The Common Man

None of the tasks of a historian is more difficult than that of distinguishing a man from his acts. Bonaparte was not only a general and a legislator; he did not consist in his military and civil policy; he was that unique animal, Napoleon, son of Letizia, husband of Joséphine, prisoner of St. Helena, a child who became a boy, a boy who became a man, carrying within him always a sense of his continuous identity, aware, as we all are, that his acts were mysteriously independent of him and that whoever judged him by them was, to a great extent, basing judgment on an irrelevance.

A man lives and has his being so largely in a realm of imagination that what are ordinarily called the facts of his life, even when they include his letters and his conversation, are extremely incomplete evidence of his nature. His thought between sleeping and waking, his small follies of hope and disappointment, his ideas of himself, a thousand secrets to which even he has not the key, are necessary parts of the whole truth, and all his works give the historian access to no more than a fragment of these fragments.

If this is the handicap of historians, how much greater is our own in forming an estimate of our contemporaries! In considering our personal acquaintance we have, it is true, one great advantage — the advantage of hearing, seeing, touching — for the rising color of a cheek, the touch of a hand, the turn of a head, may give more of the truth's essence than all the Confessions of Rousseau. But how dare we generalize about our contemporaries whom we have not seen, touched, or heard? How shall we venture to judge them by their acts or their recorded behavior? Yet to do so is one of those terrible approximations to which all of us are compelled. The King's Government must be carried on. To rule, to legislate, is to generalize.

Even sociologists, economists and statisticians have, therefore, a reason for their existence; and the rest of us, since we must have a language in which to discuss the affairs of mankind, may be driven now and then into saying: "The people need..." or "Women are...". Whatever sentence begins with such words is, we know, inevitably a lie. But how are they and their like to be altogether avoided?

Perhaps they cannot be, but the confusion of thought which arises from them may be lessened if we resolve to treat them all with profound suspicion. Avoiding them wherever possible, understanding that, even when used cautiously, they cannot be more than the roughest of approximations, and, finally, correcting their tendency to error by applying to them the imagination with which we check any sweeping statement about our own friends. To apply this corrective unflinchingly is today required of men unwilling to be dupes.

The vast, deceptive generalizations are being proclaimed with alarming naïveté. Sociology, which no genuine student of the subject has ever claimed to be an exact science, is being treated by pious amateurs as if it were. The capital letters with which "The People" and "Women" and "The New World" are spelt grow daily in stature and decline in discrimination. A creature called the Common Man has been raised up, and the Coming Age is said to be his. In certain contexts, the phrase is a legitimate convenience and is no more to be intolerantly ruled out than other phrases in the same kind; but let us beware of supposing that a gift of revelation is inherent in the use of it. At its best, it is neither newer nor more profound nor more precise than "the Man-in-the-Street. If "Women are..." is, in most cases, a rash generalization with more of lying than of truth in it, "The Common Man is..." has even less title to the round-eyed faith of the world.

I believe that the coming age will be that of the Uncommon rather than of the Common Man, and have two reasons for believing this: first, that the concept of the Common Man is as false, inhuman and fictitious as the once prevalent notion of the Innocent Savage; second, that my experience of men and women has taught me that they love their differences, their separate identities, and will not tolerate the sea-green regimenters who, in the name of social equality, seek to impose upon them a grey sameness of the soul.

The regimenters will reply that a novelist whose novels are not political, and who, it is therefore to be presumed, has always inhabited an ivory tower of privilege, is disabled from opinion on this matter by his ignorance of "the masses". The supreme insolence of the regimenters, and their most profound delusion, is their belief that the masses "exist. There is no ivory tower so windowless as theirs. Whoever has had genuine experience of life outside a social-betterment committee or a statistical bureau and has worked the so-called masses instead of grinding a political axe on their backs; whoever has kept watch on a bridge or served in an engine-room or gone away with a boat's crew or fought in trenches or made long marches or been a prisoner for long months in close company or been sunk in the North Sea, or has been or done or suffered all these things — whoever, that is to say, has learned his fellow-creatures outside the sheep-pens of the social dogmatists knows that each one of them is an uncommon man and is incapable of thinking of himself or of the man next him in any other terms.

