Letter: Mitres and miracles (1948)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below a letter from Lord Amwell criticising the article published in the February issue. A reply by the writer of the article follows the letter.

“Mitres and Miracles” in the February number of The Socialist Standard presents itself to me as a contradictory hotch-potch of old and new in quasi-scientific jargon. I hold no brief on behalf of either mitres or miracles but I am interested in the desirability of keeping socialist education free of meta-physical entanglements. Your correspondent, F.F., seems to think that scientific “explanation” consists in giving commonplace happenings ponderous names. He reminds me of famous humourist’s account of why cooks love policemen and of Pavlov’s cutting a dog’s throat, for the insertion of an instrument to prove the canine equivalent of our dressing for dinner (if we do) when we hear the first gong.

Thus: kissing is not a spiritual impulse causing physical effects, but physical attraction evoking emotional response. The writer issues a form of words which entirely begs the question with an air (I beg pardon, a response!) of devastating finality. Spiritualists do the same kind of thing I know, but F.F. is not thereby excused. Attraction and response are, of course, the questions begged.

Call kissing an emotional response and licking one’s chops a conditioned reflex and there you are ! It follows then that material nature “makes” a man wear a hat to keep his head warm even if he isn’t a miller and the hat isn’t white. This, despite the fact that a few paragraphs ahead “material nature” becomes only a “supposed reality” which no philosopher or scientist has yet discovered. We are told in the language of the black-cat-in-a-dark-room merchants, and as if it were a new proletarian truth, that reality is “behind” phenomena, for all the world as if if were a bishop telling us that God is “behind ” material nature. How a “supposed” reality “makes” or “evokes” anything at all is a puzzle, but perhaps F.F. means that phenomena is sufficient to do the trick and reality isn’t really behind nature at all and wouldn’t be wanted if it were.

When bishops talk stuff of this feeble order they are supposed to be after four-figure salaries for their doping the proletariat and I should have thought that rotundity of words to hide a bellyful of ignorance would be no appropriate recourse of a class-conscious prophet even though so desperately anxious to show that man makes his own history by allowing material nature to make it for him, the said man not appearing to belong to material nature after all!

Matter and Force, says F.F., are one and the same thing. Hardness is no longer due to solidity. Electrons are points of force moving at incredible speeds. All of which, if said a hundred years ago, would have given Engels a perfectly Victorian fit, The “older materialistic theory,” just as dogmatically acclaimed, has been given the new look, but although according to F.F. we know nothing about reality we do know that mind is “merely” the function of a physical organ just as digestion is a function of the stomach, though the famous liver and its bile is given the go-by. Bishops are “driven back” on the mind because they cannot establish that spirit is anything but matter. Yet matter is nothing but force (meaning, I suppose, energy) and bishops are therefore supposed to believe, that force, qua spirit, is a separate entity waiting round the corner to give force, qua matter, one in the eye.

Doesn’t F.F. know that it is a cardinal principle of episcopal mythology that God is a spirit that exists in totality at every point in space including that occupied by the “force” which is “matter.” What it means I don’t know, but I also don’t know what F.F. means. I know only that F.F. is quite at sea about what educated Christians believe. They don’t believe, for instance, that mind is necessarily independent of matter, though they believe with Freud that mind is not necessarily dependent upon brain. F.F. has defined matter as force; it is he alone who segregates physical force in a completely unscientific way, having to invent “thinking” matter by making the assumption that molecules of carbon and phosphorous, take on a special nature for psychic purposes. It is the materialist who “separates” matter and mind into cause and product, not the opposite metaphysician. And if this is too abstract it isn’t my fault.

As an example of the lamest of limping logic take F.F.’s dictum that before the clergy talk of mind influencing matter they must establish it as a fact that mind is different from matter and independent of it. Turn this the other way round. Is a bishop entitled to argue that before a materialist talks about matter not merely influencing but creating mind he must first establish it as a fact that matter is different from mind and independent of it? If not, why not? The fact is that F.F. is quite unfamiliar with the ontological issues involved or he would not have fallen into such an inept pit.

