FOOTNOTES:[24]Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with the addition of red.[25]Geist.[26]Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of. In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.[27]Ausbildung.[28]A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and goodness.[29]Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent later.
[24]Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with the addition of red.
[24]Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with the addition of red.
[25]Geist.
[25]Geist.
[26]Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of. In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.
[26]Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of. In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.
[27]Ausbildung.
[27]Ausbildung.
[28]A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and goodness.
[28]A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and goodness.
[29]Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent later.
[29]Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent later.
Somedecades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement, which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers, the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself to be.
It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission. It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand others took back; what one hand received,a thousand others rejected. The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained unchanged.
So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it loses its unconsciousness—men know it for wrong, and do not amend it. For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School movement should depart from its original conception, that of a temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution, then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than unculture, and is more properly described as misculture.
No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no meansour goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no, we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout.
But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic depopulation which shall restore the mediæval relation between the area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will complete his job from start to finish—he will only do a section of it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man, thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker—for what else does it mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand fora shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker, the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who calls himselfpar excellencea "worker," it can never be too short.
The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even, it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour, with the one longing that it might die more quickly—he knows how the shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.
But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all wearinesses—the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the shallowest kind oftea-table chatter to talk about good music, edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again under the next day's toil.
The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable streets.
The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science, turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning æsthetes who live in rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot returnto the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.
The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them, in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or political appointment. The others may console themselves with the thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on any other ill—toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to thispons asinorumof shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.
Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work isan evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from mouth to mouth and never tested by examination.
The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30]which is the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy, no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which formad nauseamthe monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs, can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put into practice the principle which I have called that of the Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline, endeavour to explain.
The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It demands—since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a certain degree fixedby technical conditions—that the day's work as a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to forced labour, and destroys culture.
FOOTNOTES:[30]Bildungsstaat.
[30]Bildungsstaat.
[30]Bildungsstaat.
Thereis a way by which the day's work can be ennobled, and even have mind brought into it,[31]on capitalistic lines. Before the War we were just about to enter on this path—America is treading it now. Its fundamental condition is a huge increase in general well-being.
The daily wages of the American working-man have risen, as we have already remarked, to seven or even ten dollars, corresponding to a purchasing power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to so radical a removal of all restrictions in domestic economy that one can no longer speak of the proletarian condition as existing in the United States. A man who drives to his work in his own automobile can satisfy all his reasonable needs in the way of recreation and of extending his education, he looks at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the case in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye, he forms his own judgment of its place in the whole, he improves the processes, and amuses himself bybeing both workman and engineer. (Consider in the light of this fact the value of the prophecy that America is standing on the brink of Bolshevism!)
In a country whose wealth at this moment—in consequence of war-profits and depreciation of money—is almost equal to that of the rest of the world put together, the process of abolishing proletarianism can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans, since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest of the peoples, and must begin afresh, and live for the future—we shall renounce without envy the broad path of the old way of thought, the way of riches, in order to clear with hard work the new path on which, one day, all will have to follow us. The way of Culture is the way to which we are pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all, represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant a clearly defined political procedure.
By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is required that every employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his day's work in intellectual employment; and that every brainworker shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labour.
There are, of course, fixed limits to the applicationof this principle, on the one side in intellectual, on the other in bodily incapacity, as well as in those rare cases where it is recognized that the interrupted hours of intellectual work cannot be made good.
We would also establish a year of Labour-Service, to be devoted by the whole youth of Germany, of both sexes, to bodily training and work.
The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned as "cultured" is not to consist in examinations but in proof of work. Any one who can offer some show of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we shall be taking seriously the question of the ascent to higher grades, which, so long as it depends on a particular age, or on school certificates, must remain on paper.
Let no one say that this testing system is a mere mechanical method, that it degrades Culture from its intellectual dignity, and is equivalent to the Chinese literary tests for office. True culture is distinguished from mere sybaritic æstheticism in that in some sense or other it makes for production. Where there is no talent for art or for creative thought, then there remain to be developed the educational forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of life, which must have their influence.
Different categories of Culture will arise of themselves; not ranks or castes or classes, but grades of society, each of which may be attained by any one. No one must be able to say that any monopoly ofculture has barred his way, or that training and testing have been denied him. If the culture be genuine it will never look down in intellectual arrogance on the stages below it; if it have duties associated with it, then he who has rejected the path of ascent, or has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those duties. Any one who has no faculty but that of a glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of callings some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker, backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us.
