Chapter 31

Beneath Socialism lies the assertion that society came first and that individuals are indefinitely apt for education into their place in society. Socialism has inherited the maxim, which Rousseau, the uncompromising Individualist, placed at the front of his _Social Contract_: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." There is nothing to be done but to strike off the chains and organize society on a social basis. Men are not this or that; they are what they have been made. Make the social conditions right, says the thorough-going Socialist, and individuals will be all that we could desire them to be. Not poverty alone, but disease, lunacy, prostitution, criminality are all the results of bad social and economic conditions. Create the right environment and you have done all that is necessary. To some extent that is clearly true. But the individualist insists that there are definite limits to its truth. Even in the most favourable environment nearly every ill that the Socialist seeks to remove is found. Inevitably, the Individualist declares, because we do not spring out of our environment, but out of our ancestral stocks. Against the stress on environment, the Individualist lays the stress on the ascertained facts of heredity. It is the individual that counts, and for good or for ill the individual brought his fate with him at birth. Ensure the production of sound individuals, and you may set at naught the environment. You will, indeed, secure results incomparably better than even the most anxious care expended on environment alone can ever hope to secure.

Such are the respective attitudes of Socialism and Individualism. So far as I can see, they are both absolutely right. Nor is it even clear that they are really opposed; for, as happens in every field, while the affirmations of each are sound, their denials are unsound. Certainly, along each line we may be carried to absurdity. The Individualism of Max Stirner is not far from the ultimate frontier of sanity, and possibly even on the other side of it;[254] while the Socialism of the Oneida Community involved a self-subordination which it would be idle to expect from the majority of men and women. But there is a perfect division of labour between Socialism and Individualism. We cannot have too much of either of them. We have only to remember that the field of each is distinct. No one needs Individualism in his water supply, and no one needs Socialism in his religion. All human affairs sort themselves out as coming within the province of Socialism or of Individualism, and each may be pushed to its furthest extreme.[255]

It so happens, however, that the capacity of the human brain is limited, and a single brain is not made to hold together the idea of Socialism and the idea of Individualism. Ordinary people have, it is true, no practical difficulty whatever in acting concurrently in accordance with the ideas of Socialism and of Individualism. But it is different with the men of ideas; they must either be Socialists or Individualists; they cannot be both. The tendency in one or the other direction is probably inborn in these men of ideas.

We need not regret this inevitable division of labour. On the contrary, it is difficult to see how the right result could otherwise be brought about. People without ideas experience no difficulty in harmonizing the two tendencies. But if the ideas of Socialism and Individualism tended to appear in the same brain they would neutralize each other or lead action into an unprofitable _via media_. The separate initiative and promulgation of the two tendencies encourages a much more effective action, and best promotes that final harmony of the two extremes which the finest human development needs.

There is more to be said. Not only are both alike indispensable, and both too profoundly rooted in human nature to be abolished or abridged, but each is indispensable to the other. There can be no Socialism without Individualism; there can be no Individualism without Socialism. Only a very fine development of personal character and individual responsibility can bear up any highly elaborated social organization, which is why small Socialist communities have only attained success by enlisting finely selected persons; only a highly organized social structure can afford scope for the play of individuality. The enlightened Socialist nowadays often realizes something of the relationship of Socialism to Individualism, and the Individualist--if he were not in recent times, for all his excellent qualities, sometimes lacking in mental flexibility and alertness--would be prepared to admit his own relationship to Socialism. "The organization of the whole is dominated by the necessities of cellular life," as Dareste says. That truth is well recognized by the physiologists since the days of Claude Bernard. It is absolutely true of the physiology of society. Social organization is not for the purpose of subordinating the individual to society; it is as much for the purpose of subordinating society to the individual.

