CHAPTER II. Herd Morality and the New Tyranny of Thought

HERD MORALITY AND THE NEW TYRANNY OF THOUGHT

The statement of general principles in the preceding chapter was not undertaken solely for the pleasure of political and ethical speculation. My concern is a more practical one. If the principle that justice is the interest of the stronger is the explanation of what passes for morality, what, I wish to ask, is its application in the present and what is it likely to be in the immediate future?

In order to answer these questions we must first consider a further one: Who in a modern community is the stronger?

The fact that we are a democracy has not escaped notice. In our own day it is not kings, nobles, soldiers, prelates, politicians, or elected persons who are the stronger, but the common man, the plain man, the average man, the man in the street, whether city man or working man, and the crowd or herd of such men. He, or rather his female counterpart since she is more numerous even than he is, is the arbiter of morality, and the kind of conduct which is called moral is that which is convenient or pleasing to her.

Plato with his usual acumen foresaw the possibility of this development, and was careful to provide for it within the bounds of Thrasymachus’ formula. All that it is necessary to do if we wish to apply the formula to a democracy is to invert it; for ‘stronger’ read ‘weaker’, and the formula remains unaltered. The practicability of this inversion is demonstrated by one Callicles, in the Dialogue called Gorgias. Most men are stupid, irresolute, apathetic, mediocre, timid, and unimaginative. The qualities implied by these epithets, though discernible at all times, force themselves most pressingly upon the attention when men act together. Take a sheep and stand it on its hind legs and its resemblance to a human being is scarcely noticeable; but stand a flock of sheep on their hind legs and, so far as psychology and behaviour go, you have a crowd of men. In other words, taken severally men may be individuals; taken together they are a mere transmitting medium for herd emotion. Their individual stupidities are added together, but their individual wisdoms cancel out.

In a democracy, says Callicles, the common men are the more numerous, they also possess the power; acting, therefore, in accordance with their natures, they make the laws which their natures demand. Now it is natural for every man to wish to obtain as much as he can. It is also inevitable that in a state of nature the stronger should obtain more than the weaker. Hence the weaker, acting in self-defence, so frame the laws that the endeavour of one individual to obtain more than the many is stigmatized as unjust. Hence justice, or morality, which is now revealed as the interest of the individually weaker but collectively stronger, may be regarded as their device for depriving the stronger of the preponderance of good things, which the strongers’ superior talents would naturally procure for them.

What we may call herd morality is, therefore, a form of self-defence dictated partly by fear, and partly by envy. The source of the fear is obvious; the envy springs from the natural spite of inferior persons who are conscious of their inferiority, resent it, and wish to take it out of those who make them feel it. “I have not,” says the average man, “the capacity of the strong man for acquiring a large share of the good things of life. Therefore I will take advantage of my numbers to lay it down that such acquisition is wrong and unjust.” The common view of self-denial may be taken as an illustration. The average man has neither the courage nor the strength to satisfy his desires and indulge his passions. Being unaccustomed to moderation he thinks that if he permits himself any indulgence he will be unable to stop. He dare not bend for fear he break. Hence for the Greek virtue of temperance we get the modern praise of self-denial, with a resultant standard of morality which denounces all bodily indulgence as wrong. Upon the basis of this standard of morality the principle of sour grapes proceeds to operate on a large scale. The man who is not rash enough to take sexual pleasure when he finds it, the woman who is not attractive enough to have the opportunity of being rash, combine to denounce the delights at which the independent and the charming are not afraid to grasp.

Herd morality, which is based on fear and envy, is made effective by blame. In modern society the power to blame is chiefly expressed in two ways. First, by the old whose morality consists in blaming the young; secondly, by the average whose censure descends upon the exceptional.

Upon the part played by the old in maintaining morality I do not wish to dwell, since it differs little to-day from what it has always been. A mistake which all societies have made is to entrust the management of their affairs to the old. Old men are naturally more vindictive, bad tempered, malevolent, and narrow-minded than young ones. They are easily provoked to disapproval, and dislike more things than they like. Having for the most part lived their own lives, they have nothing left to do but to interfere in the lives of others. They form the governments, misrepresent the people whom they oppress, preach to the people whom they exploit, and teach the people whom they deceive. They mete out rewards and punishments, sentence criminals to death, direct businesses, make laws which they have no temptation to disobey and wars in which they do not propose to fight. If the country were handed over exclusively to the governance of men under thirty-five, and everybody over that age were forbidden to interfere on pain of being sent to the lethal chamber, it would be a happier and a better place. Unfortunately the young men are too busy trying to make a living in the subordinate positions to which the old men grudgingly admit them to have the time or energy to interfere with other people. Besides, being young, they wish to live, a process for which the regulation of the lives of others is a poor substitute.

