The Need for Political Scepticism

[Presidential Address to the Students' Union of the London School of Economics and Political Science, October 10, 1923. Printed in Chapter XI of 'Sceptical Essays'.]

ONE of the peculiarities of the English-speaking world is its immense interest and belief in political parties. A very large percentage of English-speaking people really believe that the ills from which they suffer would be cured if a certain political party were in power. That is a reason for the swing of the pendulum. A man votes for one party and remains miserable; he concludes that it was the other party that was to bring the millennium. By the time he is disenchanted with all parties, he is an old man on the verge of death; his sons retain the belief of his youth, and the see-saw goes on.

I want to suggest that, if we are to do any good in politics, we must view political questions in quite a different way. A party which is to obtain power must, in a democracy, make an appeal to which the majority of the nation responds. For reasons which will appear in the course of the argument, an appeal which is widely successful, with the existing democracy, can hardly fail to be harmful. Therefore no important political party is likely to have a useful programme, and if useful measures are to be passed, it must be by means of some other machinery than party government. How to combine any such machinery with democracy is one of the most urgent problems of our time.

There are at present two very different kinds of specialists in political questions. On the one hand there are the practical politicians of all parties; on the other hand there are the experts, mainly civil servants, but also economists, financiers, scientific medical men, etc. Each of these two classes has a special kind of skill. The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the expert consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, [90] depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others. Moreover, the intuitive skill that they require in forecasting opinion does not imply any skill whatever in forming their own opinions, so that many of the ablest (from a party-political point of view) will be in a position to advocate, quite honestly, measures which the majority think good, but which experts know to be bad. There is therefore no point in moral exhortations to politicians to be disinterested, except in the crude sense of not taking bribes.

Wherever party politics exist, the appeal of a politician is primarily to a section, while his opponents appeal to an opposite section. His success depends upon turning his section into a majority. A measure which appeals to all sections equally will presumably be common ground between the parties, and will therefore be useless to the party politician. Consequently he concentrates attention upon those measures which are disliked by the section which forms the nucleus of his opponents' supporters. Moreover, a measure, however admirable, is useless to the politician unless he can give reasons for it which will appear convincing to the average man when set forth in a platform speech. We have thus two conditions which must be fulfilled by the measures on which party politicians lay stress: (i) they must seem to favour a section of the nation; (2) the arguments for them must be of the utmost simplicity. Of course this does not apply to a time of war, because then the party conflict is suspended in favour of conflict with the external enemy. In war, the arts of the politician are expended on neutrals, who correspond to the doubtful voter in ordinary politics. The late war showed that, as we should have expected, democracy affords an admirable training for the business of appealing to neutrals. That was one of the main reasons why democracy won the war. It is true it lost the peace; but that is another question.

The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates. There is a Gresham's law in politics as in currency; a man who aims at nobler ends than these will be driven out, except in those rare moments (chiefly revolutions) when idealism finds itself in alliance with some powerful movement of selfish passion. Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against [91] some other nation. They live by 'sound and fury, signifying nothing'. They cannot pay attention to anything difficult to explain, or to anything not involving division (either between nations or within the nation), or to anything that would diminish the power of politicians as a class.

The expert is a curiously different type. As a rule, he is a man who does not aim at political power. His natural reaction to a political problem is to inquire what would be beneficial rather than what would be popular. In certain directions, he has exceptional technical knowledge. If he is a civil servant or the head of a big business, he has considerable experience of individual men, and may be a shrewd judge as to how they will act. All these are favourable circumstances, which entitle his opinion on his speciality to considerable respect.

He has, however, as a rule, certain correlative defects. His knowledge being specialized, he probably overestimates the importance of his department. If you went successively to a scientific dentist, a scientific oculist, a heart specialist, a lung specialist, a nerve specialist, and so on, they would each give you admirable advice as to how to prevent their particular kind of ailment. If you followed the advice of all, you would find your whole twenty-four hours consumed in preserving your health, and no time left to make any use of your health. The same sort of thing may easily happen with political experts; if all are attended to, there will be no time for the nation to live its ordinary life.

