It is obvious that the old ideal of Equality won’t do. It is landing us daily deeper in a mess. And yet no idea which has passionately swayed mankind can be altogether wrong: not even the most fallacious-seeming. Therefore, before we can dispose of the equality ideal, the ideal that all men are essentially equal, we have got to find how far it is true.
In no sense whatever are men actually equal. Physically, some are big and some are small, some weak, some strong; mentally, some are intelligent, some are not, and the degrees of difference are infinite: spiritually, some are rare and fine, some are vulgar; morally, some are repulsive and some attractive. True, all men have noses, mouths, stomachs, and so on. But then this is a mere abstraction. Every nose, every stomach is different, actually, from every other nose and stomach. It is all according to the individual. Noses and stomachs are not interchangeable. You might perhaps graft the end of one man’s nose on the nose of another man. But the grafted gentleman would not thereby have a dual identity. His essential self would remain the same: a little disfigured, perhaps, but not metamorphosed. Whatever tricks you may perform, of grafting one bit of an individual on another, you don’t produce a new individual, a new type. You only produce a disfigured, patched-up old individual. It isn’t like grafting roses. You couldn’t graft bits of Lord Northcliffe on a thousand journalists and produce a thousand Napoleons of the Press. Every journalist would remain himself: a little disfigured or mutilated, maybe.
It is quite sickening to hear scientists rambling on about the interchange of tissue and members from one individual to another. They have at last reached the old alchemistic fantasy of producing the homunculus. They hope to take the hind leg of a pig and by happy grafting produce a marvellous composite individual, a fused erection of living tissue which will at last prove that man can make man, and that therefore he isn’t divine at all, he is a purely human marvel, only so extraordinarily clever and marvellous that the sun will stop still to look at him.
When science begins to generalize from its own performances it is puerile as the alchemists were, at last. The truth about man, before he falls into imbecility, is that each one is just himself. That’s the first, the middle truth. Every man has his own identity, which he preserves till he falls into imbecility or worse. Upon this clue of his own identity every man is fashioned. And the clue of a man’s own identity is a man’s own self or soul, that which is incommutable and incommunicable in him. Every man, while he remains a man and does not lapse into disintegration, becoming a lump of chaos; is truly himself, only himself, no matter how many fantastic attitudes he may assume. True it is that man goes and gets a host of ideas in his head, and proceeds to reconstruct himself according to those ideas. But he never actually succeeds in this business of reconstructing himself out of his own head, until he has gone cracked. And then he may prance on all fours like Nebuchadnezzar, or do as he likes. But whilst he remains sane the buzzing ideas in his head will never allow him to change or metamorphose his own identity: modify, yes; but never change. While a man remains sane he remains himself and nothing but himself, no matter how fantastically he may attitudinize according to some pet idea. For example, this of equality. St. Francis was ready to fall in rapture at the feet of the peasant. But he wasn’t ready to take the muck-rake from the peasant’s hands and start spreading manure at twopence a day, an insignificant and forgotten nobody, a serf. Not at all. St. Francis kept his disciples and was a leader of men, in spite of all humility, poverty, and equality. Quite right, because St. Francis was by nature a leader of men, and what has any creed or theory of equality to do with it? He was born such: it was his own intrinsic being. In his soul he was a leader. Where does equality come in? Why, by his poverty, St. Francis wished to prove his own intrinsic superiority, not his equality. And if a man is a born leader, what does it matter if he hasn’t got twopence, or if he has got two million? His own nature is his destiny, not his purse.
All a man can be, at the very best, is himself. At the very worst he can be something a great deal less than himself, a money-grubber, a millionaire, a State, like Louis Quatorze, a self-conscious ascetic, a spiritual prig, a grass-chewing Nebuchadnezzar.
So where does equality come in? Men are palpably unequal in every sense except the mathematical sense. Every man counts one: and this is the root of all equality: here, in a pure intellectual abstraction.
The moment you come to compare them, men are unequal, and their inequalities are infinite. But supposing you don’t compare them. Supposing, when you meet a man, you have the pure decency not to compare him either with yourself or with anything else. Supposing you can meet a man with this same singleness of heart. What then? Is the man your equal, your inferior, your superior? He can’t be, if there is no comparison. If there is no comparison, he is the incomparable. He is the incomparable. He is single. He is himself. When I am single-hearted, I don’t compare myself with my neighbour. He is immediate to me, I to him. He is not my equal, because this presumes comparison. He is incomparably himself, I am incomparably myself. We behold each other in our pristine and simple being. And this is the first, the finest, the perfect way of human intercourse.
