Kant once remarked that `out of crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made'. Mill believed this deeply. This, and his almost Hegelian distrust of simple models and of cut-and-dried formulae to cover complex, contradictory, and changing situations, made lain a very hesitant and uncertain adherent of organized parties and programmes. Despite his father's advocacy, despite Mrs. Taylors passionate faith in the ultimate solution of all social evils by some great institutional change (in her case that of socialism), he could not rest in the notion of a clearly discernible final goal, because he saw that men differed and evolved, not merely as a result of natural causes, but also because of what they themselves did to alter their own characters, at times in unintended ways; This alone makes their conduct unpredictable, and renders laws or theories, whether inspired by analogies with mechanics or with biology, nevertheless incapable of embracing the complexity and qualitative properties of even an individual character, let alone of a group of men. Hence the imposition of any such construction upon a living society is bound, in his favourite words of warning, to dwarf, maim, cramp, wither the human faculties.
His greatest break with his father was brought about by this conviction: by his belief (which he never explicitly admitted) that particular predicaments required each its own specific treatment; that the application of correct judgment, in curing a social malady, mattered at least as much as knowledge of the laws of anatomy or pharmacology. He was a British empiricist and not a French rationalist, or a German metaphysician, sensitive to day-to-day play of circumstances, differences of `climate', as well as to the individual nature of each case, as Helvétius or Saint-Simon or Fichte, concerned as they were with the grandes lignes of development, were not. Hence his unceasing anxiety, as great as Tocqueville's and greater than Montesquieu's, to preserve variety, to keep doors open to change, to resist the dangers of social pressure, and above all his hatred of the human pack in full cry against a victim, his desire to protect dissidents and heretics as such. The whole burden of his charge against the `progressives' (he means utilitarians and perhaps socialists) is that, as a rule, they do no more than try to alter social opinion in order to make it more favourable to this or that scheme or reform, instead of assailing the monstrous principle itself which says that social opinion `should be a law for individuals'4.13 Mill's overmastering desire for variety and individuality for their own sake emerges in many shapes; He notes that `Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest'4.14--a truism which, he declares, `stands opposed to the general tendency of existing opinion and practice'. At other times he speaks in sharper terms. He remarks that `it is the habit of our time to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character. is to be without any marked character; to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently, and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity.'4.15 And again `The greatness of England is now all collective; individually small, we only appear capable of anything great by combining; and with this our moral and religious philanthropists are perfectly content. But it was men of another stamp that made England what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline.'4.16 The tone of this, if not the content, would have shocked Bentham; so indeed would this bitter echo of Tocqueville: `Comparatively speaking, they now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties and the same means of asserting them ...All the political changes of the age promote it, since they all tend to raise the low and lower the high. Every extension of education promoted it, because education brought people under common influences. Improvement in the means of communication promotes it ...Increase of commerce and manufacture promotes ...The ascendancy of public opinion ...forms so great a mass of influence hostile to individuality4.17 [that] in this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.'4.18We have come to such a pass that mere differences, resistance for its own sake, protest as such, is now enough. Conformity, and the intolerance which is its offensive, and defensive arm, are for Mill always detestable, and peculiarly horrifying in an age which thinks itself enlightened; in which, nevertheless, a man can be sent to prison for twenty one months for atheism; jurymen are rejected and foreigners denied justice because they hold no recognized religious beliefs; no public money is given for Hindu or Moslem schools because an `imbecile display' 4.19 is made by an Under-Secretary, who declares that toleration is desirable only among Christians but not for unbelievers. It is no better when workers employ `moral police'4.20 to prevent some members of their trade union being paid higher wages earned by superior skill or industry than the wages paid to those who lack these attributes. Such conduct is even more loathsome when it interferes with private relations between individuals. He declared that `what any person might freely do with respect to sexual relations' should be deemed to be an unimportant and purely private matter which concerns no one but themselves; that to have held any human being responsible to other people, and to the world, for the fact itself (apart from such of its consequences as the birth of children, which clearly created duties which should be socially enforced) would one day. be thought one of the superstitions and barbarisms of the infancy of the human race. The same seemed to him to apply to the enforcement of temperance or Sabbath observance, or any of the matters on which `intrusively pious members of society should be told to mind their own business'. 4.21 No doubt the gossip to which Mill was exposed during his relationship with Mrs. Taylor before his marriage to her--the relationship which Carlyle mocked at as platonic--made him peculiarly sensitive to this form of social persecution. But it is of a piece with his deepest and most permanent convictions.
