Post-Prandial Philosophy

19. Imagination and Radicals

Conservatism, I believe, is mainly due to want of imagination.

In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to deny the other and equally

obvious truth that Conservatism, in the lump, is a euphemism for

selfishness. But the two ideas have much in common. Selfish people are

apt to be unimaginative: unimaginative people are apt to be selfish.

Clearly to realise the condition of the unfortunate is the beginning of

philanthropy. Clearly to realise the rights of others is the beginning

of justice. "Put yourself in his place" strikes the keynote of ethics.

Stupid people can only see their own side of a question: they cannot

even imagine any other side possible. So, as a rule, stupid people are

Conservative. They cling to what they have; they dread revision,

redistribution, justice. Also, if a man has imagination he is likely to

be Radical, even though selfish; while if he has no imagination he is

likely to be Conservative, even though otherwise good and kind-hearted.

Some men are Conservative from defects of heart, while some are

Conservative from defects of head. Conversely, most imaginative people

are Radical; for even a bad man may sometimes uphold the side of right

because he has intelligence enough to understand that things might be

better managed in the future for all than they are in the present.

But when I say that Conservatism is mainly due to want of imagination, I

mean more than that. Most people are wholly unable to conceive in their

own minds any state of things very different from the one they have been

born and brought up in. The picturing power is lacking. They can

conceive the past, it is true, more or less vaguely--because they have

always heard things once were so, and because the past is generally

realisable still by the light of the relics it has bequeathed to the

present. But they can't at all conceive the future. Imagination fails

them. Innumerable difficulties crop up for them in the way of every

proposed improvement. Before there was any County Council for London,

such people thought municipal government for the metropolis an insoluble

problem. Now that Home Rule quivers trembling in the balance, they think

it would pass the wit of man to devise in the future a federal league

for the component elements of the United Kingdom; in spite of the fact

that the wit of man has already devised one for the States of the Union,

for the Provinces of the Dominion, for the component Cantons of the

Swiss Republic. To the unimaginative mind difficulties everywhere seem

almost insuperable. It shrinks before trifles. "Impossible!" said

Napoleon. "There is no such word in my dictionary!" He had been trained

in the school of the French Revolution--which was _not_ carried out by

unimaginative pettifoggers.

To people without imagination any change you propose seems at once

impracticable. They are ready to bring up endless objections to the mode

of working it. There would be this difficulty in the way, and that

difficulty, and the other one. You would think, to hear them talk, the

world as it stands was absolutely perfect, and moved without a hitch in

all its bearings. They don't see that every existing institution just

bristles with difficulties--and that the difficulties are met or got

over somehow. Often enough while they swallow the camel of existing

abuses they strain at some gnat which they fancy they see flying in at

the window of Utopia or of the Millennium. "If your reform were

carried," they say in effect, "we should, doubtless, get rid of such and

such flagrant evils; but the streets in November would be just as muddy

as ever, and slight inconvenience might be caused in certain improbable

contingencies to the duke or the cotton-spinner, the squire or the

mine-owner." They omit to note that much graver inconvenience is caused

at present to the millions who are shut out from the fields and the

sunshine, who are sweated all day for a miserable wage, or who are

forced to pay fancy prices for fuel to gratify the rapacity of a handful

of coal-grabbers.

Lack of imagination makes people fail to see the evils that are; makes

them fail to realise the good that might be.

I often fancy to myself what such people would say if land had always

been communal property, and some one now proposed to hand it over

absolutely to the dukes, the squires, the game-preservers, and the

coal-owners. "'Tis impossible," they would exclaim; "the thing wouldn't

be workable. Why, a single landlord might own half Westminster! A single

landlord might own all Sutherlandshire! The hypothetical Duke of

Westminster might put bars to the streets; he might impede locomotion;

he might refuse to let certain people to whom he objected take up their

residence in any part of his territory; he might prevent them from

following their own trades or professions; he might even descend to such

petty tyranny as tabooing brass plates on the doors of houses. And what

would you do then? The thing isn't possible. The Duke of Sutherland,

again, might shut up all Sutherlandshire; might turn whole vast tracts

into grouse-moor or deer-forest; might prevent harmless tourists from

walking up the mountains. And surely free Britons would never submit to

_that_. The bare idea is ridiculous. The squire of a rural parish might

turn out the Dissenters; might refuse to let land for the erection of

chapels; might behave like a petty King Augustus of Scilly. Indeed,

there would be nothing to prevent an American alien from buying up

square miles of purple heather in Scotland, and shutting the inhabitants

of these British Isles out of their own inheritance. Sites might be

refused for needful public purposes; fancy prices might be asked for

pure cupidity. Speculators would job land for the sake of unearned

increment; towns would have to grow as landlords willed, irrespective of

the wants or convenience of the community. Theoretically, I don't even

see that Lord Rothschild mightn't buy up the whole area of Middlesex,

and turn London into a Golden House of Nero. Your scheme can't be

worked. The anomalies are too obvious."

They are indeed. Yet I doubt whether the unimaginative would quite have

foreseen them: the things they foresee are less real and possible. But

they urge against every reform such objections as I have parodied; and

they urge them about matters of far less vital importance. The existing

system exists; they know its abuses, its checks and its counter-checks.

The system of the future does not yet exist; and they can't imagine how

its far slighter difficulties could ever be smoothed over. They are not

the least staggered by the appalling reality of the Duke of Westminster

or the Duke of Sutherland; not the least staggered by the sinister power

of a conspiracy of coal-owners to paralyse a great nation with the

horrors of a fuel famine. But they _are_ staggered by their bogey that

State ownership of land might give rise to a certain amount of jobbery

and corruption on the part of officials. They think it better that the

dukes and the squires should get all the rent than that the State should

get most of it, with the possibility of a percentage being corruptly

embezzled by the functionaries who manage it. This shows want of

imagination. It is as though one should say to one's clerk, "All your

income shall be paid in future to the Duke of Westminster, and not to

yourself, for his sole use and benefit; because we, your employers, are

afraid that if we give you your salary in person, you may let some of it

be stolen from you or badly invested." How transparently absurd! We want

our income ourselves, to spend as we please. We would rather risk losing

one per cent. of it in bad investments than let all be swallowed up by

the dukes and the landlords.

It is the same throughout. Want of imagination makes people exaggerate

the difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can't

picture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Men

with great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always very

advanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty _they_

see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficulty

of convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability and

practicability. A great many Conservatives, who are Conservative from

selfishness, would be Radicals if only they could feel for themselves

that even their own petty interests and pleasures are not really

menaced. The squires and the dukes can't realise how much happier even

they would be in a free, a beautiful, and a well-organised community.

Imaginative minds can picture a world where everything is so ordered

that life comes as a constant ******* delight to everybody. They know

that that world could be realised to-morrow--if only all others could

picture it to themselves as vividly as they do. But they also know that

it can only be attained in the end by long ages of struggle, and by slow

evolution of the essentially imaginative ethical faculty. For right

action depends most of all, in the last resort, upon a graphic

conception of the feelings of others.