C. E. M. Joad

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Until, then, the life-force can contrive again to send a great religious teacher into the world, a true, positive morality will be lacking. The man who is born in England will continue to believe that it is right to marry one wife, and the man who is born in Persia will continue to believe that it is right to marry four, and each will invoke morality to justify his belief. Such morality is merely topographical; it reflects no conception of what is good, and it gives us no hope that the world can be made better because it does not believe that its own world is bad. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lacking the conviction that God will punish wrong-doers, they arrogate the right to themselves. But the same scepticism which lights the fires of the heresy-hunters encourages the wickedness of the heretics. If marriages were not made by God, and torment in hell is probably not the result of adultery, there is no longer reason to think that five minutes’ bliss must be paid for in terms of eternal damnation. It is, no doubt, true, that God still loves the pure, but when earthly lovers are available, the price of God’s love may be not worth the paying. ”

“ If the livelihood of women is bound up with the strict observance of the marriage tie, the maintenance of the moral restrictions upon which marriage as an institution depends is their special concern. In a purely promiscuous community the livelihood of women would be intolerably insecure. Hence women are the natural guardians of morality, knowing that it guarantees their bread and butter. It is not too much to say that morality as a going concern is kept up by women. ”

“ Since the mere process of obeying the law did not make a man a good man but only restrained him from certain unappetizing kinds of vice by which no decent upper or middle class citizen was attracted, it followed that the function of the law was negative merely; its object was to prevent citizens from so conducting themselves that nobody could be virtuous, not to define virtue or to tell men how to attain it. The definition of virtue was a matter for the individual’s insight, and the attainment of virtue a matter for the individual’s conscience ”

“ If man is by nature wicked and sinful, and woman is very little better, then, indeed, contraception and the economic independence of women will lead to an orgy of sex indulgence in which the population will shuffle itself like a pack of cards. ”

“ In a new and positive morality in which men can believe lies the hope for the world; yet such a morality cannot come without a revival of religion. Religion and religion alone gives the driving force which impels men to change things, and until a religious attitude to the world again becomes part of man’s common heritage, all the apparent changes in morality, of which different ages and countries are the witnesses, will fail to disguise the fundamental fact that there is no morality to change. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The stockbroker’s conception of the good [29] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [15] 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. ”

“ It is only the intolerable strain to which our absurd social arrangements have subjected them that has caused us to regard ourselves as being by nature unfaithful and incontinent. There is no ground for the belief that the average man or woman who allow themselves to be guided by their own impulses must needs be scoundrels. For among their impulses must be numbered self-respect, moderation, and a sense of what is right and fitting. Because this sense may be, and often is, at variance with the herd morality which is crystallized in the law, it does not mean that it does not exist. ”

“ We shall, in other words, revert to the conception of one good life for all men, or rather for all poor men, a good life which it is conceived to be the business of the State and of public opinion to promote. ”

“ In any event, whether intelligent or not, he must conform, and will have to do so increasingly. The herd morality which drove a statesman of the calibre of Dilke out of public life because it disapproved of his private life, is, after a temporary relapse, increasing in strength, and in the immediate future nobody who does not profess the morality to which the middle classes adhere will stand any chance of public office. If a man’s actions belie his professions he must be careful to conceal them.
One of the results of this development will be an increase in hypocrisy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [14] kind of conduct which is called moral is that which is convenient or pleasing to her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is immediately obvious that any woman who was prepared to give for love or for nothing what other women were only prepared to give for maintenance was a blackleg of the most subversive type, and the whole force of organized female opinion has, therefore, been devoted to making her position impossible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [19] 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. ”

“ They have not the woman’s delight in nosing out scandals, and, except when they are whipped up into a state of moral horror by their women folk, are much too prone to live and let live. The attitude of deliberate uncharitableness towards erring sisters which the sex affects does not come naturally to men, and left to themselves, they would condone offences which their outraged spouses insist on punishing with social ostracism. ”

“ May it not be the outcome of centuries of servitude and seclusion, made absolute by the knowledge that fidelity meant bread and butter and a home, infidelity starvation or the streets? Since the beginnings of recorded history the great bulk of women have, it is true, remained monogamous, but they may have done so from fear of losing their jobs as wives if they did not. ”

“ In nothing is the property basis of marriage more clearly discernible than in the ‘dum casta’ clause of the English divorce law.
It is upon the same economic basis that the husband’s objection to infidelity chiefly rests. If another man is permitted to enjoy for nothing what he himself has purchased at a heavy outlay, the husband naturally feels aggrieved. ”

“ Business-men are given to amassing property, but not to making friends. It is not in personal relationships that they [33] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This can be seen most clearly in the case of America which has produced the most congested [3] and the [25] 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 practice of birth-control makes it unnecessary even to have the children.
One further result of birth-control may be noticed before we pass on. This is the probable abolition of the double standard of morality for men and women after marriage. That adultery in a wife has always been considered to be more serious [53] than adultery in the husband the state of the law bears witness. Adultery in a wife is a sufficient cause for divorce, in a husband it [6] must be coupled with cruelty or desertion. This disparity of treatment has always caused grave offence to feminist organizations. ”

“ The belief that people are fundamentally licentious, and that a partial removal of the barriers with which society has hedged about the business of reproduction will precipitate the population into a welter of unbridled license, pleasantly shocking though it is to the minds of respectable people, has absolutely no foundation in fact. ”