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Title: The new state
Group organization the solution of popular government
Author: M. P. Follett
Release date: June 2, 2024 [eBook #73755]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Longmans, Green and Co, 1918
Credits: Lukas Bystricky, Gísli Valgeirsson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW STATE ***
THE NEW STATE
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THE NEW STATE
GROUP ORGANIZATION THE SOLUTION
OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT
BY
M. P. FOLLETT
AUTHOR OF
“THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES”
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1918
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
PART I
THE GROUP PRINCIPLE
I. THE GROUP AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 19
II. THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE IDEA 24
III. THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE IDEA
(_continued_) 33
IV. THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE FEELING 44
V. THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE WILL 48
VI. THE UNIT OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS 50
VII. THE INDIVIDUAL 60
VIII. WHO IS THE FREE MAN? 69
IX. THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM 73
X. SOCIETY 75
XI. THE SELF-AND-OTHERS ILLUSION 79
XII. THE CROWD FALLACY 85
XIII. THE SECRET OF PROGRESS 93
XIV. THE GROUP PRINCIPLE AT WORK 105
XV. FROM CONTRACT TO COMMUNITY 122
PART II
THE TRADITIONAL DEMOCRACY
XVI. DEMOCRACY NOT “LIBERTY” AND “EQUALITY”: OUR
POLITICAL DUALISM 137
XVII. DEMOCRACY NOT THE MAJORITY: OUR POLITICAL FALLACY 142
XVIII. DEMOCRACY NOT THE CROWD: OUR POPULAR DELUSION 148
XIX. THE TRUE DEMOCRACY 156
XX. THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 162
XXI. AFTER DIRECT GOVERNMENT—WHAT? 174
PART III
GROUP ORGANIZATION DEMOCRACY’S METHOD
1. THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP
XXII. NEIGHBORHOOD NEEDS THE BASIS OF POLITICS 189
XXIII. AN INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOOD 204
XXIV. NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION _vs._ PARTY
ORGANIZATION:
_The Will of the People_ 216
XXV. NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION _vs._ PARTY
ORGANIZATION:
_Leaders or Bosses?_ 227
XXVI. NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION _vs._ PARTY
ORGANIZATION:
_A Responsible Neighborhood_ 232
XXVII. FROM NEIGHBORHOOD TO NATION: THE UNIFYING STATE 245
2. THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP
XXVIII. POLITICAL PLURALISM 258
XXIX. POLITICAL PLURALISM AND SOVEREIGNTY 271
XXX. POLITICAL PLURALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM:
_The Service State vs. The “Sovereign State”_ 288
XXXI. POLITICAL PLURALISM AND THE TRUE FEDERAL STATE 296
XXXII. POLITICAL PLURALISM
(_concluded_) 311
XXXIII. INCREASING RECOGNITION OF THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP 320
PART IV
THE DUAL ASPECT OF THE GROUP:
A UNION OF INDIVIDUALS, AN INDIVIDUAL IN A LARGER UNION
XXXIV. THE MORAL STATE AND CREATIVE CITIZENSHIP 333
XXXV. THE WORLD STATE 344
APPENDIX
THE TRAINING FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY 363
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEW STATE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEW STATE
INTRODUCTION
OUR political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually at
war, the nations of Europe are at one another’s throats—because we have
not yet learned how to live together. The twentieth century must find a
new principle of association. Crowd philosophy, crowd government, crowd
patriotism must go. The herd is no longer sufficient to enfold us.
Group organization is to be the new method in politics, the basis of our
future industrial system, the foundation of international order. Group
organization will create the new world we are now blindly feeling after,
for creative force comes from the group, creative power is evolved
through the activity of the group life.
We talk about the evils of democracy. We have not yet tried democracy.
Party or “interests” govern us with some fiction of the “consent of the
governed” which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of
what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the
crude ore of life.
We talk about the tragedy of individualism. The individual we do not
yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of
the individual. Our particularism—our _laissez-faire_, our
every-man-for-his-own-interests—has little to do with true
individualism, that is, with the individual as consciously responsible
for the life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes
his all.
Politics do not need to be “purified.” This thought is leading us
astray. Politics must be vitalized by a new method. “Representative
government,” party organization, majority rule, with all their
excrescences, are dead-wood. In their stead must appear the organization
of non-partisan groups for the begetting, the bringing into being, of
common ideas, a common purpose and a collective will.
Government by the people must be more than the phrase. We are told—The
people should do this, the people should do that, the people must be
given control of foreign policy, etc. etc. But all this is wholly
useless unless we provide the procedure within which the people _can_ do
this or that. What does the “sovereign will” of the people amount to
unless it has some way of operating? Or have we any “sovereign will?”
There is little yet that is practical in “practical politics.”
But method must not connote mechanics to any mind. Many of us are more
interested in the mechanism of life than in anything else. We keep on
putting pennies in the slot from sheer delight in seeing something come
out at the other end. All this must change. Machines, forms, images,
moulds—all must be broken up and the way prepared for our plastic life
to find plastic expression. The principle of democracy may be the
underlying unity of men, the method of democracy must be that which
allows the quickest response of our daily life to the common faith of
men.
Are we capable of a new method? Can the inventive faculty of the
American people be extended from mechanical things to political
organization? There is no use denying that we are at a crisis in our
history. Whether that crisis is to abound in acute moments which will
largely wreck us, or whether we are going to be wise enough to make the
necessary political and social adjustments—that is the crucial question
which faces America to-day.
Representative government has failed. It has failed because it was not a
method by which men could govern themselves. Direct government is now
being proposed. But direct government will never succeed if (1) it is
operated from within the party organization as at present, or (2) if it
consists merely in counting all the votes in all the ballot-boxes.
Ballot-box democracy is what this book is written to oppose.
No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does
not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the
individual. Up to the present moment we have never seen the individual.
Yet the search for him has been the whole long striving of our
Anglo-Saxon history. We sought him through the method of representation
and failed to find him. We sought to reach him by extending the suffrage
to every man and then to every woman and yet he eludes us. Direct
government now seeks the individual; but as we have not found him by
sending more men to the ballot-box, so we shall not find him by sending
men more often to the ballot-box. Are our constitutional conventions to
sit and congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they
are condemning us to a new form of our old particularism? The
ballot-box! How completely that has failed men, how completely it will
fail women. Direct government as at present generally understood is a
mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy
is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The
question before the American people to-day is—How is that genuine union
to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party
has always ignored him; it wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of
votes. The early reform associations had the same aim. Both wanted
voters not men. It makes little difference whether we follow the boss or
follow the good government associations, this is all herd
life—“following the lead”—democracy means a wholly different kind of
existence. To follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the
only force in the world which can make the Perfect Society—democracy
depends upon the creative power of every man.
We find the true man only through group organization. The potentialities
of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group
life. Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through
the group. Group organization must be the new method of politics because
the modes by which the individual can be brought forth and made
effective are the modes of practical politics.
But who is the individual we have been seeking, who is the individual we
are to find within the group? Certainly not the particularist
individual. Every man to count as one? That was once our slogan. Now we
have relegated it to a mechanical age. To-day we see that every man must
count for infinitely more than one because he is not part of a whole, a
cog in a machine, not even an organ in an organism, but from one point
of view the whole itself. A man said to me the other day, “That is not
democracy, that is mysticism.” But why mysticism? It is our daily life
as lived from hour to hour. We join with one group of men at work, with
another at play, another in our civic committee, another in our art
club. Man’s life is one of manifold relatings. His vote at the polls
must express not his particularist self, but the whole complex of his
related life, must express as much of the whole as these multiple
relations have brought into existence for him, through him. I find my
expression of the whole-idea, the whole-will, through my group life. The
group must always dictate the modes of activity for the individual. We
must put clearly before us the true individual with his infinite
relations, expressing his infinite relations, as the centre of politics,
as the meaning of democracy. The first purpose of genuine politics is to
make the vote of every man express the All at his special coign of
outlook. In every man is the potentiality of such expression. To call it
forth is the aim of all training, the end sought by all modes of real
living.
Thus group organization releases us from the domination of mere numbers.
Thus democracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood
except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy
rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a
collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.
Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing
forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must
contribute the whole of his complex life, as one which every single
being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of
democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.
Many men despise politics because they see that politics manipulate, but
make nothing. If politics are to be the highest activity of man, as they
should be, they must be clearly understood as creative.
What is there inherent in the group which gives it creative power? The
activity which produces the true individual is at the same time
interweaving him and others into a real whole. A genuine whole has
creative force. Does this seem “mystical?” The power of our corporations
depends upon this capability of men to interknit themselves into such
genuine relations that a new personality is thereby evolved. This is the
“real personality” of modern legal theory. Are our company directors and
corporation lawyers usually mystics?
The seeing of self as, with all other selves, creating, demands a new
attitude and a new activity in man. The fallacy of self-and-others fades
away and there is only self-in-and-through-others, only others so firmly
rooted in the self and so fruitfully growing there that sundering is
impossible. We must now enter upon modes of living commensurate with
this thought.
What American politics need to-day is positive principles. We do not
want to “regulate” our trusts, to “restrain” our bosses. The measure of
our progress is never what we give up, but what we add. It may be
necessary to prune the garden, but we do not make a pile of the dead
branches and take our guests to see them as evidence of the flourishing
state of the garden.
The group organization movement means the substitution of intention for
accident, of organized purpose for scattered desire. It rests on the
solid assumption that this is a man-made not a machine-made world, that
men and women are capable of constructing their own life, and that not
upon socialism or any rule or any order or any plan or any utopia can we
rest our hearts, but only on the force of a united and creative
citizenship.
We are asking for group organization in order to leap at once from the
region of theory, of which Americans are so fond, to a practical scheme
of living. We hear a good deal of academic talk about “the functioning
of the social mind”; what does it all amount to? We have no social mind
yet, so we have no functioning of the social mind. We want the directive
force of consciously integrated thought and will. All our ideas of
conscious self-determination lead us to a new method: it is not merely
that we must be allowed to govern ourselves, we must learn how to govern
ourselves; it is not only that we must be given “free speech,” we must
learn a speech that is free; we are not given rights, we create rights;
it is not only that we must invent machinery to get a social will
expressed, we must invent machinery that will get a social will created.
Politics have one task only—to create. To create? But what are politics
to create? The state? The state is now discredited in many quarters. The
extremists cry, “The state is dead, Down with the state.” And it is by
no means the extremists alone who are saying that our present state has
played us false and that therefore we are justified in abolishing it. An
increasing number of men are thinking what one writer has put into
words, “We have passed from the _régime_ of the state to that of the
groups.” We must see if it is necessary to abolish the state in order to
get the advantage of the group.
Many trickles have gone to feed the stream of reaction against the
state: (1) an economic and industrial progress which demands political
recognition, which demands that labor have a share in political power,
(2) the trend of philosophic thought towards pluralism and the whole
anti-intellectualistic tendency, (3) a progressive legal theory of the
“real personality” of groups, (4) a growing antagonism to the state
because it is supposed to embody the crowd mind: our electorate is seen
as a crowd hypnotized by the party leaders, big words, vague ideas and
loose generalizations, (5) our life of rapidly increasing intercourse
has made us see our voluntary associations as real and intimate, the
state as something remote and foreign to us, and (6) the increasing
alignment before the war of interests across state lines.
Every one of these reasons has force. Almost any one of these reasons is
sufficient to turn political theory into new channels, seeking new
currents of political life. Yet if our present state is taken from us
and we are left with our multiple group life, we are at once confronted
with many questions. Shall the new state be based on occupational groups
or neighborhood groups? Shall they form a unifying or a plural state?
Shall the group or the individual be the basis of politics? The
pluralist gives us the group as the unit of politics, but most of the
group theories of politics are as entirely particularistic as the old
“individualistic” theories; our particularism is merely transferred from
the individual to the group.
Pluralism is the most vital trend in political thought to-day, but there
are many dangers lurking in pluralism as at present understood. The
pluralists apotheosize the group; the average American, on the other
hand, is afraid of the group because he thinks of it chiefly in the form
of corporation and trust. Both make the same mistake: both isolate the
group. The group _in relation_ must be the object of our study if that
study is to be fruitful for politics. The pluralists have pointed out
diversity but no pluralist has yet answered satisfactorily the question
to which we must find an answer—What is to be done with this diversity?
Some of the pluralists tend to lose the individual in the group; others,
to abandon the state for the group. But the individual, the group, the
state—they are all there to be reckoned with—we cannot ignore or
minimize any one. The relation of individual to group, of group to
group, of individual and group to state—the part that labor is to have
in the new state—these are the questions to the consideration of which
this book is directed.
This book makes no attempt, however, to construct the new state, only to
offer certain suggestions. But before the details of a new order are
even hinted at, we must look far enough within for our practical
suggestions to have value. In Part I we shall try to find the
fundamental principles which must underlie the new state; in Part II we
shall see how far they are expressed in present political forms; in Part
III we shall consider how they can be expressed. When they are fully
expressed, then we shall have the true Federal State, then we shall see
appearing the World State.
To sum up this Introduction: The immediate problem of political science
is to discover the method of self-government. Industrial democracy, the
self-government of smaller nations, the “sovereignty” of an
International League, our own political power,—how are these to be
attained? Not by being “granted” or “conferred.” Genuine control, power,
authority are always a growth. Self-government is a psychological
process. It is with that psychological process that this book is largely
concerned. To free the way for that process is the task of practical
politics.
New surges of life are pounding at circumference and centre; we must
open the way for their entrance and onflow. To-day the individual is
submerged, smothered, choked by the crowd fallacy, the herd theory. Free
him from these, release his energies, and he with all other Freemen will
work out quick, flexible, constantly changing forms which shall respond
sensitively to every need.
Under our present system, social and economic changes necessary because
of changing social and economic conditions cannot be brought about. The
first reform needed in our political practice is to find some method by
which the government shall continuously represent the people. No state
can endure unless the political bond is being forever forged anew. The
organization of men in small local groups gives opportunity for this
continuous political activity which ceaselessly creates the state. Our
government forms cannot be fossils from a dead age, but must be
sensitive, mobile channels for the quick and quickening soul of the
individual to flow to those larger confluences which finally bring forth
the state. Thus every man _is_ the state at every moment, whether in
daily toil or social intercourse, and thus the state itself, leading a
myriad-membered life, is expressing itself as truly in its humblest
citizen as in its supreme assembly.
The principle of modern politics, the principle of creative citizenship,
must predominantly and preëminently body itself and be acknowledged by
every human being. Then will “practical politics” be for the first time
practical.
* * * * *
A few words of explanation seem necessary. I have no bibliography simply
because any list of references which I could give would necessarily be a
partial one since much of this book has come by wireless. Besides all
that is being written definitely of a new state, the air to-day is full
of the tentative, the partial, the fragmentary thought, the isolated
flash of insight from some genius, all of which is being turned to the
solution of those problems which, from our waking to our sleeping, face
us with their urgent demand. I am here trying to show the need of a wide
and systematic study of these problems, not pretending to be able to
solve them. Much interweaving of thought will be necessary before the
form of the new state appears to us.
Moreover, I have not traced the strands of thought which have led us to
our present ideas. That does not mean that I do not recognize the slow
building up of these ideas or all our indebtedness to the thinkers of
the past. I speak of principles as “new” which we all know were familiar
to Aristotle or Kant and are new to-day only in their application.
The word new is so much used in the present day—New Freedom, New
Democracy, New Society etc.—that it is perhaps well for us to remind
ourselves what we mean by this word. We are using the word new partly in
reaction to the selfishness of the nineteenth century, in reaction to a
world which has culminated in this war, but more especially in the sense
of the live, the real, in contrast to the inert, the dead. It is not a
time distinction—the “new” (the vital) claims fellowship with all that
is “new” (vital) in the past. When we speak of the “New” Freedom we mean
all the reality and truth which have accumulated in all the conceptions
of freedom up to the present moment. The “New” Society is the “Perfect
Society.” The “New” Life is the Vita Nuova, “when spring came to the
heart of Italy.”
It is I hope unnecessary to explain that in my frequent use of the term
“the new psychology,” I am not referring to any definitely formulated
body of thought; there are no writers who are expounding the new
psychology as such. By the “new psychology” I mean something now in the
making: I mean partly that group psychology which is receiving more
attention and gaining more influence every day, and partly I mean simply
that feeling out for a new conception of _modes of association_ which we
see in law, economics, ethics, politics, and indeed in every department
of thought. It is a short way of saying that we are now looking at
things not as entities but in relation. When our modern jurists speak of
the growing emphasis upon relation rather than upon contract—they are
speaking of the “new psychology.”
There is, however, another and very important aspect of contemporary
psychology closely connected with this one of relation. We are to-day
seeking to understand the sources of human motives,[1] and then to free
their channels so that these elemental springs of human activity (the
fundamental instincts of man) shall not be dammed but flow forth in
normal fashion, for normal man is constructive. A few years ago, for
instance, we were satisfied merely to condemn sabotage and repudiation
of law; now we are trying to discover the cause of this deviation from
the normal in order to see if it can be removed. This necessity for the
understanding of the nature and vital needs of men has not yet reached
full self-consciousness, but appears in diverse forms: as the
investigation of the I. W. W., as a study of “Human Nature in Politics,”
an examination of “The Great Society,” as child-study, as Y. M. C. A.
efforts to nourish all sides of men at the front, etc. etc. To-day the
new psychology speaks in many voices. Soon we may hope for some unified
formulation of all this varied and scattered utterance. Soon we may hope
also that the connection will be made between this aspect of
contemporary psychology and the group psychology upon which this book is
mainly founded.
I wish to add my reason for giving quotations from many writers whose
names I have not cited. This has been chiefly because often the sentence
or phrase quoted taken away from all context does not give a fair idea
of the writer’s complete thought, and I have used it not in an attempt
to refute these writers, but merely as illustrating certain tendencies
to which we are all more or less subject at present. Many of the writers
with whom I have disagreed in some particular have been in the main my
teachers and guides.
A certain amount of repetition has seemed necessary in order to look at
the same idea from a number of angles and to make different applications
of the same principle.
From a few friends I have received much help. My thanks are especially
due to my teacher and counsellor of many years, Miss Anna Boynton
Thompson, who went over the first copy of the manuscript with me and
gave to it the most careful consideration and criticism, offering
constantly invaluable suggestion and advice; to her unflagging and most
generous help the final form owes more than I can quite express. The
inception of the book is due to my friends and fellow-workers, Mrs.
Louis Brandeis, Mrs. Richard Cabot and Mr. Arthur Woodworth, as also
much of its thought to the stimulus of “group” discussion with them.
Mrs. Charles W. Mixter, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor H. A.
Overstreet, Professor W. Ernest Hocking and Mr. Roscoe Pound have read
the manuscript in full or in part and have given me many valuable
suggestions. I owe to my friend, Miss Isobel L. Briggs, daily help,
advice and encouragement in the development of the book, and the
revision of manuscript and proofs.
-----
Footnote 1:
See William McDougall, Social Psychology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART I
THE GROUP PRINCIPLE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
THE GROUP AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
--------------
POLITICS must have a technique based on an understanding of the laws of
association, that is, based on a new and progressive social psychology.
Politics alone should not escape all the modern tendency of scientific
method, of analysis, of efficiency engineering. The study of democracy
has been based largely on the study of institutions; it should be based
on the study of how men behave together. We have to deal, not with
institutions, or any mechanical thing, or with abstract ideas, or “man,”
or anything but just men, ordinary men. The importance of the new
psychology is that it acknowledges man as the centre and shaper of his
universe. In his nature all institutions are latent and perforce must be
adapted to this nature. Man not things must be the starting point of the
future.
But man in association, for no man lives to himself. And we must
understand further that the laws of association are the laws of the
group. We have long been trying to understand the relation of the
individual to society; we are only just beginning to see that there is
no “individual,” that there is no “society.” It is not strange,
therefore, that our efforts have gone astray, that our thinking yields
small returns for politics. The old psychology was based on the isolated
individual as the unit, on the assumption that a man thinks, feels and
judges independently. Now that we know that there is no such thing as a
separate ego, that individuals are created by reciprocal interplay, our
whole study of psychology is being transformed.
Likewise there is no “society” thought of vaguely as the mass of people
we see around us. I am always in relation not to “society” but to some
concrete group. When do we ever as a matter of fact think of “society”?
Are we not always thinking of our part in our board of directors or
college faculty, in the dinner party last night,[2] in our football
team, our club, our political party, our trade-union, our church?
Practically “society” is for every one of us a number of groups. The
recognition of this constitutes a new step in sociology analogous to the
contribution William James made in regard to the individual. James
brought to popular recognition the truth that since man is a complex of
experiences there are many selves in each one. So society as a complex
of groups includes many social minds. The craving we have for union is
satisfied by group life, groups and groups, groups ever widening, ever
unifying, but always groups. We sometimes say that man is spiritually
dependent upon society; what we are referring to is his psychic relation
to his groups. The vital relation of the individual to the world is
through his groups; they are the potent factors in shaping our lives.
Hence social psychology cannot be the application of the old individual
psychology to a number of people. A few years ago I went to a lecture on
“Social Psychology,” as the subject was announced. Not a word was said
except on the nervous systems and other aspects of individual
psychology, but at the last moment the lecturer told us that had there
been time he would have applied what he had said to social conditions!
It reminded me of our old acquaintance Silas Wegg who, when he wanted to
know something about Chinese metaphysics, first looked up China in the
encyclopedia and then metaphysics and put them together. The new
psychology must take people with their inheritance, their “tendencies,”
their environment, and then focus its attention on their interrelatings.
The most careful laboratory work must be done to discover the conditions
which make these interrelatings possible, which make these
interrelatings fruitful.
Some writers make “socially minded” tendencies on the part of
individuals the subject of social psychology, but such tendencies belong
still to the field of individual psychology. A social action is not an
individual initiative with social application.[3] Neither is social
psychology the determination of how far social factors determine the
individual consciousness. Social psychology must concern itself
primarily with the _interaction_ of minds.
Early psychology was based on the study of the individual; early
sociology was based on the study of society. But there is no such thing
as the “individual,” there is no such thing as “society”; there is only
the group and the group-unit—the social individual. Social psychology
must begin with an intensive study of the group, of the selective
processes which go on within it, the differentiated reactions, the
likenesses and unlikenesses, and the spiritual energy which unites them.
The acceptance and the living of the new psychology will do away with
all the progeny of particularistic psychology: consent of the governed,
majority rule, external leadership, industrial wars, national wars etc.
From the analysis of the group must come an understanding of
collective thought and collective feeling, of the common will and
concerted activity, of the true nature of freedom, the illusion of
self-and-others, the essential unity of men, the real meaning of
patriotism, and the whole secret of progress and of life as a genuine
interpenetration which produces true community.
All thinking men are demanding a new state. The question is—What form
shall that state take? No one of us will be able to give an answer until
we have studied men in association and have discovered the laws of
association. This has not been done yet, but already we can see that a
political science which is not based on a knowledge of the laws of
association gained by a study of the group will soon seem the crudest
kind of quackery. Syndicalism, in reaction to the so-called
“metaphysical” foundation of politics, is based on “objective rights,”
on function, on its conception of modes of association which shall
emphasize the object of the associated and not the relation of the
associated to one another. The new psychology goes a step further and
sees these as one, but how can any of these things be discussed
abstractly? Must we not first study men in association? Young men in the
hum of actual life, practical politicians, the members of constitutional
conventions, labor leaders—all these must base their work on the
principles of group psychology.
The fundamental reason for the study of group psychology is that no one
can give us democracy, we must learn democracy. To be a democrat is not
to decide on a certain form of human association, it is to learn how to
live with other men. The whole labor movement is being kept back by
people not knowing how to live together much more than by any deliberate
refusal to grant justice. The trouble with syndicalism is that its
success depends on group action and we know almost nothing of the laws
of the group.
I have used group in this book with the meaning of men associating
under the law of interpenetration as opposed to the law of the
crowd—suggestion and imitation. This may be considered an arbitrary
definition, but of course I do not care about the names, I only want to
emphasize the fact that men meet under two different sets of laws.
Social psychology may include both group psychology and crowd
psychology, but of these two group psychology is much the more
important. For a good many years now we have been dominated by the crowd
school, by the school which taught that people met together are governed
by suggestion and imitation, and less notice has been taken of all the
interplay which is the real social process that we have in a group but
not in a crowd. How men behave in crowds, and the relation of the crowd
conception of politics to democracy, will be considered in later
chapters. While I recognize that men are more often at present under the
laws of the crowd than of the group, I believe that progress depends on
the group, and, therefore, that the group should be the basis of a
progressive social psychology. The group process contains the secret of
collective life, it is the key to democracy, it is the master lesson for
every individual to learn, it is our chief hope for the political, the
social, the international life of the future.[4]
-----
Footnote 2:
Probably by no means a group, but tending in some instances in that
direction, as in the discussion or conference dinners now so common.
Footnote 3:
The old definition of the word social has been a tremendous drag on
politics. Social policies are not policies for the good of the people
but policies created by the people, etc. etc. We read in the work of a
continental sociologist, “When a social will is born in the brain of a
man,” but a social will never is born in the brain of a man.
Footnote 4:
This is essentially the process by which sovereignty is created.
Therefore chapters II-VI on The Group Process are the basis of the
conception of sovereignty given in Part III and of the relation of
that conception to the politics of reconstruction.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE IDEA
--------------
LET us begin at once to consider the group process. Perhaps the most
familiar example of the evolving of a group idea is a committee meeting.
The object of a committee meeting is first of all to create a common
idea. I do not go to a committee meeting merely to give my own ideas. If
that were all, I might write my fellow-members a letter. But neither do
I go to learn other people’s ideas. If that were all, I might ask each
to write me a letter. I go to a committee meeting in order that all
together we may create a group idea, an idea which will be better than
any one of our ideas alone, moreover which will be better than all of
our ideas added together. For this group idea will not be produced by
any process of addition, but by the interpenetration of us all. This
subtle psychic process by which the resulting idea shapes itself is the
process we want to study.
Let us imagine that you, I, A, B and C are in conference. Now what from
our observation of groups will take place? Will you say something, and
then I add a little something, and then A, and B, and C, until we have
together built up, brick-wise, an idea, constructed some plan of action?
Never. A has one idea, B another, C’s idea is something different from
either, and so on, but we cannot add all these ideas to find the group
idea. They will not add any more than apples and chairs will add. But we
gradually find that our problem can be solved, not indeed by mechanical
aggregation, but by the subtle process of the intermingling of all the
different ideas of the group. A says something. Thereupon a thought
arises in B’s mind. Is it B’s idea or A’s? Neither. It is a mingling of
the two. We find that A’s idea, after having been presented to B and
returned to A, has become slightly, or largely, different from what it
was originally. In like manner it is affected by C and so on. But in the
same way B’s idea has been affected by all the others, and not only does
A’s idea feel the modifying influence of each of the others, but A’s
ideas are affected by B’s relation to all the others, and A’s plus B’s
are affected by all the others individually and collectively, and so on
and on until the common idea springs into being.
We find in the end that it is not a question of my idea being
supplemented by yours, but that there has been evolved a composite idea.
But by the time we have reached this point we have become tremendously
civilized people, for we have learned one of the most important lessons
of life: we have learned to do that most wonderful thing, to say “I”
representing a whole instead of “I” representing one of our separate
selves. The course of action decided upon is what we all together want,
and I see that it is better than what I had wanted alone. It is what _I_
now want. We have all experienced this at committee meetings or
conferences.
We see therefore that we cannot view the content of the collective mind
as a holiday procession, one part after another passing before our
mental eyes; every part is bound up with every other part, every
tendency is conditioned by every other tendency. It is like a game of
tennis. A serves the ball to B. B returns the serve but his play is
influenced as largely by the way the ball has been served to him as it
is by his own method of return. A sends the ball back to B, but his
return is made up of his own play plus the way in which the ball has
been played to him by B plus his own original serve. Thus in the end
does action and reaction become inextricably bound up together.
I have described briefly the group process. Let us consider what is
required of the individual in order that the group idea shall be
produced. First and foremost each is to do his part. But just here we
have to get rid of some rather antiquated notions. The individual is not
to facilitate agreement by courteously (!) waiving his own point of
view. That is just a way of shirking. Nor may I say, “Others are able to
plan this better than I.” Such an attitude is the result either of
laziness or of a misconception. There are probably many present at the
conference who could make wiser plans than I alone, but that is not the
point, we have come together each to give something. I must not
subordinate myself, I must affirm myself and give my full positive value
to that meeting.
And as the psychic coherence of the group can be obtained only by the
full contribution of every member, so we see that a readiness to
compromise must be no part of the individual’s attitude. Just so far as
people think that the basis of working together is compromise or
concession, just so far they do not understand the first principles of
working together. Such people think that when they have reached an
appreciation of the necessity of compromise they have reached a high
plane of social development; they conceive themselves as nobly willing
to sacrifice part of their desire, part of their idea, part of their
will, in order to secure the undoubted benefit of concerted action. But
compromise is still on the same plane as fighting. War will
continue—between capital and labor, between nation and nation—until we
relinquish the ideas of compromise and concession.[5]
But at the same time that we offer fully what we have to give, we must
be eager for what all others have to give. If I ought not to go to my
group feeling that I must give up my own ideas in order to accept the
opinions of others, neither ought I to go to force my ideas upon others.
The “harmony” that comes from the domination of one man is not the kind
we want. At a board of directors’ meeting once Mr. E. H. Harriman said,
“Gentlemen, we must have coöperation. I insist upon it.” They
“coöperated” and all his motions were put through. At the end of the
meeting some one asked Mr. Harriman to define coöperation. “Oh, that’s
simple,” he said, “do as I say and do it damned quick.”
There are many people who conscientiously go to their group thinking it
their duty to impose their ideas upon others, but the time is coming
soon when we are going to see that we have no more right to get our own
way by persuading people than by bullying or bribing them. To take our
full share in the synthesis is all that is legitimate.[6]
Thus the majority idea is not the group idea. Suppose I belong to a
committee composed of five: of A, B, C, D and myself. According to the
old theory of my duties as a committee member I might say, “A agrees
with me, if I can get B to agree with me that will make a majority and I
can carry my point.” That is, we five can then present this idea to the
world as our group idea. But this is not a group idea, although it may
be the best substitute we can get for the moment. To a genuine group
idea every man must contribute what is in him to contribute. Thus even
the passing of a unanimous vote by a group of five does not prove the
existence of a group idea if two or three (or even one) out of
indifference or laziness or prejudice, or shut-upness, or a
misconception of their function, have not added their individual thought
to the creation of the group thought. No member of a group which is to
create can be passive. All must be active and constructively active.
It is not, however, to be constructively active merely to add a share:
it must be a share which is related to and bound up with every other
share. And it must be given in such a way that it fits in with what
others are giving. Some one said to me the other day, “Don’t you think
Mr. X talks better than anyone else in Boston?” Well the fact is that
Mr. X talks so well that I can never talk with him. Everything he says
has such a ring of finality, is such a rounding up of the whole
question, that it leaves nothing more to be said on the subject. This is
particularly the kind of thing to be avoided in a committee meeting or
conference.
There are many people, moreover, who want to score, to be brilliant,
rather than to find agreement. Others come prepared with what they are
going to say and either this has often been said long before they get a
chance to speak, or, in any case, it allows no give-and-take, so they
contribute nothing; when we really learn the process our ideas will be
struck out by the interplay. To compare notes on what we have thought
separately is not to think together.
I asked a man once to join a committee I was organizing and he replied
that he would be very glad to come and give his advice. I didn’t want
him—and didn’t have him. I asked another man and he said he would like
very much to come and learn but that he couldn’t contribute anything. I
didn’t have him either—I hadn’t a school. Probably the last man thought
he was being modest and, therefore, estimable. But what I wanted was to
get a group of people who would deliberately work out a thing together.
I should have liked very much to have the man who felt that he had
advice to give if he had had also what we are now learning to call the
social attitude, that is, that of a man willing to take his place in the
group, no less and no more. This definition of social attitude is very
different from our old one—the willingness to give; my friend who wanted
to come and give advice had that, but that is a crude position compared
with the one we are now advocating.
It is clear then that we do not go to our group—trade-union, city
council, college faculty—to be passive and learn, and we do not go to
push through something we have already decided we want. Each must
discover and contribute that which distinguishes him from others, his
difference. The only use for my difference is to join it with other
differences. The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.[7] We
must have an imagination which will leap from the particular to the
universal. Our joy, our satisfaction, must always be in the more
inclusive aspect of our problem.
We can test our group in this way: do we come together to register the
results of individual thought, to compare the results of individual
thought in order to make selections therefrom, or do we come together to
create a common idea? Whenever we have a real group something new _is_
actually created. We can now see therefore that the object of group life
is not to find the best individual thought, but the collective thought.
A committee meeting isn’t like a prize show aimed at calling out the
best each can possibly produce and then the prize (the vote) awarded to
the best of all these individual opinions. The object of a conference is
not to get at a lot of different ideas, as is often thought, but just
the opposite—to get at one idea. There is nothing rigid or fixed about
thoughts, they are entirely plastic, and ready to yield themselves
completely to their master—the group spirit.[8]
I have given some of the conditions necessary for collective thinking.
In every governing board—city councils, hospital and library trustees,
the boards of colleges and churches, in business and industry, in
directors’ meetings—no device should be neglected which will help to
produce joint rather than individual thinking. But no one has yet given
us a scientific analysis of the conditions necessary or how to fulfil
them. We do not yet know, for instance, the best number to bring out the
group idea, the number, that is, which will bring out as many
differences as possible and yet form a whole or group. We cannot guess
at it but only get it through scientific experiments. Much laboratory
work has to be done. The numbers on Boards of Education, on Governors’
Commissions, should be determined by psychological as well as by
political reasons.
Again it is said that private sessions are undemocratic. If they
contribute to true collective thinking (instead of efforts to dazzle the
gallery), then, in so far, they are democratic, for there is nothing in
the world so democratic as the production of a genuine group will.
Mr. Gladstone must have appreciated the necessity of making conditions
favorable to joint thinking, for I have been told that at important
meetings of the Cabinet he planned beforehand where each member should
sit.
The members of a group are reciprocally conditioning forces none of
which acts as it would act if any one member were different or absent.
You can often see this in a board of directors: if one director leaves
the room, every man becomes slightly different.
When the conditions for collective thinking are more or less fulfilled,
then the expansion of life will begin. Through my group I learn the
secret of wholeness.[9] The inspiration of the group is proportionate to
the degree in which we do actually identify ourselves with the whole and
think that _we_ are doing this, not Mr. A and Mr. B and I, but we, the
united we, the singular not the plural pronoun we. (We shall have to
write a new grammar to meet the needs of the times, as non-Euclidean
geometries are now being published.) Then we shall no longer have a
feeling of individual triumph, but feel only elation that the group has
accomplished something. Much of the evil of our political and social
life comes from the fact that we crave personal recognition and personal
satisfaction; as soon as our greatest satisfaction is group
satisfaction, many of our present problems will disappear. When one
thinks of one’s self as part of a group, it means keener moral
perceptions, greater strength of will, more enthusiasm and zest in life.
We shall enjoy living the social life when we understand it; the things
which we do and achieve together will give us much greater happiness
than the things we do and achieve by ourselves. It has been asked what,
in peace, is going to take the place of those songs men sing as they
march to battle which at the same time thrill and unite them. The songs
which the hearts of men will sing as they go forward in life with one
desire—the song of the common will, the social will of man.
Men descend to meet? This is not my experience. The _laissez-aller_
which people allow themselves when alone disappears when they meet. Then
they pull themselves together and give one another of their best. We see
this again and again. Sometimes the ideal of the group stands quite
visibly before us as one which none of us is quite living up to by
himself. We feel it there, an impalpable, substantial thing in our
midst. It raises us to the n^{th} power of action, it fires our minds
and glows in our hearts and fulfils and actuates itself no less, but
rather on this very account, because it has been generated only by our
being together.
-----
Footnote 5:
This is the heart of the latest ethical teaching based on the most
progressive psychology: between two apparently conflicting courses of
action, _a_ and _b_, _a_ is not to be followed and _b_ suppressed, nor
_b_ followed and _a_ suppressed, nor must a compromise between the two
be sought, but the process must always be one of integration. Our
progress is measured by our ability to proceed from integration to
integration.
Footnote 6:
This statement may be misunderstood unless there is borne in mind at
the same time: (1) the necessity for the keenest individual thinking
as the basis of group thinking, and (2) that every man should maintain
his point of view until it has found its place in the group thought,
that is, until he has been neither overruled nor absorbed but
integrated.
Footnote 7:
We must not of course confuse the type of unifying spoken of here (an
integration), which is a psychological process, with the
“reconciliation of opposites,” which is a logical process.
Footnote 8:
I am sometimes told that mine is a counsel of perfection only to be
realized in the millenium, but we cannot take even the first step
until we have chosen our path.
Footnote 9:
The break in the English Cabinet in 1915, which led to the coalition
Cabinet, came when both Kitchener and Churchill tried to substitute
individual for group action.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE IDEA
(CONTINUED)
--------------
WHAT then is the essence of the group process by which are evolved the
collective thought and the collective will? It is an acting and
reacting, a single and identical process which brings out differences
and integrates them into a unity. The complex reciprocal action, the
intricate interweavings of the members of the group, is the social
process.
We see now that the process of the many becoming one is not a
metaphysical or mystical idea; psychological analysis shows us how we
can at the same moment be the self and the other, it shows how we can be
forever apart and forever united. It is by the group process that the
transfiguration of the external into the spiritual takes place, that is,
that what seems a series becomes a whole. The essence of society is
difference, related difference. “Give me your difference” is the cry of
society to-day to every man.[10]
But the older sociology made the social mind the consciousness of
likeness. This likeness was accounted for by two theories chiefly: the
imitation theory and the like-response-to-like-stimuli theory. It is
necessary to consider these briefly, for they have been gnawing at the
roots of all our political life.
To say that the social process is that merely of the spread of
similarities is to ignore the real nature of the collective thought, the
collective will. Individual ideas do not become social ideas when
communicated. The difference between them is one of kind. A collective
thought is one evolved by a collective process. The essential feature of
a common thought is not that it is held in common but that it has been
produced in common.
Likewise if every member of a group has the same thought, that is not a
group idea: when all respond simultaneously to the same stimulus, it
cannot be assumed that this is in obedience to a collective will. When
all the men in a street run round the corner to see a procession, it is
not because they are moved by a collective thought.
Imitation indeed has a place in the collective life, it is one of the
various means of coadaptation between men, but it is only a part and a
part which has been fatally overemphasized.[11] It is one of the fruits
of particularism. “Imitation” has been made the bridge to span the gap
between the individual and society, but we see now that there is no gap,
therefore no bridge is necessary.
The core of the social process is not likeness, but the harmonizing of
difference through interpenetration.[12] But to be more accurate,
similarity and difference can not be opposed in this external way—they
have a vital connection. Similarities and differences make up the
differentiated reactions of the group; that is what constitutes their
importance, not their likeness or unlikeness as such. I react to a
stimulus: that reaction may represent a likeness or an unlikeness.
Society is the unity of these differentiated reactions. In other words
the process is not that merely of accepting or rejecting, it is bound up
in the interknitting. In that continuous coördinating which constitutes
the social process both similarity and difference have a place. Unity is
brought about by the reciprocal adaptings of the reactions of
individuals, and this reciprocal adapting is based on both agreement and
difference.
To push our analysis a little further, we must distinguish between the
given similarity and the achieved similarity. The common at any moment
is always the given: it has come from heredity, biological influences,
suggestion and imitation, and the previous workings of the law of
interpenetration. All the accumulated effect of these is seen in our
habits of thinking, our modes of living. But we cannot rest in the
common. The surge of life sweeps through the given similarity, the
common ground, and breaks it up into a thousand differences. This
tumultuous, irresistible flow of life is our existence: the unity, the
common, is but for an instant, it flows on to new differings which
adjust themselves anew in fuller, more varied, richer synthesis. The
moment when similarity achieves itself as a composite of working,
seething forces, it throws out its myriad new differings. The torrent
flows into a pool, works, ferments, and then rushes forth until all is
again gathered into the new pool of its own unifying.
This is the process of evolution. Social progress is to be sure
coadapting, but coadapting means always that the fresh unity becomes the
pole of a fresh difference leading to again new unities which lead to
broader and broader fields of activity.
Thus no one of course undertakes to deny the obvious fact that in order
to have a society a certain amount of similarity must exist. In one
sense society rests on likeness: the likeness between men is deeper than
their difference. We could not have an enemy unless there was much in
common between us. With my friend all the aims that we share unite us.
In a given society the members have the same interests, the same ends,
in the main, and seek a common fulfilment. Differences are always
grounded in an underlying similarity. But all this kind of “similarity”
isn’t worth mentioning because we _have_ it. The very fact that it is
common to us all condemns it from the point of view of progress.
Progress does not depend upon the similarity which we _find_ but upon
the similarity which we _achieve_.
The new psychology, therefore, gives us individual responsibility as the
central fact of life because it demands that we grow our own
like-mindedness. To-day we are basing all our hopes not on the given
likeness but the created unity. To rest in the given likeness would be
to annihilate social progress. The organization of industry and the
settlement of international relations must come under the domination of
this law. The Allies are fighting to-day with one impulse, one desire,
one aim, but at the peace table many differences will arise between
them. The progress of the whole world at that moment will depend upon
the “similarity” we can create. This “similarity” will consist of all we
now hold in common and also, of the utmost importance for the
continuance of civilization, upon our ability to unify our differences.
If we go to that peace table with the idea that the new world is to be
based on that community of interest and aim which now animates us, the
disillusion will be great, the result an overwhelming failure.
Let us henceforth, therefore, use the word unifying instead of
similarity to represent the basis of association. And let us clearly
understand that unifying is a process involving the continuous activity
of every man. To await “variation-giving” individuals would be to make
life a mere chance. We cannot wait for new ideas to appear among us, we
must ourselves produce them. This makes possible the endless creation of
new social values. The old like-minded theory is too fortuitous, too
passive and too negative to attract us; creating is the divine
adventure.
Let us imagine a group of people whom we know. If we find the life of
that group consisting chiefly of imitation, we see that it involves no
activity of the real self but crushes and smothers it. Imitation
condemns the human race. Even if up to the present moment imitation has
been a large factor in man’s development, from this moment on such a
smothering of all the forces of life must cease.
If we have, however, among this group “like-response,” that is if there
spring up like thoughts and feelings, we find a more dignified and
worthy life—fellowship claims us with all its joys and its enlargement
of our single self. But there is no progress here. We give ourselves up
to the passive enjoyment of that already existing. We have found our
kindred and it comforts us. How much greater enhancement comes from that
life foreshadowed by the new psychology where each one is to go forth
from his group a richer being because each one has taken and put into
its right membership all the vital differences of all the others. The
like-mindedness which the new psychology demands is the like-mindedness
which is brought about by the enlargement of each by the inflowing of
every other one. Then I go forth a new creature. But to what do I go
forth? Always to a new group, a new “society.” There is no end to this
process. A new being springs forth from every fresh contact. My nature
opens and opens to thousands of new influences. I feel countless new
births. Such is the glory of our common every-day life.
Imitation is for the shirkers, like-mindedness for the comfort lovers,
unifying for the creators.
The lesson of the new psychology is then: Never settle down within the
theory you have chosen, the cause you have embraced; know that another
theory, another cause exists, and seek that. The enhancement of life is
not for the comfort-lover. As soon as you succeed—real success means
something arising to overthrow your security.
In all the discussion of “similarity” too much importance has been put
upon analogies from the animal world.[13] We are told, for instance, and
important conclusions are drawn in regard to human society, that the
gregarious instinct of any animal receives satisfaction only through the
presence of animals similar to itself, and that the closer the
similarity the greater the satisfaction. True certainly for animals, but
it is this fact which keeps them mere animals. As far as the irrational
elements of life give way to the rational, interpenetration becomes the
law of association. Man’s biological inheritance is not his only life.
And the progress of man means that this inheritance shall occupy a less
and less important place relatively.
It has been necessary to consider the similarity theory, I have said,
because it has eaten its way into all our thought.[14] Many people
to-day seem to think that progress depends upon a number of people all
speaking loudly together. The other day a woman said to me that she
didn’t like the _Survey_ because it has on one page a letter from a
conservative New York banker and on another some radical proposal for
the reconstruction of society; she said she preferred a paper which took
one idea and hammered away on that. This is poor psychology. It is the
same reasoning which makes people think that certain kindred souls
should come together, and then by a certain intensified thinking and
living together some noble product will emerge for the benefit of the
world. Such association is based on a wrong principle. However various
the reasons given for the non-success of such experiments as Brook Farm,
certain religious associations, and certain artistic and literary groups
who have tried to live together, the truth is that most of them have
died simply of non-nutrition. The bond created had not within it the
variety which the human soul needs for its nourishment.
Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through
variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor
absorbed.[15] Anarchy means unorganized, unrelated difference;
coördinated, unified difference belongs to our ideal of a perfect social
order. We don’t want to avoid our adversary but to “agree with him
quickly”; we must, however, learn the technique of agreeing. As long as
we think of difference as that which divides us, we shall dislike it;
when we think of it as that which unites us, we shall cherish it.
Instead of shutting out what is different, we should welcome it because
it is different and through its difference will make a richer content of
life. The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics
or industry or international life: every difference that is swept up
into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference
which is ignored feeds _on_ society and eventually corrupts it.
Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, I repeat, makes unity. Indeed as we go
from groups of the lower types to groups of the higher types, we go from
those with many resemblances to those with more and more striking
differences. The higher the degree of social organization the more it is
based on a very wide diversity among its members. The people who think
that London is the most civilized spot in the world give as evidence
that it is the only city in which you can eat a bun on a street corner
without being noticed. In London, in other words, difference is expected
of us. In Boston you cannot eat a bun on the street corner, at least not
without unpleasant consequences.
Give _your_ difference, welcome _my_ difference, unify _all_ difference
in the larger whole—such is the law of growth. The unifying of
difference is the eternal process of life—the creative synthesis, the
highest act of creation, the at-onement. The implications of this
conception when we come to define democracy are profound.
And throughout our participation in the group process we must be ever on
our guard that we do not confuse differences and antagonisms, that
diversity does not arouse hostility. Suppose a friend says something
with which I do not agree. It may be that instantly I feel antagonistic,
feel as if we were on opposite sides, and my emotions are at once tinged
with some of the enmity which being on opposite sides usually brings.
Our relations become slightly strained, we change the subject as soon as
possible, etc. But suppose we were really civilized beings, then we
should think: “How interesting this is, this idea has evidently a larger
content than I realized; if my friend and I can unify this material, we
shall separate with a larger idea than either of us had before.” If my
friend and I are always trying to find the things upon which we agree,
what is the use of our meeting? Because the consciousness of agreement
makes us happy? It is a shallow happiness, only felt by people too
superficial or too shut-up or too vain to feel that richer joy which
comes from having taken part in an act of creation—created a new thought
by the uniting of differences. A friendship based on likenesses and
agreements alone is a superficial matter enough. The deep and lasting
friendship is one capable of recognizing and dealing with all the
fundamental differences that must exist between any two individuals, one
capable therefore of such an enrichment of our personalities that
together we shall mount to new heights of understanding and endeavor.
Some one ought to write an essay on the dangers to the soul of
congeniality. Pleasant little glows of feeling can never be fanned into
the fire which becomes the driving force of progress.
In trying to explain the social process I may have seemed to over
emphasize difference as difference. Difference as difference is
non-existent. There is only difference which carries within itself the
power of unifying. It is this latent power which we must forever and
ever call forth. Difference in itself is not a vital force, but what
accompanies it is—the unifying spirit.
Throughout my description of the group process I have taken
committee-meetings, conferences etc. for illustration, but really the
object of every associating with others, of every conversation with
friends, in fact, should be to try to bring out a bigger thought than
any one alone could contribute. How different our dinner parties would
be if we could do this. And I mean without too labored an effort, but
merely by recognizing certain elementary rules of the game. Creation is
always possible when people meet; this is the wonderful interest of
life. But it depends upon us so to manage our meetings that there shall
be some result, not just a frittering away of energy, unguided because
not understood. All our private life is to be public life. This does not
mean that we cannot sit with a friend by our fireside; it does mean
that, private and gay as that hour may be, at the same time that very
intimacy and lightness must in its way be serving the common cause, not
in any fanciful sense, but because there is always the consciousness of
my most private concerns as tributary to the larger life of men. But
words are misleading: I do not mean that we are always to be thinking
about it—it must be such an abiding sense that we never think of it.
Thus the new psychology teaches us that the core of the group process is
creating. The essential value of the new psychology is that it carries
enfolded within it the obligation upon every man to live the New Life.
In no other system of thought has the Command been so clear, so
insistent, so compelling. Every individual is necessary to the whole. On
the other hand, every member participates in that power of a whole which
is so much greater than the addition of its separate forces. The
increased strength which comes to me when I work with others is not a
numerical thing, is not because I feel that ten of us have ten times the
strength of one. It is because all together we have struck out a new
power in the universe. Ten of us may have ten, or a hundred, or a
thousand times the strength of one—or rather you cannot measure it
mathematically at all.
The law of the group is not arbitrary but intrinsic. Nothing is more
practical for our daily lives than an understanding of this. The
group-spirit is the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night—it is
our infallible guide—it is the Spirit of democracy. It has all our love
and all our devotion, but this comes only when we have to some extent
identified ourselves with It, or rather perhaps identified It with all
our common, every-day lives. We can never dominate another or be
dominated by another; the group-spirit is always our master.
-----
Footnote 10:
Free speech is not an “individual” right; society needs every man’s
difference.
Footnote 11:
It has been overemphasized in two ways: first, many of the writers on
imitation ignore the fact that the other law of association, that of
interpenetrating, is also in operation in our social life, as well as
the fact that it has always been the fundamental law of existence;
secondly, they speak as if it were _necessary_ for human beings to be
under the law of imitation, not that it is merely a stage in our
development.
Footnote 12:
This is the alpha and omega of philosophical teaching: Heraclitus
said, “Nature desires eagerly opposites and out of them it completes
its harmony, not out of similars.” And James, twenty-four hundred
years later, has given his testimony that the process of life is to
“compenetrate.”
Footnote 13:
Also the group-units of early societies are studied to the exclusion
of group-units within modern complex society.
Footnote 14:
Even some of our most advanced thinking, which repudiates the
like-minded theory and takes pains to prove that imitation is not an
instinct, nevertheless falls into some of the errors implicit in the
imitation theory.
Footnote 15:
When we come in Part III to consider the group process in relation to
certain political methods now being proposed, we shall find that part
of the present disagreement of opinion is verbal. I therefore give
here a list of words which can be used to describe the genuine social
process and a list which gives exactly the wrong idea of it. Good
words: integrate, interpenetrate, interpermeate, compenetrate,
compound, harmonize, correlate, coördinate, interweave, reciprocally
relate or adapt or adjust, etc. Bad words: fuse, melt, amalgamate,
assimilate, weld, dissolve, absorb, reconcile (if used in Hegelian
sense), etc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE FEELING
--------------
THE unification of thought, however, is only a part of the social
process. We must consider, besides, the unification of feeling,
affection, emotion, desire, aspiration—all that we are. The relation of
the feelings to the development of the group has yet to be sufficiently
studied. The analysis of the group process is beginning to show us the
origin and nature of the true sympathy. The group process is a rational
process. We can no longer therefore think of sympathy as “contagion of
feeling” based on man’s “inherited gregarious instinct.” But equally
sympathy cannot belong to the next stage in our development—the
particularistic. Particularistic psychology, which gave us ego and
alter, gave us sympathy going across from one isolated being to another.
Now we begin with the group. We see in the self-unifying of the group
process, and all the myriad unfoldings involved, the central and
all-germinating activity of life. The group creates. In the group, we
have seen, is formed the collective idea, “similarity” is there
achieved, sympathy too is born within the group—it springs forever from
interrelation. The emotions I feel when apart belong to the phantom ego;
only from the group comes the genuine feeling _with_—the true sympathy,
the vital sympathy, the just and balanced sympathy.
From this new understanding of sympathy as essentially involved in the
group process, as part of the generating activity of the group, we learn
two lessons: that sympathy cannot antedate the group process, and that
it must not be confused with altruism. It had been thought until
recently by many writers that sympathy came before the social process.
Evidences were collected among animals of the “desire to help” other
members of the same species, and the conclusion drawn that sympathy
exists and that the result is “mutual aid.” But sympathy cannot antedate
the activity. We do not however now say that there is an “instinct” to
help and then that sympathy is the result of the helping; the feeling
and the activity are involved one in the other.
It is asked, Was Bentham right in making the desire for individual
happiness the driving force of society, or was Comte right in saying
that love for our fellow creatures is as “natural” a feeling as
self-interest? Many such questions, which have long perplexed us, will
be answered by a progressive social psychology. The reason we have found
it difficult to answer such questions is because we have thought of
egoistic or altruistic feelings as preëxisting; we have studied action
to see what precedent characteristics it indicated. But when we begin to
see that men possess no characteristics apart from the unifying process,
then it is the process we shall study.
Secondly, we can no longer confuse sympathy and altruism. Sympathy, born
of our union, rises above both egoism and altruism. We see now that a
classification of ego feelings and alter feelings is not enough, that
there are always whole feelings to be accounted for, that true sympathy
is sense of community, consciousness of oneness. I am touched by a story
of want and suffering, I send a check, denying myself what I have
eagerly desired in order to do so,—is that sympathy? It is the old
particularistic sympathy, but it is not the sympathy which is a group
product, which has come from the actual intermingling of myself with
those who are in want and suffering. It may be that I do more harm than
good with my check because I do not really know what the situation
demands. The sympathy which springs up within the group is a productive
sympathy.
But, objects a friend, if I meet a tramp who has been drinking whiskey,
I can feel only pity for him, I can have no sense of oneness. Yes, the
tramp and I are bound together by a thousand invisible bonds. He is a
part of that society for which I am responsible. I have not been doing
my entire duty; because of that a society has been built up which makes
it possible for that tramp to exist and for whiskey drinking to be his
chief pleasure.
A good illustration of both the errors mentioned—making sympathy
antedate the group process and the confusion of sympathy and altruism—we
see frequently in the discussion of coöperation in the business world.
The question often asked, “Does modern coöperation depend upon
self-interest or upon sympathy?” is entirely misleading as regards the
real nature of sympathy. Suppose six manufacturers meet to discuss some
form of union. There was a time when we should have been told that if
each man were guided entirely by what would benefit his own plant,
trusting the other five to be equally interested each in his own,
thereby the interest of all would be evolved. Then there came a time
when many thinkers denied this and said, “Coöperation cannot exist
without some feeling of altruism; every one of those manufacturers must
go to the meeting with the feeling that the interests of the other five
should be considered as well as his own; he must be guided as much by
sympathy as by self-interest.” But our new psychology teaches us that
what these men need most is not altruistic feelings, but a consciousness
of themselves as a new unit and a realization of the needs of that unit.
The process of forming this new unit generates such realization which is
sympathy. This true sympathy, therefore, is not a vague sentiment they
bring with them; it springs from their meeting to be in its turn a vital
factor in their meeting. The needs of that new unit may be so different
from that of any one of the manufacturers alone that altruistic feelings
might be wasted! The new ethics will never preach alter feelings but
whole feelings. Sympathy is a whole feeling; it is a recognition of
oneness. Perhaps the new psychology has no more interesting task than to
define for us that true sympathy which is now being born in a society
which is shedding its particularistic garments and clothing itself in
the mantle of wholeness.
To sum up: sympathy is not pity, it is not benevolence, it is one of the
goals of the future, it cannot be actualized until we can think and feel
together. At present we confuse it with altruism and all the
particularist progeny, but sympathy is always a group product;
benevolence, philanthropy, tenderness, fervor, ardor, pity, may be
possible to me alone, but sympathy is not possible alone. The
particularist stage has been necessary to our development, but we stand
now on the threshold of another age: we see there humanity consciously
generating its own activity, its own purpose and all that it needs for
the accomplishment of that purpose. We must now fit ourselves to cross
that threshold. Our faces have turned to a new world; to train our
footsteps to follow the way is now our task.
This means that we must live the group life. This is the solution of our
problems, national and international. Employers and employed cannot be
exhorted to feel sympathy one for the other; true sympathy will come
only by creating a community or group of employers and employed. Through
the group you find the details, the filling-out of Kant’s universal law.
Kant’s categorical imperative is general, is empty; it is only a blank
check. But through the life of the group we learn the content of
universal law.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE WILL
--------------
FROM the group process arise social understanding and true sympathy. At
the same moment appears the social will which is the creative will. Many
writers are laying stress on the _possibilities_ of the collective will;
what I wish to emphasize is the necessity of _creating_ the collective
will. Many people talk as if the collective will were lying round loose
to be caught up whenever we like, but the fact is we must go to our
group and see that it is brought into existence.
Moreover, we go to our group to learn the process. We sometimes hear the
advantages of collective planning spoken of as if an act of Congress or
Parliament could substitute collective for individual planning! But it
is only by doing the deed that we shall learn this doctrine. We learn
how to create the common will in our groups, and we learn here not only
the process but its value. When I can see that agreement with my
neighbor for larger ends than either of us is pursuing alone is of the
same essence as capital and labor learning to think together, as Germany
and the Allies evolving a common will, then I am ready to become a part
of the world process. To learn how to evolve the social will day by day
with my neighbors and fellow-workers is what the world is demanding of
me to-day. This is getting into the inner workshop of democracy.
Until we learn this lesson war cannot stop, no constructive work can be
done. The very essence and substance of democracy is the creating of the
collective will. Without this activity the forms of democracy are
useless, and the aims of democracy are always unfulfilled. Without this
activity both political and industrial democracy must be a chaotic,
stagnating, self-stultifying assemblage. Many of the solutions offered
to-day for our social problems are vitiated by their mechanical nature,
by assuming that if society were given a new form, the socialistic for
instance, what we desire would follow. But this assumption is not true.
The deeper truth, perhaps the deepest, is that _the will to will the
common will_ is the core, the germinating centre of that large, still
larger, ever larger life which we are coming to call the true democracy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
THE UNITY OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS
--------------
WE have seen that the common idea and the common will are born together
in the social process. One does not lead to the other, each is involved
in the other. But the collective thought and the collective will are not
yet complete, they are hardly an embryo. They carry indeed within
themselves their own momentum, but they complete themselves only through
activity in the world of affairs, of work, of government. This
conception does away with the whole discussion, into which much ardor
has gone, of the priority of thought or action in the social life. There
is no order. The union of thought and will and activity by which the
clearer will is generated, the social process, is a perfect unity.
We see this in our daily life where we do not finish our thought,
construct our will, and then begin our actualizing. Not only the
actualizing goes on at the same time, but its reactions help us to shape
our thought, to energize our will. We have to digest our social
experience, but we have to have social experience before we can digest
it. We must learn and build and learn again through the building, or we
must build and learn and build again through the learning.
We sit around the council table not blank pages but made up of all our
past experiences. Then we evolve a so-called common will, then we take
it into the concrete world to see if it will work. In so far as it does
work, it proves itself; in so far as it does not, it generates the
necessary idea to make it “common.” Then again we test and so on and so
on. In our work always new and necessary modifications arise which again
in actualizing _themselves_, again modify themselves. This is the
process of the generation of the common will. First it appears as an
ideal, secondly it works itself out in the material sphere of life,
thereby generating itself in a new form and so on forever and ever. All
is a-making. This is the process of creating the absolute or Good Will.
To elevate General Welfare into our divinity makes a golden calf of it,
erects it as something external to ourselves with an absolute nature of
its own, whereas it is the ever new adjusting of ever new relatings to
one another. The common will never finds perfection but is always
seeking it. Progress is an infinite advance towards the infinitely
receding goal of infinite perfection.
How important this principle is will appear later when we apply these
ideas to politics. Democratic ideals will never advance unless we are
given the opportunity of constantly embodying them in action, which
action will react on our ideals. Thought and will go out into the
concrete world in order to generate their own complete form. This gives
us both the principle and the method of democracy. A democratic
community is one in which the common will is being gradually created by
the civic activity of its citizens. The test of democracy is the fulness
with which this is being done. The practical thought for our
political life is that the collective will exists only through its
self-actualizing and self-creating in new and larger and more perfectly
adjusted forms.
Thus the unity of the social process becomes clear to us. We now gain a
conception of “right,” of purpose, of loyalty to that purpose, not as
particularistic ideas but as arising within the process.
RIGHT
We are evolving now a system of ethics which has three conceptions in
regard to right, conscience and duty which are different from much of
our former ethical teaching: (1) we do not follow right, we create
right, (2) there is no private conscience, (3) my duty is never to
“others” but to the whole.
First, we do not follow right merely, we create right. It is often
thought vaguely that our ideals are all there, shining and splendid, and
we have only to apply them. But the truth is that we have to create our
ideals. No ideal is worth while which does not grow from our actual
life. Some people seem to keep their ideals all carefully packed away
from dust and air, but arranged alphabetically so that they can get at
them quickly in need. But we can never take out a past ideal for a
present need. The ideal which is to be used for our life must come out
from that very life itself. The only way our past ideals can help us is
in moulding the life which produces the present ideal; we have no
further use for them. But we do not discard them: we have built them
into the present—we have used them up as the cocoon is used up in making
the silk. It has been sometimes taught that given the same situation,
the individual must repeat the same behavior. But the situation is never
the same, the individual is never the same; such a conception has
nothing to do with life. We cannot do our duty in the old sense, that is
of following a crystallized ideal, because our duty is new at every
moment.
Moreover, the knowledge of what is due the whole is revealed within the
life of the whole. This is above everything else what a progressive
ethics must teach—not faithfulness to duty merely, but faithfulness to
the life which evolves duty. Indeed “following our duty” often means
mental and moral atrophy. Man cannot live by tabus; that means
stagnation. But as one tabu after another is disappearing, the call is
upon us deliberately to build our own moral life. Our ethical sense will
surely starve on predigested food. It is we by our acts who
progressively construct the moral universe; to follow some preconceived
body of law—that is not for responsible moral beings. In so far as we
obey old standards without interpenetrating them with the actual world,
we are abdicating our creative power.
Further, the group in its distributive aspect is bringing such new
elements into the here and now that life is wholly changed, and the
ethical commands therein involved are different, and therefore the task
of the group is to discover the new formulation which these new elements
demand. The moral law thus gathers to itself all the richness of
science, of art, of all the fulness of our daily living.
The group consciousness of right thus developed becomes our daily
imperative. No mandate from without has power over us. There are many
forms of the fallacy that the governing and the governed can be two
different bodies, and this one of conforming to standards which we have
not created must be recognized as such before we can have any sound
foundation for society. When the ought is not a mandate from without, it
is no longer a prohibition but a self-expression. As the social
consciousness develops, ought will be swallowed up in will. We are some
time truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of
continuous willing, not of restraints and prohibition. Morality is not
the refraining from doing certain things—it is a constructive force.
So in the education of our young people it is not enough to teach them
their “duty,” somehow there must be created for them to live in a world
of high purpose to which their own psychic energies will instinctively
respond. The craving for self-expression, self-realization, must see
quite naturally for its field of operation the community. This is the
secret of education: when the waters of our life are part of the sea of
human endeavor, duty will be a difficult word for our young people to
understand; it is a glorious consciousness we want, not a painstaking
conscience. It is ourselves soaked with the highest, not a Puritanical
straining to fulfil an external obligation, which will redeem the world.
Education therefore is not chiefly to teach children a mass of things
which have been true up to the present moment; moreover it is not to
teach them to learn about life as fast as it is made, not even to
interpret life, but above and beyond everything, to create life for
themselves. Hence education should be largely the training in making
choices. The aim of all proper training is not rigid adherence to a
crystallized right (since in ethics, economics or politics there is no
crystallized right), but the power to make a new choice at every moment.
And the greatest lesson of all is to know that every moment _is_ new.
“Man lives in the dawn forever. Life is beginning and nothing else but
beginning. It begins ever-lastingly.”
We must breed through the group process the kind of man who is not
fossilized by habit, but whose eye is intent on the present situation,
the present moment, present values, and can decide on the forms which
will best express them in the actual world.
To sum up this point: morality is never static; it advances as life
advances. You cannot hang your ideals up on pegs and take down no. 2 for
certain emergencies and no. 4 for others. _The true test of our morality
is not the rigidity with which we adhere to standard, but the loyalty we
show to the life which constructs standards._ The test of our morality
is whether we are living not to follow but to create ideals, whether we
are pouring our life into our visions only to receive it back with its
miraculous enhancement for new uses.
Secondly, I have said that the conception of right as a group product,
as coming from the ceaseless interplay of men, shows us that there is no
such thing as an individual conscience in the sense in which the term is
often used. As we are to obey no ideals dictated by others or the past,
it is equally important that we obey no ideal set up by our unrelated
self. To obey the moral law is to obey the social ideal. The social
ideal is born, grows and shapes itself through the associated life. The
individual cannot alone decide what is right or wrong. We can have no
true moral judgment except as we live our life with others. It is said,
“Every man is subject only to his own conscience.” But what is my
conscience? Has it not been produced by my time, my country, my
associates? To make a conscience by myself would be as difficult as to
try to make a language by myself.[16]
It is sometimes said, on the other hand, “The individual must yield his
right to judge for himself; let the majority judge.” But the individual
is not for a moment to yield his right to judge for himself; he can
judge better for himself if he joins with others in evolving a
synthesized judgment. Our individual conscience is not absorbed into a
national conscience; our individual conscience must be incorporated in a
national conscience as one of its constituent members.[17] Those of us
who are not wholly in sympathy with the conscientious objectors do not
think that they should yield to the majority. When we say that their
point of view is too particularistic, we do not mean that they should
give up the dictates of their own conscience to a collective conscience.
But we mean that they should ask themselves whether their conscience is
a freak, a purely personal, conscience, or a properly evolved
conscience. That is, have they tried, not to saturate themselves with
our collective ideals, but to take their part in evolving collective
standards by freely giving and taking. Have they lived the life which
makes possible the fullest interplay of their own ideas with all the
forces of their time? Before they range themselves against society they
must ask themselves if they have taken the opportunities offered them to
help form the ideas which they are opposing. I do not say that there is
no social value in heresy, I only ask the conscientious objectors to ask
themselves whether they are claiming the “individual rights” we have
long outgrown.
What we want is a related conscience, a conscience that is intimately
related to the consciences of other men and to all the spiritual
environment of our time, to all the progressive forces of our age. The
particularistic tendency has had its day in law, in politics, in
international relations and as a guiding tendency in our daily lives.
We have seen that a clearer conception to-day of the unity of the social
process shows us: first, that we are not merely to follow but to create
“right,” secondly, that there is no private conscience, and third, that
my duty is never to “others” but to the whole. We no longer make a
distinction between selfishness and altruism.[18] An act done for our
own benefit may be social and one done for another may not be. Some
twenty or thirty years ago our “individual” system of ethics began to be
widely condemned and we have been hearing a great deal of “social”
ethics. But this so-called “social” ethics has meant only my duty to
“others.” There is now emerging an idea of ethics entirely different
from the altruistic school, based not on the duty of isolated beings to
one another, but on integrated individuals acting as a whole, evolving
whole-ideas, working for whole-ideals. The new consciousness is of a
whole.
PURPOSE
As right appears with that interrelating, germinating activity which we
call the social process, so purpose also is generated by the same
process. The goal of evolution most obviously must evolve itself. How
self-contradictory is the idea that evolution is the world-process and
yet that some other power has made the goal for it to reach. The truth
is that the same process which creates all else creates the very
purpose. That purpose is involved in the process, not prior to process,
has far wider reaching consequences than can be taken up here. The whole
philosophy of cause and effect must be rewritten. If the infinite task
is the evolution of the whole, if our finite tasks are wholes of varying
degrees of scope and perfection, the notion of causality must have an
entirely different place in our system of thought.
The question is often asked, “What is the proposed unity of European
nations after the war to be for?” This question implies that the
alliance will be a mere method of accomplishing certain purposes,
whereas it is the union which is the important thing. With the union the
purpose comes into being, and with its every step forward, the purpose
changes. No one would say that the aims of the Allies to-day are the
same as in 1914, or even as in April, 1917. As the alliance develops,
the purpose steadily shapes itself.
Every teleological view will be given up when we see that purpose is not
“preëxistent,” but involved in the unifying act which is the life
process. It is man’s part to create purpose and to actualize it. From
the point of view of man we are just in the dawn of self-consciousness,
and his purpose is dimly revealing itself to him. The life-force
wells up in us for expression—to direct it is the privilege of
self-consciousness.[19]
LOYALTY
As this true purpose evolves itself, loyalty springs into being. Loyalty
is awakened through and by the very process which creates the group. The
same process which organizes the group energizes it. We cannot “will” to
be loyal. Our task is not to “find” causes to awaken our loyalty, but to
live our life fully and loyalty issues. A cause has no part in us or we
in it if we have fortuitously to “find” it.
Thus we see that we do not love the Beloved Community because it is
lovable—the same process which makes it lovable produces our love for
it. Moreover it is not enough to love the Beloved Community, we must
find out how to create it. It is not there for us to accept or reject—it
exists only through us. Loyalty to a collective will which we have not
created and of which we are, therefore, not an integral part, is
slavery. We belong to our community just in so far as we are helping to
make that community; then loyalty follows, then love follows. Loyalty
means the consciousness of oneness, the full realization that we succeed
or fail, live or die, are saved or damned together. The only unity or
community is one we have made of ourselves, by ourselves, for
ourselves.[20]
Thus the social process is one all-inclusive, Self-sufficing process.
The vital impulse which is produced by all the reciprocally interacting
influences of the group is also itself the generating and the vivifying
power. Social unity is not a sterile conception but an active force. It
is a double process—the activity which goes to make the unity and the
activity which flows from the unity. There is no better example of
centripetal and centrifugal force. All the forces which are stored up in
the unity flow forth eternally in activity. We create the common will
and feel the spiritual energy which flows into us from the purpose we
have made, for the purpose which we seek.
-----
Footnote 16:
This does not, however, put us with those biologists who make
conscience a “gregarious instinct” and—would seem to be willing to
keep it there. This is the insidious herd fallacy which crops up
constantly in every kind of place. We may to-day partake largely of
the nature of the herd, our conscience may be to some extent a herd
conscience, but such is not the end of man for it is not the true
nature of man—man does not find his expression in the herd.
Footnote 17:
To a misunderstanding of this point are due some of the fallacies of
the political pluralists (see ch. XXXII).
Footnote 18:
See p. 45.
Footnote 19:
This view of purpose is not necessarily antagonistic to the “interest”
school of sociology, but we may perhaps look forward to a new and
deeper analysis of self-interest. And the view here put forward is not
incompatible with the “objective” theory of association (see ch. XXIX)
nor with the teleological school of jurisprudence (see ch. XV), it
merely emphasizes another point of view—a point of view which tends to
synthesize the “subjective” and “objective” theories of law. But those
jurists who say that a group is governed by its purpose and leave the
matter there are making a thing-in-itself of the purpose; we are
governed by the purpose, yes, but we are all the time evolving the
purpose. Modern jurists wish a dynamic theory of law—only such a
conception of purpose as is revealed by group psychology will give
value to a teleological school of jurisprudence.
Footnote 20:
In a relation even of two I am not faithful to the other person but to
my conception of the relation in the whole. Loyalty is always to the
group idea not to the group-personnel. This must change our idea of
patriotism.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
THE INDIVIDUAL
--------------
AS the collective idea and the collective will, right and purpose, are
born within the all-sufficing social process, so here too the individual
finds the wellspring of his life. The visible form in which this
interplay of relations appears is society and the individual. A man is a
point in the social process rather than a unit in that process, a point
where forming forces meet straightway to disentangle themselves and
stream forth again. In the language of the day man is at the same time a
social factor and a social product.
People often talk of the social mind as if it were an abstract
conception, as if only the individual were real, concrete. The two are
equally real. Or rather the only reality is the relating of one to the
other which creates both. Our sundering is as artificial and late an act
as the sundering of consciousness into subject and object. The only
reality is the interpenetrating of the two into experience. Late
intellectualism abstracts for practical purposes the ego from the world,
the individual from society.
But there is no way of separating individuals, they coalesce and
coalesce, they are “confluent,” to use the expression of James, who
tells us that the chasm between men is an individualistic fiction, that
we are surrounded by fringes, that these overlap and that by means of
these I join with others. It is as in Norway when the colors of the
sunset and the dawn are mingling, when to-day and to-morrow are at the
point of breaking, or of uniting, and one does not know to which one
belongs, to the yesterday which is fading or the coming hour—perhaps
this is something like the relation of one to another: to the onlookers
from another planet our colors might seem to mingle.
The truth about the individual and society has been already implied, but
it may be justifiable to develop the idea further because of the
paramount importance for all our future development of a clear
understanding of the individual. Our nineteenth-century legal theory
(individual rights, contract, “a man can do what he likes with his own,”
etc.) was based on the conception of the separate individual.[21] We can
have no sound legal doctrine, and hence no social or political progress,
until the fallacy of this idea is fully recognized. The new state must
rest on a true conception of the individual. Let us ask ourselves
therefore for a further definition of individuality than that already
implied.
The individual is the unification of a multiplied variety of reactions.
But the individual does not react to society. The interplay constitutes
both society on the one hand and individuality on the other:
individuality and society are evolving together from this constant and
complex action and reaction. Or, more accurately, the relation of the
individual to society is not action and reaction, but infinite
interactions by which both individual and society are forever a-making:
we cannot say if we would be exact that the individual acts upon and is
acted upon, because that way of expressing it implies that he is a
definite, given, finished entity, and would keep him apart merely as an
agent of the acting and being acted on. We cannot put the individual on
one side and society on the other, we must understand the complete
interrelation of the two. Each has no value, no existence without the
other. The individual is created by the social process and is daily
nourished by that process. There is no such thing as a self-made man.
What we think we possess as individuals is what is stored up from
society, is the subsoil of social life. We soak up and soak up and soak
up our environment all the time.
Of what then does the individuality of a man consist? Of his relation to
the whole, not (1) of his apartness nor (2) of his difference alone.
Of course the mistake which is often made in thinking of the individual
is that of confusing the physical with the real individual. The physical
individual is seen to be apart and therefore apartness is assumed of the
psychic or real individual. We think of Edward Fitzgerald as a recluse,
that he got his development by being alone, that he was largely outside
the influences of society. But imagine Fitzgerald’s life with his books.
It undoubtedly did not suit his nature to mix freely with other people
in bodily presence, but what a constant and vivid living with others his
life really was. How closely he was in vital contact with the thoughts
of men.
We must bear in mind that the social spirit itself may impose apartness
on a man; the method of uniting with others is not always that of
visible, tangible groups. The pioneer spirit is the creative spirit even
if it seems to take men apart to fulfil its dictates. On the other hand
the solitary man is not necessarily the man who lives alone; he may be
one who lives constantly with others in all the complexity of modern
city life, but who is so shut-up or so set upon his own ideas that he
makes no real union with others.
Individuality is the capacity for union. The measure of individuality is
the depth and breadth of true relation. I am an individual not as far as
I am apart from, but as far as I am a part of other men. Evil is
non-relation. The source of our strength is the central supply. You may
as well break a branch off the tree and expect it to live. Non-relation
is death.
I have said that individuality consists neither of the separateness of
one man from the other, nor of the differences of one man from the
other. The second statement is challenged more often than the first.
This comes from some confusion of ideas. My individuality is difference
springing into view as relating itself with other differences. The act
of relating is the creating act. It is vicious intellectualism to say,
“Before you relate you must have things to relate, therefore the
differences are more elemental: there are (1) differences which (2)
unite, therefore uniting is secondary.” The only fact, the only truth,
is the creative activity which appears as the great complex we call
humanity. The activity of creating is all. It is only by _being_ this
activity that we grasp it. To view it from the outside, to dissect it
into its different elements, to lay these elements on the dissecting
table as so many different individuals, is to kill the life and feed the
fancy with dead images, empty, sterile concepts. But let us set about
relating ourselves to our community in fruitful fashion, and we shall
see that our individuality is bodying itself forth in stronger and
stronger fashion, our difference shaping itself in exact conformity with
the need of the work we do.
For we must remember when we say that the essence of individuality is
the relating of self to other difference, that difference is not
something static, something given, that it also is involved in the world
of becoming. This is what experience teaches me—that society needs my
difference, not as an absolute, but just so much difference as will
relate me. Differences develop within the social process and are united
through the social process. Difference which is not capable of relation
is eccentricity. Eccentricity, caprice, put me outside, bring anarchy;
true spontaneity, originality, belong not to chaos but to system. But
spontaneity must be coördinated; irrelevancy produces nothing, is
insanity. It is not my uniqueness which makes me of value to the whole
but my power of relating. The nut and the screw form a perfect
combination not because they are different, but because they exactly fit
into each other and together can perform a function which neither could
perform alone, or which neither could perform half of alone or any part
of alone. It is not that the significance of the nut and screw is
increased by their coming together, they have no significance at all
unless they do come together. The fact that they have to be different to
enter into any fruitful relation with each other is a matter of
derivative importance—derived from the work they do.
Another illustration is that of the specialist. It is not a knowledge of
his specialty which makes an expert of service to society, but his
insight into the relation of his specialty to the whole. Thus it implies
not less but more relation, because the entire value of that
specialization is that it is part of something. Instead of isolating him
and giving him a narrower life, it gives him at once a broader life
because it binds him more irrevocably to the whole. But the whole works
both ways: the specialist not only contributes to the whole, but all his
relations to the whole are embodied in his own particular work.
Thus difference is only a part of the life process. To exaggerate this
part led to the excessive and arrogant individualism of the nineteenth
century. It behooves us children of the twentieth century to search
diligently after the law of unity that we may effectively marshal and
range under its dominating sway all the varying diversities of life.
Our definition of individuality must now be “finding my place in the
whole”: “my place” gives you the individual, “the whole” gives you
society, but by connecting them, by saying “my place in the whole,” we
get a fruitful synthesis. I have tried hard to get away from any
mechanical system and yet it is difficult to find words which do not
seem to bind. I am now afraid of this expression—my place in the whole.
It has a rigid, unyielding sound, as if I were a cog in a machine. But
my place is not a definite portion of space and time. The people who
believe in their “place” in this sense can always photograph their
“places.” But my place is a matter of infinite relation, and of
infinitely changing relation, so that it can never be captured. It is
neither the anarchy of particularism nor the rigidity of the German
machine. To know my place is not to know my niche, not to know whether I
am cog no. 3 or cog no. 4; it is to be alive at every instant at every
finger tip to every contact and to be conscious of those contacts.
We see now that the individual both seeks the whole and is the whole.
First, the individual, biology tells us, is never complete, completeness
spells death; social psychology is beginning to show us that man
advances towards completeness not by further aggregations to himself,
but by further and further relatings of self to other men. We are always
reaching forth for union; most, perhaps all, our desires have this
motive. The spirit craves totality, this is the motor of social
progress; the process of getting it is not by adding more and more to
ourselves, but by offering more and more of ourselves. Not appropriation
but contribution is the law of growth. What our special contribution is,
it is for us to discover. More and more to release the potentialities of
the individual means the more and more progressive organization of
society if at the same time we are learning how to coördinate all the
variations. The individual in wishing for more wholeness does not ask
for a chaotic mass, but for the orderly wholeness which we call unity.
The test of our vitality is our power of synthesis, of life synthesis.
But although we say that the individual is never complete, it is also
true that the individual is a being who, because his function is
relating and his relatings are infinite, is in himself the whole of
society. It is not that the whole is divided up into pieces; the
individual is the whole at one point. This is the incarnation: it is the
whole flowing into me, transfusing, suffusing me. The fulness, bigness
of my life is not measured by the amount I do, nor the number of people
I meet, but how far the whole is expressed through me. This is the
reason why unifying gives me a sense of life and more unifying gives me
a sense of more life—there is more of the whole and of me. My worth to
society is not how valuable a part I am. I am not unique in the world
because I am different from any one else, but because I am a whole seen
from a special point of view.[22]
That the relation of each to the whole is dynamic and not static is
perhaps the most profound truth which recent years have brought us.[23]
We now see that when I give my share I give always far more than my
share, such are the infinite complexities, the fulness and fruitfulness
of the interrelatings. I contribute to society my mite, and then society
contains not just that much more nourishment, but as much more as the
loaves and fishes which fed the multitude outnumbered the original seven
and two. My contribution meets some particular need not because it can
be measured off against that need, but because my contribution by means
of all the cross currents of life always has so much more than itself to
offer. When I withhold my contribution, therefore, I am withholding far
more than my personal share. When I fail some one or some cause, I have
not failed just that person, just that cause, but the whole world is
thereby crippled. This thought gives an added solemnity to the sense of
personal responsibility.
To sum up: individuality is a matter primarily neither of apartness nor
of difference, but of each finding his own activity in the whole. In the
many times a day that we think of ourselves it is not one time in a
thousand that we think of our eccentricities, we are thinking indirectly
of those qualities which join us to others: we think of the work we are
doing with others and what is expected of us, the people we are going to
play with when work is over and the part we are going to take in that
play, the committee meeting we are going to attend and what we are going
to do there. Every distinct act of the ego is an affirmation of that
amount of separateness which makes for perfect union. Every affirmation
of the ego establishes my relation with all the rest of the universe. It
is one and the same act which establishes my individuality and gives me
my place in society. Thus an individual is one who is being created by
society, whose daily breath is drawn _from_ society, whose life is spent
_for_ society. When we recognize society as self-unfolding,
self-unifying activity, we shall hold ourselves open to its influence,
letting the Light stream into us, not from an outside source, but from
the whole of which we are a living part. It is eternally due us that
that whole should feed and nourish and sustain us at every moment, but
it cannot do this unless at every moment we are creating it. This
perfect interplay is Life. To speak of the “limitations of the
individual” is blasphemy and suicide. The spirit of the whole is
incarnate in every part. “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate”—the individual from society.
-----
Footnote 21:
See ch. XV, “From Contract to Community.”
Footnote 22:
This is the principle of the vote in a democracy (see ch. XXI). This
must not, however, be confused with the old Hegelianism (see ch. XXIX
on “Sovereignty”).
Footnote 23:
In art this is what impressionism has meant. In the era before
impressionism art was in a static phase, that is, artists were working
at fixed relations. The “balance” of modern artists does not suggest
fixedness, but relation subject directly to the laws of the whole.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII
WHO IS THE FREE MAN?
--------------
THE idea of liberty long current was that the solitary man was the free
man, that the man outside society possessed freedom but that in society
he had to sacrifice as much of his liberty as interfered with the
liberty of others. Rousseau’s effort was to find a form of society in
which all should be as free as “before.” According to some of our
contemporary thinkers liberty is what belongs to the individual or
variation-giving-one. But this tells only half the tale. Freedom is the
harmonious, unimpeded working of the law of one’s own nature. The true
nature of every man is found only in the whole. A man is ideally free
only so far as he is interpermeated by every other human being; he gains
his freedom through a perfect and complete relationship because thereby
he achieves his whole nature.
Hence free-will is not caprice or whim or a partial wish or a momentary
desire. On the contrary freedom means exactly the liberation from the
tyranny of such particularist impulses. When the whole-will has supreme
dominion in the heart of man, then there is freedom. The mandate of our
real Self is our liberty. The essence of freedom is not irrelevant
spontaneity but the fulness of relation. We do not curtail our liberty
by joining with others; we find it and increase all our capacity for
life through the interweaving of willings. It is only in a complex state
of society that any large degree of freedom is possible, because nothing
else can supply the many opportunities necessary to work out freedom.
The social process is a completely Self-sufficing process. Free-will is
one of its implications. I am free for two reasons: (1) I am not
dominated by the whole because I _am_ the whole; (2) I am not dominated
by “others” because we have the genuine social process only when I do
not control others or they me, but all intermingle to produce the
collective thought and the collective will. I am free when I am
functioning here in time and space as the creative will.
There is no extra-Will: that is the vital lesson for us to learn. There
is no Will except as we act. Let us _be_ the Will. Thereby do we become
the Free-Will.
Perhaps the most superficial of all views is that free-will consists in
choice when an alternative is presented. But freedom by our definition
is obedience to the law of one’s nature. My nature is of the whole: I am
free, therefore, only when I choose that term in the alternative which
the whole commands. I am not free when I am making choices, I am not
free when my acts are not “determined,” for in a sense they always are
determined (freedom and determinism have not this kind of opposition). I
am free when I am creating. I am determined _through_ my will, not in
spite of it.
Freedom then is the identifying of the individual will with the whole
will—the supreme activity of life. Free the spirit of man and then we
can trust the spirit of man, and is not the very essence of this freeing
of the spirit of man the process of taking him from the self-I to the
group-I? That we are free only through the social order, only as fast as
we identify ourselves with the whole, implies practically that to gain
our freedom we must take part in all the life around us: join groups,
enter into many social relations, and begin to win freedom for
ourselves. When we are the group in feeling, thought and will, we are
free: it does what it wishes through us—that is our liberty. In a
democracy the training of every child from the cradle—in nursery,
school, at play—must be a training in group consciousness.
Then we shall have the spontaneous activity of freedom. Let us not be
martyrs. Let us not give up bread and coal that the ends of the Great
War may be won, with the feeling of a restricted life, but with the
feeling that we have gained thereby a fuller life. Let us joyously do
the work of the world because we are the world. Such is the _élan de
vie_, the joy of high activity, which leaps forward with force, in
freedom.
We have to begin to-day to live the life which will give us our freedom.
Savants and plain men have affirmed the freedom of the will, but at the
same time most of us, even while loudly claiming our freedom, have felt
bound. While determinism has many theoretical adherents, it has many
more practical ones; we have considered ourselves bound in thousands of
ways—by tradition, by religion, by natural law, by inertia and
ignorance, etc., etc. We have said God is free but man is not free. That
we are not free has been the most deadening fallacy to which man has
ever submitted. No outside power indeed can make us free. No document of
our forefathers can “declare” us “independent.” No one can ever give us
freedom, but we can win it for ourselves.
It is often thought that when some restraint is taken away from us we
are freer than before, but this is childish. Some women-suffragists talk
of women as “enslaved” and advocate their emancipation by the method of
giving them the vote. But the vote will not make women free. Freedom is
always a thing to be attained. And we must remember too that freedom is
not a static condition. As it is not something possessed “originally,”
and as it is not something which can be given to us, so also it is not
something won once for all. It is in our power to win our freedom, but
it must be won anew at every moment, literally every moment. People
think of themselves as not free because they think of themselves as
obeying some external law, but the truth is _we_ are the law-makers. My
freedom is my share in creating, my part in the creative responsibility.
The heart of our freedom is the impelling power of the will of the
whole.
Who then are free? Those who _win_ their freedom through fellowship.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX
THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM
--------------
THE new freedom is to be founded on the new individualism. Many people
in their zeal for a “socialized” life are denouncing “individualism.”
But individualism is the latest social movement. We must guard against
the danger of thinking that the individual is less important because the
collective aspect of life has aroused our ardor and won our devotion.
Collectivism is no short cut to do away with the necessity of individual
achievement; it means the greatest burden possible on every man. The
development of a truly social life takes place at the same time that the
freedom and power and efficiency of its members develop. The individual
on the other hand can never make his individuality effective until he is
given collective scope for his activity. We sometimes hear it said that
the strong man does not like combination, but in fact the stronger the
man the more he sees coöperation with others as the fitting field for
his strength.
But we must learn the method of a real coöperation. We cannot have any
genuine collectivism until we have learned how to evolve the collective
thought and the collective will. This can be done only by every one
taking part. The fact that the state owns the means of production may be
a good or a poor measure, but it is not necessarily collectivism or a
true socialism. The wish for socialism is a longing for the ideal state,
but it is embraced often by impatient people who want to take a short
cut to the ideal state. That state must be grown—its branches will widen
as its roots spread. The socialization of property must not precede the
socialization of the will. If it does, then the only difference between
socialism and our present order will be substituting one machine for
another. We see more and more collectivism coming: so far as it keeps
pace with the socialization of the will, it is good; so far as it does
not, it is purely mechanical. Some people’s idea of socialism is
inventing a machine to grind out your duties for you. But every man must
do his work for himself. Not socialization of property, but
socialization of the will is the true socialism.
The main aim in the reconstruction of society must be to get all that
every man has to give, to bring the submerged millions into light and
activity. Those of us who are basing all our faith on the constructive
vision of a collective society are giving the fullest value to the
individual that has ever been given, are preaching individual value as
the basis of democracy, individual affirmation as its process, and
individual responsibility as its motor force. True individualism has
been the one thing lacking either in motive or actuality in a so-called
individualistic age, but then it has not been an individualistic but a
particularistic age. True individualism is this moment piercing through
the soil of our new understanding of the collective life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
X
SOCIETY
--------------
WE have seen that the interpenetrating of psychic forces creates at the
same time individuals and society, that, therefore, the individual is
not a unit but a centre of forces (both centripetal and centrifugal),
and consequently society is not a collection of units but a complex of
radiating and converging, crossing and recrossing energies. In other
words we are learning to think of society as a psychic process.
This conception must replace the old and wholly erroneous idea of
society as a collection of units, and the later and only less misleading
theory of society as an organism.[24]
The old individualism with all the political fallacies it
produced—social contract of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
majority rule of the nineteenth, etc.—was based on the idea of developed
individuals first existing and then coming together to form society. But
the basis of society is not numbers: it is psychic power.
The organic theory of society has so much to recommend it to superficial
thinking that we must examine it carefully to find its fatal defects.
But let us first recognize its merits.
Most obviously, an organic whole has a spatial and temporal
individuality of its own, and it is composed of parts each with its
individuality yet which could not exist apart from the whole. An
organism means unity, each one his own place, every one dependent upon
every one else.
Next, this unity, this interrelating of parts, is the essential
characteristic. It is always in unstable equilibrium, always shifting,
varying, and thereby changing the individual at every moment. But it is
always produced and maintained by the individual himself. No external
force brings it forth. The central life, the total life, of this
self-developing, self-perpetuating being is involved in the process.
Hence biologists do not expect to understand the body by a study of the
separate cells as isolated units: it is the organic connection which
unites the separate processes which they recognize as the fundamental
fact.
This interrelating holds good of society when we view it externally.
Society too can be understood only by the study of its flux of
relations, of all the intricate reciprocities which go to make the
unifying. Reciprocal ordering—subordinating, superordinating,
coördinating—purposeful self-unifyings, best describe the social
process. Led by James, who has shown us the individual as a
self-unifying centre, we now find the same kind of activity going on in
society, in the social mind. And this interrelating, this unity as
unity, is what gives to society its authority and power.
Thus the term organism is valuable as a metaphor, but it has not strict
psychological accuracy.
