Human Nature in Politics Part 6

The student teacher, too, during his period of training acquires a series of facts about the human type, though in his case they are as yet far less numerous, less accurate and less conveniently arranged than those in the medical text-books.

If the student of politics followed such an arrangement, he would at least begin his course by mastering a treatise on psychology, containing all those facts about the human type which have been shown by experience to be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the student's knowledge could be most easily recalled when wanted.

At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work by reading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in the condition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates or Galen. He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the a.s.sociation of ideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selected from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearly on the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he is left to discover for himself; but he is likely to a.s.sume that they cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought. He learns also a few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after he has read a little of the history of inst.i.tutions, his political education is complete. It is no wonder that the average layman prefers old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young doctors who remember theirs.[30]

[30] In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, to discuss the method of approaching political science with two young Oxford students. In each case I suggested that it would be well to read a little psychology. Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his tutor and had been told that psychology was 'useless' or 'nonsense.' One tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have added the curiously scholastic reason that psychology was 'neither science nor philosophy.'

A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in 1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on _Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties_, containing the results of fifteen years' close observation of the party system in America and England. The instances given in the book might have been used as the basis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type which are of importance to the politician--the nature of our impulses, the necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the methods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past, and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses. But no indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he started. The facts observed are throughout regretfully contrasted with 'free reason,'[31] 'the general idea of liberty,'[32] 'the sentiments which inspired the men of 1848,'[33] and the book ends with a sketch of a proposed const.i.tution in which the voters are to be required to vote for candidates known to them through declarations of policy 'from which all mention of party is rigorously excluded.'[34] One seems to be reading a series of conscientious observations of the Copernican heavens by a loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy.

[31] _Pa.s.sim_, e.g., vol. ii. p. 728.

[32] _Ibid_., p. 649.

[33] _Ibid_., p. 442.

[34] _Ibid_., p. 756.

Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of the Const.i.tutional Democratic Party in the first Duma of Nicholas II., and must have learnt for himself that if he and his fellows were to get force enough behind them to contend on equal terms with the Russian autocracy they must be a party, trusted and obeyed as a party, and not a casual collection of free individuals. Some day the history of the first Duma will be written, and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski's experience and his faith were at last fused together in the heat of that great struggle.

The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's book is prefaced by an introduction from Mr. James Bryce. This introduction shows that even in the mind of the author of _The American Const.i.tution_ the conception of human nature which he learnt at Oxford still dwells apart.

'In the ideal democracy,' says Mr. Bryce, 'every citizen is intelligent, patriotic, disinterested. His sole wish is to discover the right side in each contested issue, and to fix upon the best man among competing candidates. His common sense, aided by a knowledge of the const.i.tution of his country, enables him to judge wisely between the arguments submitted to him, while his own zeal is sufficient to carry him to the polling booth.'[35]

[35] Ostrogorski, vol. i. p. xliv.

A few lines further on Mr. Bryce refers to 'the democratic ideal of the intelligent independence of the individual voter, an ideal far removed from the actualities of any State.'

What does Mr. Bryce mean by 'ideal democracy'? If it means anything it means the best form of democracy which is consistent with the facts of human nature. But one feels, on reading the whole pa.s.sage, that Mr.

Bryce means by those words the kind of democracy which might be possible if human nature were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was taught at Oxford to think that it was. If so, the pa.s.sage is a good instance of the effect of our traditional course of study in politics.

No doctor would now begin a medical treatise by saying, 'the ideal man requires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population.' No modern treatise on pedagogy begins with the statement that 'the ideal boy knows things without being taught them, and his sole wish is the advancement of science, but no boys at all like this have ever existed.'

And what, in a world where causes have effects and effects causes, does 'intelligent independence' mean?

Mr. Herman Merivale, successively Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, under-Secretary for the Colonies, and under-Secretary for India, wrote in 1861:

'To retain or to abandon a dominion is not an issue which will ever be determined on the mere balance of profit and loss, or on the more refined but even less powerful motives supplied by abstract political philosophy. The sense of national honour; the pride of blood, the tenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to spread our civilisation and our religion over the world; these are impulses which the student in his closet may disregard, but the statesman dares not....'[36]

[36] Herman Merivale, _Colonisation_, 1861, 2nd edition. The book is a re-issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837. The pa.s.sage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675.

What does 'abstract political philosophy' here mean? No medical writer would speak of an 'abstract' anatomical science in which men have no livers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet may disregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not.

Apparently Merivale means the same thing by 'abstract' political philosophy that Mr. Bryce means by 'ideal' democracy. Both refer to a conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe.

