CHAPTER I. Morality As the Interest of the Stronger

MORALITY AS THE INTEREST OF THE STRONGER

Thrasymachus appears in the first book of Plato’s Republic, in which the speakers discuss the nature of Justice. Several tentative definitions of Justice are given, which Socrates has no difficulty in showing to be inadequate by the peculiarly irritating methods of dialectic for which the Athenians so excusably poisoned him. Thrasymachus then breaks in. He is a blustering, overbearing personage, who makes long speeches instead of answering Socrates’ questions, and, when driven into a corner, charges the latter rather irrelevantly with having a bad cold and omitting to use his handkerchief.

Required to sustain an unpopular thesis, he is not unnaturally represented as an offensive person. The trick is an old one and argues well for Plato’s sense of dramatic fitness. It should not, however, blind us to the plausibility of Thrasymachus’ position. Justice, he says, is the interest of the stronger. Asked how he maintains this view, he points out that the stronger control the government and make the laws. These laws are not unnaturally made in their own interest; in other words, matters are so contrived that, by the mere process of obeying the laws, citizens are led to further the interests of those who govern them. Morality, which is the name we give to law-abiding conduct, is, therefore, a device on the part of the rulers to ensure subservience and contentment on the part of their subjects. Since subservient subjects are a joy and a credit to intelligent rulers, we may say that justice, and indeed morality in general, is the interest of the stronger.

The view that morality is unnatural to human beings and is imposed by law in the teeth of primitive instincts which are fundamentally non-moral, recurs at pretty regular intervals throughout the recorded history of what passes for human thought. It rests upon what is called the social contract theory of society, and leads to the conclusion that human nature is fundamentally wicked.

The life of man in a state of nature was, as the philosopher Hobbes tells us, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” His hand was against his fellows and every man’s hand was against him. Men acted offensively towards each other as and when they pleased, and were restrained by nothing but fear for their own safety. Finding this state of affairs intolerable, men agreed to renounce their natural right to act offensively towards their fellows on condition that their fellows made a similar concession as regards themselves. The best thing of all, of course, was to do what you liked to others without their having the right to retaliate. Since this seemed impracticable, the next best thing was to renounce the full liberty to do what one liked, seeing that it was attended by the obviously unpleasant consequence to oneself of a similar liberty in others, and to venture only upon those actions that the law allowed. Society then was a pis aller. Your neighbour, it was true, could not harm you, but then no longer could you work your own sweet will upon your neighbour. Men lived at peace with one another, not because they were naturally peaceable and law abiding, but because they feared the consequences of being found out if they were not. Once that fear of consequences was removed, they would revert to their primitive, natural wickedness. Let a man, for example, learn how to become invisible at will and, as Plato points out, no virgin would be safe, no strong box unrifled. Man, then, is made moral by law; he is not moral by nature.

The term ‘acting offensively’ in this connection is used to cover primitive conduct of the kind which is supposed to attract wicked and violent men, as, for example, carrying off your neighbour’s wife, raping his daughter, stealing his spoons, bashing in or otherwise mutilating his face, and so forth.

Now the man who makes the laws is in one sense like the man who has learnt how to become invisible. I do not mean that he can break the laws with impunity, but he can see to it that he has no incentive to break them. Thus we have the majestic impartiality of the modern law which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep in doorways. He can also, as Thrasymachus points out, ensure that, so long as others keep them, his own power will be automatically safeguarded. And, since the law is at once the prop and the mirror of the public opinion of the community, and, since the public opinion of the community is in matters of conduct at once the guardian and the arbiter of conventional morality, we may further say that the habit of acting in a way of which the public opinion of the community approves will be found to conduce to the maintenance of the status quo, and hence to the interests of those whom the status quo suits.

In the early eighteenth century Bernard Mandeville revived and elaborated the doctrine of Thrasymachus. Society was devised by skilful politicians for their own advantage. This they hoped chiefly to secure by the spread of what was called morality. Addressing themselves, therefore, to men’s pride, they pointed out that man had always considered himself to be superior to the brute beasts. Yet, if he indulged his passions as soon as he conceived them and gave way alike to sensual desire and violent rage, wherein did his superiority consist? Surely in order to demonstrate their superiority men must learn to master their appetites and restrain their passions. The plain man listened to the words of the flatterer, and, aspiring to live the higher life, transformed himself from a savage into a clerk. The process is known as civilization.

Tamed by his own conceit, man was now fit to live in society. As a social animal he regards as virtuous every action on the part of others by which the society to which he belongs is benefited, and stigmatizes as vicious the indulgence of private appetites irrespective of the public good.

But the skilful politicians who had planned the thing from the beginning had taken good care to ensure that the good of society should be identical with their own advantage. Uncivilized man is ungovernable man, but man tamed and tractable, with the bees of social virtue and social service buzzing in his citizen’s bonnet, is at once the prop and the dupe of unscrupulous governments. “From which”, as Mandeville says, “it is evident that the first rudiments of morality broached by skilful politicians to make men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the ambitious might reap the more benefit from, and govern vast numbers of them with the greater ease and security.”

