Chapter III

Facts brought to light in the sphere of industry have an application in politics, so to politics and the arts of government let us turn. Let politicians consider, for example, the discovery that the incidence of shell-shock in war, and of nervous disorders in peace, is highest in the dangerous occupations which are also the occupations most liable to industrial unrest. Such facts prevent us from viewing the discontented worker either as a martyred idealist, or as a mere criminal. The case is paralleled by the suggestion that desertion and malingering in exhausted armies are symptoms or ‘defence reactions’ in incipient shell-shock. They force upon us a more dispassionate and a more therapeutic point of view. The criminal in general is coming to be regarded in this light. Turn now to the anarchist, and the psycho-analyst explains to you that his activities are minor symptoms of his ‘father complex’, which imprisonment, for example, will merely intensify.

From knowledge of the conditions of these things proceeds control. Possibly punitive measures may be genuinely counteracting causes. Perhaps, however, empirical science may declare that the best treatment for an anarchist is to make him a Lord Mayor, and the best remedy for a militant labour party is a term of office judiciously supervised by our permanent officials. The future student of social affairs will be preoccupied with the scientific investigation of the sources of power and its social reservoirs. The ‘party in power’, as it is charitably called, has not much of it. Public opinion seems to have much more. In fact, the chief function of a government, now-a-days, seems to be that of carrying out the programme of the opposition.[6] The opposition is relatively free from criticism; the Government moves in dread of it, being threatened by attrition in its bye-elections and by a general landslide at any appeal to the country.

[6] We have recently witnessed a paralysed Labour Government
incapable of carrying out its projected remedies for industrial
ills, and a Conservative Government maintaining a system of
Free Trade.

Under such conditions the essential tasks of government are very much the same of whatever political colour the party in power may be. First and foremost it has to deal with emergencies, whether spontaneously arising or organized by the opposition, in such a way as to preserve its popularity with the public. It has also to carry out more or less efficiently the routine work of government, and it has to prepare for the next election by enshrining its most permanent tactical advantages within the framework of the Constitution. Any time and energy that may be left can be devoted to carrying out its ‘programme’ and in dealing with what it conceives to be the fundamental disorders of society.

A ‘party programme’, like a dream, has a manifest and a latent content. The manifest content is drawn from the incidents of the day and popular demands. The latent is constituted by those deeper policies for the furtherance of which this clap-trap may be closed. The distinction between the manifest and the latent content is not due, as is frequently asserted, to mere political dishonesty but to the necessities of the case; the primitive group mind’s need of a ‘Cause’ and of an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual economic doctrine. With the increased complexity and scientific character which the latent content is, in future, likely to assume political sacramentalism will become more and more important.

How will this affect the issue of our present discontents? Viewing the situation frankly, we find in society two powerful and opposed forces. Let us adopt the convenient labels and call them Capital and Labour. It would take us too far afield to discuss in detail the prospects of success in each of the various remedies suggested for their enmity. In general, it seems to me that all the proposals depend for their success upon large-scale persuasion, and ignore the fundamental causes of unrest and conflict. Even labour, it seems to me, is mistaken about the causes of its troubles, and labour might be expected to know them best. But even to ask this would be as unreasonable as to ask a patient to diagnose and prescribe for his own disease. The solution, I venture to think, will come along the lines upon which the only solution of any problem has ever before been found――along the lines of exact and scientific thought and piecemeal investigation. The recognition of this combined with attention to the apparent power of public opinion in modern politics has led many to suppose that the ultimate remedy lies in the dissemination of education, of exact and scientific thought throughout our great democracies. But, personally, I doubt the possibility of disseminating anything, least of all scientific habits or attitudes of mind. It would seem to violate the rule of differentiation. Nor can I bring myself to believe that there ever was or is ever likely to be a democracy in any important sense. It is sufficient if this scientific spirit be exploited by those who hold the reins of power, and it is because it seems that they are beginning to see the possibilities of this that I think the really significant revolution is to come. What is called ‘Public Opinion’ is now-a-days a carefully manufactured article produced by firms entirely outside the scope of the Factory Acts. Of course, even a despotism is a ‘democracy’ in the unimportant sense that the despot’s rule depends upon a certain kind of consent. What has happened lately is that a new kind of leader has been evolved. The old leader ruled by certain kind of obvious strength. The new ruler practices an art. He is moreover, a student of the science of persuasion. He appeals through various media directly to the masses, and does not so much inspire confidence as suggest that he is only a more articulate spokesman of their will. The contrast is rather like that between coercion and hypnotism, two obvious ways of making people do as you wish; and the transition from one to the other does not seem to me to be adequately described as a passage to democracy.