The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception of human nature in which he is ceasing to believe as 'abstract' or 'ideal' may seem to be of merely academic interest. But such half-beliefs produce immense practical effects. Because Merivale saw that the political philosophy which his teachers studied in their closets was inadequate, and because he had nothing to subst.i.tute for it, he frankly abandoned any attempt at valid thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the white colonies to the rest of the British Empire. He therefore decided in effect that it ought to be settled by the rule-of-thumb method of 'cutting the painter'; and, since he was the chief official in the Colonial Office at a critical time, his decision, whether it was right or wrong, was not unimportant.

Mr. Bryce has been perhaps prevented by the presence in his mind of such a half-belief from making that constructive contribution to general political science for which he is better equipped than any other man of his time. 'I am myself,' he says in the same Introduction, 'an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky he can.'[37] Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who, finding that experiment did not bear out some traditional formula, should speak of himself as nevertheless 'grimly resolved' to see things from the old and comfortable point of view!

[37] _Loc. cit._, p. xliii.

The next step in the course of political training which I am advocating would be the quant.i.tative study of the inherited variations of individual men when compared with the 'normal' or 'average' man who had so far served for the study of the type.

How is the student to approach this part of the course? Every man differs quant.i.tatively from every other man in respect of every one of his qualities. The student obviously cannot carry in his mind or use for the purposes of thought all the variations even of a single inherited quality which are to be found among the fifteen hundred millions or so of human beings who even at any one moment are in existence. Much less can he ascertain or remember the inter-relation of thousands of inherited qualities in the past history of a race in which individuals are at every moment dying and being born.

Mr. H.G. Wells faces this fact in that extremely stimulating essay on 'Scepticism of the Instrument,' which he has appended to his _Modern Utopia_. His answer is that the difficulty is 'of the very smallest importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation to anything but philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy it matters profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are they serve my rude physiological purpose.'[38]

[38] _A Modern Utopia_, p. 381.

To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the individual is of enormous importance, not only when he is dealing with 'philosophy and wide generalisations' but in the practical affairs of his daily activity. Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for 'two eggs' to put under a hen when he is trying to establish a new variety, and the politician, who is responsible for actual results in an amazingly complicated world, has to deal with more delicate distinctions than the breeder. A statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two generals, or two candidates likely to receive equally enthusiastic support from nonconformists and trade-unionists, does not ask for 'two men.'

On this point, however, most writers on political science seem to suggest that after they have described human nature as if all men were in all respects equal to the average man, and have warned their readers of the inexactness of their description, they can do no more. All knowledge of individual variations must be left to individual experience.

John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the Logic of the Moral Sciences at the end of his _System of Logic_ implies this, and seems also to imply that any resulting inexactness in the political judgments and forecasts made by students and professors of politics does not involve a large element of error.

'Excepting,' he says, 'the degree of uncertainty, which still exists as to the extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the physical circ.u.mstances on which these may be dependent, (considerations which are of secondary importance when we are considering mankind in the average or _en ma.s.se_), I believe most competent judges will agree that the general laws of the different const.i.tuent elements of human nature are even now sufficiently understood to render it possible for a competent thinker to deduce from those laws, with a considerable approach to certainty, the particular type of character which would be formed, in mankind generally, by any a.s.sumed set of circ.u.mstances.'[39]

[39] _System of Logic_, Book vi. vol. ii. (1875), p. 462.

Few people nowadays would be found to share Mill's belief. It is just because we feel ourselves unable to deduce with any 'approach to certainty' the effect of circ.u.mstances upon character, that we all desire to obtain, if it is possible, a more exact idea of human variation than can be arrived at by thinking of mankind 'in the average or _en ma.s.se_.'

Fortunately the mathematical students of biology, of whom Professor Karl Pearson is the most distinguished leader, are already showing us that facts of inherited variation can be so arranged that we can remember them without having to get by heart millions of isolated instances.

Professor Pearson and the other writers in the periodical _Biometrika_ have measured innumerable beech leaves, snails' tongues, human skulls, etc. etc., and have recorded in each case the variations of any quality in a related group of individuals by that which Professor Pearson calls an 'observation frequency polygon,' but which I, in my own thinking, find that I call (from a vague memory of its shape) a 'c.o.c.ked hat.'

Here is a tracing of such a figure, founded on the actual measurement of 25,878 recruits for the United States army.

[Ill.u.s.tration: [Transcriber's Description: A line graph of number of recruits vs. height. The horizontal axis is AC, and the line itself is ABC, which is roughly normal.]]

The line _ABC_ records, by its distance at successive points from the line _AC_, the number of recruits reaching successive inches of height.