To those who object that morality was invented by God and not by politicians, and that the sanctions of right conduct are derived not from social utility but from divine ordinance, it should be observed that God himself is the most potent instrument yet devised for securing the performance of conduct beneficial to the stronger. This at least is true of the great bulk of the gods who have figured in history. On this point perhaps it would be best to let the stronger speak for themselves. Napoleon may be taken as a suitable representative.

“What is it,” he writes, “that makes the poor man think it quite natural that there are fires in my parlour while he is dying of cold? That I have ten coats in my wardrobe while he goes naked? That at each of my meals enough is served to feed his family for a week? It is simply religion which tells him that in another life I shall be only his equal, and that he actually has more chances of being happy there than I. Yes, we must see to it that the floors of the churches are open to all, and that it does not cost the poor man much to have prayers said on his tomb.” Thenceforward, though an avowed free thinker, Napoleon set his face sternly against anti-Christian and anti-clerical legislation.

The moral is sufficiently obvious. Men whose lives are miserable and oppressed will either rise in revolt against their misery and servitude, or console themselves with the prospect of generous compensation hereafter. If steps are taken to ensure that their faith is sufficiently lively, they will look to the next world to supply them with the divine equivalents of the champagne and cigars they are missing in this one, an expectation which confers obvious advantages upon those whom it enables to monopolize the champagne and cigars. Tack on the further belief that riches and power in this world are the best guarantees of torment and anguish in the next, and the utility of religion to “the stronger” is sufficiently manifest. The parable of the needle’s eye and the story of Lazarus have been responsible for a political and social quietism among the many, which do credit to the political acumen of the early governing class realists who slipped them into the text of the New Testament; and whenever that quietism has showed signs of giving, way, a religious revival or the endowment of a church has usually been found the most effective method of dealing with the situation.

“In 1818 one Englishman out of seven being at that time a pauper, Parliament voted a million of public money for the construction of churches to preach submission to the higher powers. In the debates in the House of Lords, Lord Liverpool took occasion to lay stress on the social importance of guiding by this means the opinions of the masses who were for the first time beginning to receive education.” God, it seems, is cheaper than a living wage, and no less effective as a means of securing social contentment.

The Town Labourer, by J. L. and Barbara Hammond.

To its superior utility in this respect we must in part attribute the success of Christianity. Of all religions known to man it lays the greatest stress upon those virtues whose practice is advantageous to the stronger. It glorifies weakness and sentimentalizes over failure; its heaven is for the submissive and the inefficient; its hell for the dominant and the proud. Just as the charitable worker takes the revolutionary edge off poverty by distributing coal and blankets to the victims of acute industrial distress, so the priest promotes submissiveness by inculcating the duties of sobriety, meekness, unselfishness, honesty, and contentment. These virtues make good workmen and prosperous employers, and, if they are only developed to a sufficient degree, will enable their fortunate possessors cheerfully to put up with bad wages, long hours, wretched houses, and social servitude. The contrary virtues of manliness, self-reliance and independence springing from a spirit passionately resentful of injustice, quick to resist an injury and idealistically determined to make a better place of this world instead of waiting passively for the next one, are discouraged as savouring of pride and self-sufficiency, and as showing a reprehensible tendency to look for help to oneself instead of to God, our helper in time of trouble. The rich, to be sure, possess these virtues; but then the message of religion is from, not to, the rich.

But Thrasymachus has yet one more observation to make to us before we leave him to turn to the future. The penalty of law breaking on a small scale is prison, and of trivial wickedness, social ostracism. But what of law-breaking on a large scale, and a wickedness powerful enough to flout the public opinion to which others succumb? These are the qualities of the stronger and they reap the stronger’s reward. The rebel is the patriot who fails, the patriot is the rebel who prevails. This is the lesson of the past, and those who read it may learn that if only they are strong enough to succeed, they need not trouble themselves about the respectability of their credentials. Nor has the position altered to-day. The man who steals a leg of mutton goes to prison for a month; the captain of industry grown rich on the profits stolen from his workmen gets a knighthood. The man who has murdered the wife who has annoyed him gets hanged for his pains; the man who kills his fellow men for nourishment is denounced as a cannibal; but the great general who plans the death of vast multitudes of his fellows whom he has never seen, with whom he has never exchanged a cross word and whom he does not require for purposes of sustenance, is hailed as the saviour of his country.

Thus those who commit injustice, yet have the wit or the good fortune to escape the consequences of their actions, climb into the seats of the stronger and share their immunity from moral restrictions. Since, in the mere process of gratifying their tastes, they are enabled to give employment to large bodies of their fellows, they are accounted public benefactors whose wealth constitutes a social asset. And, should vestiges of the morality of the weaker, from whose ranks they have risen, assail them in the form of conscience, they discover that even the gods can be squared and that a liberal support of deserving charities, coupled with the occasional endowment of a church, are calculated――so they are assured――to procure for them as honoured a place in the hereafter as their own successful injustice has obtained for them in the present.

Thus Thrasymachus’ phrase “morality is the interest of the stronger” has a double significance. In the first place, it defines the morality of the many as that kind of conduct which promotes the interest of the few; in the second, it assures to the successful few the honourable reputation, the social consideration and the good repute among their fellows, which are commonly supposed to be the rewards of morality.