Waste Or Creation?

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Title:     Waste Or Creation?
Author: A. Clutton-Brock [More Titles by Clutton-Brock]

The William Morris Celebration was not so irrelevant to these times as it may seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe to our society, and it has come. That commercial system of ours, which seems to so many part of the order of Nature, was to him as evil and unnatural as slavery. His quarrel with it was not political, but human; it was the quarrel not of the oppressed, for he was not the man to be oppressed in any society, but of the workman. He was sure that a society which encouraged bad work and discouraged good must in some way or other come to a bad end; and he would have seen in this war the end that he predicted. Whatever its result, there must be a change in the order of our society, whether it sinks through incessant wars, national and commercial, into barbarism or is shocked into an effort to attain to civilization. There were particular sayings of Morris's to which no one at the time paid much heed. They seemed mere grumblings against what must be. He was, for instance, always crying out against our waste of labour. If only all men did work that was worth doing--

Think what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of the work which is undergone for the making of useless things. It would be an instructive day's work, for any one of us who is strong enough, to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them; and to many people, even of those who buy them, they are obvious encumbrances to real work, thought, and pleasure.

At the time most people said that this waste of labour was all a matter of demand and supply, and thought no more about it; some said that it was good for trade. Very few saw, with Morris, that demand for such things is something willed and something that ought not to be willed.

But then it was generally believed that we could afford this waste of labour; and so it went on until, after a year or two of war, we found that we could not afford it. Then even the most ignorant and thoughtless learned, from facts, not from books, certain lessons of political economy. They learned that, in war-time at least, a nation that wastes its labour will be overcome by one that does not. At once the common will was set against the waste of labour; and, what would have seemed strangest of all forty years ago, the Government, with the consent of the people, set to work to stop the waste of labour, and did to a great extent succeed in stopping it. When people thought in terms of munitions, instead of in terms of general well-being, they saw that the waste of labour must be, and could be, stopped. They talked no longer about the laws of supply and demand, but about munitions. Those who had made trash must be set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some way to second the Army. Those who still were ready to waste labour on trash for themselves were no longer obeying the laws of supply and demand; they were diverting labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic, they were helping the Germans. Money, in fact, had no longer the right to an absolute command over labour. A man, before he spent a sovereign, must ask himself whether he was spending it for the good of the nation; and if he did not ask himself that, the Government would ask it for him.

So much the war taught us, for purposes of war. But Morris many years ago tried to teach it for purposes of peace. When he wrote those words which we have quoted, he was not talking politics but ordinary common sense. He was not even talking art, but rather economics; and he was talking it not to any vague abstraction called the community, but to each individual human being. At that time every one thought of economics as something which concerned society or the universe. It was, so to speak, a natural science; it observed phenomena as if they were in the heavens; and stated laws about them, laws not human but natural. Perhaps it was the greatest achievement of Morris in the way of thought that he saw economics, even more clearly than Ruskin, as a matter not of natural laws, but of conscience and duty. He did not talk about economics at all, but about the waste of labour, just as we talk about it now. The only difference is that he saw it to be one of the chief causes of poverty in time of peace, whereas we see it as a hindrance to victory in time of war. We have, for war purposes, acquired the conscience that he wished us to acquire for all purposes. The question is whether we shall keep it in peace.

Upon that depends the question how soon we shall recover from the war. For there is no doubt that we shall not be able to afford our former waste of labour; and, if we persist in it, we shall be bankrupt as a society. It may be said that we shall not have the money, the power, to waste labour. But we shall certainly have some superfluous energy, more and more, it is to be hoped, as time goes on; and our future recovery will depend upon the use we make of this superfluous energy. We can waste it, as we wasted it before the war; or we can keep the conscience we have acquired in war and ask ourselves in peace, with every penny we spend, whether we are wasting labour. It is true that what may be waste to one will not be waste to another; but in that matter every one must obey his own conscience. The important thing is that every one should have a conscience and obey it. There will be plenty of people to tell us that no one can define waste of labour. No one can define sin; but each man has his own conscience on that point and lives well or ill as he obeys it or disobeys it. Besides, there are many things, all the trash that Morris speaks about in the shop windows, that every one knows to be waste. We need not trouble ourselves about the fact that art will seem waste to the philistine and not to the artist. We must allow for differences on that point as on most others. Some things that might have been waste to Samuel Smiles would have been to Morris a symptom of well-being. But he knew, and often said, that we cannot have the beauty which was to him a symptom of well-being unless we end the waste of labour on trash. Of luxury he said:--

By those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each day's hard practice of the difficult art of living. But I say, art cannot live beside it nor self-respect in any class of life. Effeminacy and brutality are its companions on the right hand and the left.

There is, we have all discovered now, only a certain amount of labour in the country, in the world. Even the most ignorant are aware at last that money does not create labour but only commands it, and may command it to do what will or will not benefit us all. We were, for the purposes of the war, much more of a fellowship than we had ever been before. We acknowledged a duty to each other, the duty of commanding labour to the common good. We asked with every sovereign we spent whether it would help or hinder us in the war. Morris would have us ask also whether it will help or hinder us in the advance towards a general happiness.

And he put a further question, which in time of war unfortunately we could not put, a question not only about the work but about the workman. Are we, with our money, forcing him to work that is for him worth doing; are we, to use an old phrase, considering the good of his soul? Morris insisted on our duty to the workman more even than on our duty to society. He saw that where great masses of men do work that they know to be futile there must be a low standard of work and incessant discontent. The workman may not even know the cause of his discontent. He may think he is angry with the rich because they are rich; but the real source of his anger is the work that they set him to do with their riches. And no class war, no redistribution of wealth, will end that discontent if the same waste of labour continues. Double the wages of every workman in the country, and if he spends the increase on trash no one will be any better off in mind or body. There will still be poverty and still discontent, with the work if not with the wages.

