The
Fabian Spirit
To speak of scientific management in
school and society without crediting the influence of the Fabians would do great disservice to truth, but the
nature of Fabianism is so complex
it raises questions this essay cannot answer. To deal
with the Fabians in a
brief compass as I'm going to do
is to deal necessarily in simplifications in order to see a little how this charming group of scholars,
writers, heirs, heiresses, scientists, philosophers, bombazines, gazebos, trust-fund babies, and successful men
and women of affairs became the most potent force in the creation of the modern
welfare state, distributors of its
characteristically dumbed-down version of schooling. Yet pointing only to this
often frivolous organization's
eccentricity would be to disrespect the incredible accomplishments of Beatrice Webb and her associates, and
their decisive effort on schooling.
Mrs. Webb is the only woman ever deemed worthy of burial in Westminster Abbey.
What nineteenth-century
Transcendentalists and Muggletonians hoped to be in reordering the triumvirate of society, school, and
family, twentieth-century Fabians actually were. Although far from the only potent organization working
behind the scenes to radically
reshape domestic and international life, it would not be too far out of
line to call the twentieth century
the Fabian century. One thing is certain: the direction of modern schooling for the bottom 90 percent of
our society has followed a largely Fabian design — and the puzzling security and prestige enjoyed at the moment
by those who speak of
"globalism" and "multiculturalism" are a direct
result of heed paid earlier to Fabian
prophecies that a welfare state, followed by an intense focus on
internationalism, would be the
mechanism elevating corporate society over political society, and a
necessary precursor to Utopia.
Fabian theory is the Das Kapital of financial capitalism.
Fabianism always
floated above simplistic politics, seeking to preempt both sides. The British Labour Party and its post- WWII
welfare state are Fabianism made visible. This is well understood; not so easily comprehended are signs of an
aristocratic temper — like this
little anti-meritocractic Fabian gem found in a report of the British College
of Surgeons:
Medicine would lose
immeasurably if the proportion of such students [from upper-class and upper-middle-class homes] were to
be reduced in favour of precocious children who qualify for subsidies [i.e., scholarship students].
Even though meritocracy is their
reliable cover, social stratification was always the Fabian's real trump suit. Entitlements are another Fabian
insertion into the social fabric,
even though the idea antedates them, of course.
To realize the tremendous task Fabians
originally assigned themselves (a significant part of which was given to schooling to perform), we need to
reflect again on Darwin's
shattering books, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man
(1871), each arguing in its own
way that far from being blank slates, children are written upon indelibly by their race of origin, some
"favored" in Darwin's language, some not. A powerful public relations initiative of recent years has
attempted to separate Darwin from
"social Darwinism," but it cannot be done because Darwin
himself is the prototypical social
Darwinist. Both books taken together issued a license for liberal upper classes
to justify forced schooling. From
an evolutionary perspective, schools are the indoctrination phase of a gigantic breeding experiment.
Working-class fantasies of "self-improvement" were dismissed from the start as sentimentality
that evolutionary theory had no place for.
What Darwin
accomplished with his books was a freeing of discussion from the narrow straitj acket it had worn when society
was considered a matter of internal associations and relationships. Darwin made it possible to consider political
affairs as a prime instrument of
social evolution. Here was a pivotal moment in Western thought, a changing of
the guard in which secular purpose
replaced religious purpose, long before trashed by the Enlightenment.
For the poor, the
working classes, and middle classes in the American sense, 7 this change in outlook, lauded by the most
influential minds of the nineteenth century, was a catastrophe of titanic proportions, especially for government
schoolchildren. Children could no
longer simply be parents' darlings. Many were (biologically) a racial
menace. The rest had to be thought
of as soldiers in genetic combat, the moral equivalent of war. For all but a relative handful of
favored families, aspiration was off the board as a scientific proposition.
For governments, children could no
longer be considered individuals but were regarded as categories, rungs on a biological ladder. Evolutionary
science pronounced the majority
useless mouths waiting for nature to dispense with entirely. Nature (as
expressed through her human
agents) was to be understood not as cruel or oppressive but beautifully, functionally purposeful — a neo-pagan
perspective to be reflected in the organization and administration of schools.
Three distinct and
conflicting tendencies competed in the nineteenth-century theory of society: first was the empirical
tendency stemming from John Locke and David Hume which led to that outlook on the study of society we call
pragmatism, and eventually to
behavioristic psychology; the second line descended from Immanuel Kant,
Hegel, Savigny, and others and led
to the organic theory of the modern state, the preferred metaphor of Fabians (and many later
systems theorists); the third outlook comes to us out of Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, Bentham, the Mills, and
leads almost directly to the
utilitarian state of Marxist socialism. Each of these postures was
savagely assailed over time by the
development of academic Darwinism. After Darwin, Utopia as a human- friendly place dies an agonizing death.
