Charles Kingsley - "Women and Politics"

Harriet Stark - "The Bacillus of Beauty"

John Morley - "Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)"

Ferdinand Raimund - "Der Alpenkonig und der Menschenfeind"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

A Preface to Politics

W >> Walter Lippmann >> A Preface to Politics




For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral. Conquerors
have gone forth with the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God
before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and pillage. The ruthless
exploitation of India becomes the civilizing fulfilment of the "white
man's burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drummer, and prospector
are embodied in one man. In the nineteenth century church, press and
university devoted no inconsiderable part of their time to proving the
high moral and scientific justice of child labor and human sweating. It
is a matter of record that chattel slavery in this country was deduced
from Biblical injunction, that the universities furnished brains for its
defense. Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Englishman alone when
he said in "The Man of Destiny" that "... you will never find an
Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you
on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles...."

Liberty, equality, fraternity--what a grotesque career those words have
had. Almost every attempt to mitigate the hardships of industrialism has
had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor organization, factory laws,
health regulations are still fought as infringements of liberty. And in
the name of equality what fantasies of taxation have we not woven? what
travesties of justice set up? "The law in its majestic equality," writes
Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep in the
streets and to steal bread." Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan
by which we refuse to enact what is called "class legislation"--a policy
which in theory denies the existence of classes, in practice legislates
in favor of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged are laws friendly to
business; class legislation means working-class legislation.

You have to go among lawyers to see this idolatrous process in its most
perfect form. When a judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution, what
is it that he does? He takes a sentence written by a group of men more
than a hundred years ago. That sentence expressed their policy about
certain conditions which they had to deal with. In it was summed up what
they intended to do about the problems they saw. That is all the sentence
means. But in the course of a century new problems arise--problems the
Fathers could no more have foreseen than we can foresee the problems of
the year two thousand. Yet that sentence which contained their wisdom
about particular events has acquired an emotional force which persists
long after the events have passed away. Legends gather about the men who
wrote it: those legends are absorbed by us almost with our mothers' milk.
We never again read that sentence straight. It has a gravity out of all
proportion to its use, and we call it a fundamental principle of
government. Whatever we want to do is hallowed and justified, if it can
be made to appear as a deduction from that sentence. To put new wine in
old bottles is one of the aims of legal casuistry.

Reformers practice it. You hear it said that the initiative and
referendum are a return to the New England town meeting. That is supposed
to be an argument for direct legislation. But surely the analogy is
superficial; the difference profound. The infinitely greater complexity
of legislation to-day, the vast confusion in the aims of the voting
population, produce a difference of so great a degree that it amounts to
a difference in kind. The naturalist may classify the dog and the fox,
the house-cat and the tiger together for certain purposes. The historian
of political forms may see in the town meeting a forerunner of direct
legislation. But no housewife dare classify the cat and the tiger, the
dog and the fox, as the same kind of animal. And no statesman can argue
the virtues of the referendum from the successes of the town meeting.

But the propagandists do it nevertheless, and their propaganda thrives
upon it. The reason is simple. The town meeting is an obviously
respectable institution, glorified by all the reverence men give to the
dead. It has acquired the seal of an admired past, and any proposal that
can borrow that seal can borrow that reverence too. A name trails behind
it an army of associations. That army will fight in any cause that bears
the name. So the reformers of California, the Lorimerites of Chicago, and
the Barnes Republicans of Albany all use the name of Lincoln for their
political associations. In the struggle that preceded the Republican
Convention of 1912 it was rumored that the Taft reactionaries would put
forward Lincoln's son as chairman of the convention in order to
counteract Roosevelt's claim that he stood in Lincoln's shoes.

Casuistry is nothing but the injection of your own meaning into an old
name. At school when the teacher asked us whether we had studied the
lesson, the invariable answer was Yes. We had indeed stared at the page
for a few minutes, and that could be called studying. Sometimes the
head-master would break into the room just in time to see the conclusion
of a scuffle. Jimmy's clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you throw
chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny, and then under his breath to
placate God's penchant for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once in
Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel. The waitress brought me
a glass of yellowish liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top. No
tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition state looked like that.
Though it was tea, it might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled or
winked in ordering the tea, it would have been beer. The two looked alike
in Portland; they were interchangeable. You could drink tea and fool
yourself into thinking it was beer. You could drink beer and pass for a
tea-toper.