It shows, e.g. (as indicated by the dotted lines) that the number of recruits between 5 ft. 11 in. and 6 ft. was about 1500, and the number of those between 5 ft. 7 in. and 5 ft. 8 in. about 4000.[40]

[40] This figure is adapted (by the kind permission of the publishers) from one given in Professor K. Pearson's _Chances of Death_, vol. i. p.

277. For the relation between such records of actual observation and the curves resulting from mathematical calculation of known causes of variation, see _ibid._, chap, viii., the paper by the same author on 'Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Evolution,' in vol. 186 (A) of the _Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions_ (1896), and the chapters on evolution in his _Grammar of Science_, 2nd edition.

Such figures, when they simply record the results of the fact that the likeness of the offspring to the parent in evolution is constantly inexact, are (like the records of other cases of 'chance' variation) fairly symmetrical, the greatest number of instances being found at the mean, and the descending curves of those above and those below the mean corresponding pretty closely with each other. Boot manufacturers, as the result of experience, construct in effect such a curve, making a large number of boots of the sizes which in length or breadth are near the mean, and a symmetrically diminishing number of the sizes above and below it.

In the next chapter I shall deal with the use in reasoning of such curves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter I point out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly because our visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a black line on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in our minds the quant.i.tative facts as to a number of variations enormously beyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolated instances; and secondly, that we can by imagining such curves form a roughly accurate idea of the character of the variations to be expected as to any inherited quality among groups of individuals not yet born or not yet measured.

The third and last division under which knowledge of man can be arranged for the purposes of political study consists of the facts of man's environment, and of the effect of environment upon his character and actions. It is the extreme instability and uncertainty of this element which const.i.tutes the special difficulty of politics. The human type and the quant.i.tative distribution of its variations are for the politician, who deals with a few generations only, practically permanent. Man's environment changes with ever-increasing rapidity. The inherited nature of every human being varies indeed from that of every other, but the relative frequency of the most important variations can be forecasted for each generation. The difference, on the other hand, between one man's environment and that of other men can be arranged on no curve and remembered or forecasted by no expedient. Buckle, it is true, attempted to explain the present and prophesy the future intellectual history of modern nations by the help of a few generalisations as to the effect of that small fraction of their environment which consisted of climate. But Buckle failed, and no one has attacked the problem again with anything like his confidence.

We can, of course, see that in the environment of any nation or cla.s.s at any given time there are some facts which const.i.tute for all its members a common experience, and therefore a common influence. Climate is such a fact, or the discovery of America, or the invention of printing, or the rates of wages and prices. All nonconformists are influenced by their memory of certain facts of which very few churchmen are aware, and all Irishmen by facts which most Englishmen try to forget. The student of politics must therefore read history, and particularly the history of those events and habits of thought in the immediate past which are likely to influence the generation in which he will work. But he must constantly be on his guard against the expectation that his reading will give him much power of accurate forecast. Where history shows him that such and such an experiment has succeeded or failed he must always attempt to ascertain how far success or failure was due to facts of the human type, which he may a.s.sume to have persisted into his own time, and how far to facts of environment. When he can show that failure was due to the ignoring of some fact of the type and can state definitely what that fact is, he will be able to attach a real meaning to the repeated and unheeded maxims by which the elder members of any generation warn the younger that their ideas are 'against human nature.' But if it is possible that the cause was one of mental environment, that is to say, of habit or tradition, or memory, he should be constantly on his guard against generalisations about national or racial 'character.'

One of the most fertile sources of error in modern political thinking consists, indeed, in the ascription to collective habit of that comparative permanence which only belongs to biological inheritance. A whole science can be based upon easy generalisations about Celts and Teutons, or about East and West, and the facts from which the generalisations are drawn may all disappear in a generation. National habits used to change slowly in the past, because new methods of life were seldom invented and only gradually introduced, and because the means of communicating ideas between man and man or nation and nation were extremely imperfect; so that a true statement about a national habit might, and probably would, remain true for centuries. But now an invention which may produce profound changes in social or industrial life is as likely to be taken up with enthusiasm in some country on the other side of the globe as in the place of its origin. A statesman who has anything important to say says it to an audience of five hundred millions next morning, and great events like the Battle of the Sea of j.a.pan begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off within a few hours of their happening. Enough has already occurred under these new conditions to show that the unchanging East may to-morrow enter upon a period of revolution, and that English indifference to ideas or French military ambition are habits which, under a sufficiently extended stimulus, nations can shake off as completely as can individual men.

CHAPTER V

THE METHOD OF POLITICAL REASONING