Love and Money

Richard Rorty

Common Knowledge, Volume 25, Issues 1-3, April 2019, pp. 341-345 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/727150

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 A Quarter-Century of Common Knowledge, Conversation X

LOVE AND MONEY

Richard Rorty

Howard’s 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 pre-
tend, 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

Originally published in Common Knowledge 1.1 (Spring

1992): 12–16. © 1992.

Common Knowledge 25:1 –3

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-7299438

341
 not because of the snobbery of the gentlefolk but because Bast himself, obsessed
342

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
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

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 cannot afford any disinterested
actions. The light shed by novels does not reach them.
In Aspects of the Novel 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
but not to art”; Forster’s examples of such trifles are the taming of the atom, land-
ing on the moon, and abolishing warfare. The former is “a shy crablike sideways
movement” toward 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 Theol-
ogy 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 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

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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

Conversat ion X
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,

•
Ror t y
or more, wealth to redistribute by politicizing the marketplace and replacing the
greedy Wilcoxes with government planners. It turned out that you cannot. Liber-
als 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 of 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 Western Europe, that of Yorkshire to that
of Surrey, and that of Bedford-­Stuyvesant to that of Bensonhurst. There are rela-
tively plausible scenarios for the working-­out of top-­down initiatives, scenarios
which end with the life-­chances of the Northerners roughly leveled 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 gentle-
folk 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 becom-
ing 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
34 4

young M.P. in the sixties, anxious to bring Western thought and technology to
bear on India’s problems, and especially on the Indian birthrate, he had risen,
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

in the course of thirty 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 thirty 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 insure
that their sisters’ dowries were paid, and their mother and father kept from star-
vation 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 — 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 ini-
tiatives 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 South-
erners 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 reflec-
tions, 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

345
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

Conversat ion X
natural environment, will not help.
The only things we know of which might help are top-­down techno-­
bureaucratic initiatives like the cruel Chinese only-­one-­child-­per-­family policy
(or, literalizing the top-­down metaphor and pushing things one monstrous step
further, spraying villages from the air with sterilizing chemicals). If there is a

•
Ror t y
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 as some as yet unimagined bureaucratic-­
technological initiative, not of a revolution in “values.” The slow crabwise move-
ment 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 twenty years from planning to dream-
ing, and from science to philosophy, has been a nervous, self-­deceptive reaction
to the realization that technology may not work. Maybe the problems our pre-
decessors 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 mis-
take, 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.