ECONOMIC LIFE
ROMANTIC AND REALISTIC INTERPRETATIONS.
LECTURES BY DR. F. R.E. MAULDON, B.A., M.Ec.
Under the general heading; of "Romantic and Realistic Interpretations of Economic Life," Dr. F.R.E. Mauldon delivered two addresses entitled The Romantic Approach," and "The Scientific Approach"
THE ROMANTIC APPROACH.
Dealing with "The Romantic Approach," Dr. Mauldon said:—
There are as many ways of interpreting life as there are men, women and children who have lives to live. Not one of us but who is obliged, from our very babyhood, to sift the facts of our environment, to discover their meaning for ourselves, to recognise what is good and what is bad, to approve or disapprove. We thus accumulate a store of judgments upon life. These become the body of precedents to which we habitually form for guidance in new situations. Inherited temperament, early training, the impacts of our environment, our innate powers of reflection—these are forces and contours which determine the course and flow of the stream of tendencies which we call our habits and our outlook on life. We bring different degrees and qualities of imagination to the aid of reflection. Imagination is no mere idling with fancies. It is the power we possess in our minds, like that of a lens, to focus into a clear image the impressions we receive of the world about us. But the same impression coming to two different people may produce two distinctly different images in the two minds. According to the general bias of judgments already accumulated, so will the imagination tend to focus a new impression. If the bias—however started— is to focus impressions in their matter-of-factness, to see situations essentially as the outcome of causes, to give each observable thing or event an understood relation to other things and events, we tend to interpret life realistically. We may not preen ourselves by a belief that we are philosophers, or scientists, but actually it is by such use of the imagination that philosophy and science are built. If, however, the bias—again however started—is to focus impressions in in such a way that they will produce, either directly or indirectly, a highly pleasurable stimulus, to be less concerned with the origin of than the quality we attribute to a thing or event we observe, we tend to interpret life romantically. The word romantic is so often narrowed and shallowed by usage that its wider and deeper meanings are usually missed. To be romantic in the completest sense is to see life, not as it comes in impressions of matter-of-factness or as a chain of causes and effects, but in its quality, its poetry, its values for the human spirit. Thus all art and spiritual religion which penetrate beneath the factual appearance of things, and seek for hidden meanings which give life more value, may be said to be romantic interpretations even though some artists and many to whom religion is a stern reality, would reject the description.
It is not to be supposed that, like sheep and goats, we are to be divided into two classes, realists and romanticists. To suppose such a thing would be "romancing"—the least desirable way of seeing things other than they are! Most of us are realists and romanticists by turn. But it is true to say that the more consciously we reflect upon life, the more we tend to be either one or the other. It depends upon the way we habitually react to things and events about us. But human beings have a stubborn way of defying classifications and are full of contradictions. In this first address I propose to discuss what may be called the romantic interpretation of economic life. What we call the economic is only one aspect of life as a whole. Your true romantic is not given, like the realist, to over-emphasis of the value of classification. He tends rather to see "bread and butter" questions as secondary. You get this attitude stressed in the "Songs of Joy" of the poet-tramp, W. H. Davies:
Sing out, my Soul, thy songs of joy;
Such as a happy bird will sing
Beneath a Rainbow's lovely arch
In early spring.
Strive not for gold, for greedy fools
Measure themselves, by poor men never;
Their standard still being richer men
Makes them poor ever.
Train up thy mind to feel content,
What matters then how low thy store;
What we enjoy, and not possess,
Makes rich or poor.