There is this world-wide difference between the self-interrelatings of
society and of the bodily organism: the social bond is a psychic
relation and we cannot express it in biological terms or in any terms of
physical force. If we could, if “functional combination” could mean a
psychological relation as well as a physiological, then the terms
“functional” and “organic” might be accepted. But they denote a
different universe from that of thought. For psychical self-unitings
knit infinitely more closely and in a wholly different way. They are
freed from the limitations of time and space. Minds can blend, yet in
the blending preserve each its own identity. They transfuse one another
while being each its own essential and unique self.
It follows that while the cell of the organism has only one function,
the individual may have manifold and multiform functions: he enters with
one function into a certain group of people this morning and with
another function into another group this afternoon, because his free
soul can freely knit itself with a new group at any moment.[25]
This self-detaching, self-attaching freedom of the individual saves us
from the danger to democracy which lurks in the organic theory. No man
is forced to serve as the running foot or the lifting hand. Each at any
moment can place himself where his nature calls. Certain continental
sociologists are wholly unjustified in building their hierarchy where
one man or group of men is the sensorium, others the hewers and
carriers, etc. It is exactly this despotic and hopeless system of caste
from which the true democracy frees man. He follows the call of his
spirit and relates himself where he belongs to-day, and through this
relating gains the increment of power which knits him anew where he now
belongs and so continually as the wind of spirit blows.
Moreover in society every individual may be a complete expression of the
whole in a way impossible for the parts of a physical organism.[26] When
each part is itself potentially the whole, when the whole can live
completely in every member, then we have a true society, and we must
view it as a rushing of life—onrush, outrush, inrush—as a mobile,
elastic, incalculable, Protean energy seeking fitting form for itself.
This ideal society is the divine goal towards which life is an infinite
progress. Such conception of society must be visibly before us to the
exclusion of all other theories when we ask ourselves later what the
vote means in the true democracy.[27]
-----
Footnote 24:
I speak of it as later because the biological analogy was different
from the organism of mediæval doctrine.
Footnote 25:
See ch. XXX, “Political Pluralism and Functionalism.”
Footnote 26:
See p. 66.
Footnote 27:
See ch. XXI. I have been told that the distinction between the organic
and the psychic theory of society is merely academic. But no one
should frame amendments on the initiative and referendum without this
distinction; no one without it can judge wisely the various schemes
now being proposed for occupational representation—something every one
of us will have soon to do.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XI
THE SELF-AND-OTHERS ILLUSION
--------------
IT is now evident that self and others are merely different points of
view of one and the same experience, two aspects of one thought. Neither
of these partial aspects can hold us, we seek always that which includes
self and others. To recognize the community principle in everything we
do should be our aim, never to work with individuals as individuals. If
I go to have a talk with a mother about her daughter, I cannot appeal to
the mother, the daughter, or my own wishes, only to that higher creation
which we three make when we come together. In that way only will
spiritual power be generated. Every decision of the future is to be
based not on my needs or yours, nor on a compromise between them or an
addition of them, but on the recognition of the community between us.
The community may be my household and I, my employees and I, but it is
only the dictate of the whole which can be binding on the whole. This
principle we can take as a searchlight to turn on all our life.
It is the lack of understanding of this principle which works much havoc
among us. When we watch men in the lobbies at Washington working for
their state and their town as against the interests of the United
States, do we sometimes think, “These men have learnt loyalty and
service to a small unit, but not yet to a large one?” If this thought
does come to us, we are probably doing those men more than justice. The
man who tries to get something in the River and Harbor appropriation for
his town, whether or not it needs it as much as other places, is pretty
sure back in his own town to be working not for that but for his own
pocket. It is not because America is too big for him to think of, that
he might perhaps think of Ohio or Millfield, it is just because he
cannot think of Ohio or Millfield. There he thinks of how this or the
other local development, rise in land values etc., is going to benefit
himself; when he is in Washington he thinks of what is going to benefit
Millfield. But the man who works hardest and most truly for Millfield
and Ohio will probably when he comes to Washington work most truly for
the interests, not of Millfield and Ohio, but of the United States,
because he has learned the first lesson of life—to think in wholes.
The expressions social and socially-minded, which should refer to a
consciousness of the whole, are often confused with altruism. We read of
“the socialized character of modern industry.” There is a good deal of
altruism in modern industry, but little that is socialized yet. The men
who provide rest rooms, baths, lectures, and recreation facilities for
their employees, do not by so doing prove themselves to be
socially-minded; they are altruistically-minded, and this is involved in
the old individualism.[28] Moreover, in our attempts at social
legislation we have been appealing chiefly to the altruism of people:
women and children ought not to be overworked, it is cruel not to have
machinery safeguarded, etc. But our growing sense of unity is fast
bringing us to a realization that all these things are for the good of
ourselves too, for the entire community. And the war is rapidly opening
our eyes to this human solidarity: we now see health, for instance, as a
national asset.
All of us are being slowly, very slowly, purged of our particularistic
desires. The egotistic satisfaction of giving things away is going to be
replaced by the joy of owning things together. As our lives become more
and more intricately interwoven, more and more I come to suffer not
merely when I am undergoing personal suffering, more and more I come to
desire not only when I am feeling personal desires. This used to be
considered a fantastic idea not to be grasped by the plain man, but
every day the plain man is coming more and more to feel this, every day
the “claims” of others are becoming My desires. “Justice” is being
replaced by understanding. There are many people to-day who feel as
keenly the fact of child labor as if these children were their own. I
vote for prohibition, even although it does not in the least touch me,
because it does touch very closely the Me of which I am now coming into
realization.
The identification of self and others we see in the fact that we cannot
keep ourselves “good” in an evil world any more than we can keep
ourselves well in a world of disease. The method of moral hygiene as of
physical hygiene is social coöperation. We do not walk into the Kingdom
of Heaven one by one.
The exposition of the self-and-others fallacy has transformed the idea
of self-interest. Our interests are inextricably interwoven. The
question is not what is best for me or for you, but for all of us. My
interests are not less important to the world than yours; your interests
are not less important to the world than mine. If the “altruistic” man
is not a humbug, that is, if he really thinks his affairs of less
importance to the world than those of others, then there is certainly
something the matter with his life. He must raise his life to a point
where it is of as much value to the world as any one’s else.
The self-and-others fallacy has led directly to a conception which has
wrought much harm among us, namely, the identification of “others” with
“society” which leads the self outside society and brings us to one of
the most harmful of dualisms. The reason we are slow to understand the
matter of the subordination of the individual to society is because we
usually think of it as meaning the subordination of the individual to
“others,” whereas it does not at all, it means the subordination of the
individual to the whole of which he himself is a part. Such
subordination is an act of assertion; it is fraught with active power
and force; it affirms and accomplishes. We are often told to “surrender
our individuality.” To _claim_ our individuality is the one essential
claim we have on the universe.
We give up self when we are too sluggish for the heroic life. For our
self is after all the greatest bother we ever know, and the idea of
giving it up is a comfortable thought for sluggish people, a narcotic
for the difficulties of life. But it is a cowardly way out. The strong
attitude is to face that torment, our self, to take it with all its
implications, all its obligations, all its responsibilities, and be
ourselves to the fullest degree possible.
I do not mean to imply, however, that unselfishness has become obsolete.
With our new social ideal there is going to be a far greater demand on
our capacity for sacrifice than ever before, but self-sacrifice now
means for us self-fulfilment. We have now a vision of society where
service is indeed our daily portion, but our conception of service has
entirely changed. The other day it was stated that the old idea of
democracy was a society in which every man had the right to pursue his
own ends, while the new idea was based on the assumption that every man
should serve his fellow-men. But I do not believe that man should “serve
his fellow-men”; if we started on that task what awful prigs we should
become. Moreover, as we see that the only efficient people are the
servers, much of the connotation of humility has gone out of the word
service! Moreover, if service is such a very desirable thing, then every
one must have an equal opportunity for service.
We have had a wrong idea of individualism which has made those who had
more strength, education, time, money, power, feel that they must do for
those who had less. In the individualism we see coming, all our efforts
will be bent to making it possible for every man to depend upon himself
instead of depending upon others. So _noblesse oblige_ is really
egoistic. It is what I owe to myself to do to others. _Noblesse oblige_
has had a splendid use in the world, but it is somewhat worn out now
simply because we are rapidly getting away from the selfish point of
view. I don’t do things now because my position or my standing or my
religion or _my_ anything else demands it, nor because others need it,
but because it is a whole-imperative, that is, a social imperative. We
cannot transcend self by means of others, but only through the synthesis
of self and others. Wholeness is an irresistible force compelling every
member. The consciousness of this is the wellspring of our power.
An English writer says that we get leadership from the fact that men are
capable of being moved to such service by the feeling of altruism; he
attributes public spirit to love, pity, compassion and sensitiveness to
suffering. This is no doubt largely true at the present moment, but
public spirit will sometime mean, as it does to-day in many instances,
the recognition that it is not merely that my city, my nation needs me,
but that I need it as the larger sphere of a larger self-expression.
I remember some years ago a Boston girl just entering social work, fresh
from college, with all the ardor and enthusiasm of youth and having been
taught the ideals of service to others. She was talking to me about her
future and said that she was sorry family circumstances obliged her to
work in Boston instead of New York, there was so much more to reform in
New York! She seemed really afraid that justice and morality had reached
such a point with us that she might not be afforded sufficient scope for
her zeal. It was amusing, but think of the irony of it: that girl had
been taught such a view of life that her happiness, her outlet, her
self-expression, depended actually on there being plenty of misery and
wretchedness for her to change; there would be no scope for her in a
harmonious, well-ordered world.
The self-and-others theory of society is then wrong. We have seen that
the Perfect Society is the complete interrelating of an infinite number
of selves knowing themselves as one Self. We see that we are dependent
on the whole, while seeing that we are one with it in creating it. We
are separate that we may belong, that we may greatly produce. Our
separateness, our individual initiative, are the very factors which
accomplish our true unity with men. We shall see in the chapter on
“Political Pluralism” that “irreducible pluralism” and the self-unifying
principle are not contradictory.
-----
Footnote 28:
It must be remembered, however, that these welfare arrangements are
often accompanied by truly social motives, and experiments looking
towards a more democratic organization of industries.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XII
THE CROWD FALLACY
--------------
MANY people are ready to accept the truth that association is the law of
life. But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory with only a
partial understanding of it, many people to-day are advocating the life
of the crowd. The words society, crowd, and group are often used
interchangeably for a number of people together. One writer says, “The
real things are breathed forth from multitudes ... the real forces of
to-day are group forces.” Or we read of “the gregarious or group life,”
or “man is social because he is suggestible,” or, “man is social because
he likes to be with a crowd.” But we do not find group forces in
multitudes: the crowd and the group represent entirely different modes
of association. Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on
concurrence of emotion rather than of thought, or if on the latter, then
on a concurrence produced by becoming aware of similarities, not by a
slow and gradual creating of unity. It is a crowd emotion if we all
shout “God save the King.” Suggestibility, feeling, impulse—this is
usually the order in the crowd mind.
I know a little boy of five who came home from school one day and said
with much impressiveness, “Do you know whose birthday it is to-morrow?”
“No,” said his mother, “whose?” “Ab’m Lincoln’s,” was the reply. “Who is
he?” said the mother. With a grave face and an awed voice the child
replied, “He freed the slates!” and then added, “I don’t know whether
they were the big kind like mine or the little kind like Nancy’s.” But
his emotion was apparently as great, his sentiment as sincere, as if he
had understood what Lincoln had done for his country. This is a good
example of crowd suggestion because thought was in this case inhibited
by contagious emotion.
Suggestion is the law of the crowd, interpenetration of the group. When
we study a crowd we see how quickly B takes A’s ideas and also C and D
and E; when we study a group we see that the ideas of A often arouse in
B exactly opposite ones. Moreover, the crowd often deadens thought
because it wants immediate action, which means an unthinking unanimity
not a genuine collective thought.[29] The group on the other hand
stimulates thought. There are no “differences” in the crowd mind. Each
person is swept away and does not stop to find out his own difference.
In crowds we have unison, in groups harmony. We want the single voice
but not the single note; that is the secret of the group. The enthusiasm
and unanimity of a mass-meeting may warm an inexperienced heart, but the
experienced know that this unanimity is largely superficial and is based
on the spread of similar ideas, not the unifying of differences. A crowd
does not distinguish between fervor and wisdom; a group usually does. We
do not try to be eloquent when we appear before a board or a commission;
we try merely to be convincing. Before a group it is self-control,
restraint, discipline which we need, we don’t “let ourselves go”; before
a crowd I am sorry to say we usually do. Many of us nowadays resent
being used as part of a crowd; the moment we hear eloquence we are on
the defensive. The essential evil of crowds is that they do not allow
choice, and choice is necessary for progress. A crowd is an
undifferentiated mass; a group is an articulated whole.
It is often difficult to determine whether a number of people met
together are a crowd or a group (that is, a true society), yet it is a
distinction necessary for us to make if we would understand their
action. It is not in the least a question of numbers: it is obvious that
according to our present definition a group is not a small number of
people and a crowd a large number. If someone cries “Fire,” and you and
I run to the window, then you and I are a crowd. The difference between
a group and a crowd is not one of degree but of kind. I have seen it
stated in a sociological treatise that in any deliberative assembly
there is a tendency for the wisest thought to prevail. This assumes that
“any deliberative assembly” is more like a group than a crowd—a very
pleasant thing to assume!
Some writers seem to think that the difference between a crowd and a
not-crowd is the difference between organized and unorganized, and the
example is given of laborers unorganized as a crowd and of a trade-union
as a not-crowd. But a trade-union can be and often is a crowd.
We have distinguished between the crowd and the group; it is also
necessary to distinguish between the crowd and the mob. Often the crowd
or mass is confused with the mob. The examples given of the mass or
crowd mind are usually a lynching-party, the panic-stricken audience in
a theatre fire, the mobs of the French Revolution. But all these are
very different from a mass of people merely acting under the same
suggestion, so different that we need different names for them. We might
for the moment call one a crowd and the other a mob.
An unfortunate stigma has often attached itself to the crowd mind
because of this tendency to think of the crowd mind as always exhibiting
itself in inferior ways. Mass enthusiasm, it is true, may lead to riots,
but also it may lead to heroic deeds. People talk much of the panic of a
crowd, but every soldier knows that men are brave, too, in a mass.
Students have often studied what they called the mass mind when it was
under the stress of great nervous strain and at a high pitch of
excitement, and then have said the mass acts thus and so. It has been
thought legitimate to draw conclusions concerning the nature of the mass
mind from an hysterical mob. It has been assumed that a crowd was
necessarily, as a crowd, in a condition of hysteria. It has often been
taken for granted that a crowd _is_ a pathological condition. And color
has been given to this theory by the fact that we owe much of our
knowledge of the laws of suggestion to pathologists.
But the laws of the mass can be studied in ordinary collections of
people who are not abnormally excited, who are not subjects for
pathologists. The laws of the mass as of the mob are, it is true, the
laws of suggestion and imitation, but the mob is such an extreme case of
the mass that it is necessary to make some distinction between them.
Emotion in the crowd as in the mob is intensified by the consciousness
that others are sharing it, but the mob is this crowd emotion carried to
an extreme. As normal suggestibility is the law of the mass, so abnormal
suggestibility is the law of the mob. In abnormal suggestibility the
controlling act of the will is absent, but in normal suggestibility you
have the will in control and using its power of choice over the material
offered by suggestion. Moreover, it must be remembered that emotional
disturbance is not always the cause of the condition of suggestibility:
the will may lose its ascendancy from other causes than excitement;
suggestibility often comes from exhaustion or habit.
The fact is we know little of this subject. Billy Sunday and the
Salvation Army, political bosses and labor agitators, know how to handle
crowds, but the rest of us can deal with individuals better than with
the mass; we have taken courses in first-aid to the injured, but we have
not yet learned what to do in a street riot or a financial panic.
Besides the group and the crowd and the mob, there is also the herd. The
satisfaction of the gregarious instinct must not be confused with the
emotion of the crowd or the true sense of oneness in the group. Some
writers draw analogies from the relation of the individual to the herd
to apply to the relation of man to society; such analogies lead to false
patriotism and wars. The example of the wild ox temporarily separated
from his herd and rushing back to the “comfort of its fellowship” has
adorned many a different tale. The “comfort” of feeling ourselves in the
herd has been given as the counterpart of spiritual communion, but are
we seeking the “comfort” of fellowship or the creative agonies of
fellowship? The latter we find not in herd life, but in group life.
Then besides the group, the crowd, the mob, the herd, there are numbers
as mere numbers. When we are a lot of people with different purposes we
are simply wearied, not stimulated. At a bazaar, for instance, far from
feeling satisfaction in your fellow-creatures, you often loathe them.
Here you are not swayed by one emotion, as in a crowd, nor unified by
some intermingling of thought as in a group.
It must be understood that I do not wish to make any arbitrary dictum in
regard to distinctions between the crowd and the herd, the crowd and
mere numbers, etc. I merely wish to point out that the subject has not
yet received sufficient study. What is it we feel at the midnight mass
of the Madeleine? It is not merely the one thought which animates all;
it is largely the great mass of people who are feeling the one thought.
But many considerations and unanswered questions leap to our mind just
here. All this is an interesting field for the further study and close
analysis of psychologists.
We must not, however, think from these distinctions that man as member
of a group and man as member of a crowd, as one of a herd or of a mob or
of a mere assemblage, is subject to entirely different laws which never
mingle; there are all the various shadings and minglings of these which
we see in such varied associations as business corporation, family,
committee, political meeting, trade-union etc. Our herd traditions show
in our group life; there is something of the crowd in all groups and
there is something of the group in many crowds, as in a legislative
assembly. Only further study will teach us to distinguish how much herd
instinct and how much group conviction contribute to our ideas and
feelings at any one time and what the tendencies are when these clash.
Only further study will show us how to secure the advantages of the
crowd without suffering from its disadvantages. We have all felt that
there was much that was valuable in that emotional thrill which brings
us into a vaster realm although not a coördinated realm; we have all
rejoiced in the quickened heart-beat, the sense of brotherhood, the love
of humanity, the renewed courage which have sometimes come to us when we
were with many people. Perhaps the ideal group will combine the
advantages of the mass and the group proper: will give us collective
thought, the creative will and at the same time the inspiration for
renewed effort and sustained self-discipline.
Crowd association has, however, received more study than group
association because as a matter of fact there is at present so much more
of the former than of the latter. But we need not only a psychology
which looks at us as we are, but a psychology which points the way to
that which we may become. What our advanced thinkers are now doing is to
evolve this new psychology. Conscious evolution means giving less and
less place to herd instinct and more to the group imperative. We are
emerging from our gregarious condition and are now to enter on the
rational way of living by scanning our relations to one another, instead
of bluntly feeling them, and so adjusting them that unimpeded progress
on this higher plane is secured.
And now that association is increasing so rapidly on every hand, it is
necessary that we see to it that this shall be group association, not
crowd association. In the business world our large enterprises are
governed by boards, not by one man: one group (corporation) deals with
another group (corporation). Hospitals, libraries, colleges, are
governed by boards, trustees, faculties. We have committees of
arbitration, boards of partial management (labor agreements) composed of
representatives of employers and employed. Many forms of coöperation are
being tried: some one must analyze the psychological process of the
generation of coöperative activity. All this means a study of group
psychology. In the political world there is a growing tendency to put
the administrative part of government more and more into the hands of
commissions. Moreover, we have not legislatures swayed by oratory and
other forms of mass suggestion, but committee government. Of course
legislative committees do not try to get the group idea, they are
largely controlled by partisan and financial interests, but at any rate
they are not governed wholly by suggestion. In the philanthropic world
we no longer deal with individuals: we form a committee or association
to deal with individuals or with groups of individuals. The number of
associations of every kind for every purpose increases daily. Hence we
must study the group.
-----
Footnote 29:
A good example of the crowd fallacy is the syndicalist theory that the
vote should be taken in a meeting of strikers not by ballot but by
acclamation or show of hands. The idea is that in an open meeting
enthusiasm passes from one to another and that, therefore, you can
thus get the collective will which you could not get by every man
voting one by one.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XIII
THE SECRET OF PROGRESS
--------------
I HAVE said that the essence of the social process is the creating of
ever new values through the interplay of all the forces of life. But I
have also tried to show that these forces must be organized; from
confusion nothing is born. The spiritual order grows up within us as
fast as we make new correlations. Chaos, disorder, destruction, come
everywhere from refusing the syntheses of life.
The task of coadaptation is unending, whether it means getting on with a
difficult member of my family, playing the game at school or college,
doing my part in my business, my city, or whether it means Germany and
the Allies living together on the same planet.
Nietzsche thought that the man who showed the most force was the most
virtuous. Now we say that all this brute energy is merely the given,
that the life-process is the unifying of the given—he who shows the
unifying power in greatest degree is the superman. Progress is not
determined then by economic conditions, by physical conditions nor by
biological factors solely, but more especially by our capacity for
genuine coöperation.
This idea of progress clear-cuts some long-established notions. We see
now the truth and the fallacy in the assertions (1) that social
evolution depends upon individual progress with imitation by the crowd,
(2) that evolution means struggle and the survival of the fittest.
For some years the generally accepted theory of the social process was
that the individual invents, society spreads. We have already examined
one half of this theory; let us look at the other half—the idea that the
individual originates.
If a man comes forward with an idea, what do we mean by saying that he
is more “original” than his fellows? So far as the quality of
originality can be described, do we not mean that his capacity for
saturation is greater, his connection with the psychic reservoir more
direct, so that some group finds in him its most complete interpreter?
Or even if it is quite evident that in a particular instance a
particular individual has not derived his idea from the group of which
he is at the moment a member, but has brought it to the group, none of
us believes that that idea arose spontaneously in his mind independent
of all previous association. This individual has belonged to many other
groups, has discussed with many men, or even if he has lived his life
apart he has read newspapers and magazines, books and letters, and has
mingled his ideas with those he has found there. Thus the “individual”
idea he brings to a group is not really an “individual” idea; it is the
result of the process of interpenetration, but by bringing it to a new
group and soaking it in that the interpenetration becomes more complex.
The group idea he takes away is now his individual idea so far as any
new group is concerned, and in fact it becomes an active agent in his
progress and the progress of society only by meeting a new group. Our
life is more and more stagnant in proportion as we refuse the group
life.
According to the old theory, the individual proposes, society accepts or
rejects; the individual is forever walking up to society to be embraced
or rejected—it sounds like some game but is hardly life.
There is an interesting theory current which is the direct outcome of
the fallacy that the individual originates and society imitates, namely,
the great man theory. While it seems absurd in this age to be combating
the idea of special creation, yet it is something very like this that
one comes up against sometimes in the discussion of this theory. The
question is often asked, “Does the great man produce his environment or
is he the product of his environment?” Although for my purpose I may
seem to emphasize the other side of things, not for a moment do I wish
to belittle the inestimable value of genius. But the fact of course is
that great men make their environment and are made by their environment.
There wells up in the individual a fountain of power, but this fountain
has risen underground and is richly fed by all the streams of the common
life.[30]
I have spoken of fallacies in the individual invention theory and in the
struggle theory. But I am using the word struggle as synonymous with
strife, opposition, war; effort, striving, the ceaseless labor of
adjustment will always be ours, but these two ideas represent opposite
poles of existence. In the true theory of evolution struggle has indeed
always been adaptation. For many years the “strongest” man has been to
science the being with the greatest number of points of union, the
“fittest” has been the one with the greatest power of coöperation.
Darwin we all know believed that the cause of the advance of
civilization was in the social habits of man. Our latest biologists tell
us that “mutual aid” has from the first been a strong factor in
evolution, that the animal species in which the practice of “mutual
aid”[31] has attained the greatest development are invariably the most
numerous and the most prosperous. We no longer think of the animal world
as necessarily a world of strife; in many of its forms we find not
strife but coördinated activities.
But to too many people struggle suggests conquest and domination; it
implies necessarily victors and vanquished. Some sociologists call the
dissimilar elements of a group the struggle elements, and the similar
elements the unifying elements. But this is a false distinction which
will, as long as persisted in, continue the war between classes and
between nations. The test of our progress is neither our likenesses nor
our unlikenesses, but what we are going to do with our unlikenesses.
Shall I fight whatever is different from me or find the higher
synthesis? The progress of society is measured by its power to unite
into a living, generating whole its self-yielding differences.
Moreover, we think now of the survival of groups rather than of
individuals. For the survival of the group the stronger members must not
crush the weaker but cherish them, because the spiritual and social
strength which will come from the latter course makes a stronger group
than the mere brute strength of a number of “strong” individuals. That
is, the strength of the group does not depend on the greatest number of
strong men, but on the strength of the bond between them, that is, on
the amount of solidarity, on the best organization.
But it might be said, “You still evidently believe in struggle, only you
make the group instead of the individual the unit.” No, the progress of
man must consist in extending the group, in belonging to many groups, in
the relation of these groups. If we accept life as endless battle, then
we shall always have the strong overcoming the weak, either strong
individuals conquering the weak, or a strong group a weak group, or a
strong nation a weak nation. But synthesis is the principle of life, the
method of social progress. Men have developed not through struggle but
through learning how to live together.
Lately the struggle theory has been transferred from the physical to the
intellectual world. Many writers who see society as a continuous
conflict think its highest form is discussion. One of these says, “Not
for a moment would I deny that fighting is better carried on by the pen
than by the sword, but some sort of fighting will be necessary to the
end of the world.” No, as long as we think of discussion as a struggle,
as an opportunity for “argument,” there will be all the usual evil
consequences of the struggle theory. But all this is superficial. If
struggle is unavailing, it is unavailing all along the line. It is not
intellectual struggle that marks the line of progress, but any signs of
finding another method than struggle. Two neighbors quarrelling in words
are little more developed than two men fighting a duel. We must learn to
think of discussion not as a struggle but as experiment in coöperation.
We must learn coöperative thinking, intellectual team-work. There is a
secret here which is going to revolutionize the world.
Perhaps the most profound reason against struggle is that it always
erects a thing-in-itself. If I “fight” Mr. X, that means that I think of
Mr. X as incapable of change—that either he or I must prevail, must
conquer. When I realize fully that there are no things-in-themselves,
struggle simply fades away; then I know that Mr. X and I are two flowing
streams of activity which must meet for larger ends than either could
pursue alone.
Is Germany the last stronghold of the old theory of evolution, is she
the last being in a modern world to assert herself as a thing-in-itself?
President Wilson’s contribution to this war is that he refuses to look
upon Germany as a thing-in-itself.
The idea of adaptation to environment has been so closely connected with
the “struggle for existence” theory that some people do not seem to
realize that in giving up the latter, the former still has force,
although with a somewhat different connotation. We now feel not only
that adaptation to environment is compatible with coöperation, but that
coöperation is the basis of adaptation to environment. But our true
environment is psychic, and as science teaches adaptation to the
physical, so group psychology will teach the secret of membership in the
psychic environment, will teach the branch to know its vine, where its
own inner sources of life are revealed to it. Then we shall understand
that environment is not a hard and rigid something external to us,
always working upon us, whose influence we cannot escape. Not only have
self and environment acted and reacted upon each other, but the action
and reaction go on every moment; both self and environment are always in
the making. The individual who has been affected by his environment acts
on an environment which has been affected by individuals. We shall need
an understanding of this for all our constructive work: it is not that
formative influences work on a dead mass of inertia, but formative
influences work on an environment which has already responded to
initiatives, and these initiatives have been affected by the responses.
We cannot be practical politicians without fully understanding this.
Progress then must be through the group process. Progress implies
respect for the creative process not the created thing; the created
thing is forever and forever being left behind us. The greatest blow to
a hide-bound conservatism would be the understanding that life is
creative at every moment. What the hard-shelled conservative always
forgets is that what he really admires in the past is those very moments
when men have strongly and rudely broken with tradition, burst bonds,
and created something. True conservatism and true progressivism are not
two opposites: conservatives dislike “change,” yet they as well as
progressives want to grow; progressives dislike to “stand pat,” yet they
as well as conservatives want to preserve what is good in the present.
But conservatives often make the mistake of thinking they can go on
living on their spiritual capital; progressives are often too prone not
to fund their capital at all.
What we must get away from is “the hell of rigid things.” There is a
living life of the people. And it must flow directly through our
government and our institutions, expressing itself anew at every moment.
We are not fossils petrified in our social strata. _We are alive._ This
is the first lesson for us to learn. That very word means change and
change, growth and growth. To live gloriously is to change
undauntedly—our ideals must evolve from day to day, and it is upon those
who can fearlessly embrace the doctrine of “becoming” that the life of
the future waits. All is growing; we must recognize this and free the
way for the growth. We must unclose our spiritual sources, we must allow
no mechanism to come between our spiritual sources and our life. The
_élan vital_ must have free play.
Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal. We do not want
rigid institutions, however good. We need no “body of truth” of any
kind, but the will to will, which means the power to make our own
government, our own institutions, our own expanding truth. _We progress,
not from one institution to another, but from a lesser to a greater will
to will._
We know now that there are no immutable goals—there is only a way, a
process, by which we shall, like gods, create our own ends at any
moment—crystallize just enough to be of use and then flow on again. The
flow of life and we the flow: this is the truth. Life is not a matter of
desirable objects here and there; the stream flows on and he who waits
with his object is left with a corpse. Man is equal to life at every
moment, but he must live for _life_ and not for the _things_ life has
produced.
Yet while it is true that life can never be formalized or formulated,
that life is movement, change, onwardness, this does not mean that we
must give up the abiding. The unchangeable and the unchanging are both
included in the idea of growth.[32] Stability is neither rigidity nor
sterility: it is the perpetual power of bringing forth.
Writers are always fixing dates for the dividing line between the
ancient and the modern world, or between the mediæval and the modern
world. Soon the beginning of modern times, of modern thought, will, I
believe, be dated at the moment when men began to look at a plastic
world, at a life constantly changing, at institutions as only temporary
crystallizations of life forces, of right as evolving, of men as
becoming.
The real work of every man is then to build. The challenge is upon us.
This is the task to which all valiant souls must set themselves. We are
to rise from one mastery to another. We are to be no longer satisfied
with the pace of a merely fortuitous progress. We must know now that we
are coworkers with every process of creation, that our function is as
important as the power which keeps the stars in their orbits. We are
creators here and now. We are not in the anteroom of our real life. This
is real life.
We cannot, however, mould our lives each by himself; but within every
individual is the power of joining himself fundamentally and vitally to
other lives, and out of this vital union comes the creative power.
Revelation, if we want it to be continuous, must be through the
community bond. No _individual_ can change the disorder and iniquity of
this world. No chaotic _mass_ of men and women can do it. Conscious
_group_ creation is to be the social and political force of the future.
Our aim must be to live consciously in more and more group relations and
to make each group a means of creating. It is the group which will teach
us that we are not puppets of fate.
Then will men and women spend their time in trivial or evil ways when
they discover that they can make a world to their liking? We are
sometimes told that young men and women working all day under the
present very trying industrial conditions live in our great cities a
round of gaiety at night. Go and look at them. It is a depressing sight.
A tragedy is a tragedy and has its own nobility, but this farce of a
city population enjoying itself at night is a pitiful spectacle. Go to
clubs, go to dances, go to theatres or moving-pictures, and the mass of
our young people look indifferent and more or less bored—they have _not_
found the joy of life. Play, as useless idling, does not give us joy.
Work, as drudgery, does not give us joy. Only creating gives us joy.
When we see that we are absolute masters of our life, that in every
operation, however humble, we are working out the fundamental laws of
being, then we shall walk to our daily work as the soldiers march to the
Marseillaise.
We know what happened on that lonely island in a distant sea when the
young Prince came to the people of the Kingdom of Cards, who had always
lived by Rules, and taught them to live by their Ichcha, their will.
Images became men and women, rules gave place to wills, the caste of the
Court cards was lost, a mechanism changed into life. The inhabitants of
the Kingdom of Cards, who had never thought, who had never made a
decision, learned the royal power of choosing for themselves.
Regulations were abandoned, and the startling discovery was made that
_they could walk in any direction they chose_. This is what we need to
learn—that we can walk in any direction we choose. We are not a pack of
cards to be put here and there, to go always in rows, to totter and fall
when we are not propped up. We must obey our Ichcha.
Already the change has begun. I have said that we are beginning to
recognize this power—there are many indications that we are beginning to
live this power. We are no longer willing to leave human affairs to
“natural” control: we do not want war because it is “natural” to fight;
we do not want a haphazard population at the dictates of “nature.” We no
longer believe that sickness and poverty are sent by God; people are
being taught that they need not be sick, that it is largely in their own
hands, their own collective hands (social hygiene etc.). Modern charity
is not aimed at relieving individual poverty, but at freeing the
individual from the particular enslavement which has produced his
poverty, in freeing society from the causes which produce poverty at
all.[33]
Our once-honored blind forces are more and more losing their mastery
over us. We are at this moment, however, in a difficult transition
period. We are “freer” than ever before; the trouble is we do not know
what to do with this freedom. It is easy to live the moral, the
“social,” life when it consists in following a path carefully marked out
for us, but the task given us to-day is to revalue all the world values,
to steer straight on and on into the unknown—a gallant forth-faring
indeed. But conscious evolution, the endless process of a perfect
coördinating, demands vital people. War is the easy way: we take to war
because we have not enough vitality for the far more difficult job of
agreeing. So also that kind of religion which consists of contemplation
of other-worldliness is the easy way, and we take to that when we have
not enough vitality deliberately to direct our life and construct our
world. It takes more spiritual energy to express the group spirit than
the particularist spirit. This is its glory as well as its difficulty.
We have to be higher order of beings to do it—we become higher order of
beings by doing it. And so the progress goes on forever: it means life
forever in the making, and the creative responsibility of every man.
Conscious evolution is the key to that larger view of democracy which we
are embracing to-day. The key? Every man sharing in the creative process
_is_ democracy; this is our politics and our religion. People are always
inquiring into their relation to God. God is the moving force of the
world, the ever-continuing creating where men are the co-creators.
“_Chaque homme fait dieu, un peu, avec sa vie_,” as one of the most
illumined of the younger French poets says.[34] Man and God are
correlates of that mighty movement which is Humanity self-creating. God
is the perpetual Call to our self-fulfilling. We, by sharing in the
life-process which binds all together in an active, working unity are
all the time sharing in the making of the Universe. This thought calls
forth everything heroic that is in us; every power of which we are
capable must be gathered to this glorious destiny. This is the True
Democracy.[35]
-----
Footnote 30:
It is unfortunate to be obliged to treat this important point with
such brevity.
Footnote 31:
The expressions “mutual aid” and “animal coöperation” have, however, a
slightly misleading connotation; mutual adaptation, coördinated
activities, come nearer the truth. It is confusing to take the words
and phrases we use of men in the conscious stage and transfer them to
the world of animals in the unconscious stage.
Footnote 32:
It is because of this profound truth that we must always respect
conservatism.
Footnote 33:
The claim of the individual to a larger share in government and to a
share in the control of industry will be taken up in later chapters.
Footnote 34:
“Ce que Nait” is the title of a volume of poems by Arcos, and that
which is being born through all the activity of our common life is
God. It is of the “naissance” and “croissance” of God that Arcos loves
to sing.
Footnote 35:
I have said that we gain creative power through the group. Those who
feel enthralled by material conditions, and to whom it seems an irony
to be told that they are “creators,” will demand something more
specific. Concrete methods of group organization are given in Part
III.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XIV
THE GROUP PRINCIPLE AT WORK
--------------
OUR rate of progress, then, and the degree in which we actualize the
perfect democracy, depend upon our understanding that man has the power
of creating, and that he gets this power through his capacity to join
with others to form a real whole, a living group. Let us see, therefore,
what signs are visible to-day of the group principle at work.
First, our whole idea of education is rapidly changing. The chief aim of
education now is to fit the child into the life of the community; we do
not think of his “individual” development except as contributing to
that. Or it would be nearer the truth to say that we recognize that his
individual development is essentially just that. The method of
accomplishing this is chiefly through (1) the introduction of group
class-room work in the place of individual recitations, (2) the addition
of vocational subjects to the curriculum and the establishment of
vocational schools, and (3) the organizing of vocational guidance
departments and placement bureaus in connection with the public schools.
In many of the large cities of the United States the public schools have
a vocational guidance department, and it is not considered that the
schools have done their duty by the child until they have helped him to
choose his life occupation, have trained him in some degree for it, and
have actually found him a job, that is, fitted him into the community.
It is becoming gradually accepted that this is a function of the state,
and several of our states are considering the appropriation of funds for
the carrying on of such departments.[36]
The further idea of education as a continuous process, that it stops
neither at 14 nor 21 nor 60, that a man should be related to his
community not only through services rendered and benefits received but
by a steady process of preparation for his social and civic life, will
be discussed later.[37]
The chief object of medical social service is to put people into
harmonious and fruitful relation, not only because illness has
temporarily withdrawn certain people from the community, but because it
is often some lack of adaptation which has caused the illness.
Our different immigration theories show clearly the growth of the
community idea. First came the idea of amalgamation: our primary duty to
all people coming to America was to assimilate them as quickly and as
thoroughly as possible. Then people reacted against the melting-pot
theory and said, “No, we want all the Italians have to offer, all the
Syrians can give us; the richness of these different civilizations must
not be engulfed in ours.” So separate colonies were advocated, separate
organizations were encouraged. Many articles were written and speeches
made to spread this thought. But now a third idea is emerging—the
community idea. We do not want Swedes and Poles to be lost in an
undifferentiated whole, but equally we do not want all the evils of the
separatist method; we are trying to get an articulated whole. We want
all these different peoples to be part of a true community—giving all
they have to give and receiving equally. Only by a mutual permeation of
ideals shall we enrich their lives and they ours.
Again our present treatment of crime shows the community principle in
two ways: (1) the idea of community responsibility for crime is
spreading rapidly; (2) we are fast outgrowing the idea of punishing
criminals merely, our object is to fit them into society.
First, the growing idea of community responsibility for crime. We read
in an account of the new penology that “Crime in the last analysis is
not to be overcome after arrest but before,” that crime will be
abolished by a change of environment and that “environment is
transformed by child labor laws and the protection of children, by
housing laws and improved sanitation, by the prevention of tuberculosis
and other diseases, by health-giving recreational facilities, by
security of employment, by insurance against the fatalities of industry
and the financial burdens of death and disease, by suitable vocational
training, by all that adds to the content of human life and gives us
higher and keener motives to self-control, strenuous exertion and
thrift.” We of course do not exonerate the individual from
responsibility, but it must be shared by the whole society in which he
lives.
Secondly, the old idea of justice was punishment, a relic of personal
revenge; this punishment took the form of confinement, of keeping the
man outside society. The new idea is exactly the opposite: it is to join
him to society by finding out just what part he is best fitted to play
in society and training him for it. A former Commissioner of Corrections
in New York told me that a number of people, including several judges,
were looking forward to the time very soon being ripe for making the
“punishment” of a crime the doing some piece of social service in order
to fit the criminal into the social order. One man who had shown in his
crime marked organizing ability had been sent to oversee the reclaiming
of some large tracts of abandoned farm land, and this had worked so well
that a number of judges wished to try similar experiments.
Thus criminals are coming to be shown that their crime has not been
against individuals but against society, that it has divorced them from
their community and that the object of their imprisonment is that they
may learn how to unite themselves to their community. The colony system
means that they must learn to live in a community _by_ living in a
community. This is the object of Mr. William George’s “Social
Sanitarium,” where the men are to live in a graded series of farm
villages, govern themselves, support themselves and also their families
as far as possible, and pass from “village” to “village” on their way
towards the society from which their crime has separated them.
This same principle, to make the life while under punishment a
preparation for community life, underlay the work of Mr. Osborne at Sing
Sing. Through his Mutual Welfare League he tried to develop a feeling of
responsibility to the community, a feeling first of all that there was a
community within the prison. All the men knew gang loyalty; it was Mr.
Osborne’s aim to build upon this. He thought they could not feel
responsibility to a community outside when they left unless they learnt
community consciousness inside. He did not provide recreation for them
solely for the sake of recreation; he did not allow them self-government
because of any abstract idea of the justice of self-government; he tried
to bring the men of Sing Sing to a realization of a community, to a
sense of responsibility to a community. The two men who escaped from
Sing Sing in 1916 and voluntarily returned had learned this lesson.[38]
Both these principles—community responsibility for crime and the
necessity of fitting the offender into the community life—underlie the
work of the juvenile court. The probation officer’s duty is not
exhausted by knitting the child again into worthy relations; he must try
to see that community life shall touch children on all sides in a
helpful not a harmful way.
A future task for the juvenile court is to organize groups back of the
child as part of the system of probation. All our experience is showing
us the value of using the group incentive. The approval or blame of our
fellow-men is an urgent factor in our lives; a man can stand any sort of
condemnation better than that of his club. It was the idea of community
punishment which was such an interesting part of the “Little
Commonwealth” which Mr. Homer Lane established near Detroit for boys and
girls on probation. If a boy did not work he was not punished for it, he
did not even go without food, but the whole commonwealth had to pay for
it out of their earnings. The whole moral pressure of the community was
thus brought to bear upon that boy to do his share of the work—an
incentive which Mr. Lane found more powerful than any punishment.
A colonel of the American army says that fewer offenses are committed in
our army than in the Continental armies, not because human nature is
different in America but because our methods of army discipline are
different: the custom in our army is to punish a company for the offense
of an individual; the company, therefore, looks after its own members.
The procedure of our courts also shows signs of change in the direction
of the recognition of the group principle. Until recently we have had in
our courts two lawyers, each upholding his side: this means a real
struggle, there is no effort at unifying, one or the other must win; the
judge is a sort of umpire. But the Reconciliation Court of Cleveland
(and some other western cities) marks a long step in advance. This does
away with lawyers each arguing one side; the judge deals directly with
the disputants, trying to make them see that a harmonizing of their
differences is possible. In our municipal courts, to be sure, the
principal function of the judge has long been not to punish but to take
those measures which will place the individual again in his group, but
this applies only to criminal cases, whereas the Reconciliation Court of
Cleveland, following the practice of the conciliation courts of certain
continental countries,[39] deals with civil cases. The part of the judge
in our juvenile courts is too well known to need mention.
In a jury I suppose we have always had an example of the group idea in
practical life. Here there is no question of counting up similar
ideas—there must be one idea and the effort is to seek that.
In our legislatures and legislative committees we get little integrated
thought because of their party organization; even among members of the
same party on a committee there are many causes at work to prevent the
genuine interplay we should have. The governors’ commissions, on the
other hand, hear both sides, call in many experts and try to arrive at
some composite judgment.
Nowhere has our social atomism been more apparent than in our lack of
city-planning: (1) we have had many beautiful single buildings, but no
plan for the whole city; (2) and more important, we could not get any
general plan for our cities accepted because the individual property
owner (this was called individualism!) must be protected against the
community. City-planning includes not only plans for a beautiful city
but for all its daily needs—streets, traffic regulations, housing,
schools, industry, transportation, recreational facilities; we cannot
secure these things while property owners are being protected in their
“rights.” The angry protest which goes up from real estate owners when
it is proposed to regulate the height of buildings we have heard in all
our cities. The struggle for enough light and air in tenements has been
fought step by step. The “right” claimed was the right of every man to
do what he liked with his own property. Now we are beginning to
recognize the error of this, and to see that it is not a state of
individualism but of anarchy that our new building laws are trying to do
away with. No real estate owner is to be allowed to do that with his own
property which will not fit into a general plan for the beauty and
efficiency of the city. The key-note of the new city-planning is
adaptation, adaptation of means to end and of part to part. This does
not stifle individual initiative, but directs it.
And the interesting point for us here is that the real estate men
themselves are now beginning to see that particularistic building has
actually hurt real estate interests. The “Report of the Advisory Council
of the Real Estate Interests of New York City” admits that “light, air
and access, the chief factors in fixing rentable values, had been
impaired by high buildings and by the proximity of inappropriate or
nuisance buildings and uses.” It is impossible to talk ten minutes with
real estate men to-day without noticing how entirely changed their
attitude has been in the last ten or twenty years. Moralists used to
tell us that the only path of progress was to make people willing to
give up their own interests for the sake of others. But this is not what
our real estate men are doing. They are coming to see that their
interests are in the long run coincident with the interests of all the
other members of the city.
The growing recognition of the group principle in the business world is
particularly interesting to us. The present development of business
methods shows us that the old argument about coöperation and competition
is not fruitful. Coöperation and competition are being taken up into a
larger synthesis. We are just entering on an era of collective living.
“Cut-throat” competition is beginning to go out of fashion. What the
world needs to-day is a coöperative mind. The business world is never
again to be directed by individual intelligences, but by intelligences
interacting and ceaselessly influencing one another. Every mental act of
the big business man is entirely different from the mental acts of the
man of the last century managing his own competitive business. There is
of course competition between our large firms, but the coöperation
between them is coming to occupy a larger and larger place relatively.
We see this in the arrangement between most of our large printers in
Boston not to outbid one another, in those trades which join to
establish apprentice schools, in the coöperative credit system, worked
out so carefully in some of the western cities as almost to eliminate
bad debts, in the regular conferences between the business managers of
the large department stores, in our new Employment Managers’
associations in Boston and elsewhere, in the whole spirit of our
progressive Chambers of Commerce. When our large stores “compete” to
give the highest class goods and best quality service, and meet in
conference to make this “competition” effective, then competition itself
becomes a kind of coöperation! There are now between thirty and forty
associations in this country organized on the open-price plan. The
Leather Belting Exchange, an excellent example of “coöperative
competition,” was organized in 1915. Some of its avowed objects are:
standardization of grades of leather, promotion of use of leather
belting by scientific investigation of its possible uses, uniform
contract system, uniform system of cost accounting, daily charts of
sales, monthly statistical reports, collection and distribution of
information relative to cost of raw material and to methods and cost of
manufacturing and distribution.[40] How vastly different a spirit from
that which used to animate the business world!
