environment and so on—have any real existence apart from a total life in which all share in the same way that the members of the body share in the life of the animal organism. It looks upon mind and matter, soil, climate, flora, fauna, thought, language and institutions as aspects of a single rounded whole, one total growth. We may concentrate attention upon some one of these things, but this concentration should never go so far as to overlook the subordination of each to the whole, or to conceive one as precedent to others.”