The Cult of Incompetence Part 7

In this he is a far more faithful follower of Montesquieu than he will allow. All that I have quoted is to be found literally in Montesquieu's chapters on democracy. Even his famous saying, "the ruling principle of democracy is virtue," means, when he uses it in one sense, no more than that it is the synthesis of these three perfections, equality, simplicity and frugality. For Montesquieu sometimes uses "virtue" in a narrow, and sometimes in a broad sense, sometimes in the sense of political and civic virtue or patriotism, sometimes in the sense of virtue properly speaking (simplicity, frugality, thrift, equality). In this latter case he and Rousseau are absolutely agreed.

Montesquieu only considers democracy in decadence, as his custom is in respect of other forms of government, and though he does not actually cite Plato, he really gives the substance of what we have already quoted. "When the people wishes to do the work of the magistrates, the dignity of the office disappears and when the deliberations of the Senate carry no weight, neither senators nor old men are treated with respect. When old men do not receive respect, fathers cannot expect it from their children, husbands from their wives, nor masters from their men. At length everyone will learn to rejoice in this untrammelled liberty, and will grow as weary of commanding as of obeying. Women, children and slaves will submit to no authority. There will be an end of morals, no more love of order, no more virtue."

Now as to this transition, this pa.s.sage from the public morals of a democracy to the private, domestic, personal morals which exist under that form of government, have you observed what is the common root of our failings both public and private? The common root of both is misunderstanding, forgetfulness and contempt of competence. If pupils despise their masters, young men despise old men, if wives do not respect their husbands and the unenfranchised do not respect the citizens, if the condemned do not stand in awe of their judges, nor sons in awe of their parents, the principle of efficiency has vanished.

Pupils no longer admit the scientific superiority of their teachers, young men have no regard for the experience of the old, women will not recognise the supremacy of their husbands in practical matters, the unenfranchised have no sense of the superiority of the citizens from the point of view of national tradition, the condemned do not feel the moral supremacy of their judges, and sons do not realise the scientific, practical, civic and moral superiority of their fathers.

Indeed, why should they? How could we expect these feelings to be of anything but the most transient description since the State itself is organised on a basis of contempt for competence, or of what is even worse, a reverence for incompetence, and an insatiable craving for the guidance and government of the incompetent?

Thus public morals have a great influence on private morals; and gradually into family and social life there comes that laxity in the daily relations of the citizens which Plato has wittily termed, "equality between things that are equal and those that are not."

The first innovation which democracy brings into family life is the equality of the s.e.xes, and this is followed by woman's disrespect for man. This idea, be it admitted, is substantially correct, it only ceases to be true when it is viewed relatively to the varying competences of the two s.e.xes. Woman is man's equal in cerebral capacity, and in civilised societies, where intellect is the only thing that matters, the woman is the equal of the man. She should be admitted to the same employments as men in society, and under the same conditions of capacity and education, but in family life the same rules should apply as in every other enterprise; (1) division of labour according to the competence of each; (2) recognition of a leader according to the competence of each. This is the law which women are constantly led to misunderstand in a democracy. They will not admit the principle of the division of labour either in the world at large or in the domestic circle. They try to encroach upon men's work, which perhaps they might do very successfully, if they were obliged to do it and had nothing else at all to do; but which they really spoil by undertaking when they have other obvious duties to perform. They will not admit that men should be at the head of affairs; they aspire to be not only partners but managing directors. This implies a contemptuous rejection of that form of social competence which comes from the acceptance of convention or contract. No doubt a woman would be just as good a tax-collector as her husband, but since they have entered into partnership, the one to administer the collection of taxes, the other to look after the house, it is just as bad for the one whose business it is to keep house to begin collecting taxes, as it is for the tax-collector to interfere with the housekeeping. It is necessary to respect the efficiency that arises out of the observance of convention and contract. This, with practice and experience, will quickly become a very real and a very valuable efficiency, but if thwarted from outside will lead to friction, insecurity and disorganisation.