And on this great first-truth of the pristine incomparable nature of every individual soul is founded, mistakenly, the theory of equality. Every man, when he is incontestably himself, is single, incomparable, beyond compare. But to deduce from this that all men are equal is a sheer false deduction: a simple non sequitur. Let every man be himself, purely himself. And then, in the evil hour when you do start to compare, you will see the endless inequality between men.
In the perfect human intercourse, a relation establishes itself happily and spontaneously. No two men meet one another direct without a spontaneous equilibrium taking place. Doubtless there is inequality between the two. But there is no sense of inequality. The give-and-take is perfect; without knowing, each is adjusted to the other. It is as the stars fall into their place, great and small. The small are as perfect as the great, because each is itself and in its own place. But the great are none the less the great, the small the small. And the joy of each is that it is so.
The moment I begin to pay direct mental attention to my neighbour, however; the moment I begin to scrutinize him and attempt to set myself over against him, the element of comparison enters. Immediately I am aware of the inequalities between us. But even so, it is inequalities and not inequality. There is never either any equality or any inequality between me and my neighbour. Each of us is himself, and as such is single, alone in the universe, and not to be compared. Only in our parts are we comparable. And our parts are vastly unequal.
Which finishes equality for ever, as an ideal. Finishes also fraternity. For fraternity implies a consanguinity which is almost the same as equality. Men are not equal, neither are they brothers. They are themselves. Each one is himself, and each one is essentially, star- rily responsible for himself. Any assumption by one person of responsibility for another person is an interference, and a destructive tyranny. No person is responsible for the being of any other person. Each one is starrily single, starrily self-responsible, not to be blurred or confused.
Here then is the new ideal for society: not that all men are equal, but that each man is himself: “one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.” Particularly this is the ideal for a new system of education. Every man shall be himself, shall have every opportunity to come to his own intrinsic fullness of being. There are unfortunately many individuals to whom these words mean nothing: mere verbiage. We must have a proper contempt and defiance of these individuals, though their name be legion.
How are we to obtain that a man shall come to his own fullness of being; that a child shall grow up true to his own essential self? It is no use just letting the child do as it likes. Because the human being, more than any other living thing, is susceptible to falsification. We alone have mental consciousness, speech, and thought. And this mental consciousness is our greatest peril.
A child in the bath sees the soap, and wants it, and won’t be happy till he gets it. When he gets it he rubs it into his eyes and sucks it, and is in a far more unhappy state. Why? To see the soap and to want it is a natural act on the part of any young animal, a sign of that wonderful naive curiosity which is so beautiful in young life. But the “he won’t be happy till he gets it” quality is, alas, purely human. A young animal, if diverted, would forget the piece of soap at once. It is only an accident in his horizon. Or, given the piece of soap, he would sniff it, perhaps turn it over, and then merely abandon it. Beautiful to us is the pure nonchalance of a young animal which forgets the piece of soap the moment it has sniffed it and found it no good. Only the intelligent human baby proceeds to fill its mouth, stomach, and eyes with acute pain, on account of the piece of soap. Why? Because the poor little wretch got an idea, an incipient idea into its little head. The rabbit never gets an idea into its head, so it can sniff the soap and turn away. But a human baby, poor, tormented little creature, can’t help getting an idea into his young head. And then he can’t help acting on his idea: no matter what the consequences. And this bit of soap shows us what a bitter responsibility our mental consciousness is to us, and how it leads astray even the infant in his bath. Poor innocent: we like to imagine him a spontaneous, unsophisticated little creature. But what do we mean by sophistication? We mean that a being is at the mercy of some idea which it has got into its head, and which has no true relation to its actual desire or need. Witness the piece of soap. The baby saw the piece of soap, and got an idea into its head that the soap was immeasurably desirable. Acting on this simple idea, it nearly killed itself, and filled an hour or so of its young life with horrid misery.
It is only when we grow up that we learn not to be run away with by ideas which we get in our heads and which don’t correspond to any true natural desire or need. At least, education and growing-up is supposed to be a process of learning to escape the automatism of ideas, to live direct from the spontaneous, vital centre of oneself.