At this point we may hear a voice from the average heart of Socialism exclaim: "How is this? Do you call that having no castes? We have just begun to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are we expected to put the cultured in command? This is pure reaction!"
Softly! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we shall clear it up. If any scruples still remain, we shall consider them further.
Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is apparently forgotten that capitalism ruled by hereditary power. Any one who belonged to that circle ruled along with it, whether he were competent to rule or not. But culture is not a heritable possession; no one can win it save by virtue of a higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and this will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit for higher responsibilities. Is the voice from the average heart answered?
No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do wecare? We are out for equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy."
Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I, so we are quits.
For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind, in will and in heart—let him begin by altering Nature!
In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or remission ofwork. Work of the highest class, creative and intellectual work—the most self-sacrificing that is known to man because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life, including his hours of leisure and recreation—this work demands extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different. Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be graded two stages upward, one for the output,[32]and one for the grade of culture implied.
Women will also be subject to this system of grading whether they exercise any vocation outside their homes or not, for society has a deep interest in the culture of its mothers, and in external incentives to culture women must share equally with men.
An intimate sense of association will grow up within each grade of culture. This, however, will not impair the general solidarity of the people, since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This sense of association, renewed with elements that vary from generation to generation, and corresponding very much to the relations between contemporary artists who spring from different classes or territories, will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary sentiment and absorb into itself whatever traditional values the latter may possess.
Between the separate grades there will not only be the connexion afforded by the living possibilities of free ascent from one to the other, but the system of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at the same work will in itself promote culture, tradition, and the consciousness of union. We need only recall the old gilds and military associations in order to realize what a high degree of manly civic consciousness can arise from the visible community of duty and achievement. The mechanical worker will become the instructor of his temporary comrade and guest, and the latter will in turn widen the other's outlook, and emulate him in the development of the processes of production. The manual worker will bring to the desk and the board-room his freedom from prepossessions and the practical experience of his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstractions and general ideas; he will gain a respect for intellectual work, and will feel the impulse to winnew knowledge and faculty, or to make good what he has neglected.
Two objections remain to be considered and confuted.
First: there are far more places to be filled in mechanical than in intellectual employment. Is it possible so to organize the interchange of work that every one who desires intellectual employment can find it? The answer is: that, whether we like it or not, all work tends more and more to take on an administrative character. Just as in industry there is ever more talk and less production, so our economic life is working itself out through thousands upon thousands of new organizations. Industrial Councils, Councils of Workers, Gild-Councils, are forming themselves in among the existing agencies of administration; and the immediate consequence of this is a tremendous drop in production, to be followed later by a more highly articulated and more remunerative system of work. It is as if a marble statue came to life, and then had to be internally equipped with bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up, drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it remains a comfortless and dismal waste.
But the administrative side of our future economic and national life demands the creation of so many posts of intellectual work that at present there isnot the trainedpersonnelto fill it. If the Year of Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still more defections and gaps to be filled. The rush for intellectual work is more likely to be too small than too great.
Let us come to the second objection. Will not confusion be worse confounded if there are many who have to fill two jobs, if, in these jobs constant exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work are brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if time and work are lost through never-ending rearrangement?
Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea of the old high-strung work done, as it were, under military discipline, any one who cherishes the remotest idea that this system can ever return, in spite of the fact that its clamps and springs have been dashed to pieces, may well lament these unsettlements. One who starts from the fluctuating conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour will take organic unsettlements as part of the price to be paid, if they only lead in the end to systematic production. But one who weighs the fact that the make-believe life of our present economy has not even yet reached its final form, will discern in every new transition-form, however tedious, the final redemption; in so far, at least, as any equilibrium is capable of being restored at all.
The essence of the interchange of labour will, therefore, consist in this, that while the distinctionbetween physical and intellectual work will still exist, there will be no distinction between a physical and intellectual calling. Until advanced age may forbid, it will be open to every man not merely to acquire some ornamental branches of knowledge but seriously and with both feet to take his footing in the opposite calling to his own.
The different callings will learn to know and respect each other, and to understand their respective difficulties. This applies particularly to those who call themselves the operative workers.
As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end and loafing has been trampled out, then many a one, who now thinks that mental work is mere chattering, will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to this kneading and rummaging of the brain, he will go back with relief to his workshop; he will neither envy nor despise those who are operative workers with the brain, and will understand, or at least unconsciously feel, the oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life, and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive resignation to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose its charm.