Modern business, therefore, needs above all men who can unite, not
merely men who can unite without friction, but who can turn their union
to account. The successful business man of to-day is the man of trained
coöperative intelligence. The world as well as the psychologist places a
higher value on the man who can take part in collective thinking and
concerted action, and has higher positions to offer him in the business
and political field. The secretary of a Commission investigates a
subject, is clever in mastering details, in drawing conclusions and in
presenting them, perhaps far cleverer in these respects than any member
of the Commission. But the chairman of the Commission must have another
and higher power—the power of uniting these conclusions with the
conclusions of others, the power of using this material to evolve with
others plans for action. This means a more developed individual and
brings a higher price in the open market.
Another illustration of the group principle in the business world is
that a corporation is obliged by law to act in joint meeting, that is,
it cannot get the vote of its members by letter and then act according
to the majority.
But more important than any of the illustrations yet given is the
application of the group principle to the relations of capital and
labor. People are at last beginning to see that industrial organization
must be based on the community idea. If we do not want to be dominated
by the special interests of the capital-power, it is equally evident
that we do not want to be dominated by the special interests of the
labor-power. The interests of capital and labor must be united.[41]
Even collective bargaining is only a milestone on the way to the full
application of the group principle. It recognizes the union, it
recognizes that some adjustment between the interests of capital and
labor is possible, but it is still “bargaining,” still an adjustment
between two warring bodies, it still rests on the two pillars of
concession and compromise. We see now the false psychology underlying
compromise and concession. Their practical futility has long been
evident: whenever any difference is “settled” by concession, that
difference pops up again in some other form. Nothing will ever truly
settle differences but synthesis. No wonder the syndicalists label the
“compromises” made between “antagonistic interests” as insincere. In a
way all compromise is insincere, and real harmony can be obtained only
by an integration of “antagonistic” interests which can take place only
when we understand the method. The error of the syndicalists is in
thinking that compromise is the only method; their fundamental error is
in thinking that different interests are necessarily “antagonistic”
interests.
Compromise is accepted not only as inevitable and as entirely proper,
but as the most significant fact of human association, by those
economists who belong to that school of “group sociologists” which sees
present society as made up of warring groups, ideal society as made up
of groups in equilibrium. Not only, I believe, is conflict and
compromise not the true social process, but also it is not, even at
present, the most significant, although usually the largest, part of the
social process. The integrating of ideas which comes partly from direct
interpenetration, and partly from that indirect interpenetration which
is the consequence of the overlapping membership of groups, I see going
on very largely in the groups to which I belong, and is surely an
interesting sign-post to future methods of association.
The weakness of Arbitration and Conciliation Boards, with their
“impartial” member, is that they tend to mere compromise even when they
are not openly negotiations between two warring parties.[42] It is
probable from what we see on all sides that the more “concessions” we
make, the less “peace” we shall get. Compulsory Arbitration in New
Zealand has not succeeded as well as was hoped just because it has not
found the community between capital and labor.
The latest development of collective bargaining, the Trade
Agreement,[43] with more or less permanent boards of representatives
from employers and workers, brings us nearer true community than we have
yet found in industrial relations. The history of these Agreements in
England and America is fruitful study. One of the best known in America
is Mr. Justice Brandeis’ protocol scheme in 1910 for the garment
industries of New York, which provided for an industrial court composed
of employers and employed to which all disagreements should be brought,
and for six years this prevented strikes in the needle trades of New
York.[44]
One of the most interesting of the Trade Agreements to be found in the
Bulletins of the National Labor Department, and one which can be studied
over a long term of years, is that between the Stove Founders’ National
Defence Association (employers) and the Iron Moulders’ Union of North
America. It is not only that the permanent organ of “conference”
(employers and employees represented) has brought peace to the stove
industry after forty years of disastrous strikes and lockouts, but that
question after question has been decided not by the side which the
market rendered strongest at the moment seizing its advantage, but by a
real harmonizing of interest. A good illustration is the treatment of
the question of who should pay for the bad castings: that was not
decided at once as a matter of superior strength or of compromise, but
after many months a basis of mutual advantage was found.
For some years Trade Agreements have been coming to include more and
more points; not wages and hours alone, but many questions of shop
management, discipline etc. are now included. Moreover it has been seen
over and over again that the knowledge gained through joint conference
is the knowledge needed for joint control: the workmen ought to know the
cost of production and of transportation, the relative value of
different processes of production, the state of the market, the
conditions governing the production and marketing of the competing
product etc.; the employer must know the real conditions of labor and
the laborer’s point of view.
The fundamental weakness of collective bargaining is that while it
provides machinery for adjustment of grievances, while it looks forward
to all the conceivable emergencies which may arise to cause disagreement
between labor and capital, and seeks methods to meet these, it does not
give labor a direct share in industrial control. In the collective
_bargain wages_ and the conditions of employment are usually determined
by the relative _bargaining_ strength of the workers and employers of
the industrial group. Not bargaining in any form, not negotiation, is
the key to industrial peace and prosperity; the collective contract must
in time go the way of the individual contract. Community is the key-word
for all relations of the new state. Labor unions have long been seeking
their “rights,” have looked on the differences between capital and labor
as a fight, and have sought an advantageous position from which to carry
on the fight: this attitude has influenced their whole internal
organization. They quite as much as capital must recognize that this
attitude must be given up. If we want harmony between labor and capital,
we must make labor and capital into one group: we must have an
integration of interests and motives, of standards and ideals of
justice.
It is a mistake to think that social progress is to depend upon anything
happening to the working people: some say that they are to be given more
material goods and all will be well; some think they are to be given
more “education” and the world will be saved. It is equally a mistake to
think that what we need is the conversion to “unselfishness” of the
capitalist class. Those who advocate profit-sharing are not helping us.
The quarrel between capital and labor can never be settled on material
grounds. The crux of that quarrel is not profits and wages—it is the
joint control of industry.
There has been an increasing tendency of recent years for employers to
take their employees into their councils. This ranges from mere
“advisory” boards, which are consulted chiefly concerning grievances,
through the joint committees for safety, health, standardization, wages
etc., to real share in the management.[45] But even in the lowest form
of this new kind of coöperation we may notice two points: the advisory
boards are usually representative bodies elected by the employees, and
they are consulted as a whole, not individually. The flaw in these
advisory boards is not so much, as is often thought, because the
management still keeps all the power in its own hands, as that the
company officials do not sit with these boards in joint consultation.
There is, however, much variety of method. In some shops advisory
committees meet with the company officials. Some companies put many more
important questions concerning conditions of employment before these
bodies than other companies would think practical. A few employers have
even given up the right to discharge—dismissal must be decided by
fellow-employees.
Usually the management keeps the final power in its own hands. This is
not so, however, in the case of Wm. Filene Son’s Co., Boston, which has
gone further than any other plant in co-management. Here the employees
have the right by a two-thirds vote to change, initiate, or amend any
rule that affects the discipline or working conditions of the employees
of the store, and such vote becomes at once operative even against the
veto of the management. Further, out of eleven members of the board of
directors, four are representatives of the employees.[46]
The great advantage of company officials and workers acting together on
boards or committees (workshop committees, discipline boards, advisory
councils, boards of directors, etc.) is the same as that of the regular
joint conferences of the Trade Agreement: employers and employed can
thus learn to function together and prepare the way for joint control.
Workshop committees should be encouraged, not so much because they
remove grievances etc., as because in the joint workshop committee,
managers and workers are learning to act together. Industrial democracy
is a process, a growth. The joint control of industry may be established
by some fiat, but it will not be the genuine thing until the _process_
of joint control is learned. To be sure, the workshop committees which
are independent of the management are often considered the best for the
workers because they can thus keep themselves free to maintain and fight
for their own particular interests, but this is exactly, I think, what
should be avoided.
The labor question is—Is the war between capital and labor to be
terminated by fight and conquest or by learning how to function
together? I face fully the fact that many supporters of labor believe in
what they call the “frank” recognition that the interests of capital and
labor are “antagonistic.” I believe that the end of the wars of nations
and of the war between labor and capital will come in exactly the same
way: by making the nations into one group, by making capital and labor
into one group. Then we shall learn to distinguish between true and
apparent interests, or rather, between long-run and immediate interests;
then we shall give up the notion of “antagonisms,” which belong to a
static world, and see only difference—that is, that which is capable of
integration. This is not an idealistic treatment of the labor problem.
Increase of wages and reduction in cost of production were once
considered an irreconciliable antagonism—now their concurrence is a
matter of common experience. If the hope of that concurrence had been
abandoned as visionary or idealistic, we should be sadly off to-day.
Many people are now making a distinction, however, between production
and distribution in this respect: in the former the interests of capital
and labor are the same, it is said, but not in the latter. When that
reorganization of the business world, which it is no longer utopian to
think of, is further actualized, then in distribution too we shall be
able to see the coincident interests of labor and capital.
As the most hopeful sign in the present treatment of industrial
questions is the recognition that man with his fundamental instincts and
needs is the very centre and heart of the labor problem, so the most
hopeful sign that we shall fully utilize the constructive powers which
will be released by this psychological approach to industrial problems,
is the gradually increasing share of the workman in the actual control
of industry.
The recognition of community rather than of individuals or class, the
very marked getting away from the attitude of pitting labor interests
against the interests of capital, is the most striking thing from our
point of view about the famous report formulated by a sub-committee of
the British Labor Party in the autumn of 1917. In every one of the four
“Pillars” of the new social order this stands out as the most dominant
feature. In explaining the first, The Universal Enforcement of the
National Minimum, it is explicitly stated that this is not to protect
individuals or a class, but to “safeguard” the “community” against the
“insidious degradation of the standard of life.” The second, The
Democratic Control of Industry, proposes national ownership and
administration of the railways, canals and mines and “other main
industries ... as opportunity offers,” with “a steadily increasing
participation of the organized workers in the management,” the extension
of municipal enterprise to housing and town planning, public libraries,
music and recreation, and the fixing of prices. This “Pillar,” too, we
are told, is not a class measure, but is “to safeguard the interests of
the community as a whole.”
Under the heading, “Revolution in National Finance,” the third “Pillar,”
it is again definitely stated and moreover convincingly shown that this
is not “in the interests of wage-earners alone.” Under “The Surplus
Wealth for the Common Good,” the fourth “Pillar,” it is stated that the
surplus wealth shall be used for what “the community day by day needs
for the perpetual improvement and increase of its various enterprises,”
“for scientific investigation and original research in every branch of
knowledge,” and for “the promotion of music, literature and fine arts.”
“It is in the proposal for this appropriation of every surplus for the
common good—in the vision of its resolute use for the building up of the
community as a whole ... that the Labor Party ... most distinctively
marks itself off from the older political parties.”[47]
-----
Footnote 36:
It is interesting to notice that Miss Lathrop’s whole conception of
the Children’s Bureau is that it is to fit children into the life of
the community.
Footnote 37:
See Appendix.
Footnote 38:
The new farm industrial system which is to replace Sing Sing is
founded largely on the community idea.
Footnote 39:
France, Norway, Switzerland. In Norway it is said that more then
three-quarters of the cases which come before the conciliation courts
are settled without law suits.
Footnote 40:
“Experiences in Coöperative Competition,” by W. V. Spaulding.
Footnote 41:
The great value of Robert Valentine’s work consisted in his
recognition of this fact.
Footnote 42:
I am speaking in general. It is true that the history of cases settled
by arbitration reveals many in which the “umpire” has insisted that
negotiations continue until the real coincident interest of both sides
should be discovered.
Footnote 43:
It has long been known in England and America but recently it has been
spreading rapidly.
Footnote 44:
Recently abandoned.
Footnote 45:
The three firms which have carried co-management furthest are the
Printz-Biederman Co. of Cleveland, the Wm. Filene’s Sons Co. of Boston
and the U. S. Cartridge Co. of Lowell. See Report of Committee on
Vocational Guidance, Fourth Annual Convention of National Association
of Corporation Schools, by Henry C. Metcalf.
Footnote 46:
We have a number of minor instances of the recognition of the group
principle in industry. An interesting example is the shop piece-work
in the Cadbury works, where the wages are calculated on the output of
a whole work-room, and thus every one in the room has to suffer for
the laziness of one. (See “Experiments in Industrial Organization,” by
Edward Cadbury.)
Footnote 47:
I have not spoken of the coöperative buying and selling movement
because by the name alone it is obvious how well it illustrates my
point, and also because it is so well known to every one.
Another evidence of the spreading of the community idea is the wide
acceptance of the right of the community to value created by the
community.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XV
FROM CONTRACT TO COMMUNITY
--------------
BUT perhaps nowhere in our national life is the growing recognition of
the group or community principle so fundamental for us as in our modern
theory of law. Mr. Roscoe Pound has opened a new future for America by
his exposition of modern law, an exposition which penetrates and
illumines every department of our thought. Let us speak briefly of this
modern theory of law. It is: (1) that law is the outcome of our
community life, (2) that it must serve, not individuals, but the
community.
Mr. Pound, in a series of articles on “The Scope and Purpose of
Sociological Jurisprudence” in the Harvard Law Review (1910-1912),
points out that it was an epoch-making moment when attention began to be
turned from the nature of law to its purpose. The old conception of law
was that “new situations are to be met always by deductions from old
principles.” The new school (headed by Jhering) believe that “law is a
product of conscious and increasingly determinate human will.” “Legal
doctrines and legal interests do not work themselves out blindly, but
have been fashioned by human wants to meet human needs.” Before Jhering
the theory of law had been individualistic; Jhering’s is a social theory
of law. “The eighteenth century conceived of law as something which the
individual invoked against society; ... Jhering taught that it was
something created by society through which the individual found a means
of securing his interests, so far as society recognized them.” And
Jhering called his a jurisprudence of realities; he wanted legal
precepts worked out and tested by results. For instance, if a rule of
commercial law were in question, the search should be for the rule which
best accords with and gives effect to sound business practice.[48]
So, Mr. Pound tells us, the idea of justice as the maximum of individual
self-assertion, which began to appear at the end of the sixteenth
century and reached its highest development in the nineteenth century,
began to give way towards the end of the nineteenth century to the new
idea of the end of law. Modern jurists have come to consider the working
of law more than its abstract content; they lay stress upon the social
purposes which law subserves rather than upon sanction.[49]
Mr. Pound then shows us that Gierke’s theory of association “became as
strong an attack upon the individualistic jurisprudence of the
nineteenth century upon one side as Jhering’s theory of interests was
upon another.” The “real personality” of the group is plainly expounded
by Gierke, that it is not a legal fiction, that is that the law does not
create it but merely recognizes that which already exists, that this
“real person” is more than an aggregation of individuals, that there is
a group will which is something real apart from the wills of the
associated individuals.
Thus German jurists recognize the principle of “community.” The theory
of Vereinbarung, as expounded by Jellinek,[50] is also a recognition of
the fact that one will can be formed from several. The present tendency
to work out the law of association through the study of the group is
marked and significant.
The chief consequence of this growing tendency in modern juristic
thinking is seen in the change in attitude towards contract. The
fundamental question of relation, of association, is—Can you make one
idea grow where two grew before? _This_ is the law of fruitful increase.
The gradual progress away from contract in legal theory is just the
gradual recognition of this principle. You can have a contractual
relation between two wills or you can have those two wills uniting to
form one will. Contract never creates one will. It is the latter process
which is shown in the development of corporation law.[51] The laws
regulating partnership are based on contractual relations between the
individual members. The laws regulating corporations are based on the
theory that a corporation is something quite different from the
individuals who constitute it or the sum of those individuals, that a
new entity has been created. I am writing at this moment (February,
1918) in a room with the thermometer at 42, but the law would not uphold
me in going and getting my share, as a stock holder, of the coal now in
the New York, New Haven and Hartford sheds! But to many the personality
of the corporation is a fiction: they do not consider the corporation a
self-created entity but a state-created entity. To others, following
Gierke, the corporation is merely a state-_recognized_ entity, it has
the inherent power to create itself. The increasing acceptance of this
latter theory has made it possible to hold liable groups which have not
been legally incorporated but which exercise powers analogous to those
of corporations. This has been the principle of some of the English
decisions making trade-unions responsible, as notably in the Taff-Vale
case.
The paradox of contract is that while it seems to be based on relation,
it is in reality based on the individual. Contract is a particularist
conception. Mr. Pound speaks of the significance of the “parallel
movement away from liberty of contract and yet at the same time towards
the full recognition of association.” It is the legal theory of
association based on our growing understanding of group psychology which
will finally banish contract. When Duguit, the eminent French jurist,
tells us that contract is diminishing, it is because he sees a time when
all juridical manifestations will come from unilateral acts.[52] We see
contract diminishing because we believe in a different mode of
association: as fast as association becomes a “community” relation, as
fast as individuals are recognized as community-units, just so fast does
contract fade away. Jellinek points out that legal theory is coming to
recognize that violation of community is quite different from the
violation of contract.
From status to contract we do not now consider the history of liberty
but of particularism—the development of law through giving a larger and
larger share to the particular will. The present progress of law is from
contract to community. Our particularistic law is giving way to a legal
theory based on a sound theory of interrelationship. Our common law has
considered men as separate individuals, not as members of one another.
These separate individuals were to be “free” to fight out their
differences as best they could, it being overlooked that freedom for one
might not mean freedom for the other, as in the case of employer and
employed. “Individual rights” in practice usually involve some
difference of opinion as to who is the individual! Mr. Olney said of the
Adair case: “It is archaic, it is a long step into the past, to conceive
of and deal with the relations between the employer in such industries
and the employee as if the parties were individuals.”[53]
The principles of individual rights and contract which have long
dominated our courts[54] are giving way now to sounder doctrine. The old
idea was that a man could do what he liked with his own; this is not the
modern notion of law. We find a judge recently saying: “The entire
scheme of prohibition as embodied in the Constitution and laws of Kansas
might fail, if the right of each citizen to manufacture intoxicating
liquors for his own use or as a beverage were recognized. Such a right
does not inhere in citizenship.”[55] Our future law is to serve neither
classes nor individuals, but the community. The lawyer is to bring his
accumulation of knowledge not to his clients merely, but to enrich and
interpret and adjust our whole social life.
We have many signs to-day of the growing recognition of community as the
basis of law. The following are taken from an article by Mr. Pound:[56]
The increasing tendency of law to impose limitations on the use of
property, limitations designed to prevent the anti-social use of
property. This has already been noticed in our new building laws.
The limitations now imposed on freedom of contract. This is shown in the
statutes regulating the hours and conditions of labor, in the law of
insurance,[57] in the judicial decisions which have established that the
duties of public service corporations are not contractual, flowing from
agreement, but quasi-contractual, flowing from the calling in which the
public servant is engaged.
Limitations on the part of creditor or injured party to exact
satisfaction. This is illustrated by the homestead exemptions which
prevail in many states, and such exemptions as tools to artisans,
libraries to professional men, and animals and implements to farmers.
Imposition of liability without fault, as illustrated in workmen’s
compensation and employers’ liability.[58]
Water rights are now interpreted with limitations on the owners. The
idea is becoming accepted that running water is an asset of society
which is not capable of private appropriation or ownership except under
regulations that protect the general interest. This tendency is changing
the whole water law of the western states.
Insistence on interest of society in dependent members of household.
With respect to children it is not the individual interest of the
parents, but the interest of society which is regarded.
Thus modern law is being based more and more upon a recognition of the
community principle.
When we sometimes hear a lawyer talk of such measures as old age
pensions as a matter of “social expediency,” we know that he has not yet
caught the community idea in law. Modern law considers individuals not
as isolated beings, but in their relation to the life of the whole
community. Thus in shortening the hours of work the courts can no longer
say this is an “unwarrantable interference” with individual liberty;
they have to consider the health of the individual in its relation to
his family and his work, also the use he will make of his leisure, the
need he has for time to perform his duties as citizen, etc. etc. Mr.
Pound points out with great clearness that relation is taking the place
of contract in modern law. Workmen’s compensation arises from the theory
of reciprocal rights and duties and liabilities which flow from a
relation. This he tells us was the common law conception until deflected
by contract; now we are going back to it and we do not ask the strict
terms of the contract, but what the relation demands.
Perhaps social psychology can give two warnings to this new tendency of
law. First this relation must not be a personal relation. I have spoken
several times of our modern legal system as based on relation, but this
must not be confused with the relation of the Middle Ages. Then the
fundamental truth of relation, that life is a web of relationships, was
felt intuitively, but it was worked out on its personal side. The feudal
age lived in the idea of relation, but the heart of the feudal system
was personal service. It was like loyalty to the party chief: right or
wrong, the vassal followed his lord to the battlefield and died with him
there. Because it was worked out on its personal side it had many
imperfections, and the inevitable reaction swung far away. Now the
pendulum is returning to relation as the truth of life, but it is to be
impersonal. Employers and employed must study the ideal relation and try
to actualize that. We seek always the law of true community.
Secondly, the relation itself must always be in relation. But these
warnings are not necessary for our progressive judges. It is interesting
to read the decisions of our common-law judges with this in view: to see
how often the search is for the law of the actual conditions and what
obligations those actual conditions create, not for a personal relation
with some abstract conception of a static relation. It is of a _relation
in relation_ that judges must, and often to-day do, consider: not
landlord and tenant as landlord and tenant, not master and servant as
master and servant, but of that relation in relation to other relations,
or, we might say, to society. This growing conception of a dynamic
relation in itself means a new theory of law.[59]
Thus our law to-day is giving up its deductions from juristic
conceptions, from the “body of rules” upon which trial procedure has so
largely rested, and is beginning to study the condition given with the
aim of reaching the law of that condition. Mr. Pound says distinctly
that law is to be no longer based on first principles, but on “the
conditions it is to govern.” And we are told that “Mr. Justice
Holmes has been unswerving in his resistance to any doctrinaire
interpretation,” that his decisions follow the actual conditions of life
even often against his own bias of thought.[60] The great value of Mr.
Justice Brandeis’ brief in the Oregon case concerning the
constitutionality of limiting the hours of women in industry, was his
insistence upon social facts. And Mr. Felix Frankfurter made an address
before the American Bar Association in August, 1915, the burden of which
was that “law must follow life.” His plea for a “creative” system of law
in the place of the crystallized system of the past which we are trying
with hopeless failure to apply to present conditions points the way with
force and convincingness to a New Society based on the evolving not the
static principle of life.
As our theory of the state no longer includes the idea of contractual
obligation, we begin to see the interdependence of state and law, that
neither is prior to the other. The same process which evolves the state
evolves the law. Law flows from our life, therefore it cannot be above
it. The source of the binding power of law is not in the consent of the
community, but in the fact that it has been produced by the community.
This gives us a new conception of law. Some writers talk of social
justice as if a definite idea of it existed, and that all we have to do
to regenerate society is to direct our efforts towards the realization
of this ideal. But the ideal of social justice is itself a collective
and a progressive development, that is, it is produced through our
associated life and it is produced anew from day to day. We do not want
a “perfect” law to regulate the hours of women in industry; we want that
kind of life which will make us, all of us, grow the best ideas about
the hours of women in industry, about women in industry, about women,
about industry.
We cannot assume that we possess a body of achieved ideas stamped in
some mysterious way with the authority of reason and justice, but even
were it true, the reason and justice of the past must give way to the
reason and justice of the present. You cannot bottle up wisdom—it won’t
keep—but through our associated life it may be distilled afresh at every
instant. We are coming now to see indeed that law is a social imperative
in the strict psychological sense, that is, that it gets its authority
through the power of group life. Wundt says, The development of law is a
process of the psychology of peoples, therefore law will forever be a
process of becoming.[61] Our obedience to law then must not be obedience
to past law, but obedience to that law which we with all the experience
of the past at our command, with all the vision of the future which the
past has taught us, with all the intelligence which vivid living in the
present has developed in us, are able to make for our generation, for
our country, for the world. We are told that one of the most salient
points in modern juristic thinking is its faith in the efficacy of
effort, its belief that law has been and may be made consciously.
When we look upon law as a thing we think of it as a finished thing; the
moment we look upon it as a process we think of it always in evolution.
Our law must take account of our social and economic conditions, and it
must do it again to-morrow and again day after to-morrow. We do not want
a new legal system with every sunrise, but we do want a method by which
our law shall be capable of assimilating from day to day what it needs
to act upon that life from which it has drawn its existence and to which
it must minister. The vital fluid of the community, its life’s blood,
must pass so continuously from the common will to the law and from the
law to the common will that a perfect circulation will be established.
We do not “discover” legal principles which it then behooves us to burn
candles before forever, but legal principles are the outcome of our
daily life. Our law therefore cannot be based on “fixed” principles: our
law must be intrinsic in the social process.
There has been a distinction made between legal principles and the
application of these principles: legal principles partook of the nature
of the absolute, and to our high-priests, the lawyers, fell the
privilege of applying them. But this is an artificial distinction. If
our methods could be such that the energy of lawyers, which now often
goes in making the concrete instance and the legal principle in some way
(by fiction, or twisting, or “interpreting”) fit each other, could help
evolve day by day a crescent law which is the outcome of our life as it
is to be applied to our life, an enormous amount of energy would be
saved for the development of our American people. It is static law and
our reverence for legal abstractions which has produced “privilege.” It
is dynamic law, as much as anything else, which will bring us the new
social order.
To sum up: Law should not be a “body” of knowledge; it should be
revitalized anew at every moment. Our judges cannot administer law by
knowing law alone. They have to be so closely in touch with a living,
growing society, so at one with the conceptions that are being evolved
by that society that their interpretations will be the method by which
our so-called “body of law” shall indeed be alive and grow in
correspondence with the growth of society. This is what gives to our
American supreme courts their large powers, and makes us choose for
judges not only men who understand law and who can be trusted for
accurate interpretation, but men who have a large comprehension of our
country’s needs, wide conceptions of social justice, and who have
creative minds—who can make legal interpretation contribute to the
structure of our government.[62] The modern lawyer must see, amidst all
the complexity of the twentieth-century world, where we are tending,
what our true purpose is, and the part law can take in making manifest
that purpose. The modern lawyer must create a new system of service. A
living law we demand to-day—this is always the law of the given
condition, never a “rule.”
-----
Footnote 48:
Col. Law Rev. 8, 610.
Footnote 49:
Pound, Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 20. The influence of
sociology on law has here been very marked. For further discussion of
a teleological jurisprudence, see ch. XXIX.
Footnote 50:
Duguit, L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive, 398–409, from
Jellinek, System der subjektiren öffentlichen Rechte, 193.
Footnote 51:
The whole legal history of associations and the development of
association law throws much light on the growth of the community idea.
Footnote 52:
Also, I recognize, because his “_droit objectif_” based on social
solidarity tends to sweep away contract. It is interesting to notice
that contract is being attacked from more than one point of view. The
bearing of all this on politics will be seen later, especially in ch.
XXIX, “Political Pluralism and Sovereignty.”
Footnote 53:
Quoted by Roscoe Pound in Col. Law Rev. 8, 616.
Footnote 54:
Statutes limiting the hours of labor were held unconstitutional,
railway corporations were held not to be required to furnish
discharged employees with a cause for dismissal, etc.
Footnote 55:
Harlan, J., in Mugler _v._ Kansas, 123 U. S. 623. Taken from Roscoe
Pound, Liberty of Contract, Yale Law Journal, 18, 468.
Footnote 56:
The End of Law as Developed in Legal Rules and Doctrine, Harv. Law
Rev. 27, 195–234.
Footnote 57:
“Statutes ... have taken many features of the subject out of the
domain of agreement and the tendency of judicial decision has been in
effect to attach rights and liabilities to the relation of insurer and
insured and thus to remove insurance from the category of contract.”
Footnote 58:
The old idea of “contributory negligence” is seen in the following
decision: “We must remember that the injury complained of is due to
the negligence of a fellow workman, for which the master is
responsible neither in law nor morals.” Durkin _v._ Coal Co. 171, Pa.
St. 193, 205. Quoted by Roscoe Pound in Yale Law Journal, 18, 467.
Footnote 59:
This is the “new natural law” of which Mr. Pound speaks as “the
revival of the idealist interpretation which is the enduring
possession of philosophical jurisprudence.” Formerly, we are told,
“equity imposed moral limitations. The law to-day is beginning to
impose social limitations.” Harv. Law Rev. 27, 227.
Footnote 60:
“The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes,” by Felix Frankfurter,
Harv. Law Rev. 29, 683–702.
Footnote 61:
Quoted by Roscoe Pound in Harv. Law Rev. 25, 505.
Footnote 62:
It has been proposed that we should have trained business men on the
benches of our supreme courts as well as lawyers. I should think it
would be better for our lawyers to be so conversant with social facts
that this need not be necessary.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART II
THE TRADITIONAL DEMOCRACY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVI
DEMOCRACY NOT “LIBERTY” AND “EQUALITY”: OUR POLITICAL DUALISM
--------------
THE purpose of this book is to indicate certain changes which must be
made in our political methods in order that the group principle, the
most fruitful principle of association we have yet found, shall have
free play in our political life. In Part III we shall devote ourselves
specifically to that purpose. Here let us examine some of our past
notions of democracy and then trace the growth of true democracy in
America.
Democracy has meant to many “natural” rights, “liberty” and “equality.”
The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion
those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my
only rights are those which membership in a group gives me. The old idea
of natural rights postulated the particularist individual; we know now
that no such person exists. The group and the individual come into
existence simultaneously: with this group-man appear group-rights. Thus
man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society or
against society. Particularist rights are ruled out as everything
particularist is ruled out. When we accept fully the principle of rights
involved in the group theory of association, it will change the
decisions of our courts, our state constitutions, and all the concrete
machinery of government. The truth of the whole matter is that our only
concern with “rights” is not to protect them but to create them. Our
efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the rights which Heaven has
showered upon us, but in creating all the rights we shall ever have.[63]
As an understanding of the group process abolishes “individual rights,”
so it gives us a true definition of liberty. We have seen that the free
man is he who actualizes the will of the whole. I have no liberty except
as an essential member of a group. The particularist idea of liberty was
either negative, depending on the removal of barriers, or it was
quantitative, something which I had left over after the state had
restrained me in every way it thought necessary. But liberty is not
measured by the number of restraints we do not have, but by the number
of spontaneous activities we do have. Law and liberty are not like the
two halves of this page, mutually exclusive—one is involved in the
other. One does not decrease as the other increases. Liberty and law go
hand in hand and increase together in the larger synthesis of life we
are here trying to make.
We see that to obey the group which we have helped to make and of which
we are an integral part is to be free because we are then obeying
ourself. Ideally the state is such a group, actually it is not, but it
depends upon us to make it more and more so. The state must be no
external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be
myself acting as the state in every smallest detail of life. Expression,
not restraint, is always the motive of the ideal state.
There has been long a kind of balance theory prevalent: everything that
seems to have to do with the one is put on one side, everything that has
to do with the many, on the other, and one side is called individuality
and freedom, and the other, society, constraint, authority. Then the
balancing begins: how much shall we give up on one side and how much on
the other to keep the beautiful equilibrium of our daily life? How
artificial such balancing sounds! We are beginning to know now that our
freedom depends not on the weakness but on the strength of our
government, our government being the expression of a united people. We
are freer under our present sanitary laws than without them; we are
freer under compulsory education than without it. A highly organized
state does not mean restriction of the individual but his greater
liberty. The individual is restricted in an unorganized state. A greater
degree of social organization means a more complex, a richer, broader
life, means more opportunity for individual effort and individual choice
and individual initiative. The test of our liberty is not the number of
limitations put upon the powers of the state. The state is not an
extra-will. If we are the state we welcome Our liberty.
But liberty on the popular tongue has always been coupled with equality,
and this expression too needs revaluation. The group process shows us
that we are equal from two points of view: first, I am equal to every
one else as one of the necessary members of the group; secondly, each of
these essential parts is the tap from an infinite supply—in every man
lives an infinite possibility. But we must remember that there are no
mechanical, no quantitative equalities. Democracy in fact insists on
what are usually thought of as inequalities. Of course I am not “as good
as you”—it would be a pretty poor world if I were, that is if you were
no better than I am. Democracy without humility is inconceivable. The
hope of democracy is in its inequalities. The only real equality I can
ever have is to fill my place in the whole at the same time that every
other man is filling his place in the whole.
Much of our present class hatred comes from a distorted view of
equality. This doctrine means to many that I have as much “right” to
things as any one else, and therefore if I see any one having more
things than I have, it is proper to feel resentment against that person
or class. Much legislation, therefore, is directed to lopping off here
and there. But such legislation is a negative and therefore
non-constructive interpretation of equality. The trouble with much of
our reform is that it is based on the very errors which have brought
about the evils it is fighting. The trade-unionists say that the courts
give special privileges to employers and that they do not have equal
rights. But this is just the complaint of the employers: that the
unionists are doing them out of their time-honored equal rights.[64]
Our distorted ideas of rights and liberty and equality have been mixed
up with our false conception of the state, with the monstrous fallacy of
man _vs._ the state. But as we now see that the individual and society
are different aspects of the same process, so we see that the citizen
and the state are one, that their interests are identical, that their
aims are identical, that they are absolutely bound up together. Our old
political dualism is now disappearing. The state does not exist for the
individual or the individual for the state: we do not exalt the state
and subordinate the individual or, on the other hand, apotheosize the
individual and give him the state as his “servant.” _The state is not
the servant of the people._ The state must _be_ the people before it can
reach a high degree of effective accomplishment. The state is one of the
collective aspects of the individual; the individual is from one point
of view the distributive aspect of the state. The non-existence of
self-sufficing individuals gives us the whole of our new theory of
democracy. Those who govern and those who are governed are merely two
aspects of the common will. When we have a state truly representative of
our collective citizenship, then the fear of the state will disappear
because the antithesis between the individual and the state will have
disappeared.
To sum up: our present idea of the state is that it is not something
outside ourselves, that it must flow out from ourselves and control our
social life. But it must “control” our life by expressing it. The state
is always the great Yes, not the great No. Liberty and restraint are not
opposed, because ideally the expression of the social will in restraint
_is_ our freedom. The state has a higher function than either
restraining individuals or protecting individuals. It is to have a great
forward policy which shall follow the collective will of the people, a
collective will which embodied through our state, in our life, shall be
the basis of a progress yet undreamed of. When we can give up the notion
of individual rights, we shall have taken the longest step forward in
our political development. When we can give up the idea of national
rights—but it is too soon to talk of that yet.
-----
Footnote 63:
See ch. XXIX for the theory of “objective rights” now held by many as
the basis of the new state.
Footnote 64:
This is a hoary quarrel. From the beginning of our government it was
seen that the equal rights doctrine was a sword which could cut both
ways. Both Federalists and Republicans believed in equal rights: the
Federalists, therefore, wanted to protect individuals with a strong
government; the Republicans wanted a weak government so that
individuals could be let alone in the exercise of their equal rights.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVII
DEMOCRACY NOT THE MAJORITY: OUR POLITICAL FALLACY
--------------
IF many people have defined democracy as liberty and equal rights,
others have defined it as “the ascendancy of numbers,” as “majority
rule.” Both these definitions are particularistic. Democracy means the
will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not necessarily
represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or three-quarters vote,
nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is democratic when it is
approaching not a unanimous but an integrated will. We have seen that
the adding of similarities does not produce the social consciousness; in
the same way the adding of similar votes does not give us the political
will. We have seen that society is not an aggregation of units, of men
considered one by one; therefore we understand that the will of the
state is not discovered by counting.[65] This means a new conception of
politics: it means that the organization of men in small, local groups
must be the next form which democracy takes. Here the need and will of
every man and woman can appear and mingle with the needs and wills of
all to produce an all-will. Thus will be abolished the reign of numbers.
A crude view of democracy says that when the working-people realize
their power they can have what they want, since, their numbers being so
great, they can out-vote other classes. But the reason the
working-people have not already learned something so very obvious is
because it is not true—_we are never to be ruled by numbers alone_.
Moreover, a fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it
abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule:
the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into
committees—Committee of Fifty, Fifteen, Three—which in their turn
resolve themselves into a committee of one, and behold—the full-fledged
era of bosses is at hand, with the “consent of the governed” simply
because the governed are physically helpless to govern themselves. Many
men want majority rule so that they can be this committee of one; some
of our most worthy citizens are incipient Greek tyrants longing to give
us of their best—tyranny.
Many working-men are clamoring for majority rule in industry, yet we
know how often in their own organizations the rule of the many becomes
the rule of the few. If “industrial democracy” is to mean majority rule,
let us be warned by our experience of it in politics—it will rend
whoever dallies with it.
Yet it will be objected, “But what other means under the sun is there of
finding the common will except by counting votes?” We see already here
and there signs of a new method. In many committees, boards and
commissions we see now a reluctance to take action until all agree;
there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it long enough, we can
unify our ideas and our wills, and there is also a feeling that such
unification of will has value, that our work will be vastly more
effective in consequence. How different from our old methods when we
were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting
with us. Some one has said, “We count heads to save breaking them.” We
are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift
until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought.
We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it. We
are not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the
majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will.
This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted. Is this
the way diplomats meet? Is this the way competing industrial interests
adjust their differences? Not yet, but it must be. And what will help us
more than anything else is just to get rid of the idea that we ever meet
to get votes. The corruption in city councils, state legislatures,
Congress, is largely the outcome of the idea that the getting of votes
is the object of our meeting. The present barter in votes would not take
place if the unimportance of votes was once clearly seen.
Even now so far as a majority has power it is not by the brute force of
numbers; it is because there has been a certain amount of unifying; it
has real power directly in proportion to the amount of unifying. The
composition of a political majority depends at present partly on
inheritance and environment (which includes sentiment and prejudice),
partly on the mass-induced idea (the spread of thought and feeling
throughout a community by suggestion), and partly on some degree of
integration of the different ideas and the different forces of that
particular society. Its power is in proportion to the amount of this
integration. When we use the expression “artificial majority” we mean
chiefly one which shows little integration, and we have all seen how
quickly such majorities tend to melt away when the artificial stimulus
of especially magnetic leadership or of an especially catchy and
jingoistic idea is withdrawn. Moreover a majority meaning a
preponderance of votes can easily be controlled by a party or an
“interest”; majorities which represent unities are not so easily
managed. Group organization is, above everything else perhaps, to
prevent the manipulation of helpless majorities.
But “helpless majority” may sound amusing to those who are telling us of
the tyranny of majorities. From one point of view indeed majority rule
tends to become majority tyranny, so we do not want a majority in either
case, either as a tyrant or as an inert mass. But those who talk of the
tyranny of majorities are usually those who are advocating the “rights
of minorities.” If it is necessary to expose the majority fallacy, it is
equally necessary to show that the present worship of minorities in
certain quarters is also unsound. There is no inherent virtue in a
minority. If as a matter of fact we cannot act forcefully without a
certain amount of complacency, then perhaps it is a good thing for those
in a minority to flatter themselves that of twenty people nine are more
apt to be right than eleven. It may be one of those false assumptions
more useful than a true one, and in our pragmatic age we shall not deny
its value. Still sour grapes hang sometimes just as high and no higher
than the majority, and it seems possible to find a working assumption
that will work even better than this. In fact the assumption that the
minority is always right is just as much an error as the assumption that
the majority is always right. The right is not with the majority or
minority because of preponderance of numbers or because of lack of
preponderance of numbers.
But many people tell us seriously that this is not a question of opinion
at all, but of fact: all the great reforms of the past, they say, whose
victories are now our common heritage, were inaugurated by an
intelligent and devoted few. You can indeed point to many causes led by
a faithful minority triumphing in the end over a numerical and inert
majority, but this minority was usually a majority of those who thought
on the subject at all.
But all talk of majority and minority is futile. It is evident that we
must not consider majority versus minority, but only the methods by
which unity is attained. Our fetich of majorities has held us back, but
most of the plans for stopping the control of majorities look to all
kinds of bolstering up of minorities. This keeps majorities and
minorities apart, whereas they have both one and only use for us—their
contribution to the all-will. Because such integration must always be
the ideal in a democracy, we cannot be much interested in those methods
for giving the minority more power on election day. The integration must
begin further back in our life than this.
I know a woman of small school education, but large native intelligence,
who spends her time between her family and the daily laundry work she
does to support that family, who, when she goes to her Mothers’ Club at
the “School Centre” penetrates all the superficialities she may find
there, and makes every other woman go home with higher standards for her
home, her children and herself. The education of children, the
opportunities of employment for girls and boys, sanitation, housing, and
all the many questions which touch one’s everyday life are considered in
a homely way on those Thursday afternoons. Sometime these women will
vote on these questions, but a true intermingling of majority and
minority will have taken place before election day.
Moreover, while representation of the minority, as proportional
representation,[66] is always an interesting experiment, just because it
is a method of representation and not a mode of association the party
can circumvent it. We are told that minority representation tried in the
lower house of the Illinois legislature has been completely subverted to
their own ends by the politicians. And also that in Belgium, where
proportional representation has been introduced, this system has become
a tool in the hands of the dominant party. No electoral or merely
representative method can save us.
Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main concern
of politics is _modes of association_. We do not want the rule of the
many or the few; we must find that method of political procedure by
which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we
are truly ruled by the will of the whole. We shall have democracy only
when we learn to produce this will through group organization—when young
men are no longer lectured to on democracy, but when they are made into
the stuff of democracy.
-----
Footnote 65:
This view of democracy was well satirized by some one, I think Lord
Morley, who said, “I do not care who does the voting as long as I do
the counting.”
Footnote 66:
Proportional representation is interesting to the view put forward in
this book because it is a method to bring out all the differences.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVIII
DEMOCRACY NOT THE CROWD: OUR POPULAR DELUSION
--------------
WHEN we define democracy as the “rule of the whole,” this is usually
understood as the rule of all, and unless we fully understand the
meaning of “all,” we run the danger of falling a victim to the crowd
fallacy. The reaction to our long years of particularism, of “individual
rights” and “liberty,” which led to special privilege and all the evils
in its train, has brought many to the worship of the crowd. Walt Whitman
sang of men “en masse.” Many of our recent essayists and poets and
novelists idealize the crowd. Miss Jane Harrison in her delightful
volume, “Alpha and Omega,” says, “Human life is lived to the full only
in and through the herd.” There is an interesting group of young poets
in France[67] who call themselves Unanimistes because they believe in
the union of all, that an “Altogetherness” is the supreme fact of life.
Mr. Ernest Poole in “The Harbor” glorifies the crowd, and the New York
“_Tribune_” said of this book, “‘The Harbor’ is the first really notable
novel produced by the New Democracy,” thus identifying the new democracy
with the crowd. Another writer, looking at our present social and
political organization and finding it based largely on class and
therefore unsound, also leaps to the conclusion that our salvation rests
not on this individual or that, this class or that, this body of people
or that, but on all together, on “this mass-life, seething, tumultuous,
without compass or guide or will or plan.”
This school is doing good service in leading us from the few or the many
to the all, in preaching that the race contains within itself the power
of its own advancement; but this power which the race contains within
itself is not got through its being a crowd, “without guide or will or
plan,” but just because it contains the potentialities of guide, will,
plan, all within itself, through its capability of being a true society,
that is, through its capability of adopting group methods. It is in the
group that we get that complex interpenetration which means both
modification and adjustment and at the same time coöperation and
fulfilment. The group process, not the crowd or the herd, is the social
process. Out of the intermingling, interacting activities of men and
women surge up the forces of life: powers are born which we had not
dreamed of, ideas take shape and grow, forces are generated which act
and react on each other. This is the dialectic of life. But this
upspringing of power from our hidden sources is not the latent power of
the mass but of the group. It is useless to preach “togetherness” until
we have devised ways of making our togetherness fruitful, until we have
thought out the methods of a genuine, integrated togetherness. Anything
else is indeed “blubbering sentimentality,” as Bismarck defined
democracy.
But there are two sets of people who are victims of the crowd fallacy:
those who apotheosize the crowd and those who denounce the crowd; both
ignore the group. The latter fear the crowd because they see in the
crowd the annihilation of the individual. They are opposed to what they
call collective action because they say that this is herd action and
does not allow for individual initiative. We are told, “Man loses his
identity in a crowd,” “The crowd obliterates the individual mind.” Quite
true, but these writers do not see that the crowd is not the only form
of association, that man may belong to a group rather than to a crowd,
and that a group fulfils, not wipes out his individuality. The
collective action of the group not only allows but consists of
individual initiative, of an individual initiative that has learned how
to be part of a collective initiative.
Collective thought, moreover, is often called collective mediocrity. But
the collective thought evolved by the group is not collective
mediocrity. On the contrary there is always a tendency for the group
idea to express the largest degree of psychic force there is in a group,
ideally it would always do so. Herein lies the difference between the
group idea and the mass idea. When we hear it stated as a commonplace of
human affairs that combined action is less intelligent than individual
action, we must point out that it all depends upon whether it is a crowd
combination or a group combination. The insidious error that democracy
means the “average” is at the root of much of our current thought.
The confusion of democratic rule and mass rule, the identification of
the people with the crowd, has led many people to denounce democracy.
One writer, thinking the collective man and the crowd man the same,
condemns democracy because of his condemnation of the crowd man. Another
speaks of “the crowd-mind or the state,” and therefore abandons the
state. All these writers think that the more democracy, the more
complete the control of the crowd. Our faith in democracy means a
profound belief that this need not be true. Moreover this idea that the
crowd man must necessarily be the unit of democracy has led many to
oppose universal suffrage because they have seen it as a particularist
suffrage, giving equal value, they say, to the enlightened and the
unenlightened. True democracy frees us from such particularist point of
view. It is the group man, not the crowd man, who must be the unit of
democracy.
