How the economic half of the problem will be dealt with.
The labour problem involves two distinct questions, one of them relating to a conflict of interests, the other to a conflict of intentions. We believe that the strictly economic problem will one day be solved by a simultaneous increase in the difficulty of the industrial situation and in the knowledge of how to deal with it, which will lead the well-to-do classes to perceive that by endeavouring to save everything they are running the risk of losing everything, and will lead the lower classes to perceive that by endeavouring to obtain too much they are running the risk of gaining nothing and of seeing society’s coveted wealth melt away before their eyes, and that dividing capital is like dividing a germ, and results in sterilization. The remedy for socialism lies in science—even though the first effect of a wider dissemination of knowledge would be to increase the strength of socialism. Out of the very intensity of the crisis the solution will come. The moment different interests are completely conscious of their real points of antagonism, they are close upon a compromise. War is never the result of anything but an incomplete knowledge of the comparative powers and respective interests of the opposing parties; people fight when they can no longer calculate, and the march of armies and pitched battles may themselves be regarded as a sort of higher arithmetic.
The human half will settle itself.
When it has once come to be understood that there is no fundamental conflict of interest between the classes, the sense of antagonism between them will gradually diminish. The most reassuring promise of a complete solution of the industrial problem lies in human sociality. All asperity of temper in the matter will be smoothed away by the incontestable growth of sympathy and altruism.
Love and admiration the panacea for pessimism.
If sympathy, love, labour in common, recreation in common, sometimes seem to augment the pains of life, they more than proportionately augment the joys. Moreover, as is well known, to share trouble is to lessen it; sympathy is itself a pleasure; poets know it, dramatic poets in especial; even when pity is accompanied by a lively realization of another’s pain it nevertheless induces love, and to that extent still preserves a certain charm. That creature suffers, therefore I love it; and there are infinite joys in love; it, multiplies the value of life in one’s own eyes, by giving it a value in the eyes of other people, a social value, which is in the best sense a religious value. Man, Wordsworth says, lives in admiration, hope, and love, but he who possesses admiration and love will always possess an abundance of hope. He who loves and admires will possess the lightness of heart that carries one through the day without fatigue. Love and admiration are the great remedies of despair. Love, and you will wish to live. Whatever may be the value of life from the point of view of sensibility—knowledge and action, and principally action in behalf of another, will always constitute reasons for living. And it is mainly one’s reasons for living that justify one’s tenacity of life.
Pessimism an optical illusion.
Pessimism sees only the sensitive side of life; but life presents also an active and an intellectual side; over and above the agreeable there exist the great, the beautiful, and the generous. Even from the mere point of view of pleasure and pain, pessimism is based on calculations which are as open to discussion as Bentham’s hedonistic arithmetic. We have seen elsewhere[141] that happiness and unhappiness are ex post facto mental constructions that are based upon a multitude of optical illusions. Even the disillusionment of pessimism is itself a sort of an illusion.
Leopardi hit upon an ingenious empirical argument in favour of pessimism in his dialogue between an almanac seller and a passer-by:
Almanac Seller. Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars! Who wants new almanacs?