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Love And Money

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Howards End asks whether it is sufficient to `connect', whether love is

enough. `Only connect' has been taken as E. M. Forster's last word, but at various points in the novel he notes that connection is possible only when there is enough money. The heroine, Margaret Schlegel, wonders whether `the very soul of the world is economic ... [whether] the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin'. Speaking in his own voice - a voice that mingles pity with self-disgust - Forster says, `We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.' At the novel's end, one of the people who has been obliged so to pretend, Leonard Bast, dies as a result of being caught up in the struggle between the Schlegels, the people who are good at loving, and the Wilcoxes, the people who know how to make money. But even if he had not died, he would have become unthinkable - because he had been reduced from pseudo-gentility to grinding poverty.

As long as Bast had enough money to keep up the pretension to gentility, he was conversable; Margaret and the others could make connections with him. But when he lost his job and had no money left he became unconversable. This was not because of the snobbery of the gentlefolk but because Bast himself, obsessed with the need to feed himself and his wife, could think and talk of nothing else. No money, no conversability and no connectability. No money, no chance for love. The very poor, those in the lowest abyss, the people whom Brecht called `the ones who live in darkness', can afford neither love nor conversability. `Only connect' has no relevance to them, for they

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cannot afford any disinterested actions. The light shed by novels does not reach them. In Aspects of the Nonel, Forster distinguishes `the development of the novel', which is the same as `the development of humanity', from the `great tedious onrush known as history'. The latter includes `trifles' which `belong to history not to art'; Forster's examples of such trifles are the taming of the atom, landing on the moon and abolishing warfare. The former is `a shy crablike sideways movement' towards tenderness, the tenderness which connection makes possible. Of tenderness Forster says: Far more mysterious than the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call; far wider is the gulf between us and the farmyard than that between the farmyard and the garbage that nourishes it. We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate. `Men did produce one jewel,' the gods will say, and saying, will give us immortality. Forster sometimes seems on the brink of saying that the very poor, the people who cannot afford love or friendship because every moment of every day is filled with anxiety for the next bit of food, are more like the farmyard than like gentlefolk, more like garbage than like us. Wells and Shaw sometimes did say things like that. But Forster was too decent to agree with them. Instead, he hopes, as all us liberal gentlefolk hope, that eventually the Wilcoxes will produce so much money that, when shared out as it should be, there will be nobody left who is very poor. He knows that the very soul of the `great tedious onrush known as history' is economic. He knows that tenderness only appears, that the shy crabwise movement only continues, when there is enough money to produce a little leisure, a little time in which to love. His decency consists in his confidence that tenderness will, in fact, appear when there is money enough. But he shares enough of Wells's and Shaw's realism to admit that money is the independent, and tenderness the dependent, variable. Forster's hope that eventually there will be enough money to go around, enough so that its redistribution will make connection and

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tenderness ubiquitous, runs through liberal thought from the French Revolution to our own time. Every top-down liberal initiative, from the abolition of slavery through the extension of the franchise to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, has been driven by the hope that someday we shall no longer need to distinguish us gentlefolk from those others, the people who live like animals. The cash value of the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood has, for the last two centuries, been the conviction that once science and technology have produced enough wealth - and enlightened, unselfish political initiatives have redistributed it - there will be no one left who is incapable of tenderness. All human beings will live in the light; all of them will be possible characters in novels. Seen from this Forsterian vantage point, the distinction between Marxism and liberalism was largely a disagreement about whether you can get as much, or more, wealth to redistribute by politicizing the marketplace and replacing the greedy Wilcoxes with government planners. It turned out that you cannot. Liberals of Forster's time knew as well as the Marxists that the soul of history - if not of the novel or of humanity - is economic, but they thought that history had to be guided from the top down, by the gentlefolk. The Marxists hoped that once those on the bottom seized control, once the revolution turned things upside down, everything would automatically get better. Here again, alas, the Marxists were wrong. So now Marxism is no longer of much interest, and we are back with the question of what top-down initiatives we gentlefolk might best pursue.