The philosophy of the all is supposed, by its advocates, to be opposed
to the philosophy of the individual, but it is interesting to notice
that the crowd theory and the particularistic theory rest on the same
fallacy, namely, looking on individuals one by one: the crowd doctrine
is an attempt to unite mechanically the isolated individuals we have so
ardently believed in. This is the danger of the crowd. The crowd idea of
sovereignty is thoroughly atomistic. This is sometimes called an era of
crowds, sometimes an era of individuals: such apparent opposition of
judgment need not confuse us, the crowd spirit and the particularistic
spirit are the same; that spirit will continue to corrupt politics and
disrupt society until we replace it by the group spirit.
The crowd theory, like the particularist doctrine, has been strengthened
by the upholders of the imitation theory of society. Many of our
political as well as our sociological writers have seen life as some
exceptional individual suggesting and the crowd following without
reasoning, without effort of mind or will. Even Bagehot, who did so much
to set us in the right way of thinking, overemphasizes the part of
imitation. What he says of the “imitative part of our natures” is indeed
true, but by not mentioning the creative part of our natures more
explicitly, he keeps himself in the crowd school.
It is true that at present the people are to a large extent a mass led
by those who suggest. The suggestion and imitation of sociology are the
leading and following of politics—the leadership of the boss and the
following of the mass. The successful politician is one who understands
crowds and how to dominate them. He appeals to the emotions, he relies
on repetition, he invents catch phrases. The crowd follows. As long as
the corner-stone of our political philosophy is the theory that the
individual originates and society accepts, of course any man who can get
the people to “accept” will do so. This is the fallacy at the foundation
of our political structure. When we have a genuine democracy, we shall
not have the defective political machinery of the present, but some
method by which people will be able not to accept or reject but to
create group or whole ideas, to produce a genuine collective will.
Because we have invented some governmental machinery by which clever
politicians can rule with the entirely artificial “assent” of their
constituencies, does not mean that we know anything about democracy.
It is the ignoring of the group which is retarding our political
development. A recent writer on political science says that a study of
the interaction between individual and crowd is the basis of politics,
and that “the will of nations or states is the sum of individual wills
fashioned in accordance with crowd psychology.” In so far as this is
true it is to be steadily opposed. Many writers imply that we must
either believe in homogeneity, similarity, uniformity (the herd, the
crowd), or lose the advantages of fellowship in order to discover and
assert our own particularistic ideals. But our alternatives are not the
individual and the crowd: the choice is not between particularism with
all its separatist tendencies, and the crowd with its levelling, its
mediocrity, its sameness, perhaps even its hysteria; there is the
neglected group. Democracy will not succeed until assemblages of people
are governed consciously and deliberately by group laws. We read, “No
idea can conquer until a crowd has inscribed it on its banner.” I should
say, “No idea can finally conquer which has not been created by those
people who inscribe it on their banner.” The triumph of ideas will never
come by crowds. Union, not hypnotism, is the law of development. There
can be no real spiritual unity in the mass life, only in the group life.
Whether the people of America shall be a crowd, under the laws of
suggestion and imitation, or follow the laws of the group, is the
underlying problem of to-day.
The promise for the future is that there now is in associations of men
an increasing tendency for the laws of the group rather than the laws of
the crowd to govern. Our most essential duty to the future is to see
that that tendency prevail. As we increase the conscious functioning of
the group we shall inevitably have less and less of the unconscious
response, chauvinists will lose their job, and party bosses will have to
change their tactics. People as a matter of fact are not as suggestible
as formerly. Men are reading more widely and they are following less
blindly what they read.
This largely increased reading, due to reduction in price, spread of
railroads, rural delivery, and lessening hours of industry, is often
spoken of as making men more alike in their views. Tarde spoke of the
“public,” which he defined as the people sitting at home reading
newspapers, as a mental collectivity because of this supposed tendency.
Christensen confirms this when he says that the people reading the
newspapers are “a scattered crowd.” The usually accepted opinion is that
the daily press is making us more and more into crowds, but that is not
my experience. A man with his daily paper may be obeying the group law
or the crowd law as he unites his own thoughts with the thoughts of
others or as he is merely amenable to suggestion from others, and it
seems to me we see a good deal of the former process. The newspaper
brings home to us vividly what others are feeling and thinking. It
offers many suggestions; we see less and less tendency to “swallow these
whole,” the colloquial counterpart of the technical “imitation.” These
suggestions are freely criticized, readers do a good deal of thinking
and the results are fairly rational. The reader more and more I believe
is selecting, is unifying difference. The result of all this is that
men’s minds are becoming more plastic, that they are deciding less by
prejudice and hypnotism and more by judgment. And it must be remembered
that a man is not necessarily a more developed person because he rejects
his newspaper’s theories than if he accepts them; the developed man is
the group man and the group man neither accepts nor rejects, but joins
his own thought with that of all he reads to make new thought. The group
man is never sterile, he always brings forth.[68]
Democracy can never mean the domination of the crowd. The helter-skelter
strivings of an endless number of social atoms can never give us a fair
and ordered world. It may be true that we have lived under the
domination either of individuals or of crowds up to the present time,
but now is the moment when this must be deliberately challenged. The
party boss must go, the wise men chosen by the reform associations must
go, the crowd must be abandoned. The idea of the All has gripped us—but
the idea has not been made workable, we have yet to find the way. We
have said, “The people must rule.” We now ask, “How are they to rule?”
It is the technique of democracy which we are seeking. We shall find it
in group organization.
-----
Footnote 67:
Arcos, Romains and Vildrac are the chief of these. Romains, who has
written “La Vie Unanime,” is the most interesting for our present
purpose, for his togetherness is so plainly that of the herd:
... “quelle joie
De fondre dans ton corps [le ville] immense
oú l’on a chaud!”
Here is our old friend, the wild ox, in the mask of the most civilized
(perhaps) portion of our most civilised (perhaps) nation. Again
“Nous sommes indistincts: chacun de nous est mort;
Et la vie unanime est notre sépulture.”
Footnote 68:
Other results of the increased reading of newspapers and magazines are
that large questions are driving out trivial interests (I find this
very marked in the country), and the enormous amount of publicity now
given everything finds a channel to the public through the press. The
reports of commissions, like the Industrial Relations Commission, the
surveys, like the Pittsburgh Survey, the reports of foundations, like
the Russell Sage, the reports of the rapidly increasing bureaus of
research, like the New York Municipal Bureau, all find their way to us
through the columns of our daily or weekly or monthly. Therefore we
have more material on which to found individual thinking.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XIX
THE TRUE DEMOCRACY
--------------
DEMOCRACY is the rule of an interacting, interpermeating whole. The
present advocates of democracy have, therefore, little kinship with
those ardent writers of the past who when they said they believed in the
people were thinking of working-men only. A man said to me once, “I am
very democratic, I thoroughly enjoy a good talk with a working-man.”
What in the world has that to do with democracy? Democracy is faith in
humanity, not faith in “poor” people or “ignorant” people, but faith in
every living soul. Democracy does not enthrone the working-man, it has
nothing to do with sympathy for the “lower classes”; the champions of
democracy are not looking down to raise any one up, they recognize that
all men must face each other squarely with the knowledge that the
give-and-take between them is to be equal.
The enthusiasts of democracy to-day are those who have caught sight of a
great spiritual unity which is supported by the most vital trend in
philosophical thought and by the latest biologists and social
psychologists. It is, above all, what we have learnt of the psychical
processes of association which makes us believe in democracy. Democracy
is every one building the single life, not my life and others, not the
individual and the state, but my life bound up with others, the
individual which _is_ the state, the state which _is_ the individual.
“When a man’s eye shall be single”—do we quite know yet what that means?
Democracy is the fullest possible acceptance of the single life.
Thus democracy, although often considered a centrifugal tendency, is
rather a centripetal force. Democracy is not a spreading out: it is not
the extension of the suffrage—its merely external aspect—it is a drawing
together; it is the imperative call for the lacking parts of self. It is
the finding of the one will to which the will of every single man and
woman must contribute. We want women to vote not that the suffrage may
be extended to women but that women may be included in the suffrage: we
want what they may have to add to the whole. Democracy is an infinitely
including spirit. We have an instinct for democracy because we have an
instinct for wholeness; we get wholeness only through reciprocal
relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations. Democracy
is really neither extending nor including merely, but creating wholes.
This is the primitive urge of all life. This is the true nature of man.
Democracy must find a form of government that is suited to the nature of
man and which will express that nature in its manifold relations. Or
rather democracy is the self-creating process of life appearing as the
true nature of man, and through the activity of man projecting itself
into the visible world in fitting form so that its essential oneness
will declare itself. Democracy then is not an end, we must be weaving
all the time the web of democracy.
The idea of democracy as representing the all-will gives us a new idea
of aristocracy. We believe in the few but not as opposed to the many,
only as included in all. This makes a tremendous change in political
thought. We believe in the influence of the good and the wise, but they
must exert their influence within the social process; it must be by
action and reaction, it must be by a subtle permeation, it must be
through the sporting instinct to take back the ball which one has
thrown. The wise can never help us by standing on one side and trying to
get their wisdom across to the unwise. The unwise can never help us
(what has often been considered the most they could do for the world) by
a passive willingness for the wise to impose their wisdom upon them. We
need the intermingling of all in the social process. We need our
imperfections as well as our perfections. So we offer what we have—our
unwisdom, our imperfections—on the altar of the social process, and it
is only by this social process that the wonderful transmutation can take
place which makes of them the very stuff of which the Perfect Society is
to be made. Imperfection meets imperfection, or imperfection meets
perfection; it is the _process_ which purifies, not the “influence” of
the perfect on the imperfect. This is what faith in democracy means.
Moreover, there is the ignorance of the ignorant and the ignorance of
the wise; there is the wisdom of the wise and the wisdom of the
ignorant. Both kinds of ignorance have to be overcome, one as much as
the other; both kinds of wisdom have to prevail, one as much as the
other.
In short, there is not a static world for the wise to influence. This
truth is the blow to the old aristocracy. But we need the wise within
this living, moving whole, this never-ceasing action and interaction,
and this truth is the basis of our new conception of aristocracy.
Democracy is not opposed to aristocracy—it includes aristocracy.
As biology shows us nature evolving by the power within itself, so
social psychology shows us society evolving by the power of its own
inner forces, of _all_ its inner forces. There is no passive material
within it to be guided by a few. There is no dead material in a true
democracy.
When people see the confusion of our present life, its formlessness and
planlessness, the servile following of the crowd, the ignorance of the
average man, his satisfaction in his ignorance, the insignificance of
the collective life, its blindness and its hopelessness, they say they
do not believe in democracy. But this is not democracy. The so-called
evils of democracy—favoritism, bribery, graft, bossism—are the evils of
our lack of democracy, of our party system and of the abuses which that
system has brought into our representative government. It is not
democracy which is “on trial,” as is so often said, but it is we
ourselves who are on trial. We have been constantly trying to see what
democracy meant from the point of view of institutions, we have never
yet tried to see what it meant from the point of view of men.
If life could be made mechanical, our method would be correct, but as
mechanics is creature and life its superabounding creator, such method
is wholly wrong. When people say that the cure for the evils of
democracy is more democracy, they usually mean that while we have some
“popular” institutions, we have not enough, and that when we get enough
“popular” institutions, our inadequacies will be met. But no form is
going to fulfil our needs. This is important to remember just now, with
all the agitation for “democratic control.” You cannot establish
democratic control by legislation: it is not democratic control to allow
the people to assent to or refuse a war decided on by diplomats; there
is only one way to get democratic control—by people learning how to
evolve collective ideas. The essence of democracy is not in
institutions, is not even in “brotherhood”; it is in that organizing of
men which makes most sure, most perfect, the bringing forth of the
common idea. Democracy has one task only—to free the creative spirit of
man. This is done through group organization. We are sometimes told that
democracy is an attitude and must grow up in the hearts of men. But this
is not enough. Democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving
the will of the people. For this reason the study of group psychology is
a necessary preliminary to the study of democracy. Neither party bosses
nor unscrupulous capitalists are our undoing, but our own lack of
knowing how to do things together.
The startling truth that the war is bringing home to many of us is that
unity must be something more than a sentiment, it must be an actual
system of organization. We are now beginning to see that if you want the
fruits of unity, you must _have_ unity, a real unity, a coöperative
collectivism. Unity is neither a sentiment nor an intellectual
conception, it is a psychological process produced by actual psychic
interaction.
How shall we gain a practical understanding of this essential unity of
man? By practising it with the first person we meet; by approaching
every man with the consciousness of the complexity of his needs, of the
vastness of his powers. Much is written of the power of history and
tradition in giving unity to a community or nation. This has been
overemphasized. If this were the only way of getting unity, there would
be little hope for the future in America, where we have to make a unity
of people with widely differing traditions, and little hope for the
future in Europe where peace is unthinkable unless the past can be
forgotten and new ties made on the basis of mutual understanding and
mutual obligation. To have democracy we must live it day by day.
Democracy is the actual commingling of men in order that each shall have
continuous access to the needs and the wants of others. Democracy is not
a form of government; the democratic soul is born within the group and
then it develops its own forms.
Democracy then is a great spiritual force evolving itself from men,
utilizing each, completing his incompleteness by weaving together all in
the many-membered community life which is the true Theophany. The world
to-day is growing more spiritual, and I say this not in spite of the
Great War, but because of all this war has shown us of the inner forces
bursting forth in fuller and fuller expression. The Great War has been
the Great Call to humanity and humanity is answering. It is breaking
down the ramparts to free the way for the entrance of a larger spirit
which is to fill every single being by interflowing between them all.
France, England, America—how the beacon lights flash from one to the
other—the program of the British Labor Party, the speeches of our
American President, the news of the indomitable courage of France—these
are like the fires in Europe on St. John’s Eve, which flash their
signals from hill-top to hill-top. Even the school children of France
and America write letters to each other. American men and women are
working for the reconstruction of France as they would work for the
reconstruction of their own homes—and all this because we are all
sharing the same hope. A new faith is in our hearts. The Great War is
the herald of another world for men. The coming of democracy is the
spiritual rebirth. We have been told that our physical birth and life
are not all, that we are to be born again of water and the spirit. Not
indeed of _water_ and spirit, but of _blood_ and spirit, are the warring
children of men, a groaning, growing humanity, coming to the Great
Rebirth.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XX
THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
--------------
THE two problems of democracy to-day are: (1) how to make the individual
politically effective, and (2) how to give practical force to social
policies. Both of these mean that the individual is at last recognized
in political life. The history of democracy has been the history of the
steady growth towards individualism. The hope of democracy rests on the
individual. It is all one whether we say that democracy is the
development of the social consciousness, or that democracy is the
development of individualism; until we have become in some degree
socially conscious we shall not realize the value of the individual. It
is not insignificant that a marked increase in the appreciation of
social values has gone hand in hand with a growing recognition of the
individual.
From the Middle Ages the appreciation of the individual has steadily
grown. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was an individualistic
movement. The apotheosis of the individual, however, soon led us astray,
involving as it did an entirely erroneous notion of the relation of the
individual to society, and gave us the false political philosophy of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men thought of individuals as
separate and then had to invent fictions to join them, hence the social
contract fiction. The social contract theory was based on the idea of
the state as an aggregate of units; it therefore followed that the
rights of those units must be maintained. Thus individual rights became
a kind of contractual rights. And during the nineteenth century,
fostered by Bentham’s ideas of individual happiness, by the
_laissez-faire_ of the Manchester school and the new industrial order,
by Herbert Spencer’s interpretations of the recent additions to
biological knowledge, by Mill, etc., the doctrine of “individual rights”
became more firmly entrenched. Government interference was strenuously
resisted, “individual” freedom was the goal of our desire, “individual”
competition and the survival of the fittest the accredited method of
progress. The title of Herbert Spencer’s book, “The Man versus the
State,” implies the whole of this false political philosophy built on an
unrelated individual.
But during the latter part of the nineteenth century there began to grow
up, largely at first through the influence of T. H. Green, influenced in
his turn by Kant and Hegel, an entirely different theory of the state.
The state was now not to be subordinate to the individual, but it was to
be the fulfilment of the individual. Man was to get his rights and his
liberty from membership in society. Green had at once a large influence
on the political thought of England and America, and gradually, with
other influences, upon practical politics. The growing recognition of
the right and duty of the state to foster the life of its members, so
clearly and unequivocally expressed in the social legislation of Lloyd
George, we see as early as the Education Act of 1870, the Factory Act of
1878 (which systematized and extended previous Factory Acts), and the
various mines and collieries acts from 1872.
I do not mean to imply that the growing activity of the state was due
entirely or mainly to the change of theory in regard to the individual
and the state; when the disastrous results of _laissez-faire_ were seen,
then people demanded state regulation of industry. Theory and practice
have acted and reacted on each other. Some one must trace for us, step
by step, the interaction of theory and practice in regard to the
individual and his relation to society, from the Middle Ages down to the
present day.[69]
What has been the trend of our development in America? Particularism was
at its zenith when our government was founded. Our growth has been away
from particularism and towards a true individualism.[70]
It is usual to say that the framers of our constitution were
individualists and gave to our government an individualistic turn. We
must examine this. They did safeguard and protect the individual in his
life and property, they did make the bills of rights an authoritative
part of our constitutions, they did make it possible for individuals to
aggrandize themselves at the expense of society, their ideal of justice
was indeed of individual not of social justice. And yet all this was
negative. The individual was given no large positive function. The
individual was feared and suspected. Our early constitutions showed no
faith in men: the Massachusetts constitution expressly stated that it
was not a government of men. The law of the land was embodied in written
documents with great difficulty of amendment just because the people
were not trusted. As we look at the crudities of the Declaration of
Independence, as we examine our aristocratic state constitutions, as we
study our restricted federal constitution, as we read the borrowed
philosophy of our early statesmen, we see very little indication of
modern democracy with its splendid faith in man, but a tendency towards
aristocracy and a lack of real individualism on every side.
To be sure it was at the same time true that the government was given no
positive power. Every one was thoroughly frightened of governments which
were founded on status and resulted in arbitrary authority. The
executive power was feared, therefore it was so equipped as to be
unequal to its task; the legislative power was feared, so the courts
were given power over the legislatures, were allowed to declare their
acts valid or invalid; the national government was feared, therefore
Congress was given only certain powers. Power was not granted because no
man and no institution was trusted. The will to act could not be a
motive force in 1789, because no embodiment of the will was trusted; the
framers of our constitutions could not conceive of a kind of will which
could be trusted. Fear, not faith, suspicion not trust, were the
foundation of our early government. The government had, therefore, no
large formative function, it did not look upon itself as a large social
power. As the individual was to be protected, the government was to
protect. All our thinking in the latter part of the eighteenth century
was rooted in the idea of a weak government; this has been thought to
show our individualism.[71]
But our government as imagined by its founders did not work.[72] Our
system of checks and balances gave no real power to any department.
Above all there was no way of fixing responsibility. A condition of
chaos was the result. Such complicated machinery was almost unworkable;
there was no way of getting anything done under our official system.
Moreover, the individual was not satisfied with his function of being
protected, he wanted an actual share in the government. Therefore an
extra-official system was adopted, the party organization. The two chief
reasons for this adoption were: (1) to give the individual some share in
government, (2) to give the government a chance to carry out definite
policies, to provide some kind of a unifying power.
What effect has party organization had on the individual and on
government? The domination of the party gives no real opportunity to the
individual: originality is crushed; the aim of all party organization is
to turn out a well-running voting machine. The party is not interested
in men but in voters—an entirely different matter. Party organization
created artificial majorities, but gave to the individual little power
in or connection with government. The basic weakness of party
organization is that the individual gets his significance only through
majorities. Any method which looks to the fulfilment of the individual
through the domination of majorities is necessarily not only partial but
false. The present demand that the nation shall have the full power of
the individual is the heaviest blow that party organization has ever
received.
Now consider, on the other hand, what party organization has done for
the government. The powers of government moved steadily to political
bosses and business corporations. Boss-rule, party domination and
combinations of capital filled in the gaps in the system of government
we inaugurated in the eighteenth century. The marriage of business and
politics, while it has been the chief factor in entrenching the party
system, was the outcome of that system, or rather it was the outcome of
the various unworkabilities of our official government. The expansion of
big business, with its control of politics, evasion of law, was
inevitable; we simply had no machinery adequate to our need, namely, the
development of a vast, untouched continent. The urge of that development
was an overwhelming force which swept irresistibly on, carrying
everything before it, swallowing up legal disability, creating for
itself extra-legal methods. We have now, therefore, a system of party
organization and political practice which subverts all our theories.
Theoretically the people have the power, but really the government is
the primaries, the conventions, the caucuses. Officials hold from the
party. Party politics became corrupt because party government was
irresponsible government. The insidious power of the machine is due to
its irresponsibility.
The evils of our big business have not come because Americans are prone
to cheat, because they want to get the better of their fellows, because
their greed is inordinate, their ambition domineering. Individuals have
not been to blame, but our whole system. It is the system which must be
changed. Our constitutions and laws made possible the development of big
business; our courts were not “bought” by big business, but legal
decision and business practice were formed by the same inheritance and
tradition. The reformation of neither will accomplish the results we
wish, but the nation-wide acceptance, through all classes and all
interests, of a different point of view.
The next step was the wave of reform that swept over the country. The
motive was excellent; the method poor. The method was poor because the
same method was adopted which these reform movements were organized to
fight, one based on pure crowd philosophy. It was a curious case of
astigmatism. The trouble was that the reformers did not see accurately
what they were fighting; they were fighting essentially the
non-recognition of the individual, but they did not see this, so they
went on basing all their own work on the non-appreciation of men. Their
essential weakness was the weakness of the party machine—all their
efforts were turned to the voter not the man. Their triumphs were always
the triumphs of the polls. Their methods were principally three: change
in the forms of government (charters, etc.), the nomination of “good”
men to office, and exhortation to induce “the people” to elect them.
The idea of “good” men in office was the fetich of many reform
associations. They thought that their job was to find three or four
“good” men and then once a year to hypnotize the electorate to “do their
duty” and put these men into office, and then all would go well if
before another year three or four more good men could be found. What a
futile and childish idea which leaves out of account the whole body of
citizenship! It is only through this main body of citizenship that we
can have a decent government and a sound social life. That is, in other
words, it is only by a genuine appreciation of the individual, of every
single individual, that there can be any reform movement with strength
and constructive power. The wide-spread fallacy that good officials make
a good city is one which lies at the root of much of our thinking and
insidiously works to ruin our best plans, our most serious efforts. This
extraordinary belief in officials, this faith in the panacea of a change
of charters, must go. If our present mechanical government is to turn
into a living, breathing, pulsing life, it must be composed of an entire
citizenship educated and responsible.
This the reform associations now recognize, in some cases partially, in
some cases fully. The good government association of to-day has a truer
idea of its function. The campaign for the election of city officials is
used as a means of educating the mass of citizens: besides the
investigation and publication of facts, there is often a clear showing
of the aims of government and an enlightening discussion of method. Such
associations have always considered the interests of the city as a
whole; they have not appealed, like the party organizations, to local
sentiment.
I have spoken of the relation of the reform movement of the last of the
nineteenth century to the body of citizenship. What was its relation to
government? The same spirit applied to government meant patching,
mending, restraining, but it did not mean constructive work, it had not
a formative effect on our institutions. Against any institution that has
to be guarded every moment lest it do evil, there is a strong a priori
argument that it should not exist. This until recently has not been
sufficiently taken into account. Now, however, in the beginning of the
twentieth century, we see many evidences that the old era of restraint
is over and the constructive period of reform begun. We see it, for
instance, in our Bureaus of Municipal Research; we see it in the more
progressive sections of our state constitutional conventions. But the
chief error of the nineteenth-century reformers was not that they were
reactionary, nor that they were timid, nor that they were insincere, nor
that they were hedgers. They were wanting in neither sincerity nor
courage. Their error was simply that they did not appreciate the value
of the individual. Individualism instead of being something we are
getting away from, is something we are just catching sight of.
And if our institutions were founded on a false political philosophy
which taught “individual rights,” distorted ideas of liberty and
equality, and thought of man versus the state, if our political
development was influenced by a false social psychology which saw the
people as a crowd and gave them first to the party bosses and next to
the social reformers, our whole material development was dominated by a
false economic philosophy which saw the greatest good of all obtained by
each following his own good in his own way. This did not mean the
development of individuals but the crushing of individuals—of all but a
few. The Manchester school of economics, which was bound to flourish
extensively under American conditions, combined with a narrow legal
point of view, which for a hundred years interpreted our constitutions
in accordance with an antiquated philosophy and a false psychology, to
make particularism the dominant note in American life.
The central point of our particularism was the idea of being let alone.
First, the _individual_ was to be let alone, the pioneer on his
reclaimed land or the pioneer of industry. But when men saw that their
gains would be greater by some sort of combination, then the _trusts_
were to be let alone—freedom of contract was called liberty! Our courts,
completely saturated with this philosophy, let the trusts alone. The
interpretations of our courts, our corrupt party organization, our
institutions and our social philosophy, hastened and entrenched the
monopolistic age. Natural rights meant property rights. The power of
single men or single corporations at the end of the nineteenth century
marked the height of our particularism, of our subordination of the
state to single members. They were like _pâté de foie gras_ made by the
enlargement of the goose’s liver. It is usual to disregard the goose.
The result of our false individualism has been non-conservation of our
national resources, exploitation of labor, and political corruption. We
see the direct outcome in our slums, our unregulated industries, our
“industrial unrest,” etc.
But egotism, materialism, anarchy are not true individualism. To-day,
however, we have many evidences of the steadily increasing appreciation
of the individual and a true understanding of his place in society, his
relation to the state. Chief among these are: (1) the movement towards
industrial democracy, (2) the woman movement, (3) the increase of direct
government, and (4) the introduction of social programs into party
platforms. These are parallel developments from the same root. What we
have awakened to now is the importance of every single man.
The first, the trend towards industrial democracy, will, in its relation
to the new state, be considered later. The second, the woman movement,
belongs to the past rather than to the present. Its culmination has
overrun the century mark and makes what is really a nineteenth-century
movement seem as if it belonged to the twentieth. It belongs to the past
because it is merely the end of the movement for the extension of the
suffrage. Our suffrage rested originally in many states on property
distinctions; in New Hampshire there was a religious and property
qualification,—only Protestant tax-payers could vote. Gradually it
became manhood suffrage, then the immigrants were admitted, later the
negroes, then Colorado opened its suffrage to women, and now in thirteen
states women have the full suffrage. The essence of the woman movement
is not that women as women should have the vote, but that women as
individuals should have the vote. There is a fundamental distinction
here.
The third and fourth indications of the growth of democracy, or the
increase of individualism (I speak of these always as synonymous)—the
tendency towards more and more direct government and the introduction of
social programs into party platforms—will be considered in the next
chapter together with a third tendency in American politics which is
bound up with these two: I refer to the increase of administrative
responsibility.
* * * * *
The theory of government based on individual rights no longer has a
place in modern political theory; it no longer guides us entirely in
legislation but has yielded largely to a truer practice; yet it still
occupies a large place in current thought, in the speeches of our
practical politicians, in our institutions of government, and in America
in our law court decisions. This being so it is important for us to look
for the reasons. First, there are of course always many people who trail
along behind. Secondly, partly through the influence of Green and
Bosanquet, the idea of contract has been slowly fading away, and many
people have been frightened at its disappearance because Hegelianism,
even in the modified form in which it appears in English theory, _seems_
to enthrone the state and override the individual.[73] Third, the large
influence which Tarde, Le Bon, and their followers have had upon us with
their suggestion and imitation theories of society—theories based on a
pure particularism. The development of social and political organization
has been greatly retarded by this school of sociology. Fourth, our
economic development is still associated in the minds of many with the
theories of individual rights.
A more penetrating analysis of society during recent years, however, has
uncovered the true conception of individualism hidden from the first
within the “individualistic” movement. All through history we see the
feeling out for the individual; there are all the false trails followed
and there are the real steps taken. The false trails led to the
individual rights of politics, the _laissez-faire_ of economics and our
whole false particularism. The real steps have culminated in our ideas
of to-day. To substitute for the fictitious democracy of equal rights
and “consent of the governed,” the living democracy of a united,
responsible people is the task of the twentieth century. We seek now the
method.
-----
Footnote 69:
Also the development of the relation of individualistic theories to
the rise and decline of the doctrines regarding the national state.
Footnote 70:
I do not wish, however, to minimize the truly democratic nature of our
local institutions.
Footnote 71:
While it is true that there were undemocratic elements in the mental
equipment and psychological bent of our forefathers, and it is these
which I have emphasized because from them came our immediate
development, it is equally true that there were also sound democratic
elements to which we can trace our present ideas of democracy. Such
tracing even in briefest form there is not space for here.
Footnote 72:
It became at once evident that a government whose chief function was
to see that individual rights, property rights, state rights, were not
invaded, was hardly adequate to unite our colonies with all their
separatist instincts, or to meet the needs of a rapidly developing
continent. Our national government at once adopted a constructive
policy. Guided by Hamilton it assumed constructive powers authority
for which could be found in the constitution only by a most liberal
construction of its terms. When Jefferson, an antinationalist,
acquired Louisiana in 1803, it seemed plain that no such restricted
national government as was at first conceived could possibly work.
Footnote 73:
These English writers to whom our debt is so large are not responsible
for this, but their misinterpreters.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXI
AFTER DIRECT GOVERNMENT—WHAT?
--------------
WE have outgrown our political system. We must face this frankly. We
had, first, government by law,[74] second, government by parties and big
business, and all the time some sort of fiction of the “consent of the
governed” which we said meant democracy. But we have never had
government by the people. The third step is to be the development of
machinery by which the fundamental ideas of the people can be got at and
embodied; further, by which we can grow fundamental ideas; further
still, by which we can prepare the soil in which fundamental ideas can
grow. Direct government will we hope lead to this step, but it cannot
alone do this. How then shall it be supplemented? Let us look at the
movement for direct government with two others closely connected with
it—the concentration of administrative responsibility and the increase
of social legislation—three movements which are making an enormous
change in American political life. Then let us see if we can discover
what idea it is necessary to add to those involved in these three
movements, in other words what new principle is needed in modern
politics.
We are at present trying to secure (1) a more efficient government, and
(2) a real not a nominal control of government by the people. The
tendency to transfer power to the American citizenship, and the tendency
towards efficient government by the employment of experts and the
concentration of administrative authority, are working side by side in
American political life to-day. These two tendencies are not opposed,
and if the main thesis of this book has been proved, it is understood by
this time why they are not opposed. Democracy I have said is not
antithetical to aristocracy, but includes aristocracy. And it does not
include it accidentally, as it were, but aristocracy is a necessary part
of democracy. Therefore administrative responsibility and expert service
are as necessary a part of genuine democracy as popular control is a
necessary accompaniment of administrative responsibility. They are
parallel in importance. Some writers seem to think that because we are
giving so much power to our executives, we must safeguard our “liberty”
by giving at the same time ultimate authority to the people. While this
is of course so in a way, I believe a truer way of looking at the matter
is to see centralized responsibility and popular control, not one
dependent on the other, but both as part of the same thing—our new
democracy.
Both our city and our state governments are being reorganized. We have
long felt that city government should be concentrated in the hands of a
few experts. The old idea that any honest citizen was fit for most
public offices is rapidly disappearing. Over three hundred cities have
adopted the commission form of government, and there is a growing
movement for the city-manager plan. But at the same time we must have a
participant electorate. We can see three stages in our thinking: (1) our
early American democracy thought that public offices could be filled by
the average citizen; (2) our reform associations thought that the
salvation of our cities depended on expert officials; (3) present
thinking sees the necessity of combining expert service and an active
electorate.[75]
The increasing number of states which are holding, or are considering
holding, constitutional conventions for the reconstruction of state
governments shows the wide-spread dissatisfaction with our state
machinery. The principal object of nearly all of these conventions is
increased efficiency through concentration of responsibility. In our
fear of abuse of power there has been no one to use power; we must
change this if we are to have administrative efficiency. Most of the
schemes for a reconstruction of state governments are based on (1)
concentration of executive leadership in the hands of the governor, and
(2) direct responsibility to the electorate. The former implies
appointment of administrative officials by the governor, an executive
budget, and readjustment in the relation of executive and legislative so
that the governor can introduce and defend bills. The latter
necessitates the ability of the electorate to criticize work done and
plans proposed.
Therefore the tendency towards an effective responsibility through the
increased power of our executive does not mean that less is required of
citizens, but more. To the initiative, referendum and recall is to be
added the general control by the people themselves of our state
policies. Executive leadership may reduce the power of legislatures, but
it will increase the power of the electorate both directly and
indirectly: indirectly by weakening party organization, and directly by
giving the people more and more control. It has been suggested, for
instance, that in any dispute between governor and legislature the
people might be called on to decide, either directly by passing on the
proposed legislation itself, or by a new election. At any rate ultimate
control must somehow be with the people. That this was not sufficiently
provided for in the New York constitution submitted to the voters of New
York a few years ago was one of the reasons for its rejection. What
frightened the men of New York was undoubtedly the increased power of
the state administrative without any corresponding increase in
democratic control. To increase at the same time democratic control and
administrative responsibility, while not an easy thing to do, is the
task of our new constitutions.
With regard to direct government we are at present making two mistakes:
first, in thinking that we can get any benefit from it if it is operated
from within the party organization;[76] secondly, in thinking that it is
merely to record, that it is based on counting, on the preponderance of
votes.
The question staring us in the face in American politics to-day is—What
possible good can direct government do us if party organization remains
in control? The movement for direct primaries, popular choice of United
States senators, presidential primaries, initiative and referendum, the
recall etc., will bear little fruit unless something is done at the same
time to break the power of the party. Many people tell us that our
present party system, with its method of caucuses, conventions, bosses
etc., has failed, and they are now looking to the direct primary as
their hope, but the direct primary in itself will not free us from the
tyranny of party rule. Look at this much-lauded direct primary and see
what it is actually giving us: the political machines have known from
the beginning how to circumvent it, it often merely increases the power
of the boss, and at its best it is accomplishing no integrating of the
American people—the real task of democracy. No development of party
machinery or reform of party machinery is going to give us the will of
the people, only a new method.
Moreover, merely giving more power to the people does not automatically
reduce the hold of the party; some positive measures must be taken if
direct government is not to fail exactly as representative government
has failed. The faith in direct government as a sure panacea is almost
pathetic when we remember how in the past one stronghold after another
has been captured by the party. Much has been written by advocates of
direct government to show that it will destroy the arbitrary power of
the party, destroy its relation to big business, etc., but we see little
evidence of this. We all know, and we can see every year if we watch the
history of referendum votes, that the party organization is quite able
to use “direct government” for its own ends. Direct government worked by
the machine will be subject to much the same abuses as representative
government. And direct and representative government cannot be
synthesized by executive leadership alone. All that is said in favor of
the former may be true, but it can never be made operative unless we are
able to find some way of breaking the power of the machine. Direct
government can be beneficial to American politics only if accompanied by
the organization of voters in non-partisan groups for the production of
common ideas and a collective purpose. Of itself direct government can
never become the responsible government of a people.
I have said that direct government will never succeed if operated from
within the party organization, nor if it is considered, as it usually
is, merely a method by which the people can accept or reject what is
proposed to them. Let us now look at the second point. We have seen that
party organization does not allow group methods, that the party is a
crowd: suggestion by the boss, imitation by the mass, is the rule. But
direct government also may and probably will be crowd government if it
is merely a means of counting. As far as direct government can be given
the technique of a genuine democracy, it is an advance step in political
method, but the trouble is that many of its supporters do not see this
necessity; they have given it their adherence because of their belief in
majority rule, in their belief that to count one and one and one is to
get at the will of the people. But for each to count as one means crowd
rule—of course the party captures us. Yet even if it did not, we do not
want direct government if we are to fall from party domination into the
tyranny of numbers. That every man was to count as one was the
contribution of the old psychology to politics; the new psychology goes
deeper and further,—it teaches that each is to be the whole at one
point. This changes our entire conception of politics. Voting at the
polls is not to be the expression of one man after another. My vote
should not be my freak will any more than it should be my adherence to
party, but my individual expression of the common will. The
particularist vote does not represent the individual will because the
evolution of the individual will is bound up in a larger evolution.
Therefore, _my duty as a citizen is not exhausted by what I bring to the
state; my test as a citizen is how fully the whole can be expressed in
or through me_.
The vote in itself does not give us democracy—we have yet to learn
democracy’s method. We still think too much of the solidarity of the
vote; what we need is solidarity of purpose, solidarity of will. To make
my vote a genuine part of the expression of the collective will is the
first purpose of politics; it is only through group organization that
the individual learns this lesson, that he learns to be an effective
political member. People often ask, “Why is democracy so unprogressive?”
It is just because we have not democracy in this sense. As long as the
vote is that of isolated individuals, the tendency will be for us to
have an unprogressive vote. This state of things can be remedied, first,
by a different system of education, secondly, by giving men
opportunities to exercise that fundamental intermingling with others
which is democracy. To the consideration of how this can be accomplished
Part III is mainly directed.
But I am making no proposal for some hard and fast method by which every
vote shall register the will of a definite, fixed number of men rather
than of one man. I am talking of a new method of living _by_ which the
individual shall learn to be part of social wholes, _through_ which he
shall express social wholes. The individual not the group must be the
basis of organization. But the individual is created by many groups, his
vote cannot express his relation to one group; it must ideally, I have
said, express the whole from his point of view, actually it must express
as much of the whole as the variety of his group life makes
possible.[77]
When shall we begin to understand what the ballot-box means in our
political life? _It creates nothing_—it merely registers what is already
created. If direct government is to be more than ballot-box democracy it
must learn not to record what is on the surface, but to dig down
underneath the surface. No “democracy” which is based on a preponderance
of votes can ever succeed. The essence of democracy is an educated and
responsible citizenship evolving common ideas and _willing_ its own
social life. The dynamic thought is the thought which represents the
most complete synthesis. In art the influence of a school does not
depend upon the number of its adherents, but upon the extent to which
that school represents a synthesis of thought. This is exactly so in
politics. Direct government must create. It can do this through group
organization. We are at the cross-roads now: shall we give the
initiative and referendum to a crowd or to an interpenetrating group?
To sum up: the corruption of politics is due largely to the conception
of the people as a crowd. To change this idea is, I believe, the first
step in the reform of our political life. Unless this is done before we
make sweeping changes in the mechanism of government, such changes will
not mean progress. If the people are a crowd capable of nothing but
imitation, what is the use of all the direct government we are trying to
bring about, how can a “crowd” be considered capable of political
decisions? Direct government gives to every one the right to express his
opinion. The question is whether that opinion is to be his particularist
opinion or the imitation of the crowd or the creation of the group. The
party has dominated us in the past chiefly because we have truly
believed the people to be a crowd. When we understand the law of
association as the law of psychic interplay, then indeed shall we be on
the way towards the New Democracy.
Direct government will not succeed if it is operated through the party
organization; it will not succeed even if separated from party control
if it means the crowd in another guise. To be successful direct
government must be controlled by some method not yet brought into
practical politics. When we have an organized electorate, we shall begin
to see the advantages of direct government.
* * * * *
At the beginning of this chapter three closely related movements in
American politics were mentioned. The third must now be considered—the
introduction of social programs into party platforms.
We have had three policies in legislation: (1) the let-alone policy,[78]
(2) the regulation policy, and now (3) the constructive policy is just
appearing.
In order to get away from the consequences of _laissez-faire_, we
adopted, at the end of the nineteenth century, an almost equally
pernicious one, the regulation theory. The error at the bottom of the
“regulation” idea of government is that people may be allowed to do as
they please (_laissez-faire_) until they have built up special rules and
privileges for themselves, and then they shall be “regulated.” The
regulation theory of government is that we are to give every opportunity
for efficiency to come to the top in order that we shall get the benefit
of that efficiency, but at the same time our governmental machinery is
to be such that efficiency is to be shorn of its power before it can do
any harm—a sort of automatic blow-off. Gauge your boiler (society) at
what it will stand without bursting, then when our ablest people get to
that point the blow-off will make society safe.
But the most salient thing about present American politics is that we
are giving up both our let-alone and our regulation policies in favor of
a constructive policy. There has been a steady and comprehensible growth
of democracy from this point of view, that is, of the idea of the
function of government being not merely to protect, to adjust, to
restrain, and all the negative rest of it, but that the function of
government should be to build, to construct the life of its people. We
think now that a constructive social policy is more democratic than the
protection of men in their individual rights and property. In 1800 the
opposite idea prevailed, and Jefferson, not Hamilton, was considered the
Democrat. We must reinterpret or restate the fundamental principles of
democracy.
But why do we consider our present constructive social policies more
democratic? Are they necessarily so? Has not paternalistic Germany
constructive social policies for her people? Social legislation in
England and America means an increase of democracy because it is a
movement which is in England and America bound up with other democratic
movements.[79] In America we see at the same time the trend towards (1)
an increase of administrative responsibility, (2) an increase of direct
control by the people, (3) an increase of social legislation. Not one of
these is independent of the other two. They have acted and reacted on
one another. Men have not first been given a more direct share in
government and then used their increased power to adopt social policies.
The two have gone on side by side. Moreover, the adoption of social
policies has increased the powers of government and, therefore, it has
more and more come to be seen that popular control of government is
necessary. At the same time the making of campaign issues out of social
policies has at once in itself made all the people more important in
politics. Or it is equally true to say that giving the people a closer
share in government means that our daily lives pass more naturally into
the area of politics. Hence we see, from whichever point we begin, that
these three movements are bound together.
Thus in America there is growing recognition of the fact that social
policies are not policies invented for the good of the people, but
policies created by the people. The regulation theory was based on the
same fallacy as the let-alone theory, namely, that government is
something external to the structural life of the people. Government
cannot leave us alone, it cannot regulate us, it can only express us.
The scope of politics should be our whole social life. Our present idea
of an omnipresent, ever-active, articulate citizenship building up its
own life within the frame of politics is the most fruitful idea of
modern times.
Moreover, social legislation is an indication of the growth of
democracy, the increase of individualism, because it is legislation for
the individual. We have had legislation to protect home industries, we
have encouraged agriculture, we have helped the railroads by concessions
and land grants, but we have not until recently had legislation for the
individual. Social legislation means legislation for the individual man:
health laws, shorter hours of work, workmen’s compensation, old age
pensions, minimum wage, prevention of industrial accidents, prohibition
of child labor, etc. Over and over again our social legislation is
pointed to as a reaction against individualism. On the contrary it shows
an increase of genuine individualism. The _individual_ has never been so
appreciated as in the awakening _social_ world of to-day.
This is not a contradiction of what is said in chapter XV, that law
according to its most progressive exponents is to serve not individuals,
but the community; that modern law thinks of men not as separate
individuals, but in their relation to one another. Modern law
synthesizes the idea of individual and community through its view of the
social individual as the community-unit. Law used to be for the
particularist individual; now it serves the community, but the
community-unit is the social individual.
In our most recent books we see the expression “the new individualism.”
The meaning of this phrase, although never used by him, is clearly
implied in the writings of Mr. Roscoe Pound. He says “As a social
institution the interests with which law is concerned are social
interests, but the chiefest of these social interests is one in the full
human life of the individual.” Here is expressed the essential meaning
of the new individualism—that it is a synthesis of individual and
society. That the social individual, the community-unit, is becoming
“the individual” for law is the most promising sign for the future of
political method. When Mr. Pound says that the line between public law
and private law in jurisprudence is nothing more than a convenient mode
of expression, he shows us the old controversy in regard to the state
and the individual simply fading away.
Social legislation, direct government, concentration of administrative
responsibility, are then indications of the growth of democracy? Yes,
but only indications. They can mean an actual increase of democracy only
if they are accompanied by the development of those methods which shall
make every man and his daily needs the basis and the substance of
politics.
-----
Footnote 74:
With the executive and legislative limited in their powers, the
decisions of the courts gradually came, especially as they developed
constructive powers, to be a body of law which guided the American
people.
Footnote 75:
For ways of doing this see Part III.
Footnote 76:
We used to think frequent elections democratic. Now we know that they
mean simply an increase of party influence and a decrease of official
responsibility.
Footnote 77:
See ch. XXX, “Political Pluralism and Functionalism.”
Footnote 78:
_Laissez-faire_ was popular when there were great numbers of
individual producers. When the large-scale business system made
wage-earners of these, there was the beginning of the break-down of
_laissez-faire_.
Footnote 79:
Besides the more obvious one of “universal suffrage.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III
GROUP ORGANIZATION DEMOCRACY’S METHOD
1. THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP
2. THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXII
NEIGHBORHOOD NEEDS THE BASIS OF POLITICS
--------------
POLITICS are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or
method, or is this the guiding moment?
We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of
politics as entirely outside our daily life manipulated by those set
apart for the purpose. The methods by which the party platform is
constructed are not those which put into it the real issues before the
public; the tendency is to put in what will elect candidates or to cover
up the real issues by generalities. But just so long as we separate
politics and our daily life, just so long shall we have all our present
evils. Politics can no longer be an extra-activity of the American
people, they must be a means of satisfying our actual wants.
We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the work we
do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we live, the water
we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for bringing up our
children, that in fact the whole area of our daily life should
constitute politics. There is no line where the life of the home ends
and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private
life and my public life. A man I know tells me that he “wouldn’t touch
politics with a ten-foot pole,” but how can he help touching politics?
