Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
matters as wealth, morality, poetry, environment, production, and congregation tend to become intertwined, shaping a point of view, making for “partisans” insofar as different relationships become simplified as consciousness of “class.”
However, to have pursued our speculations as far as the matter of “class-consciousness” is to realize that the relation between the “economic substructure” and the “moral superstructure” is lacking in the symmetry of one-to-one correspondences. We can belong in as many classifications as scientists or philosophers care to invent. Though a radical paper is written for a different “class” than a conservative one, we may have heard complaints from the contributors to radical papers which would suggest that, to them, the editors of the radical paper often seem to be in the same “class” as the editors of the conservative paper. Their most intimate connection with a “class war” may be in the war between the editor class and the contributor class—and it can be a very bitter one, waged behind the lines at a moment when battles on a wider front are being fought.
Again, our “economic environment” is not wholly historical. At any given time in history, we have specific relationships to the forces of production (tools and weapons) accumulated by our society. But there is another “economic plant,” the resources of the body itself, the biologic tools and weapons, with their “superstructural” counterparts (intelligence, love, hate, desire for mobility, etc.). We might call this a “human” environment or situation, wider than any given historic environment. Here enters the possibility of cultural overlap, whereby a “proletarian” may find much in common with the “late feudal” or “early bourgeois” Shakespeare.
The presence of this “human” environment, the “natural” frame of reference that is wider than the “historical,” may be discussed as the tendency of the poet to “transcend” the peculiar economic necessities of his times. Not even a fish could be said to live in a totally different environment from man. The “moralities” of man and fish must tend to overlap, destroying the symmetry of complete differentiation, insofar as both “classes” live by respiration and locomotion. A happy translator might do a fairly reputable job at turning a fish’s delight in gills and fins into a glorification of lungs and legs.
Many of the recent literary battles hinge about this issue. The over-simplifying advocate of “proletarian” art would stress the historic environment to the exclusion of all else (and would then invent all sorts of subterfuges and epicycles to explain a liking he might have for Dante or Aeschylus, perhaps finally deciding that they were “workers” in their field). And the oversimplifying advocate of the universally human would lay all emphasis upon the continuity of “man’s burden” throughout the ages, as he incessantly confronts the critical events of birth, growth, love, union, separation, initiation, sorrow, fear, death, and the like.
In sum: we live by the goring of the ox (or some equivalent victim, be it only a vegetable). Call this relationship the biological, the universal-human, that attains its replica in the syntheses of ideology and morals (“imagination”). But it also makes a difference whose ox is gored. Call this relationship the historical, the partisan, making for “consciousness” insofar as the partisans tend to think of themselves as a “class” (“propaganda,” “rhetoric,” the “producing of effects”). As so stated, might not some of the issues dissolve? Might we not suspect that, unless men were brutes or gods (and Aristotle reminds us that they are not either) they must inevitably exemplify imagination and propaganda both? Or, to employ another trope: the nonpartisan, imaginative poet writes, “Beware, a storm approacheth.” As propagandist he adds, “Go thou, and buy rubbers.” The critics of the “proletarian” school (in tune with the Zweck im Recht analysis of law) have done us a service in recalling how often the poet, in this imperfect world, is in effect writing, “Go thou, and buy rubbers” when he is only aware of writing, “A storm approacheth.” In the mere act of warning us what to beware of, he suggests the kind of measures to be taken.
There is also the problem of “leads.” Philosophies are thinking machines—and like machines, they are frightfully “efficient.” Their efficiency makes particularly for extremes in the placing of emphasis. And the proletarians, even the least intellectual of them, are philosophers. Their philosophy (the philosophy of the “class struggle”) gives them “leads.” And it is obvious that “leads” can on occasion mislead. By giving us so quickly and persuasively certain important clues as to the nature of “experience,” they can incidentally prevent us from noticing other clues. In particular, those of their readers who follow other leads may sometimes find their work impoverished and “unreal,” by reason of misplaced emphases. Indeed, insofar as the privileged can hire men to gore the ox for their benefit, the privileged may even afford to be above this despicable matter entirely. And they can resent the low-mindedness of those who would go back over a territory that they have happily left behind. I would answer them by quoting Goethe’s admonition, that “no one walks unpunished beneath palms.” Even were there no acute social issues, even if we had, here and now, an ideal “classless society,” with communal property upon which to build a communality of morals (as in the monastic orders of the early Church) I should suspect that a people could forget the goring of the ox only at their peril. The neglect would be an act of pride; and pride is the basic sin not only of the Church, but of the universe. Pride: “that state of mind that goes before a fall”—the “assumption that one can walk unpunished beneath palms”—the “failure to remind oneself that all blessings are mixed blessings.” The monastic orders were framed to guard against it; hence their great emphasis upon the moral effect of lowly occupations. A monastic order would deteriorate in proportion as the admonitions of its founder came to be forgotten, “alienation” arising as some men were “released” from too immediate concerns with the goring of the ox, which somehow got gored, while they could turn to nobler matters, and of a sudden you find the order corrupt.
As Mr. John Crowe Ransom has wisely admonished us, there is a disturbing contemporary tendency to imagine God after the analogy of central heating and dental anesthetics. He resents this cult of a deity that is merely a celestial version of “all modern conveniences.” He has asked for a Jehovah, a God of wrath, a God with thunder. And I have paradoxically asked myself whether the “proletarian” school, for all its atheistic trappings, might come very close to meeting his requirements. Merely put “history” in place of “Jehovah”—and anger, vengeance, lamentation once again come to the fore. History, in the proletarian code, a just God, a jealous God, a wrathful God. Only at their peril can men violate its commandments. It rewards, with the rewards of a good conscience, those that give it strict obedience and glorify its prowess. But as for those that sin against it, attempting to maintain human laws in opposition to its laws, it wreaks its vengeance upon them, even unto the children of the third and fourth generation.
Thus, I should not advise one to take the atheistic trappings at their face value. Why be sidetracked if, by a mere shifting of vocabulary, a new word causes to live again a pattern of thought that had been obscured by an old word? The morality of toil was ingrained in Hebraicism. It renewed its vigor in Catholicism after the collapse of pagan Rome, an elegant world that pined away in proportion as its cultured elements became psychologically unemployed (“leisured”). But Catholicism in turn eventually ran into difficulties. Surely it is not an accident that the last monastic order before the collapse (the Franciscans), an order that just missed being anathematized as a heresy, attempted to counteract the new difficulties of work by making a vocation of the mendicant (somewhat as we today some-times attempt so to manipulate our fictions that unemployment itself can be turned into a profession). In keeping with the nostalgia and mystic vision of Piers Plowman, new vents for human effort were found through Protestantism (particularly in the new vein that could be tapped by the Calvinistic sanctions upon credit and investment). And when this solution in turn has floundered of its “inner contradictions,” we find the morality of toil reborn in the emphases of socialism. It holds that there can be no leisure without decay. Were every material want to be satisfied, people could live as moral beings (without pride) only by developing subtler concepts of necessity. In a civilization of mechanical slaves, for instance, they might revert to Grecian concepts of effort. They might focus their attention upon the ultimate task, the development of the “perfect citizen” (shaped for the playing of his role