This is a romantic judgment of life. Davies is not stirred to indignation with things as they are, rather, he has found his own key of adjustment to the economic problem. But others desire ardently to have economic life, other than it is, with all its harshnesses, its iniquities, its frets, its sufferings for those who cannot cope with it; and so they denounce things as they are, having emotions acutely sensible to what frustrates fine living and an imaginative faculty capable of seeing vividly things as they might otherwise be. Without intense feeling there can be no romanticism, and no true savouring of the quality of living. Feeling, in this sense, is both a hunger and a satisfaction. It is hunger and a satisfaction. It is hunger for life at its best, and if it is not satisfied by what is preferred by the present, it will seek its satisfaction in the contemplation of some idealised past or future. Everyone who speaks fervently of the "good old days" is a romantic seeking satisfaction in an imagined past. All apocalyptists and millenialists are essentially romantics; for their imagination leaps and lives ahead of life as it is and dreams how it ideally will be. For some, the "good old days" were the days of their youth when, it is true, wages were small, but a pound went much farther than it does today; for others they were the good old medieval days when never a factory whistle was heard and each man was his own master. For some the apocalypse is just the other side of attainable reforms; for others it waits on a cataclysm or revolution for which the times must ripen; for others it is a remote ideal, perhaps never to be attained, yet ever to be persued.
Not every romantic, unsatisfied with our social and economic life as it is, is a utopist; but few escape the creative urge to make utopias of the imagination. Not all the makers of utopias have been concerned primarily with a more satisfying interpretation and reconstruction of economic life alone; but few have been able to escape the necessity of concerning themselves about it. There never has been a "golden age," but there have probably always been creative, or at any rate imaginative, utopists who would remould "the sorry scheme of things entire nearer to the heart's desire." No doubt the Stone Age had its utopists who pictured for the hardy hunters of that time in which neither dinosaur, nor mastodon, nor any other beast of grossly unfair fierceness and strength, would make life insecure, nasty, brutish and short. Each of the great utopists who have left us the record of their thoughts and feelings have castigated the economic iniquities of their own time, have looked back envyingly or wistfully to the happier commonwealth, which might yet be. Yet the greatest of them have been concerned far less with the removal of iniquities in the distribution of material comforts than with the establishment of relations between men and man in which the human spirit can be at its best. Foremost among these men of vision we may venture to place Christ Himself. There was much of the same vision in the denunciations and teaching of the Hebrew prophets who preceded Him, and in the expectations of the early Christian apocalyptists and millenialists who came after Him.
The speculative age of Greece produced Hippodamos, Euhemeros and Plato, each of whom elaborated an ideal utopia. The intervening period between the early days of Christianity and the renascence was remarkably unfruitful in imaginative speculation, and even apocalyptical hopes lost their early strong hold over Christian faith and imagination. Then came the renascence with its crop of utopists —Moore, Bacon, Harrington and Campanella—and the period prior to the French Revolution with Rousseau, Morelly and Babeuf. The 19th century was perhaps the richest of all centuries with its romantic outburst of utopian, or at any rate imaginative speculation.
Let us examine the ways in which two of the most lovable of our romanticists—John Ruskin (1819-1900) and William Morris (1834-1896)—interpreted the economic problems of their time. The times in which they lived and worked and wrote are sufficiently near to and like our own to permit us to expect that they have a message for ourselves, and yet sufficiently far back to enable us to see wherein they erred as well as spoke the truth; for every truth-seeker may err, just because of the limitations of capacity.
Both Ruskin and Morris were men of remarkable genius which expressed itself in many directions. We think of them primarily as apostles of beauty, but they, are no less remembered as ardent evangelists of social and economic reform. Ruskin for 50 years and Morris for more than 40 years, worked strenuously to transform the world about them into some resemblance of the ideal pattern of their imaginations. They both finish life with a heavy sense of failure. It was not for them to realise that they had sown better than they knew, nor that they had planted leaven which would do its work slowly through generations to follow. We can realise this now, even though we can also realise that neither possessed all the required keys of understanding of the modern economic problem, for the keys of the romanticist are, alone, insufficient. Ruskin "[was of a Tory] school"; Morris called himself "a practical socialist." But in truth the one was neither tory nor the other socialist as those two terms are ordinarily used in the political sense. Each of these men turned fiercely on the economic and other evils of their day because it seemed that (to use the words of Morris) "the struggles of mankind for many ages had produced nothing but sordid, aimless, ugly confusion"; and so they turned all their critical powers of imagination, art, and moral indignation upon the tendencies, ideas and institutions which, they felt, were perverting civilisation.
