12: Theory and Practice

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IN addition to the rapprochement between philosophy and history, whose earlier stages I have already tried to describe, I was also working at a rapprochement between theory and practice. My first efforts in this direction were attempts to obey what I felt as a call to resist the moral corruption propagated by the ‘realist’ dogma that moral philosophy does no more than study in a purely theoretical spirit a subject-matter which it leaves wholly unaffected by that investigation.

The opposite of this dogma seemed to me not only a truth, but a truth which, for the sake of his integrity and efficacy as a moral agent in the wider sense of that term, ought to be familiar to every human being: namely, that in his capacity as a moral, political, or economic agent he lives not in a world of ‘hard facts’ to which ‘thoughts’ make no difference, but in a world of ‘thoughts’; that if you change the moral, political, and economic ‘theories’ generally accepted by the society in which he lives, you change the character of his world; and that if you change his own ‘theories’ you change his relation to that world; so that in either case you change the ways in which he acts.

The ‘realist’ attempt to deny this could, no doubt, be defended with some plausibility, so long as a clean cut could be made between philosophical and historical thinking. It could be admitted that the way in which a man acts, in so far as he is a moral, political, economic agent, is not independent of the way in which he thinks of the situation in which he finds himself. If knowledge as to the facts of one’s situation is called historical knowledge, historical knowledge is necessary to action. But it could still be argued that philosophical thinking, which has to do with timeless ‘universals’, is not necessary.

Arguments of this kind were no longer even worth refuting, once I knew that ‘realism’ was completely astray as to the nature of history, and that consequently any ‘realist’ argument based on the distinction between history and philosophy, or ‘facts’ and ‘theories’, or ‘the individual’ (which some ‘realists’ miscalled ‘the particular’) and ‘the universal’, must be regarded as suspect. Immediately after the War, therefore, I began to reconsider in detail all the familiar topics and problems of moral philosophy, including under that head the theory of economics and that of politics, as well as that of morals in the narrower sense, on the principles which by now were controlling all my work.

In the first place, I subjected these topics and problems to what I called an historical treatment, insisting that every one of them had its history and was unintelligible without some knowledge of that history. Secondly, I attempted to treat them in another way, which I called analytic. My notion was that one and the same action, which as action pure and simple was a ‘moral’ action, was also a ‘political’ action as action relative to a rule, and at the same time an ‘economic’ action as means to an end. The problems of moral theory, in the broader sense of the word moral, could thus be divided into (a) problems of moral theory in the narrower sense, that is, problems concerned with action as such; (b) problems of political theory, that is, problems concerned with action as the making, obeying, or breaking of rules; and (c) problems of economic theory, or problems concerned with action as the procuring or non-procuring of ends beyond itself.

There were, I held, no merely moral actions, no merely political actions, and no merely economic actions. Every action was moral, political, and economic. But although actions were not to be divided into three separate classes---the moral, the political, and the economic---these three characteristics, their morality, their politicality, and their economicity, must be distinguished and not confused as they are, for example, by utilitarianism, which offers an account of economicity when professing to offer one of morality.

These were the lines on which I treated the subject in my lectures of 1919. I continued to lecture upon it yearly during almost the whole remainder of my life at Pembroke College, with constant revision. The scheme I have just described obviously represents a stage in my thought at which the rapprochement between history and philosophy was very incomplete. Any reader who has understood the earlier chapters of this book can see for himself how I modified it as time went on.

The rapprochement between theory and practice was equally incomplete. I no longer thought of them as mutually independent: I saw that the relation between them was one of intimate and mutual dependence, thought depending upon what the thinker learned by experience in action, action depending upon how he thought of himself and the world; I knew very well, too, that scientific, historical, or philosophical thinking depended quite as much on ‘moral’ qualities as on ‘intellectual’ ones, and that ‘moral’ difficulties were to be overcome not by ‘moral’ force alone but by clear thinking.