In the sphere of morality the function of the old is confined to discovering methods of deterring the young from pleasures of which they themselves are no longer capable. Old men give young men good advice, no longer being able to give them bad examples, and old women invent a symbolic Mrs. Grundy to intimidate their daughters into resisting the temptations which now pass them by. The deterrent influences so exercised are called morality under which name they impose on the young who will not have caught their elders lying often enough to disbelieve them, until they have begun to produce sons and daughters of their own, by which time they will be only too ready to abet the prevailing hypocrisy.

The other strand in the fabric of modern morality has already been noticed as the tendency of the weaker to get even with the stronger by taking it out of him on moral grounds. Morals, it is thought, are everybody’s privilege and everybody’s possession. Few of us can understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, but we all know the difference between right and wrong. Hence the man who is deficient in talent can make up for it in virtue, and by assuring himself that God’s noblest work is an honest man, put brains and capacity in their proper place.

Since the motives which have prompted its invention persist unchanged, morality, which has always been the special emanation of the herd, varies little in spite of superficial differences from age to age, whilst intellectuality throws off new lights in every age. There is probably very little difference between the crowds of ancient Babylon and modern Clapham, but the mind of Einstein differs in radical particulars from that of Archimedes.

Realizing that any fool can be good intellectuals have always made light of morality for the same reasons as those which have caused the herd to set store by it. If the herd has been ready to censure the eccentrics, the eccentrics have been even readier to provide materials for censure. Despising the mob, they flout their standards and laugh at their scruples. The good are so harsh to the clever, the clever so rude to the good, that one might almost be tempted to believe in a fundamental antipathy between virtue and brains. Whether this be so or not, it seems probable that there is a permanent necessity in our natures requiring us to exalt the common qualities we share and understand, and to condemn rare gifts. Thus morality represents the average man’s attempt to console himself in the face of the insulting superiority of the few, by proving that the superiority is achieved only at the cost of loss of virtue. Certainly we must take it out of these fellows somehow! It tortures our self-respect to admire those who have qualities we cannot possess. That is why we love to think of the philosopher as an absent-minded fool, incapable of feeding himself, writing cheques or catching trains, and listen so greedily to the legends of vice and voluptuousness in men of genius.

Wickedness in high places is so much more appetizing than wickedness in low; it enables us to prove that those who are inconsiderate enough to rise above us in place and power, only do so at the cost of falling below us in simplicity and virtue. The public lips have recently been smacking over the details of a case in which it was alleged that a wife endeavoured to advance the career of her husband by a liaison with the Quarter Master General of H.M. Forces. It was further alleged that the husband condoned and even encouraged her conduct. The Quarter Master General was a man of marked ability. His organizing and administrative capacity were justly famous; he was, in fact, one of the few brilliant successes of the War. When the rumour spread that this man, one of the most powerful as well as the ablest in the land, had been willing to advance a subordinate because he desired his wife, the outburst of public indignation in the press was tremendous. Wickedness in high places was a glorious theme: there had been nothing like it since the Armistice. Labour bodies met to insist on the superior purity of the lives of working-people, and parsons thundered in their pulpits against the luxury of the rich. For several weeks the Dennistoun case was the chief subject of conversation in trains, ’buses, and bar-parlours, and those whose lips smacked the most greedily over the luscious scandal were the most severe in their condemnation of the vices of society.

Why was it that this case attracted so much attention? Why was the wickedness involved considered so shocking? Why did those who would not have looked twice at the six-line paragraph describing a similar occurrence in the remoter suburbs, follow every detail of the case with the most avid curiosity? Because the woman was unusually beautiful, the man unusually powerful and talented. The beauty of the woman aroused the envy of other women; the power and talents of the man excited the envy of other men.

We all of us have an impulse to blame those whom life has more generously gifted or more fortunately bestowed than ourselves. We make a virtue of our deficiencies, argue that only the dull and lowly are good, and call the feeling of envy which we experience for those who are neither dull nor lowly moral indignation.

In addition to the envy of the old for the young and of the herd for the exceptional, the impulse to blame, which men call morality, owns another source. This is the desire for uniformity. The desire for uniformity springs in its turn from the fear of insecurity. Society, said Schopenhauer, is like a collection of hedgehogs driven together for the sake of warmth. The object of social observances is to put felt upon the spikes in order that the proximity of the hedgehogs may not cause them to injure one another. The risk of friction will be reduced to a minimum if all the hedgehogs behave in the same way. Identical behaviour in all circumstances is, no doubt, an unattainable ideal; but this makes it doubly important that the herd as a whole should know within limits in what way each of its members will behave. Those who react unexpectedly to familiar situations, or differ markedly in their conduct from others are a danger to the herd, causing social friction and a sense of insecurity. For this reason reformers like Christ or Ibsen, who violently question the standards of thought and conduct prevalent in their herd, and refuse to conform to them, are regarded with bitter hostility.