It is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial and so deliberate. The
openness cleanses it. Advertising, for example, would be nothing but
gigantic and systematic lying if almost everybody didn't know that it
was. Yet it runs into the sinister all the time. The pure food agitation
is largely an effort to make the label and the contents tell the same
story. It was noteworthy that, following the discovery of salvarsan or
"606" by Dr. Ehrlich, the quack doctors began to call their treatments
"606." But the deliberate casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is
not so difficult to deal with. The very deliberation makes it easier to
detect, for it is generally awkward. What one man can consciously devise,
other men can understand.

But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No one escapes it entirely. A
wealth of evidence could be adduced to support this from the studies of
dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian school of psychologists. They
have shown how constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a shallow
incident--how the superficial is all the time being shoved into the light
of consciousness in order to conceal a buried intention; how inveterate
is our use of symbols.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of
idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this
into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we
build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and
personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much
easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights
of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the
theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their
fate and forget their original content.

For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstractions of all kinds are
nothing but the porous vessels into which life flows, is contained for a
time, and then passes through. But our reverence clings to the vessels.
The old meaning may have disappeared, a new one come in--no matter, we
try to believe there has been no change. And when life's expansion
demands some new container, nothing is more difficult than the
realization that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the present need.

It is interesting to notice how in the very act of analyzing it I have
fallen into this curious and ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor
is taken for the reality: I have used at least six metaphors to state it.
Abstractions are not cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and
life doesn't flow like water. What they really are you and I know
inwardly by using abstractions and living our lives. But once I attempt
to give that inwardness expression, I must use the only weapons I
have--abstractions, theories, phrases. By an effort of the sympathetic
imagination you can revive within yourself something of my inward sense.
As I have had to abstract from life in order to communicate, so you are
compelled to animate my abstractions, in order to understand.

I know of no other method of communication between two people. Language
is always grossly inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is merely
passive, if he falls into the mistake of the literal-minded who expect
words to contain a precise image of reality. They never do. All language
can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the imagination enabling the
reader to recreate the author's insight. The artist does that: he
controls his medium so that we come most readily to the heart of his
intention. In the lyric poet the control is often so delicate that the
hearer lives over again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the
words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the
time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous
vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at
the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means
when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his
system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign to the thinker.

That too is why debating is such a wretched amusement and most
partisanship, most controversy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue
from the opponent's language, never from his insight. You take him
literally, you pick up his sentences, and you show what nonsense they
are. You do not try to weigh what you see against what he sees; you
contrast what you see with what he says. So debating becomes a way of
confirming your own prejudices; it is never, never in any debate I have
suffered through, a search for understanding from the angles of two
differing insights.

And, of course, in those more sinister forms of debating, court trials,
where the stakes are so much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is
to make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the other lawyer's
contention. Men have been hanged as a result. How often in a political
campaign does a candidate suggest that behind the platforms and speeches
of his opponents there might be some new and valuable understanding of
the country's need?

The fact is that we argue and quarrel an enormous lot over words. Our
prevailing habit is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not about
the realities they express. In controversy we do not try to find our
opponent's meaning: we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts to
shape policies we do not seek out what is worth doing: we seek out what
will pass for moral, practical, popular or constitutional.

In this the Vice Commission reflected our national habits. For those
earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of
abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to
four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to
be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect
that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that
cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could
then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It
means these changes in industry, sex relations, law and public opinion.
If you think it is worth the cost you can begin to deal with the problem.
If you don't, then confess that you will not abolish prostitution, and
turn your compassion to softening its effects."

That would have left the issues clear and wholesome. But the procedure of
the Commission is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions may "square
with the public conscience of the American people" but they will not
square with the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell you at the
top of the page that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
ultimate ideal and twenty lines further on that the method must be
constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence.
Calf-worship was never more idolatrous than this. Truth would have slept
more comfortably in Procrustes' bed.

Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived ideas of the
Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused
no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to
conventionality--I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report,
and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent
hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too
shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the
minds of the Commission, and without them the report cannot be
understood. They are typical idols of the American people. This report
offers an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping them.

A valuable contribution, then, must be _moral_. There is no doubt that
the Commission means sexually moral. We Americans always use the word in
that limited sense. If you say that Jones is a moral man you mean that he
is faithful to his wife. He may support her by selling pink pills; he is
nevertheless moral if he is monogamous. The average American rarely
speaks of industrial piracy as immoral. He may condemn it, but not with
that word. If he extends the meaning of immoral at all, it is to the
vices most closely allied to sex--drink and gambling.

Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined for the Commission. As we
have seen, it means that sex must be confined to procreation by a
healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple. All other sexual
expression would come under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do the
Commission no injustice. Now this limited conception of sex has had a
disastrous effect: it has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual
impulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any modification of the
relationship of men and women was immediately put out of consideration.
Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Havelock Ellis make could, of
course, not even get a hearing.

With this moral ideal in mind, not only vice, but sex itself, becomes an
evil thing. Hence the hysterical and minute application of the taboo
wherever sex shows itself. Barred from any reform which would reabsorb
the impulse into civilized life, the Commissioners had no other course
but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this they were compelled to
discard the precious values of art, religion and social life of which
this superfluous energy is the creator. Driven to think of it as bad,
except for certain particular functions, they could, of course, not see
its possibilities. Hence the poverty of their suggestions along
educational and artistic lines.

A valuable contribution, we are told, must be _reasonable_ and
_practical_. Here is a case where words cannot be taken literally.
"Reasonable" in America certainly never even pretended to mean in
accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"--well one thinks of
"practical politics," "practical business men," and "unpractical
reformers." Boiled down these words amount to something like this: the
proposals must not be new or startling; must not involve any radical
disturbance of any respectable person's selfishness; must not call forth
any great opposition; must look definite and immediate; must be tangible
like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance, or a policeman's
club. Above all a "reasonable and practical" proposal must not require
any imaginative patience. The actual proposals have all these qualities:
if they are "reasonable and practical" then we know by a good
demonstration what these terms meant to that average body of citizens.

To see that is to see exposed an important facet of the American
temperament. Our dislike of "talk"; the frantic desire to "do something"
without inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dollar standard; the
unwillingness to cast any bread upon the waters; our preference for a
sparrow in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the naive inability to
understand the inner satisfactions of bankrupt poets and the
unworldliness of eccentric thinkers; success-mania; philistinism--they
are pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure or unwillingness to
project the mind beyond the daily routine of things, to play over the
whole horizon of possibilities, and to recognize that all is not said
when we have spoken. In those words "reasonable and practical" is the
Chinese Wall of America, that narrow boundary which contracts our vision
to the moment, cuts us off from the culture of the world, and makes us
such provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own problems. Fixation
upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land
meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One
suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real feeling
that the world is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce panics.

How this fascination of the obvious has balked the work of the Commission
I need not elaborate. That the long process of civilizing sex received
perfunctory attention; that the imaginative value of sex was lost in a
dogma; that the implied changes in social life were dodged--all that has
been pointed out. It was the inability to rise above the immediate that
makes the report read as if the policeman were the only agent of
civilization.

For where in the report is any thorough discussion by sociologists of the
relations of business and marriage to vice? Why is there no testimony by
psychologists to show how sex can be affected by environment, by
educators to show how it can be trained, by industrial experts to show
how monotony and fatigue affect it? Where are the detailed proposals by
specialists, for decent housing and working conditions, for educational
reform, for play facilities? The Commission wasn't afraid of details:
didn't it recommend searchlights in the parks as a weapon against vice?
Why then isn't there a budget, a large, comprehensive budget, precise and
informing, in which provision is made for beginning to civilize Chicago?
That wouldn't have been "reasonable and practical," I presume, for it
would have cost millions and millions of dollars. And where would the
money have come from? Were the single-taxers, the Socialists consulted?
But their proposals would require big changes in property interests, and
would that be "reasonable and practical"? Evidently not: it is more
reasonable and practical to keep park benches out of the shadows and to
plague unescorted prostitutes.