A second defect of the able civil servant results from his having to use the method of persuasion behind the scenes. He will either greatly overestimate the possibility of persuading people to be reasonable, or he will prefer hole-and-corner methods, by which politicians are induced to pass crucial measures without knowing what they are doing. As a rule, he will make the former mistake when he is young and the latter when he is middle-aged.

A third defect of the expert, if regarded as one who is to have executive power, is that he is no judge of popular passions. He usually understands a committee very well, but he seldom under-stands a mob. Having discovered some measure which all well-informed persons of good will at once see to be desirable, he does not realize that, if it is publicly advocated, certain powerful people who think it will damage themselves can stir up popular feeling to the point where any advocate of the measure in question will be lynched. In America, the magnates, it is said, set detectives on to any man they dislike, and presently, if he is not exceptionally astute, manoeuvre him into a compromising situation. He must then either change his [92] politics or be denounced throughout the Press as an immoral man. In England, these methods are not yet so well developed, but they probably will be before long. Even where there is nothing sinister, popular passions are often such as to astonish the unwary. Every-body wishes the Government to cut down expenditure in general, but any particular economy is always unpopular, because it throws individuals out of work, and they win sympathy. In China, in the eleventh century, there was a civil servant, Wang An Shih, who, having converted the Emperor, set to work to introduce Socialism. In a rash moment, however, he offended the literati (the Northcliffe Press of that time), was hurled from power, and has been held up to obloquy by every subsequent Chinese historian until modern times.

A fourth defect is connected with this, namely, that experts are apt to undervalue the importance of consent to administrative measures, and to ignore the difficulty of administering an unpopular law. Medical men could, if they had power, devise means which would stamp out infectious diseases, provided their laws were obeyed; but if their laws went much ahead of public opinion, they would be evaded. The ease of administration during the war was due to the fact that people would submit to a great deal in order to win the war, whereas ordinary peace legislation has no object making such a strong appeal.

Hardly any expert allows enough for sheer laziness and indifference. We take some trouble to avoid dangers which are obvious, but very little to avoid those only visible to the expert. We think we like money, and daylight saving saves us many millions a year; yet we never adopted it until we were driven to it as a war-measure. We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life. This seems incredible to a person who has reflected upon the harmfulness of some of our habits.

Probably most experts do not realize that, if they had executive power, their impulses towards tyranny would develop, and they would cease to be the amiable and high-minded men they are at present. Very few people are able to discount the effect of circumstances upon their own characters.

For all these reasons, we cannot escape from the evils of our present politicians by simply handing over the power to civil servants. Nevertheless it seems imperative, in our increasingly complex society, that experts should acquire more influence than they have at present. There is at present a violent conflict between instinctive passions and industrial needs. Our environment, both human and material, has been suddenly changed by industrialism. Our [93] instincts have presumably not changed, and almost nothing has been done to adapt our habits of thought to the altered circumstances. Unwise people who keep beavers in their libraries find that, when wet weather is coming, the beavers build dams out of books, because they used to live on the banks of streams. We are almost equally ill-adapted to our new surroundings. Our education still teaches us to admire the qualities that were biologically useful in the Homeric age, regardless of the fact that they are now harmful and ridiculous. The instinctive appeal of every successful political movement is to envy, rivalry, or hate, never to the need for co-operation. This is inherent in our present political methods, and in conformity with pre-industrial habits. Only a deliberate effort can change men's habits of thought in this respect.

It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates every-body, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold up someone to obloquy. If so-and-so's wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.