The problem for us, for every modern society now, is not so much to redistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but to use our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste it piecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We have to solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is not to lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us a great opportunity. It has opened our eyes, if only we do not shut them again. It has taught every one in the country the most important of all lessons in political economy which the books often seem to conceal. And, better still, it has taught us that in economics we can exercise our own wills, that they concern each individual man and woman as much as morals; that they are morals, and not abstract mathematics; that we have the same duty towards the country, towards mankind, that we have to our own families. The proverb, Waste not, want not, does not apply merely to each private income. We have accounts to settle not only with our bankers, but with the community. It will thrive or not according as we are thrifty or thriftless; and our thrift depends upon how we spend our income, not merely on how much we spend of it. For all that part of it which we do not spend on necessaries is the superfluous energy of mankind, and we determine how it shall be exercised; each individual determines that, not an abstraction called society.

One may present the thrift of labour as a matter of duty to society. But Morris saw that it was more than that; and he lit it with the sunlight of the warmer virtues. It is not merely society that we have to consider, or the direction of its superfluous energy. It is also the happiness, the life, of actual men and women. We shall not cease to waste work until we think always of the worker behind it, until we see that it is our duty, if with our money we have command over him, to set him to work worth doing. Capital now is to most of those who own it a means of earning interest. We should think of it as creative, as the power which may make the wilderness blossom like the rose and change the slum into a home for men and women; and, better still, as the power that may train and set men to do work that will satisfy their souls, so that they shall work for the work's sake and not only for the wages. Until capital becomes so creative in the hands of those who own it there will always be a struggle for the possession of it; and to those who do possess it it will bring merely superfluities and not happiness. If it becomes creative, no one will mind much who possesses it. The class war will be ended by a league of classes, their aim not merely peace, but those things which make men resolve not to spoil peace with war.

We shall be told that this is a dream, as we are always told that the ending of war is a dream. "So long as human nature is what it is there will always be war." Those who talk thus think of human nature as something not ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is not their own nature. They know that they themselves do not wish for war; but, looking at mankind in the mass and leaving themselves out of that mass, they see it governed by some force that is not really human nature, but merely nature "red in tooth and claw," a process become a malignant goddess, who forces mankind to act contrary to their own desires, contrary even to their own interests. She has taken the place for us of the old original sin; and the belief in her is far more primitive than the belief in original sin. She is in fact but a modern name for all the malignant idols that savages have worshipped with sacrifices of blood and tears that they did not wish to make. It is strange that, priding ourselves as we do on our modern scepticism which has taught us to disbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine, we yet have not dared to affirm the plain fact that this nature, this human nature, does not exist. There is no force, no process, whether within us or outside us, that compels us to act contrary to our desires and our interests. There is nothing but fear; and fear can be conquered, as by individuals, so by the collective will of man. It is fear that produces war, the fear that other men are not like ourselves, that they are hostile animals governed utterly by the instinct of self-preservation.

So it is fear that produces the class war and the belief that it must always continue. It is our own fears that cut us off from happiness by making us despair of it. The man who has capital sees it as a means of protecting himself and his children from poverty; it is to him a negative, defensive thing, at best the safeguard of a negative, defensive happiness. So others see it as something which he has and they have not, something they would like to snatch from him if they could. But if he saw capital as a creative thing, like the powers of the mind, like the genius of the artist, then it would be to him a means of positive happiness both for himself and for others. He would say to himself, not How can I protect myself with this against the tyranny of the struggle for life? not How can I invest this? but What can I do with this? He would see it as Michelangelo saw the marble when he looked for the shape within it. And then he would rise above the conception of mere duty as something we do against our own wills, or of virtue as a luxury of the spirit to which we escape in our little leisure from the struggle for life. Virtue, duty, would be for him life itself; in creation he would attain to that harmony of duty and pleasure which is happiness.

If only we could see that the superfluous energy of mankind is something out of which to make the happiness of mankind we should find our own happiness in the making of it. There is still for us a gulf between doing good to others and the delight of the artist, the craftsman, in his work. The artist is one kind of man and the philanthropist another; the artist is a selfish person whom we like, and the philanthropist an unselfish person whom we do not like. What we need is to fuse them in our use of capital, in our exercise of the superfluous energy of mankind. There are single powerful capitalists who know this joy of creation, who are benevolent despots, and yet are suspect to the poor because of their great power. But it never enters the head of the smaller investor that he, too, might create instead of merely investing; that, instead of being a shareholder in a limited liability company, he might be one of a creative fellowship, not merely earning dividends but transforming cities, exalting things of use into things of beauty, giving to himself and to mankind work worth doing for its own sake, work in which all the obsolete conflicts of rich and poor could be forgotten in a commonwealth. That is the vision of peace which our sacrifices in the war may earn for us. We have learned sacrifice and the joy of it; but, so far, only so that we may overcome an enemy of our own kind. There remains to be overcome, by a sacrifice more joyful and with far greater rewards, this other old enemy not of our own kind, the enemy we call nature or human nature, the enemy that is so powerful merely because we dare not believe that she does not exist.

[The end]
A. Clutton-Brock's essay: Waste Or Creation?

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