The Egoist: No. 14, Vol. 1, July 15th, 1914.
by Dora Marsden
THE notion which enables the Saviours of Society to develop their steamiest heads is that of "equality", and to take this notion to pieces is a process after the nature of a cold douche which should do much to reduce the humanitarian temperature to the level of common sense.
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On the face of it the task is difficult because of the elusive element in the enthusiasts' advocacy, for the first comment which they will make after affirming that all men are equal is that they are quite ready to grant you that they are not. But one must have patience with a humanitarian: being a verbalist he must be given ground-room to set up his catch- words, and labels: else what is he? And if with patience you let him run on with his discourse, somewhere approaching the finish he will begin to show what he means as opposed to what he originally has said. Out of the twisted phrases one gathers that what the egalitarians mean is not that "all men are equal," but that they are "equal in the eyes of God," or that they are "equal before the law," or that they ought (blessed word!) to have "equal opportunities," or that they have "a right to equal treatment"; Mr. Bernard Shaw would say that they ought to have equal incomes. There are other turnings of the phrases, "levellings up" and "levellings down," but these already cited will serve.
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Between them there is little in common to serve as a connecting link. Each requires to be taken singly on its individual merit. The most illuminating, if the most vulnerable, is the one that men are "equal before God": and we need not worry to ascertain the meaning of God before seeking to learn why. It is enough to know where we may find him. It is commonly agreed that whatever God's nature, his abode is in the human heart, and that whatever response comes from that intimate quarter will be inflected with the voice of God. Now it is the heart which ia the most emphatic in its denial that men are equal: the tricks of verbalism may go as far as they can but when feeling is more than skin deep it remains unaffected by mere expression of opinion. Individual feeling is not merely aware that one is not equal to another but differs from all the rest: it acquiesces with a sense of satisfaction which is the secret of the hold which every form of genuine sport has upon the best elements of human nature. A desire to test and call into full evidence the amount of disparity between one and another is the motive behind every competition. To maintain a fair field and no favour in order to clinch the matter: to be satisfied to let the best man win in ungruding [ungrudging] recognition of "inequality": these are the best traditions of virile peoples, and furnish the evidence that worth is shown not merely in the possession in a high degree of power, but also in intelligence which is capable of recognising it even at its own expense. If the "eyes of God" have looked with favour on anything it has been upon the sporting instinct of good losers as well as good winners, and these same eyes have been always ready to frown on those who claimed to be equal with all men.
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If in claiming to be equal in the eyes of God, inferiors have presumed on their merits overmuch, in maintaining that we are all "equal before the law," the superiors have presumed overmuch upon our lack of understanding, for it is a catch which could deceive only the excessively stupid. Before the law was, we were-unequal: that is why the law was necessary to perpetuate the inequalities of power and possessions. Consider, for instance, the law prohibiting theft, which is made to prevent those who have little or nothing from attacking those who have much. The poor man has scarcely anything that the rich man would care to own. He has the energy of his limbs, and the law is so framed that even this comes easily within the rich man's reach. The law is irrelevant as regards the rich who could have no sane motive in coming by possessions in the prohibited ways. Should they indulge in them it is, as a matter of fact, regarded as insanity, and "kleptomania" is a recognised feature of "pathological crime." That there are no laws against rent, interest, and profits, or against speculating for profit proves that by instinct the law has kept clear of any attempt to put a term to the obtaining of the lavish rewards which fall to the superiorly "unequal." There is to be no counting of heads and sharing up if the trend of the law is to count for anything. It assumes that initiative is, and is likely to remain, at a premium.
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When the equality argument shifts to claims of "rights to equal opportunity," "rights to receive equal treatment," "equal incomes," it becomes obvious that the assertion about all men being "equal" has in reality been abandoned, and the theory of what we should call the "Other Persons" has been resorted to. It is the shadow of the "Other Persons" which hangs over all these rights to deserts which one's own powers fall short of obtaining. It has its roots in the dependence on the feeding-bottle and apron-strings; it is the refusal of responsibility which seeks for the protection of the fostering parent in the outer world at the age when the fostering of the parent would naturally come to an end. It looks to the world to press opportunity upon it as it aforetime found the parent pressing the bottle. It is a misapprehension due to a false analogy. Opportunity is not like cake which exists apart from one's ability to eat it. An opportunity only becomes one when it is seized. It is the power which can use it which strikes the hour for the advent of opportunity. Opportunity is the form in which power asserts itself. It is there or not according as power is there. To ask for equal opportunity is to ask to be endowed with the powers of some one else. What can be another's opportunity might not be ours. What shape our opportunity will take depends upon what kind of power we have. Whether we have any opportunities or not depends upon whether we have any power or not. If one has power in one's self everything will turn to opportunity; if one has not, the most obviously open avenues will appear locked as with impassable walls. Power exploits everything which is amenable to it; lack of it means just inability to exploit anything. To have an opportunity means to be able to exploit; i.e., to use what is at hand. To ask to have opportunities provided is to show inability to use an opportunity, as a fretting infant turning from one nourishing food to another will be unable to get benefit from any. A parent may care to protect and arduously keep alight the unhealthy flicker of life, but it is a mistake to imagine that others will do this without demanding a price. What the price is reveals itself in the sequel.