I will illustrate the point by contrasting two books advocating international Socialism, Marx's Capital and Salter's Allied Shipping Control. (No doubt Sir Arther Salter does not call himself an international socialist, but he is one none the less.) We may take these two books as representing the politician's and the civil servant's methods, respectively, of advocating economic change. Marx's object was to create a political party which should ultimately overwhelm all others; Salter's object is to influence administrators within the existing system, and to modify public opinion by arguments based upon the general advantage. Marx proves conclusively that under capitalism wage-earners have suffered terrible privations. He does not prove, and does not attempt to prove, that they will suffer less under Communism; that is an assumption implicit in his style and in the ordering of his chapters. Any reader who starts with a proletarian class bias will find himself sharing this assumption as he reads, and will never notice that it is not proved. Again: Marx emphatically repudiates ethical considerations as having nothing to do with social development, which is supposed to proceed by inexorable economic laws, just as in Ricardo and Malthus. But Ricardo and Malthus thought that the inexorable laws inexorably brought happiness to their class along with misery to wage-earners; while Marx, like Tertullian, had an apocalyptic vision of a future in which his class would enjoy the circuses while the bourgeois would lie howling. Although Marx professed to regard men as neither good nor bad, but merely embodiments of economic forces, he did in fact represent the bourgeois as wicked, and set to work to stimulate a fiery hatred of him in the wage-earner. Marx's Capital is in essence, like the Bryce Report, a collection of atrocity stories designed to stimulate martial ardour against the enemy. [The theoretical part of Capital is analogous to our talk about a 'war to end war', a 'war for small nations', a 'war for democracy', etc. Its sole purpose is to make the reader feel that the hatred stirred up in him is righteous indignation, and may be indulged with benefit to mankind.] Very naturally, it also stimulates the martial ardour of the enemy. It thus brings about the class-war which it prophesies. It is through the stimulation of hatred that Marx has proved such a tremendous political force, and through the fact that he has successfully represented capitalists as objects of moral abhorrence.

In Salter's Allied Shipping Control we find a diametrically opposite spirit. Salter has the advantage, which Marx had not, of having been for some time concerned in administering a system of international Socialism. This system was brought about, not by the desire to kill capitalists, but by the desire to kill Germans. As, however, the Germans were irrelevant to economic issues, they are in the background in Salter's book. The economic problem was exactly the same as if the soldiers and munition-workers and those who supplied the raw materials of munitions had been kept in idleness and the remainder of the population had had to do all the work. Or, alternatively, as if it had been suddenly decreed that everybody was to do only half as much work as hitherto. War experience has given us a technical solution of this problem, but not a psychological solution, because it has not shown how to provide a stimulus to co-operation in [95] peacetime as powerful as hatred and fear of the Germans during the years of war.

Salter says (p. 19):

There is probably no task at this moment which more deserves the attention of professional economists who will approach the problem in a purely scientific spirit, without bias either for or against the principle of State control, than an investigation of the actual results of the war period. The prima facie facts with which they would start are indeed so striking as to constitute at least a challenge to the normal economic system. It is true that several factors contributed to the results. . . . An unbiased professional inquiry would assign full weight to these and other factors, but would probably find much still to the credit of the new methods of organization. The success of these methods under the conditions of the war is indeed beyond reasonable dispute. At a moderate estimate, and allowing for the production of persons who were idle before the war, between half and two-thirds of the productive capacity of the country was withdrawn into combatant or other war service. And yet throughout the War Great Britain sustained the whole of her military effort and maintained civilian population at a standard of life which was never intolerably low, and for some periods and for some classes was perhaps as comfortable as in time of peace. She did this without, on balance, drawing any aid from other countries. She imported, on borrowed money, less from America than she supplied, on loaned money, to her Allies. She therefore maintained the whole of the current consumption both of her war effort and her civilian population with a mere remnant of her productive power by means of current production.

Discussing the ordinary commercial system of peace-time, he [Salter] says:

It was thus of the essence of the peace economic system that it was under no deliberate direction and control. By the exacting criterion of war conditions, however, this system proved to be, at least for those conditions, seriously inadequate and defective. By the new standards it was blind and it was wasteful. It produced too little, it produced the wrong things, and it distributed them to the wrong people, (p. 17)

The system which was gradually built up under the stress of war became, in 1918, in all essentials a complete international Socialism. The Allied Governments jointly were the sole buyer of food and raw material, and the sole judge as to what should be imported, not only into their own countries, but even into those of European neutrals. They controlled production absolutely, because they controlled raw material, and could ration factories as they chose. As regards food they even controlled retail distribution. They fixed prices as well as [96] quantities. Their power was exercised mainly through the Allied Maritime Transport Council, which, in the end, controlled nearly all the world's available shipping, and was consequently able to dictate the conditions of import and export. The system was thus, in all essentials, one of international Socialism, applied primarily to foreign trade, the very matter which causes the greatest difficulties to political socialists.