But this was only a theoretical rapprochement of theory and practice, not a practical one. I still conducted my daily life as if I thought that the business of that life was theoretical and not practical. I did not see that my attempted reconstruction of moral philosophy would remain incomplete so long as my habits were based on the vulgar division of men into thinkers and men of action.

This division, like so much that nowadays we take for granted, was a survival from the Middle Ages. I lived and worked in a University; and a University is an institution based on medieval ideas, whose life and work are still hedged about by the medieval interpretation of the Greek distinction between the contemplative life and the practical life as a division between two classes of specialists.

I can now see that I had three different attitudes towards this survival. There was a first R. G. C. who knew in his philosophy that the division was false, and that ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, being mutually dependent, must both alike suffer frustration if segregated into the specialized functions of different classes.

There was a second R. G. C. who in the habits of his daily life behaved as if it had been sound; living as a professional thinker whose college gate symbolized his aloofness from the affairs of practical life. My philosophy and my habits were thus in conflict; I lived as if I disbelieved my own philosophy, and philosophized as if I had not been the professional thinker that in fact I was. My wife used to tell me so; and I used to be a good deal annoyed.

But underneath this conflict there was a third R. G. C., for whom the gown of the professional thinker was a disguise alternately comical and disgusting in its inappropriateness. This third R. G. C. was a man of action, or rather he was something in which the difference between thinker and man of action disappeared. He never left me alone for very long. He turned over in his sleep, and the fabric of my habitual life began to crack. He dreamed, and his dreams crystallized into my philosophy. When he would not lie quiet and let me play at being a don, I would appease him by throwing off my academic associations and going back to my own part of the country to address the local antiquarian society. It may seem an odd form of ‘release’ for a suppressed man of action; but it was a very effective one. The enthusiasm for historical studies, and for myself as their leader in those studies, which I never failed to arouse in my audiences, was not in principle different from the enthusiasm for his person and his policy which is aroused by a successful political speaker. And sometimes this third R. G. C. woke right up; for example, on a day soon after the beginning of August 1914, when a crowd of Northumberland coal-miners, full of patriotic fervour, saw what they imagined to be a German spy on ‘the old Roman camp’ up the hill, and took appropriate action.

The third R. G. C. used to stand up and cheer, in a sleepy voice, whenever I began reading Marx. I was never at all convinced either by Marx’s metaphysics or by his economics; but the man was a fighter, and a grand one; and no mere fighter, but a fighting philosopher. His philosophy might be unconvincing; but to whom was it unconvincing? Any philosophy, I knew, would be not only unconvincing but nonsensical to a person who misunderstood the problem it was meant to solve. Marx’s was meant to solve a ‘practical’ problem; its business, as he said himself, was to ‘make the world better’. Marx’s philosophy would necessarily, therefore, appear nonsensical except to a person who, I will not say shared his desire to make the world better by means of a philosophy, but at least regarded that desire as a reasonable one. According to my own principles of philosophical criticism, it was inevitable that Marx’s philosophy should appear nonsensical to gloves-on philosophers like the ‘realists’, with their sharp division between theory and practice, or the ‘liberals’, such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that people ought to be allowed to think whatever they liked because it didn’t really matter what they thought. In order to criticize a gloves-off philosophy like that of Marx, you must be at least enough of a gloves-off philosopher to think gloves-off philosophizing legitimate.

The first and third R. G. C.s agreed in wanting a gloves-off philosophy. They did not want a philosophy that should be a scientific toy guaranteed to amuse professional thinkers safe behind their college gates. They wanted a philosophy that should be a weapon. So far, I was with Marx. Perhaps all that stood in the way of a closer agreement was the second R. G. C., the academic or professional thinker.

My attitude towards politics had always been what in England is called democratic and on the Continent liberal. I regarded myself as a unit in a political system where every citizen possessing the franchise had the duty of voting for a representative to parliament. I thought that the government of my country, owing to a wide franchise, a free press, and a universally recognized right of free speech, was such as to make it impossible that any considerable section should be oppressed by government action, or that their grievances should be hushed up, even if a remedy for them could not be found. I thought that the democratic system was not only a form of government but a school of political experience coextensive with the nation, and I thought that no authoritarian government, however strong, could be so strong as one which rested on a politically educated public opinion. As a form of government, I thought its essence lay in the fact that it was a nursery-garden where policies were brought to maturity in the open air, not a post office for distributing ready-made policies to a passively receptive country.