In calling J. B. S. Haldane to his aid F.F. is on dangerous ground, for Haldane is a “new” materialist sans bustle or side-whiskers. He no more believes that mind is comparable to colly-wobbles or that thinking is a kind of cranial atomic jitterbugging than I do. Haldane even advances the theory that a future life, or “something hardly to be distinguished from it,” is a logical necessity of modern materialism.

The fact is, as F.F. hints, that the whole question has been, as they say, reorientated. It is useless to ignore this. It is deplorable to admit it, as F.F. does, and then drag in all the old clichés as it nothing had happened. Of course materialism stands—backside foremost—but who’s afraid? The one-time big black wolf frightens no bishop. Once identify matter with force, and the old-fashioned logic-chopping about “interaction” and what not is well and truly snookered. There cannot be varieties of “force.” F.F. should brush up his physics. If matter is force, so is mind, and no bishop could say more.

When F.F. tells me as a revolutionary and emancipating truth that I am something like my viscera, I can only remark that if this is true even the most scientific individual of us must think as his belly guides him. What exact reliance can be placed on the ratiocination of livers and lights or even cortex and thalomus I don’t know and hate to think of for the sake of my respect for scientists if not for the sake of my respect for bishops. And don’t give me the guff that brotherly love flowers exclusively on the secular fig tree. Brotherly love, my hat !

F.F. should also brush up his theology before venturing again in furrin parts. Tommy Aquinas and Karl Marx would make an interesting combination.

Reply:

Lord Amwell professes to be concerned about a question begged. Has he ever done anything else but beg that particular question? He wants to keep socialist education free of metaphysical entanglements, then sets a metaphysical conundrum that everybody bye-passes, including himself. It is set in many forms: what is attraction? What is life? To push it farther back, what, is universal existence? What are these things in reality?

Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have wasted many of the best years of their lives puzzling over that question, with no result except idle speculations on imaginary things, or happenings beyond experience. The socialist accepts the world as he finds it, including the knowledge that comes to him through the senses. Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, laid it down that all knowledge begins with the senses, an elementary principle for correct thinking.

It was in the eighteenth century that Emanuel Kant contended that we only know the appearances, or phenomena, of a thing; never the thing in itself. Lord Amwell pours ridicule on the notion in the mistaken belief that he is crushing an opponent of his friends, the bishops. Kant’s famous speculation has got no farther. It is ignored by serious thinkers because it suggests something beyond experience, and because in everyday life, if we know the qualities of a thing, we know the thing in itself.

“Man makes his own history by allowing material nature to make it for him.” This statement gives a wrong conception of the position. Man acquaints himself with natural laws and their operation and then uses those natural laws to suit his purposes. The atom bomb is an example of this. As a part of universal existence man is compelled to observe natural laws. This also applies to the social forms that develop and has a particular significance for the socialist. At certain epochs the social arrangements develop to a point where they cause internal disruption. Today the means of production and distribution are socially operated by the working class but they are capitalist owned, and there is a conflict of interest set up between owners and dispossessed. The working out of social laws based upon private property has brought about this disharmony. Class antagonism within society operates against the well-being of mankind. The longer it continues the worse become the penalties for ignoring the law.

It is the scientist, Lord Amwell, who tells us all those details about atoms and electrons, not F.F. The information was passed on to the readers with the comment that the alleged discovery had made no difference to our previous conception of matter. Scientists and chemists still carried on with the table of elements and their relative weights just as they did before the discovery.

Again, Lord Amwell attributes to me the ridiculous statement that matter is force, not once but several times; whereas the only passage that justifies it is in quotes and was by Dr. Blunt. The fact remains we can only separate matter and force in the understanding, never in the laboratory or anywhere else. No scientist has ever abstracted the force, or if he prefers it the energy, from any substance, solid, liquid or gaseous, and left a residue of matter only. Nor could the reverse be accomplished, that is draw off the energy and bottle it.

Lord Amwell admits his inability to understand what educated Christians believe, or the cardinal principle of episcopal mythology, that God is a spirit existing in totality at every point in space. It means that the history of religion, in its essence, is traversing its final chapter. It has not yet discarded its spiritual God, but in the esoteric circles of educated Christians God is identical with the physical universe.