The odd thing about this system is that it was introduced without antagonizing the capitalists. It was a necessary feature of wartime politics that at all costs no important section of the population must be antagonized. For instance, at the time of greatest stringency in the shipping position, it was argued that munitions must be cut down rather than food, for fear of discontent in the civilian population. To have alienated the capitalists would have been very dangerous, and in fact the whole transformation was carried out without serious friction. The attitude was not: Such-and-such classes of men are wicked and must be punished. The attitude was: The peace-time system was inefficient, and a new system must be established with a minimum of hardship to all concerned. Under the stress of national danger, consent to measures which the Government considered necessary was not so difficult to obtain as it would be at ordinary times. But even at ordinary times consent would be less difficult if measures were presented from an administrative point of view rather than from that of class-antagonism.

It would appear from the administrative experience of the war that most of the advantages hoped from Socialism can be obtained by Government control of raw materials, foreign trade, and banking. This point of view has been developed by Lloyd's valuable book on Stabilization. [George Allen & Unwin, 1923] It may be taken as a definite advance in the scientific analysis of the problem, which we owe to the experimentation forced upon civil servants by the war.

One of the most interesting things, from a practical point of view, in Sir Arthur Salter's book is his analysis of the method of inter-national co-operation which was found to work best in practice. It was not the custom for each country separately to consider each question, and then employ diplomatic representatives to secure as much as possible in bargaining with other Powers. The plan adopted was for each question to have its separate international committee of experts, so that the conflicts were not between nations, but between commodities. The wheat commission would fight the coal commission, and so on; but the recommendations of each were the result [97] of deliberation between expert representatives of the different Allies. The position in, fact, was almost one of international syndicalism, except for the paramount authority of the Supreme War Council. The moral is that any successful internationalism must organize separate functions internationally, and not merely have one supreme international body to adjust the claims of conflicting purely national bodies.

Any person reading Salter's book can see at once that such an international government as existed among the Allies during the war would increase the material, mental, and moral welfare of almost the whole population of the globe, if it could be established universally in time of peace. It would not injure business men; indeed, they could easily be promised in perpetuity, as a pension, their average profits for the last three years. It would prevent unemployment, fear of war, destitution, shortage, and over-production. The argument and the method are set forth in Mr Lloyd's book. Yet, in spite of these obvious and universal advantages, die prospect of anything of the sort is, if possible, even more remote than the establishment of universal revolutionary Socialism. The difficulty of revolutionary Socialism is that it rouses too much opposition; die difficulty of the civil servant's Socialism is that it wins too little support. Opposition to a political measure is roused by the fear that oneself will be damaged; support is won by the hope (usually subconscious) that one's enemies will be damaged. Therefore a policy that injures no one wins no support, and a policy that wins much support also rouses fierce opposition.

Industrialism has created a new necessity for world-wide co-operation and a new facility for injuring each other by hostility. But the only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of co-operation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political sceptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time. Many quite sensible people, from Mr H. G. Wells downward, believed that the late war was a war to end war. [98]

They are now disillusioned. Many quite sensible people believe that the Marxian class war will be a war to end war. If it ever comes, they too will be disillusioned-if any of them survive. A well-intentioned person who believes in any strong political movement is merely helping to prolong that organized strife which is destroying civilization. Of course I do not lay this down as an absolute rule: we must be sceptical even of our scepticism. But if a political party has a policy (as most have) which must do much harm on the way to some ultimate good, the call for scepticism is very great, in view of the doubtfulness of all political calculations. We may fairly suspect that, from a psycho-analytic point of view, the harm to be done the way is what makes the policy really attractive, and the ultimate good is of the nature of a 'rationalizing'.