These I thought very great merits; greater than those of any other political system yet devised, and worth defending at all costs against people who, because they wished to hoodwink the citizen and enforce upon him ready-made policies devised by some irresponsible cabal, untruthfully accused it of being ‘cumbrous’ and ‘inefficient’. I knew, of course, that Marx had denounced it as a fraud, whose business was to throw a semblance of legality over the oppression of the workers by the capitalists; but although I knew that such oppression existed and was to a great extent legalized, I thought that the business of a democratic government was to eradicate it.

I did not think that our constitution was free from faults. But the discovery and correction of these faults was the function of governments, not of individual voters. For the system was a self-correcting one, charged with amending its own faults by legislation. It was also a self-feeding one. Members of parliament were chosen by the voters from among themselves; higher grades in the system were filled from among the members of parliament; and thus, so long as the individual voters did their political duty by keeping themselves adequately informed on public questions, and voting in accordance with their judgement as to where on any given occasion the good of the nation as a whole was to be sought, there was little danger that their representatives would be insufficiently informed, or insufficiently endowed with public spirit, to do their work creditably. And owing to the majority vote it did not matter if a few, at any stage, were ignorant or misguided. So long as the majority were well enough informed and public-spirited enough for what they had to do, fools and knaves would be out-voted.

The whole system, however, would break down if a majority of the electorate should become either ill informed on public questions or corrupt in their attitude towards them: by which I mean, capable of adopting towards them a policy directed not to the good of the nation as a whole, but to the good of their own class or section or of themselves.

In the first respect, I became conscious of a change for the worse during the eighteen-nineties. The newspapers of the Victorian age made it their first business to give their readers full and accurate information about matters of public concern. Then came the Daily Mail, the first English newspaper for which the word ‘news’ lost its old meaning of facts which a reader ought to know if he was to vote intelligently, and acquired the new meaning of facts, or fictions, which it might amuse him to read. By reading such a paper, he was no longer teaching himself to vote. He was teaching himself not to vote; for he was teaching himself to think of ‘the news’ not as the situation in which he was to act, but as a mere spectacle for idle moments.

In the second respect, I became aware of corrupting influences rather later. The South African settlement of the Campbell-Bannerman ministry was a fine exhibition of the principles in which I believed, and a proof that I was not wrong in thinking them to be the principles of English policy. The social legislation of its successor, Asquith’s first ministry, was such as I could not but approve. But the way in which it was advertised, by promising voters ‘ninepence for fourpence’, was the negation of those principles. Mr. Lloyd George became to me a landmark, second only to the Daily Mail, in the corruption of the electorate. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, each of these corrupting influences underwent enormous development.

After the War the democratic system was threatened by two powerful rivals. There were two elements in that system, one of which was inherited by each rival. On a Lockian basis of private property the democratic tradition had erected a system of representative institutions designed to promote the good of the nation as a whole. But there existed, on paper since Marx formulated it, and in terms of political fact since the Russian revolution, a system having the same end but a different starting-point. The Socialists (I use the term as implying Marxian Socialism) agreed with the democratic tradition in aiming at social and economic betterment for the entire people, but proposed to achieve this aim through the public ownership of ‘means of production’. ‘Then came Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, which agreed with the democratic tradition in making private property their first principle; but in order to preserve it they abandoned, not only the political institutions of democratic government, but also the aim of social and economic betterment upon which those institutions had been directed.

