Chapter 4

NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE IN POLITICS

The assumption--which is so closely interwoven with our habits of political and economic thought--that men always act on a reasoned opinion as to their interests, may be divided into two separate assumptions: first, that men always act on some kind of inference as to the best means of reaching a preconceived end, and secondly, that all inferences are of the same kind, and are produced by a uniform process of 'reasoning.'

In the two preceding chapters I dealt with the first assumption, and attempted to show that it is important for a politician to realise that men do not always act on inferences as to means and ends. I argued that men often act in politics under the immediate stimulus of affection and instinct, and that affection and interest may be directed towards political entities which are very different from those facts in the world around us which we can discover by deliberate observation and analysis.

In this chapter I propose to consider the second assumption, and to inquire how far it is true that men, when they do form inferences as to the result of their political actions, always form them by a process of reasoning.

In such an inquiry one meets the preliminary difficulty that it is very hard to arrive at a clear definition of reasoning. Any one who watches the working of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy to trace these sharp distinctions between various mental states, which seem so obvious when they are set out in little books on psychology. The mind of man is like a harp, all of whose strings throb together; so that emotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of inference called reasoning, are often simultaneous and intermingled aspects of a single mental experience.

This is especially true in moments of action and excitement; but when we are sitting in passive contemplation we would often find it hard to say whether our successive states of consciousness are best described as emotions or inferences. And when our thought clearly belongs to the type of inference it is often hard to say whether its steps are controlled by so definite a purpose of discovering truth that we are entitled to call it reasoning.

Even when we think with effort and with a definite purpose, we do not always draw inferences or form beliefs of any kind. If we forget a name we say the alphabet over to ourselves and pause at each letter to see if the name we want will be suggested to us. When we receive bad news we strive to realise it by allowing successive mental associations to arise of themselves, and waiting to discover what the news will mean for us. A poet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear in his mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in _The Tempest_ the connection between the successive images--the baseless fabric of this vision--the cloud-capped towers--the gorgeous palaces--the solemn temples--the great globe itself--is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and subordinated to poetic intention.

Most of the actual inferences which we draw during any day belong, indeed, to a much humbler type of thought than do some of the higher forms of non-inferential association. Many of our inferences, like the quasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany and modify, take place when we are making no conscious effort at all. In such a purely instinctive action as leaping backwards from a falling stone, the impulse to leap and the inference that there is danger, are simply two names for a single automatic and unconscious process. We can speak of instinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, for instance, by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to the distance and solidity of objects from the movements of our eye-muscles in focussing, and from the difference between the images on our two retinas. We are unaware of the method by which we arrive at these inferences, and even when we know that the double photograph in the stereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed two converging sheets of looking-glass beneath his table, we can only say that the photograph 'looks' solid, or that we 'seem' to see right under the table.

The whole process of inference, rational or non-rational, is indeed built up from the primary fact that one mental state may call up another, either because the two have been associated together in the history of the individual, or because a connection between the two has proved useful in the history of the race. If a man and his dog stroll together down the street they turn to the right hand or the left, hesitate or hurry in crossing the road, recognise and act upon the bicycle bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process of inference to guide the same group of impulses. Their inferences are for the most part effortless, though sometimes they will both be seen to pause until they have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It is only when a decision has to be taken affecting the more distant purposes of his life that the man enters on a region of definitely rational thought where the dog cannot follow him, in which he uses words, and is more or less conscious of his own logical methods.

But the weakness of inference by automatic association as an instrument of thought consists in the fact that either of a pair of associated ideas may call up the other without reference to their logical connection. The effect calls up the cause as freely as the cause calls up the effect. A patient under a hypnotic trance is wonderfully rapid and fertile in drawing inferences, but he hunts the scent backward as easily as he does forward. Put a dagger in his hand and he believes that he has committed a murder. The sight of an empty plate convinces him that he has had dinner. If left to himself he will probably go through routine actions well enough. But any one who understands his condition can make him act absurdly.

In the same way when we dream we draw absurd inferences by association. The feeling of discomfort due to slight indigestion produces a belief that we are about to speak to a large audience and have mislaid our notes, or are walking along the Brighton Parade in a night-shirt. Even when men are awake, those parts of their mind to which for the moment they are not giving full attention are apt to draw equally unfounded inferences. A conjurer who succeeds in keeping the attention of his audience concentrated on the observation of what he is doing with his right hand can make them draw irrational conclusions from the movements of his left hand. People in a state of strong religious emotion sometimes become conscious of a throbbing sound in their ears, due to the increased force of their circulation. An organist, by opening the thirty-two foot pipe, can create the same sensation, and can thereby induce in the congregation a vague and half-conscious belief that they are experiencing religious emotion.