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As for equal treatment. "Treatment" is the retort according to kind. Gunpowder is treated as becomes gunpowder, gossamer as becomes gossamer. People are treated according as they are, i.e., for what they respond to. The egalitarian would have men treated as they imagine some ideal person called "Man," whom they have in mind, should be treated; but as men are unlike this "Man" as cheese is unlike chalk, the treatment is not forthcoming. A person who is a shuffling hanger-on will not be treated as though he were a strong independent self-reliant individual. He will be treated, i.e, used; i.e., exploited for what he is, just as the strong man will be exploited for what he is. He will get as his total income what he appears to be worth to anyone to whom he cares to put the delicate question: to his employer, for instance. Income is the reverse side of "outgo"; divorced from the latter the former is without meaning, and when Mr. Shaw proposes making the first independent of the second he indulges a grotesque fancy for his own diversion which he could not reasonably expect to have any force with his fellows. For him it has force as a whim, and that-his own: just as arctic exploration has had force with certain explorers. Or rather it would be possible to argue that it had such force with him, did he make a bona fide attempt to practise it: which unfortunately for the strengthening of one's belief in his genuine convictions regarding this matter, but unfortunately [fortunately] as regards one's belief in his general commonsense he shows no sign of doing. And with the enthusiasm of its arch-prophet at this low heat we feel justified in leaving "equality of incomes."
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However difficult it may be to coax from the egalitarians a coherent statement as to their main position, it is not at all difficult to track the notion of equality in its modern preposterous democratic sense back to its source. The grotesque misconceptions on which modern democratic theory is based are the outcome of a misunderstanding of the forces behind a tiny social experiment upon which sheer accident concentrated the attention of the civilised world. The nature of American political institutions following upon the successful issue of the War of Independence was not fixed under the influence of an underlying intellectual theory. It was the natural adjustment to the fact that the American rebels were what they were-capable farmers- owning and working their own land, bearing and knowing the effective use of arms. There was no large servant class amongst them. They came of a picked stock; self-assertive and powerful; too powerful to brook control-as the history of the early American settlements offers sufficient evidence. If they were not the equals one of another, at least there were none so inferior in native power amongst them as to encourage interference with impunity. It was because they were just what they were that the American constitution fitted their needs. The constitution was an adjustment fitted to free men, i.e., powerful men. The rights which it guaranteed them represented the terms of a bargain which each one could justly contract for. Their rights were a consequence of their individual might.
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The European theorists, however, who were fired by this spectacle of American "free and equal" institutions, failed to grasp the fact that those social arrangements were secondary: wholly relative to the particular conditions in which they took rise. They deluded themselves into imagining that the conditions of free and equal Americans could be introduced holus bolus into ancient civilisations of which the foundations were fixed on a basis of slavery, mitigated here and there by local differences; a truly fantastic misconception. From a highly particularised situation they risked an impossible generalisation; from the mights of picked Americans they generalised upon the Rights of Man. How this generalisation has broken down it is now open for all to see-notwithstanding the fact that the "liberty" and "equality" elements of the American experiment have been so exceedingly well lubricated with the "fraternity" element, a foreign element which, at the outset, it become [became] clear would be necessary to make the scheme work at all in the slave states of Europe.