The real breach between the democratic tradition and the Socialists was not on a point of policy but on a point of fact. No one, I think, would deny that modern European society is divided into people whose energies are focused on owning things, and people whose energies are focused on doing things. Let these be called capitalists and workers respectively. All capitalists do things, and all workers own things; but this does not obliterate the distinction. If what is vital to a man is his ownership of certain things, while his engaging in certain activities is relatively unimportant, he is a capitalist, however much he does. If the contrary, he is a worker, however much he owns.

Between these two ‘classes’ in modern European society, the Socialists held that there was in existence a ‘class war’, and that parliamentary institutions only disguised this war and did not overcome it. The democratic tradition maintained that parliamentary institutions acted in such a way as to dissipate any tendency to class war by means of free speech and open discussion. Fascism on this point agreed with Socialism; though its mouthpieces, pursuing their declared policy of deceit, denied it. But whereas Socialism hoped to end the class war by a workers’ victory leading to the abolition of class distinctions, Fascism hoped to perpetuate it by a capitalist victory leading to the permanent subjection of the workers. National Socialism is only the local German variety of Fascism.

Fascism could best be understood as a capitalist Socialism: a system in which the machinery of Socialism had been turned upside down in order to connect it up with a different prime mover, namely, the desire of capitalists to remain capitalists. In order to gratify this desire they were glad to pay blackmail to the Fascist state far in excess of any taxation and control ever devised by parliamentary government. In Socialism, the prime mover was the desire for the whole nation’s social and economic welfare. By comparison with this, the motive power of Fascism was not respectable, and had to be disguised. It was therefore concealed beneath a cloak of international hatred and jealousy.

Actually, Fascism was not compatible with international hatred. It was based not on the idea of nation but on the idea of class; and had it been honest, it would have answered the Communists’ Manifesto with the call, ‘Capitalists of the world, unite.’

But Fascism was not capable of honesty. Essentially an attempt to fight Socialism with its own weapons, it was always inconsistent with itself. There was once a very able and distinguished philosopher who was converted to Fascism. As a philosopher, that was the end of him. No one could embrace a creed so fundamentally muddle-headed and remain capable of clear thinking. The great exponents of Fascism have been specialists in arousing mass-emotion; its minor adherents, tacticians and plotters.

Knowing all this, and thinking that in spite of some corrupting influences the true democratic tradition still existed in my own country, I rejected Socialism on the ground that the parliamentary system was still working well enough to perform its proper function of an antiseptic against class war; rejected Fascism as an incoherent caricature of Socialism’s worst features; and stood by the democratic tradition.

‘It was the Spanish ulcer’, said Napoleon, ‘that destroyed me.’ I had travelled over large parts of Spain in 1930 and 1931, and in the latter year had seen revolutionary movements everywhere going on. They were being conducted in the most orderly fashion. My friends and I never saw or heard of a single act of violence, or a single piece of evidence that such acts had been done. In one town we watched what we took for a religious festival, at which children in white were singing while their elders looked on, respectfully interested and perfectly quiet. Later, in a wine-shop, with the wireless relaying evensong from Canterbury cathedral, we asked our fellow drinkers what the festival was. ‘Festival?’ said they. ‘That was the Revolution.’

Our friends used to write from England expressing fears for our safety among the atrocities by which, the newspapers told them, the revolution was being accompanied; at the mercy of the bloodthirsty Communists in their war against religion. But there were no atrocities; no Communists to be seen or heard of, only democratically minded men at work establishing a parliamentary government; no war against religion, only a clean sweep of the old political domination by ecclesiastical and military bosses, while the Church itself, as one saw in every town, carried on its religious functions undisturbed, its buildings and its personnel in no way interfered with.

At the time, I thought it no more than comical that the English newspapers should be so ill informed about what was going on in Spain. It did not occur to me that another explanation was possible. I do not know which is the right one. Either it was a mere coincidence that this epidemic of journalistic ignorance prepared the way for the policy by which, later on, the larger part of the British press (acting, one cannot but suspect, under government instructions) deliberately deceived its readers as to the character of the Spanish republic; or else that policy was already working, and those instructions presumably issued, by 1931.