He may not like the party game, but politics shape the life he leads
from hour to hour. When this is once understood no question in history
will seem more astonishing than the one so often reiterated in these
days, “Should woman be given a place in politics?” Woman _is_ in
politics; no power under the sun can put her out.
Politics then must satisfy the needs of the people. What are the needs
of the people? Nobody knows. We know the supposed needs of certain
classes, of certain “interests”; these can never be woven into the needs
of the people. Further back we must go, down into the actual life from
which all these needs spring, down into the daily, hourly living with
all its innumerable cross currents, with all its longings and
heart-burnings, with its envies and jealousies perhaps, with its
unsatisfied desires, its embryonic aspirations, and its power, manifest
or latent, for endeavor and accomplishment. The needs of the people are
not now articulate: they loom out of the darkness, vague, big,
portentously big, but dumb because of the separation of men. To open up
this hinterland of our life the cross currents now burrowing under
ground must come to the surface and be openly acknowledged.
We work, we spend most of our waking hours working for some one of whose
life we know nothing, who knows nothing of us; we pay rent to a landlord
whom we never see or see only once a month, and yet our home is our most
precious possession; we have a doctor who is with us in the crucial
moments of birth and death, but whom we ordinarily do not meet; we buy
our food, our clothes, our fuel, of automatons for the selling of food,
clothes and fuel. We know all these people in their occupational
capacity, not as men like ourselves with hearts like ours, desires like
ours, hopes like ours. And this isolation from those who minister to our
lives, to whose lives we minister, does not bring us any nearer to our
neighbors in their isolation. For every two or three of us think
ourselves a little better than every other two or three, and this
becomes a dead wall of separation, of misunderstanding, of antagonism.
How can we do away with this artificial separation which is the dry-rot
of our life? First we must realize that each has something to give.
Every man comes to us with a golden gift in his heart. Do we dare,
therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by myself on my little self-made
pedestal, I narrow myself down to my own personal equation of error. If
I go to all my neighbors, my own life increases in multiple measure. The
aim of each of us should be to live in the lives of all. Those fringes
which connect my life with the life of every other human being in the
world are the inlets by which the central forces flow into me. I am a
worse lawyer, a worse teacher, a worse doctor if I do not know these
wider contacts. Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with every
other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in isolation.
But it must be a significant union, never a mere coming together. How we
waste immeasurable force in much of our social life in a mere tossing of
the ball, on the merest externality and travesty of a common life which
we do not penetrate for the secret at its heart. The quest of life and
the meaning of life is reality. We may flit on the surface as gnats in
the sunlight, but in each of us, however overlaid, is the hunger and
thirst for realness, for substance. We must plunge down to find our
treasure. The core of a worthy associated life is the call of reality to
reality, the calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the
depths forever more and more. To go to meet our fellows is to go out and
let the winds of Heaven blow upon us—we throw ourselves open to every
breath and current which spring from this meeting of life’s vital
forces.
Some of us are looking for the remedy for our fatal isolation in a
worthy and purposeful neighborhood life. Our proposal is that people
should organize themselves into neighborhood groups to express their
daily life, to bring to the surface the needs, desires and aspirations
of that life, that these needs should become the substance of politics,
and that these neighborhood groups should become the recognized
political unit.
Let us consider some of the advantages of the neighborhood group. First,
it makes possible the association of neighbors, which means fuller
acquaintance and a more real understanding. The task of creation from
elektrons up is putting self in relation. Is man the only one who
refuses this task? I do not know my next-door neighbor! One of the most
unfortunate circumstances of our large towns is that we expect concerted
action from people who are strangers to one another. So mere
acquaintance is the first essential. This will lead inevitably to
friendly feeling. The story is told of some American official who begged
not to be introduced to a political enemy, for he said he could not hate
any one with whom he became acquainted. We certainly do feel more kindly
to the people we actually see. It is what has been called “the pungent
sense of effective reality.” Neighborhood organization will substitute
confidence for suspicion—a great gain.
Moreover, neighborhood organization gives opportunity for constant and
regular intercourse. We are indeed far more interested in humanity than
ever before. Look at what we are studying: social psychology, social
economics, social medicine and hygiene, social ethics etc. But people
must socialize their lives by practice, not by study. Until we begin to
acquire the habit of a social life no theory of a social life will do us
any good. It is a mistake to think that such abstractions as unity,
brotherhood etc. are as self-evident to our wills as to our intellect. I
learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship, but by
living my life with my friends and learning by experience the
obligations friendship demands. Just so must I learn my relation to
society by coming into contact with a wide range of experiences, of
people, by cultivating and deepening my sympathy and whole understanding
of life.
When we have come together and got acquainted with one another, then we
shall have an opportunity for learning the rules of the game—the game of
association which is the game of life. Certain organizations have sprung
up since 1914 with the avowed object of fighting war with love. If only
we knew how to love! I am ready to say to you this minute, “I love my
neighbors.” But all that I mean by it is that I have a vague feeling of
kindliness towards them. I have no idea how to do the actual deed. I
shall offend against the law of love within an hour. The love of our
fellow-men to be effective must be the love evolved from some actual
group relation. We talk of fellowship; we, puny separatists bristling
with a thousand unharmonized traits, with our assertive particularist
consciousness, think that all we have to do is to _decide_ on fellowship
as a delightful idea. But fellowship will be the slowest thing on earth
to create. An eager longing for it may help, but it can come into being
as a genuine part of our life only through a deep understanding of what
it really means.
Yet association is the impulse at the core of our being. The whole
social process is that of association, individual with individual, group
with group. Progress from one point of view is a continuously widening
of the area of association. Our modern civilization has simply overlaid
and falsified this primary instinct of life. But this is rapidly
changing. The most striking characteristic of the present day is that
people are doing more things together: they are coming together as never
before in labor organizations, in coöperative societies, in consumers’
leagues, in associations of employers and employed, in municipal
movements, for national purposes, etc. etc. We have the Men’s City Club,
the Women’s City Club; professional societies are multiplying over
night. The explanation sometimes given for this present tendency towards
union is that we are beginning to see the material advantages of
coöperation, but the root of the thing is far from utilitarian
advantage. Our happiness, our sense of living at all, is directly
dependent on our joining with others. We are lost, exiled, imprisoned
until we feel the joy of union.
I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us with a
fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common life, is
going to be the substitute for what men now get in war. Some
psychologists tell us that fighting is one of the fundamental instincts,
and that if we do not have war we shall have all the dangers of thwarted
instinct. But the lure of war is neither the instinct of hate nor the
love of fighting; it is the joining of one with another in a common
purpose. “And the heart of a people beat with one desire.” Many men have
gone joyfully to war because it gave them fellowship. I said to some one
that I thought the reason war was still popular in spite of all its
horrors was because of our lack of imagination, we simply could not
realize war. “No,” said the man I spoke to, “I know war, I know its
horrors, and the reason that in spite of it all men like war is because
there we are doing something all together. That is its exhilaration and
why we can’t give it up. We come home and each leads his separate life
and it seems tame and uninteresting merely on that account, the deadly
separateness of our ordinary life.”
When we want a substitute for war, therefore, we need not seek for a
substitute for fighting or for hating; we must find some way of making
ourselves feel at one with some portion of our fellow-creatures. If the
essential characteristic of war is doing things together, let us begin
to do things together in peace. Yet not an artificial doing things
together, we could so easily fall into that, but an entire
reorganization of life so that the doing things together shall be the
natural way—the way we shall all want to do things.
But mere association is not enough. We need more than the “collective
life,” the mere “getting-together,” so much talked of in these days; our
getting together must be made effective, must exercise our minds and
wills as well as our emotions, must serve the great ends of a great
life. Neighborhood organization gives all an opportunity to learn the
technique of association.
A further advantage of neighborhood organization is that as a member of
a neighborhood group we get a fuller and more varied life than as a
member of any other kind of a group we can find, no matter how big our
city or how complex or comprehensive its interests. This statement
sounds paradoxical—it will seem to many like saying that the smaller is
greater than the larger. Let us examine this statement therefore and see
if perhaps in this case the smaller is not greater than the larger. Why
is the neighborhood group better for us than the selected group? Why are
provincial people more interesting than cosmopolitan, that is, if
provincial people have taken advantage of _their_ opportunities? Because
cosmopolitan people are all alike—that has been the aim of their
existence and they have accomplished it. The man who knows the “best”
society of Petrograd, Paris, London and New York, and that only, is a
narrow man because the ideals and standards of the “best” society of
London, Paris and New York are the same. He knows life across but not
down—it is a horizontal civilization instead of a vertical one, with all
the lack of depth and height of everything horizontal. This man has
always been among the same kind of people, his life has not been
enlarged and enriched by the friction of ideas and ideals which comes
from the meeting of people of different opportunities and different
tastes and different standards. But this is just what we may have in a
neighborhood group—different education, different interests, different
standards. Think of the doctor, the man who runs the factory, the
organist and choir leader, the grocer, the minister, the watch-maker,
the school-teacher, all living within a few blocks of one another.
On the other hand consider how different it is when we _choose_ the
constituents of our group—then we choose those who are the same as
ourselves in some particular. We have the authors’ club, the social
workers’ club, the artists’ club, the actors’ society, the business
men’s club, the business women’s club, the teachers’ club etc.[80] The
satisfaction and contentment that comes with sameness indicates a meagre
personality. I go to the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my
neighborhood club to meet men. It is just because my next door neighbor
has never been to college that he is good for me. The stenographer may
come to see that her life is really richer from getting the factory
girl’s point of view.
In a neighborhood group you have the stimulus and the bracing effect of
many different experiences and ideals. And in this infinite variety
which touches you on every side, you have a life which enriches and
enlarges and fecundates; this is the true soil of human development—just
because you have here a natural and not an artificial group, the members
find all that is necessary in order to grow into that whole which is
true community living.
Many young men and women think as they come to the teeming cities that
there they are to find the fuller life they have longed for, but often
the larger our world the narrower we become, for we cannot face the
vague largeness, and so we join a clique of people as nearly like
ourselves as we can find.
In so far, therefore, as neighborhoods are the result of some selective
process, they are not so good for our purpose. The Italian colony or the
Syrian colony does not give us the best material for group organization,
neither does any occupational segregation like the stockyard district of
Chicago. (This is an argument against the industrial colonies which are
spreading.) In a more or less mixed neighborhood, people of different
nationalities or different classes come together easily and naturally on
the ground of many common interests: the school, recreational
opportunities, the placing of their children in industry, hygiene,
housing etc. Race and class prejudices are broken down by working
together for intimate objects.
Whenever I speak of neighborhood organization to my friends, those who
disagree with me at once become violent on the subject. I have never
understood why it inflames them more easily than other topics. They
immediately take it for granted that I am proposing to shut them up
tight in their neighborhoods and seal them hermetically; they assume
that I mean to substitute the neighborhood for every other contact. They
tell me of the pettiness of neighborhood life, and I have to listen to
stories of neighborhood iniquities ranging from small gossip to
determined boycotting. Intolerance and narrowness thrive in the
neighborhood group they say; in the wider group they do not. But I am
not proposing to substitute the neighborhood group for others, yet even
so I should like to say a word for the neighborhood.
We may like some selected group better than the company of our
neighbors, but such a group is no “broader” necessarily, because it
draws from all over the city, than a local one. You can have narrow
interests as well as narrow spaces. Neighbors may, it is true, discuss
the comings and goings of the family down the street, but I have heard
people who are not neighbors discuss equally trivial subjects. But
supposing that non-neighborhood groups are less petty in the sense of
less personal in their conversation, they are often also less real, and
this is an important point. If I dress in my best clothes and go to
another part of the city and take all my best class of conversation with
me, I don’t know that it does me any good if I am the same person who in
my every-day clothes goes in next door and talks slander. What I mean is
that the only place in the world where we can change ourselves is on
that level where we are real. And what is forgotten by my friends who
think neighborhood life trivial is that (according to their own
argument) it is the same people who talk gossip in their neighborhoods
who are impersonal and noble in another part of the city.
Moreover, if we are happier away from our neighborhood it would be well
for us to analyze the cause—there may be a worthy reason, there may not.
Is it perhaps that one does not get as much consideration there as one
thinks one’s due? Have we perhaps, led by our vanity, been drawn to
those groups where we get the most consideration? My neighbors may not
think much of me because I paint pictures, knowing that my back yard is
dirty, but my artist friends who like my color do not know or care about
my back yard. My neighbors may feel no admiring awe of my scientific
researches knowing that I am not the first in the house of a neighbor in
trouble.
You may reply, “But this is not my case. I am one of the most esteemed
people in my neighborhood and one of the lowest in the City Club, but I
prefer the latter just because of that: there is room for me to aspire
there, but where I am leading what is there for me to grow toward, how
can I expand in such an atmosphere?” But I should say that this also
might be a case of vanity: possibly these people prefer the City Club
because they do not like to think they have found their place in life in
what they consider an inferior group; it flatters them more to think
that they belong to a superior group even if they occupy the lowest
place there. But the final word to be said is I think that this kind of
seeking implies always the attitude of getting, almost as bad as the
attitude of conferring. It is extremely salutary to take our place in a
neighborhood group.
Then, too, that does not always do us most good which we enjoy most, as
we are not always progressing most when thrills go up and down our
spine. We may have a selected group feeling “good,” but that is not
going to make us good. That very homogeneity which we nestle down into
and in which we find all the comfort of a down pillow, does not provide
the differences in which alone we can grow. We must know the finer
enjoyment of recognized diversity.
It must be noted, however, that while it is not proposed that the
neighborhood association be substituted for other forms of
association—trade-union, church societies, fraternal societies, local
improvement leagues, coöperative societies, men’s clubs, women’s clubs
etc.—yet the hope is that it shall not be one more association merely,
but that it shall be the means of coördinating and translating into
community values other local groups. The neighborhood association might
become a very mechanical affair if we were all to go there every evening
and go nowhere else. It must not with its professed attempt to give a
richer life cut off the variety and spontaneity we now have.
But the trouble now is that we have so much unrelated variety, so much
unutilized spontaneity. The small merchant of a neighborhood meets with
the other small dealers for business purposes, he goes to church on
Sundays, he gets his social intercourse at his lodge or club, but where
and when does he consider any possible integration of these into
channels for community life? At his political rally, to be sure, he
meets his neighbors irrespective of business or church or social lines,
but there he comes under party domination. A free, full community life
lived within the sustaining and nourishing power of the community bond,
lived for community ends, is almost unknown now. This will not come by
substituting the neighborhood group for other groups, not even by using
it as a clearing-house, but by using it as a medium for interpretation
and unofficial integration.
There should be as much spontaneous association as the vitality of the
neighborhood makes possible, but other groups may perhaps find their
significance and coördination through the neighborhood association. If a
men’s or women’s club is of no use to the community it should not exist;
if it is of use, it must find out of what use, how related to all other
organizations, how through and with them related to the whole community.
The lawyers’ club, the teachers’ club, the trade association or the
union—these can have little influence on their community until they
discover their relation to the community through and in one another. I
have seen many examples of this. If the neighborhood group is to be the
political unit, it must learn how to gather up into significant
community expression these more partial expressions of individual wants.
It is sometimes said that the force of the neighborhood bond is
lessening now-a-days with the ease of communication, but this is true
only for the wealthy. The poor cannot afford constantly to be paying the
ten-cent carfare necessary to leave and return to their homes, nor the
more well-to-do of the suburbs the twenty or twenty-five cents it costs
them to go to the city and back. The fluctuating population of
neighborhoods may be an argument against getting all we should like out
of the neighborhood bond, but at the same time it makes it all the more
necessary that some organization should be ready at hand to assimilate
the new-comers and give them an opportunity of sharing in civic life as
an integral, responsible part of that life. Moreover a neighborhood has
common traditions and memories which persist and influence even although
the personnel changes.
To sum up: whether we want the exhilaration of a fuller life or whether
we want to find the unities which will make for peace and order, for
justice and for righteousness, it would be wise to turn back to the
neighborhood group and there begin the a b c of a constructive
brotherhood of man. We must recognize that too much congeniality makes
for narrowness, and that the harmonizing, not the ignoring, of our
differences leads us to the truth. Neighborhood organization gives us
the best opportunity we have yet discovered of finding the unity
underneath all our differences, the real bond between them—of living the
consciously creative life.
We can never reform American politics from above, by reform
associations, by charters and schemes of government. Our political forms
will have no vitality unless our political life is so organized that it
shall be based primarily and fundamentally on spontaneous association.
“Government is a social contact,” was found in the examination papers of
a student in a near-by college. He was nearer the truth than he knew.
Political progress must be by local communities. Our municipal life will
be just as strong as the strength of its parts. We shall never know how
to be one of a nation until we are one of a neighborhood. And what
better training for world organization can each man receive than for
neighbors to live together not as detached individuals but as a true
community, for no League of Nations will be successful which regards
France and Germany, England and Russia as separatist units of a
world-union.
Those who are working for particular reforms to be accomplished
immediately will not be interested in neighborhood organization; only
those will be interested who think that it is far more important for us
to find the right method of attacking all our problems than to solve any
one. We who believe in neighborhood organization believe that the
neighborhood group is a more significant unit to identify ourselves with
than any we have hitherto known in cities. People have been getting
together in churches, in fraternal societies, in political parties, in
industrial and commercial associations, but now in addition to these
partial groups communities are to get together as communities.
The neighborhood organization movement is not waiting for ideal
institutions, or perfect men, but is finding whatever creative forces
there are within a community and taking these and building the future
with them. The neighborhood organization movement is a protest against
both utopias on the one hand and a mechanicalized humanity on the other.
It consists of the process of building always with the best we have, and
its chief problem is to discover the methods by which the best we have
can be brought to the surface. Neighborhood organization gives us a
method which will revolutionize politics.
-----
Footnote 80:
This movement to form societies based on our occupations is of course,
although usually unconscious, part of the whole syndicalist movement,
and as such has real advantages which will be taken up later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIII
AN INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOOD
--------------
HOW can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into
existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources
within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration? And then how
can the vision which we learn to see together be actualized? How can
neighborhoods learn to satisfy their own needs through their own
initiative? In other words how can the force generated by our
neighborhood life become part of our whole civic and national life? How
can an integrated neighborhood responsibility become a civic and
national responsibility?
There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense, something
more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people, until you have a
neighborhood consciousness. Rows of houses, rows of streets, do not make
a neighborhood. The place bond must give way to a consciousness of real
union. This neighborhood consciousness can be evolved in five ways:
1. By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of
neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional
meetings for specific objects.
2. By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings.
3. By learning together—through lectures, classes, clubs; by sharing one
another’s experience through social intercourse; by learning forms of
community art expression; in short by leading an actual community life.
4. By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the
neighborhood.
5. By establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and
city, state and national governments.
The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood organization
is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement to mobilize
community forces and to get these forces expressed in our social and
political life. Each community, it is becoming recognized, has its own
desires, its own gifts, its own inherent powers to bring to the life of
the whole city. But these inner forces must be freed and utilized for
public ends. The Community Centre movement is a movement to release the
potential values of neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to
flow in, to help people find and organize their own resources. It is to
provide a means for the self-realization of neighborhoods. In
considering, therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration,
it must be remembered that many of these methods are being already
actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood
Associations—there are many names for the many forms in which this vital
need is finding expression.
Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for neighborhood use.
In the larger cities, indeed, where school buildings have auditoriums,
gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms etc., the School Centre is for
many reasons the best form of community organization. In some cities, as
in Chicago, the field-houses in the parks are used as community centres,
in addition to the schoolhouses. In many smaller towns or villages,
where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable (although
often we find valuable if not showy results in the little red
schoolhouse at the cross-roads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar underneath
the district school), “community buildings” are being built. Their name
is significant. They have a reading room, library, rest room, club rooms
and usually a small hall with stage for dramatic and musical
entertainments.
And beyond this conscious effort to organize neighborhoods, or rather to
help neighborhoods to organize themselves, much spontaneous initiative
in both rural and urban communities, springing from the daily needs of
the people, is finding neighborhood organization to be the result of
concerted effort. Mothers want to learn more of the care of their homes,
men want to discuss local improvements, young men and women want
recreation, there is a hunger for a wider social intercourse or for some
form of community art-expression, music or drama. Yet whichever of these
motives leads us to the schoolhouse or the community building, the
result is always the same—a closer forging of the neighborhood bond.
Whoever takes the initiative in organizing the Community Centre—a
parents’ association, a men’s civic club, a mothers’ club, a committee
of citizens, the city council, the board of education—the result is
always the same, a closer forging of the community bond.
The Community Centre movement has made rapid progress in the last ten
years. All over the country new Centres are springing up constantly.
That the impulse for their organization is almost as varied as there are
different towns and cities is evidence of their real need. I have had
letters in regard to the organization of Centres from as widely
different sources as the city council of a western city, girls teaching
in rural schools, the mayor of a small city, and young working men in a
big city. Indeed Centres have become so much the fashion that one man
came to me and said, “We want a School Centre in our district—will you
help us to get one—what is a School Centre?”
In the year 1915–16, 463 cities reported over 59,000 occasions in public
school buildings after 6 P.M. in addition to evening school work.[81]
But School or Community Centres do not exist merely for the satisfaction
of neighborhood needs, for the creating of a community bond, for the
expression of that bond in communal action,—they also give the training
necessary to bring that activity to its highest fulfilment. We all need
not merely opportunities to exercise democracy, but opportunity for a
training in democracy. We are not going to take any kind of citizen for
the new state, we intend to grow our own citizens. Through group
activities, through classes and lectures, through university extension,
through actual practice in self government by the management of their
own Centres and the varied activities therein, all, young and old, may
prepare themselves for the new citizenship of the new democracy.[82]
Let us now consider the five ways given above for producing an
integrated and responsible neighborhood. First, the regular meetings of
neighbors in civic clubs. In Boston we have, in connection with the
School Centres, the so-called “East Boston Town-Meeting,” the
“Charlestown Commonwealth,” etc. At such meetings neighborhood needs can
be discussed, and the men and women of those neighborhoods, while
getting to know one another and their local conditions, can be training
themselves to function with government and as government. The first
advantage of such meetings is their regularity.
I am urging _regular_ meetings of small groups of neighbors as a new
method in politics. Neighbors now often meet for one object or two or
three, and then when these are accomplished think that they need not
meet again until there is another definite end to be gained. But in the
meantime there should be the slow building up of the neighborhood
consciousness. A mass-meeting will never do this. But this neighborhood
consciousness is far more important than to get a municipal bath-house
for a certain district. If the bath-house is considered the chief thing,
and no effort made to get the neighborhood group together again until
something else, a playground for instance, is wanted, this time perhaps
not enough cohesion and concentration of purpose can be obtained to
secure the playground. The question, in neighborhood organization is—Is
our object to get a new playground or to create methods by which
playgrounds will become part of the neighborhood consciousness, methods
which will above all educate for further concerted effort? If
neighborhood organization is one among many methods of getting things,
then it is not of great value; if, however, it is going to bring about a
different mental life, if it will give us an open mind, a flexible mind,
a coöperative mind, then it is the greatest movement of our time. For
our object is not to get certain things, or to have certain things; our
object is to evolve the kind of life, the way of thinking, within which
these specific things will naturally have place. We shall make no real
progress until we can do this.
Bernard Shaw has said of family life that it is often cut off equally
from the blessings of society and the blessings of solitude. We must see
that our neighborhood associations are so organized that we do get the
advantages of society.
The second way of creating an integrated neighborhood is by learning and
practising a genuine discussion, that is, a discussion which shall
evolve a true collective purpose and bring the group will of the
neighborhood to bear directly on city problems. When I speak of
discussion I mean always the kind of discussion which is called out by a
genuine group. The group idea, not the crowd idea, is to come from
discussion. What is the remedy for a “ruthless majority”? What is the
remedy for an “arrogant minority”? Group discussion. Group discussion
will diminish suggestion as a social force and give place to
interpermeation.
When we advocate discussion as a political method, we are not advocating
the extension of a method already in use. There is little discussion
to-day. Talk to air our grievances or as a steam-valve for the
hot-headed, the avowed intention sometimes in the organization of
so-called “discussion” societies, is not discussion. People often speak
of “self-expression” as if it were a letting off of steam, as if there
were something inside us that must be let out before it explodes. But
this is not the use to which we must put the powers of self-expression;
we must release these powers not to be wasted through a safety valve,
but to be used constructively for the good of society. To change the
metaphor, we must not make a petty effort to stem a stream which cannot
and should not be stemmed but helped to direct itself.
Do we have discussion in debating societies? Never. Their influence is
pernicious and they should be abolished in colleges, schools,
settlements, Young Men’s Christian Associations, or wherever found. In
these societies the men as a rule take either side of the question
allotted to them, but even if they choose their side the process of the
debate is the same. The object is always to win, it is never to discover
the truth. This is excellent training for our present party politics. It
is wretched preparation for the kind of politics we wish to see in
America, because there is no attempt to think together. Some one to whom
I said this replied, “But each side has to think together.” Not in the
least: they simply pool their information and their arguments, they
don’t think together. They don’t even think; that artificial mental
process of maintaining a thesis which is not yours by conviction is not
thinking. In debating you are always trying to find the ideas and facts
which will support your side; you do not look dispassionately at all
ideas and all facts, and try to make out just where the truth lies. You
do not try to see what ideas of your opponent will enrich your own point
of view; you are bound to reject without examination his views, his
ideas, almost I might say his facts. In a discussion you can be
flexible, you can try experiments, you can grow as the group grows, but
in a debate all this is impossible.
One of the great advantages of the forum movement is that here we are
beginning to have discussion.[83]
Let us analyze briefly the advantages of discussion. Genuine discussion
is truth-seeking. First, then, it presses every man to think clearly and
appreciatively and discriminatingly in order to take his part worthily.
What we need above everything else is clear thinking. This need has been
covered over by the demand for “honest” men, but hardly any one would
say to-day, “Give the management of your city over to a group of the
most honest men you can find.” A group of honest men—what a
disconcerting picture the phrase calls up! We want efficient men,
thinking men, as well as honest men. Take care of your thinking and your
morals will take care of themselves—is a present which would have
benefited certain reform campaigns.
The first advantage of discussion then is that it tends to make us think
and to seek accurate information in order to be able to think and to
think clearly. I belong to a civic conference lunch club which meets
once a month to discuss civic questions. On one occasion the program
committee discovered a few days before the luncheon that on the question
to be considered (a certain bill before the legislature), we were all of
the same opinion, and so the discussion did not seem likely to be very
lively. But it happened that our secretary knew some one who was on the
other side, and this woman was therefore invited to be our guest and
present her point of view to us. She accepted with pleasure as she said
she felt strongly on the matter. On the morning of the day of our
meeting, however, she telephoned that she could not come, as she had
just read the bill, thinking it would be wise to do so before she
publicly opposed it, and she found she agreed with it heartily!
Moreover, no one question can be adequately discussed without an
understanding of many more. Remedies for abuses are seldom direct
because every abuse is bound up with our whole political and economic
system. And if discussion induces thinking by the preparation necessary,
it certainly stimulates thinking by the opposition we meet.
But the great advantage of discussion is that thereby we overcome
misunderstanding and conquer prejudice. An Englishman who visited
America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper this
advice, “Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like him,” and was
much struck with the difference between the American and the English way
of looking at the matter. The Englishman, he said, does not get
acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him! I sometimes
feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our
opponents for fear we might sympathize with them.
Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring out
difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with
difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion is
that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives form to
truth.
The whole conception of discussion is now changing. Discussion is to be
the sharpest, most effective political tool of the future. The value of
the town-meeting is not in the fact that every one goes, but in what
every one does when he gets there. And discussion will overcome much
indifference, much complacency. We must remember that most people are
not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together
is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as
well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them. I always feel
intimate with my enemies. It is not opposition but indifference which
separates men.
Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors is that
men discuss questions there before they come to a political issue, when
there is not the heat of the actual fight and the desire to win.
Through regular meetings then, and a genuine discussion, we help to
forge the neighborhood bond. But this is not enough. A true community
life should be developed. If the multiplicity and complexity of
interrelations of interests and wants and hopes are to be brought to the
surface to form the substance of politics, people must come more and
more to live their lives together. We are ignorant: we should form
classes and learn together. The farmer in Virginia goes to the School
Centre to learn how to test his seed corn. We need social intercourse:
we should meet to exchange experiences and to have a “good time”
together. We need opportunity for bringing old and young together,
parents and children, for boys and girls to meet in a natural, healthy
way. We need true recreation, not the passive looking at the motion
pictures, not the deadening watching of other people’s acting; we want
the real re-creation of active participation. The leisure time of men
and women is being increased by legislation, by vocational efficiency,
by machinery, and by scientific management. One of the most pressing
needs of to-day is the constructive use of leisure. This need can be
largely satisfied in the Neighborhood Centre. Festivals, pageants, the
celebration of holidays can all be used as recreation, as a means of
self-expression, and of building up the neighborhood bond.
Here too the family realizes that its life is embedded in a larger life,
and the richer that larger life the more the family gains. The family
learns its duty to other families, and it finds that its external
relations change all its inner life, as the International League will
change fundamentally the internal history of every nation. I knew two
sisters who were ashamed of their mother until they could say to their
friends, “Mother goes to the lectures every Saturday night at the School
Centre.” I know men and wives who never went out together until they
found an extended home in a School Centre. I know a father, an
intelligent policeman, who never had any real friendship with his four
daughters until he planned dances for them at the School Centre so that
they should not go to the public dance-halls.
Families often need some means of coming to a common understanding; they
are not always capable by themselves of making the necessary adjustment
of points of view brought from so many sources as the different family
outgoings produce. For example, food conservation taught in various ways
in the Neighborhood Centre—by cooking classes for women, by lectures for
both men and women showing the relation of food to the whole present
world problem, by having regular afternoons for meeting with agents from
the Health Department, by comparison between neighbors of the results of
the new feeding—food conservation, that is, taught as a community
problem, is more effective than taught merely to classes of mothers. For
if the mother makes dishes the father and children refuse to eat, the
cooking classes she has attended will have no community value. To give
community value to all our apparently isolated activities is one of the
primary objects of neighborhood organization.
The Neighborhood Centre, therefore, instead of separating families, as
sometimes feared, is uniting them. To live their life in the setting of
the broader life is continuously to interpret and explain one to the
other. And if we have learned that sacred as our family life must always
be, the significance of that sacredness is its power of contributing to
the life around us, the life of our little neighborhood, then we are
ready to understand that the nation too is real, that its tasks are
mighty and that those tasks will not be performed unless every one of us
can find self-expression through the nation’s needs.
We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an external
integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group discussion
begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen that a sharing of
our daily life—its cares and burdens, its pleasures and joys, each with
all—furthers this inner, this spiritual union which is at last to be the
core of a new politics. The fourth way of developing the neighborhood
bond is by citizens taking more and more responsibility for the life of
their community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig
down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that
government satisfy those needs—the satisfaction also must be found in
that fermenting life from which our demands issue. The methods of
neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter XXVI.
The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by establishing
some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and
national governments. Then shall we have the political integration of
the neighborhood. This will be discussed in chapter XXVII, “From
Neighborhood to Nation.” Party politics are organized, “interests” are
organized, our citizenship is not organized. Our neighborhood life is
starving for lack of any real part in the state. Give us that part and
as inevitably as the wake follows the ship will neighborhood
responsibility follow the integration of neighborhood and state.
-----
Footnote 81:
Since April, 1917, with the rapidly extending use of the schoolhouse
as a centre for war services, these numbers have probably greatly
increased.
Footnote 82:
See Appendix, The Training for the New Democracy.
Footnote 83:
That it is also in many instances leading the way to real community
organization makes it one of the most valuable movements of our time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIV
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION
The Will of the People
--------------
MANY of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of
neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood
consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood organization as
the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What
our political life needs to-day is to get at the will of the people and
to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed
country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer
mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are
to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be
adopted from any we have hitherto known.
Where do we show political vitality at present? In our government? In
our party organization? In our local communities? We can see nowhere any
clear stream of political life. The vitality of our community life is
frittered away or unused. The muddy stream of party politics is choked
with personal ambition, the desire for personal gain. Neighborhood
organization is, I believe, to be the vital current of our political
life. There is a wide-spread idea that we can do away with the evils of
the party system by attacking the boss. Many think also that all would
be well if we could separate politics and business. But far below the
surface are the forces which have allied business and politics; far
below the surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly
mated couple.
Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most
important are: to give a knock-out blow to party organization, to make a
direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and needs and
our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to create a
responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the new democracy;
or, to sum up all these things, to break down party organization and to
make a creative citizenship the force of American political life.
An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow to
party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of party,
by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the people,[84] (2)
by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3) by putting a
responsible government in the place of the irresponsible party.
First, there is at present no real unity of the people.
It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was the
only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must be
obtained by the manipulation of other men’s minds or by the evolving of
the common mind; we must choose between the two. In the past the monarch
got his power from the fact that he represented the unity of his
people—the tribal or national consciousness. In the so-called
democracies of England and America we have now no one man who represents
a true collective consciousness. Much of the power of party has come,
therefore, from the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of
pseudo collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get
a common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity was
through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather than
anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party organization was
largely doctrinaire because party has given us collective action of a
kind, and what has been offered in its place was a scattered and
irresponsible, and therefore weak and ineffective, particularism. No
“independent” method of voting can ever vie with the organized party
machinery: its loose unintegrated nebulosity will be shattered into
smithereens by the impact of the closely organized machine.
The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives—whether
they are to adhere to party or to be “independent”—is futile. Personal
honesty exhausts no man’s duty in life; an effective life is what is
demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness.
When we go up to the gates of another world and say, “I have been
honest, I have been pure, I have been diligent”—no guardian of those
Heavenly gates will fling them open for us, but we shall be faced with
the counter thrust: “How have you used those qualities for making
blossom the earth which was your inheritance? We want no sterile virtues
here. Have you sold your inheritance for the pottage of personal purity,
personal honesty, personal growth?”
To make our “independence” effective, to vie successfully with party
organization, we must organize genuine groups and learn in those true
collective action. No particularistic theory of politics will ever be
strong enough to take the place of party. The political consciousness of
men must be transferred from the party to the neighborhood group.
We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion governs the
world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our legislatures are
supposed to enact the will of the people, our courts are supposed to
declare the will of the people, our executive to voice the will of the
people, a will surrounding men like a nimbus apparently from their
births on. But there is no will of the people.[85] We talk glibly about
it but the truth is that it is such a very modern thing that it does not
yet exist. There is, it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all
the problems which surround us. Is this public opinion? The urge of the
crowd often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated.
Is this public opinion? Certain interests find a voice; one party or
another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public opinion?
Public opinion is that common understanding which is the driving force
of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole.
We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common will,
but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices for getting
at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that we have a will
to express; but our great need at present is not to get a chance to
express our wonderful ideas, but to get some wonderful ideas to express.
A more complete representation is the aim of much of our political
reform, but our first requirement is surely to have something to
represent. It isn’t that we need one kind of government more than
another, as the image-breakers tell us, it isn’t that we need honest
intentions, as the preachers tell us, our essential and vital need is a
people creating a will of its own. In all the sentimental talk of
democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were
there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put
it into operation.
The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we
have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I have no money in
my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know
it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve. The
average American citizen says to himself, “It doesn’t matter very much
what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core.” It
is our Great Illusion. There has been much apotheosizing of the
so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can’t
put a wreath round “the popular will” and call it democracy. The popular
will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will—the true
will of the people.
Who are the people? Every individual? The majority? A theoretical
average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public
opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of
the “people.” We are told that we must elevate the “people.” There are
no “people.” We have to create a people. The people are not an imaginary
average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off
all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level
that is left the people. The people are the integration of every
development, of every genius, with everything else that our complex and
interacting life brings about. But the method of such integration can
never be through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi
is vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found
by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the crowd
or counting the votes in the ballot-box.
The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same
sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our
political thought: that the social process is the spread of similarities
by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is shared, simply because
it is shared, is called public opinion. But if this opinion is shared
because it has spread among large numbers by “unconscious imitation,”
then it is not a genuine public opinion; to be that, the process by
which it has been evolved must be that of intermingling and
interpermeating. Public opinion has been defined as the opinions of all
the men on the “tops of busses,” or the opinion made by “banks,
stock-exchanges and all the wire-pullers of the world,” or the opinion
“imposed on the public by a succession of thinkers.” All this is, no
doubt, true of much of our so-called public opinion at present, for
public opinion to-day is largely crowd opinion. But there is less of
this than formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which
there shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an
evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about by
crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily; there
is no real progress here.
Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us
until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not
because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any
will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated
and artificially stimulated by those who can command sufficient money to
engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until
we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the
future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great
rank and file of men and women to-day, and which must be brought clearly
to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful
future for our political life under the present scheme of party
domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life
under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for
the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting
abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is
a tilting at wind-mills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our
role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of
creative citizenship. We need to-day: (1) an _active_ citizenship, (2) a
_responsible_ citizenship, (3) a _creative_ citizenship—a citizenship
building its own world, creating its own political and social structure,
constructing its own life forever.
Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this
creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our
capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to
create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a
constructive life. The organization of neighborhood groups will give us
this machinery.
Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine
public opinion.
First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate,
personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting
will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These
common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till
then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent
the life of our people. Then when we see clearly that the affairs of
city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or
indifferent in regard to politics. We all _are_ interested in our own
affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party
will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we
feel that they have nothing to do with us.
Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of
government through the increased social legislation of all our states
during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with
social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social
programs into party platforms means that a powerful influence is at work
to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the
political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency,
closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so
little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could
contribute little to their solution. The social legislation of the last
few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a
great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen’s
compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis,
mothers’ pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment
agencies etc.
Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family, no
child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the long
view: votes are not crudely bought—always; the boy is found a job, the
father is helped through his illness, the worn-out mother is sent for a
holiday to the country. As politics comes to mean state employment
bureaus, sickness and accident insurance, mothers’ pensions, Tammany is
being shorn of much of its power.
We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that campaign
issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday needs, yet it is
feared that on each question a different split would come, and thus
politics would be too confusing and could not be “handled.” Neighborhood
organization is going to help us meet this difficulty. In non-partisan
neighborhood associations we shall have different alignments on every
question. Moreover, we shall have different alignments on the same
question in different years. Thus the rigidity of the party organization
disappears. The party meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the
victrola is to the human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has
been impressed upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the
neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from the
hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is the
difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be true of a
good government organization as well as of a Tammany organization—it is
true wherever the machine is put above the man. We can get no force
without freshness, and you cannot get freshness from a machine, only
from living men. Just the very thing which costs the party money—keeping
its members together—is its condemnation. Men will make up their minds
on question after question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will
vote according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease
until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to show
any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it has shown
in the past, there must be some provision made for considering and
voting on questions irrespective of party: you can not join a different
party every day, but you can separate political issues from partisanship
and vote for the thing you want. The reason more of our real wants have
not got expressed in our politics is just because people cannot be held
together on many issues.
Again, if neighborhood organization takes the place of party
organization each question can be decided on its own merit: we shall not
have to ask, “How will the management of this affect the power and
prestige of our party?”
Also neighborhood groups can study problems, but the study of problems
is fatal to party organization. The party hands out the ephemeral
comings-to-the-surface of what will help the party, or the
particularistic interests dominating the party. Every question brought
forward at all is brought forward as a campaign issue.
Moreover the group discovers and conserves the individual. A party
gathering is always a crowd. And party methods are stereotyped,
conventional. Under a party system we have no spontaneous political
life. The party system gives no exercise to the judgment, it weakens the
will, it does away with personal responsibility. The party, as the
crowd, blots out the individual. Mass suggestion is dominating our
politics to-day. We shall get rid of mass influence exactly as fast as
we develop the group consciousness. Men who belong to neighborhood
organizations will not be the stuff of which parties are made. The party
has prevented us from having genuine group opinion; or if we do by any
chance get a group opinion now, it can usually speak only in opposition
to party, it cannot get incorporated in our political life.
Every one of us will have an opportunity to learn collective thinking in
the small, local, neighborhood group. No one comes to his neighborhood
group pledged beforehand to any particular way of thinking. The object
of the party system is to stifle all difference of opinion. Moreover, in
partisan discussion you take one of two sides; in neighborhood groups an
infinitely varied number of points of view can be brought out, and thus
the final decision will be richer from what it gains on all sides. The
neighborhood group which makes possible different alignments on every
question, allows ultimate honesty in the expression of our views. If we
get into the habit of suppressing our differences, these differences
atrophy and we lose our sensitiveness to their demands. And we have
found that the expression and the maintenance of difference is the
condition of the full and free development of the race.
But we want not only a genuine public opinion, but a progressive public
opinion. We cannot understand once for all, we must be constantly
understanding anew. At the same time that we see the necessity of
creating the common will and giving voice to it, we must bear in mind
that there should be no crystallizing process by which any particular
expression of the common will should be taken as eternally right because
it is the expression of the common will. It is right for to-day but not
for to-morrow. The flaming fact is our daily life, whatever it is,
leaping forever and ever out of the common will. Democracy is the
ever-increasing volume of power pouring through men and shaping itself
as the moment demands. Constitutional conventions are seeking the
machinery by which the reason and justice which have existed among us
can be utilized in our life. We must go beyond this and unseal the
springs which will reveal the forms for the wisdom and justice of their
day. This is life itself, the direct and aboriginal constructor. We meet
with our neighbors at our civic club not in order to accumulate facts,
but to learn how to release and how to control a constructive force
which will build daily for us the habitation of our needs. Then indeed
will our government be no longer directed by a “body of law,” but by the
self-renewing appearing of the will of the people.
The chief need of society to-day is an enlightened, progressive and
organized public opinion, and the first step towards an enlightened and
organized public opinion is an enlightened and organized group opinion.
When public opinion becomes conscious of itself it will have a justified
confidence in itself. Then the “people,” born of an associated life,
will truly govern. Then shall we at last really have an America.
-----
Footnote 84:
Public opinion in a true democracy is a potential will. Therefore for
practical purposes they are identical and I use them synonymously.
Footnote 85:
Our federal system of checks and balances thwarted the will of the
people. The party system thwarted the will of the people. Our state
governments were never designed to get at the will of the people.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXV
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION
Leaders or Bosses?
--------------
NEIGHBORHOOD organization will prove fatal to party organization not
only through the creating of a genuine will of the people, but also
through the producing of real leaders to take the place of the bosses.
American democracy has always been afraid of leadership. Our
constitutions of the eighteenth century provided no one department to
lead, no one man in the legislature to lead. Therefore, as we must have
leadership, there has been much undefined, irresponsible leadership.
This has often meant corruption and abuse, bad enough, but worse still
it has meant the creation of machinery for the perpetuation of
corruption, the encouragement of abuse. Under machine politics we choose
for our leaders the men who are most popular for the moment or who have
worked out the most thorough system of patronage, or rather of course we
do not choose at all. We have two kinds of leaders under our party
system, both the wrong kind: we have our actual leaders, the bosses, and
our official leaders who have tended to be men who could be managed by
the party. Our officials in their campaign speeches say that they are
the “servants of the people.” But we do not want “servants” any more
than we want bosses; we want genuine leaders. Now that more and more
direct power is being given to the people it is especially necessary
that we should not be led by machine bosses, but that we should evolve
the kind of leadership which will serve a true democracy, which will be
the expression of a true democracy, and will guide it to democratic ends
by democratic methods.
We hope through local group organization to evolve real leaders. There
should be in a democracy some sort of regular and ceaseless process by
which ability of all sorts should come to the top, and flexibility in
our forms so that new ability can always find its greatest point of
usefulness, and so that service which is no longer useful can be
replaced by that which is. In neighborhood groups where we have
different alignments on different questions, there will be a tendency
for those to lead at any particular moment who are most competent to
lead in the particular matter in hand. Thus a mechanical leadership will
give place to a vital leadership. Suppose the subject is sanitation. The
man who is most interested, who has the clearest view of the need and
who is its most insistent champion, will naturally step forth as the
leader in that. The man who knows most about educational matters will
lead in those, will be chosen eventually for the school committee or for
the educational committee of the state legislature. Thus the different
leaders of a democracy appear. Here in the neighborhood group leaders
are born. Democracy is the breeding-ground of aristocracy. You have all
the chance the world gives. In your neighborhood group show the
clearness of your mind, the strength of your grip, your power to elicit
and to guide coöperative action, and you emerge as the leader of men.
No adequate statement can be made in regard to leadership until it is
studied in relation to group psychology. The leadership of the British
Premier, of President Wilson, will become interesting studies when we
have a better understanding of this subject. Meanwhile let us look
briefly at some of the qualities of leadership.
The leader guides the group and is at the same time himself guided by
the group, is always a part of the group. No one can truly lead except
from within. One danger of conceiving the leader as outside is that then
what ought to be group loyalty will become personal loyalty. When we
have a leader within the group these two loyalties can merge.
The leader must have the instinct to trace every evil to its cause, but,
equally valuable, he must be able to see the relative value of the cause
to each one of his group—in other words, to see the total relativity of
the cause to the group. He must draw out all the varying needs of the
neighborhood as related to the cause and reconcile them in the remedy. A
baby is ill; is the milk perhaps too rich for babies? But probably the
rest of the neighborhood demands rich milk. All the neighborhood needs
in regard to milk must be elicited and reconciled in the remedy for the
sick child. That is, the remedy cannot be thinner milk, but it may be a
demand that the milkman have separate milk for babies.