The political importance of all this consists in the fact that most of the political opinions of most men are the result, not of reasoning tested by experience, but of unconscious or half-conscious inference fixed by habit. It is indeed mainly in the formation of tracks of thought that habit shows its power in politics. In our other activities habit is largely a matter of muscular adaptation, but the bodily movements of politics occur so seldom that nothing like a habit can be set up by them. One may see a respectable voter, whose political opinions have been smoothed and polished by the mental habits of thirty years, fumbling over the act of marking and folding his ballot paper like a child with its first copybook.

Some men even seem to reverence most those of their opinions whose origin has least to do with deliberate reasoning. When Mr. Barrie's Bowie Haggart said: 'I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion,'[20] he was comparing the merely rational conclusion which might have resulted from a reading of Burns's works with the conviction about them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the more sacred to him and more intimately his own, because he did not know how it was produced.

[20] _Auld Licht Idylls_, p. 220.

Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe guide in the affairs of our daily life. The material world does not often go out of its way to deceive us, and our final convictions are the resultant of many hundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which the valid are more numerous and more likely to survive than the fallacious. But even in our personal affairs our memory is apt to fade, and we can often remember the association between two ideas, while forgetting the cause which created that association. We discover in our mind a vague impression that Simpson is a drunkard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had any reason to believe it, or whether some one once told us that Simpson had a cousin who invented a cure for drunkenness. When the connection is remembered in a telling phrase, and when its origin has never been consciously noticed, we may find ourselves with a really vivid belief for which we could, if cross-examined, give no account whatever. When, for instance, we have heard an early-Victorian Bishop called 'Soapy Sam' half a dozen times we get a firm conviction of his character without further evidence.

Under ordinary circumstances not much harm is done by this fact; because a name would not be likely to 'catch on' unless a good many people really thought it appropriate, and unless it 'caught on' we should not be likely to hear it more than once or twice. But in politics, as in the conjuring trade, it is often worth while for some people to take a great deal of trouble in order to produce such an effect without waiting for the idea to enforce itself by merely accidental repetition. I have already said that political parties try to give each other bad names by an organised system of mental suggestion. If the word 'Wastrel,' for instance, appears on the contents bills of the _Daily Mail_ one morning as a name for the Progressives during a County Council election, a passenger riding on an omnibus from Putney to the Bank will see it half-consciously at least a hundred times, and will have formed a fairly stable mental association by the end of the journey. If he reflected, he would know that only one person has once decided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of each other. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short and pithy merely from considerations of space, have developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like the advertisement pages of an American magazine) into a psychological laboratory for the unconscious production of permanent associations. 'Another German Insult,' 'Keir Hardie's Crime,' 'Balfour Backs Down,' are intended to stick and do stick in the mind as ready-made opinions.

In all this again the same rule holds as in the production of impulse. Things that are nearer sense, nearer to our more ancient evolutionary past, produce a readier inference as well as a more compelling impulse. When a new candidate on his first appearance smiles at his constituents exactly as if he were an old friend, not only does he appeal, as I said in an earlier chapter, to an ancient and immediate instinct of human affection, but he produces at the same time a shadowy belief that he is an old friend; and his agent may even imply this, provided that he says nothing definite enough to arouse critical and rational attention. By the end of the meeting one can safely go as far as to call for three cheers for 'good old Jones.'[21]

[21] Three-quarters of the art of the trained salesman depends upon his empirical knowledge of this group of psychological facts. A small girl of my acquaintance, explaining why she had brought back from her first independent shopping expedition a photograph frame which she herself found to be distressing, said: 'The shopman seemed to suppose I had chosen it, and so I paid for it and came away.' But her explanation was the result of memory and reflection. At the moment, in a shadowy way which was sufficient for the shopman, she supposed that she had chosen it.

Mr. G.K. Chesterton some years ago quoted from a magazine article on American elections a sentence which said: 'A little sound common-sense often goes further with an audience of American working men than much high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential election.'[22] The 'sound common-sense' consisted, not, as Mr. Chesterton pretended to believe, in the presentation of the hammering as a logical argument, but in the orator's knowledge of the way in which force is given to non-logical inference and his willingness to use that knowledge.

[22] _Heretics_, p. 122.

When a vivid association has been once formed it sinks into the mass of our mental experience, and may then undergo developments and transformations with which deliberate ratiocination had very little to do. I have been told that when an English agitation against the importation of Chinese contract labour into South Africa was proposed, an important personage said that 'there was not a vote in it.' But the agitation was set on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a rather cruel kind of slavery imposed upon unusually intelligent Asiatics. Any one, however, who saw much of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed that the pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings aroused among very many of the voters an immediate hatred of the Mongolian racial type.

This hatred was transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a Chinaman thrown suddenly on a lantern screen before a working-class audience would have aroused an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour.

After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese faces on the posters tended slowly to identify itself, in the minds of the Conservatives, with the Liberals who had used them. I had at the general election worked in a constituency in which many such posters were displayed by my side, and where we were beaten. A year later I stood for the London County Council in the same constituency. An hour before the close of the poll I saw, with the unnatural clearness of polling-day fatigue, a large white face at the window of the ward committee-room, while a hoarse voice roared: 'Where's your bloody pigtail? We cut it off last time: and now we'll put it round your bloody neck and strangle you.'