It is particularly by their contempt, which they are at no pains to disguise, for the competence that comes from contract and later from habit, by their refusal to recognise the position of the head of the family, that women every day and in every minute particular are training their children to despise their father. Democracy seems bent on bringing up its children to despise their parents. No other construction can be put upon the facts, however good and innocent the motives. Just sum up the facts. In the first place democracy denies that the living can be guided by the dead; it is one of its fundamental axioms that no generation should be tied and bound by its predecessor. What inference can children be expected to draw from this except that they owe no obedience to their father and mother?

Children have naturally only too great a tendency to look down on their parents. They are proud of their physical superiority; they know that their star is rising while that of their parents is setting. They are imbued with the universal prejudice of modern humanity that _progress is constant_ and that therefore whatever is of yesterday is _ex hypothesi_ inferior to that which is of to-day. They are driven also, as I am constrained to believe, by a sort of Nemesis inspired by fear lest human science and power should hurry forward too fast if the children were content to pick up the burden of life where their parents left it, and simply followed their fathers and did not insist on effacing all that their fathers had done and beginning again--with the result that the edifice never rises far above its foundations, and that children for this and other reasons have a natural inclination to treat their parents as Ca.s.sandras. Then, as it were to clench the argument, democracy is ready with its teaching that each generation is independent of the other, and that the dead have no lesson to impart to the living.

In the second place, democracy, applying the principle still further and proclaiming the doctrine that the State is master of all, withdraws the child from the family, as often and as completely as it can.

"Democracy," said Socrates, in one of his humorous dialogues, "is a mountebank, a kidnapper of children. It s.n.a.t.c.hes the child from its family while he is playing, takes him far away, allows him no more to see his family, teaches him many strange languages, drills him till his joints are supple, paints his face and dresses him in ridiculous clothes, and imparts to him all the mysteries of the acrobat's trade until he is sufficiently dexterous to appear in public and amuse the company by his tricks."

At all events democracy is determined to take the child away from his family, to give him the education which it has chosen and not that which the parents have chosen, and to teach him that he must not believe what his parents teach him. It denies the competence of parents to rear their children and puts forward its own competence, a.s.serting that it is only its own that has any value.

This is one of the princ.i.p.al causes of the divisions between fathers and children in a democracy.

You may retort that democracy does not always succeed in its efforts to separate children from their parents, because there is nothing to prevent the children extending the contempt, which for such excellent reasons they have been taught to entertain for their parents, to their State-appointed teachers.

This is a most pertinent observation, for the general maxims of democracy are just as likely to make pupils despise their masters as to make sons despise their fathers. The master, too, represents in the eyes of his pupil that past which has no connection with the present and which by the law of progress is very inferior to the present. This is true; but the end of all is that between the school which counteracts the influence of the parents and the home which counteracts the influence of the school, the child becomes a personage who is never educated at all. He is in like case with a child who in the family itself receives lessons, and what is more important, example, from a mother who is religious and from a father who is an atheist. He is not educated, he has had no sort of education. The only real education, that is to say, the only transmission to the children of the ideas of their parents consists of an education at home which is reinforced by the instruction of masters chosen by the parents in accordance with their own views. This is precisely the form of education to which democracy refuses to be reconciled.

There is a still more cogent reason why old men are neither respected nor honoured in a democracy. Here is yet another efficiency formally denied and formally set aside. An interesting treatise might be written on the rise and fall of old men. Civilization has not been kind to them.

In primitive times, as among savage races to-day, old men were kings.

Gerontocracy, that is, government by the aged, is the most ancient form of government. It is easy to understand why this should be. In primitive ages, all knowledge was experience and the old men possessed all the historical, social and political experience of the State. They were held in great honour and listened to with the profoundest respect and veneration, in fact with an almost superst.i.tious reverence. Nietzsche was thinking of those days when he said: "Respect for the aged is the symbol of aristocracy," and when he added: "Respect for the aged is respect for tradition," he was thinking of the reason for this a.s.sumption. That the dead should rule the living was accepted instinctively, and it was their nearness to death which evoked honour for the aged.

At a later stage the old man shared in the civil government with monarchy, aristocracy or oligarchy, and retained an almost complete control of judicial affairs. His moral and technical efficiency were still appreciated. His moral efficiency to his contemporaries consisted in the fact that his pa.s.sions were deadened and his judgment as disinterested as was humanly possible. Even his obstinacy is rather an advantage than otherwise. He is not liable to whims and fancies and sudden gusts of temper or to external influence. His technical efficiency is considerable, because he has seen and remembered much and his mind has unconsciously drawn up a reference book of cases. As history repeats itself with very slight alterations, every fresh case which arises is already well known to him; it does not take him by surprise and he has a solution at hand which only requires very slight modification.