In other words the leader of our neighborhood group must interpret our
experience to us, must see all the different points of view which
underlie our daily activities and also their connections, must adjust
the varying and often conflicting needs, must lead the group to an
understanding of its needs and to a unification of its purpose. He must
give form to things vague, things latent, to mere tendencies. He must be
able to lead us to wise decisions, not to impose his own wise decisions
upon us. We need leaders, not masters or drivers.
The power of leadership is the power of integrating. This is the power
which creates community. You can see it when two or three strangers or
casual acquaintances are calling upon some one. With some hostesses you
all talk across at one another as entirely separate individuals,
pleasantly and friendlily, to be sure, but still across unbridged
chasms; while other hostesses have the power of making you all feel for
the moment related, as if you were one little community for the time
being. This is a subtle as well as a valuable gift. It is one that
leaders of men must possess. It is thus that the collective will is
evolved from out the chaos of varied personality and complex
circumstance.
The skilful leader then does not rely on personal force; he controls his
group not by dominating but by expressing it. He stimulates what is best
in us; he unifies and concentrates what we feel only gropingly and
scatteringly, but he never gets away from the current of which we and he
are both an integral part. He is a leader who gives form to the inchoate
energy in every man. The person who influences me most is not he who
does great deeds but he who makes me feel I can do great deeds. Many
people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but few
have made me want to do something. Who ever has struck fire out of me,
aroused me to action which I should not otherwise have taken, he has
been my leader. The community leader is he who can liberate the greatest
amount of energy in his community.
Then the neighborhood leader must be a practical politician. He must be
able to interpret a neighborhood not only to itself but to others. He
must know not only the need of every charwoman but how politics can
answer her call. He must know the great movements of the present and
their meaning, and he must know how the smallest needs and the humblest
powers of his neighborhood can be fitted into the progressive movements
of our time. His duty is to shape politics continuously. As the
satisfaction of one need, or the expression of one latent power, reveals
many more, he must be always alert and ever ready to gather up the many
threads into one strand of united endeavor. He is the patient watcher,
the active spokesman, the sincere and ardent exponent of a community
consciousness. His guiding, embracing and dominant thought is to make
that community consciousness articulate in government.
The politician is not a group but a crowd leader. The leader of a crowd
dominates because a crowd wants to be dominated. Politicians do not try
to convince but to dazzle; they do not deal with facts but with formulæ
and vague generalizations, with the flag and the country. If our
politicians and our representatives are not our most competent men, but
those who have the greatest power of suggestion and are most adroit in
using it, the proposal here is that we shall develop methods which will
produce real leaders. We are aiming now in the reorganization of our
state constitutions at responsible official leadership instead of the
irresponsible party boss system which was necessary once because we had
to have leaders of some sort. How far this new movement shall succeed,
will depend on how far it has back of it, or can be made to have back of
it, the kind of organization which will develop group not crowd leaders.
Through neighborhood organization we hope that real leaders instead of
bosses will be evolved. Democracy does not tend to suppress leadership
as is often stated; it is the only organization of society which will
bring out leadership. As soon as we are given opportunities for the
release of the energy there is in us, heroes and leaders will arise
among us. These will draw their stimulus, their passion, their life from
all, and then in their turn increase in all passion and power and
creating force.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVI
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION
A Responsible Neighborhood
--------------
WE have said that neighborhood organization must replace party
organization by evolving a true will of the people, by giving us leaders
instead of bosses, and by making possible a responsible government to
take the place of our irresponsible party government. Let us now
consider the last point: the possibility of an integrated neighborhood
responsibility.
Under our party organization the men who formulate the party platform do
not have the official responsibility of carrying it out. Moreover at
present representative government rests on the fallacy that when you
delegate the job you delegate the responsibility. Most of the abuses
which have crept in, business corruption and political bossism alike,
are due in large measure to this delegating of responsibility. What we
need is a kind of government which will delegate the job but not the
responsibility. The case is somewhat like that of the head of a business
undertaking, who makes the men under him responsible for their own work
and still the final responsibility rests with him. This is not divided
responsibility but shared responsibility—a very different thing.
Consider what happens when I want to get a bill through the legislature.
I may feel sure that the bill is good and also that “the people” want
it, but I can work only through party, and at the state house I have to
face all the special interests bound up with party, all the thousand and
one “political” considerations, whether I succeed or fail. But of course
I recognize the humor of this statement: _I_ ought never to try to get a
bill through the legislature; special and partial groups have to do this
simply because there is at present no other way; there must be some
other way, some recognized way. We do not want to circumvent party but
to replace party.
Our reform associations, while they have fought party, have often
endeavored to substitute their own organization for the party
organization. This has often been the alternative offered to us—do we
want good government or poor government? We have not been asked if we
would like to govern ourselves. This is why Mitchell lost last year in
New York. One of the New York papers during the campaign advised Mr.
Mitchell “to get nearer the people.” But it is not for government to
“get nearer” the people; it must identify itself with the people. It
isn’t enough for the “good” officials to explain to the people what they
are doing; they must take the people into their counsels. If the Gary
system had ever been properly put up to the fathers it is doubtful if
they would have voted against it. Then a good deal of this advice in
regard to city officials “explaining” their plans in all parts of the
city leaves out of account that the local people have a great deal to
give. Some of the most uneducated, so-called, of the fathers and mothers
might have had valuable points of view to offer in regard to the
practical workings of the Gary system.
Tammany won in New York and we heard many people say, “Well, this is
your democracy, the people want bad government, the majority of people
in New York city have voted for it.” Nothing could be more superficial.
What the election in New York meant was that “the people” are cleverer
than was thought; they know that the question should not be of “good”
government or “bad” government, but only of self-government, and the
only way they have of expressing this is to vote against a government
which _seems_ to disregard them.
To say, “We are good men, we are honest officials, we are employing
experts on education, sanitation etc., you must trust us,” will not do;
some way must be devised of connecting the experts and the people—that
is the first thing to be worked out, then some way of taking the people
into the counsels of city administration. All of us criticize things we
don’t know anything about. As soon as we see the difficulties, _as soon
as the responsibility is put upon us_, our whole attitude changes. Take
the popular cry “Boston positions for Boston people.” This seems a
pretty good principle to superficial thinking. But when we know that we
have an appropriation of $200,000 a year for a certain department, and
are looking for a man to administer it, when we go into the matter and
find that there are only two or three experts for this position in the
United States, and that not one of these lives in Boston, the question
takes the concrete form, “Shall we allow $200,000 of our money to be
wasted through inept administration?” It might be said, “But city
governments do have the responsibility and yet this is just what they
are all the time doing.” Certainly, because their position rests on
patronage, but I am proposing that the whole system be changed.
Neighborhood organization must be the method of effective popular
responsibility: first, by giving reality to the political bond;
secondly, by providing the machinery by which a genuine control of the
people can be put into operation. At present nearly all our needs are
satisfied by external agencies, government or institutional. Health
societies offer health to us, recreation associations teach us how to
play, civic art leagues give us more beautiful surroundings, associated
charities give us poor relief. A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist,
a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the
city sees that my children are in their places at school. I am
constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act. New York
has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I
robbed of my most precious possession—my responsibilities—for only the
active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose.
But all this is to end. The community itself must grip its own problems,
must fill its needs, must make effective its aspirations. If we want the
latest scientific knowledge in regard to food values, let us get an
expert to come to us, not wait for some society to send an “agent” to
us; if the stores near us are not selling at fair prices, let us make a
coöperative effort to set this right. If we want milk and baby hygiene
organized, our own local doctors should, in proper coöperation with
experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other, organize this
branch of public service. The medical experts may be employees of the
government, but if the plan of their service be worked out by all
three—the experts, the local doctors and the mothers—the results will
be: (1) that the needs of the neighborhood will really be met, (2) much
valuable time of the expert will be saved, (3) a close follow-up will be
possible, (4) the expert can be called in whenever necessary through
local initiative, and (5) the machinery will be in existence by which
the study of that particular problem can be carried on not as a special
investigation but as a regular part of neighborhood life.
Take another example. The Placement Bureau is also a necessary public
service: it needs the work of experts and it needs pooled information
and centralized machinery; a parent cannot find out all the jobs
available in a city for boys of 16 in order to place one boy. But as
long as the secretary of the Placement Bureau appears in the home and
takes this whole burden off the parent, and off the community he is
serving, his work will not be well done. For the boy will suffer
eventually: he cannot be cut off from his community without being hurt;
community incentive is the greatest one we know, and somehow there must
be worked out some community responsibility for that boy, as well as
some responsibility on his part to his community for standing up or
falling down on his job. I say that the boy will eventually suffer; his
community also will suffer, for it also has need of him; moreover, the
community will greatly suffer by the loss of this opportunity of
connecting it, through the parents, with the whole industrial problem of
the city. The expert service of the Placement Bureau, whether it is
administered by city or state, should always be joined to local
initiative, effort and responsibility.
And so for every need. If we want well-managed dances for our daughters,
we, mothers and fathers, must go and manage them. We do not exist on one
side and the government on the other. If you go to a municipal
dance-hall and see it managed by officials appointed from City Hall, you
say, “This is a government affair.” But if you go to a schoolhouse and
see a dance managed by men and women chosen by the district, you say,
“This is a community affair, government has nothing to do with this.”
These two conceptions must mingle before we can have any worthy
political life. It must be clearly seen that we can operate _as_
government as well as _with_ government, that the citizen functions
through government and the government functions through the citizen. It
is not a municipal dance-hall regulated by the city authorities which
expresses the right relation between civics and dancing, but dances
planned and managed by a neighborhood for itself.
It is not the civic theatre which is the last word in the relation of
the drama to the people, it is a community organized theatre. Art and
civics do not meet merely by the state presenting art to its members;
the civic expression of art is illustrated by locally managed festivals,
by community singing, a local orchestra or dramatic club, community
dancing etc. Those of us who are working for civic art are working for
this: for people to express themselves in artistic forms and to organize
themselves for that purpose. The state must give the people every
opportunity for building up their own full, varied, healthful life. It
seems to be often thought that when the state provides schools, parks,
universities etc., there you have the ideal state. But we must go beyond
this and find our ideal state in that which shows its members how to
build up its own life _in_ schools, parks, universities etc.[86]
The question which the state must always be trying to answer is how it
can do more for its members at the same time that it is stimulating them
to do more for themselves. No, more than this, its doing more for them
must take the form of their doing more for themselves. Our modern
problem is not, as one would think from some of the writing on social
legislation, how much the increased activity of the state can do for the
individual, but how the increasing activity of the individual can be
state activity, how the widening of the sphere of state activity can be
a widening of our own activity. The arguments for or against government
action should not take the form of how much or how little government
action we shall have, but entirely of how government action and
self-action can coincide. Our one essential political problem is always
how to be the state, not, putting the state on one side and the
individual on the other, to work out their respective provinces. I have
said in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the state and the
individual are one, yet this is pure theory until we make them one. But
they can never be made one through schemes of representation etc., only
by the intimate daily lives of all becoming the constituents of the life
of the state.
When a Mothers’ Club in one of the Boston School Centres found a united
want—that of keeping their children off the streets on Saturday
afternoon and giving them some wholesome amusement—and decided to meet
this want by asking the city of Boston for permission to use the
moving-picture machine of the Dorchester High School for fairy-story
films, the mothers to manage the undertaking, two significant facts
stand out: (1) they did not ask an outside agency to do something for
them, for the men and women of Dorchester, with all the other men and
women of Boston, _are_ the city of Boston; (2) they were not merely
doing something for their children on those Saturday afternoons, they
were in a sense officials of the city of Boston working for the youth of
Boston. These two conceptions must blend: we do not do for government,
government does not do for us, we should be constantly the hands and
feet, yes and the head and heart of government.[87]
A most successful effort at neighborhood organization is that of the
East Harlem Community Association, which set East Harlem to work on its
own problems: first to investigate conditions, and then to find a way of
meeting these conditions. The most interesting point about the whole
scheme is that the work is not done by “experts” or any one else from
outside; there are no paid visitors, but a committee of twelve
mothers—one colored woman, two Italian, two Jewish, two Irish, three
American, one Polish, and one German—are doing the work well. As a
result of the activities of the East Harlem Community Association there
are now in a public school building of the neighborhood organized
athletic clubs, industrial classes, orchestra, glee, dramatic and art
clubs, concerts, good moving pictures, dances, big brother and big
sister groups, Mothers’ Leagues, Parents’ Associations, physical
examination of school children etc. Of course these community
associations must use expert advice and expert service. Exactly how this
relation will be most satisfactorily worked out we do not yet clearly
see.[88]
I give this merely as one illustration out of many possible ones. The
necessity of neighborhood organization as the basis of future progress
is seen by many people to-day. In New York there is a vigorous movement
for “Neighborhood Associations”; there are four already in active
working order. If the main idea of some of these is services rendered
rather than neighborhood organization; if others see too great a
separation between needs and the satisfaction of the needs, that is, if
the neighborhoods are always to ask the questions and the experts to
find the answers, still these Associations are an interesting and
valuable part of the neighborhood movement.[89]
The acute problem of municipal life is how to make us men and women of
Boston feel that we _are_ the city, directly responsible for everything
concerning it. Neighborhood organization, brought into existence largely
by the growing feeling of each individual that he is responsible for the
life around him, itself then increases and focuses this sense of
responsibility. Neighborhood association is vivid and intimate. Whereas
the individual seems lost in a big city, through his neighborhood he not
only becomes an integral part of the city but becomes keenly conscious
of his citizenship.
In a word, what we hope neighborhood organization will do for the
development of responsibility is this: that men will learn that they are
not to _influence_ politics through their local groups, they are to _be_
politics. This is the error of some of the reform associations: they
want to influence politics. This point of view will never spell progress
for us. When we have the organized neighborhood group, when every man
sees the problems of political and social reorganization not as abstract
matters but as constituting his daily life, when men are so educated in
politics as to feel that they themselves are politics functioning, and
when our organization is such that this functioning recoils on them,
they will so shape their conduct as to change the situation. Then when
they are conscious of themselves as masters of the situation they will
acknowledge their responsibility.
We see many signs around us to-day of an increased sense of
responsibility, of a longing for a self-expression that is not to be an
individual self-expression but community self-expression. Take the
women’s clubs: in their first stage their object was personal
development; in the second they wished to do something for their town;
in the present or third stage women are demanding through some of the
more progressive clubs, through women’s municipal leagues etc., a more
direct share in community life. They are joining together not to benefit
themselves, not to benefit others, as others, but because all together
they wish to express their community—no, they wish to _be_ their
community. They are not satisfied with serving, but gathering up the
service of all in a common consciousness, each feels herself the whole
and seeks to express the whole.
But I do not mean that this greater realization of community is confined
to women. How often in the past we have heard a man say complacently,
“Well, I suppose I must do my duty and go to the polls and vote
to-morrow,” or “I must show myself at that rally to-night.” But a nobler
idea than this is now filling the minds of many men. They go to their
civic club not because it is their duty, but because just there working
together with their fellows for the furtherance of their common aims,
they find their greatest satisfaction. In neighborhood groups men can
find that self-realization which becomes by the most wonderful miracle
life can offer us community realization. That is, I can learn through my
neighborhood group that I am the city, I am the nation, and that fatal
transference of responsibility to an invisible and non-existent “they”
can be blotted out forever. When neighborhood organization begins to
teach that there is no “they,” that it is always we, we, we, that
mothers are responsible and fathers are responsible, and young men are
responsible, and young women are responsible, for their city and their
nation, it will begin to teach its chief lesson.
Do I thrill with the passion of service, of joyful, voluntary surrender
to a mighty cause as I sail for France to serve the great ends of the
Allies? Social and political organization are fatally at fault if they
cannot give me the same elation as I go to my Neighborhood Centre and
know that there too the world has vital need of me, there too am I not
only pouring myself out in world service, but that I am, just in so far,
creating, actually building, a new and fairer world.
This is the finest word that can be said for neighborhood organization,
for my finding my place through my response to every daily need of my
nearest group. For the great word I believe on this subject is not that
I _serve_ my neighborhood, my city, my nation, but that by this service
I _become_ my neighborhood, my city, my nation. Surely at this hour in
our history we can realize this as never before. The soul of America is
being born to-day. The war is binding together class and class, alien
and American, men and women. We rejoice that we are alive at this
moment, but the keenness of my joy is not because I can serve America
but because I am America. I save food in my home not in order that my
family income can meet the strain of the higher prices, not because I
can thereby help to send more food to the Allies, but because I, saving
the food of America for the Allies and the world, am performing
America’s task, _am_ therefore America. This is the deeper thought of
neighborhood organization: that through performing my humblest duties I
am creating the soul of this great democracy.
* * * * *
Neighborhood organization must then take the place of party
organization. The neighborhood group will answer many of the questions
we have put to a party organization which has remained deaf to our
importunities, dumb to all our entreaties. We have asked for bread and
received the stone times without number. The rigid formality of the
party means stultification, annihilation. But group politics, made of
the very stuff of life, of the people of the groups, will express the
inner, intimate, ardent desires of spontaneous human beings, and will
contain within its circumference the possibility of the fullest
satisfaction of those desires. Group organization gives a living,
pulsing unity made up of the minds and hearts and seasoned judgments of
vital men and women. Such organization is capable of unbroken growth.
And when this vine of life, which sends its roots where every two or
three are gathered together, has rooted itself in the neighborhood,
faithful care, sedulous watching, loving ministration will appear with
it, will be the natural way of living. Its impalpable bonds hold us
together, and although we may differ on countless questions, instead of
flying asunder we work out the form in political life which will shelter
us and supply our needs. Faithfulness to the neighborhood bond must take
the place of allegiance to party. Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a
thing—we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic.
And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our
united life. Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the
new democracy. Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is
the order of our new life.
Do you think the neighborhood group too puny to cope with this giant
towering above us, drunk with the blood of its many triumphs? The young
David went out to conquer Goliath, strong in the conviction of his
power. Cannot our cause justify an equal faith?
Is our daily life profane and only so far as we rise out of it do we
approach the sacred life? Then no wonder politics are what they have
become. But this is not the creed of men to-day: we believe in the
sacredness of all our life; we believe that Divinity is forever
incarnating in humanity, and so we believe in Humanity and the common
daily life of all men.
-----
Footnote 86:
The war has shown us that our national agricultural program can best
be done on a coöperative neighborhood basis: through the establishment
of community agricultural conferences, community labor, seed and
implement exchanges, community canning centres, community markets,
etc.
Footnote 87:
I do not mean to imply that I think it is easy to learn how to
identify ourselves with our city, especially for those who live in
large cities. The men of a small town know that if they have a new
town-hall they will have to pay for it. In a large city men ask for a
ward building because they will not have to pay for it, they think. It
is all this which neighborhood organization and the integration of
neighborhoods, of which I shall speak later, must remedy.
Footnote 88:
The plan of Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Phillips for community organization
and for the connection with it of expert service is too comprehensive
to describe here, but based as it is on their actual experience, and
planning as it does for the training of whole neighborhoods and the
arousing of them to responsibility and action, it should be studied by
every one, for such plans are, I believe, the best signs we have that
democracy is yet possible for America.
Footnote 89:
How much we are all indebted to the settlements as the pioneer
neighborhood movement I do not stop to consider here.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVII
FROM NEIGHBORHOOD TO NATION: THE UNIFYING STATE
--------------
HOW can the will of the people be the sovereign power of the state?
There must be two changes in our state: first, the state must be the
actual integration of living, local groups, thereby finding ways of
dealing directly with its individual members. Secondly, other groups
than neighborhood groups must be represented in the state: the
ever-increasing multiple group life of to-day must be recognized and
given a responsible place in politics.[90]
First, every neighborhood must be organized; the neighborhood groups
must then be integrated, through larger intermediary groups, into a true
state. Neither our cities nor our states can ever be properly
administered until representatives from neighborhood groups meet to
discuss and thereby to correlate the needs of all parts of the city, of
all parts of the state. Social workers and medical experts have a
conference on tuberculosis, social workers and educational experts have
a conference on industrial education. We must now develop the methods by
which the citizens also are represented at these conferences. We must go
beyond this (for certain organizations, as the National Settlement
Conference at least, do already have neighborhood representation), and
develop the methods by which regular meetings of representatives from
neighborhood organizations meet to discuss all city and state problems.
Further still, we must give official recognition to such gatherings, we
must make them a regular part of government. The neighborhood must be
actually, not theoretically, an integral part of city, of state, of
nation.
When Massachusetts is thus organized, the neighborhood groups and
intermediary, or district, groups should send representatives to city
council and state legislature. The Senate might be composed of
experts—experts in education, in housing, in sanitation etc.[91] The
neighborhood and district centres would receive reports from their
representatives to city council and state legislature and take measures
on these reports. They should also be required to send regular reports
up to their representative bodies. We should have a definitely organized
and strongly articulated network of personal interest and representative
reporting. Then the state legislature must devise ways of dealing not
only with the district group but with the neighborhood groups through
the district group, and thus with every individual in the commonwealth.
The nation too must have a real connection with every little
neighborhood centre through state and district bodies.[92]
America at war has found a way of getting word from Washington to the
smallest local units. The Council of National Defense has a “Section of
Coöperation with States.” This is connected with a State Council of
Defense in every state. In most cases the State Council is connected
with County Councils, and these often with councils in cities and towns.
Beyond this the Council of National Defense has recently (February,
1918) recommended the extension of county organization by the creation
of Community Councils in every school district. Its official statement
opens with this sentence: “The first nine months of the war have shown
the vital importance of developing an official nation-wide organization
reaching into the smallest communities to mobilize and make available
the efforts of the whole people for the prosecution of the war.” And it
goes on to say that the government must have such close contact with
small units that personal relation with all the citizens is possible.
President Wilson in endorsing this step, said, “[This is an] advance of
vital significance. It will, I believe, result when thoroughly carried
out in welding the nation together as no nation of great size has ever
been welded before.... It is only by extending your organization to
small communities that every citizen of the state can be reached.”
Thus when the government found that it must provide means to its hands
for keeping constantly in touch with the whole membership of the nation,
it planned to do this by the encouragement and fostering of neighborhood
organization. The nation is now seeking the individual through
neighborhood groups. It is using the School Centres (it recommends the
schoolhouse as the best centre for community organization) for the
teaching of Food and Fuel Conservation, for Liberty Loan and Red Cross
work, for recruiting for the army, for enlisting workers for war
industries, for teaching the necessity and methods of increasing the
food supply, for plans to relieve transportation by coöperative
shipments and deliveries, for patriotic education etc.[93] This
“patriotic education” has an interesting side. In a country which is
even nominally a democracy you cannot win a war without explaining your
aims and your policy and carrying your people with you step by step. If
beyond this the country wishes to be really a democracy, the
neighborhood groups must have a share in forming the aims and the
policy.
Of course one would always prefer this to be a movement from below up
rather than from above down, but it is not impossible for the two
movements to go on at the same time, as they are in fact doing now with
the rapid development of spontaneous local organization. There were
Community Councils in existence in fact if not in name before the
recommendation of the Council of National Defense.[94]
Through these non-partisan councils not only national policy can be
explained and spread throughout the country, but also what one locality
thinks out that is good can be reported to Washington and thus handed on
to other sections of the country. It is a plan for sending the news
backwards and forwards from individual to nation, from nation to
individual, and it is also a plan for correlating the problems of the
local community with the problems of the nation and of coöperating
nations.
But why should we be more efficiently organized for war than for peace?
Is our proverbial carelessness to be pricked into effectiveness only by
emergency calls? Is the only motive you can offer us for efficiency—to
win? Or, if that is an instinctive desire, can we not change the goal
and be as eager to win other things as war?
* * * * *
I speak of the new state as resting upon integrated neighborhood
groups.[95] While the changes necessary to bring this about would have
to be planned and authorized by constitutional conventions, its
psychological basis would be: (1) the fact that we are ready for
membership in a larger group only by experience first in the smaller
group, and (2) the natural tendency for a real group to seek other
groups. Let us look at this second point.
We have seen the process of the single group evolving. But
contemporaneously a thousand other unities are a-making. Every group
once become conscious of itself instinctively seeks other groups with
which to unite to form a larger whole. Alone it cannot be effective. As
individual progress depends upon the degree of interpenetration, so
group progress depends upon the interpenetration of group and group. For
convenience I speak of each group as a whole, but from a philosophical
point of view there is no whole, only an infinite striving for
wholeness, only the _principle_ of wholeness forever leading us on.
This is the social law: the law which connects neighborhood with
neighborhood. The reason we want neighborhood organization is not to
keep people within their neighborhoods but to get them out. The movement
for neighborhood organization is a deliberate effort to get people to
identify themselves actually, not sentimentally, with a larger and
larger collective unit than the neighborhood. We may be able through our
neighborhood group to learn the social process, to learn to evolve the
social will, but the question before us is whether we have enough
political genius to apply this method to city organization, national
organization, and international organization. City must join with city,
state with state, actually, not through party. Finally nation must join
with nation.
The recommendation of the Council of National Defense which has been
mentioned above would repay careful reading for the indications which
one finds in it of the double purpose of neighborhood organization. It
is definitely stated that the importance of the Community Council is in:
(1) initiating work to meet its own war needs; and (2) in making all its
local resources available for the nation. And again it is stated that:
(1) in a democracy local emergencies can best be met by local action;
and (2) that each local district should feel the duty of bearing its
full share of the national burden.
Thus our national government clearly sees and specifically states that
neighborhood organization is both for the neighborhood and for the
nation: that it looks in, it looks out. Thus that which we are coming to
understand as the true social process receives practical recognition in
government policy.
I have said that neighborhood must join with neighborhood to form the
state. This joining of neighborhood and neighborhood can be done neither
directly nor imaginatively. It cannot be done directly: representation
is necessary not only because the numbers would be too great for all
neighborhoods to meet together, but because even if it were physically
possible we should have created a crowd not a society. Theoretically
when you have large numbers you get a big, composite consciousness made
up of infinite kinds of fitting together of infinite kinds of
individuals, but practically this varied and multiplied fitting together
is not possible beyond a certain number. There must be representatives
from the smallest units to the larger and larger, up to the federal
state.
Secondly, neighborhoods cannot join with neighborhoods through the
imagination alone. Various people have asserted that now we have large
cities and solidarity cannot come by actual acquaintance, it must be got
by appropriate appeals to the imagination, by having, for instance,
courses of lectures to tell one part of a city about another part. But
this alone will never be successful. Real solidarity will never be
accomplished except by beginning somewhere the joining of one small
group with another. We are told too that the uneducated man cannot think
beyond his particular section of the universe. We can teach him to think
beyond his particular section of the universe by actually making him
participate in other sections through connecting his section with
others. We are capable of being faithful to large groups as well as
small, to complex groups as well as simple, to our city, to our nation,
but this can be effected only by a certain process, and that process,
while it may begin by a stimulation of the imagination, must, if it is
going to bring forth results in real life, be a matter of actual
experience. Only by actual union, not by appeals to the imagination, can
the various and varied neighborhood groups be made the constituents of a
sound, normal, unpartisan city life. Then being a member of a
neighborhood group will mean at the same time being a member and a
responsible member of the state.
I have spoken of the psychological tendency for group to seek group.
Moreover, it is not possible to isolate yourself in your local group
because few local needs can be met without joining with other
localities, which have these same needs, in order to secure city or
state action. We cannot get municipal regulation for the dance-hall in
our neighborhood without joining with other neighborhoods which want the
same thing and securing municipal regulation for all city dance-halls.
If we want better housing laws, grants for industrial education, we join
with other groups who want these things and become the state. And even
if some need seems purely local, the method of satisfying it ought not
to be for the South End to pull as hard as it can for a new ward
building, say, while the North End is also pulling as hard as it can for
a new ward building, and the winner of such tug-of-war to get the
appropriation. If the South End wants a new ward building it should
understand how much money is available for ward buildings, and if only
enough for one this year, consider where it is most needed. Probably,
whatever the evidence, it will be decided that it is most needed in the
South End, but a step will be taken towards a different kind of decision
in the future.
And we join not only to secure city and state but also federal action.
If we want a river or harbor appropriation, we go to Congress. And if
such demands are supplied at present on the log-rolling basis, we can
only hope that this will not always be so. When group organization has
vitalized our whole political life, there may then be some chance that
log-rolling will be repudiated.
And we do not stop even at Washington. Immigration is a national and
international problem, but the immigrant may live next door to you, and
thus the immigration question becomes one of nearest concern. This
intricate interweaving of our life allows no man to live to himself or
to his neighborhood.
Then when neighborhood joins with neighborhood all the lessons learned
in the simple group must be practised in the complex one. As the group
lesson includes not only my responsibility _to_ my group but my
responsibility _for_ my group, so I learn not only my duty to my
neighborhood but that I am responsible for my neighborhood. Also it is
seen that as the individuals of a group are interdependent, so the
various groups are interdependent, and the problem is to understand just
in what way they are interdependent and how they can be adjusted to one
another. The process of the joining of several groups into a larger
whole is exactly the same as the joining of individuals to form a
group—a reciprocal interaction and correlation.
The usual notion is that our neighborhood association is to evolve an
idea, a plan, and then when we go to represent it at a meeting of
neighborhood associations from different parts of the city that we are
to try to push through the plan of action decided on by our own local
group. If we do not do this, we are not supposed to be loyal. But we are
certainly to do nothing of the kind. We are to try to evolve the
collective idea which shall represent the new group, that is, the
various neighborhood associations all acting together. We are told that
we must not sacrifice the interests of the particular group we
represent. No, but also we must not try to make its interests prevail
against those of others. Its real interests are the interests of the
whole.
And then when we have learned to be truly citizens of Boston, we must
discover how Boston and other cities, how cities and the rural
communities can join. And so on and so on. At last the “real” state
appears. We are pragmatists because we do not want to unite with the
state imaginatively, we want to be the state; we want to actualize and
feel our way every moment, let every group open the way for a larger
group, let every circumference become the centre of a new circumference.
My neighborhood group opens the path to the State.
But neighborhoods coöperating actively with the city government is not
to-day a dream. Marcus M. Marks, President of the Borough of Manhattan,
New York City, in 1914 divided Manhattan into sixteen neighborhoods, and
appointed for each a neighborhood commission composed of business men,
professional men, mechanics, clerks etc.—a thoroughly representative
body chosen irrespective of party lines. Mr. Marks’ avowed object was to
obtain a knowledge of the needs of his constituents, to form connecting
links between neighborhoods and the city government. And these bodies
need not exist dormant until their advice is asked. Sections 1 and 2 of
the Rules and Regulations read:
“1. The Commissions shall recommend, or suggest, to the Borough
President, for his consideration and advice, matters which, in
their opinion will be of benefit to their districts and to the
City.
“2. The Commissions shall receive from the Borough President
suggestions or recommendations for their consideration as to
matters affecting their districts, and report back their
conclusions with respect thereto.”
Moreover, beyond the recommendations of the Commission, the coöperation
of the whole neighborhood is sought. “Whenever the commissions are in
doubt as to the policy they desire to advocate and wish to further sound
the sentiment of their localities, meetings similar to town-meetings are
held, usually in the local schoolhouse.” The “neighborhoods” of
Manhattan have coöperated with the city government in such matters as
bus franchise, markets, location of tracks, floating baths, pavement
construction, sewerage etc. One of the results of this plan, Mr. Marks
tells us, is that many types of improvement which were formerly opposed,
such as sewerage construction by the owners of abutting property, now
receive the support of the citizens because there is opportunity for
them to understand fully the needs of the situation and even to employ
their own expert if they wish.
The chairmen of the twelve Neighborhood Commissions form a body called
the Manhattan Commission. This meets to confer with the President on
matters affecting the interests of the entire borough.[96]
This plan, while not yet ideal, particularly in so far as the
commissions are appointed from above, is most interesting to all those
who are looking towards neighborhood organization as the basis of the
new state.
To summarize: neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to
form the city—then only shall we understand what it is to be the city;
neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to form the
state—then only shall we understand what it is to be the state. We do
not begin with a unified state which delegates authority; we begin with
the neighborhood group and create the state ourselves. Thus is the state
built up through the intimate intertwining of all.
But this is not a crude and external federalism. We have not transferred
the unit of democracy from the individual to the group. It is the
individual man who must feel himself the unit of city government, of
state government: he has not delegated his responsibility to his
neighborhood group; he has direct relation with larger wholes. I have no
medieval idea of mediate articulation, of individuals forming groups and
groups forming the nation. Mechanical federalism we have long outgrown.
The members of the nation are to be individuals, not groups. The
movement for neighborhood organization is from one point of view a
movement to give the individual political effectiveness—it is an
individualistic not a collectivistic movement, paradoxical as this may
seem to superficial thinking. But, as the whole structure of government
must rest on the individual, it must have its roots within that place
where you can get nearest to him, and where his latent powers can best
be freed and actualized—his local group.
What are we ultimately seeking through neighborhood organization? To
find the individual. But let no one think that the movement for
neighborhood organization is a new movement. Our neighborhood
organization, we are often told, had its origin in the New England
town-meeting. Yes, and far beyond that in the early institutions of our
English ancestors. That our national life must be grounded in the daily,
intimate life of all men is the teaching of the whole long stream of
English history.
We have seen that the increasing activity of the state, its social
policies and social legislation, demands the activity of every man. We
have seen in considering direct government that the activity of every
man is not enough if we mean merely his activity at the polling
booths. With the inclusion of all men and women (practically
accomplished) in the suffrage, with the rapidly increasing acceptance
of direct government, the _extensive_ work of the democratic impulse
has ended. Now the _intensive_ work of democracy must begin. The great
historic task of the Anglo-Saxon people has been to find wise and
reasoned forms for the expression of individual responsibility, has
been so to bulwark the rights of the individual as to provide at the
same time for the unity and stability of the state. They have done
this externally by making the machinery of representative government.
We want to-day to do it spiritually, to direct the spiritual currents
in their flow and interflow so that we have not only the external
interpenetration—choosing representatives etc.—but the deeper
interpenetration which shows the minds and needs and wants of all men.
We can satisfy our wants only by a genuine union and communion of all,
only in the friendly outpouring of heart to heart. We have come to the
time when we see that the machinery of government can be useful to us
only so far as it is a living thing: the souls of men are the stones of
Heaven, the life of every man must contribute fundamentally to the
growth of the state. So the world spirit seeks freedom and finds it in a
more and more perfect union of true individuals. _The relation of
neighbors one to another must be integrated into the substance of the
state._ Politics must take democracy from its external expression of
representation to the expression of that inner meaning hidden in the
intermingling of all men. This is our part to-day—thus shall we take our
place in the great task of our race. Our political life began in the
small group, but it has taken us long to evolve our relation to a
national life, and meanwhile much of the significance and richness of
the local life has been lost. Back now to the local unit we must go with
all that we have accumulated, to find in and through that our complete
realization. Back we must go to this small primary unit if we would
understand the meaning of democracy, if we would get the fruits of
democracy. As Voltaire said, “The spirit of France is the candle of
Europe,” so must the spirit of the neighborhood be the candle of the
nation.
-----
Footnote 90:
This point will be taken up in ch. XXXIII.
Footnote 91:
Or perhaps the Senate might represent the occupational group (see ch.
XXXIII). Or perhaps the experts mentioned above might be
representatives from occupational groups.
Footnote 92:
In North Carolina the recently organized State Bureau of Community
Service—made up of the administrators of the Department of
Agriculture, the Board of Health, the Normal and Industrial College
and the Farmers’ Union, with the State Superintendent of Public
Instruction as its central executive—is making its immediate work the
development of local community organization which shall be directly
articulated with a unified state organization.
Footnote 93:
The Community Council, however, is not to duplicate other
organizations but first to coördinate all existing agencies before
planning new activities.
Footnote 94:
And spontaneously many towns and villages turned to the schoolhouse as
the natural centre of its war services.
Footnote 95:
For the moment I ignore the occupational group to be considered later.
Footnote 96:
I have taken this account from the official report. I have been told
by New York people that these commissions have shown few signs of
life. This does not, however, seem to me to detract from the value of
the plan as a suggestion, or as indication of what is seen to be
advisable if not yet wholly practicable. The New York charter provides
for Local Improvement Boards as connecting links with the central
government, but these I am told have shown no life whatever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVIII
POLITICAL PLURALISM
--------------
ALL that I have written has been based on the assumption of the unifying
state. Moreover I have spoken of neighborhood organization as if it were
possible to take it for granted that the neighborhood group is to be the
basis of the new state. The truth of both these assumptions is denied by
some of our most able thinkers.
The unified state is now discredited in many quarters. Syndicalists,
guild socialists, some of the Liberals in England, some of the advocates
of occupational representation in America, and a growing school of
writers who might be called political pluralists are throwing the burden
of much proof upon the state, and are proposing group organization as
the next step in political method. To some the idea of the state is
abhorrent. One writer says, “The last hundred years marked in all
countries the beginning of the dissolution of the State and of the
resurrection of corporate life [trade unions etc.].... In the face of
this growth of syndicalism in every direction, ... it is no longer
venturesome to assert that the State is dead.”
Others like to keep the word “state” but differ much as to the position
it is to occupy in the new order: to some it seems to be merely a kind
of mucilage to keep the various groups together; with others the state
is to hold the ring while different groups fight out their differences.
Still other thinkers, while seeing the open door to scepticism in regard
to the state, are nevertheless not ready to pass through, but,
preserving the instinct and the reverence for the unity of the state,
propose as the most immediate object of our study how the unity can be
brought about, what is to be the true and perfect bond of union between
the multiple groups of our modern life. All these thinkers, differing
widely as they do, yet may be roughly classed together as the upholders
of a multiple group organization as the basis for a new state.
This movement is partly a reaction against an atomistic sovereignty, the
so-called theory of “subjective” rights, a “senseless” geographical
representation, a much berated parliamentary system, and partly the wish
to give industrial workers a larger share in the control of industry and
in government.
The opposition to “numerical representation” has been growing for some
time. We were told thirty years ago by Le Prins that vocational
representation is “the way out of the domination of the majority,” that
the vocational group is the “natural” group “spontaneously generated in
the womb of a nation.” Twenty-five years ago Benoist said that the state
must recognize private associations: universities, chambers of commerce,
professional associations, societies of agriculture, syndicates of
workmen—“en un mot tout ce qui a corps et vie dans la nation.” If the
state is to correspond to reality, it must recognize, Benoist insisted,
all this group life, all these interests, within it. Moreover, he urged,
with our present pulverized suffrage, with sovereignty divided among
millions, we are in a state of anarchy; only group representation will
save us from “la force stupide de nombre.” M. Léon Duguit has given us a
so-called “objective” theory of law which means for many people a new
conception of the state.
Many say that it is absurd for representation to be based on the mere
chance of residence as is the case when the geographical district is the
unit. The territorial principle is going, we are told, and that of
similar occupational interests will take its place. Again some people
are suggesting that both principles should be recognized in our
government: that one house in Parliament represent geographical areas,
the other occupations.[97] No one has yet, however, made any proposal of
this kind definite enough to serve as a basis of discussion.
Syndicalism demands the abolition of the “state” while—through its
organization of the syndicate of workers, the union of syndicates of the
same town or region and the federation of these unions—it erects a
system of its own controlled entirely by the workers. Syndicalism has
gained many adherents lately because of the present reaction against
socialism. People do not want the Servile State and, therefore, many
think they do not want any state.
In England a new school is arising which is equally opposed to
syndicalism and to the bureaucracy of state socialism. Or rather it
takes half of each. Guild socialism believes in state ownership of the
means of production, but that the control of each industry or
“guild”—appointment of officers, hours and conditions of work
etc.—should be vested in the membership of the industry. The
syndicalists throw over the state entirely, the guild socialists believe
in the “co-management” of the state. There are to be two sets of
machinery side by side but quite distinct: that based on the
occupational group will be concerned with economic considerations, the
other with “political” considerations, the first culminating in a
national Guild Congress, and the second in the State.[98]
“Guild Socialism,” edited by A. R. Orage, gives in some detail this
systematic plan already familiar to readers of the _New Age_. A later
book of the same school “Authority, Liberty and Function,” by Ramiro de
Maeztu, concerns itself less with detail and more with the philosophical
basis of the new order. The value of this book consists in its emphasis
on the functional principle.[99]
Mr. Ernest Barker of Oxford, although he formulates no definite system,
is a political pluralist.
John Neville Figgis makes an important contribution to pluralism,[100]
and although he has a case to plead for the church, he is equally
emphatic that all the local groups which really make our life should be
fostered and given an increased authority.
In America vocational representation has many distinguished advocates,
among them Professor Felix Adler and Professor H. A. Overstreet. Mr.
Herbert Croly, who has given profound thought to the trend of democracy,
advocates giving increased power and legal recognition to the powerful
groups growing up within the state. Mr. Harold Laski is a pronounced
political pluralist, especially in his emphasis on the advantage of
multiple, varied and freely developing groups for the enrichment and
enhancement of our whole life. Mr. Laski’s book, “Studies in the Problem
of Sovereignty,” is one of the most thought-stimulating bits of modern
political writing: it does away with the fetich of the abstract state—it
is above all an attempt to look at things as they are rather than as we
imagine them to be; it shows that states are not supreme by striking
examples of organizations within the state claiming and winning the
right to refuse obedience to the state; it sees the strength and the
variety of our group life to-day as a significant fact for political
method; it is a recognition, to an extent, of the group principle—it
sees that sovereignty is not in people as a mass; it pleads for a
revivification of local life, and finally it shows us, implicitly, not
only that we need to-day a new state, but that the new state must be a
great moral force.[101]
Perhaps the most interesting contribution of the pluralists is their
clear showing that “a single unitary state with a single sovereignty” is
not true to the facts of life to-day. Mr. Barker says, “Every state is
something of a federal society and contains different national groups,
different churches, different economic organizations, each exercising
its measure of control over its members.” The following instances are
cited to show the present tendency of different groups to claim
autonomy:
1. Religious groups are claiming rights as groups. Many churchmen would
like to establish the autonomy of the church. It is impossible to have
undenominational instruction in the schools of England because of the
claims of the church.
2. There is a political movement towards the recognition of national
groups. The state in England is passing Home Rule Acts and Welsh
Disestablishment Acts to meet the claims of national groups. “All Europe
is convulsed with a struggle of which one object is a regrouping of men
in ways which will fulfil national ideals.”
3. “The Trade-Unions claim to be free groups.” “Trade-unions have
recovered from Parliament more than they have lost in the courts.”
Let us consider the arguments of the pluralist school, as they form the
most interesting, the most suggestive and the most important theory of
politics now before us. It seems to me that there are four weaknesses in
the pluralist school[102] which must be corrected before we can take
from them the torch to light us on our political way: (1) some of the
pluralists ostensibly found their books on pragmatic philosophy and yet
in their inability to reconcile the distributive and collective they do
not accept the latest teachings of pragmatism, for pragmatism does not
end with a distributive pluralism, (2) the movement is in part a
reaction to a misunderstood Hegelianism, (3) many of the pluralists are
professed followers of medieval doctrine, (4) their thinking is not
based on a scientific study of the group, which weakens the force of
their theories of “objective” rights and sovereignty, much as these
latter are an advance on our old theories of “subjective” rights and a
sovereignty based on an atomistic conception of society.
First, the underlying problem of pluralism and pragmatism is, as James
proclaims, the relation of “collective” and “distributive.” The problem
of to-day, we all agree, is the discovery of the kind of federalism
which will make the parts live fully in the whole, the whole live fully
in the parts. But this is the central problem of philosophy which has
stirred the ages. The heart of James’ difficulty was just this: how can
many consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can the
same identical fact experience itself so diversely? How can you be the
absolute and the individual? It is the old, old struggle which has
enmeshed so many, which some of our philosophers have transcended by the
deeper intuitions, sure that life is a continuous flow and not spasmodic
appearance, disappearance and reappearance. James struggled long with
this problem, but the outcome was sure. His spirit could not be bound by
intellectualistic logic, the logic of identity. He was finally forced to
adopt a higher form of rationality. He gave up conceptualistic logic
“fairly, squarely and irrevocably,” and knew by deepest inner testimony
that “states of consciousness can separate and combine themselves freely
and keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of
simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.” James always saw the
strung-along universe, but he also saw the unifying principle which is
working towards its goal. “That secret,” he tells us, “of a continuous
life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot
be a contradiction incarnate.... Our intelligence must keep on speaking
terms with the universe.”
When James found that the “all-form” and the “each-forms” are not
incompatible, he found the secret of federalism. It is our task to work
out in practical politics this speculative truth which the great
philosophers have presented to us. The words absolute and individual
veil it to us, but substitute state and individual and the problem comes
down to the plane of our actual working everyday life. It may be
interesting to read philosophy, but the thrilling thing for every man of
us to do is to make it come true. We may be heartened by our sojourns on
Sinai, but no man may live his life in the clouds. And what does
pragmatism mean if not just this? We can only, as James told us again
and again, understand the collective and distributive by living. Life is
the true revealer: I can never understand the whole by reason, only when
the heart-beat of the whole throbs through me as the pulse of my own
being.
If we in our neighborhood group live James’ philosophy of the
compounding of consciousness, if we obey the true doctrine, that each
individual is not only himself but the state—for the fulness of life
overflows—then will the perfect form of federalism appear and express
itself, for then we have the spirit of federalism creating its own form.
Political philosophers talk of the state, but there is no state until we
make it. It is pure theory. We, every man and woman to-day, must create
his small group first, and then, through its compounding with other
groups, it ascends from stage to stage until the federal state appears.
Thus do we understand by actual living how collective experiences can
claim identity with their constituent parts, how “your experience and
mine can be members of a world-experience.” In our neighborhood groups
we claim identity with the whole collective will, at that point we are
the collective will.