Between individuals, even the greatest, and society there is perpetual action and reaction. While the individual powerfully acts on society, he can only so act in so far as he is himself the instrument and organ of society. The individual leads society, but only in that direction whither society wishes to go. Every man of science merely carries knowledge or invention one further step, a needed and desired step, beyond the stage reached by his immediate predecessors. Every poet and artist is only giving expression to the secret feelings and impulses of his fellows. He has the courage to utter for the first time the intimate emotion and aspiration which he finds in the depth of his own soul, and he has the skill to express them in forms of radiant beauty. But all these secret feelings and desires are in the hearts of other men, who have not the boldness to tell them nor the ability to embody them exquisitely. In the life of man, as in nature generally, there is a perpetual process of exfoliation, as Edward Carpenter calls it, whereby a latent but striving desire is revealed, and the man of genius is the stimulus and the incarnation of this exfoliating movement. That is why every great poet and artist when once his message becomes intelligible, is acclaimed and adored by the crowd for whom he would only have been an object of idle wonderment if he had not expressed and glorified themselves. When the man of genius is too far ahead of his time, he is rejected, however great his genius may be, because he represents the individual out of vital relation to his time. A Roger Bacon, for all his stupendous intellect, is deprived of pen and paper and shut up in a monastery, because he is undertaking to answer questions which will not be asked until five centuries after his death. Perhaps the supreme man of genius is he who, like Virgil, Leonardo, or Shakespeare, has a message for his own time and a message for all times, a message which is for ever renewed for every new generation.

The need for insisting on the intimate relations between Socialism and Individualism has become the more urgent to-day because we are reaching a stage of civilization in which each tendency is inevitably so pushed to its full development that a clash is only prevented by the realization that here we have truly a harmony. Sometimes a matter that belongs to one sphere is so closely intertwined with a matter that belongs to the other that it is a very difficult problem how to hold them separate and allow each its due value.[256]

At times, indeed, it is really very difficult to determine to which sphere a particular kind of human activity belongs. This is notably the case as regards education. "Render unto Cæsar the things that be Cæsar's, and unto God the things that be God's." But is education among the things that belong to Cæsar, to social organization, or among the things that belong to God, to the province of the individual's soul? There is much to be said on both sides. Of late the Socialist tendency prevails here, and there is a disposition to standardize rigidly an education so superficial, so platitudinous, so uniform, so unprofitable--so fatally oblivious of what even the word _education_ means[257]--that some day, perhaps, the revolted Individualist spirit will arise in irresistible might to sweep away the whole worthless structure from top to bottom, with even such possibilities of good as it may conceal. The educationalists of to-day may do well to remember that it is wise to be generous to your enemies even in the interests of your own preservation.

In every age the question of Individualism and Socialism takes on a different form. In our own age it has become acute under the form of a conflict between the advocates of good heredity and the advocates of good environment. On the one hand there is the desire to breed the individual to a high degree of efficiency by eugenic selection, favouring good stocks and making the procreation of bad stocks more difficult. On the other hand there is the effort so to organize the environment by collectivist methods that life for all may become easy and wholesome. As usual, those who insist on the importance of good environment are inclined to consider that the question of heredity may be left to itself, and those who insist on the importance of good heredity are indifferent to environment. As usual, also, there is a real underlying harmony of those two demands. There is, however, here more than this. In this most modern of their embodiments, Socialism and Individualism are not merely harmonious, each is the key to the other, which remains unattainable without it. However carefully we improve our breed, however anxiously we guard the entrance to life, our labour will be in vain if we neglect to adapt the environment to the fine race we are breeding. The best individuals are not the toughest, any more than the highest species are the toughest, but rather, indeed, the reverse, and no creature needs so much and so prolonged an environing care as man, to ensure his survival. On the other hand, an elaborate attention to the environment, combined with a reckless inattention to the quality of the individuals born to live in that environment can only lead to an overburdened social organization which will speedily fall by its own weight.

During the past century the Socialists of the school for bettering the environment have for the most part had the game in their own hands. They founded themselves on the very reasonable basis of sympathy, a basis which the eighteenth-century moralists had prepared, which Schopenhauer had formulated, which George Eliot had passionately preached, which had around its operations the immense prestige of the gospel of Jesus. The environmental Socialists--always quite reasonably--set themselves to improve the conditions of labour; they provided local relief for the poor; they built hospitals for the free treatment of the sick. They are proceeding to feed school children, to segregate and protect the feeble-minded, to insure the unemployed, to give State pensions to the aged, and they are even asked to guarantee work for all. Now these things, and the likes of them, are not only in accordance with natural human impulses, but for the most part they are reasonable, and in protecting the weak the strong are, in a certain sense, protecting themselves. No one nowadays wants the hungry to hunger or the suffering to suffer. Indeed, in that sense, there never has been any _laissez-faire_ school.[258]

But as the movement of environmental Socialism realizes itself, it becomes increasingly clear that it is itself multiplying the work which it sets itself to do. In enabling the weak, the incompetent, and the defective to live and to live comfortably, it makes it easier for those on the borderland of these classes to fall into them, and it furnishes the conditions which enable them to propagate their like, and to do this, moreover, without that prudent limitation which is now becoming universal in all classes above those of the weak, the incompetent, and the defective. Thus unchecked environmental Socialism, obeying natural impulses and seeking legitimate ends, would be drawn into courses at the end of which only social enfeeblement, perhaps even dissolution, could be seen.