The method by which the herd secures the uniformity of conduct upon which its comfort and security depend is the exercise of social approval and disapproval. In extreme cases this method is forcibly employed. The soldier who shows a tendency to run away under the enemy’s fire endangers the safety of his fellows. Steps are accordingly taken to check this tendency by the pressure of social disapproval in the form of discipline. Discipline is a device for substituting the certainty of being shot for those who do not go over the top for the probability of being shot for those who do. The result is that most soldiers go over the top. This is conduct conducive to the safety of the herd, and is rewarded with social approval under the name of courage.

More usually social approval and disapproval find expression in the sphere of manners and modes. In Japan under the old laws the term for a rude man is “other-than-expected fellow”, and a noble is not to be interfered with in cutting down a fellow who has behaved to him in a manner other than is expected. In general, thought or conduct calculated to surprise or disturb the herd incurs disapproval and is called immoral; thought and conduct which mirrors the beliefs and habits of the herd is regarded with approval and is called moral. Thus virtue is the habit of acting in a manner of which other people approve; vice in a manner of which they disapprove.

Summing up, therefore, we may say that social morality in a democracy springs from the envy of the average man for the talents of the able man which cause him to feel inferior, and from the dislike of the herd for the conduct of the eccentric which makes it feel unsafe.

These are general principles and are more or less applicable in any state of society which is not a tyranny or a close oligarchy. What I wish to emphasize is their special application to a modern western democracy.

In a community of this type the herd is at once more congested and more powerful than it has been in any other period of history. Its congestion causes it to place a hitherto unparalleled emphasis upon the necessity for felting the spikes of the hedgehogs, that is to say, upon the importance of uniformity; its power enables it to vent its disapproval upon those who offend its prejudices with the maximum effect. This can be seen most clearly in the case of America which has produced the most congested and the most powerful herd on record. America is a melting pot in which all the races of the earth are fused. The natural diversity of its elements produces a special need for artificial uniformity in its citizens. A civilization with its roots in the earth can allow its members to spread outwards, like the branches of a tree; a civilization, whose seeds are planted in shallow soil, must hedge them about lest they be scattered by the wind. The first is centrifugal: it can tolerate individuality because it has a centre. The second is centripetal: it must enforce uniformity because it has none.

The word ‘congested’ is used to denote the oppression of spiritual stuffiness rather than of physical overcrowding.

For this reason all American citizens strive to be exactly like each other, and, on the whole, they succeed. They have the same clothes, they live in the same houses, they have the same social habits, the same respect for money and the same suspicion of such superfluous eccentricities as thought, culture, and art.

A friend of mine, who had wintered in a Southern State, as the season advanced discarded his felt hat for the regulation straw. A few weeks later he had occasion to travel northwards to New York. As he left the train he noticed that he was an object of attention to people on the platform. Porters and loungers stared, and as he walked away from the station, he found himself followed by a small and apparently hostile crowd. Hailing a taxi, he drove to his hotel. In the porch he met an acquaintance, told him of the notice he had attracted, and asked the reason. His friend explained the matter by pointing to his straw hat. It was too early in New York for the change over into straws, he said, and of course one could not dress differently from other people.

The rigid enforcement of uniformity is hostile not only to freedom of action but also to independence of thought. The laws against teaching or holding doctrines displeasing to the majority are particularly severe in America. Immigrants, for example, are not allowed to land in America until they have first expressed their disbelief in Communism, atheism, and free love. Many people are put in prison for holding unpopular views, although these views do no apparent harm to anybody. Advocacy of birth-control, possession of irreverent and disreputable books such as Jurgen, expression of subversive opinions with regard to the relationship of capital and labour, and disbelief in God are among the offences so punished.