Anyhow, it is criminal to expect children to “express themselves” and to bring themselves up. They will eat the soap and pour the treacle on their hair and put their fingers in the candle-flame, in the acts of physical self-expression, and in the wildness of spiritual self-expression they will just go to pieces. All because, really, they have enough mental intelligence to obliterate their instinctive intelligence and to send them to destruction. A little animal that can crawl will manage to live, if abandoned. Abandon a child of five years and it won’t merely die, it will almost certainly maim and kill itself. This mental consciousness we are born with is the most double-edged blessing of all, and grown-ups must spend years and years guarding their children from the disastrous effects of this blessing.
Now let us go back to the maxim that every human being must come to the fullness of himself. It is part of our sentimental and trashy creed today that a little child is most purely himself, and that growing up perverts him away from himself. We assume he starts as a spontaneous little soul, limpid, purely self-expressive, and grows up to be a sad, sophisticated machine. Which is all very well, and might easily be so, if the mind of the little innocent didn’t start to work so soon, and to interfere with all his little spontaneity. Nothing is so subject to small, but fatal automatization as a child: some little thing it sets its mind on, and the game is up. And a child is always setting its little mind on something, usually something which doesn’t at all correspond with the true and restless desire of its living soul. And then, which will win, the little mind or the little soul? We all know, to our sorrow. When a child sets its little mind on the soap, its little soul, not to speak of its little eyes and stomach, is thrown to the winds. And yet the desire for the soap is only the misdirection of the eternally yearning, desirous soul of an infant.
Here we are, then. Instead of waiting for the wisdom out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, let us see that we keep the soap- tablet out of the same mouths. We’ve got to educate our children, and it’s no light responsibility. We’ve got to try to educate them to that point where at last there will be a perfect correspondence between the spontaneous, yearning, impulsive-desirous soul and the automatic mind which runs on little wheels of ideas. And this is the hardest job we could possibly set ourselves. For man just doesn’t know how to interpret his own soul-promptings, and therefore he sets up a complicated arrangement of ideas and ideals and works himself automatically till he works himself into the grave or the lunatic-asylum.
We’ve got to educate our children. Which means, we’ve got to decide for them: day after day, year after year, we’ve got to go on deciding for our children. It’s not the slightest use asking little Jimmy “What would you like, dear?” because little Jimmy doesn’t know. And if he thinks he knows, it’s only because, as a rule, he’s got some fatal little idea into his head, like the soap-tablet. Yet listen to the egregious British parent solemnly soliciting his young son: “What would you like to be, dear? A doctor or a clergyman?” — “An engine-driver,” replies Jimmy, and the comedy of babes-and- sucklings continues.
We’ve got to decide for our children: for years and years we have to make their decisions. And we’ve got to take the responsibility on to ourselves, as a community. It’s no good feeding our young with a sticky ideal education till they are fourteen years old, then pitching them out, pap-fed, into the whirling industrial machine and the warren of back streets. It’s no good expecting parents to do anything. Parents don’t know how to decide; they go to little Jimmy as if he were the godhead. And even if they did know how to decide, they can do nothing in face of the factory and the trades union and the back streets.
We, the educators, have got to decide for the children: decide the steps of their young fates, seriously and reverently. It is a sacred business, and unless we can act from our deep, believing souls, we’d best not act at all, but leave it to Northcliffe and trades unions.
We must choose, with this end in view. We want quality of life, not quantity. We don’t want swarms and swarms of people in back streets. We want distinct individuals, and these are incompatible with swarms and masses. A small, choice population, not a horde of hopeless units.
And every man to be himself, to come to his own fullness of being. Not every man a little wonder of cleverness or high ideals. Every man himself, according to his true nature. And those who are comparatively non-mental can form a vigorous, passionate proletariat of indomitable individuals: and those who will work as clerks to be free and energetic, not humiliated as they are now, but fierce with their own freedom of beings: and the man will be always more than his job; the job will be a minor business.
We must have an ideal. So let our ideal be living, spontaneous individuality in every man and woman. Which living, spontaneous individuality, being the hardest thing of all to come at, will need most careful rearing. Educators will take a grave responsibility upon themselves. They will be the priests of life, deep in the wisdom of life. They will be the life-priests of the new era. And the leaders, the inspectors, will be men deeply initiated into the mysteries of life, adepts in the dark mystery of living, fearing nothing but life itself, and subject to nothing but their own reverence for the incalculable life-gesture.