All this, however, is very ancient history. That which undermined the authority of old men was the book. Books contain all science, equity, jurisprudence and history better, it must be confessed, than the memories of old men. One fine day the young men said: "The old men were our books; now that we have books we have no further need for old men."

This was a mistake; the knowledge which is acc.u.mulated in books can never be anything but the handmaiden of living science, the science which is being constantly remodelled and corrected by living thought. A book is a wise man paralysed; the wise man is a book which still thinks and writes.

These ideas did not hold; the book superseded the old man, and the old man no longer was a library to the nation.

Later still, for various reasons, the old men drifted from a position of respect to one of ridicule. Undoubtedly they lend themselves to this; they are obstinate, foolish, prosy, boring, crotchety and unpleasant to look upon. Comic writers poked fun at these failings which are only too self-evident and showered ridicule upon them. Then as the majority of audiences is composed of young men, first of all because there are more young men than old, and secondly because old men do not often go to the theatre, authors of comic plays were certain of raising a laugh by turning old men into ridicule, or rather by exposing only their ridiculous characteristics.

At Athens and at Rome and probably elsewhere, the old man was one of the princ.i.p.al grotesque characters. These things, as Rousseau pointed out, have a great effect upon morals. Once the old man became a recognised traditional stage-b.u.t.t, his social authority had come to an end. In the _de Senectute_ it is obvious that Cicero is running counter to the stream in seeking to restore to favour a character about whom the public is indifferent and for whom all he can do is to plead extenuating circ.u.mstances.

It is a remarkable fact that even in mediaeval epics, Charlemagne himself, the emperor of the flowing beard, often plays a comic part. The epic is invaded by the atmosphere of the fable.

During the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the old man is generally, though not invariably, held up to ridicule.

Moliere takes his lead from Aristophanes and Plautus rather than from Terence and is the scourge of old age as well as "the scourge of the ridiculous"; he pursues the old as a hound his prey and never leaves them in peace either in his poetry or his prose.

We must do this much justice to Rousseau that both he and his child, the Revolution, tried to restore the old man to his former glory; he makes honourable mention of him in his writings, and she gives him important posts in public ceremonies and national fetes. Therein were received the ancient memories of Lacedaemon and of early Rome, combined with a form of reaction against the days of Louis XIV and Louis XV.

But with the triumph of democracy the old man was finally banished to the limbo of discredited things. Montesquieu's advice was quite forgotten (see the context Laws, v, 8). He said that _in a democracy_ "nothing kept the standard of morals so high as that young men should venerate the old. Both profit by it, the young because they respect the old, and the old because they are confirmed in their respect for themselves" (for the respect of the young is an a.s.sistance to the self-respect of the aged).

Democracy has forgotten this advice, because it no longer believes in tradition and believes too much in progress. Old men are the natural upholders of tradition, and we must confess that an enthusiastic faith in the value of what we call progress is not commonly their failing. For this very reason their influence would be a most wholesome corrective to the system, or rather to the att.i.tude of mind, which despises the past and sees in every change a step in the path of progress. But democracy will not allow that it needs a corrective, and the old man, to it, is only an enemy. The old man upholds tradition and has no enthusiasm for progress, but beyond this he appeals for respect, first for himself, then for religion, for glory, for his country and for the history of his nation. Democracy is indifferent to the sentiment of respect, or rather it lives in constant fear that the sentiment may be applied elsewhere.

Then what does democracy want for itself?

Not respect, but adoration, pa.s.sion, devotion. We all like to see our own sentiments as to ourselves repeated in the minds of others. The crowd never respects, it loves, it yields to pa.s.sion, enthusiasm, fanaticism. It never respects even that which it loves.

It is quite natural that the ma.s.ses should not care for old men. The ma.s.ses are young. How aptly does Horace's description of the young man apply to the people!

