Flesh in the Age of Reason (59 page)

Turning visionary, Owen had come to believe that the founding of model villages or factory colonies, inhabited by these
human machines
, would put an end to the gross miseries caused by beggar-my-neighbour competitive capitalism of the kind encouraged by classical free-market economics. ‘The governing principle of trade, manufacturers, and commerce is immediate pecuniary gain,’ he reflected:

All are sedulously trained to buy cheap and to sell dear: and to succeed in this art, the parties must be taught to acquire strong powers of deception; and thus a spirit is generated… destructive of that open, honest, sincerity, without which man cannot make others happy, nor enjoy happiness himself.

In such circumstances, the workforce was treated as ‘mere instruments of gain’ and, partly as a consequence, they retaliated by acquiring ‘a gross ferocity of character’. This, warned Owen, ‘will sooner or later plunge the country into a formidable and perhaps inextricable state of danger’.

Fortunately, the solution was to hand: co-operation would create the harmony which wise counsels dictated. William Godwin, a man with much philosophically in common with Owen, loathed co-operation
as destructive of individuality; Owen craved it for its capacity to create the harmony which was the
sine qua non
of happiness.

A true man of the Enlightenment, like Godwin, Owen championed reason with fanatical passion. ‘Expose [error] but for an instant to the clear light of intellectual day,’ he declared, ‘and, as though conscious of its own deformity, it will instantaneously vanish, never to reappear.’ Here was the Socratic creed that evil was error, awaiting refutation – a belief taken over by Godwin – being expressed again with great warmth: great is truth and will prevail.

In the tradition launched by Locke, Owen looked to education to dispel such error – or, better, to prevent it in the first place. In particular, he took up the ideas on education of Helvétius, who had developed Locke’s ideas as filtered through the medium of his fellow Frenchman, Condillac. More overtly than Locke, Helvétius held human beings to be radically conditionable, putty in one’s hands, a position which Owen enthusiastically endorsed. Central to his philosophical programme was the ‘formation of character’: ‘the members of any community may by degrees be trained to live
without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment
; for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world.
They are all the necessary consequences of ignorance
.’ Why could he be so optimistic? It was because

human nature, save the minute differences which are ever found in all the compounds of the creation, is one and the same in all; it is without exception universally plastic, and, by judicious training,
THE INFANTS OF ANY ONE CLASS IN THE WORLD MAY BE READILY FORMED INTO MEN OF ANY OTHER CLASS
.

Here, with a vengeance, was the absolute malleability of man. Owen’s new view of the power of education to condition men’s minds depended heavily upon radical notions of necessity, notably the thinking of Godwin. And precisely how could bad conditioning be turned into good? The personality of the workforce must be moulded by intellectual superiors who had embraced rational views of
progress. Since ‘the end of government is to make the governed and the governors happy,’ he declared, further nailing his utilitarian colours to the mast, ‘that government then is the best, which in practice produces the greatest happiness to the greatest number.’

Owen early became, as we have seen, a religious sceptic, and he turned into a militant secularist who found a scapegoat for the world’s ills in organized religion. He deplored the dire influence of Churches which degraded and defamed the true potential and latent goodness of human beings – such creeds ‘have created, and still create, a great proportion of the miseries which exist in the world’. Yet he left the door open for the creation of a new and pure faith: ‘a knowledge of truth on the subject of religion would permanently establish the happiness of man.’ Owen was convinced of the value of public religion in promoting the cause of harmony. His was, to all intents and purposes, a new religion of mankind, a gospel of industrial work, co-operation and communitarianism, in which men would be happiest when best organized.

Ironically, if hardly surprisingly, Owen’s vision for the future may be seen as secularized Christianity. He naturalized and fused two related religious traditions, eschatology and utopianism. The Christian apocalyptic tradition was discussed in
Chapter 2
, and we shall see the enduring circulation of antinomianism in Blake in
Chapter 24
. Attempts to render biblical prophecy and eschatology spiritual, and thus to give them a renewed currency with different inflections, were numerous in the exhilarating French Revolutionary decades. Wordsworth proclaimed that the theme of his poetic autobiography
The Prelude
concerned godlike powers and actions internalized as processes of his own mind –

                     of Genius, Power,
Creation and Divinity itself,
I have been speaking.

And in the verse ‘Prospectus’ to
The Excursion
, he announced that his poetic journey must ascend beyond ‘the heaven of heavens’, past ‘Jehovah – with his thunder, and the choir/Of shouting Angels’, and
also sink deeper than the lowest hell, without ever leaving the confines of ‘the Mind of Man –/My haunt, and the main region of my song’. The conclusion he drew was the recovery of a lost Paradise – a paradise within all of us – to be achieved in a consummation viewed as an apocalyptic marriage between mind and nature: ‘Paradise, and groves/Elysian, Fortunate Fields.’

Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and others responded to the great events of the 1790s by writing visionary epics which depicted mankind’s dark and turbulent past and present but hailed the Revolution as the critical turning-point ushering in a new world which would combine the pagan golden age with the biblical paradise or Last Judgement. In the conclusion of the ‘Argument’ for
Religious Musings
, written in 1794, Coleridge laconically reviewed this prophetic reading of contemporary events: ‘The present State of Society. The French Revolution. Millennium. Universal Redemption. Conclusion.’