All the bishops, together with Lord Amwell, use the words mind and spirit alternatively as meaning the same thing. The word spirit, with its implications of a future life, independent of matter, must be merged into mind clothed with so-called spiritual qualities.

If spirit is only another name for mind the bishops have nothing to prove, but if they insist on the generally accepted meaning, a spiritual power independent of flesh and blood, the onus for proof is on them ; because it is their assertion.

Up-to-date physics will not answer his lordship’s question. But the knowledge as to how men do their thinking may. For instance, in the understanding they visualise a purpose in nature, and deduce a power controlling its fulfilment; after the same manner as man designs and carries through a work of art. But what purpose can there be other than infinite change? The world is in constant process of becoming something else. Its only purpose is existence. To say that the purpose of existence is existence may seem tautology, but not so in conjunction with infinite change.

If we know all the qualities of a thing we know the thing in itself. If we know how the universe works, we know the universe.

Amwell says next that “educated Christians don’t believe that mind is necessarily independent of matter. Though they believe that mind is not necessarily dependent on brain.” It’s a bit of a mix-up. Let us try and straighten it out, using the socialist method of approach. How does the brain work? Impressions are received and classified in the memory according to their association with previous conceptions. Throughout life the number of these impressions multiply enormously, and constitute a collection of memories on which we can. draw at will, though concentration is sometimes rendered difficult because much of this association goes on without conscious effort. Now, all our ideas come to us through the senses, therefore our apparent freedom of choice can only be exercised within the realms of experience. So we draw the conclusion that mind is dependent on brain, plus all the other parts of nature of which we have experience, for the materials on which it functions. If that is what educated Christians mean when they say “mind is not necessarily dependent on brain,” we can only ask: what has happened to the spirit? Their only answer is that it, “exists in totality at every point in space.” In other words; it is just universal existence.

One other point for our critic. We are only secularists in the sense that the materialist, explanation of the history of religion is part of the materialist conception of history as a whole. The greater includes the less. If the secularist accepts evolution in the physical world, he has failed to apply it to social science. He has not always recognised the conflicting interests and class antagonism in society. He only sees the confusion that is wrought in men’s minds by superstition. We are not blind to its stultifying effects. That is why we accept its challenge whenever it attempts to use science to bolster up its lies.

F. Foan

Christianity and Capitalism (1948)

From the September 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

Occasionally, when we pick up a newspaper, we are confronted with the reported utterance of some representative of the Church.

At this stage of scientific and industrial development the Church is very little thought about. It no longer commands the attention of large masses of the community. In fact it is continually seeking new methods of enticing people back into the light of the Lord and out of the darkness of barbaric superstition.

The priesthood now dabbles in such things as foreign policy, economics and politics generally. We read, at intervals, that another ecclesiastic has voiced his inexpert views on some aspect of everyday life.

Recently it was reported that an attack has been made by the Church of England Youth Council upon the discipline in post-war factories.

“What happens,” asks their report, “to the boy who leaves school for factory believing in the dignity of labour and in a fair return for a fair wage? ”

It supplies its own answer quoted from an observer in a London engineering factory:—-

“The boy finds that everything about the factory contradicts his belief. Everybody expects him to dodge work as much as possible. If he works steadily he is regarded as an oddity, a despised master’s man, toadying to the bosses. “The foreman winks at slackness. It is unknown for anyone to work voluntarily for one minute after the hooter has gone unless on official overtime.” (Daily Express, 11th June, 1947.)

The whole wording of the report is familiar. It is of the same type as other reports made from time to time by the supporters of the capitalist system. In the first sentence we have the foolish reference lo the “dignity of labour.” A man who has worked in an engineering factory for a number of years has no reason to think of his daily routine as dignified. It usually consists of being awakened by an alarm-clock before his sleep has completed its proper function, dressing himself in his dirty, smelly garments, bolting his breakfast (if any) and rushing to the factory to clock-on. He is afraid of being a few minutes late in case he should have the equivalent of a quarter of an hour deducted from his wages. This latter is the procedure at such times as the present when engineers are required to bolster the export trade. In times of economic depression the loss of a minute would furnish the master with sufficient excuse to dispense with the wage-slave’s services altogether. During the war, when it was necessary for the worker to supply the materials necessary for maintaining the supremacy of British capitalism, it was possible to be hours late. No notice was taken.