Widespread political scepticism is possible; psychologically this means concentrating our enmity upon politicians, instead of nations or social classes. Since enmity cannot be effective except by the hatred of politicians, an enmity of which they are the objects may be psychologically satisfying, but cannot be socially harmful. I suggest it as fulfilling the conditions for William James's desideratum a 'moral equivalent for war'. True, it would leave politics to obvious scoundrels (i.e. persons whom you and I dislike), but that might be a gain. I read in The Freeman of September 26, 1923, a story which may illustrate the usefulness of political scoundrelism. A certain Englishman, having made friends with a Japanese Elder Statesman, asked him why Chinese merchants were honest while those of Japan were not. 'Some time ago,' he replied, 'a period of particularly brilliant corruption set in in Chinese politics, and as far as the Courts were concerned, justice became a mockery. Hence, in order to save the processes of trade from complete chaos and stagnation, the Chinese merchant was compelled to adopt the strictest ethical standards; and since that time his word has been as good as his bond. In Japan, however, the merchant has been under no such compulsion, for we have probably the finest code of legal justice in the world. Hence when you do business with a Japanese, you must take your chances.' This story shows that dishonest politicians may do harm than honest ones.

The conception of an 'honest' politician is not altogether a simple one. The most tolerant definition is: one whose political actions are not dictated by a desire to increase his own income. In this sense Mr Lloyd George is honest. The next stage would be the man whose political actions are not dictated by desire to secure or preserve his own power any more than by pecuniary motives. In this sense, Lord [99] Grey is an honest politician. The last and most stringent sense is: one who, in his public actions, is not only disinterested, but does not fall very far below the standard of veracity and honour which is taken for granted between acquaintance. In this sense, the late Lord Morley was an honest politician; at least, he was honest always, and a politician until his honesty drove him out of politics. But even a politician who is honest in the highest sense may be very harmful; one may take George III as an illustration. Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality. Moreover, an honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid, like the late Duke of Devonshire; because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation. Therefore any man who is both able and public-spirited must be a hypocrite if he is to succeed in politics; but the hypocrisy will in time destroy his public spirit.

One obvious palliative of the evils of democracy in its present form would be to encourage much more publicity and initiative on the part of civil servants. They ought to have the right, and, on occasion, the duty, to frame Bills in their own names, and set forth publicly the arguments in their favour. Finance and Labour already have international conferences, but they ought to extend this method enormously, and cause an international secretariat to be perpetually considering measures to be simultaneously advocated in different countries. The agricultural interests of the world ought to meet for direct negotiations and adoption of a common policy. And so on. It is neither possible nor desirable to dispense with democratic parliaments, because measures which are to succeed must, after due discussion and the dissemination of considered expert opinions, be such as to commend themselves to the ordinary citizen. But at present in most matters, the ordinary citizen does not know the considered opinion of experts, and little machinery exists for arriving at their collective or majority opinion. In particular, civil servants are debarred from public advocacy of their views, except in exceptional cases and by non-political methods. If measures were framed by experts after international deliberation, they would cut across party lines, and would be found to involve far less division of opinion than is now taken for granted. I believe, for example, that international finance and international labour, if they could overcome the mutual distrust, could at this moment agree on a programme which would take the national Parliaments several years to carry out, and would improve the world immeasurably. In unison, they would be difficult to resist. [100]

The common interests of mankind are numerous and weighty, but our existing political machinery obscures them through the scramble for power between different nations and different parties. A different machinery, requiring no legal or constitutional changes, and not very difficult to create, would undermine the strength of national and party passion, and focus attention upon measures beneficial to all rather than upon those damaging to enemies. I suggest that it is along these lines, rather than by party government at home and foreign-office diplomacy abroad, that an issue is to be found from the present peril to civilization. Knowledge exists, and good will exists; but both remain impotent until they possess the proper organs for making themselves heard.