Mere habit and the force of inertia are also extremely powerful. To get out of a rut, even an uncomfortable rut, requires more effort than most people are prepared to make. In his Studies in History and Jurisprudence Bryce suggests that the main reason for obedience to law is simply indolence. ‘It is for this reason,’ he says, ‘that a strenuous and unwearying will sometimes becomes so tremendous a power . . . almost a hypnotic force.’ Because of indolence, the disinherited are hardly less conservative than the possessors; they cling to their familiar miseries almost as tenaciously as the others cling to their privileges. The Buddhist and, later, the Christian moralists numbered sloth among the deadly sins. If we accept the principle that the tree is to be judged by its fruits, we must admit that they were right. Among the many poisonous fruits of sloth are dictatorship on the one hand and passive, irresponsible obedience on the other. Reformers should aim at delivering men from the temptations of sloth no less than from the temptations of ambition, avarice and the lust for power and position. Conversely, no reform which leaves the masses of the people wallowing in the slothful irresponsibility of passive obedience to authority can be counted as a genuine change for the better.[7]
Reinforcing the effect of indolence, kindliness and fear, rationalizing these emotions in intellectual terms, is philosophical belief. The ruled obey their rulers because, in addition to all the other reasons, they accept as true some metaphysical or theological system which teaches that the state ought to be obeyed and is intrinsically worthy of obedience. Rulers are seldom content with the brute facts of power and satisfied ambition; they aspire to rule de jure as well as de facto. The rights of violence and cunning are not enough for them. To strengthen their position in relation to the ruled and at the same time to satisfy their own uneasy cravings for ethical justification, they try to show that they rule by right divine. Most theories of the state are merely intellectual devices invented by philosophers for the purpose of proving that the people who actually wield power are precisely the people who ought to wield it. Some few theories are fabricated by revolutionary thinkers. These last are concerned to prove that the people at the head of their favourite political party are precisely the people who ought to wield power—to wield it just as ruthlessly as the tyrants in office at the moment.
To discuss such theories is mainly a waste of time; for they are simply beside the point, irrelevant to the significant facts. If we wish to think correctly about the state, we must do so as psychologists, not as special pleaders, arguing a case for tyrants or would-be tyrants. And if we want to make a reasonable assessment of the value of any given state, we must judge it in terms of the highest morality we know—in other words, we must judge it in the light of the ideal postulates formulated by the prophets and the founders of religions. Hegel, it is true, regarded such judgments as extremely ‘shallow.’ But if profundity leads to Prussianism, as it did in Hegel’s case, then give me shallowness. Let those who will, be tief; I prefer superficiality and the common decencies. We shall understand nothing of the problems of government unless we come down to psychological facts and ethical first principles.
To a greater or less degree, then, all the civilized communities of the modern world are made up of a small class of rulers, corrupted by too much power, and of a large class of subjects, corrupted by too much passive and irresponsible obedience. Participation in a social order of this kind makes it extremely difficult for individuals to achieve that non-attachment in the midst of activity, which is the distinguishing mark of the ideally excellent human being; and where there is not at least a considerable degree of non-attachment in activity, the ideal society of the prophets cannot be realized.
A desirable social order is one that delivers us from avoidable evils. A bad social order is one that leads us into temptation which, if matters were more sensibly arranged, would never arise. Our present business is to discover what large-scale social changes are best calculated to deliver us from the evils of too much power and of too much passive and irresponsible obedience. It has been shown in the preceding chapter that the economic reforms, so dear to ‘advanced thinkers,’ are not in themselves sufficient to produce desirable changes in the character of society and of the individuals composing it.
Unless carried out by the right sort of means and in the right sort of governmental, administrative and educational contexts, such reforms are either fruitless or actually fruitful of evil. In order to create the proper contexts for economic reform we must change our machinery of government, our methods of public administration and industrial organization, our system of education and our metaphysical and ethical beliefs. With education and beliefs I shall deal in a later section of this book. Our concern here is with government and the administration of public and industrial affairs. In reality, of course, these various topics are inseparable parts of a single whole.
Existing methods of government and existing systems of industrial organization are not likely to be changed except by people who have been educated to wish to change them. Conversely, it is unlikely that governments composed as they are to-day will change the existing system of education in such a way that there will be a demand for a complete overhaul of governmental methods. It is the usual vicious circle from which, as always, there is only one way of escape—through acts of free will on the part of morally enlightened, intelligent, well-informed and determined individuals, acting in concert. Of the necessity for the voluntary association of such individuals and of the enormously important part that they can play in the changing of society I shall speak later. For the moment, let us consider the machinery of government and industrial administration.
Chapter VII CENTRALIZATION AND DECENTRALIZATION
We have found agreement in regard to the ideal society and the ideal human being. Among the political reformers of the last century we even find a measure of agreement about the best means of organizing the state so as to achieve the ends which all desire. Philosophic Radicals, Fourierists, Proudhonian Mutualists, Anarchists, Syndicalists, Tolstoyans—all agree that authoritarian rule and an excessive concentration of power are among the main obstacles in the way of social and individual progress. Even the Communists express at least a theoretical dislike of the centralized, authoritarian state. Marx described the state as a ‘parasite on society’ and looked forward to the time, after the revolution, when it would automatically ‘wither away.’ Meanwhile, however, there was to be the dictatorship of the proletariat and an enormous increase in the powers of the central executive. The present Russian state is a highly centralized oligarchy.
Its subjects, children and women as well as men, are regimented by means of military conscription, and an efficient secret police system takes care of people when they are not actually serving in the army. There is a censorship of the press, and the educational system, liberalized by Lenin, has now reverted to the authoritarian, militaristic type, familiar in Tsarist Russia, in the Italy of Mussolini, in Germany before the war and again under Hitler. We are asked by the supporters of Stalin’s government to believe that the best and shortest road to liberty is through military servitude; that the most suitable preparation for responsible self-government is a tyranny employing police espionage, delation, legalized terrorism and press censorship; that the proper education for future freemen and peace-lovers is that which was and is still being used by Prussian militarists.
Our earth is round, and it is therefore possible to travel from Paris to Rouen via Shanghai. Our history, on the contrary, would seem to be flat. Those who wish to reach a specific historical goal must advance directly towards it; no amount of walking in the opposite direction will bring them to their destination.
The goal of those who wish to change society for the better is freedom, justice and peaceful co-operation between non-attached, yet active and responsible individuals. Is there the smallest reason to suppose that such a goal can be reached through police espionage, military slavery, the centralization of power, the creation of an elaborate political hierarchy, the suppression of free discussion and the imposition of an authoritarian system of education? Obviously and emphatically, the answer is No.
Marx believed that, after the revolution, the state would, in due course, automatically wither away. This is a point worth considering in some detail. In any given society, as Marx himself pointed out, the state exists, among other reasons, for the purpose of ensuring to the ruling class the continuance of its privileges. Thus, in a feudal community the state is the instrument by means of which the landed nobility keeps itself in power. Under capitalism, the state is