Any man will be respected who contents himself with the lowest prescribed measure of culture,who modestly renounces further study, and goes back to manual work. But there will be no excuse for those who know nothing and can do nothing, but pretend to set everybody right; for there will be no monopoly of culture to keep them down, and all genuine faculty must come to the test of action.
To-day there are three classes of social swindlers. First, those who live on the community without returning it any service. These are the people who live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against these social legislation must be framed. Secondly, those who deliberately practise "ca' canny," and therefore live on the surplus work of their fellows. These are the champions of the principle: Every one according to his need, no one according to his deed; thesaboteursof labour. Against these the remedy lies in the spread of intelligence and a just system of remuneration. Thirdly, there are those who simulate thought and brain-work while they have nothing to give but hack phrases uttered with a glib tongue. Against these worst of all swindlers, these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is culture.
And this, in the new Order, is open to every one, young or old, who can maintain his foothold in the exercise of intellect, when the chance is offered him. He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal standard of accomplishment can demand that he shall not besent back to manual work, but continue to be employed in the same occupation, and be further cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At every further stage of development a corresponding sphere of activity is to be opened to him, up to the point at which the limits of his capacity come into sight.
Let no one object that the rush for intellectual work will become uncontrollable. Would that it might! For then the country would be so highly developed and its methods of work so perfected that there would be quite a new relation between the demand for head-work and for hand-work. For a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice if the rising forces are set free, and the laggard are tranquillized.
But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed one-year examination[33]is abrogated, and now are we again to be condemned according to this so-called standard of culture?
Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few years we shall feel the deeply depressingeffects which will arise from the domination of the uncultured.
But the transition period will come to an end. Then every one who likes will be able to learn and to execute, and every one who is able will wish to do so.
"But supposing one does not wish? May not he be the very one who is most capable of achievement? We don't want model pupils."
Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has learnt nothing may make his trial as a man when culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he does not care to rack his brains he will be thought none the less of; he will merely be offered ordinary work according to his choice.
But those who wish to see responsibility and the destiny of the country placed in the hands of men who do not care to rack their brains, must not entrench themselves behind social principles, but plainly admit that they want for all time to establish the rule of demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect. It is not for such a one to pass judgment on the mission of Germany.
The way to the German mission, to German culture, which is to be no more a culture of the classes but of the people, stands open to all by means of the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as it were a single ship's crew; the issues are the same for all. The manual worker is no longer kept down by over-fatigue, and the brainworker is no longer cut off from the rest of the people.
The manual worker no longer regards the territory of culture as a sort of inaccessible island, but rather as a district which he can visit every day and in which he is quite at home. Every one in future will start even in school training, and the degree to which his further culture may be carried will not be limited by want of money or of time, or, above all, of opportunity. He will continually have intercourse with men of culture, and in that intercourse he will at once give and receive; the habits of thought, the methods and the range of intellectual work which are now only the heritage of a few will be his own; and the twofold language of the country, the language of conceptions and the language of things, will for him be one.
There will be no permanent system of stratification; the energies of the people, rising and falling, will be in constant movement and their elements will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting and unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and the destiny they have shaped for themselves—these aberrations will never cease so long as men are men—but there will be no more hatred of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary association of artists or of athletes.
And since culture is to be at once the recognized social aim of the country and the personal goal and standard of each individual, the struggle for possessions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by publicopinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the background.
But the spirit of the land will not resemble any that we know at present. As in the Middle Ages, a spiritual power will rule, but it will not be imposed from without or above, it will be a creation from within. The competition of all will be like that of the best in the time of the Renaissance, but it will not be a competition for conventional values but for the furthering of life. The country will become, as it was in former days, a generous giver, not, however, from the lofty eminence of a class set apart, but out of the whole strength of the people.
Again, for the first time, the convinced and conscious will of a people will be seen to direct itself to a common and recognized goal. This is a fact of immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise of forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-peaks of history, and of which the last example was the French Revolution.
But those dangers of which we have spoken, that hell of a mechanical socialism, of institutions and arrangements without sentiment or spirit, are done away with, for production has ceased to be merely material and formal, it has acquired absolute value and substance. Spirit is the only end that sanctifies all means; and it sanctifies not by justifying them but by purifying them.