The key to the situation, it is now beginning to be more and more widely felt, is to be found in the counterbalancing tendency of Individualism, and the eugenic guardianship of the race. Not, rightly understood, as a method of arresting environmental Socialism, nor even as a counterblast to its gospel of sympathy. Nietzsche, indeed, has made a famous assault on sympathy, as he has on conventional morality generally, but his "immoralism" in general and his "hardness" in particular are but new and finer manifestations of those faded virtues he was really seeking to revive. The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born.

So it is that the question of breed, the production of fine individuals, the elevation of the ideal of quality in human production over that of mere quantity, begins to be seen, not merely as a noble ideal in itself, but as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path. If the entry into life is conceded more freely to the weak, the incompetent, and the defective than to the strong, the efficient, and the sane, then a Sisyphean task is imposed on society; for every burden lifted two more burdens appear. But as individual responsibility becomes developed, as we approach the time to which Galton looked forward, when the eugenic care for the race may become a religion, then social control over the facts of life becomes possible. Through the slow growth of knowledge concerning hereditary conditions, by voluntary self-restraint, by the final disappearance of the lingering prejudice against the control of procreation, by sterilization in special cases, by methods of pressure which need not amount to actual compulsion,[259] it will be possible to attain an increasingly firm grip on the evil elements of heredity. Not until such measures as these, under the controlling influence of a sense of personal responsibility extending to every member of the community, have long been put into practice, can we hope to see man on the earth risen to his full stature, healthy in body, noble in spirit, beautiful in both alike, moving spaciously and harmoniously among his fellows in the great world of Nature, to which he is so subtly adapted because he has himself sprung out of it and is its most exquisite flower. At this final point social hygiene becomes one with the hygiene of the soul.[260]

Poets and prophets, from Jesus and Paul to Novalis and Whitman, have seen the divine possibilities of Man. There is no temple in the world, they seem to say, so great as the human body; he comes in contact with Heaven, they declare, who touches a human person. But these human things, made to be gods, have spawned like frogs over all the earth. Everywhere they have beslimed its purity and befouled its beauty, darkening the very sunshine. Heaped upon one another in evil masses, preying upon one another as no other creature has ever preyed upon its kind, they have become a festering heap which all the oceans in vain lave with their antiseptic waters, and all the winds of heaven cannot purify. It is only in the unextinguished spark of reason within him that salvation for man may ever be found, in the realization that he is his own star, and carries in his hands his own fate. The impulses of Individualism and of Socialism alike prompt us to gain self-control and to learn the vast extent of our responsibility. The whole of humanity is working for each of us; each of us must live worthy of that great responsibility to humanity. By how fine a flash of insight Jesus declared that few could enter the Kingdom of Heaven! Not until the earth is purified of untold millions of its population will it ever become the Heaven of old dreamers, in which the elect walk spaciously and nobly, loving one another. Only in such spacious and pure air is it possible for the individual to perfect himself, as a rose becomes perfect, according to Dante's beautiful simile,[261] in order that he may spread abroad for others the fragrance that has been generated within him. If one thinks of it, that seems a truism, yet, even in this twentieth century, how few, how very few, there are who know it!

This is why we cannot have too much Individualism, we cannot have too much Socialism. They play into each other's hands. To strengthen one is to give force to the other. The greater the vigour of both, the more vitally a society is progressing. "I can no more call myself an Individualist or a Socialist," said Henry George, "than one who considers the forces by which the planets are held to their orbits could call himself a centrifugalist or a centripetalist." To attain a society in which Individualism and Socialism are each carried to its extreme point would be to attain to the society that lived in the Abbey of Thelema, in the City of the Sun, in Utopia, in the land of Zarathustra, in the Garden of Eden, in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a kingdom, no doubt, that is, as Diderot expressed it, "diablement idéal." But to-day we hold in our hands more certainly than ever before the clues that were imperfectly foreshadowed by Plato, and what our fathers sought ignorantly we may attempt by methods according to knowledge. No Utopia was ever realized; and the ideal is a mirage that must ever elude us or it would cease to be ideal. Yet all our progress, if progress there be, can only lie in setting our faces towards that goal to which Utopias and ideals point.

