If I had displayed confidence in him, it is highly probable that he would sooner or later have displayed an equal confidence in me. The solution of the problem of natural (and, where it exists, of acquired) inequality is moral and practical. The gulfs which separate human beings of unlike temperaments and different degrees of ability do not extend over the entire field of the personality. The inhabitants of the highlands of Arizona are cut off from one another by the mile-deep abyss of the Grand Canyon. But if they follow the Colorado River down towards its mouth they find themselves at last in the plains at a point where the stream can be conveniently bridged. Something analogous is true in the psychological world. Human beings may be separated by differences of intellectual ability as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon, may peer at one another, uncomprehending, across great gulfs of temperamental dissimilarity.
But it is always in their power to move away from the territories in which these divisions exist; it is always possible for them, if they so desire, to find in the common world of action, the site for a broad and substantial bridge connecting even the most completely incommensurable of psychological universes. It is the business of the large-scale reformer so to arrange the structure of society that no impediment shall be put in the way of bridge-building. It is the business of educators and religious teachers to persuade individual men and women that bridge-building is desirable and to teach them at the same time how to translate mere theory and platonic good resolutions into actual practice.
Impediments to bridge-building will be most numerous in communities where inequalities of income (and, along with them, inequalities of education) are very great and where the social pattern is hierarchical and authoritarian. They will be fewest in communities where the principle of self-government is most widely applied, where responsible group-life is most intense, and where inequalities of income and education are small. Feudalism, capitalism and military dictatorship (whether accompanied by public ownership of the means of production or not) are almost equally unfavourable to bridge-building. Under these regimes natural inequalities are emphasized and new artificial inequalities created ex nihilo. The most propitious environment for equality is constituted by a society where the means of production are owned co-operatively, where power is decentralized, and where the community is organized in a multiplicity of small, interrelated but, as far as may be, self-governing groups of mutually responsible men and women.
Equality in action—in other words, reciprocal good behaviour—is the only kind of equality that possesses a real existence. But this equality in action cannot be fully realized except where individuals of different types and professions are given opportunities for associating freely and frequently with one another. It is the job of the large-scale reformer to arrange the social structure in such a way that existing obstacles to free and frequent contact between individuals shall be removed and new opportunities for contact created. The change-over from an authoritarian to a co-operative pattern of society would effectively get rid of most of the arbitrary caste barriers which at present make it so hard for individuals to come together freely. At the same time opportunities for the making of new contacts should be created in a variety of ways. For example, it would be possible to extend to a wider circle the advantages of the simultaneously academic and technical system of education developed by Dr. A. E. Morgan at Antioch College, Ohio. (I shall return to this example in the chapter on Education.)
It is not only during the period of formal education that opportunities for new contacts can be made. By arranging for individuals to change over from one job to another, the large-scale reformer can greatly increase the number of personal relationships entered into during any given working life. Such changes of job are valuable, not only because they bring the individual into contact with new groups of his fellow-men and women, but also because they alleviate the boredom induced by monotony and the sight of all-too-familiar surroundings. (Boredom, as we have already seen, is one of the reasons for the persistent popularity of war; any change, whether in the structure of society or in the structure of the individual personality, that tends to reduce boredom, tends also to reduce the danger of war.)
I have given only two examples; but many other methods could doubtless be devised for multiplying valuable contacts and so transforming the life of every individual man and woman into an education in responsibility and equal co-operation.
There are no bridges across the Grand Canyon. Those who live on opposite sides of the abyss must go down to the plains in order to find a crossing-place. But between those who live on the same side, communication is easy. They can come and go without hindrance, can mingle freely with their fellows. In other words, men and women of different types can establish contact with one another only in action, and only on condition of reciprocal good behaviour. Men and women of the same type are psychologically commensurable. Communication between them is, of course, facilitated by reciprocal good behaviour; but even when the behaviour is bad, even when they dislike and mistrust, they can understand one another.
Cerebrotonics who have had the same sort of education can come together on the intellectual plane. Viscerotonics will mingle in the loud, and expansive good-fellowship which all of them enjoy. Somatotonics will appreciate each other’s delight in muscular activity for its own sake. And there are also the smaller sub-divisions. Mathematicians will associate with other mathematicians. The musician speaks a language which all other musicians understand. People with the same kind of eccentric sexual habits meet on the common ground of their particular aberration. (Thus, the freemasonry of homosexuality brings together men of the most diverse types, intraverted intellectuals and bargees, emotional viscerotonic people and people of somatotonic type, professional boxers and able-bodied seamen.)
In a word, there will always be a tendency for birds of a feather to flock together. This is inevitable and right. What is not right is that flocking should be exclusively between birds of a feather. It is essential that society should be so arranged that there are opportunities for people of different types to co-operate. This, of course, will not prevent people of the same type from forming groups of their own. For it is fortunately possible for a human being to be a member of many groups simultaneously. Thus, a man may have a family and various sets of friends; may be a member of a professional association, a friendly society, a golf club, a church, a scientific association. It is worth remarking in this context that, so far as the concrete facts of human experience are concerned, ‘Society’ is a meaningless abstraction. A man has no direct experience of his relations with ‘Society’; he has experience only of his relations with limited groups of similar or dissimilar individuals. Social theory, and practice have often gone astray, because they have started out from such abstractions as ‘Society’ instead of the facts of concrete experience—relationships within groups and of groups with one another.
It is a significant historical fact that political philosophies which make great play with such large, abstract words as ‘Society’ have generally been philosophies intended to justify a tyranny, either military-capitalist-feudal, like the tyranny of Hegel’s Prussia and Hitler’s Third Reich, or military-state-socialist-bureaucratic, like that of Russia after the death of Lenin. If we want to realize the good ends proposed by the prophets, we shall do well to talk less about the claims of ‘Society’ (which have always, as a matter of brute fact, been identified with the claims of a ruling oligarchy) and more about the rights and duties of small co-operating groups.
Some individuals have more general intelligence than others; some possess special abilities which others lack; certain men and women have a temperament which unfits them to be leaders or administrators; in others, on the contrary, the configuration of the ‘humours’ is such that they are admirably well adapted to take the direction of a common enterprise. The problem is, first, to see that round and square pegs get into the holes that fit them, and, second, to prevent the born leader, when he is where his abilities entitle him to be, from exploiting his position in undesirable ways.
In his book, A Chacun sa Chance, Hyacinthe Dubreuil has pointed out that, where small groups are engaged on a particular job of work for which they are jointly responsible and for which they are rewarded, not as individuals, but as a group, the choice of a leader and the assignment of particular tasks to each individual seldom present any special difficulty. Every man is a very shrewd judge of the professional competence of those who are in the same line