Not only is it necessary not to profess unpopular views――it is sometimes necessary to profess popular ones. In order to placate herd opinion it is found necessary to enforce by law the propagation of deliberate falsehood. This happens especially in those cases, unfortunately only too numerous, in which the truth is less gratifying to human conceit than we could wish, so that its adoption involves the abandonment of cherished beliefs. Such, for instance, is the belief that man is a degenerate angel, which is thought to be more flattering than the truth that he is a promoted ape. Thus the State of Tennessee has recently officially repudiated the “monkey ancestry” of its citizens. A law has been passed under which it is illegal for any teacher in a university or other public school to teach anything denying the story of creation given in the Bible, or that man has descended from the lower order of animals, and men have already been imprisoned for teaching evolution. It is not, so far as I know, maintained even in America that the doctrine of evolution is untrue. It is sufficient that it incurs the disapproval of the stronger. Thus truth herself is liable to be stigmatized as immoral if she is inconsiderate enough to flout the wishes of respectable citizens.

Where individuality is to a large extent obliterated, and citizens are cut according to approved specification by the social machine, nothing is so much valued as personality. I have said that every American wishes to be like every other American, and so he does――but with a difference. He wants to have a personality of his own. He wishes to have a something about him that will convey an impression of uniqueness and cause him to be talked about among his fellows. Nothing is so much discussed in America as personality. Men try to cultivate it as they try to cultivate biceps; agencies exist in order to tell you how to be unique, and psycho-analysts flourish by the simple process of telling you that you are unique.

But this is just what the conditions upon which herd morality depends will not let you be. Depart one hair’s-breadth from the standard habits of thought and accepted codes of conduct, and the herd will make your existence intolerable until you consent to toe the line.

Now the drift of British development follows increasingly the course set by America. America is our most advanced nation in morals as in everything else, and, if we want to know what England will be like to-morrow, we cannot do better than look at America to-day. America is at once a signpost and a stimulus. What American business men are, that do our business men strive humbly to be. They ape their magnificence, and enjoy a large and increasing share of this power. The stockbroker’s conception of the good life is becoming increasingly accepted by the clerk, the clerk’s by the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper’s by the workman, so that the community as a whole is doing its best to live up to the standard which its business men set. So soon as we have got rid of the last vestiges of our dying aristocracy, such as respect for hunting and a semi-feudal tenantry, we shall subside into an inferior and imitative satellite of the States.

The objects of American civilization are to substitute cleanliness for beauty, mechanism for men, and hypocrisy for morals. It devotes so much energy to obtaining the means to make life possible, that it has none left to practise the art of living. Hot baths and more hot baths, larger and ever larger hotels, faster and ever faster cars, golf played by ever fatter and more vulgar men, and lap-dogs kept by ever fatter and more vulgar women, cocktails and culture, psycho-analysis and faith healing, sensual poetry and sensational sport, supported and maintained by an illiterate governing class ready to be imposed upon by any quack or charlatan who can persuade it to take an interest in what it imagines to be its soul, such is the probable development of bourgeois civilization in England.

Hints of the growing adhesion of the herd to the ideals and pursuits of big business are not wanted in current developments of moral sentiment. As the profiteer supplants the aristocrat as the dominant force in the community, a slight twist is given to the moral opinions of the herd as a whole in order that they may be brought into line with the changed interests of the stronger. Moral sentiments suitable to the interests of a hereditary aristocracy of landed proprietors insensibly give place to a morality designed to protect and safeguard the pursuits of the fat man on holiday.

An example of this process is afforded by the changed attitude to hunting. A hundred years ago hunting was considered an entirely honourable pursuit, appropriate to gentlemen and advantageous to the countryside. To-day it is attacked on humanitarian grounds and voices are raised in favour of the fox. If he must be killed why not humanely? It was recently reported that a fox chased by the Cowdray hounds jumped through the window of a private residence and up the chimney flue. Efforts were made to smoke him out by lighting a fire immediately below, for all the world as if he were a boy chimney brush of a century ago instead of a fox, but they were unsuccessful. Ultimately workmen removed some bricks and the fox was got out and given to the hounds. This case caused an outcry on the ground that the fox, who had given the hounds a good run, was the victim of cruel and unsporting conduct. A similar outburst was provoked by a hunted stag who recently took refuge in the Channel, and was picked up and carried to France.

That hunting is now condemned by the moral sense of the community not because of any increase in humanitarian sentiment, but because of a change in the interests of the predominant herd, is shown by the apathy of public opinion with regard to the victims of the gun and the motor. Business men unable to hunt because of the obesity produced by their habits are not debarred from shooting. Moors are hired in Scotland and all creatures liable to interfere with the supply of game are ruthlessly exterminated. Thus a squirrel-catching society has recently been formed in Aberdeenshire. Rewards are offered for each squirrel captured, and it is estimated that between two and three thousand squirrels are killed a year. At Monte Carlo business-men sit on terraces and shoot down pigeons which have been previously imprisoned in darkened boxes, with the result that, when they are let out into the sunlight, they are too dazed to fly away. Before they are placed in the boxes the tails of these birds are removed. This impedes their flight and makes things easier for the business-men, who kill between sixty and a hundred an hour. But it is not thought, except by cranks, that the business-men are immoral for amusing themselves in this way, although it is illegal in England for boys to steal the eggs of many kinds of birds.

