Nineteenth Century Thought (4 page)

Whereas Darwin went over the larger
naturalist terrain to map the emergence of species in evolution leading to the
descent of man, John Stuart Mill turned his eye to events and occurrences in
the contemporary world. One social group to which he particularly drew
attention was that of women. The question that disturbed him no end related to
the place and role of women in the nineteenth century English society. In his
opinion, if we allowed women to become active participants in social life, we
would gain a great deal in producing amenities as well as create better
culture. A genuine utilitarian, Mill thought that because of unacceptable
prejudices, men had rendered half of the human population unproductive by
confining women to the limited space of home.

Mill's realization was that most
people allow their thought to be moulded by traditional ideas and do not
subject their notions to objective scrutiny. What are traditional ideas if not
reflection of an attitude of lazy acceptance of the views of the powerful
sections in society? Should this be allowed to remain so or examined for seeing
what it actually is? Mill firmly believed that communities and societies would
profit a lot in social improvement and dignity if women were treated on a par
with men. The obstacle standing in the way of equality and increased
productivity, according to Mill, was the oppressive, unthinking norms governing
people's minds. He wondered why people accepted whatever was on offer. Was it
that patriarchy had dug itself deep in society and also that the ordinary
notion of male superiority, "wrong in itself and ... one of the chief
hindrances to human improvement," suited the community of men?

Mill's attitude was similar to
Darwin's. Mill, too, picked up significant details from life to ascertain their
intellectual validity and
analysed
them in the
context of social reality. At the same time, Mill
sought to
mould contemporary thought along concerns of freedom, equality, happiness and
productivity. Mill emphasized the importance of clearly demarcating the
tangible and proven from that which was uncritically accepted in life. In the
process of doing so, he must have ruffled a few feathers and angered entrenched
social interests. A courageous thinker, Mill projected the idea of utility
(through wrong adherence to self-denial and sacrifice, people had been
effectively kept away from 'utility' all along, something that Mill would
strongly disapprove of) and production of
labour
.
This way, Mill wished to transform human
environmt-nt
into a systematized and rationally-governed world.

Mill's attack on man-made myths is
worthy of emulation in that it compelled people to introspect and question. We
can ignore Mill's materialist thought at our own peril. He brought the human
discourse at the doorstep of collective usefulness, as against individual (or
narrow sectional) preference for a popularly-held idea, whatever its true merit
or worth. His reference to the interests of common masses can scarcely be
missed.

We hear that Dickens critiqued in
Hard
Times
Mill's emphasis on facts and Mill's overall doctrine of
utilitarianism. This apparently seems to be the case. Through the character of
Gradgrind
, Dickens projected the attitude of bourgeois
utility and let the reader
 
know that
more
 
important
 
than
 
increased
 
productivity
 
in
 
society
 
was the deeper affections
 
and
 
sentiments
 
of
 
human
 
beings.
 
We can't for instance
overlook the aridity and vacuity present in
Gradgrind's
life. Dickens is quite right in representing a paradigm of human alliance,
emotional interchange and pursuit of common goals as an alternative to
competitiveness in the bourgeois world. Dickens talked of humanist ideals and
chose to see in their light the goings on in contemporary life. The strength of
Hard Times
lies in its humanist assertion .of the loving and caring
masses.

At the same time, however, it has to
be noted that
Gradgrind
is a caricature. Obviously,
in order to meet the requirements of caricature, Dickens only shows the cold
calculations of a manufacturer out to offer a rationale of his endeavour. But
does Dickens love the life of scarcity and destitution and glorify poverty?

Nothing could be farther from the
truth. Dickens hates poverty and knows its demeaning impact on men and women as
well as the suffering it causes to innocent children.

Interestingly, Dickens offers in
Hard
Times
a binary opposition between material good and human sentiment. In the
body of the novel, this becomes an ideological position suited, as we see, to
provide an answer to inequality and misery. Dickens apparently presents the
idea that in times of misery and hardship, ordinary masses should stick to
honesty, sweetness and togetherness. We note that from this angle, the trade
union activity of the workers in the novel is found to be narrow and
hypocritical. Add to this the fact that Dickens's own sentimental-Christian
preference for the wretched of the earth and the purer values of kindness,
self-sacrifice, etc. imply a critique of utilitarianism. That is how things are
portrayed in the novel. But we should not overlook the general anguish,
marginalisation
of the hardworking honest masses together with
the deviousness of the privileged. The structure of the novel suggests a
different answer than the sentimental-Christian one by showing that good honest
people deserve to win in the battle against greed. Thus, the novel and not the
writer posits a solution outside the existing framework. The novel and the
writer seem to be looking in two different directions, the latter suggesting a
path, idealistic and abstract, that the former cannot uphold.

