Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: XV. The Hunting Life
I am no friend of the people. As a force, by which this tenor of the times is conditioned, they inspire me with distrust, with fear; as a visible multitude, they make me shrink aloof, and often move me to abhorrence. For the greater part of my life, the people signified to me the London crowd, and no phrase of temperate meaning would utter my thoughts of them under that aspect. The people as country-folk are little known to me; such glimpses as I have had of them do not invite to nearer acquaintance. Every instinct of my being is anti-democratic, and I dread to think of what our England may become when Demos rules irresistibly.
Right or wrong, this is my temper. But he who should argue from it that I am intolerant of all persons belonging to a lower social rank than my own would go far astray. Nothing is more rooted in my mind than the vast distinction between individual and the class. Take a man by himself, and there is generally some reason to be found in him, some disposition for good; mass him with his fellows in the social organism, and ten to one he becomes a blatant creature, without a thought of his own, ready for any evil to which contagion prompts him. It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.
In my youth, looking at this man and that, I marvelled that humanity had made so little progress. Now, looking at man in the multitude, I marvel that they have advanced so far.
Foolishly arrogant as I was, I used to judge the worth of a person by his intellectual power and attainment. I could see no good where there was no logic, no charm where there was no learning. Now I think that one has to distinguish between two forms of intelligence, that of the brain, and that of the heart, and I have come to regard the second as by far the more important...
Alpha.
The news today just happens to be full of an incident in Monrovia, Liberia where a mob from a slum attacked a quarantine facility for Ebola patients, taking some patients home and chasing others away while looting contaminated bedding. I was reading the BBC account of this amazing episode and the person quoted said what I was thinking, that it was the stupidest thing he had ever seen. The mob claimed that Ebola is a government hoax... well, we shall soon see.
There is a vital debate that has now been going on for over 300 years about the innate goodness or badness of the body politic. At the time of the French Revolution Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, believed in the goodness of people, as did a generation of socialists and communists in the early to mid 20th century. Edmund Burke saw humanity more like Ryecroft above, and also like Mary Shelley at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and like the disenchanted of the mid to late 20th century.
I understand both sides of this debate. In my mid-teens I was a Marxist and then a Utopian, before grudgingly agreeing with Burke by the time I was in university. What I noticed was that all Utopian schemes (including Marxism and those of Henry George) would work perfectly well if only human nature weren’t what it is. Things are as they are, because we are as we are. The most enlightened social policies imaginable -- I’m thinking of contemporary Norway now -- are only a generation of greed away from ruin.
I think there may be something to Ryecroft’s “Intelligence of the heart,” but it also makes me nervous. The world is full of people who are, while no scholars, perfectly delightful company... unless you happen to be of the wrong race or religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation. I acknowledge that “intelligence of the brain” is not a sure cure for bigotry, and perhaps I’m short changing the people of the heart, but I don’t have enough personal experience of their generosity of spirit to vouch for them. In truth I don’t really trust either group.
No comments:
Post a Comment