And where are the open questions: the issues that everybody should
consider, the problems that scientists should study? I see almost no
trace of them. Why are the sexual problems not even stated? Where are the
doubts that should have honored these investigations, the frank statement
of all the gaps in knowledge, and the obscurities in morals? Knowing
perfectly well that vice will not be repressed within a year or
prostitution absolutely annihilated in ten, it might, I should think,
have seemed more important that the issues be made clear and the thought
of the people fertilized than that the report should look very definite
and precise. There are all sorts of things we do not understand about
this problem. The opportunities for study which the Commissioners had
must have made these empty spaces evident. Why then were we not taken
into their confidence? Along what lines is investigation most needed? To
what problems, what issues, shall we give our attention? What is the
debatable ground in this territory? The Commission does not say, and I
for one, ascribe the silence to the American preoccupation with
immediate, definite, tangible interests.

Wells has written penetratingly about this in "The New Machiavelli." I
have called this fixation on the nearest object at hand an American
habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an English one too. But in this
country we have a philosophy to express it--the philosophy of the
Reasonable and the Practical, and so I do not hesitate to import Mr.
Wells's observations: "It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men,
have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out
the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of the
purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves
to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the
perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma,
persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the
stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good
intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought,
crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any
extension of social organization is at present achieved. Directly,
however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is grasped, directly
the dominating importance of this critical, less personal, mental
hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind in the race is
understood, the whole problem of the statesman and his attitude toward
politics gains a new significance, and becomes accessible to a new series
of solutions...."

Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to cultivate what Mr. Wells
calls the "mental hinterland" is a vice peculiar to the business man. The
colleges submit to it whenever they concentrate their attention on the
details of the student's vocation before they have built up some cultural
background. The whole drift towards industrial training in schools has
the germs of disaster within it--a preoccupation with the technique of a
career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities of our schools and
colleges, still less am I a lover of shallow specialists. The
unquestioned need for experts in politics is full of the very real danger
that detailed preparation may give us a bureaucracy--a government by men
divorced from human tradition. The churches submit to the demand for
immediacy with great alacrity. Look at the so-called "liberal" churches.
Reacting against an empty formalism they are tumbling over themselves to
prove how directly they touch daily life. You read glowing articles in
magazines about preachers who devote their time to housing reforms, milk
supplies, the purging of the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of
their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the political absorption
of their sermons, you are told that the church must abandon forms and
serve the common life of men. There are many ways of serving everyday
needs,--turning churches into social reform organs and political rostra
is, it seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of performing that
service. When churches cease to paint the background of our lives, to
nourish a Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate purposes and reaffirm
the deepest values of life, then churches have ceased to meet the needs
for which they exist. That "hinterland" affects daily life, and the
church which cannot get a leverage on it by any other method than
entering into immediate political controversy is simply a church that is
dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform, but it has ceased to be a
church.

A large wing of the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It
boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical."
Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great
achievement. It forgets the difference between voting the Socialist
ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is the tangible thing, and
for that these Socialist politicians work. They get the votes, enough to
elect them to office. In the City of Schenectady that happened as a
result of the mayoralty campaign of 1911. I had an opportunity to observe
the results. A few Socialists were in office set to govern a city with no
Socialist "hinterland." It was a pathetic situation, for any reform
proposal had to pass the judgment of men and women who did not see life
as the officials did. On no important measure could the administration
expect popular understanding. What was the result? In crucial issues,
like taxation, the Socialists had to submit to the ideas,--the general
state of mind of the community. They had to reverse their own theories
and accept those that prevailed in that unconverted city. I wondered over
our helplessness, for I was during a period one of those officials. The
other members of the administration used to say at every opportunity that
we were fighting "The Beast" or "Special Privilege." But to me it always
seemed that we were like Peer Gynt struggling against the formless
Boyg--invisible yet everywhere--we were struggling with the unwatered
hinterland of the citizens of Schenectady. I understood then, I think,
what Wells meant when he said that he wanted "no longer to 'fix up,' as
people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the development of
that needed intellectual life without which all his shallow attempts at
fixing up are futile." For in the last analysis the practical and the
reasonable are little idols of clay that thwart our efforts.

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