A ship's company is not a herd — nor, for that matter, except to our ignorance of animals, is a herd itself! Woe betide the priest who looks for the Common Parishioner and not for the child of God, or the captain who is not a distinguisher of sailors, or the midshipman whose cutter's crew is for him an Average multiplied by twelve! The boat is called away at night. The shore is distant by a long spell under oars. The dip of the blades, the click-clock of the crutches, the steady body-swing, the dim monotony of twelve faces half hidden, half revealed: might not the midshipman on his dickey almost be lulled into supposing himself confronted by a dozen specimens of the Common Man? Not when shore is reached and the boat waits, tied up to a wall, and pipes are lighted. Then each man is distinct; alone in his case of flesh as with a sense of association, all spirits are, as Nelson was; never of sameness, and, ultimately, incommunicable. Look in the twelve faces: the Common Man is not there, nor any awareness of him.

This is not a mean age of compromise and cowardice and the shelving of responsibility upon a phrase. It is true that the conditions of modern war, rightly called appear to press all but a very few down into "total", the common rut, harnessing men to machines, paring away by each restriction upon living the area of taste, dissolving private judgment (or seeming to dissolve it) in the acceptance of discipline. "Seeming" — but no more. Discipline does not dissolve private judgment any more than a rule of law dissolves it, but is rather an endorsement and proof of it in those who, for the avoidance of tyranny, agree as free men to be disciplined. Nevertheless the "seeming" and the appearances have been enough to mislead many into supposing that this is a docile nation, desiring to be averaged, classified, docketed, ironed out, jealous of great men, resentful of character, the dull fodder of a bureaucracy. Those who count on this may be violently undeceived. For many years now the natural bureaucrats, the purists of the blue-print and the coupon, aided by two wars — for war is the apotheosis of their system — have struggled to persuade men to be slaves for their own good. They promise to continue in this endeavor. When they contemplate the end of this war, it is for a kind of civil totalitarianism that they look with brightly eager eyes. Everything is to be regulated. From birth to death, we are all, for the benefit of our common soul, to live in a state of continuous war, excepting only the sound of guns. What, they ask, are we fighting for? It is not for a regulated millennium? The answer is: No, for our lives. But that answer is not convenient to those who specialize in millennia. They need clients and have invented one; he is called the Common Man. They forget that man was born to be loved or hated, to plow a field or write a poem, to win a battle or lose it, to take a risk, to make his soul; he is not on this earth to be counted as though he were one of a million beads on the adding-machine of some gargantuan and idiot child. A statesman who grasps this and bases his policy upon it will not be without followers in the cutter's. The slogan "Tear up the forms!" would be as silly as all slogans, but, used unscrupulously, might win an election.

It is not an essayist's business to legislate but to examine the values, and the changes in them, which lie, or should lie if they are rightly discerned, at the root of policy; and if it be true, as it seems to be, that the philosophy of the Uncommon Man will express, more nearly than its alternative, the desire and purpose of those who survive this war, it is necessary to examine it closely, to ask what it is and what it implies. Like all Considerable movements of thought, it is, in part, a revolt against the doctrines and the experience immediately preceding it—a revolt, in this instance, against the greyness of being regimented; and force is added to it by the suspicion, which has become an assurance, that those who like to exercise a detailed control over the lives of others have used two wars as an opportunity to exalt as a polity desirable in itself a regimentation that is a bleak necessity of war. The Uncommon Man, having consented to restriction for the purpose of saving his life, finds that restriction itself is being exalted as an ideal. That it cannot be instantly removed at the end of a war he is well aware; he is no fool and will curb his impatience; but he is aware also that behind the burden of officials which the two wars have imposed upon society is a theory of officialdom which would treat him as the Common Man, and this theory is abominable to him. If it persists as a theory of government he will break it.

The difference between his philosophy and the so-called philosophy of the Common Man rests upon his belief that his life is his own and that he himself is primarily responsible for it. The Constitution of the United States offers an interesting analogy. All powers are in the individual States except those which they themselves have conferred upon the Federal Government. Any attempted encroachment by the Federal Government on the States' residuary powers is fiercely contested. The Uncommon Man regards himself as being possessed of all powers in his own life which he has not conferred upon the State; the theorists of the Common Man take the opposite view: that the community is the source of power and that what men do is to be done by its consent, even by its direction that is to say, uniformly so far as the lamentable differences between men permit.