The last conception of Utopia after Darwin which isn't some kind of hellish nightmare is William Morris' News
from Nowhere.
With only niggling
reservations, the Fabian brain trust had no difficulty employing force to shape recalcitrant individuals,
groups, and organizations. Force in the absence of divine injunctions is a tool to be employed unsentimentally.
Fabian George Bernard Shaw
established the principle wittily in 1920 when he said that under a Fabian
future government:
You would not be
allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or
not. If it were discovered that you have not character and industry, you might possibly be
executed in a kindly manner. - The
Intelligent Woman 's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
Fabianism came into existence around the
year 1884, taking its name from Roman
general Fabius Cunctator 8 who preserved the Roman state by defeating
Hannibal, chipping away at
Hannibal's patience and will to win by avoiding combat. Darwin was the weird holy man Fabians adored, the
man who gave them their principle, a theory inspirationally equal to god-theory, around which a new
organization of society could be
justified.
Society, after Darwin, was
incontrovertibly about good breeding. That was the only true goal it had, or scientifically could
have. Before Darwin, the view of historical development which fit best with Anglo/ American tradition
was a conception of individual
rights independent of any theory of reciprocal obligations to the State; the
duty of leaders was to Society,
not to Government, a crucial distinction in perfect harmony with the teachings of Reformation
Christianity, which extended to all believers a conception of individual duty, individual responsibility,
and a free will right to decide for
oneself beyond any claims of states. John Calvin proclaimed in his
Institutes that through natural
law, the judgment of conscience alone was able to distinguish between justice
and injustice.
It's hard for secular minds to face, but the powerful freedoms of the
West, unmatched by any other
society at any other time, are rooted deeply in a religion so radical, so demanding it revolts the
modern temper.
For Protestant
Christians, salvation was uniquely a matter between God and the individual. The mind of northern Europe
had for centuries been fixed on the task of winning liberties for the individual against the State.
Notable individual freedoms were
taken from the State beginning symbolically at Runnemede' in 1215. By
1859, six and a half centuries
later, in the Age of Darwin, individual rights were everywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world understood to
transcend theories of obligation to the State. Herbert Spencer embodies this attitude, albeit
ambiguously. For Spencer, Darwinian evolution promised rights only to the strong. It is well to keep in
mind that his brief for liberty
masks a rigorously exclusionary philosophy, particularly when he sounds
most like Thomas Paine. The first
and second amendments of our own constitution illustrate just how far this freedom process could
carry. Say what you please before God and Man; protect yourself with a gun if need be from government
interference.
Spencer was the reigning British
philosopher from 1870 to 1900. In the Westminster Review of January 1860, he wrote: "The welfare of
citizens cannot rightly be sacrificed to
some supposed benefit of the State, the State is to be maintained solely
for the benefit of citizens. 10
The corporate life in society must be subservient to the lives of its parts,
instead of the lives of the parts
being subservient to the corporate life." Spencer had an even greater vogue in America, influencing
every intellectual from Walt Whitman to John Dewey and becoming the darling of corporate business. Early
in 1882 a grand dinner was held in
his honor by the great and powerful who gathered to hear scientific proof
of Anglo-Saxon fitness for rule —
and a brief for moral relativism. This dinner and its implications set the standard for twentieth-century management,
including the management of
schooling. A clear appraisal of the fateful meal and its resonance is
given in E. Digby Baltzell's The
Protestant Establishment, a well-bred look at the resurgence of the Anglican outlook in America.
This attitude constituted a violent
contradiction of German strong-state, state-as-first- parent doctrine which held that interests of the individual
as individual are without
significance. But derogation of individual rights was entirely
consistent with Darwinian science.
The German authoritarian preference received an invigorating restorative with Darwin's advent. Natural selection, the
operational principle of Darwinism, was held to reach individuals only indirectly — through the action of
society. Hence society becomes a
natural subject for regulation and intervention by the State.
To illustrate how reverberant a drum the
innocent-sounding locution "natural selection" 11 can really be, translated into social
practice, try to imagine how denial of black dignities and rights and the corresponding
degradation of black family relationships in America because of this denial, might well be reckoned an
evolutionarily /wszYzve course, in
Darwinian terms. By discouraging Negro breeding, eventually the numbers
of this most disfavored race would
diminish. The state not only had a vested interest in becoming an active agent of evolution, it could not
help but become one, willy-nilly. Fabians set out to write a sensible evolutionary agenda when
they entered the political arena. Once this biopolitical connection is recognized, the past, present,
and future of this seemingly
bumbling movement takes on a formidable coherence. Under the dottiness,
lovability, intelligence, high
social position, and genuine goodness of some of their works, the system held out as humanitarian by
Fabians is grotesquely deceptive; in reality, Fabian compassion masks a real aloofness to humanity. It is purely
an intellectual project in
scientific management.