In the south of England, where the roads are tarred to facilitate the passage of motors and the approach of business-men is heralded over the countryside by a stink of tar and petrol, it is reported that the emanations from the roads have poisoned the waters of the Test and Itchen and caused the death of many of the living things that dwell in them. Even the fish, it seems, have begun to feel the march of progress.

Motors are frequently the cause of the death to hens, puppies, cats, and small children. Yet nobody thinks the business man’s pursuit of motoring immoral. On the contrary, it is assumed without question that the road is his property, and that the pedestrian should make way for him, while the risk to life and damage to limb consequent upon his refusal to do so are regarded as the results of culpable folly and negligence on the part not of the motorist but of himself.

Business-men are given to amassing property, but not to making friends. It is not in personal relationships that they seek the good life, but in a plenitude of goods. For this reason current herd morality visits offences against property with greater severity than offences against the person. A man will get six months for stealing a diamond necklace, but only six days for beating his wife. But, though the ill treatment of a wife by her husband is punished with comparative lightness, her appropriation by another man is considered to be the height of wickedness. This is because the man who makes love to his neighbour’s wife is committing an offence against property. For the same reason the desire on the part of a wife to secede from her existing possessor and to be an independent entity maintaining herself by her own exertions is regarded with disfavour. It is as if a valuable house were to insist that it should remain uninhabited.

Cp. the success of A. S. M. Hutchinson’s This Freedom.

Those who belong to a herd are in general unable to understand the wish of others to escape from it. Such a wish is an implied criticism upon the herd conception, and brings a sense of insecurity. Thus the desire for leisure and solitude, or for a life amid wild surroundings, is regarded with instinctive disapproval. A Frenchman recently exploring in Brazil came upon a party of Indians one of whom had a paler skin than the others. The pale skinned Indian turned out to be his long-lost brother, who had lived among the Indians for a number of years. The explorer immediately set to work to persuade his brother to return with him to civilization. His efforts, however, proved unavailing. The brother asked why he should return to a community in which he had to pay taxes, wear clothes and do other disagreeable things, when he could live with the Indians in a state of nature without labour of any kind. The explorer had no answer to these questions. He was unable to understand this refusal to return to the herd and accept the restrictions that existence in the herd involves. Accordingly he told his brother that he was a hopeless degenerate, and left him to what he characteristically called his fate.

Something of the same feeling is entertained by the average man towards the artist or the writer. He distrusts the contempt of herd standards which his irregular life implies. This sentiment is reinforced by a feeling of insecurity in regard to possessions. The average man is too busy to spare time for sexual immorality, and instinctively suspects the life of the artist or writer because of the facilities which it accords for meddling with his wife during office hours. The general nature of the objection entertained by the herd to sexual immorality will be examined more fully in the next chapter.

Before I close this chapter I wish to point out how the sentiments I have endeavoured to describe have been intensified by the decay of religion.

Communities in which the average man is the stronger have always been noted for their Puritanism and high moral standard. Promiscuity has historically been practised by the aristocracy rather than by the middle classes, and in societies in which the standard is set by the latter is visited accordingly with a disproportionate amount of moral obloquy. Severer steps would no doubt have been taken against it, had it not been for the conviction that the sinner would be punished hereafter. The poor man, lacking the rich man’s goods, has comforted himself with the story of Lazarus. But the moral man has found equal consolation when denying himself the pleasures of the flesh, in picturing the eternal torments which awaited those who refused to be bound by his inhibitions.

The average moralist has accordingly refrained from punishing the successful libertine, knowing that God would do it for him. But this conviction is no longer held. God is a much more mysterious being than he used to be, and we have less knowledge of his ways. It may be that he does not exist at all, and in any event the belief that he will do this or that, and, in particular, that he will entertain the same moral views as we do ourselves, is no longer entertained with its old time certainty. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.” Perhaps it is, but it might be visited on the wrong people. In any event it is safer to take no chances, and to make sure that sinners shall suffer in this world the punishment which the eccentricity of God’s views may permit them to forego in the next. For this reason it is to be expected that the herd morality of the future will develop a severer outlook upon derelictions from the standards of behaviour which it regards as moral. What these derelictions are, and what are the reasons for supposing that in spite of this attitude they are likely to increase, I will consider in the next chapter.