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There is something pathetic-as well as ludicrous- in this wordy attempt of modern democracy, boldly to assert "rights" which they are bankrupt of power to validate, i.e., to justify, i.e., to make good in power as well as in words. Its century and a half of a hearing is a standing monument of the extraordinary hypnotism which words wholly divorced from sense can exercise. Perhaps the delusion owes part of its success to the fact that the soil in which it settled was so well prepared. The religious notion that there existed an external authority from which all bounties flowed had much to do with the ready belief that rights and powers could be conferred. The paternal version of faith was in keeping with an extension which saw in the State the temporal parent of the people: a parental authority as potent to bestow "freedom" as it was to clap its members in goal [gaol]. In fact, so superbly has the delusion flourished that far from giving way it has compelled the term "free" to develop a new meaning. In addition to its only efficient meaning of "empowered," it has developed the meaning of "unrestricted"; making the term-in consonance with all democratic thought-relevant to a duty laid upon the "Other Persons" rather than to any change in the personal force in one self.
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To be "free" in its meaning of "unrestricted" implies dependence upon the exercise of an embargo put upon the forces of the "Other Persons" in the interests of those persons who are to be kept "freed." It sets itself to the removal of obstacles by others to make clear the path of the particularised ones. By virtue of those refraining from exercising power when they might, these are permitted to be "free." They are "unrestricted," "left free," which being free is a fixed condition, and a permission granted them beyond their powers, by courtesy termed a "right." Thus a status accorded to the down-and-outs by others of a different order is called "being free." This freedom extends exactly the length of the chain of permission. They become "Freed men": a permitted status very redolent of associations with another. And the higher order is very paternal, very protective, very anxious for the good of its proteges as long as this does not interfere too much with its own. Let there be no misunderstanding about the fraternal spirit, the sand upon which the edifice of democracy is built. To recognise it for what it is is not to under-value it. Most of us are very good-natured and fraternal when it comes to the pinch, and when we are in the mood for it can be protective and what not. Only, people cannot have their cake and eat it. They cannot press for the granting of bogus courtesy "rights" and then complain that the respect which goes with genuine ones is not accorded them. They cannot cry out for the protective offices of a state and then cry out that the Government is grandmotherly. People who argue to the effect that the Government of a community made up nine-tenths of servants can be called "free" should be the last people in the world to mention the fact that such a state develops very servile aspects.
It is, indeed, only at the present time that the democratic theorists, though always mistaken, have become genuinely farcical. A protective Government, under which all look after each, which delivers "rights" out of hand so to speak, accords opportunities, finds you work, shelter, food, education, cannot let you run amok: it must look after you. A parent does not let a bottle fed infant please itself: neither does the democratic state. The cries of the "Servile State" alarmists latterly gathering volume amongst good democrats are the vexed and disgusted comments which the creators have to pass on their creation. They look on their handiwork and see that it is bad: which would be all to the good no doubt were they aware that they are the responsible progenitors. Unfortunately they understand so little what it is in the Servile State which disturbs them that it would be too much to expect them to true its parentage. When these alarmed democrats understand better the motive of their own outcry, we shall hear less not only of the Servile State but of democracy.
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That the Servile State bogey promises to have a little vogue is due to the fact that skilful use can be made of an ambiguity in the term "servile." The term, when used as implying a detestable quality, means that certain persons elect to make a display of feebleness beyond what is necessary on account of their incompetence in order to flatter a stronger person with a view to getting more out of him. It is a sort of commerce in lowering of status in order to be accorded a measure of charity, over and above the terms of a bargain. In this connotation, to be servile is to crawl where necessity merely demands a walking circumspectly, to lick the superior's boots when the contract would be filled by merely brushing them: an overfeigning of feebleness to induce the throwing of a bigger bone of charity out of the thankfulness in the superior one's heart, when seeing the crawling object he can exclaim "Thank God I am not as this one." That servility of this sort is despised is just a matter of taste, for it usually turns in the long run to an increase in the servile one's competence. Though he sinks very low he has the reasonable expectation that his plunge will enable him to climb a little higher: that is, if he does not mistake his man and actually receive a sound kicking from the superior one's boot in a burst of repulsion against the figure he cuts. Nine out of ten even of the poorest prefer as a matter of taste not to descend in this particular kind of way, or to take such offensive risks.
