THE ANATOMY OF FRUSTRATION : VI. MAN ON HIS PLANET

: WHAT DOES HE DESIRE ?

By H. G. WELLS

In reading him we have to bear in mind certain very characteristic habits of thought that pervade his argu- ments. Chief of these is this mystical identification of the personal self (Steele or you or me or anyone) with " Man " and with "Life." There are odd expressions of his that need to be weighed and assimilated if his attitude is to be fully apprehended. " The individuality is the handle end of all life," he writes in one place. In another he says " Since every individual is also Man, an integral thread of human thought and purpose, he cannot, once he has arrived at a realisation of that, concede his re- sponsibility for the whole world to any priest, leader, dictator, king or whatnot. He may hive done so before- hand in ignorance, as dogs or horses do, but after he has once seen the light in this matter subservience is degradation. He has adjusted himself to an immortal. collaboration and he cannot divest himself any more of responsi7 bility. The universe has been given him." There arc definite intimations that Steele considered that a sort of " Illumination " was coming to mankind and also that it came—almost in the fashion, of the theologian's " Con- version "—to individual persons. After " the individual is different and the world is different.

There are times when Steele seems to be presenting nothing but a sort of rethattire or quintessence (you may choose either word) of religious mysticism throughout the ages. _This Illumination '! of. his is clearly, little more or little less than being ." born again." Men, have been trying to realise that _second . birth. for nineteen centuries. Where, the trouble has crept in has been in the trailing question, " Born again to what ? " Where' Steele seems to be.noveLis in.the realism and.completeness• with which he presents - the world of . new values and strenuous thinking and effort opened out to the.

Illuminated. . _ .

Rejecting as he does the time-honoured distinetion between matter and spirit, as a profound fallacy, " in- grained in language," he is able to state his- conception of our objective, the New Life, in terms at once extremely Mental and extremely concrete. He cannot slide away into " other-worldism " as the dualists do. He con- templates a world so unified, so understanding, so clarified and harmonised, that its advancing welfare and the vigour and happiness of its individuals reflect and complement each other. " We shall live in the All and the All will live in each of us."

He writes that sentence, reflects and anticipates a criticism. " Am I saying something there that is still concrete, or am I walking more and more dangerously along a rhetorical plank above an abyss of nonsense ? " He reflects that " every effort at extreme definition is apt by its sheer intensity to thrust through exaggeration towards absolute and therefore conteritless statements. Language is all too apt to oversay," and with that he drops the subject for a while. But he means to return to it from another angle.' He admits and calls attention to the fact that he has oversaid what he has to say, and there for a time until he can prepare an approach from a different angle, he leaves that discussion. It remains- oversaid.

Next he sets himself to present in considerable detail the possible world community towards which life is thrusting now, the sort of All in which the individual is to live. Just as in his big first volume he made a very respectable attempt to get all the gods and philosophies of mankind into one great boiling, so in this third volume he gets together a very impressive mass of Utopias, revolutionary plans, reconstruction plans, social criticisms, and does what he can to make an extract that shall be the quintessence of the desire behind all this discontent, all this hope and scheming for change. He rejects what he calls " mere envy and vindictiveness systems," mere reversals of conditions by which the mighty are to be laid low and the humble and meek exalted, and he con- centrates on substantial proposals. His _purpose is to find what is wanting positively, what is wanted positively.

He makes a shrewd criticism of Utopias generally. They do not, he points out, investigate what is desired by men ; they assume—often very rashly—what is desired by. men, they leave that unstated and implicit, and merely set about showing us ingenious ways by which these unformulated ends are to be attained. - But if we read -between the lines, we 'can nevertheless bring out from the implicit to'the explicit' in this melange of projects and dreams, the real ends which are " com- monly acceptable to the human imagination." That- is as much -unanimity as he feels is possible for any human beings and it is as much as he-requires. Impulses purely personal and anti-social, will always, he admits, be flaring out in human conduct. That does not matter so .far as a general statement of purpose goes. If such impulses can be kept to individual limitations and prevented from running over into contagion and social complication, they will by their very diversity and discordance neutralise each other. When he says what is " generally desired " by men, he means no more, than this, " what molt men, • most of .the time, if the thing is put to them, wii_ agree should be achieved and which they will even profess themselves willing to assist in achieving."

From this he goes on to find the most general formula for the common desire.

Freedom, Steele begins, if you use the word broadly, is the primary desire of living things. Almost all that they desire either individually or in common, can be expressed as a freedom, as an escape from a limitation. When they want Peace it is really freedom from the intense preoccupation and danger of war. When they want Plenty it is freedom from the irksomeness of want and toil. When they obey it is to relieve themselves of the immediate penalties of compulsion. When they dance or drill or sing or shout in unison it is to free them- selves from the lonely conspicuousness of initiative, the essential agoraphobia. " Men will only willingly place themselves under the disciplines of organised effort in order to remain, in some nearer and more essential respect, free." This is a fundamental paradox in the structure of human communities. We consent to a common social order in order to preserve our freedoms, just as on the wider basis • of religious conduct we dissolve ourselves into merger immortalities in order to save our souls alive.