In February 1907, during the County Council election, there appeared on the London hoardings thousands of posters which were intended to create a belief that the Progressive members on the Council made their personal livelihood by defrauding the ratepayers. If a statement had been published to that effect it would have been an appeal to the critical intellect, and could have been met by argument, or in the law courts. But the appeal was made to the process of subconscious inference. The poster consisted of a picture of a man supposed to represent the Progressive Party, pointing a foreshortened finger and saying, with sufficient ambiguity to escape the law of libel: 'It's your money we want.' Its effectiveness depended on its exploitation of the fact that most men judge of the truth of a charge of fraud by a series of rapid and unconscious inferences from the appearance of the man accused. The person represented was, if judged by the shape of his hat, the fashion of his watch-chain and ring, the neglected condition of his teeth, and the redness of his nose, obviously a professional sharper. He was, I believe, drawn by an American artist, and his face and clothes had a vaguely American appearance, which, in the region of subconscious association, further suggested to most onlookers the idea of Tammany Hall. This poster was brilliantly successful, but, now that the election is over, it, like the Chinese pictures, seems likely to continue a career of irrational transference. One notices that one Progressive evening paper uses a reduced copy of it whenever it wishes to imply that the Moderates are influenced by improper pecuniary motives. I myself find that it tends to associate itself in my mind with the energetic politician who induced the railway companies and others to pay for it, and who, for all I know, may in his own personal appearance recall the best traditions of the English gentleman.

Writers on the 'psychology of the crowd' have pointed out the effect of excitement and numbers in substituting non-rational for rational inference. Any cause, however, which prevents a man from giving full attention to his mental processes may produce the phenomena of non-rational inference in an extreme degree. I have often watched in some small sub-committee the method by which either of the two men with a real genius for committee work whom I know could control his colleagues. The process was most successful towards the end of an afternoon, when the members were tired and somewhat dazed with the effort of following a rapid talker through a mass of unfamiliar detail. If at that point the operator slightly quickened the flow of his information, and slightly emphasised the assumption that he was being thoroughly understood, he could put some at least of his colleagues into a sort of waking trance, in which they would have cheerfully assented to the proposition that the best means of securing, _e.g.,_ the permanence of private schools was a large and immediate increase in the number of public schools.

It is sometimes argued that such non-rational inferences are merely the loose fringe of our political thinking, and that responsible decisions in politics, whether they are right or wrong, are always the result of conscious ratiocination. American political writers, for instance, of the traditional intellectualist type are sometimes faced with the fact that the delegates to national party conventions, when they select candidates and adopt programmes for Presidential elections, are not in a condition in which they are likely to examine the logical validity of their own mental processes. Such writers fall back on the reflection that the actual choice of President is decided not by excited conventions, but by voters coming straight from the untroubled sanctuary of the American home.

President Garfield illustrated this point of view in an often-quoted passage of his speech to the Republican Convention of 1880:--

'I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man. But I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.... Not here, in this brilliant circle where fifteen thousand men and women are gathered, is the destiny of the Republic to be decreed for the next four years ... but by four millions of Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love of home and country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and knowledge of the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by. There God prepares the verdict that shall determine the wisdom of our work to-night.'[23]

[23] _Life of J.A. Garfield_, by R. H. Conwell, p. 328.

But the divine oracle, whether in America or in England, turns out, too often, only to be a tired householder, reading the headlines and personal paragraphs of his party newspaper, and half-consciously forming mental habits of mean suspicion or national arrogance. Sometimes, indeed, during an election, one feels that it is, after all, in big meetings, where big thoughts can be given with all their emotional force, that the deeper things of politics have the best chance of recognition.

The voter as he reads his newspaper may adopt by suggestion, and make habitual by repetition, not only political opinions but whole trains of political argument; and he does not necessarily feel the need of comparing them with other trains of argument already in his mind. A lawyer or a doctor will on quite general principles argue for the most extreme trade-unionism in his own profession, while he thoroughly agrees with a denunciation of trade-unionism addressed to him as a railway shareholder or ratepayer. The same audience can sometimes be led by way of 'parental rights' to cheer for denominational religious instruction, and by way of 'religious freedom' to hoot it. The most skilled political observer that I know, speaking of an organised newspaper attack, said, 'As far as I can make out every argument used in attack and in defence has its separate and independent effect. They hardly ever meet, even if they are brought to bear upon the same mind.' From the purely tactical point of view there is therefore much to be said for Lord Lyndhurst's maxim, 'Never defend yourself before a popular assemblage, except with and by retorting the attack; the hearers, in the pleasure which the assault gives them, will forget the previous charge.'[24]

[24] Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. i. p. 122.