Thomas Davidson's
History of Education seen through this lens transmutes in front of our eyes from the harmlessly addled
excursion into romantic futurism it seems to be into a manual of frightening strategic goals and tactical
methods. Fabians emerged in the first
years of the twentieth century as great champions of social efficiency
in the name of the evolutionary
destiny of the race. This infused a powerful secular theology into the movement, allowing its members to revel
privately in an ennobling destiny. The Fabian program spread quickly through the best colleges and
universities under many different
names, multiplying its de facto membership among young men and women
blissfully unaware of their
induction. They were only being modern. H.G. Wells called it "the
open conspiracy" in an essay
bearing the same title, and worth your time to track down.
As the movement developed, Fabians
became aristocratic friends of other social- efficiency vanguards like Taylorism or allies of the
Methodist social gospel crowd of
liberal Christian religionists busy substituting Works for Faith in one
of the most noteworthy religious
reversals of all time. Especially, they became friends and advisors of industrialists and financiers,
travelers in the same direction. This cross-fertilization occurred naturally, not out of petty
motives of profit, but because by Fabian lights evolution had progressed furthest among the international
business and banking classes!
These laughing gentry were impressively
effective at whatever they turned their hands to because they understood principles of social leverage. Kitty
Muggeridge writes:
If you want to pinpoint the moment in
time when the very first foundation of the Welfare State was laid, a reasonable date to choose would be the
last fortnight of November in 1905
when Beatrice Webb was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law,
and she convinced her protege,
Albert Beveridge, to join a committee for dealing with employment.
During Mrs. Webb's
tenure on the Royal Commission, she laid down the first blueprint of cradle-to-grave social security to
eradicate poverty "without toppling the whole social structure." She lived to see
Beveridge promulgate her major ideas in the historic Beveridge Report, from which they were brought to life in
post- WWII Britain and the United
States.
Fabian practitioners developed Hegelian
principles which they co-taught alongside
Morgan bankers and other important financial allies over the first half
of the twentieth century. One
insightful Hegelianism was that to push ideas efficiently it was necessary first to co-opt both political Left and
political Right. Adversarial politics — competition — was a loser's game. 12 By infiltrating all
major media, by continual low-intensity
propaganda, by massive changes in group orientations (accomplished
through principles developed in
the psychological- warfare bureaus of the military), and with the ability, using government intelligence agents
and press contacts, to induce a succession of crises, they accomplished that astonishing feat.
7. In the British sense, middle classes
are a buffer protecting elites from the poor; our own statistical income-based
designation leads to a more
eclectic composition, and to somewhat less predictability of attitudes
and values.
8.'The
origins are disputed but it was an offshoot of Thomas Davidson's Utopian group
in New York, "The Fellowship of the New Life" — an American export to Britain, not the
other way around. The reader should be warned I use the term "Fabian"
more indiscriminately with less
concern for actual affiliation through the rest of the book than I do
here. Fabianism was a Zeitgeist as well as a literal association, and
thousands of twentieth-century
influentials have been Fabians who might be uncomfortable around its flesh and
blood adherents, or who would be
puzzled by the label.
9.
The spelling preferred by baronial descendants of the actual event. See Chapter
Twelve.
10.
Contrast this with John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country cando for
you but what you can do foryour country" Inaugural of 1960 which measured the distance we had
retreated since the Civil War. It's useful to remember, however, that Spencer
reserved these feelings only for
the Elect.
11.
In 1900, Sidney Sherwood of Johns Hopkins University joined a host of prominent
organizations and men like Andrew Carnegie in declaring the emergence of the corporate system
as the highest stage in evolution. Sherwood suggested the modern corporation's
historic task was to sort out
"genius," to get rid of "the weak." This elimination is
"the real function of the trust," and the formation of monopoly
control is "natural selection
of the highest order. " Try to imagine how this outlook played out in
corporate schooling.
l2
The most dramatic example of abandoning competition and replacing it with
cooperation was the breath-taking monopolization of first the nation's, then the world's oil supply
by Standard Oil under the personal direction of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Rockefeller despised the
competitive marketplace, as did his fellow titans of finance and
industry, J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Rockefeller's negotiating team was instructed to accommodate any
company willing to enter his cartel, to destroy any that resisted.
The
Open Conspiracy
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