Owen the unbeliever also thought in secularized eschatological terms. Unlike the Romantics, however, whose hopes for a glorious transformation collapsed with the failure of the French Revolution to deliver universal liberty and the rights of man – leading them to turn reactionary – Owen’s hopes remained buoyed up by the prospects of a grand industrial future. In 1837, in a famous debate with the Revd J. H. Roebuck, he issued an impassioned apostrophe to the coming ‘moral world’, with direct echoes of the prophet Isaiah:

Oh… that the time may now commence when men shall become rational, and, in consequence, turn their spears into pruning hooks, and their swords into ploughshares; when each man shall sit under any vine, or any fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

He there set out his vision of the perfectibility of man, and of the role of the enlightened in bringing it about:

Until the characters of men can be new-created by society, from their birth, so as to form them into rational beings who will act wisely and consistently through life,
an intermediate or preparatory government
must be made to govern
those townships, while the new characters are in progress of formation from birth.

Did this plant in Marx’s mind the germ of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?

Owen fused this secular eschatology with utopianism owing much to Plato’s
Republic
and More’s
Utopia
. A just society required central direction to eliminate poverty, war, inequality, repression and so forth, and create an order in which people willingly participated for the good of the whole. For Owen, utopian thinking was truly a vision of a new harmony, be it at the Lanark mills, or at ‘New Harmony’ in the United States, the utopian colony he later set up in the New World.

The Book of the New Moral World
(1836) contains his mature thought on ‘a New Moral World, in which, evil, except as it will be recorded in the past sufferings of mankind, will be unknown’. All was now revealed: ‘truth is nature, and nature God’ – that is, God had become a God within, the old idea of the divine had been transferred to Nature. Owen once more set out his pleasure–pain psychology in the service of an early version of behaviourism. Human beings were shaped by their training; with correct educational arrangements, they would turn into superior beings. What had been mistaken for an innate strain of evil was really the product of bad education, creating false incentives for the child.

Owen thus looked to a benign paternalism, through which the world was perfectible – the millennium was literally at our doors. ‘The rubicon between the Old Immoral and the New Moral Worlds is finally passed,’ he proclaimed:

and Truth, Knowledge, Union, Industry, and Moral Good now take the field, and openly advance against the united powers of Falsehood, Ignorance, Dis-Union, and Moral Evil.… The time is therefore arrived when the foretold millennium is about to commence, when the slave and the prisoner, the bond-man and the bond-woman, and the child and the servant, shall be set free for ever, and oppression of body and mind shall be known no more.

Thus, militant secularism became a faith in itself.

Perhaps ironically, perhaps predictably, this truculent unbeliever turned late in life to the new craze for spiritualism – that Victorian attempt to surmount the gap between the living and the dead (created in part by the Protestant abolition of purgatory) and to prove an afterlife. Was this a turnabout – the foible of an old man facing death? Or was it the further extension of rational, secular, industrial principles to one of religion’s remaining outposts?

Although his thought was hardly subtle, Owen’s historical significance is immense. He was the first in the industrial age to formulate a secular doctrine which both explained the place of men within the economic order – how industry shaped human nature – and promised to change it, to forge new men in a new economic and social order. Like Erasmus Darwin, he came to terms with the machine. He accepted mechanization as an irrevocable fact, and welcomed the wealth it brought, as long as it was properly distributed. But he saw the danger of the machine subverting the morality upon which society ought to rest; and in proposing certain practical solutions he attempted to surmount them. Many of the radical thinkers who preceded him seem to belong to another era – William Godwin, for example, confident that man’s rationality must inevitably prompt him towards the good and that this would result in the abolition of government and authority. Such individualism heralded a dignity for the lone individual, unsupported by God, the soul, the Chain of Being or the Church; but it abstracted that individual from society. Owen recognized how man was necessarily – for good or ill – a product of the society in which he lived – in this case a mechanized society dedicated to making products. Marx was but a step away.

Enlightenment philosophical, scientific and medical radicalism asserted that man could be understood in natural terms, by a ready extension of that law-seeking method which the mechanical philosophy had espoused and the Newtonian synthesis vindicated. Through this search an end would be put to the obscurantist mystery-mongering which had always proved so useful a tool for the powers-that-be.

Hume may have confused matters by exposing causality as nothing other than constant conjunction, but his friend Adam Smith reassuringly demonstrated that the progress of the mind brought the supersession of primitive wonder by a more satisfying grasp of the underlying regularities governing nature. The revolution which students of the self were seeking was an equivalent for man: an understanding of motivation in terms of the laws of mechanism – the inner clockwork of the self, the springs, balances, pulleys, levers and hinges by means of which the organism functioned.

Radicals grounded human science in a metaphysics of determinism. As formulated by Hartley, necessity became the clarion call for William Godwin and for Benthamite philosophical radicals. If determinism was not shouted from the rooftops by all comers, it was nevertheless, at a practical level, implicit in utilitarian and economic thinking at large: everyone accepted, tacitly at least, that people invariably sought pleasure and shunned pain, followed self-interest and pursued profit – and that they could predictably be assumed, or trained, to behave on that basis.

Emergent psychology thus broadly traded in assumptions about the constant drives, proclivities and passions of individuals, notably
a fundamental selfishness. Similarly, medical thinking took a broad determinism for granted: at bottom, the laws of the organism determined life and consciousness: fevers would produce delirium, madness probably had physical roots, a good digestion aided a happy and contented mind – or, contrariwise, bad dreams followed from eating too much old cheese, or raw pork, for supper; and, alongside taxes, death was certain.

The body’s hold over the mind was not, however, to be encouraged. A man had the power, and duty, to guard his health and look after his constitution, by self-regulation, by tending his body and mastering his passions. Traditional Christian humanists saw this primarily as an exercise of will; progressives like Hartley viewed it more as a matter of harmonizing with the dictates of nature. Loss of such rational control became a matter of growing concern to philosophers of the self.