This question looks manageable as long as we confine our attention to the northern hemisphere. If that part of the planet (suitably gerrymandered so as, for example, to include Australia and exclude China) were all we had to worry about, it would be plausible to suggest that there is, or soon will be, enough money to go around - that our problems are simply those of redistribution. All we need to do is to formulate effective Schlegelian appeals to the tenderness of the gentlefolk who make up the electorates of the rich nations, appeals which will overcome Wilcoxian greed. There seems to be enough money sloshing around the northern hemisphere to make it practicable, eventually, to raise the east European standard of living to that of

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western Europe, that of Yorkshire to that of Surrey, and that of Bedford-Stuyvesant to that of Bensonhurst. There are relatively plausible scenarios for the working out of top-down initiatives, scenarios which end with the life chances of the Northerners roughly levelled out. liberal hope, the hope for a decent world, a world in which Christianity's promises are fulfilled, nourishes itself on such scenarios. The fear that is beginning to gnaw at the hearts of all us liberal gentlefolk in the North is that there are no initiatives which will save the southern hemisphere, that there will never be enough money in the world to redeem the South. We are beginning to be at a loss for scenarios which cross the north-south border, largely because of the scary population growth statistics for countries such as Indonesia, India and Haiti. This part of the planet is becoming increasingly unthinkable. We are more and more tempted to turn it over to the statisticians, and to the sort of poet whom we call `the ethnologist'. This temptation was brought home to me when, during my first trip to India, I met a fellow philosophy professor who is also a politician. Starting as a young MP in the sixties, anxious to bring Western thought and technology to bear on India's problems, and especially on the Indian birth rate, he had risen, in the course of 30 years, to various high offices, including that of Minister of Health. He was in a very good position to dream up concrete and optimistic scenarios, but had none to offer. After 30 years' work on the part of people like himself, he said, it was still the case that the only rational thing for parents in an Indian village to do was to try as hard as they could to have eight children. It had to be eight because two would die in childhood, three of the remainder would be girls and thus require dowries, and one of the remaining boys would run off to Bombay and never be heard of again. Two male children working desperately hard, all their lives, with no time off for tenderness, would be required to ensure that their sisters' dowries were paid, and their mother and father kept from starvation in their old age. In the course of this trip, I found myself, like most Northerners in the South, not thinking about the beggars in the hot streets once I was back in my pleasantly air-conditioned hotel. My Indian acquaintances - fellow academics, fellow gentlefolk, honorary Northerners -

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gave the same small percentage of what they had in their pockets to the beggars as I did, and then, like me, forgot about the individual beggars when they got home. As individuals, beggars were, just as Forster says, unthinkable. Instead, both of us thought about liberal initiatives which might eliminate the beggars as a class. But neither of us came up with any initiatives which inspired any confidence. The country, and perhaps the world, did not seem to have enough money to keep the number of Southerners who will be alive in the middle of the twenty-first century from despair, much less to open up to them the possibility of joining in the slow crabwise movement which has been taking place in the North. Of course, there might be enough money, because science and technology might once again come to the rescue. There are a few scientific possibilities - e.g., a breakthrough in plasma physics which makes fusion energy, and thus (for example) desalination and irrigation on a gigantic scale, possible and cheap. But the hope is pretty faint. As things stand, nobody who reads the statistics about the unthinkably poor of the South can generate any optimism. I should like to produce a bracing conclusion to end these pessimistic reflections, but all I can offer is the suggestion that we Northern gentlefolk at least keep ourselves honest. We should remind ourselves, as Forster reminded us, that love is not enough - that the Marxists were absolutely right about one thing: the soul of history is economic. All the talk in the world about the need to abandon `technological rationality' and to stop `commodifying', about the need for `new values' or for `non-Western ways of thinking', is not going to bring more money to the Indian villages. As long as the villagers have enough Weberian means-end rationality to see that they need eight children, such talk is not to any point. All the love in the world, all the attempts to abandon `Eurocentrism', or `liberal individualism', all the `politics of diversity', all the talk about cuddling up to the natural environment, will not help. The only things we know of which might help are top-down technobureaucratic initiatives like the cruel Chinese only-one-child-perfamily policy (or, literalizing the top-down metaphor and pushing things one monstrous step further, spraying villages from the air with

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sterilizing chemicals). If there is a happy solution to the dilemma created by the need of very poor Brazilians to find work and the need of the rest of us for the oxygen produced by the Amazonian rain forest, it is going to be the result of some as yet unimagined bureaucratic-technological initiative, not of a revolution in `values'. The slow crabwise movement is not going to speed up thanks to a change in philosophical outlook. Money remains the independent variable. I think that the sudden popularity of anti-technological talk among us Northern liberals, our turn over the last years from planning to dreaming, and from science to philosophy, has been a nervous, self-deceptive reaction to the realization that technology may not work. Maybe the problems our predecessors assumed it could solve are, in fact, too tough. Maybe technology and centralized planning will not work. But they are all we have got. We should not try to pull the blanket over our heads by saying that technology was a big mistake, and that planning, top-down initiatives, and `Western ways of thinking' must be abandoned. That is just another, much less honest, way of saying what Forster said: that the very poor are unthinkable.
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