Simplicity or Subtlety?

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 54, 27 November 1926, Page 17

Simplicity or Subtlety?

A New View of the “Muddle Through” Policy

“ German statesmen imputed to Sir Edward Grey far-reaching and intricate plans of ‘ Weltpolitik ’ that were simply ludicrous to anyone who knew his mind and methods. But any such disclaimers on our part are taken for new strokes of cunning. Nor are our foreign critics entirely in the wrong. There is a sort of cunning, or even wisdom, in our policy of ‘ muddling throngh.’ The best example of this unconscious cunning is in our presentment of the familiar portrait of John Bull, whose fatuous, good-natured, bucolic face suggests that anyone can ‘ best ’ him in a bargain or lead him along any road he chooses. So foolish a creature is an easy prey for sharp practitioners ! Put off their guard by such stupidity, they try it on—with consequences that surprise them,” —Mr. J. A. Hobson.

JN a recent issue of “Harper’s Magazine” Mr. J. A. Hobson has a remarkable article, “In Praise of Muddling Through.” He suggests that “it is the free, skilled, successful handling of the unexpected opportunity that marks the statesman or any other adept in the arts of conduct.” Mr.

Hobson’s endeavour to explain the success of "laissez faire” in politics and economics, as far as this country is concerned, may show that, after all, it is based on the common sense on which we pride ourselves. “Students of our economic history see the rise of modern industry, not as a process of orderly application of the fruits of science, but as a loose scramble of ignorant, hard-headed, pushful profiteers with the wit and courage to seize new opportunities and work them energetically,” writes Mr. Hobson, after the passage quoted above. “Even the better-equipped modern capitalist employers are usually single-track minds with short haulage. Here and there you find a man of vision and a scientific planner. But almost always within the circumscribed area of his business. For business as a national concern we still believe in ‘muddling through.’

“Our present stuation is by common admission exceedingly precarious. With growing difficulty and by a narrowing margin we purchase from the world our daily bread and other subsistence. We carry on our backs an immovable burden of some ten per cent, idle surplus population. Taxation has risen fourfold, some of our staple trades lie in a desperate plight. Coal, the basis of our national economy, threatens to collapse. And what is the attitude of our public mind? Simply fuddled.

"Committees sit, Commissions are appointed, Congresses of Bankers, Chambers of Commerce, Manufacturers’ Associations meet and ladle out their conflicting panaceas. Protection, Free Trade, Empire Development, Inflation and Deflation, Revival of Agriculture, International Controls, Credit Schemes, Nationalisation of Essential Industries jostle one another for attention. But, urgent as the situation is, and specious as these cures can be dressed to look, there is no firm belief in any of them, no wide enthusiastic acclamation. “Indeed, is there anj- logic at all in our system? The reasons why this is a test question just now are various. Though many motives, as we know, co-opcrated in our empire-building, some selfish, some generous and altruistic, we have in recent times committed ourselves, if not consistently, at any rate with tolerable frequency, to the view that our Empire was a great world-school for self-government, and that as the child-nations grew up, we would clear out.

“Our ■white children have already taken us at our word, reducing the parental control to a thin and evanescent formula. . The more precocious of our coloured children are following suit, with clamorous demands for the closure of our ‘mission.’ John Bull, however, feels aggrieved at his fine professions being taken au pied de la letfre. He would like to keep the family together, and the property in the family. ‘Consequently,’ to quote a French commentator,

‘a new imperial order is being evolved under our eyes without any apparent logic and almost without written texts.’

“This task primarily consists in a loosening of political, and a tightening of economic, relations between the constituent parts of the Empire. But it also involves some straightening out of the imperial foreign policy, so as to make it intelligble and acceptable to outsiders. And this calls for a super-Athanasius who shall explain how an Empire can be at the same time one and six, reconciling its substantial unity with the separate claims of the Dominions and India to regulate their external relations, as attested by their signature to the Peace Treaties and their membership of the League of Nations. “It may, however, be admitted that, confronting our new tasks and entanglements, we are smitten with doubts about the efficacy of our ways of going on. May not the needs of the new age call upon us to replace the lowgrade thinking that has served us hitherto by a more highly organised intelligence with a longer and more accurate range of conscious activity? “If we arc to win in ‘the race between education and catastrophe,’ it must be by a stimulation of order and co-operative thinking, not so much among the populace, or among the small cultivated minority wjiom Matthew Arnold spoke of as ‘the remnant,’ but among that considerable middle-class in economic and social status whose activities have always been absorbed by over-zeal in doing. “For these middle-classes have remained substantially Philistine, emitting here and there a family of intellectual vigour and attainments, and tempering their life of pushful business with some superficial interest in literature and art, and with some very real addiction to sports. But among these classes there is a great deal of rude untrained ability, capable under due pressure of being put to intellectual service.

“Here has been the great repository of muddled thinking, or that common sense which no longer suffices for success, or safety. From these classes still are mainly drawn the business men, the professionals, the local politicians, and the officials. It is their brains that most need simulation. For a handful of expert supermen cannot do what is wanted. They may furnish seminal thoughts and plot out new lines of organised activity. “But the conversion of a substantial portion of the middle-class is needed to reform our institutions and apply the long-range thinking. "A hard-set intellectual caste? By no means. Through the open channels of popular education will flow a constant supply of new brains and energy from the main stream of national life. Democracy, or the people’s part in government, will remain, as ever, a mainly instinctive process of the general mind, that common sense always needed to hold in check the forces of intellectualism and expertism. It will continue to operate as consent, or dissent, of the people, with such measure of intelligence and rectitude as the organs of public opinion enable or permit it to attain.”