_Imberbis juvenis, tandem custode remoto Gaudet equis, canibusque et aprici gramine campi; Cereus in vitium flecti, monitoribus asper, Utilium tardus provisor, prodigus aeris, Sublimis, cupidusque et amata relinquere pernix._

"Once free from the control of his tutors, the young man thinks of nothing but horses, dogs and the Campus Martius, impressionable as wax to every temptation, impatient of correction, unthrifty, extravagant, presumptuous and light of love."

At all events respect has no meaning for the crowd, and when it rules, we cannot from its example learn the lessons of respect. Democracy has no love for the old; and it is interesting to note that the word gerontocracy to which the ancients attached the most honourable meaning is now only a term of ridicule, and is applied only to a government which, because it is in the hands of old men, is therefore grotesque.

This disappearance of respect, noted as we have seen by Plato, Aristotle and Montesquieu as a morbid system, is, regard it how we will, a fact of the gravest import. Kant has asked the question, what must we obey? What criterion is there to tell us what to obey? What is there within us which commands respect, which does not ask for love or fear, but for respect alone? He has given us the answer. The feeling of respect is the only thing that we can trust, and that will never fail us.

In society the only feelings we obey are those which win our respect, and the men to whom we listen, and whom we honour, are those who inspire respect. This is the only criterion which enables us to gauge correctly the men and things to whom we owe, if not absolute obedience, at least attention and deference. Old men are the nation's conscience, and it is a conscience at times severe, morose, tiresome, obstinate, over-scrupulous, dictatorial, and it repeats for ever the same old saws; in other words a conscience; but conscience it is.

The comparison might be carried further with results that would be advantageous as well as curious. We degrade and finally vitiate our conscience if we do not respect its behests. Conscience then itself becomes small and timid and humble, shamefaced, and at length a mere whisper. Absolutely silent it can never be made.

It becomes sophisticated, it begins to employ the language of pa.s.sion, not of the vilest pa.s.sions of our nature, but still the voice of pa.s.sion; it ceases to use the categoric imperative and tries to be persuasive. It no longer raises the finger of command, but it seeks to cajole with caressing hand.

Then it falls still lower, it affects indifference and scepticism and it puts on the air of the trifler in order to insinuate a word of wisdom into the seductive talk that is heard around it, and it holds language somewhat as follows: "Probably everything has its good points and there is something to be said for both vice and virtue, crime and honesty, sin and innocence, rudeness and politeness, licence and purity. These are all simply different forms of an activity which cannot be wholly wrong in any of its manifestations; and it is precisely because every one of these has its value that there may be nothing to lose in being honest, nay, perhaps something to gain."

Nevertheless, a nation that does not respect its old men changes their nature and despoils them of their beauty and integrity. How true is Montesquieu's saying that the respect paid them by the young helps old men to respect themselves! Old men who are not respected take no interest in their natural duties; they cease to advise, or else they only venture to advise indirectly, as though they were apologising for their wisdom, or they affect a laxity of morals to enable them to insinuate a surrept.i.tious dose of worldly wisdom;--and worst of all in view of the insignificant part a.s.signed to them in society, old men will nowadays decline to be old.

CHAPTER IX.

MANNERS.

If the worship of incompetence reverberates with a jarring note through our domestic morals, it has an effect hardly less harmful on the social relations of men in the wider theatre of public life. We often ask why politeness is out of date, and everyone replies with a smile: "This is democratic." So it is, but why should it be? Montesquieu remarks that "to cast off the conventions of civility is to seek a method for putting our faults at their ease." He adds the rather subtle distinction that "politeness flatters the vices of others, and civility prevents us from displaying our own. It is a barrier raised by men to prevent them from corrupting each other." That which flatters vice can hardly be called politeness, but is rather adulation. Civility and politeness are only slightly different in degree; civility is cold and very respectful, politeness has a suggestion of flattery. It graciously draws into evidence the good qualities of our neighbour, not his failings, much less his vices.

There is no doubt that civility and politeness are a delicate means of showing respect to our fellow-men, and of communicating a wish to be respected in turn. These things then are barriers, but barriers from which we derive support, which separate and strengthen us, but which, though holding us apart, do not keep us estranged from our neighbours.

It is also very true that if we release ourselves from these rules, whether they are civility or politeness, we set our faults at liberty.