The climax of Materialist thought is
seen in Marxism. Another name of this doctrine is historical materialism which
signifies the application of materialist dialectical logic to history. Marx
offered a theory of history under which he projected class struggle as the
driving force of social life through epochs and centuries. Without such an
approach, it was not possible to explain change in human surroundings that
otherwise was noticed all around, in countries and continents. In fact, changes
had swept, as Marx saw it, through Europe at such a hectic pace in the previous
centuries, particularly after the Renaissance, that they offered a constant
challenge to thinkers and philosophers in their effort at evolving answers to
the
existing questions. Being idealist, mechanical or
unilinear
, the traditional logic remained confined to
merely 'interpreting' what was considered reality. The starting point of Marx's
dialectical logic, on the other hand, was the famous thesis that
"Philosophers have so far interpreted the world. The point, however, is to
change it." In this manner, materialist logic came to devote itself to
study society solely in order to change it - of course, to the extent possible
at a given time. Raymond Williams has remarked in his book
The English novel
From Dickens to Lawrence
that after the publication of Marx's
Communist
Manifesto
in 1848, the novel in England changed radically, it became
entirely different from what it was in the preceding period. Indeed, the impact
of this famous document was not only on the novel but on the whole of
nineteenth century European life -the masses, the social structures, the
states, regimes, ideological-philosophical systems, culture, literature and the
arts.

The vast appeal of
Communist
Manifesto
in the nineteenth century did not go to Marx's head, a young man
of thirty at the time, who modestly said that the credit for the theory went
actually to the emergence of a new class in history, the industrial worker or
the proletariat. According to Karl Marx, Marxism was the theory of the
proletarian class which he only elaborated at the given historical moment. The
outlook of the proletariat enabled scholars to grasp the nature of the mode of
production (the base), social consciousness (corresponding to the base in
superstructure) and the immense potential of the productive forces. In the
light of this, Marx had a great deal to say about the formation and role of
ideas in social life.

See for example the notion that ideas
are formed in society not in a place outside or beyond it. If we find this to
be true, we would be led to the conclusion that we .should determine the
veracity of ideas, improve them if they are inadequate and discard them if they
have become obsolete with the passage of time. Such a notion restores to the
human being the dignity of his/ her existence by virtue of which the making and
unmaking of social reality would pass into the human domain. It is thus the
human being, not any transcendental power that should be called The Maker. Let
us understand a few basic premises of Marxism, particularly related to ideology
and consciousness from the passage quoted below:

We set out from
real active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the
development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The
phantom s formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their
material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material
premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology, and their
corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of
independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their
material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this
their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.

(German Ideology)

Some important words in this
quotation are "real active men," "real life process" and
"material life process." What is meant by these is the engagement of
men in production. It is these active human beings who carry on the necessary
work for society, be it in factories or on the land. Then, the work they do is
part of what can be called social process which entails collective production
and distribution ("material production" and "material
intercourse"). Thus, all life is conditioned and determined by this human
labour
. In brief, this is what we mean by social or
material existence. Think why Marx puts so much emphasis on
material
through
repeated mention when he could simply say the word once and take it for granted
later. The reason is that he is propounding the extremely important thesis of
materialism under which "ideas," "idealism,"
"ideology," etc. are assigned secondary importance - actual life
process is primary and men's feelings, emotions and thoughts are secondary. The
two are connected and the connection is both cause and effect.

The second point made by Marx here is
that things such as morality and religion do not have an independence of their
own - they do not evolve from within themselves. In Marx's words, "they
have no history, no development." Does this agree with our day-to-day
perception? Do we always see a link between religious beliefs of the past with
those attitudes that guide our behaviour at present? More, isn't the concept of
tradition relevant to us in the sense of heritage which can be subjected to
scrutiny to ascertain
whether it is still valid or has to be
discarded? Finding answers to these would make us investigate those areas which
Marx has dealt with on a theoretical plane in the above comment, where the
material practice of people is shown as fundamental to the growth of society
and the corresponding fields of consciousness - ideas, values, beliefs - as
"the phantoms formed in the human brain ... (as) sublimates of their
material life process." The theoretical plane is to be always kept in mind
because calling ideas independent of material human life would assign to them
transcendence, a quality that takes the entire discourse to a power outside
human purview. Such a view would be idealistic and arbitrary, something we
always confront in traditional thought.

The third thing to note is concerned
with the material existence's "corresponding forms of consciousness."
To me, the expression indicates a set of beliefs tempered by our actual
requirements at a given time and that the tempering involved in our behaviour
makes us conscious about the applicability of prevalent ideas and attitudes.
This is an ongoing process. As corresponding to life-situations, specific forms
of consciousness owe their 'life' and dynamism to the collective human practice
outside themselves.
 
Significantly, this
does not belittle consciousness but actually imparts to it a new value and
meaning in terms of real life-demands.

How then do we define ideology or
ideologies? Do we say, like Maurice Cornforth, for instance, that "more or
less systematic views, which are historically evolved by definite social groups
in definite stages of social development and which vary according to their
social origin are called ideologies" and that "ideology is
essentially a social rather than an individual product? In my opinion, there is
some problem with regard to this definition of ideology; 'Social product' as
somewhat opposed to 'individual product' in this definition violates the
specific act of a thinking and participating individual. We do not merely pick
up ideas and notions as individuals but interpret them and are conscious while
doing so in order that ideas are of use to us in a particular way.

While providing a sound theoretical
base to ideology, Marx has highlighted its role and significance in human life.
The use of words such as 'reflexes' and 'phantoms' in the above quotation
should, therefore, suggest that ideological factors stand denigrated in the Marxist
scheme of things. In fact, these familiarize us in a new way with how human
beings' minds work while they participate in the actual process of living. None
would know it better than a writer who studies and explores the state of mind
of characters caught in the interplay of various forces. There, the said forces
operate as obstacles while the characters involved continuously try to find
their way out and assert independence.

This explanation of a few of Marx's
ideas could help us to relate the historical materialist doctrine to the
developments in the nineteenth century.