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But this meaning of servile is not the actual meaning as used in the phrase Servile State, though it is upon association with it that those who use it rely to make the notion odious. With utter futility, nevertheless, since the Servile State as intended by the alarmists who use it, is merely the description of any community where the great disparity between the power and audacity of certain of its members and those of others is so great as to deter the latter from the exercise of initiative. Wherever this disparity exists there must exist as the outcome of it two classes: one class which feels that it dare take certain risks; break away from the herd and strike out on its own; and another that dare not and therefore cannot. The latter will divide themselves up on terms of wages to serve on the former's schemes. So there obtains on the one hand, initiative, imagination, knowledge of human conditions and wants, and readiness for responsibility; on the other hand, toil, more or less heavy with skill more or less elementary; the two classes being joined together by the bond of wages for services rendered. One requires nothing more than this to postulate of necessity a Servile State, which less flamboyantly labelled would be a Servant-State, since services are paid for in wages; just as when services are paid for in kind it was Slave-state. For the wage system is not a cause, it is an effect; indeed, it is misleading to call the working for wages a system at all. A system is a design planned beforehand and laid on a situation, as an irrigation system, or a canal system, or a railroad system is a design laid upon the natural lie of the land or flow of the water. Working for wages is natural in the sense that the rivers of a primitive country are natural, or as the circulatory system of the body. It is bound up with the heights and depths of human ability; the natural differences in endowment of power back to which all changes (i.e., all systems by which it is overlaid), must revert in the long run. It is not to demand its destruction or to assert that its destruction is possible, likely or desirable,-it is only to describe it-to say that the present wage-system is merely an adjustment of the old slave-system, where, on the one hand, the granting of a certain amount of leisure and freedom from surveillance is balanced on the other by a corresponding disregard of the servant's welfare outside the hours of service demanded in the wage contract. Add to this lack of responsibility for the servants' general welfare, the utter divorce made necessary by modern "progress" between men and proximity to any base capable of furnishing an adequate yield of the elementary means of life, and one realises that the amount of initiative which would have been considerable for the needs of the old slave days, is relatively far less adequate faced with the needs of to-day. It proves that the wage-earners have not only failed to exercise initiative on their own account, they have allowed the initiative of their superiors so to plunge ahead as to make it increasingly difficult for them to become anything more than hired men. That they realise this and seek to decorate the terms of hire, by calling them salary, or pay, is evidence that the present generation at all events sees no prospect of wage-earners showing any such increase in natural power as will urge them to cease to be hirelings and become their own masters.
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Consider the experiment of the letting direct to the workmen the contract for the new Theosophical Buildings. What does it prove? That the men can do the work off their own bat, and assert their power to absorb profits? Not at all. It merely proves that if a wealthy woman has a fad that can be run by money she will he able to give it a run, with exactly the same incentive which moves Sir Thomas Lipton, for instance, to keep on building new yachts. As long as the money holds out one can do as one pleases: pay as good prices as there are in the market, and so on. I do not see how such a scheme can be a failure. There is everything which ordinarily goes to make a job a success. Mrs. Besant supplies the initiative, places the order, dictates the the prices (good ones because it amuses her) she is willing and able to pay and the "workers" as usual work on the scheme of someone else. Not only are they working on the lines of other people's purposefulness and initiative: they are backed by the most skilful organiser of sentimental goodwill alive in this sentimental age. One hopes they like it: and like raising their caps and giving My Lady Beneficent three cheers when she graciously goes down to the works to say good-bye to the "dear poor fellows" before her departure to India. It would perhaps be too much to hope that they proceeded to add a pious if silent prayer that she would go to blazes, and felt a rebelling itch against this all too, too gentle touch: perhaps the democratic, paternal influence has gone too far to expect "workers" to be anything other than crosses between lap-dogs and draught-horses in their relationships with employers.
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The experiment itself might very well be compared in one aspect at least with the system of "pay" in the Army. The very good-natured but excessively unobservant work on the wage-system to which we referred at length in our last issue has this remark:
"Do officers ever dream of wages? Do they say they are going on half-salary? No. They go on half-pay.... It is obvious, is it not, that these verbal distinctions disclose substantial material differences."
