The Battle Between The Inner Life and The Outer Life

Thoughts Sparked by E.M. Forster’s Howards End

A Wych Elm tree, a key feature of the beauty of Howards End; Photo by Christian Pickl on Wikipedia.

I believe modern American capitalism has become so pervasive as to have severely constrained the lives of many, if not most, people, regardless of their wealth. That constraint has created a lot of angst, which we can see in the attention paid to the loneliness epidemic, to the insidious nature of social media, and in the efforts to slow down lives that seem to be moving at a breakneck pace in the pursuit of evermore.

One must have a mind of stone to read E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End and not think of our current time of hyper-capitalism. To see Forster’s hope-crushed souls eager for culture but too poor and too unlucky to get it, and fail to consider the crushing of so many Americans caught in generational poverty.

Or to see the great advances of abundance from Forster’s time to our own and fail to see how pitiful our efforts have been at achieving the eradication of “economic cares” as predicted by Forster’s fellow member of Bloomsbury, JM Keynes.

Or to see the characters in the novel devoted exclusively to commerce and fail to consider that the most privileged of Americans seem to have embraced “Workism,” a word coined by Derek Thomson to describe the transformation of a career into a “religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver.” ¹

Howards End

Howards End has at its moral center the conflict between what Forster called the inner and outer ways of life. The inner life consists of deep personal relations, self-knowledge, nature, and art. The outer life is everything else. Careers, daily duties, commutes and travel, contracts, business, productivity, money––everything that goes into making the world go round.

In Forster’s rendering of the London area, circa 1910, we see capitalism moving relentlessly across the landscape, knocking down old buildings, carving suburbs from meadows, motoring at increasing speed, like a juggernaut, making people in its implacable path hurry faster and faster to keep up to avoid being crushed beneath its wheels.

Forster was part of the Bloomsbury group, the legendary circle of artists and intellectuals of the early 20^thcentury in London. Many in that group could afford to ignore the capitalist juggernaut and prioritize the inner life, because they came from wealthy backgrounds. ²

In Howards End, the outer life seems well on its way to an unstoppable victory with only a few lucky beneficiaries of generational wealth able to evade its ever turning wheels. In 1910 England the inequality of income and wealth was even greater than in our current modern moment of extreme economic inequality. ³

This rearguard action of generational wealth on behalf of the inner life is represented by the orphaned Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen––well-read and well-spoken, candid and progressive in their opinions, lovers of nature, decent to all classes, concerned above all with the well-being of each other.

Margaret Schlegel tells Helen,

“The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched–––a life of telegrams and anger. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there.”

Margaret and Helen each have a legacy of 600 pounds a year, equivalent today to about 430,000 pounds (or about $5400,000). It’s important to understand that 1910 was near the end of a remarkably long and stable period in British inflation and interest rates, markedly different from the volatile nature of modern American finance. ⁴

In 1910, for the inheritors of wealth, the wheel of fortune had been turning slowly, perhaps imperceptibly, for almost a century. So Margaret Schlegel had a great deal of historical confidence to say, “I stand each year upon six hundred pounds…and as fast as [my] pounds crumble away they are renewed.”

While the Schlegel sisters felt completely safe on their “golden isles” of wealth, not so the other wealthy family in the novel, the Wilcoxes. They are the men of “telegrams and anger,” who are commercially consumed by promoting their various ventures in Africa, who leave a tip not to be generous but so that their waiter will remember them favorably next time, and who were “at their best when serving on committees.”  

Among the Wilcox family, only Mrs. Wilcox loves Howards End, the house she owns and the charming country cottage that is at the physical center of the novel. The other Wilcoxes see only the cottage’s impracticalities and even its doom. The house is too close to London to avoid the encroachment of suburban housing.

But Mrs. Wilcox sees Howards End, with its flower gardens and ancient wych-elm tree as an enchanted place, her spiritual home.

When we meet Mrs. Wilcox, she’s dying, and her illness accentuates her ethereal aspect and leads her to turn ever more inward. She recognizes the flame of inner life in Margaret, and on her deathbed, she writes a note bequeathing Howards End to Margaret. But her deathbed note has no legal force in the outer life. So Mr. Wilcox tells his daughter to throw her dead mother’s note into the fire.

Eventually, Margaret marries the widowed Mr. Wilcox, knowing full well that he is all outer life, but hoping to reform him. Her sister Helen, the person Margaret cares most about in the world, is horrified that Margaret would marry such an authoritarian barbarian with values so inimical to the two sisters’ own.

Margaret defends her decision to Helen by citing the necessity of the Wilcox outer life to make the sisters’ inner life possible.

“If Wilcoxes hadn’t worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn’t sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even…More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it.”

While Margaret’s statement is true, and we can be glad that she recognizes that she owes her secure perch to the work of others––reminiscent of Obama’s 2012 campaign speech, unfairly remembered as “you didn’t build that,” a phrase taken out of context when the real context was if you've been successful, you didn't get there completely on your own.

But Margaret says nothing in favor of the marriage concerning love or any emotional connection to Wilcox. Helen, and the reader, remain unpersuaded. The marriage is one of the reasons the two sisters, so close all their lives, have a painful severing of relations, a disconnection lasting more than a year.  