For example, in a society of Common Men there is to be uniformity of The idea raised its head in this war. A shortage Of material and labor, which was a good reason for restricting the quantity of each that a citizen might consume' was made an excuse to prevent him from using his assigned quantity in accordance with his taste. Though he might be willing to surrender for a coat of his choice twice the number of coupons required for a coat of the standard design, and though he would thus have absorbed less material and less labor than his friend who ordered two standard coats, he was denied this saving liberty. He had to be uniform for the sake not of economy but of uniformity. The area of his independence was reduced and his neighbors gained nothing. Though this instance of dress may seem trivial, it serves to illustrate the purpose of the regimenters and its deep unpopularity — for this particular dress-regulation had to be abandoned in March 1944.

There are two kinds of law law that requires and law that forbids. At no time can the law that requires be altogether eliminated ; it is necessary to require that births be registered, or taxes paid, or that, in certain circumstances, men shall be trained as soldiers ; and it is probable that the complexity of modern international life will demand that the area of this positive law be increased. At the same time the negative law that forbids may also be increased, but this does not necessarily mean that liberty will be ground to dust between the upper and the nether millstones ; for negative law — the law, for example, which forbids A to hold B a prisoner without trial — may be a law protective of freedom. One law may have two aspects. The law that now prevents a man from having more than his share of food and clothing is, in this aspect, negative and protects a general liberty, but when it requires him to wear a particular coat, it is, in that aspect, positive and at enmity with freedom.

The distinguishing character of those who see men not as individuals but as the Common Man is that they prefer positive to negative law, they desire to use the power of the State not only to prevent a free man from injuring others, but steadily to increase the area of compulsion and so of uniformity. Their argument is that they would compel men to act for their own good; this is the justification of all positive law for example, of that which requires a child to submit to education ; and no one denies that it is sometimes necessary. To refuse all positive law would be to revert to an extreme policy of laissez-faire, and this is neither possible nor to be desired. But there is a real distinction of values between those who wish to preserve and those who, in pursuit of the theory of the Common Man, wish to overthrow that balance between positive and negative law upon which has hitherto rested our whole conception of a community at once orderly and free. The distinction is by no means for lawyers only. The question is not "By what means shall I be governed?" but "To what end?" Are the people, synthesized as the Common Man, to be regarded as the material of Government, or is Government to be regarded as a method, convenient to differing men, of safeguarding a defined area of common interest?

Perhaps the most profound division between the two schools of thought is on the question of opportunity. What is it? How is it to be used? There is agreement that disabilities ought to be removed in so far as nature has not made them irremovable. To remove them is generally regarded as being, after the duty of self-preservation from external enemies, a first charge upon the resources of a community. Among these disabilities are destitution and the fear of destitution. Thus far there is no dispute. It is after this point that the ways of thought diverge. What are men, freed from destitution, to do with their freedom? Is it their principal purpose to raise the Common Man a little further above the subsistence levesl? And then a little further? And then further still? In brief, is the purpose of living an increasing measure of comfort, physical safety and regimented amenities? Is this all? Is "equal opportunity" to mean, when we have it, only a ticket for an increasingly prosperous soup-kitchen? If this is what it means in terms of the body, what does it mean in terms of the mind? If the governing idea is to be that of the Common Man and all things are to be shaped to his supposed needs, education must conform to his conformity, and educational authorities, with a dutiful eye on the Common Boy, must deny exceptional opportunity to exceptional boys.

Finally, if the balance between the law that requires and the law that forbids were to be more weighed down on the side of positive requirement, it would not seem enough to forbid a book to be seditious or libelous; censorship would become positive; men would not only have bounds put to their liberty to write what they pleased, but would be told what, in the interest of the Common Man, they were to write. To write is to think; to think is to believe or disbelieve. There are no boundaries to the area of greyness into which men will be led who are duped by the fallacy of the Common Man.

-- by Charles Morgan, "Reflections in a Mirror", a compilation of essays published January 1, 1945.