The Quality of Greatness

Henry Geiger

[An assessment of Henry George's book, Progress and Poverty.
Reprinted from MANAS, Vol. VII, No. 22, 2 June 1954]

ONE wonderful thing about a Great Book is that it always contains an element of the unexpected. Like others who read Progress and Poverty "many years ago," we have thought of it as an enlightened treatise dealing broadly with economic forces, offering the proposition that freedom depends upon equality, and that equality, in economic terms, depends upon free access to the land. Now comes a new, condensed edition of Henry George's classic - published in England for the Henry George Foundation of Great Britain by the Hogarth Press (available at $1.25 in the U.S. at the Henry George School of Social Science, in various cities) - which makes us thrill anew to this nineteenth-century genius. The book is pervaded by universal sympathies for it represents a non-partisan cause; indigenous American radicalism such as Edward Bellamy's and George's has no use for the class struggle, and George, like Bellamy, refused to divide human society into partisan groups.

For vision of a theme in American life that is all but forgotten, these days, we recommend an excursion into the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Bellamy, and George. If there is to be a "Next America," such as Lyman Bryson hopes for and predicts, it will need, we think, the inspiration of these Americans of the past.

Henry George, some may remember, ran twice for Mayor of New York on a labor ticket. The second campaign was too much for his ravaged health, and he died four days before the election (in 1887). The evening before his death, he addressed a meeting at which the chairman introduced him as "the great friend of labor." George rose and spoke. He started feebly, but his voice grew until it filled the hall. He exclaimed:

"I have never claimed to be a special friend of labor. Let us have done with this call for special privileges for labor. Labor does not want special privileges. I have never advocated nor asked for special rights or special sympathy for working men. What I stand for is the equal rights of all men."

When working men and all other men recognize that any leader who stands for anything else is not worthy of being followed - that objectives which are partisan always backfire we may begin to get leaders like Henry George, once again; and if we do, we may hope and pray that they will not die four days before election.

But this is not the unexpected element of which we spoke. Turning to the last chapter of the condensed Progress and Poverty, George says that his researches into economic processes led him to a new conviction of the immortality of the human soul! He was no tired and disillusioned thinker who turned to economics because he could believe in no religion and wanted to do something "practical"! He was a man moved to study economic processes by his love of his fellow men, and by his hatred of suffering and injustice. But he pursued these studies as a philosopher. Concerning the question of immortality, he wrote:

The yearning for a further life is natural and deep. It grows with intellectual growth, and perhaps none really feel it more than those who have begun to see how great is the universe and how infinite are the vistas that every advance in knowledge opens before us - vistas that would require nothing short of eternity to explore. But in the mental atmosphere of our times, to the great majority of men on whom mere creeds have lost their hold, it seems impossible to look on this yearning save as a vain and childish hope that arises from man's egotism, having not the slightest ground or warrant, but on the contrary seems inconsistent with positive knowledge.

When we come to trace and to analyze the ideas that thus destroy the hope of a future life, we shall I think find that they have their source, not in any revelations of physical science, but in certain teachings of political and social science that have deeply permeated thought in all directions. They have their root in the doctrines that there is a tendency to the production of more human beings than can be provided for, that vice and misery are the result of natural laws and the means by which advance goes on, and that human progress is by a slow race development. These doctrines, which have been generally accepted as approved truth, do what (except as scientific interpretations have been colored by them) the extensions of physical science do not do-they reduce the individual to insignificance; they destroy the idea that there can be in the ordering of the universe any regard for his existence, or any recognition of what we call moral qualities.

It is difficult to reconcile the idea of human immortality with the idea that nature wastes men by constantly bringing them into being where there is no room for them. It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelligent and beneficent Creator with the belief that the wretchedness and degradation that are the lot of such a large proportion of human kind result from His enactments. And the idea that man mentally and physically is the result of slow modifications perpetuated by heredity irresistibly suggests the idea that it is the race life and not the individual life that is the object of human existence. …

George contends against the Malthusian doctrines. He holds that "the waste of human powers and the prodigality of human suffering do not spring from natural laws, but from the ignorance and selfishness of men in refusing to conform to natural laws." He ends with an heroic note which may surprise even some of his admirers who have not lately looked through Progress and Poverty:

What then is the meaning of life - of life absolutely and inevitably bounded by death? To me it seems only intelligible as the avenue and vestibule to another life. Out of the chain of thought we have been following there seems to rise vaguely a glimpse, a shadowy gleam, of ultimate relations, the endeavor to express which inevitably falls into type and allegory.

Look around today.