FOOTNOTES:

[248] In the narrow sense Socialism is identical with the definite economic doctrine of the Collectivistic organization of the productive and distributive work of society. It also possesses, as Bosanquet remarks (in an essay on "Individualism and Socialism," in _The Civilization of Christendom_), "a deeper meaning as a name for a human tendency that is operative throughout history." Every Collectivist is a Socialist, but not every Socialist would admit that he is a Collectivist. "Moral Socialism," however, though not identical with "Economic Socialism," tends to involve it.

[249] The term "Individualism," like the term "Socialism," is used in varying senses, and is not, therefore, satisfactory to everyone. Thus E.F.B. Fell (_The Foundations of Liberty_, 1908), regarding "Individualism," as a merely negative term, prefers the term "Personalism," to denote a more positive ideal. There is, however, by no means as any necessity to consider "Individualism," a more negative term than "Socialism."

[250] The inspiring appeal of Socialism to ardent minds is no doubt ethical. "The ethics of Socialism," says Kirkup, "are closely akin to the ethics of Christianity, if not identical with them." That, perhaps, is why Socialism is so attractive to some minds, so repugnant to others.

[251] This idea was elaborated by Eimer in an appendix to his _Organic Evolution_ on the idea of the individual in the animal kingdom.

[252] The term "socialism" is said to date from about the year 1835. Leroux claimed that he invented it, in opposition to the term "individualism," but at that period it had become so necessary and so obvious a term that it is difficult to say positively by whom it was first used.

[253] An important point which the Individualist may fairly bring forward in this connection is the tendency of Socialism to repress the energy of the best worker among its officials at the expense of the public. Alike in government offices at Whitehall and in municipal offices in the town halls there is a certain proportion of workers who find pleasure in putting forth their best energies at high pressure. But the majority take care that work shall be carried on at low pressure, and that the output shall not exceed a certain understood minimum. They ensure this by making things uncomfortable for the workers who exceed that minimum. The gravity of this evil is scarcely yet realized. It could probably be counteracted by so organizing promotion that the higher posts really went to the officials distinguished by the quantity and the quality of their work. Pensions should also be affected by the same consideration. In any case, the evil is serious, and is becoming more so since the number of public officials is constantly increasing. The Council of the Law Society found some years ago that the cost of civil administration in England had increased between the years 1894 and 1904 from 19 millions to 25 millions, and, excluding the Revenue Departments, it is now said to have gone up to 42 millions. It is an evil that will have to be dealt with sooner or later.

[254] Max Stirner wrote his work, _Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum_ (_The Ego and His Own_, in the English translation of Byington), in 1845. His life has been written by John Henry Mackay (_Max Stirner: Sein Leben und Sein Werk_), and an interesting study of Max Stirner (whose real name was Schmidt) will be found in James Huneker's _Egoists_.

[255] In the introduction to my earliest book, _The New Spirit_ (1889), I set forth this position, from which I have never departed: "While we are socializing all those things of which all have equal common need, we are more and more tending to leave to the individual the control of those things which in our complex civilization constitute individuality. We socialize what we call our physical life in order that we may attain greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life." No doubt such a point of view was implicit in Ruskin and other previous writers, just as it has subsequently been set forth by Ellen Key and others, while from the economic side it has been well formulated by Mr. J.A. Hobson in his _Evolution of Capital_: "The _very raison d'être_ of increased social cohesiveness is to economize and enrich the individual life, and to enable the play of individual energy to assume higher forms out of which more individual satisfaction may accrue." "Socialism will be of value," thought Oscar Wilde in his _Soul of Man_, "simply because it will lead to Individualism." "Socialism denies economic Individualism for any," says Karl Nötzel ("Zur Ethischen Begrundung des Sozialismus," _Sozialistische Monatshefte_, 1910, Heft 23), "in order to make moral intellectual Individualism possible for all." And as it has been seen that Socialism leads to Individualism, so it has also been seen that Individualism, even on the ethical plane, leads to Socialism. "You must let the individual make his will a reality in the conduct of his life," Bosanquet remarks in an essay already quoted, "in order that it may be possible for him consciously to entertain the social purpose as a constituent of his will. Without these conditions there is no social organism and no moral Socialism.... Each unit of the social organism has to embody his relations with the whole in his own particular work and will; and in order to do this the individual must have a strength and depth in himself proportional to and consisting of the relations which he has to embody." Grant Allen long since clearly set forth the harmony between Individualism and Socialism in an article published in the _Contemporary Review_ in 1879.