In the end, Margaret separates from Wilcox who behaves in abominable fashion to Helen whose absence is explained by her having had a child out of wedlock. Wilcox forbids Helen from staying in the Howards End cottage for a single night. Wilcox is not only being cruel, but hypocritical––he cheated on his dead wife.

Margaret disobeys Wilcox and stays with her sister in the cottage. The two sisters reunite and while spending the night together in the cottage, they recognize the unique deepness of their connection. As Forster puts it,

“…triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind––the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things…The inner life had paid.”

Keynes’ Prediction

Two decades after Howards End was published, Forster’s fellow Bloomsbury member, John Maynard Keynes made a prediction of glad tidings for future generations.

“Thus for the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.“

For Keynes, the Outer Life was a means to achieve the goal of universal prosperity, when the workweek for all would be fifteen hours and the problem would be how to occupy all the remaining hours. A surplus of leisure for all the classes. ⁵

It’s tempting to dismiss Keynes’ prediction as laughably off the mark, especially applied to modern American capitalism where it can seem that the outer life has achieved a complete victory. Statistics tell us that Americans work longer hours than comparable countries. As noted above, American economic inequality is at modern record highs. I wrote a post a few days ago about the malign effects of wealth inequality, and “the way that the extravagant, often outrageous lifestyles of the wealthiest are thrust into our faces in media, social and otherwise.” ⁶

American Capitalism in 2024––Where are we headed?

But I think the state of the modern American conflict between inner and outer life is not as simple as complete victory for the outer. There is a great deal of resistance to hyper-capitalism, not only in what’s being written, but what’s starting to be done.

I read a lot of articles from diverse viewpoints, and I seldom read arguments for an acceleration of progress. Rather, I read more and more arguments for a slower life, a return to nature, an escape from the incessant drumbeat of productivity, pleas to reduce quick-take social media activity, and an emphasis on “eulogy values vs. resume values,” per David Brooks.

To say that the intellectual vanguard advocating the inner life has already had a profound effect would be to overstate the power of the “resistance.” But there are signs. Here’s one of them.

Derek Thompson’s 2019 article about “Workism” described the phenomenon that

“from 1980 to 2005, the richest 10% of married men increased their work hours by more than any other group of married men: about five hours a week, or 250 hours a year.” His 2019 article was called “Workism is Making Americans Miserable.”

Four years later, Thompson wrote that the trend had reversed in an article titled “America’s Fever of Workaholism Is Finally Breaking. His subtitle: “For the first time in 50 years, the rich are buying more free time.”

Thompson takes this reversal as an important, but not definitive, piece of data. But it’s often the case that cultural trends start at the top and then filter down. As well, often the cumulative power of the written word, in this case arguing for a greater emphasis on the inner life, takes time to resonate, but ultimately it does. Trend setters take action and the rest of the population follows along, perhaps never having read a single article on the subject.

JM Keynes was convinced that ideas were much more powerful at moving the course of history than anything else. “Indeed,” he wrote, “the world is ruled by little else.” Practical men”––one thinks of the Wilcoxes––who think they are influenced only by self-interest are “usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes’ expanded quote is worth reading in the footnote. ⁷

As a writer, I choose to side with Keynes and to believe that the triumph of hyper-capitalism will not survive the weight of the ideas to resist it.

Question for the Comments: Is an “inner vs. outer" life a useful way to think about your own life?

David Roberts writes Sparks From Culture

1. From Thompson’s article in the Atlantic, early 2019.

2

“The Bloomsbury Group…came from wealthy backgrounds, which had given them social advantages and self-confidence. But they were linked by a spirit of rebellion against what they saw as the unnecessary conventions, restraints and double standards of their parents’ generation. They wanted freedom to develop their own ideas and lifestyles. They were politically liberal. They also had liberal ideas about sex, which meant there were often complicated relationships and affairs between the various members of the Bloomsbury circle.” From the Tate Museum: Lifestyle and Legacy of the Bloomsbury Group.

3. In modern America, about 45% of the after tax and after transfer income goes to the top 20% https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58781#_idTextAnchor012

In early 1900s England, 50% of the income went to the top 12%: Gertrude Himmelfarb; Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination Of The Late Victorians; 1991, referencing Chiozza Money; Riches And Poverty; 1905.

4. Conversion of the Schlegel sister legacy based on the equivalent income method per Measuring Worth

Cumulative inflation from 1815 to 1914 was actually slight deflation, and during that century interest rates on long term British government securities (“Consols”) rarely dipped below 3% or above 4%.

Source for the Consol interest rates and U.K. inflation, The St. Louis Fed; The aggregate inflation from 1815 (end of Napoleonic wars) to 1914 was actually deflation of about 10%, with periodic various bouts of inflation and deflation. Over the next hundred years, from 1914 to 2014, prices in the U.K. increased by a factor of almost 80 times. That’s what happens when you compound at 4.5% over one hundred years. (Can you tell that I love numbers?)

5. JM Keynes quote and 15 hour workweek prediction from Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren

6. Per the OECD, Americans work 16% more hours per year than the average of the other G-7 countries (U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan).

My post: “Wealth-Envy Has Become Part Of The Cultural Air We Breathe”

“But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil. “

7. From JM Keynes; The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money; 1936