The future, it seems, will see these powers scientifically employed. Much has been learnt by crude empirical methods. The newspapers, the advertising agencies, and the publicity departments have a store of knowledge upon which politicians are wisely beginning to draw. Soon they may attend to Mr Bertrand Russell, who in his prophetic volume, foresees the development of glandular psychology. We know that by suitable injections a person’s emotional mood can be changed, and Russell suggests that a simple operation like compulsory vaccination will convert the reddest Bolshevic to the temperament of the mildest curate. The glands of docility will be under government control.

The suggestion appears to me to be over-simple, and to belong to the mechanistic type of prophecy. Its supreme simplicity is in this connection its supreme defect. The only defence against democracy is a complicated mode of government. If methods of government are foolproof then any one can practice it; and a sudden _coup d’état_, or an invasion of half-a-dozen uninoculated savages, would be an irrevocable disaster.

It is, I think, mainly through the development of scientifically conducted propaganda that the world may one day see the abandonment of force. No wholesale change of heart will be involved. It will simply be that a more efficient weapon will have been discovered, a weapon that is preventive as well as corrective in its use.

The military mind is, it is generally agreed, conservative to the verge of sheer stupidity, but even the military mind is becoming infected with the new ideas. Under the influence of Captain Liddel Hart, the military representative of the prophetic school with which we are concerned, it will surely come to recognize “the moral objective of war.”[7] Even this author is conservative, in regarding tanks and aeroplanes as being the principal weapons of the future. With regard to the immediate future he may be right. But the implication of his general thesis is that all these weapons will ultimately give place to subtler ones of psychological design. Hardly less effective than the ‘death ray’ in bending the enemy’s will is the rumour that one has been invented. And rumours can be invented daily in His Majesty’s Office of Propaganda. And why stop at the control of fear? Why not apply psychology throughout the whole of the enemy’s mental life? Perhaps, in the last of all wars to end war, victory will fall to the side which first makes its enemy laugh. The power of a sense of humour, at any rate, is a terrible weapon in the negotiation of peace. Our late enemies would scarcely have fared so badly had they been less sparingly endowed with it in war.

[7] See _Paris, or the Future of War_.

Humour has its applications in peace as in war. Under universal Scientific Management, the Government will vie with the underground railways for the control of public laughter. The Catholic Church, in enlisting the aid of Chesterton and Ronald Knox against its irrefutable but dreary adversaries, has for once in modern history placed itself in the vanguard of a winning cause.

The weapon has curious possibilities, but is one difficult to employ. Quick wits sensitive to the trend of fashion are the essential qualifications for a Minister of Public Humour. For the joke is the most ephemeral of all works of art. It takes years of patient research, now, to see the jokes of classical antiquity, and pages of solemn argument to defend the taste of Shakespeare in his humour. Differences of humour separate age from age and class from class. It is the weakest link which binds the intellectuals to the cause of labour. One might expect this weapon to favour established institutions, for only the fat and prosperous can laugh with merriment, but by the same token the jokes of Marie Antoinette were unintelligible to the hungry. Therefore the lean and plodding journalists will come into their own and take their place among the expert advisors to the future Ministry of Talents.