A few years later, the Spanish civil war began. It was a rebellion of the deposed military bosses against the democratic regime that had supplanted them: the rebellion of a nation’s army against that nation’s people and their properly constituted government; properly constituted, that is to say, according to English ideas. Every Englishman who had any faith in the English political tradition would, if he knew the truth, wish to help the Spanish government against the rebels. And very little help was needed; only a fair field. If the government could once extemporize and equip an army, the rebels’ fate was sealed.

The British ‘National’ government prevented this from happening. It adopted, and enforced on certain other nations, a policy of ‘non-intervention’, which meant forbidding the introduction into Spain of men to fight and munitions to fight with. Now, if in a certain country the army is in rebellion against an unarmed government, which is trying to arm in its own defence, no great penetration is needed in order to see that an embargo against the importation of arms into that country is an act of assistance to the rebels. People in England saw that their government, under its ‘non-intervention’ mask, was intervening, and very energetically, on the rebels’ side; so to keep them quiet a press campaign began, repeating the stories about Communism and atrocities for whose falsity a few years earlier I could vouch. It was successful. People who believe in the English political tradition do not like Communists and do not approve of atrocities. Sympathy for the Spanish government wilted visibly. No doubt, people said, it was only our ‘non-intervention’ humbug that was enabling the rebels to make headway against the government; but did one really want the government to win? Everybody knew that the rebel leader was a tool of the Italian and German dictators; and that these, whatever lip-service they gave to ‘non-intervention’, were feeding him constantly with men and munitions.

Everybody knew that in doing so they had altered the strategic situation in the Mediterranean, from the British point of view, very greatly for the worse. But if anybody hinted at these things, the British ‘National’ government answered, ‘Trust us; we know what we are doing; we have given you peace.’ This, once more, was successful. The electorate was willing to put up with almost anything so long as war was averted. But no evidence was produced, either then or later, that it had been. No evidence was produced that either or both of the dictators bullied the British government into adopting the ‘non-intervention’ policy by threats of war. No evidence was produced that their own notorious refusal to abide by that policy was covered by threats of the same kind. No evidence was produced that the British government would have endangered peace by simply refraining from those actions by which, legally or illegally, it forbade its nationals to enlist in the Spanish government’s service.

No evidence of these things was produced; and they were things which, certainly, no one would have believed at the time, and no one ever will believe, without evidence, and conclusive evidence, adduced to prove them. But so dense was the atmosphere of concealment in which the ‘National’ government had wrapped its policy for many years (beginning with the empty rodomontades of Ramsay MacDonald, who seemed to say so much and never said anything at all; and going on with the ‘con-man’ methods of Mr. Baldwin, who seldom said anything except what an honest man he was and how completely every one could trust him) that no one expected the government spokesmen even to say these things, let alone produce evidence for them. Nothing was definitely said, but a great deal was hinted.

But though nothing was said, much was done. Failing any statement of the ‘National’ government’s policy, I found myself obliged to infer their policy from the evidence of their actions. This was not difficult. For any one accustomed to interpret evidence, their actions admitted only one explanation. They wanted the rebels to win, and wanted to conceal this fact from the electorate. They knew that the rebels could not win without help from themselves, so they gave that help. They knew that the rebels could not win without grave damage to British interests, so they sacrificed those interests.

Why were they so anxious for the rebels’ success? Not because of ‘the Communist menace’, for although my old friend the Daily Mail, a keen supporter of the ‘National’ government, and now as ever a keen worker in the cause of corrupting the public mind, habitually referred to the Spanish government as ‘Red’, that is, Communist, the government knew as well as the Daily Mail did that republican Spain was not a Communist state but a parliamentary democracy, and that Senior Negrin’s cabinet, for example, contained only one solitary communist, who was included after his party had joined in the general declaration of loyalty to democratic principles. The Spanish civil war was a straight fight between Fascist dictatorship and parliamentary democracy. The British government, behind all its disguises, had declared itself a partisan of Fascist dictatorship.

