On Compromise

by John Morley

THE REALISATION OF OPINION.

A person who takes the trouble to form his own opinions and beliefs will feel that he owes no responsibility to the majority for his conclusions. If he is a genuine lover of truth, if he is inspired by the divine passion for seeing things as they are, and a divine abhorrence of holding ideas which do not conform to the facts, he will be wholly independent of the approval or assent of the persons around him. When he proceeds to apply his beliefs in the practical conduct of life, the position is different. There are now good reasons why his attitude should be in some ways less inflexible. The society in which he is placed is a very ancient and composite growth. The people from whom he dissents have not come by their opinions, customs, and institutions by a process of mere haphazard. These opinions and customs all had their origin in a certain real or supposed fitness. They have a certain depth of root in the lives of a proportion of the existing generation. Their fitness for satisfying human needs may have vanished, and their congruity with one another may have come to an end. That is only one side of the truth. The most zealous propagandism cannot penetrate to them. The quality of bearing to be transplanted from one kind of soil and climate to another is not very common, and it is far from being inexhaustible even where it exists.

In common language we speak of a generation as something possessed of a kind of exact unity, with all its parts and members one and homogeneous. Yet very plainly it is not this. It is a whole, but a whole in a state of constant flux. Its factors and elements are eternally shifting. It is not one, but many generations. Each of the seven ages of man is neighbour to all the rest. The column of the veterans is already staggering over into the last abyss, while the column of the newest recruits is forming with all its nameless and uncounted hopes. To each its tradition, its tendency, its possibilities. Only a proportion of each in one society can have nerve enough to grasp the banner of a new truth, and endurance enough to bear it along rugged and untrodden ways.

And then, as we have said, one must remember the stuff of which life is made. One must consider what an overwhelming preponderance of the most tenacious energies and most concentrated interests of a society must be absorbed between material cares and the solicitude of the affections. It is obviously unreasonable to lose patience and quarrel with one's time, because it is tardy in throwing off its institutions and beliefs, and slow to achieve the transformation which is the problem in front of it. Men and women have to live. The task for most of them is arduous enough to make them well pleased with even such imperfect shelter as they find in the use and wont of daily existence. To insist on a whole community being made at once to submit to the reign of new practices and new ideas, which have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced speculative intelligence of the time,—this, even if it were a possible process, would do much to make life impracticable and to hurry on social dissolution.

'It cannot be too emphatically asserted,' as has been said by one of the most influential of modern thinkers, 'that this policy of compromise, alike in institutions, in actions, and in beliefs, which especially characterises English life, is a policy essential to a society going through the transitions caused by continued growth and development. Ideas and institutions proper to a past social state, but incongruous with the new social state that has grown out of it, surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with these new ideas and institutions—necessarily furnish elements of contradiction in men's thoughts and deeds. And yet, as for the carrying on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not ready, this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accompaniment of a normal development.'[^[27]]

Yet we must not press this argument, and the state of feeling that belongs to it, further than they may be fairly made to go. The danger in most natures lies on this side, for on this side our love of ease works, and our prejudices. The writer in the passage we have just quoted is describing compromise as a natural state of things, the resultant of divergent forces. He is not professing to define its conditions or limits as a practical duty. Nor is there anything in his words, or in the doctrine of social evolution of which he is the most elaborate and systematic expounder, to favour that deliberate sacrifice of truth, either in search or in expression, against which our two previous chapters were meant to protest.[^[28]] When Mr. Spencer talks of a new social state establishing its own ideas, of course he means, and can only mean, that men and women establish their own ideas, and to do that, it is obvious that they must at one time or another have conceived them without any special friendliness of reference to the old ideas, which they were in the fulness of time to supersede. Still less, of course, can a new social state ever establish its ideas, unless the persons who hold them confess them openly, and give to them an honest and effective adherence.

Every discussion of the more fundamental principles of conduct must contain, expressly or by implication, some general theory of the nature and constitution of the social union. Let us state in a few words that which seems to command the greatest amount both of direct and analogical evidence in our time. It is perhaps all the more important to discuss our subject with immediate and express reference to this theory, because it has become in some minds a plea for a kind of philosophic indifference towards any policy of Thorough, as well as an excuse for systematic abstention from vigorous and downright courses of action.

A progressive society is now constantly and justly compared to a growing organism. Its vitality in this aspect consists of a series of changes in ideas and institutions. These changes arise spontaneously from the operation of the whole body of social conditions, external and internal. The understanding and the affections and desires are always acting on the domestic, political, and economic ordering. They influence the religious sentiment. They touch relations with societies outside. In turn they are constantly being acted on by all these elements. In a society progressing in a normal and uninterrupted course, this play and interaction is the sign and essence of life. It is, as we are so often told, a long process of new adaptations and re-adaptations; of the modification of tradition and usage by truer ideas and improved institutions. There may be, and there are, epochs of rest, when this modification in its active and demonstrative shape slackens or ceases to be visible. But even then the modifying forces are only latent. Further progress depends on the revival of their energy, before there has been time for the social structure to become ossified and inelastic. The history of civilisation is the history of the displacement of old conceptions by new ones more conformable to the facts. It is the record of the removal of old institutions and ways of living, in favour of others of greater convenience and ampler capacity, at once multiplying and satisfying human requirements.

Now compromise, in view of the foregoing theory of social advance, may be of two kinds, and of these two kinds one is legitimate and the other not. It may stand for two distinct attitudes of mind, one of them obstructive and the other not. It may mean the deliberate suppression or mutilation of an idea, in order to make it congruous with the traditional idea or the current prejudice on the given subject, whatever that may be. Or else it may mean a rational acquiescence in the fact that the bulk of your contemporaries are not yet prepared either to embrace the new idea, or to change their ways of living in conformity to it. In the one case, the compromiser rejects the highest truth, or dissembles his own acceptance of it. In the other, he holds it courageously for his ensign and device, but neither forces nor expects the whole world straightway to follow. The first prolongs the duration of the empire of prejudice, and retards the arrival of improvement. The second does his best to abbreviate the one, and to hasten and make definite the other, yet he does not insist on hurrying changes which, to be effective, would require the active support of numbers of persons not yet ripe for them. It is legitimate compromise to say:—'I do not expect you to execute this improvement, or to surrender that prejudice, in my time. But at any rate it shall not be my fault if the improvement remains unknown or rejected. There shall be one man at least who has surrendered the prejudice, and who does not hide that fact.' It is illegitimate compromise to say:—'I cannot persuade you to accept my truth; therefore I will pretend to accept your falsehood.'

That this distinction is as sound on the evolutional theory of society as on any other is quite evident. It would be odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of the society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so. Progress depends upon tendencies and forces in a community. But of these tendencies and forces, the organs and representatives must plainly be found among the men and women of the community, and cannot possibly be found anywhere else. Progress is not automatic, in the sense that if we were all to be cast into a deep slumber for the space of a generation, we should awake to find ourselves in a greatly improved social state. The world only grows better, even in the moderate degree in which it does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right steps to make it better. Evolution is not a force, but a process; not a cause, but a law. It explains the source, and marks the immovable limitations, of social energy. But social energy itself can never be superseded either by evolution or by anything else.