"ELEMENTS THAT ARE WANTED"
375
Marx,
with his claim to a science of society, with his concept of
materialistic and dialectical causation, who, for his adherents,
made the new emphasis seem unavoidable. Considerations of
morality Marx largely scorned; he begins in morality, in the great
historical and descriptive chapters of
Capital,
but he does not con·
tinue in it, perhaps because he is led to believe that the order of
the
world is going to establish morality. He speaks often of human
dignity, but just what human dignity is he does not tell us, nor has
any
adequate Marxist philosopher or poet told us: it is not a sub–
ject
which comes within the scope of their science.
Yet not merely upon the tempo of events nor upon Marx him–
self can we lay the indifference to morality and to aims. It must
fall
on something of which Marx was indeed a part and of which
the
tempo is of course a part but of which each of us is also a part:
111
the total imagination of our time. It is the characteristic of
this
imagination so to conceive the human quality that it diminishes
with
ever-increasing speed before the exigencies of means.
Lenin gave us the cue when, at the end of
The State
and
Revo–
lution,
he told us that we might well postpone the problem of what
man is to become until such time as he mighf become anything he
ehose. One understands how such a thing gets said; but one under–
llands too that saying it does not make a suspension of choice: it is
1
choice already made and the making of it was what gave certain
people the right to wonder whether the ethics and culture of com–
munism were anything else than the extension of the ethics and
calture of the bourgeois business world. For many years the hero
rJ
our moral myth was that Worker-and-Peasant who smiled from
the
covers of
Soviet Russia Today,
simple, industrious, literate-–
and grateful. Whether or not people like him actually existed is
liard
to say; one suspects not and hopes not; but he was what his
leaders and the radical intellectuals were glad to propagate as a
110ral ideal; that probably factitious Worker was the moral
IIIXimum which the preoccupation with immediate ends could
lllCOmmodate.
The diminished ideal which was represented by that Worker is
what Mr. Eliot would perhaps call, in his way, a heresy. But from
mother point of view it is also a practical, a political, error.
k
is
the error which lies hidden in materialist and rationalist
J11Ychology. Against it a certain part of the nineteenth century was