At the beginning of 1938, when this became clear to me, I formed no opinion as to how far individual members of that government knew what they were doing. Fascism, I repeat, is a muddle-headed business. I found it easy to believe that the ‘National’ government’s policy of truckling to the Fascist powers, and of refusing to tell the country what they were doing, need not have arisen from that government’s clear comprehension of its own aims, coupled with a clear understanding of their detestableness in the eyes of the country, and resulting in a clear decision that the country must be deceived. It might arise from imbecility of will and weakness of intellect, combined with certain sneaking admirations and certain unexamined timidities, a defective sense of responsibility, and a feeble and sometimes inoperative regard for the truth. If any one in 1937, or even early in 1938, had said to the prime minister, with a reminiscence of Dr. Johnson’s repartee to the Thames waterman, ‘Sir, your government, under pretence of inability to defend the national interests, is conducting a Fascist revolution’, I dare say the prime minister would have denied the charge with all the sincerity that he possesses.

The events of 1938 taught me nothing about the ‘National’ government that I did not know already. I began the year in the expectation of two developments: an open clash between the prime minister and the principles of parliamentary government, and a more flagrant repetition, somewhere else, of the Spanish formula: aggression by a Fascist state, rendered successful by support from the British government under cover of a war-scare engineered by that government itself among the British people.

The first expectation was realized in the early summer, when in open defiance of the rules of parliamentary privilege a concerted attempt was made by members of the cabinet to suppress parliamentary criticism of the government’s already notorious inefficiency in carrying out the rearmament programme, by threats of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act against Mr. Duncan Sandys, the member of parliament who had dared to criticize. The matter was discreetly hushed up in the government newspapers; but every one who had access to the facts knew that it meant war between a Fascist cabinet and the parliamentary constitution of the country it was ruling.

The second expectation was realized during the Czechoslovakia crisis in September, when the British prime minister fiew successively to Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich, returning every time with orders in his pocket from the German dictator in obedience to which he changed the country’s policy behind the back of parliament, and even of the cabinet.

To me, therefore, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia was only a third case of the same policy by which the ‘National’ government had betrayed Abyssinia and Spain; and I was less interested in the fact itself than in the methods by which it was accomplished: the carefully engineered war-scare in the country at large, officially launched by the simultaneous issue of gas-masks and of the prime minister’s emotional broadcast, two days before his flight to Munich, and the carefully staged hysterical scene in parliament on the following night. These things were in the established tradition of Fascist dictatorial methods; except that whereas the Italian and German dictators sway mobs by appeal to the thirst for glory and national aggrandizement, the English prime minister did it by playing on sheer, stark terror.

He gained his point. At the time of writing, England has not formally bidden farewell to its parliamentary institutions; it has only permitted them to become inoperative. It has not renounced its faith in political liberty; it has only thrown away the thing in which it still professes to believe. It has not given away its Empire; it has only handed over the control of that Empire’s communications to a jealous and grasping power. It has not ceased to have a voice in European affairs; it has only used that voice to further the ends of another power even more jealous and even more grasping.

This has been done not by the wish of the country, or of any considerable section in the country, but because the country has been tricked. To recall what I said above, the forces which have been at work for nearly half a century corrupting the public mind, producing in it by degrees a willingness to forgo that full, prompt, and accurate information on matters of public importance which is the indispensable nourishment of a democratic society, and a disinclination to make decisions on such matters in the public-spirited frame of mind which is a democratic society’s life-blood, have ‘trained up a generation of Englishmen and Englishwomen’ to be the dupes of a politician who has so successfully ‘appealed to their emotions’ by ‘promises of private gain’ (the gain of personal safety from the horrors of war) that they have allowed him to sacrifice their country’s interests, throw away its prestige, and blacken its name in the face of the world, in order that he should glare out from his photographs with the well-known hypnotic eyes of a dictator.

It is not the business of this autobiography to ask how completely the country has in fact been deceived, or how long the present degree of deception will last. I am not writing an account of recent political events in England: I am writing a description of the way in which those events impinged upon myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.

THE END