Steele becomes apologetic for reminding us of things so plainly before our eyes. But they are so constantly as well as so plainly before us that, for the most part and for most of the time, we forget that they are there. We let our essentially negative and freedom-protecting im- pulses clothe themselves for the purposes of collective action in positive forms. We seek something only to escape something. It is well to be reminded at times of the primary egotism at the bottom of all our search for a merger immortality that shall include practically all mankind. Our search for a " common maximum freedom " runs parallel, at its own level, to our search for the " most comprehensive immortality." " It is almost as if I repeated myself here," he says, but it is not an exact repetition. It is a parallel at another level. It is a very important second statement of the human objective in a different phraseology. It is absolutely necessary to any solution of the problem of frustration to correct such a glib and mystical overstatement, "Each in All and All in Each," by this admission that the world commonweal we have in mind is a compromise of free- doms, 'a deal for a maximum general freedom at the expense of 'unregulated individual self-assertion, some- thing in short as individualistic as the Social Contract of Rousseau. So put, it is an understatement. It presents the business as a bargain instead of as a mystical self-abnegation, exalted and profound. " The subtle veracity quivers broadly and mercurially between that overstatement and this understatement."

• " The subtle veracity quivers broadly and mercurially between that overstatement and • this understatement," between merger immortality and the mystic swallowing up of the ego in an undying purpose, on the one hand, and the social contract on the other. This is Steele at his most characteristic. He is an adept of chiaro-oscuro in philosophical statement. Having thrown this paradoxi- cal quality over. his discussion,' he feels able to go on to his detailed study of our general frustration. Through the shimmer of a varying idiom he is able to make his vision appear sometimes the vision .of a prophet and sometimes the flattest of common sense. It is—to vary the image— stereoscopic, this double style—and to my mind at any rate exposes his subject rounded and living, as no hard, consistent terminology and logical idiom could do.

We can now go a step further in our examination of the general desire of mankind.

Man desires peace upon his planet. He desires release from the perpetual anxiety of impending -violence, com- pulsion, conscription, discipline, effort, destruction, waste and death, which the organisation of his affairs into war-making societies and states involves. And he lives now in a world in which peace and a general release froM these obsessions could plainly be attained and secured by the practical -fusion of the Foreign Offices of quite a few " Great Powers " in the world. Every main line and structure of a World Pax has been thought out and projected. There is no other method of peace. The plans for an eternal world peace have been convincingly sketched in outline by hundreds of thinkers and writers. The deepening horror of the alternatives to such a settle- ment, the horror of air-warfare, gas-warfare, the habitual practice of treacheries and cruelties, social disorganisa- tion, economic dislocation, social and biological degriugo- lade has been made plain to the general imagination.

Peace ballots and suchlike canvassing of the popular mind show an explicit realisation of the situation. For all that, we prepare steadily for war and drift towards war. Yet there is the desire. There is the broad concep- tion of a method for its satisfaction. Why is it frustrated ?

There can be no other answer than that for all its wide distribution that desire for peace is too weak, too dis- continuous and too into-ordinated for the adverse impulses. Moreover, man desires plenty, which again has become now—whatever the conditions of economic life may have been in the past—a reasonable and feasible desire.

He desires release from preoccupation with sordid needs, anxieties and uncongenial toil. There is the completest justification for that desire. The thing could be arranged.

Whatever may have been the case in the past it is now a commonplace that " men starve in the midst of potential plenty." And they go on starving ! We have had the possibility of economic abundance and the necessity of a World Pax plainly before us for two whole generations at least, and we have scarcely budged a step towards their realisation, in spite of that world-wide desire.

And having reiterated these commonplaces of our time, Steele opens out what is destined to become the ruling thought of most of the rest of the Anatomy. It is that motives are things of deeper origin than intellectual convictions, and that the real will of homo sapiens is still largely unaffected by his conscious and formulated wishes. His intentions are one thing ; his behaviour quite another. The world's expressed desire, its conscious desire, is such and such ; the total complex of human impulses is quite another system, darker, deeper and profoundly more real. These desires for world unity and sane economics are conscious and intellectual desires, he says, and they scarcely penetrated at all into that more primitive and substantial mental mass which is the true reservoir of motives and impulses. It is only in its lucid conscious region that the mind of man has yet appre- hended his new conditions. The unspoken is far' more potent than the spoken. Our religions, our philosophies, our creeds and faiths and loyalties, float unsubstantially upon these inarticulate and potent realities of our lives.

The latter affect and confuse and frustrate the former. They split them up ; they misdirect and misapply them ; they sterilize them. The reciprocal action of the former has still to be made effective.

Unless that can be done complete frustration lies before mankind. . . .

• [Mr. Wells' article in next week's " Spectator " is on " The Frustration of Socialism."]