FOOTNOTES:[31]Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.[32]Assuming that the highest output is reached in the particular instance which of course will not be the case with every worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of culture (Bildungsstufe).[33]Referring to the shortening of military service which used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.
[31]Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.
[31]Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.
[32]Assuming that the highest output is reached in the particular instance which of course will not be the case with every worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of culture (Bildungsstufe).
[32]Assuming that the highest output is reached in the particular instance which of course will not be the case with every worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of culture (Bildungsstufe).
[33]Referring to the shortening of military service which used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.
[33]Referring to the shortening of military service which used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.
Asthe kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves in the death-chamber with every little droop in the curve of temperature, although they know in their hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter themselves with the idea that in the end all will come right, if not by itself at least with trifling exertion. But it is not so: except by the greatest exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for the piles on which it is built are decayed. It is true that it still stands, and will be standing for an hour or so, and life goes on in it very much as in the days when it was sound. We can choose either to leave it alone, and await the downfall of the city, among whose ruins life will never bloom again, or we can begin the underpinning of the tottering edifice, a process which will last for decades, which will allow no peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and dangerous, and will end almost imperceptibly, when the ancient city has been transformed into the new.
Let us have no doubt about it: something tremendous and unprecedented has to be accomplished here. Does any thinking man believe that when the socialorder of the world has collapsed, when a country of the importance of Germany has lost the very basis of its existence, when the development of centuries is broken off, its faculties and its traditions emptied of value and repudiated—does any man really believe that by means of certain clauses in a Constitution a few confiscations, socializations and rises in wages, a nation of sixty millions can be endowed with a new historical reason for existence? Why is not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us?
Our character is weak on the side of will, and our former lords say that we are good for nothing except under strict discipline administered by dynasts and hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is all over with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us and give us a modest place among the nations with a great past and a small future. If we are worthy of our name we must be born again of the Spirit. Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement for a people; to carry it out, to embody the conception in a new order of society, is at once a test and an achievement.
Our social ethics must take up a new position. Hitherto—stripping off the usual rhetorical phrases—it has taken its stand on two effective and really driving principles, those of Duty and of Success; two side-views of Individualism. All else, including love of one's neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith, spiritual cultivation, feeling for Nature, was (apart from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary; meansto an end, convention or falsehood. There were few whose careers were not influenced by these estimates; the majority of the upper classes was wholly under their dominion.
The two goals of our wishes, to have something and to be something, were expressed by the whole outward aspect of society. The great object was not to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had less, or was less, than others. There were grades of being, grades of human being: it was possible to be something, to be much, to be little, or to be nothing at all. From the white collar to the pearl necklace, from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at the ordinary to the title of Excellency, everything was a proof of what one had, or was, or believed oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must not speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow a hundred marks from him, but one must not ask him for a penny. Whoever had wealth displayed it in order to be admired; whoever had a social position displayed his unapproachability and the weight of his dignity, as, for instance, when with an absent look and lost in the burden of his own existence he entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded a degrading attitude and forms of speech, and presented to them a face of stone; towards those in higher position one came to life and displayed an attentive civility. It was—or shall we say is?—permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly incomeof a poor family. "One had it to spend" and "what business was it of theirs?" In the lower ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these abuses and also much envy and malice, much open imitation, and much of secret admiration. Every silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the suburb and the village made a display which in quality, indeed, fell below the model, but in quantity not at all.
It may be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal interests and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand for service and the claim to command. If anything can explain the eagerness with which we Germans flung ourselves into a war whose origins we did not know and did not want to know, then besides the conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and renown, we must also take into account the obscure impulse of the national conscience which in the midst of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion.
Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in human nature, that it has been there from time immemorial, and it is impossible to alter it at one stroke? Pedantic drivel! Many things lie deep inhuman nature, and it depends on which of these the will chooses to develop. And who talked of altering things at one stroke? Our judgment of values is to be transformed, and if human nature never changed, much that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would be creeping in the shade. This transformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness, frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the November days[34]and proselytes of every description: you can see that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too closely—unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion.
All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the collective judgment of mankind; even in the mediæval bloom of Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of courage. The Churches never madeany serious effort to shape an ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world.
The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes, and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness, the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed.
We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean by "esprit gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy," while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically created nocharacter of which we can say that it embodies the collective spirit of Germany.
