Birth of the Liberal Creed (Continued) [ 163 ]
clash of class interests, which otherwise would have been met by com-
promise, was invested with a fatal significance.
All this should warn us against relying too much on the economic
interests of given classes in the explanation of history. Such an ap-
proach would tacitly imply the givenness of those classes in a sense in
which this is possible only in an indestructible society. It leaves outside
its range those critical phases of history, when a civilization has broken
down or is passing through a transformation, when as a rule new
classes are formed, sometimes within the briefest space of time, out of
the ruins of older classes, or even out of extraneous elements like for-
eign adventurers or outcasts. Frequently, at a historical juncture new
classes have been called into being simply by virtue of the demands of
the time. Ultimately, therefore, it is the relation of a class to society as
a whole which maps out its part in the drama; and its success is deter-
mined by the breadth and variety of the interests, other than its own,
which it is able to serve. Indeed, no policy of narrow class interest can
safeguard even that interest well—a rule which allows of but few ex-
ceptions. Unless the alternative to the social setup is a plunge into utter
destruction, no crudely selfish class can maintain itself in the lead.
In order to fix safely the blame on the alleged collectivist conspiracy,
economic liberals must ultimately deny that any need for the protec-
tion of society had arisen. Recently they acclaimed views of some
scholars who had rejected the traditional doctrine of the Industrial
Revolution according to which a catastrophe broke in upon the unfor-
tunate labouring classes of England about the 1790s. Nothing in the
nature of a sudden deterioration of standards, according to these writ-
ers, ever overwhelmed the common people. They were, on the average,
substantially better off after than before the introduction of the fac-
tory system, and, as to numbers, nobody could deny their rapid in-
crease. By the accepted yardsticks of economic welfare—real wages
and population figures—the Inferno of early capitalism, they main-
tained, never existed; the working classes, far from being exploited,
were economically the gainers and to argue the need for social protec-
tion against a system that benefited all was obviously impossible.
Critics of liberal capitalism were baffled. For some seventy years,
scholars and Royal Commissions alike had denounced the horrors of
the Industrial Revolution, and a galaxy of poets, thinkers, and writers
[164] The Great Transformation
had branded its cruelties. It was deemed an established fact that the
masses were being sweated and starved by the callous exploiters of
their helplessness; that enclosures had deprived the country folk of
their homes and plots, and thrown them on the labor market created
by the Poor Law Reform and that the authenticated tragedies of the
small children who were sometimes worked to death in mines and fac-
tories offered ghastly proof of the destitution of the masses. Indeed,
the familiar explanation of the Industrial Revolution rested on the de-
gree of exploitation made possible by eighteenth-century enclosures;
or the low wages offered to homeless workers which accounted for the
high profits of the cotton industry as well as the rapid accumulation of
capital in the hands of the early manufacturers. And the charge against
them was exploitation, a boundless exploitation of their fellow citi-
zens that was the root cause of so much misery and debasement. All
this was now apparently refuted. Economic historians proclaimed the
message that the black shadow that overcast the early decades of the
factory system had been dispelled. For how could there be social catas-
trophe where there was undoubtedly economic improvement?
Actually, of course, a social calamity is primarily a cultural not an
economic phenomenon that can be measured by income figures or
population statistics. Cultural catastrophes involving broad strata of
the common people can naturally not be frequent; but neither are cat-
aclysmic events like the Industrial Revolution—an economic earth-
quake which transformed within less than half a century vast masses
of the inhabitants of the English countryside from settled folk into
shiftless migrants. But if such destructive landslides are exceptional in
the history of classes, they are a common occurrence in the sphere of
culture contact between peoples of various races. Intrinsically, the
conditions are the same. The difference is mainly that a social class
forms part of a society inhabiting the same geographical area, while
culture contact occurs usually between societies settled in different
geographical regions. In both cases the contact may have a devastating
effect on the weaker part. Not economic exploitation, as often as-
sumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the vic-
tim is then the cause of the degradation. The economic process may,
naturally, supply the vehicle of the destruction, and almost invariably
economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the immediate
cause of his undoing is not for that reason economic; it lies in the lethal
injury to the institutions in which his social existence is embodied.
Birth of the Liberal Creed (Continued) [ 165 ]
The result is loss of self-respect and standards, whether the unit is a
people or a class, whether the process springs from so-called culture
conflict or from a change in the position of a class within the confines
of a society.
To the student of early capitalism the parallel is highly significant.
The condition of some native tribes in modern Africa carries an un-
mistakable resemblance to that of the English laboring classes during
the early years of the nineteenth century. The Kaffir of South Africa, a
noble savage, than whom none felt socially more secure in his native
kraal, has been transformed into a human variety of half-domesti-
cated animal dressed in the "unrelated, the filthy, the unsightly rags
that not the most degenerated white man would wear,"* a nondescript
being, without self-respect or standards, veritable human refuse. The
description recalls the portrait Robert Owen drew of his own work-
people, when addressing them in New Lanark, telling them to their
faces, coolly and objectively as a social researcher might record the
facts, why they had become the degraded rabble which they were; and
the true cause of their degradation could not be more aptly described
than by their existing in a "cultural vacuum"—the term used by an an-
thropologist to describe the cause of the cultural debasement of some
of the valiant black tribes of Africa under the influence of contact with
white civilization. Their crafts have decayed, the political and social
conditions of their existence have been destroyed, they are dying from
boredom, in Rivers's famous phrase, or wasting their lives and sub-
stance in dissipation. While their own culture offers them no longer
any objective worthy of effort or sacrifice, racial snobbishness and
prejudice bar the way to their adequate participation in the culture of
the white intruders.* Substitute social bar for color bar and the Two
Nations of the 1840s emerge, the Kaffir having been appropriately re-
placed by the shambling slum-dweller of Kingsley's novels.
Some who would readily agree that life in a cultural void is no life
at all nevertheless seem to expect that economic needs would auto-
matically fill that void and make life appear livable under whatever
conditions. This assumption is sharply contradicted by the result of
anthropological research. "The goals for which individuals will work
are culturally determined, and are not a response of the organism to
* Millin, Mrs. S. G., The South Africans, 1926.
1
Goldenweiser, A., Anthropology, 1937.
* Goldenweiser, A., ibid.
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