Imagination and Radicals
Grant Allen
[Chapter XIX from the book, Post-Prandial
Philosophy, published 1894 in London by Chatto & Windus]
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 vaguelybecause 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 Revolutionwhich 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 difficultiesand 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 æsthetic
delight to everybody. They know that that world could be realised
to-morrowif 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.
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