BY PROF. BALDOON DHINGRA, M. A. (CANTAB)

The difference between what men say and what men do has provided satirists with fruity material. Some of the richest passages in Lucian, Voltaire, Moliere, and Swift are devoted to presenting the conflict between speech and action among the leaders of men, and it is still a major duty of criticism to keep this difference in mind when writing glosses on contemporary social behaviour.

It has been well said that speech has evolved out of the desire to conceal thought; but thought itself is often designed to conceal action; and it would certainly be a futile task to examine the world’s thought in order to appraise its conduct.

An exact and impartial view of the world’s thought does not reveal historical reality. Rather, it opens us avenues of escape. Not one accepted thinker in a dozen has managed to present more than a facet of human nature in its social manifestation, and that, more often than not, accidentally. In the philosophical side-view of life, which exhibits all the great thinkers from Aristotle to Bergson, there are many retreats from actual existence. Deities of various orders preside; but whether they assume human form or protean aspects of the elan vital, the majority of them deny the validity of that complex of human phenomena, which is the social life of man. This gives a strange inhuman colour to religion and philosophy. So long as the former retains passion-play externals, it moves men externally, without bringing them necessarily nearer to the nature of reality. Philosophy, however, has never held the mass of men, because it not only ignores their most powerful emotions, but virtually denies their existence–denies the all-important role they play in life.

Thus philosophy has rightly provoked general hatred and contempt. The spectacle of squint-eyed thinkers searching the heavens for hints of human destiny is, however, sufficiently comic to relieve tension; and it is amusing to note the variety of human abstractions which are used to cloak the real forces in human history.

If you turn to the philosophers for reference to the ordering of material life, you will be rewarded by dark hints anent certain inscrutable spiritual powers engaged in a tug-of-war for the possession of Homo Stultus, of the domination of pure idea in the human scene, or of splendid mansions which await mankind when it has finally vacated the earthly stable.

Translated into terms of dramatic narrative history, these hints assume human shape in the figure of gods and heroes. Transcendental history–i.e., history which uses thought and speech to conceal action–has gone to incredible lengths in its efforts to escape from reality. We are asked to believe that social life would have taken a different course if men such as Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, had not lived; that a parasitic light o’ love like Cleopatra exercised an influence on human destiny; that Lenin ‘made’ the Russian Revolution, and that dozens of idealists have ‘saved’ the world.

In this regard you will find that rationalists of the type of Buckle, with his canonisation of environment, do not differ essentially from mystics of the type of Carlyle, who hold that the hero is a specially selected vessel of the cosmic spirit; for both see the dominant factors of history outside man and man’s control.

In short, they hold that it is futile to examine human action for an explanation of historical processes, since such action is conditioned by external forces.

There has never been a more devastating criticism of this separation of speech and thought from action than that which was set forth by Cervantes in Don Quixote. A wiser generation than ours will rescue this work from the clutches of literary necrophiles and establish it in the position of a sociological textbook. Its hero embraces every phase of philosophical and historical thought which denies the ultimate validity of action, and the disastrous consequences of his attempts to impose his thought and speech on the Manchean peasantry are impeccable guides to social conduct.

Miguel de Unamuno, in his masterly study, ‘The Life and Opinions of Don Quixote,’ has presented a brilliantly realistic commentary on the social ideas of the Knights of the Rueful Countenance, but Unamuno’s tragic view of existence prevents him from drawing realistic conclusions. Like many of his counterparts in real life, Don Quixote imagined that, as an ‘inspired person,’ he could bend the social process to his will. Every hero has thought the same; and while it cannot be doubted that many of them have, in some measure, left an impress on their age, it is certain that all of them, without doubt, are far more the products of the age than its master.

Napoleon is a classic example of this truth. He was in every sense the hero of the period of modern history which closed with the world War. His thought and speech never coincided with his actions. He was a mystigogue and a confirmed liar. He hinted at super-terrestrial forces which were driving him on, at the essentially malignant spirits of his opponents, at his own destiny. He stole all this from Plutarch; but it was swallowed by a world which seeks the will of men in their speech and thought. And the France of that time, saturated as it was by the rationalism of Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire, swallowed it with enthusiasm.

It never occurred to Napoleon’s friends and enemies to look for the inspiration of his actions on earth. If they had done so, they would have found it in the murderous economic competition between France and England.

Freud, has many pregnant pages on the part that day-dreaming plays in the life of an individual. It is not uncommon for grocers’ servants, who are daily engaged in the highly practical business of defeating the ends of the scales, to dwell in thought in high, solitary places, with Shelley and other pard-like spirits.

Which is the true man–the retail seller or the detached lyric rhapsodist? That question can only be answered by equating the individual to his practical activities. In the case of an efficient grocer’s assistant, it is obvious that his vital will, which is the mainspring of all action, is in his work at the counter and not in his day-dreaming. Where there is action, there is will; but we need not expect thought and speech to be a true reflection of action. In a world where the highest thought and the most consummate speech is generally directed towards concealing the true motives of action, it happens occasionally that speech and thought are delusive.

Of the millions of people, for instance, who today think and talk pacifism, and yet pay taxes for the upkeep of military forces, it may be said that their will is not in peace, but in war. And no other conclusion is possible.

Let me give an individual case. I know a man of pious character who has talked for years to me of the blessings of poverty. He goes to his office every day and works in the stock exchange and in his mills. He is highly successful and could sign his name to a cheque for ten lakhs.

How is this man to be judged? By his words or his deeds? It is quite clear to me that his vital will is in the hands that daily toy with the quotation-type and not in the mind that day-dreams about the blessing of material destitution.

And if you apply that judgment to historical processes, you will not go far wrong, either in prognosis or diagnosis, although you will throw more than ninety per cent of history and philosophy overboard.

This is the judgment of historical materialism, and by historical materialism alone is it possible to separate action from the camouflage of thought and speech, and to reveal the dominant factors in human society. There is no other path to the discovery of the human origins of what I have already described as the complex of physical phenomena which is the social life of man.

Functional necessities are pleasant to society as well as to the individual. The most terrible events, the most barbarous institutions, the falsest ideas have, in various periods of history, been joyously embraced because they were justified by the material conditions of life. Looking back on that chamber of horrors which is called human history, we wonder how such and such a people could have stomached such and such an event, such and such an institution, and such and such an idea; how Egypt, with religio-aesthetic soul, could have inflicted such physical brutalities on its fellaheen; how Greece, with its noble intellectual virtues, could have tolerated slavery; how Rome, with its keen appreciation of legal justice, could have crucified Spartacus and his followers; how contemporary Britain, with its profound psychological understanding of foreign peoples, can maintain its imperialistic sway in India with physical violence. More: how all these nations managed to bend thought and speech to a point where they at once concealed and justified action.

We must look into the material ordering of their societies; into their particular phases of economic development; into the condition of their fractional lives.

Their arts, philosophies, religions tell us nothing more than that men will, at all times, and in all conditions, seek outside themselves the power that is actually within themselves. The deepest evil no less than the highest good resides in them and in the material conditions which express their relations.

The difference between what they say and what they do has a material basis; for while their speech may sound as dulcet as angels’ flutings, their legs and arms, which are the instruments of their will, belong to earth.

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