Lo! here, now, in our civilized society, the old allegories have yet a meaning, the old myths are still true. Into the Valley of the Shadow of Death yet often leads the path of duty, through the streets of Vanity Fair walk Christian and Faithful, and on Greatheart's armor ring the clanging blows. Ormuzd still fights with Ahriman - the Prince of Light with the Powers of Darkness. He who will hear, to him the clarions of the battle call.

How they call, and call, and call till the heart swells that hears them! Strong soul and high endeavor, the world needs them now. Beauty still lies imprisoned, and iron wheels go over the good and true and beautiful that might spring from human lives.

And they who fight with Ormuzd, though they may not know each other - somewhere, sometime, will the muster roll be called.

And now, with this blazoning of faith, do we think less of George, or more? Curiously, it is the enthusiasm of great men which their followers often wish to forget. They want the hard facts, the close-woven arguments, the devastating logic, but not the glow of the dream. Newton's profound, Neoplatonic mysticism, Kepler's heavenly intelligences - in these the modern astronomer is hardly interested. Yet the structured transcendentalism of great thinkers may be as important a part of their contribution as anything else perhaps more important; for what good, Newton might ask, is a Universe without a soul?

Let us note that Henry George's wonderings about immortality led him to write prophetically of the materialistic ideologies of the twentieth century. To him, Malthusianism was not merely an economic doctrine to be refuted: it was an attack on the dignity of man. He saw mat the claim that Nature or "natural law" dictates the multiplication of the human species far beyond the earth's capacity to support these multitudes implies that man - individual man - is of no more account than a white rat. And if men are but a social horde, then why not control their life and behavior - "the idea that it is the race life and not the individual life that is the object of human existence." So goes the Nazi ideology, and so, with a few changes, goes the Communist credo of State power in behalf of "the masses."

What we are contending for, here, is not the dogma of immortality, nor the certainty of immaterial forces and intelligence in nature, but the possibility of these things. For unless a man like George had held in his mind a sense of such possibilities, it might not have occurred to him to consider the implications of their denial. It is the certainties, whether of affirmation or denial, which we must learn to beware. The certainty that man is no more than a physical being, shaped by the forces of heredity and environment, will bring, in time, logical justification for the ruthless terrorism and "liquidations" which are supposed to purify the blood stream of the race or complete arrangements for the perfect social environment. It is the men who "know" with finality what man is, what are his qualities, and what must be done to improve his lot, who are never restrained by doubts. The head of the secret police and the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky both obtain sanction for their crimes from the notion that they possess absolute knowledge. The one maintains that man is a social animal, the other that he is a spiritual "creature," and both insist that their certainty gives them absolute authority over the destiny of other men.

So, oddly enough, the important thing is not a choice between the competing claims of these two, but a rejection of their common presumption.

Socrates - or Plato - is a model of excellence in this respect. His disciples longed for finalities, yet Socrates plagued them with uncertainties. They wanted blueprints of a life beyond the grave, but Socrates gave them "myths." Not this, he told them, after speaking of his own views, but something "like this," may be what the future holds. Socrates suffered death at the hands of the Athenians because he insisted upon his faith in man's capacity to learn the Good, whereas the Athenians were looking for endorsements of a particular doctrine of the Good - the doctrine currently popular among the Hellenes.

Nothing angers the mob so effectively as a threat to take away its common certainties, to question its popular authorities. This was the crime of Socrates, the crime of Jesus, and is the offense of every man who publicly resists the orthodox finalities of his time. The determined inquirer who cares more for the truth than for conformity disturbs all those who obtain their feeling of security from being a part of the herd. It is really the fear of the members of the herd which defines the opinions of dissenters as crimes against the public good; and it is the habit of believing in doctrines as finalities which makes the herd assume that the dissenter who questions is actually declaring for a competing finality, when all he actually demands is impartiality and caution in reaching the conclusions upon which men act. Thus the man who questions "capitalist" assumptions is soon branded a "communist," and the critic of Stalinism is singled out as a monster who has "betrayed the working classes."

This may seem a long way to have come from Henry George's objection to the social philosophies based upon utilitarian assumptions, and far from the raptures with which he ends his great work. But George's transcendentalism and the deep philosophical faith which made his raptures possible are, we think, of immeasurable importance not, perhaps, to George's actual economic theories, although of this we are not certain, but to the quality of his historical influence. The enrichment of human life is the gift of wide-hearted men who are unable to contemplate a mean and impotent status for the individual human being. This is a "law" of human progress, for both society and the single man. And as George shows in his last chapter, the view men entertain of the universe exercises control over what they think of individual men.

The influence of Henry George on social thinking may live on after other nineteenth-century social philosophers are forgotten, even if his economic theories, as some maintain, are "dated." As to this, we cannot say. But the principles he expounded are not dated, nor his conviction that it lies within the capacity of men to remake their society according to canons of equality and justice.