Now Mrs. Besant's proteges might very well consider that they were receiving not wages but pay, as they do in the Army. For the difference between the two appears to be that wages are wages when the person who pays them-the initiator from the workman's point of view in doing so is comparing them with a total computation which he has in his mind which he calls working at a profit, and by which he means that after computing his outlay upon wages and other necessary expenses his income shall present a satisfactory balance. When on the other hand wages are "pay," as, for instance, in the Army and Navy, the Government can go into the business almost regardless of expense: for the simple reason that they have sufficient money to do so. So has Mrs. Besant. Both she and the politicians can afford to be philanthropists-if they choose, and as long as the money lasts: that is as long as Mrs. Besant's popularity lasts, and the State's finances show no immediate sign of tottering. There can, of course, be only a limited number of such philanthropists since the wherewithal must come from somewhere. Mrs. Besant's supporters and the taxpayers to the Government must get their surplus from somewhere before the former can be in a position to do the graceful thing. And "surplus" and philanthropists are inextricably bound together. Not all employers could indulge in Mrs. Besant's hobby: as a matter of fact the Government at present does not propose to. It is not their whim: their good- will at present elects to run into other channels. If only people understood the arbitrary character of good-will they would save themselves from calculations which can only lead them in pursuit of a social mirage. It is the failure to apprehend its spasmodic nature, and the fleeting and accidental conditions upon which it is based that keeps so many of us spending the best energies of our youth planning mistaken good things for a mythical class called the poor. And making part and parcel with all this miscomprehended goodwill is a sinister meaning which has come to be attached to the term "to exploit," which after all means nothing more diabolical than "to use" or to "bring out possible developments." It is not for those who know how to exploit anything whatsoever to attend to their ways: it is for those who hitherto have known but meagrely how to turn anything to use, to augment their power. It is their move: their turn to exploit. Attempted embargos upon other's exploitations will always fail in the long run: for those who know how to exploit know that there are many more ways than one to a desired end. Embargos are negative, empty of positive power. The positive power shows itself in use: in creative activity. To set about exploitation off one's own bat, is that initiative and enterprise on their own that the "workers" need. It is the lack of it which keeps them still in the serving class. It is its possession which makes masters.
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We might here perhaps revert to the question of "moral wrappings" concerning which Mr. Stafford Hatfield raised some interesting considerations in our last issue. Before doing so let us give a report of the progress egoist doctrine is making in the direction of the multitude. If any reader of THE EGOIST by chance saw a copy of the "New Statesman" Literary Supplement of June 27th, he must have been led to wonder how long Mr. Bernard Shaw had been a silent convert before breaking silence thus:-
"The highest forms (i.e., of art), like the lowest, are necessarily immoral because the morals of the community are simply its habits, good and bad; and the highest habits, like the lowest, are not attained to by enough people to make them general and therefore moral. Morality, in fact, is only popularity; and popular notions of virtuous conduct will no more keep a nation in the front rank of humanity than popular notions of science and art will keep it in the front rank of culture. Ragtimes are more moral than Beethoven's Symphonies."
What next? We are in danger of becoming popular! It is true that the "New Age" put the last sentence in a column which it calls "current cant," but then is it not in the "New Age" where one may read of the "changeless laws of morality"? However, to Mr. Hatfield. Mr. Hatfield's query in substance is: "What compensating values does the egoist offer to the moralist in exchange for the depreciated values of social authority?" We offer nothing and suggest no such exchange.
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Let us be clear. We do not conceive ourselves as offering egoist-vests in exchange for popular moralists overcoats. We would not willingly make a convert of one who found comfort in moral wrappings, which wrappings we conceive to be of the nature of skins rather than garments: the outer layers of which drop off only when the new skin is ready grown underneath. When ever an amoralist argument is addressed to the moralist crowd it is purely in self-defence: its intent is to splinter the fangs of their watch-dogs on the hard bone of derision where they expected to bury them deep into flesh: quite different from its intent when addressed to friends where it is merely for amusement and the pleasure of common understanding. That it is necessary to be able to state one's creed upon occasion to the herd: to be able to oppose a single lightning stroke as a fit reply to innumerable pin-pricks and wasp-bites, the fate of the author of "Dorian Gray" makes clear. For a dazzling intelligence to suffer itself to be shamed to death by the rabble is a shocking and offensive thing. Yet a brilliantly audacious and adventurous life, only half-self conscious, and consequently only half-expressed, must of its very nature invite it, and-almost as hard a thing-allow of one's friends perpetuating the unintelligent grounds of attack even after the event. (Here anent a recent trial in the courts bearing somewhat on this issue we might point out that Oscar Wilde spoke with the inaccuracy of impatience when he said that books were neither moral nor immoral. As a matter of fact they tend either one way or the other: one would be sorry to be accused of writing a book with a moral tendency. And by a friend, too!) However, again coming back to the subject, apart from the putting of oneself in such a position that, should the herd presume to issue a challenge, the cost shall be theirs, the amoralist has no message for the moralist. In any case, such a message would not arrive, and for the only valid egoistical reason: that if "true," it would not serve his purpose. It is therefore, for him, not true: the skin is still alive and sticks. And for the rest, what does it matter? The situation is met when the amoralist has succeeded in making the moralist realise that it will be well with him only if he minds his manners.
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Conscience and Mr. Harpur (sex correspondence ln last issue) must be deferred to a later.
D.M.