Like Carlyle and many another romanticist since, they vehemently attacked not only the unlovely aspects of the commercial and industrial practices of the 19th century but also those typical "realists," the political economists, whose writings they mistook to be apologies for the immoralities and uglinesses of the economic system. But it is evident now that, had they better understood the economists, had they realised that the economic problem is not solely a moral problem, their own peculiar contributions to the thinking of their age would have been far more effective.
THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH.
In his second address, entitled "The Scientific Approach," Dr. Mauldon said that economists had to have facts as they had to try to be exact. This was made difficult at times because those in a position to supply information were not willing to divulge it and it was, therefore, difficult for the economist to arrive at conclusions.
Economics as a science was of two kinds, that which was concerned only with the discovery of what is and that which employed inductive methods. Economists who followed the former course tried to see tendencies at work when, to the untrained eye, there were no tendencies at work. They sought to discover whether different groups of people living under the same conditions tended to do the same things. Economics in this sense was a pure science.
The science could be regarded in another way. It could be a science of standards in which the economists were seeking the best way in which people could be induced to act in a uniform manner provided the same conditions were set for them. In this case economics was an applied science.
Economists were concerned also with the creation of conditions in which the best tendencies will have a chance to operate. They taught us what to know in order to do. Economics was sometimes described as an art. It carried the practical application of knowledge into the field of doing. It had to concern itself with the best form of administration. Economics as an art formed in its precepts what ought to be done or what ought not to be done.
Economists were concerned all the time about the discovery of uniformity of behavior. That did not prevent them being idealists because they must be concerned the whole time with setting conditions which would allow their schemes to operate. Economists differed in their methods but all had one concern, the discovery of the basic necessities upon which economic life was built.
There were two ways of arriving at general conclusions about facts. One economist, looking for an explanation of our seasons of depression and prosperity, knew sufficient about astronomy to know that there were alterations in the behavior of other bodies. He knew that the sun got freckles every 10 years. He got the idea that this freckling of the sun might have something to do with the ups and downs of life on earth. He saw that when spots appeared on the sun the earth was affected by disturbances. He argued that these disturbances reacted on the crops which, in turn, affected prices. Therefore he argued that the spots on the sun were responsible for depressions on earth. That was called the deductive method. Right through economic teaching a great deal of use was made of that method.
The other method was known as the inductive method. It was the method of getting as many practical instances as possible and gathering them together and examining how far they had things in common. If in one country (say France) they had peasant proprietorship and, under the same conditions in other countries, they found that similar results were obtained, they drew certain conclusions.
Economists today employed both methods. The work took the form of a science and produced results that were scientific. Adam Smith was called the father of practical economics. He was the first man to organise the thinking on economic matters into something like a science. He corrected many foolish mistakes made by men who did not discover proper scientific methods.
Wealth, to the ordinary person, conveyed an idea of abundance of things. What did this mean? In Adam Smith's time there was a body of economists in France who held that the only wealth was that which came from the soil year by year. They said only those people who were concerned in bringing the wealth of the soil were producers. Many believed that today. It was often said that the people of Australia owed everything to the man on the land. It was true that they owed much to the man on the land but they did not owe him everything. Wealth had to be defined as all those things or services which we think will give us satisfaction and which are exchangeable.
Was Karl Marx a realist or a romanticist? He himself claimed that he was a realist but he was essentially a romanticist and, more a romanticist than a realist, though he ranged himself with the realist school. Marx was scientific to the extent that he used the inductive method. He examined thousands of cases of communities in the past and from those examinations came to certain conclusions. But he was a romanticist because, while he looked with an eye at the present, he was really looking forward to an ideal and all his investigations were colored by that idealism.
Frankston and Somerville Standard (Vic. : 1921 - 1939), Saturday 18 June 1932, page 3
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