When the worker has performed all these degrading formalities he then proceeds to his bench or machine where he goes through the depressing and monotonous actions from the point where he left off the previous evening. All this in an environment of dirt and discomfort, but above all one of extreme monotony. In an atmosphere like this the officers of the Church expect a boy, fresh from school, to preserve a pure and righteous outlook presupposing, apparently, that he entered the factory in this condition in the first place. It would be interesting to discover the source of supply of these miraculous youths.

Let us examine the position as it really is through the eyes of a worker instead of through the eyes of a religious observer. The boys to whom the report refers are of the working-class. They may enter the engineering trade, through inclination, but being workers it is obvious that they must sell their mental and physical energies somewhere in order to live. Very few boys who take up engineering like this do so because of their intense interest in mechanical matters. They do it because, due to the specialised training required, they can, when fully qualified tradesmen, obtain a higher wage than a boy who has started life as an errand-boy.

In the days before mass-production the wages paid to engineers were relatively much higher compared with those paid to other types of labour than they are now, the reason being that capitalist competition has become so intense that many operations have become universally simplified to such an extent that no great skill is required to perform them.

Apprenticeships are of much less value now, and since much less training is required, it follows that this type of labour-power is more plentiful, more competition exists between workers, and wages therefore tend to suffer in comparison with other branches of industry.

Perhaps the reader who is not familiar with the subject will now understand the tendency towards work-dodging.

If we accept the fact that the boy enters the factory because of economic necessity and he finds his environment to be one of monotony and drudgery, there is little cause for wonder that he rebels against these conditions. He does all he can to compensate for his unhappy position.

The report did not mention that production is carried on primarily for the profit of the capitalists, nor that this is inseparable from capitalism. Profits are made by the exploitation of the working-class. Surely this vital point ought not to have been missed by those who drew up the report! The report also ignores the constant drive by the employers to capture markets and maintain profits by trying to get the workers to turn out more commodities in a given time than they were able to before.

It requires very little imagination on the part of the reader to understand the effect which this speeding-up has upon the worker. He becomes mentally and physically exhausted and develops a tendency to dodge work as much as possible. In factories where supervision is very strict work-dodging becomes practically impossible. Hence the increase in the number of thugs, spivs and gangsters. If there is any possibility of making a living easily and unlawfully the modern working-class youth has every incentive to try it.

The report goes on to say: “The boy may have been taught in church, home and school to respect other people’s property, but at work he finds that scrounging is almost universal.” This, presumably, refers to the practice of removing small quantities of the master’s plant and material either for sale or personal use. It is by no means a novelty from the point of view of the managements. They employ uniformed men to stand at the gates of the factory to look out for suspicious bundles and bulges underneath the coats of the workers. As the report says, this is commonly understood and is brought about by the conflict of interests between employer and employee. One owns the means of wealth production and distribution and the other owns nothing but his ability to work.

Towards the end of the column there is a paragraph which says: “In general everything about the atmosphere of the works, other than the friendliness of the people, conflicts with everything which a normal young Christian boy or girl has been taught.” This statement is quite correct. The friendliness of the workshop is not to be denied, but it is a friendship arising from human beings who, subconsciously at my rate, are aware of the, conflict of interests. The pilfering is one-sided arid rarely takes place between worker and worker.

The Church could hardly he expected to appreciate the day-to-day struggle of the workers. It is too much out of contact with reality, and the solution which it offers is not acceptable to intelligent men and women.

The object of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is to point out to the working-class the nature of the class-struggle and the only way in which workers can solve their problems. Study our case and compare it with those, of other political parties. Socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life, is the, only solution.

Rid the world of capitalism and society will rid itself of the evils of capitalism, including war, unemployment, poverty, thugs and parsons.

Chester.