The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth and the empire of the soul has been laid down by us, but there are as yet few into whose consciousness it has penetrated; the transformation of thought and feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold of the masses directly, but will filter continually from one social stratum to another.
The recognized values of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this after we have shattered the visible, and are living in the midst of intellectual anarchy and moral Nihilism! And yet moral valuations, simple, binding, and on the level of social judgment, are near enough to be within our grasp.
Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day talking about Democracy? Have not we ourselves got tired of this word, forbidden till a year ago—tired, even in circles where the modest word "Liberal" was never pronounced without a frown? And what does Democracy mean? Do we take it in the merely negative sense, that one is no longer obliged to put up with things? Or in the meagre sense, that responsibility goes by favour, and that the majority must decide? Or the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our way through a sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic?
It is not the form of government, it is the form of society, that determines the spirit of a land. There is no democratic form of society, for democracy can be in league with capitalism, with socialism, or even with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken fundamental conception which gives significance and stability both to the forms of a democratic constitution and to those of an organic society is called Solidarity—that is to say, cohesion and the sense of community. Solidarity means that each man does not come first in his own eyes, but before God and State and himself each man must stand and be answerable for all, and all for each.
In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the majority over the minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided; the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which, under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every occupation must beopen to him, except that he must not encroach on the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib tongue, but again, by spirit and by will.
To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of syntax.
When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment.
Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by separate interests; byideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered body—ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility.
Any one who does not accept this self-created and self-renewing order, and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary, an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy.
An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity, or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture, resting upon spirit, character, and education.
This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this orderwe recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock on which it foundered.
The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness—all this is clearly mechanization seen from the political side.
The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized, and burdened with the relics of mediævalism, Cæsarism and clericalism, seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers in the department of mechanization.
For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success; elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then came Napoleon.
He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same time he wassomething mightier than that: he was the heir of the French idea of spiritual and popular liberty.
Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England, they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have lately seen France conquer with the help of America.
But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit. Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being the uprising economic movement.
Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so. Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized victories. As in Frederick'stime the slovenly Continent had to give way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany.
And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the professors were political realists, success followed the side of mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the hope of gain.
Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever. One was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts, another had no battle-cruisers, another was lacking in cannon, or in recruits, or in railways, or in finances; the trains never came in up to time, everywhere one found public opinion or the Press interfering in process of law or in the administration, everywhere there were scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was everything up to the mark.
Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we say now, to militarize them. And this could be done with even more life and vigourthan in Prussia, whose organization was there believed to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism was, as it were, stored up in tins and in some places was obviously getting mouldy. In the matter of Freedom, however, the other peoples were ahead of us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual isolation was now added.
In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic developments there was not a single statesman who recognized that Prussian principles had ceased to be a monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a conception of genius. This lack of perception was the political cause of the war. Instead of renewing ourselves inwardly through freedom and the spirit, and carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly, and inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming and hurrahing. Worse than any playing of false notes was the mistake we made in key and in tempo: D major,Allegro,Marcia,Fortissimo, with cymbals and trumpets!
To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a decision. The period of mechanical Prussianization is over for us, the period of the mechanical policy of Force is over for all the world, although the heliographs of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon. It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the international police which has now begun; it is the social epoch. In this epoch the people will live and will range themselves according to the strength of the ideas which they stand for.
It is not enough for us to become Germans instead of Prussians; not even if, as it were to be desired, we should succeed in rescuing from the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough—no, it will lead us to destruction quicker than any one believes—to blunder along with the disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief: Well, something's got done; all will come right.
No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do you want to stakeourexistence, on ships, soldiers, mines, trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your thought? Where is the thought of Germany?
We can and must live only by becoming what wewere designed to be, what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought of Germany.
This thought is shaping the New Society—the society of the spirit and the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground in the new epoch, and which fulfils it.
This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things. For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror, not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a thinking nation among the nations.
But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live? With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation?
No—it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly developed form ofsociety will be one that works and produces. All around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little work and little production. For the next decade the question will be, not where is the demand but where is the supply?
The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years' War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we do not notice the decline.
Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more than valuable production or cheap production; it is something exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.
It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected.
The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us which we have not known for acentury, and the scope of which we cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in their internationalism.
There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will be something more than a bond of interest.
The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one. In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself but every one can redeem another. Class for class, man for man: thus is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in each there must be good-will.