Mill's suspicion of democracy as the only just, and yet potentially the most oppressive, form: of government, springs from the same roots. He wondered uneasily whether centralization of authority and the inevitable dependence of each on all and `surveillance of each by all' would not end by grinding all down into `a tame uniformity of thought, dealings and actions', and produce `automatons in human form' and `liberticide'. Tocqueville had written pessimistically about the moral and intellectual effects of democracy in America. Mill agreed. He said that even if such power did not destroy, it prevented existence; it compressed, enervated, extinguished, and stupefied a people; and turned them into a flock of `timid and industrious animals of whom the government is a shepherd'. Yet the only cure for this, as Tocqueville himself maintained (it may be a little half-heartedly), is more democracy, 4.22 which can alone educate a sufficient number of individuals to independence, resistance, and strength. Men's disposition to impose their own views on others is so strong that, in Mill's view, only want of power restricts it; this power is growing; hence unless further barriers are erected it will increase, leading to a proliferation of `conformers, time servers, hypocrites, created by silencing opinion', 4.23 and finally to a society where timidity has killed independent thought, and men confine themselves to safe subjects. Yet if we make the barriers too high, and do not interfere with opinion at all, will this not end, as Burke or the Hegelians have warned, in the dissolution of the social texture, atomization of society--anarchy? To this Mill replies that `the inconvenience arising from conduct which neither violates specific duty to the public, nor hurts any assignable individual, is one which society can afford to bear for the sake of the greater good of human freedom'.4.24 This is tantamount to saying that if society, despite the need for social cohesion, has itself failed to educate its citizens to be civilized men, it has no right to punish them for irritating others, or being misfits, or not conforming to some standard which the majority accepts. A smooth and harmonious society could perhaps be created, at any rate for a time, but it would be purchased at too high a price. Plato saw correctly that if a frictionless society is to emerge the poets must be driven out; what horrifies those who revolt against this policy is not so much the expulsion of the fantasy mongering poets as such, but the underlying desire for an end to variety, movement, individuality of any kind; a craving for a fixed pattern of life and thought, timeless, changeless, and uniform. Without the right of protest, and the capacity for it, there is for Mill no justice, there are no ends worth pursuing. `If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of a contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.'4.25
In his lecture in this series, to which I have already referred, Sir Richard Livingstone, Whose sympathy with Mill is not in doubt, charges him with attributing too much rationality to human beings: the ideal of untrammelled freedom may be the right of those who have reached the maturity of their faculties, but of how many men today, or at most times, is this true? Surely Mill asks far too much and is far too optimistic? There is certainly an important sense in which Sir Richard is right: Mill was no prophet. Many social developments caused him grief, but he had no inkling of the mounting strength of the irrational forces that have moulded the history of the twentieth century. Burckhardt and Marx, Pareto and Freud, were more sensitive to the deeper currents of their own times, and saw a good deal more deeply into the springs of individual and social behaviour. But I know of no evidence that Mill overestimated the enlightenment of his own age, or that he supposed that the majority of men of his own time were mature or rational or likely soon to become so. What he did see before him was the spectacle of some men, civilized by any standards; Who were kept down, or discriminated against, or persecuted by prejudice, stupidity, `collective mediocrity'; he saw such men deprived of what he regarded as their most essential rights, and he protested. He believed that all human progress, all human greatness and virtue and freedom, depended chiefly on the preservation of such men and the clearing of paths before them. But he did not 4.26 want them appointed Platonic Guardians. He thought that others like them could be educated, and, when they were educated, would be entitled to make choices, and that these choices must not, within certain limits, be blocked or directed by others. He did not merely advocate education and forget the freedom to which it would entitle the educated, (as Communists have), or press for total freedom of choice, and for get that without adequate education it would lead to chaos and, as a reaction to it, a new slavery (as anarchists do). He demanded both. But he did not think that this process would be rapid, or easy, or universal; he was on the whole a pessimistic man, and consequently at once defended and distrusted democracy, for which he has been duly attacked, and is still sharply criticized. Sir Richard has observed that Mill was acutely; conscious of the circumstances of his age, and saw no further than that. This seems to me a just comment. The disease of Victorian England was claustrophobia--there was a sense of suffocation, and the best and most gifted men of the period, Mill and Carlyle, Nietzsche and Ibsen, men both of the left and of the right-- demanded more air and more light. The mass neurosis of our age is agoraphobia; men are terrified of disintegration and of too little direction: they ask, like Hobbes's masterless men:in a state of nature, for walls to keep out the raging ocean, for order, security, organization, clear and recognizable authority, and are alarmed by the prospect of too much freedom, which leaves them lost in a vast, friendless vacuum, a desert without paths or land marks or goals. Our situation is different from that of the nineteenth century, and so are our problems: the area of irrationality is seen to be vaster and more complex than any that Mill had dreamed of. Mill's psychology has become antiquated and grows more so with every discovery that is made. He is justly criticized for paying too much attention to purely spiritual obstacles to the fruitful use of freedom--lack of moral and intellectual light; and too little (although nothing like as little as his detractors have maintained) to poverty, disease, and their causes, and to the common sources and the interaction of both, and for concentrating too narrowly on freedom of thought and expression. All this is true. Yet what solutions have we found, with all our new technological and psychological knowledge and great new powers, save ancient prescription advocated by the creators of humanism-- Erasmus and Spinoza, Locke and Montesquieu, Lessing and Diderot--reason, education, self-knowledge, responsibility-- above all, self-knowledge? What other hope is there for men, or has there ever been?