Unless multiple sovereignty can mean ascending rather than parallel
groups it will leave out the deepest truth which philosophy has brought
us. But surely the political pluralists who are open admirers of James
will refuse with him to stay enmeshed in sterile intellectualism, in the
narrow and emasculated logic of identity. Confessedly disciples of
James, will they not carry their discipleship a step further? Have they
not with James a wish for a world that does not fall into “discontinuous
pieces,” for “a higher denomination than that distributed, strung-along
and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings [now] swim in”? Their
groups must be the state each at its separate point. When they see this
truth clearly, then the leadership to which their insight entitles them
will be theirs.
I have said that the political pluralists are fighting a misunderstood
Hegelianism. Do they adopt the crudely popular conception of the
Hegelian state as something “above and beyond” men, as a separate entity
virtually independent of men? Such a conception is fundamentally wrong
and wholly against the spirit of Hegel. As James found collective
experience not independent of distributive experience, as he reconciled
the two through the “compounding of consciousness,” so Hegel’s related
parts received their meaning only in the conception of total relativity.
The soul of Hegelianism is total relativity, but this is the essence of
the compounding of consciousness. As for James the related parts and
their relations appear simultaneously and with equal reality, so in
Hegel’s total relativity: the members of the state in their right
relation to one another appear in all the different degrees of reality
together as one whole total relativity—never sundered, never warring
against the true Self, the Whole.
But there is the real Hegel and the Hegel who misapplied his own
doctrine, who preached the absolutism of a Prussian State. Green and
Bosanquet in measure more or less full taught the true Hegelian
doctrine. But for a number of years the false leadings of Hegel have
been uppermost in people’s minds, and there has been a reaction to their
teaching due to the panic we all feel at the mere thought of an absolute
monarch and an irresponsible state. The present behavior of Prussia of
course tends to increase the panic, and the fashion of jeering at Hegel
and his “misguided” followers is wide-spread. But while many English
writers are raging against Hegelianism, at the same time the English are
pouring out in unstinted measure themselves and their substance to
establish on earth Hegel’s absolute in the actual form of an
International League!
The political pluralists whom we are now considering, believing that a
collective and distributive sovereignty cannot exist together, throw
overboard collective sovereignty. When they accept the compounding of
consciousness taught by their own master, James, then they will see that
true Hegelianism finds its actualized form in federalism.
Perhaps they would be able to do this sooner if they could rid
themselves of the Middle Ages! Many of the political pluralists
deliberately announce that they are accepting medieval doctrine.
In the Middle Ages the group was the political unit. The medieval man
was always the member of a group—of the guild in the town, of the manor
in the country. But this was followed by the theory of the individual
not as a member of a group but as a member of a nation, and we have
always considered this on the whole an advance step. When, therefore,
the separate groups are again proposed as the political units, we are
going back to a political theory which we have long outgrown and which
obviously cramps the individual. It is true that the individual as the
basis of government has remained an empty theory. The man with political
power has been the rich and strong man. There has been little chance for
the individual as an individual to become a force in the state. In
reaction against such selfish autocracy people propose a return to the
Middle Ages. This is not the solution. Now is the critical moment. If we
imitate the Middle Ages and adopt political pluralism we lose our chance
to invent our own forms for our larger ideas.
Again, balancing groups were loosely held together by what has been
called a federal bond. Therefore we are to look to the medieval empire
for inspiration in forming the modern state. But the union of church and
guild, boroughs and shires of the Middle Ages seems to me neither to
bear much resemblance to a modern federal state nor to approach the
ideal federal state. And if we learn anything from medieval
decentralization—guild and church and commune—it is that political and
economic power cannot be separated.
Much as we owe the Middle Ages, have we not progressed since then? Are
our insights, our ideals, our purposes at all the same? Medieval theory,
it is true, had the conception of the living group, and this had a large
influence on legal theory.[103] Also medieval theory struggled from
first to last to reconcile its notion of individual freedom,[104] the
patent fact of manifold groups, and the growing notion of a sovereign
state. Our problem it is true is the same to-day, but the Middle Ages
hold more warnings than lessons for us. While there was much that was
good about the medieval guilds, we certainly do not want to go back to
all the weaknesses of medieval cities: the jealousies of the guilds,
their selfishness, the unsatisfactory compromises between them, the
impossibility of sufficient agreement either to maintain internal order
or to pursue successful outside relations.
The Middle Ages had not worked out any form by which the parts could be
related to the whole without the result either of despotism of the more
powerful parts or anarchy of all the parts. Moreover, in the Middle Ages
it was true on the whole that your relation to your class separated you
from other classes: you could not belong to many groups at once. Status
was the basis of the Middle Ages. This is exactly the tendency we must
avoid in any plan for the direct representation of industrial workers in
the state.
Is our modern life entirely barren of ideas with which to meet its own
problems? Must twentieth century thought with all the richness which our
intricately complex life has woven into it try to force itself into the
embryonic moulds of the Middle Ages?
The most serious error, however, of the political pluralists is one we
are all making: we have not begun a scientific study of group
psychology. No one yet knows enough of the laws of associated life to
have the proper foundations for political thinking. The pluralists
apotheosize the group but do not study the group. They talk of
sovereignty without seeking the source of sovereignty.
In the next three chapters I shall consider what the recent recognition
of the group, meagre as it is at present, teaches us in regard to
pluralism. Pluralism is the dominant thought to-day in philosophy, in
politics, in economics, in jurisprudence, in sociology, in many schemes
of social reorganization proposed by social workers, therefore we must
consider it carefully—what it holds for us, what it must guard against.
-----
Footnote 97:
Léon Duguit, Graham Wallis, Arthur Christensen, Norman Angell, etc.
Footnote 98:
The fatal flaw of guild socialism is this separation of economics and
politics. First, the interests of citizenship and guild-membership are
not distinct; secondly, in any proper system of occupational
representation every one should be included—vocational representation
should not be trade representation; third, as long as you call the
affairs of the guilds “material,” and say that the politics of the
state should be purified of financial interests, you burn every bridge
which might make a unity of financial interests and sound state
policy. Guild socialism, however, because it is a carefully worked out
plan for the control of industry by those who take part in it, is one
of the most well worth considering of the proposals at present before
us.
Footnote 99:
See G. D. H. Cole, “The World of Labor,” for the relation of trade
unionism to guild socialism.
Footnote 100:
See especially “Churches in the Modern State” and “Studies in
Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius.”
Footnote 101:
See also Mr. Laski’s articles: “The Personality of Associations,”
Harv. Law Rev. 29, 404–426, and “Early History of the Corporation in
England,” Harv. Law Rev.: 30, 561–588. This is the kind of work which
is breaking the way for a new conception of politics.
Footnote 102:
It must be understood that all I say does not apply to all the
pluralists. For the sake of brevity I consider them as a school
although they differ widely. Moreover, for convenience I am using the
word pluralist roughly and in a sense inaccurately to include all
those who are advocating a multiple group organization as the basis of
a new state. Most of these agree in making the group rather than the
individual the unit of politics, in their support of group “rights,”
the “consent” of the group, the “balance” of groups, and in their
belief that “rights” should be based on function. But syndicalists and
guild socialists are not strictly pluralists since they build up a
system based on the occupational group; yet the name is not wholly
inapplicable, for, since the guild socialists base their state on
balancing groups, that state cannot be called a unified state. It is
too early yet to speak of this school with entire accuracy, and in
fact there is no “school.”
Footnote 103:
From this was taken, Gierke tells us, modern German “fellowship.”
Footnote 104:
And the individual was certainly as prominent in medieval theory as
the community of individuals, a fact which the vigorous corporate life
of the Middle Ages may lead us to forget.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIX
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND SOVEREIGNTY
--------------
WHAT does group psychology teach us, as far as we at present understand
it, in regard to sovereignty? How does the group get its power? By each
one giving up his sovereignty? Never. By some one from outside
presenting it with authority? No, although that is the basis of much of
our older legal theory. Real authority inheres in a genuine whole. The
individual is sovereign over himself as far as he unifies the
heterogeneous elements of his nature. Two people are sovereign over
themselves as far as they are capable of creating one out of two. A
group is sovereign over itself as far as it is capable of creating one
out of several or many. A state is sovereign only as it has the power of
creating one in which all are. Sovereignty is the power engendered by a
complete interdependence becoming conscious of itself. Sovereignty is
the imperative of a true collective will. It is not something academic,
it is produced by actual living with others—we learn it only through
group life. By the subtle process of interpenetration a collective
sovereignty is evolved from a distributed sovereignty. Just so can and
must, by the law of their being, groups unite to form larger groups,
these larger groups to form a world-group.
I have said that many of the pluralists are opposed to the monistic
state because they do not see that a collective and distributive
sovereignty can exist together. They talk of the Many and the One
without analyzing the process by which the Many and the One are creating
each other. We now see that the problem of the compounding of
consciousness, of the One and the Many, need not be left either to an
intellectualistic or to an intuitive metaphysics. It is to be solved
through a laboratory study of group psychology. When we have that, we
shall not have to argue any more about the One and the Many: we shall
actually see the Many and the One emerging at the same time; we can then
work out the laws of the relation of the One (the state) to the Many
(the individual), and of the Many (the individual) to the One (the
state), not as a metaphysical question but on a scientific basis. And
the process of the Many becoming One is the process by which sovereignty
is created. Our conceptions of sovereignty can no longer rest on mere
abstractions, theory, speculative thought. How absurdly inadequate such
processes are to explain the living, interweaving web of humanity. The
question of sovereignty concerns the organization of men (which
obviously must be fitted to their nature), hence it finds its answer
through the psychological analysis of man.
The seeking of the organs of society which are the immediate source of
legal sanctions, the seeking of the ultimate source of political
control—these are the quests of jurists and political philosophers. To
their search must be added a study of the process by which a genuine
sovereignty is created. The political pluralists are reacting against
the sovereignty which our legal theory postulates, for they see that
there is no such thing actually, but if sovereignty is at present a
legal fiction, the matter need not rest there—we must seek to find how a
genuine social and political control can be produced. The understanding
of self-government, of democracy, is bound up with the conception of
sovereignty as a psychological process.
The idea of sovereignty held by guild socialists[105] is based largely
on the so-called “objective” theory of _le droit_ expounded by M. Léon
Duguit of Bordeaux. This theory is accepted as the “juridical basis” of
a new state, what some call the functionarist state.[106] Man, Duguit
tells us, has no rights as man, but only as a member of the social
order. His rights are based on the fact of social interdependence—on his
relations and consequent obligations. In fact he has no rights, but
duties and powers. All power and all obligation is found in “social
solidarity,” in a constantly evolving social solidarity.[107]
The elaboration of this theory is Duguit’s large contribution to
political thought. His _droit_ is a dynamic law—it can never be captured
and fixed. The essential weakness of his doctrine is that he denies the
possibility of a collective will, which means that he ignores the
psychology of the social process. He and his followers reject the notion
of a collective will as “_concept de l’esprit dénué de toute réalité
positive_.” If this is their idea of a collective will, they are right
to reject it. I ask for its acceptance only so far as it can be proved
to have positive reality. There is only one way in the world by which
you can ever know whether there is a collective will, and that is by
actually trying to make one; you need not discuss a collective will as a
theory. If experiment proves to us that we cannot have a collective
will, we must accept the verdict. Duguit thinks that when we talk of the
sovereignty of the people we mean an abstract sovereignty; the new
psychology means by the sovereignty of the people that which they
actually create. It is true that we have none at present. Duguit is
perfectly right in opposing the old theory of the “sovereign state.”
But Duguit says that if there were a collective will there is no reason
why it should impose itself on the individual wills. “_L’affirmation que
la collectivité a le pouvoir légitime de commander force qu’elle est la
collectivité, est une affirmation d’ordre métaphysique oú
religieux...._” This in itself shows a misunderstanding of the evolution
of a collective will. This school does not seem to understand that every
one must contribute to the collective will; ideally it would have no
power unless this happened, actually we can only be constantly
approaching this ideal.[108] Duguit makes a thing-in-itself of _la
volonté nationale_—it is a most insidious fallacy which we all fall into
again and again. But we can never accept that kind of a collective will.
We believe in a collective will only so far as it is _really_ forming
from out our actual daily life of intermingling men and women. There is
nothing “metaphysical” or “religious” about this. Duguit says
metaphysics “_doit rester étranger à toute jurisprudence_....” We agree
to that and insist that jurisprudence must be founded on social
psychology.
Five people produce a collective idea, a collective will. That will
becomes at once an imperative upon those five people. It is not an
imperative upon any one else. On the other hand no one else can make
imperatives for those five people. It has been generated by the social
process which is a self-sufficing, all-inclusive process. The same
process which creates the collective will creates at the same time the
imperative of the collective will. It is absolutely impossible to give
self-government: no one has the right to give it; no one has the power
to give it. Group A _allows_ group B to govern itself? This is an empty
permission unless B has _learned how_ to govern itself. Self-government
must always be grown. Sovereignty is always a psychological process.
Many of Duguit’s errors come from a misconception of the social process.
Violently opposed to a collective will, he sees in the individual
thought and will the only genuine “_chose en soi_” (it is interesting to
notice that _la chose en soi_ finds a place in the thought of many
pluralists). Not admitting the process of “community” he asserts that
_la règle de droit_ is anterior and superior to the state; he does not
see the true relation of _le droit_ to _l’état_, that they evolve
together, that the same process which creates _le droit_ creates
_l’état_.[109] The will of the people, he insists, can not create _le
droit_. Here he does not see the unity of the social process. He
separates will and purpose and the activity of the reciprocal
interchange instead of seeing them as one. Certainly the will of the
people does not create _le droit_, but the social process in its entire
unity does. “Positive law must constantly follow _le droit objectif_.”
Of course. “_Le droit objectif_ is constantly evolving.” Certainly. But
how evolving? Here is where we disagree. The social process creates _le
droit objectif_, and will is an essential part of the social process.
Purpose is an essential part of the social process. Separate the parts
of the social process and you have a different idea of jurisprudence, of
democracy, of political institutions. Aim is all-important for Duguit.
The rule of _le droit_ is the rule of conscious ends: only the aim gives
a will its worth; if the aim is juridical (conformed to _la règle de
droit_), then the will is juridical. Thus Duguit’s pragmatism is one
which has not yet rid itself of absolute standards. It might be urged
that it has, because he finds his absolute standards in “social
solidarity.” But any one who believes that the individual will is a
_chose en soi_, and who separates the elements of the social process,
does not wholly admit the self-sufficing character of that process.
The modern tendency in many quarters, however, in regard to conceptions
of social practice, is to substitute ends for will.[110] This is a
perfectly comprehensible reaction, but future jurisprudence must
certainly unite these two ideas. Professor Jethro Brown says, “The
justification for governmental action is found not in consent but in the
purpose it serves.” Not in that alone. De Maeztu says, “The profound
secret of associations is not that men have need of one another, but
that they need the same thing.” These two ideas can merge. Professor
Brown makes the common good the basis of the new doctrine of natural
right.[111] But we must all remember, what I do not doubt this writer
does remember, that purpose can never be a _chose en soi_, and that, of
the utmost importance, the “new natural law” can be brought into
manifestation only by certain modes of association.
It is true, as Duguit says, that the state has the “right” to will
because of the thing willed, that it has no “subjective” right to will,
that its justification is in its purpose. (This is of course the truth
in regard to all our “rights”; they are justified only by the use we
make of them.) And yet there is a truth in the old idea of the “right”
of a collectivity to will. These two ideas must be synthesized. They
_are_ synthesized by the new psychology which sees the purpose forming
the will at the same time as the will forms the purpose, which finds no
separation anywhere in the social process. We can never think of purpose
as something in front which leads us on, as the carrot the donkey.
Purpose is never in front of us, it appears at every moment with the
appearance of will. Thus the new school of jurisprudence founded on
social psychology cannot be a teleological school alone, but must be
founded on all the elements which constitute the social process. Ideals
do not operate in a vacuum. This theorists seem sometimes to forget, but
those of us who have had tragic experience of this truth are likely to
give more emphasis to the interaction of purpose, will and activity,
past and present activity. The recognition that _le droit_ is the
product of a group process swallows up the question as to whether it is
“objective” or “subjective”; it is neither, it is both; we look at the
matter quite differently.[112]
To sum up this point. We must all, I think, agree with the “objective”
conception of law in its essence, but not in its dividing the social
process, a true unity, into separate parts. Rights arise from relation,
and purpose is bound up in the relation. The relation of men to one
another and to the object sought are part of the same process. Duguit
has rendered us invaluable service in his insistence that _le droit_
must be based on “_la vie actuelle_,” but he does not take the one step
further and see that _le droit_ is born within the _group_, that there
is an essential law of the group as different from other modes of
association, and that this has many implications.
The _droit_ evolved by a group is the _droit_ of that group. The _droit_
evolved by a state-group (we agree that there is no state-group yet, the
state is evolving, the _droit_ is evolving, there is only an approximate
state, an approximately genuine _droit_) is the _droit_ of the state.
The contribution of the new psychology is that _le droit_ comes from
relation and is always in relation. The warning of the new psychology to
the advocates of vocational representation is that the _droit_ (either
as law or right)[113] evolved by men of one occupation only will
represent too little intermingling to express the “community” truth. We
don’t want doctors’ ethics and lawyers’ ethics, and so on through the
various groups. That is just the trouble at present. Employers and
employees meet in conference. Watch those conferences. The difference of
interest is not always the whole difficulty; there is also the
difference of standard. Capitalist ethics and workman ethics are often
opposed. We must accept _le droit_ as a social product, as a group
product, but we must have groups which will unify interests and
standards. Law and politics can be founded on nothing but vital modes of
association.
Mr. Roscoe Pound’s exposition of modern law is just here a great help to
political theory. The essential, the vital part of his teaching, is, not
his theory of law based on interests, not his emphasis upon relation,
but his bringing together of these two ideas. This takes us out of the
vague, nebulous region of much of the older legal and political theory,
and shows us the actual method of living our daily lives. All that he
says of relation implies that we must seek and bring into use those
modes of association which will reveal true interests, actual interests,
yet not particularist interests but the interests discovered through
group relations—employer and employed, master and servant, landlord and
tenant, etc. But, and this is of great importance, these groups must be
made into genuine groups. If law is to be a group-product, we must see
that our groups are real groups, we must find the true principle of
association. For this we need, as I must continually repeat, the study
of group psychology. “Life,” “man,” “society,” are coming to have little
meaning for us: it is your life and my life with which we are concerned,
not “man” but the men we see around us, not “society” but the many
societies in which we pass our lives. “Social” values? We want
individual values, but individual values discovered through group
relations.
To sum up this point: (1) law should be a group-product, (2) we should
therefore have genuine groups, (3) political method must be such that
the “law” of the group can become embodied in our legislation.
M. Duguit’s disregarding of the laws of that intermingling which is the
basis of his _droit objectif_ leads to a partial understanding only of
the vote. Voting is for him still in a way a particularist matter. To be
sure he calls it a function and that marks a certain advance. Moreover
he wishes us to consider the vote an “objective” power, an “objective”
duty, not a “subjective” right. This is an alluring theory in a
pragmatic age. And if you see it leading to syndicalism which you have
already accepted beforehand, it is all the more alluring! But to call
the vote a function is only half the story; as long as it is a
particularist vote, it does not help us much to have it rest on
function, or rather, it goes just half the way. It must rest on the
intermingling of all my functions, it must rest on the intermingling of
all my functions with all the functions of all the others; it must rest
indeed on social solidarity, but a social solidarity in which every man
interpenetrating with every other is thereby approaching a whole of
which he is the whole at one point.
Duguit, full of Rousseau, does not think it possible to have a
collective sovereignty without every one having an equal share of this
collective sovereignty, and he most strenuously opposes _le suffrage
universel égalitaire_. But _le suffrage universel égalitaire_ staring
all the obvious _in_equalities of man in the face, Rousseau’s divided
sovereignty based on an indivisible sovereignty—all these things no
longer trouble you when you see the vote as the expression at one point
of some approximate whole produced by the intermingling of men.
True sovereignty and true functionalism are not opposed; the vote
resting on “subjective” right and the vote resting on “objective” power
are not opposed, but the particularist vote and the genuinely individual
vote are opposed. Any doctrine which contains a trace of particularism
in any form cannot gain our allegiance.
Again Duguit’s ignoring of the psychology of the social process leads
him to the separation of governors and governed. This separation is for
him the essential fact of the state. Sovereignty is with those
individuals who can impose their will upon others. He says no one can
give orders to himself, but as a matter of fact no one can really give
orders to any one but himself.[114] Here Duguit confuses present facts
and future possibilities. Let us _be_ the state, let us be
sovereign—over ourselves. As the problem in the life of each one of us
is to find the way to unify the warring elements within us—as only thus
do we gain sovereignty over ourselves—so the problem is the same for the
state. Duguit is right in saying that the German theory of
auto-limitation is unnecessary, but not in the reasons he gives for it.
A psychic entity is subordinate to the _droit_ which itself evolves not
by auto-limitation, but by the essential and intrinsic law of the group.
But Duguit has done us large service not only in his doctrine of a law,
a right, born of our actual life, of our always evolving life, but also
in his insistence on the individual which makes him one of the builders
of the new individualism.[115] We see in the gradual transformation of
the idea of natural law which took place among the French jurists of the
end of the nineteenth century, the struggle of the old particularism
with the feelings-out for the true individualism. That the French have
been slow to give up individual rights, that many of them have not given
them up for any collective theory, but, feeling the truth underneath the
old doctrine, have sought (and found) a different interpretation, a
different basis and a different use, has helped us all immeasurably.
* * * * *
Group psychology shows us the process of man creating social power,
evolving his own “rights.” We now see that man’s only rights are
group-rights. These are based on his activity in the group—you can call
it function if you like, only unless you are careful that tends to
become mechanical, and it tends to an organic functionalism in which
lurk many dangers. But the main point for us to grasp is that we can
never understand rights by an abstract discussion of “subjective” _vs._
“objective”—only by the closest study of the process by which these
rights are evolved. The true basis of rights is neither a “mystical”
idea of related personalities, nor is it to be found entirely in the
relation of the associated to the object sought; a truly modern
conception of law synthesizes these two ideas. “Function,” de Maeztu
tells us “[is] a quality independent of the wills of men.” This is a
meaningless sentence to the new psychology. At present the exposition of
the “objective” theory of law is largely a polemic against the
“subjective.” When we understand more of group psychology, and it can be
put forth in a positive manner, it will win many more adherents.
Then as soon as the psychological foundation of law is clearly seen, the
sovereignty of the state in its old meaning will be neither acclaimed
nor denied. An understanding of the group process teaches us the true
nature of sovereignty. We can agree with the pluralist school that the
present state has no “right” to sovereignty;[116] we can go further and
say that the state will never be more than ideally sovereign, further
still and say that the whole idea of sovereignty must be recast and take
a different place in political science. And yet, with the meaning given
to it by present psychology, it is perhaps the most vital thought of the
new politics. The sovereign is not the crowd, it is not millions of
unrelated atoms, but men joining to form a real whole. The atomistic
idea of sovereignty is dead, we all agree, but we may learn to define
sovereignty differently.
Curiously enough, some of the pluralists are acknowledged followers of
Gierke and Maitland, and base much of their doctrine on the “real
personality” of the group. But the group can create its own personality
only by the “compounding of consciousness,” by every member being at one
and the same time an individual and the “real personality.” If it is
possible for the members of a group to evolve a unified consciousness, a
common idea, a collective will, for the many to become really one, not
in a mystical sense but as an actual fact, for the group to have a real
not a fictional personality, this process can be carried on through
group and group, our task, an infinite one, to evolve a state with a
real personality. The imagination of the born pluralist stops with the
group.[117]
But even in regard to the group the pluralists seem sometimes to fall
into contradictions. Sovereignty, we are often told, must be
decentralized and divided among the local units. But according to their
own theory by whom is the sovereignty to be divided? The fact is that
the local units must _grow_ sovereignty, that we want to revivify local
life not for the purpose of breaking up sovereignty, but for the purpose
of creating a real sovereignty.
The pluralists always tell us that the unified state proceeds from the
One to the Many; that is why they discard the unified state. This is not
true of the unify_ing_ state which I am trying to indicate. They think
that the only alternative to pluralism is where you begin with the
whole. That is, it is true, the classic monism, but we know now that
authority is to proceed from the Many to the One, from the smallest
neighborhood group up to the city, the state, the nation. This is the
process of life, always a unifying through the interpenetration of the
Many—Oneness an infinite goal.
This is expressed more accurately by saying, as I have elsewhere, that
the One and the Many are constantly creating each other. The pluralists
object to the One that comes before the Many. They are right, but we
need not therefore give up oneness. When we say that there is the One
which comes _from_ the Many, this does not mean that the One is _above_
the Many. The deepest truth of life is that the interrelating by which
both are at the same time a-making is constant. This must be clearly
understood in the building of the new state.
The essential error in the theory of distributed sovereignty is that
each group has an isolated sovereignty. The truth is that each should
represent the whole united sovereignty at one point as each individual
is his whole group at one point. An understanding of this fact seems to
me absolutely necessary to further development of political theory.[118]
This does not mean that the state must come first, that the group gets
its power from the state. This the pluralists rightfully resent. The
power within the group is its own genetically and wholly. But the same
force which forms a group may form a group of groups.
But the conclusion drawn by some pluralists from the theory of “real
personality” is that the state is superfluous because a corporate
personality has the right to assert autonomy over itself. They thus
acknowledge that pluralism means for them group and group and group side
by side. But here they are surely wrong. They ignore the implications of
the psychological fact that power developed within the group does not
cease with the formation of the group. That very same force which has
bound the individuals together in the group (and which the theory of
“real personality” recognizes) goes on working, you cannot stop it; it
is the fundamental force of life, of all nature, of all humanity, the
universal law of being—the out-reaching for the purpose of further
unifying. If this force goes on working after the group is formed, what
becomes of it? It must reach out to embrace other groups in order to
repeat exactly the same process.
When you stop your automobile without stopping your engine, the power
which runs your car goes on working exactly the same, but is completely
lost. It only makes a noise. Do we want this to happen to our groups?
Are they to end only in disagreeable noises? In order that the
group-force shall not be lost, we must provide means for it to go on
working effectively after it is no longer needed within the group, so to
speak. We must provide ways for it to go out to meet the life force of
other groups, the new power thus generated again and endlessly to seek
new forms of unification. No “whole” can imprison us infinite beings.
The centre of to-day is the circumference of to-morrow.
Thus while the state is not necessary to grant authority, it is the
natural outcome of the uniting groups. The state must be the collective
mind embodying the moral will and purpose of All. From living group to
living group to the “real” state—such must be our line of evolution.
Sovereignty, it is true, is a fact, not a theory. Whoever can gain
obedience has the sovereign power. But we must go beyond this and seek
those political methods by which the command shall be with those who
have evolved a genuine authority, that is, an authority evolved by what
I have called the true social process. We must go beyond this and seek
those methods by which a genuine authority _can_ be evolved, by which
the true social process shall be everywhere possible. To repeat: first,
the true social process must be given full opportunity and scope, then
it must be made the basis of political method. Then shall we see
emerging a genuine authority which we can all acclaim as sovereign.
There is, I agree with the pluralists, a great advantage in that
authority being multiple and varied, but a static pluralism, so to
speak, would be as bad as a static monism. The groups are always
reaching out _towards_ unity. Our safeguard against crystallization is
that every fresh unity means (as I have tried to show in chapter III)
the throwing out of myriad fresh differences—our safeguard is that the
universe knows no static unity. Unification means sterilization;
unifying means a perpetual generating. We do not want the unified
sovereignty of Germany; but when you put the individual and the group
first, you get unify_ing_ sovereignty.[119]
-----
Footnote 105:
See writings of Ramiro de Maeztu in New Age and his book mentioned
above.
Footnote 106:
See “Traité de Droit Constitutionnel” and “Études de Droit Public”: I,
L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive; II, L’État, Les
Gouvernants and Les Agents.
As in French _droit_ may be either law or _a_ right, Duguit, in order
to distinguish between these meanings, follows the German distinction
of _objektives Recht_ and _subjektives Recht_, and speaks of _le droit
objectif_ and _le droit subjectif_, thus meaning by _le droit
objectif_ merely law. But because he at the same time writes of power
as resting on function in contradistinction to the classical theory of
the abstract “rights” of man, rights apart from law and only declared
by law, political writers sometimes speak of Duguit’s “objective”
theory of law, as opposed to a “subjective” theory of law, when
jurists would tell us that law _is_ objective, and that subjective
right is always merely _a_ right, my right. This matter of terminology
must be made much clearer than it is at present.
Footnote 107:
Although how far Duguit had in mind merely the solidarity of French
and Roman law has been questioned.
Footnote 108:
I have just read in a work on sociology, “Men surrender their
individual wills to the collective will.” No, the true social process
is not when they _surrender_ but when they _contribute_ their wills to
the collective will. See chs. II-VI, “The Group Process.”
Footnote 109:
See p. 130.
Footnote 110:
De Maeztu tells us, “Rights do not arise from personality. This idea
is mystic and unnecessary. Rights arise primarily from the relation of
the associated with the thing which associates them....” Authority,
Liberty, and Function, p. 250.
Mr. Barker substitutes purpose for personality and will as the
unifying bond of associations, and says that we thus get rid of
“murder in the air” when it is a question of the “competition of
ideas, not of real collective personalities.” (See “The Discredited
State,” in _The Political Quarterly_, February, 1915.) This seems a
curiously anthropomorphic, so to speak, idea of personality for a
twentieth-century writer. The article is, however, an interesting and
valuable one.
See also Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I, 472.
Footnote 111:
See “Underlying Principles of Legislation.”
Footnote 112:
The teleological school of sociology is interesting just here. While
it marked a long advance on older theories, the true place of
selection of ends is to-day more clearly seen. We were told: “Men have
wants, therefore they come together to seek means to satisfy those
wants.” When do men “come together”? When were they ever separated?
But it is not necessary to push this further.
Footnote 113:
I have tried not to jump the track from legal right to ethical right
but occasionally one can speak of them together, if it is understood
that one is not thereby merging them.
Footnote 114:
The old consent theory assumes that some make the laws and others obey
them. In the true democracy we shall obey the laws we have ourselves
made. To find the methods by which we can be approaching the true
democracy is now our task; we can never rest satisfied with “consent.”
Footnote 115:
Although I do not agree with the form individualism takes in his
doctrine.
Footnote 116:
Some of the pluralists are concerned, I recognize, with the fact
rather than the right of sovereignty.
Footnote 117:
The trouble with the pluralists is that their emphasis is not on the
fact that the group creates its own personality, but on the fact that
the state does _not_ create it. When they change this emphasis, their
thinking will be unchained, I believe, and leap ahead to the
constructive work which we eagerly await and expect from them.
Footnote 118:
It is also necessary to an understanding of the new international law.
See ch. XXXV, “The World State.”
Footnote 119:
No one has yet given us a satisfactory account of the history of the
notion of sovereignty: just how and in what degree it has been
affected by history, by philosophy, by jurisprudence, etc., and how
all these have interacted. We have not only to disentangle many
strands to trace each to its source, but we have, moreover, just not
to disentangle them, but to understand the constant interweaving of
all. To watch the interplay of legal theory and political philosophy
from the Middle Ages down to the present day is one of the most
interesting parts of our reading, but perhaps nowhere is it more
fruitful than in the idea of sovereignty. We see the corporation long
ignored and the idea of legal partnership influencing the development
of the social contract theory, which in its turn reacted on legal
theory. We find the juristic conception of group personality, clearly
seen as early as Althusius (1557–1638), and revived and expanded by
Gierke, influencing the whole German school of “group sociologists.”
But to-day are not many of us agreed that however interesting such
historical tracing, our present notion of sovereignty must rest on
what we learn from group psychology?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXX
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM
The Service State vs. the “Sovereign State”
--------------
THE idea at the bottom of occupational representation which has won it
many adherents is that of the interdependence of function. Most of the
people who advocate vocational representation believe in what they call
an organic democracy. This leads them to believe that the group not the
individual should be the unit of government: a man in an industry is to
vote not as an individual but as a department member because he is thus
representing his function. But man has many functions and then there is
something left over. It is just because our place in the whole can never
be bounded by any one function that we cannot accept the organism of the
Middle Ages, the organic society of certain sociologists, or the
“organic democracy” of the upholders of occupational representation.
Man has many functions or rather he is the interplay of many functions.
The child grows to manhood through interpenetrating—with his family, at
school, at work, with his play group, with his art group: the carpenter
may join the Arts and Crafts to find there an actualization of spirit
for which he is fitted, and so on and so on. All the different sides of
our nature develop by the process of compounding. If you shut a man up
in his occupation, you refuse him the opportunity of full growth. The
task has been given to humanity to “Know thyself,” but man cannot know
himself without knowing the many sides of his self. His essential self
is the possibility of the multiple expression of spirit.
We see this principle operating every day in our own lives: we cannot do
one thing well by doing one thing alone. The interrelations are so
manifold that each of us does far more than he wishes, not because our
tendency is a senseless ramifying, but because we cannot do our own job
well unless we do many other things: we do not take on the extra
activities as an _ex_tension of our life, but simply as an
_in_tensification of our life at the point of our particular interest.
Ideally one should fulfil all the functions of man in order to perform
one function. No one ought to teach without being a parent! etc. etc.
Man must identify himself with humanity. The great lesson which the
pluralist school has to teach is that man cannot do this imaginatively
but only actually, through his group relations. What it leaves out is
that the task is manifold and infinite because man must identify himself
with a manifold and infinite number of groups before he has embraced
humanity.
Society, however, does not consist merely of the union of all these
various groups. There is a more subtle process going on—the interlocking
of groups. And in these interlocking groups we have not only the same
people taking up different activities, but actually representing
different interests. In some groups I may be an employer, in others an
employee. I can be a workman and a stockholder. Men have many loyalties.
It is no longer true that I belong to such a class and must always
identify myself with its interests. I may belong at the same time to the
college club and the business women’s club, to the Players’ League
(representing the actor’s point of view) and to the Drama Association
(representing the playgoer’s point of view). I not only thus get
opposite points of view, but I myself can contribute to two opposite
points of view. The importance of this has not been fully estimated. I
may have to say the collective I or we first of my basket-ball team,
next of my trade-union, then of my church club or citizens’ league or
neighborhood association, and the lines may cross and recross many
times. It is just these cross lines that are of inestimable value in the
development of society.
Thus while two groups may be competing, certain members of these groups
may be working together for the satisfaction of some interest. This is
recognized by law. A man can be a member of different corporations. Our
possibility of association is not exhausted by contributing to the
production of one legal person, we may help to create many different
legal persons, each with an entirely different set of liabilities. Then
there may be some sort of relation with a definite legal status existing
between these bodies: I as member of one corporation may have relation
with myself as member of another corporation. We see this clearly in the
case of corporations, but it is what is taking place everywhere, this
interlocking and overlapping of groups, and is I feel one of the
neglected factors in the argument of those who are advocating
occupational representation. What we are working for is a plastic social
organization: not only in the sense of a flexible interaction between
the groups, but in the sense of an elasticity which makes it possible
for individuals to change constantly their relations, their groups,
without destroying social cohesion. Vocational representation would tend
to crystallize us into definite permanent groups.
The present advocacy of organic democracy or “functionalism” is
obviously, and in many cases explicitly, a reaction to “individualism”:
the functional group must be the unit because the individual is so
feared. I agree with the denunciation of the individual if you mean the
man who seeks only his own advantage. But have we not already seen that
that is not the true individual? And do we not see now that man is a
multiple being? Life is a recognition of multitudinous multiplicity.
Politics must be shaped for that. Our task is to make straight the paths
for the coming of the Lord—the true Individual. Man is struggling for
the freedom of his nature. What is his nature? Manifold being. You must
have as many different kinds of groups as there are powers in man—this
does away with “organic democracy.”
The state cannot be composed of groups because no group nor any number
of groups can contain the whole of me, and the ideal state demands the
whole of me. No one group can seize the whole of me; no one group can
seize any part of me in a mechanical way so that having taken one-tenth
there are nine-tenths left. My nature is not divisible into so many
parts as a house into so many rooms. My group uses me and then the whole
of me is still left to give to the whole. This is the constant social
process. Thus my citizenship is something bigger than my membership in a
vocational group. Vocational representation does not deal with men—it
deals with masons and doctors. I may be a photographer but how little of
my personality does my photography absorb. We are concerned with what is
left over—is that going to be lost? The whole of every man must go into
his citizenship.
Some at the guild socialists tell us, however, that a man has as many
“rights” as he has functions: a shoe-maker is also a father and a
rate-payer. But they do not give us any plan for the political
recognition of these various functions. How the father _as_ father is to
be represented in the state we are not told. The state will never get
the whole of a man by his trying to divide himself into parts. A man is
not a father at home, a citizen at the polls, an artisan at work, a
business man in his office, a follower of Christ at church. He is at
every moment a Christian, a father, a citizen, a worker, if he is at any
time these in a true sense. We want the whole man in politics. Clever
business men are not engaging workers, they need men, our churches need
men, the insistent demand of our political life is for men.
As ideally every function should include every other, as every power of
which I am capable should go into my work, occupational representation
might do for the millennium, but it is not fitted for the limitations of
man in 1918.
I am advocating throughout the group principle, but not the group as the
political unit. We do not need to swing forever between the individual
and the group. We must devise some method of using both at the same
time. Our present method is right so far as it is based on individuals,
but we have not yet found the true individual. The groups are the
indispensable means for the discovery of self by each man. The
individual finds himself in a group; he has no power alone or in a
crowd. One group creates me, another group creates me and so on and on.
The different groups bring into appearance the multiple sides of me. I
go to the polls to express the multiple man which the groups have
created. I am to express the whole from my individual point of view, and
that is a multiple point of view because of my various groups. But my
relation to the state is always as an individual. The group is a method
merely. It cannot supplant either the individual on the one hand or the
state on the other. The unit of society is the individual coming into
being and functioning through groups of a more and more federated
nature. Thus the unit of society is neither the group nor the
particularist-individual, but the group-individual.
The question is put baldly to us by the advocates of vocational
representation—“Do you want representation of numbers or representation
of interests?” They are opposed to the former, which they call
democracy, because “democracy” means to them the “sovereignty of the
people,” which means the reign of the crowd. Democracy and functionalism
are supposed to be opposed. An industry is to be composed not of
individuals but of departments; likewise the state is to be a union of
industries or occupations. The present state is conceived as a
crowd-state.[120] If the state is and must necessarily be a crowd, no
wonder it is being condemned to-day in many quarters. But I do not
believe this is the alternative we are facing—the crowd-state or the
group-state. We want the representation of individuals, but of true
individuals, group-individuals.[121]
The best part of pluralism is that it is a protest against the
domination of numbers; the trouble is that it identifies numbers with
individuals. Some plan must be devised by which we put the individual at
the centre of our political system, without an atomistic sovereignty,
and yet by which we can get the whole of the individual. I am proposing
for the moment the individual the unit, the group the method, but this
alone does not cover all that is necessary. In the French syndicalist
organization every syndicate, whatever its size, is represented by a
single individual. In this way power is prevented from falling into the
hands of a strong federation like the miners, but of course this often
means minority rule. In England the Trade Union Congress can be
dominated by the five large trades, a state of things which has been
much complained of there. But we must remember that while the
syndicalists get rid of majority rule, that is, that the majority of
individuals no longer govern, they merely give the rule to the majority
of groups. They have not given up the _principle_ of majority rule, they
simply apply it differently. There is a good deal of syndicalist
thinking that is not a penetrating analysis which presents us with new
principles, but a mere taking of ideas long accepted in regard to the
individual and transferring them to the field of the group. I have tried
to show in chapter XVII, “Democracy Not the Majority,” that the pressing
matter in politics is not whether we want majority rule or not, but to
decide upon those methods of association by which we get the greatest
amount of integration. The syndicalists are right, we do not want a
crowd, but I do not think most syndicalists have discovered the true use
of the true group.
The task before us now is to think out the way in which the group method
can be a regular part of our political system—its relation to the
individual on the one hand and to the state on the other. No man should
have a share in government as an isolated individual, but only as bound
up with others: the individual must be the unit, but an individual
capable of entering into genuine group relations and of using these for
an expanding scale of social, political and international life.
The best part of functionalism is that it presents to us the Service
State in the place of the old Sovereign State. This has two meanings:
(1) that the state is created by the actual services of every man, that
every man will get his place in the state through the service rendered:
(2) that the state itself is tested by the services it renders, both to
its members and to the world-community.[122] The weakness of
functionalism, as so far developed, is that it has provided no method
for all the functions of man to be included in the state. The essence of
democracy is the expression of every man in his multiple nature.
To sum up: no one group can enfold me, because of my multiple nature.
This is the blow to the theory of occupational representation. But also
no number of groups can enfold me. This is the reason why the individual
must always be the unit of politics, as group organization must be its
method. We _find_ the individual through the group, we _use_ him always
as the true individual—the undivided one—who, living link of living
group, is yet never embedded in the meshes but is forever free for every
new possibility of a forever unfolding life.
-----
Footnote 120:
The French syndicalists avowedly do not want democracy because it
“mixes the classes,” because, as they say, interests and aims mingle
in one great mass in which all true significance is lost.
Footnote 121:
See p. 184.
Footnote 122:
This is the basis of Duguit’s international law—the place of a state
in an international league is to be determined directly by services
rendered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXI
POLITICAL PLURALISM AND THE TRUE FEDERAL STATE
--------------
IN the last two chapters I have taken up the two fundamental laws of
life—the law of interpenetration and the law of multiples. (1)
Sovereignty, we have seen, is the power generated within the
group—dependent on the principle of interpenetration. (2) Man joins many
groups—in order to express his multiple nature. These two principles
give us federalism.
Let us, before considering the conception of federalism in detail, sum
up in a few sentences what has already been said of these two
principles. The fundamental truth of life we have seen is
self-perpetuating activity—activity so regnant, so omnipresent, so
all-embracing, that it banishes even the conception of anything static
from the world of being. Conscious evolution means that we must discover
the essential principle of this activity and see that it is at work in
the humblest of its modes, the smallest group or meeting of even two or
three. The new psychology has brought to political science the
recognition of interpenetration and the “compounding of consciousness”
as the very condition of all life. Our political methods must conform to
life’s methods. We must understand and follow the laws of association
that the state may appear, that our own little purposes may be
fulfilled. _Little_ purposes? Is there any great and small? The humblest
man and the price of his daily loaf—is this a small matter—it hangs upon
the whole world situation to-day. In order that the needs of the
humblest shall be satisfied, or in order that world purposes shall be
fulfilled—it matters not which—this principle of “compounding” must be
fully recognized and embodied in our political methods. It is this vital
intermingling which creates the real individual and knits men into the
myriad relations of life. We win through life our individuality, it is
not presented to us at the beginning to be exploited as we will. We win
a multiple individuality through our manifold relations. In the workings
of this dual law are rooted all of social and political progress, all
the hope and the potency of human evolution.
Only the federal state can express this dual principle of existence—the
compounding and the multiple compounding. It is an incomplete
understanding of this dual law which is responsible for the mistaken
interpretation of federalism held by some of the pluralists: a
conception which includes the false doctrines of division of power, the
idea that the group not the individual should be the unit of the state,
the old consent of governed theory, an almost discarded particularism
(group rights), and the worn-out balance theory.
The distributive sovereignty school assumes that the essential, the
basic part of federalism is the division of power between the central
and separate parts: while the parts may be considered as ceding power to
the central state, or the central state may be considered as granting
power to the parts, yet in one form or another federalism means a
divided sovereignty. Esmein says definitely, “_L’État fédératif ...
fractionne la souveraineté...._”[123] No, it should unite sovereignty.
There should be no absolute division of power or conferring of power.
The activity of whole and parts should be one.
In spite of all our American doctrines of the end of the eighteenth
century, in spite of our whole history of states-right theory and
sentiment, the division of sovereignty is not the main fact of the
United States government. From 1789 to 1861 the idea of a divided
sovereignty—that the United States was a voluntary agreement between
free, sovereign and independent states, that authority was “divided”
between nation and states—dictated the history of the United States. The
war of 1861 was fought (some of the pluralists seem not to know) to
settle this question.[124] The two ideas of federalism came to a death
grapple in our Civil War and the true doctrine triumphed. That war
decided that the United States was not a delegated affair, that it had a
“real” existence, and that it was sovereign, yet not sovereign over the
states as an external party, for it is composed of the states, but
sovereign over itself, merely over itself. You have not to be a mystic
to understand this but only an American. Those who see in a federal
union a mere league with rights and powers granted to a central
government, those who see in a federal union a balancing of sovereign
powers, do not understand true federalism. When we enumerate the powers
of the states as distinct from the powers of our national government,
some people regard this distinction as a dividing line between nation
and states, but the true “federalist” is always seeing the relation of
these powers to those of the central government. There are no absolute
divisions in a true federal union.
Do we then want a central government which shall override the parts
until they become practically non-existent? The moment federalism
attempts to transcend the parts it has become vitiated. Our Civil War
was not, as some writers assert, the blow to states-rights and the
victory of centralization. We shall yet, I believe, show that it was a
victory for true federalism.[125] The United States is neither to ignore
the states, transcend the states, nor to balance the states, it is to
_be_ the states in their united capacity.
Of course it is true that many Americans do think of our government as a
division of powers between central and local authority, therefore there
is as a matter of fact much balancing of interests. But as far as we are
doing this at Washington it is exactly what we must get rid of. The
first lesson for every member of a federal government to learn is that
the interests of the different parts, or the interests of the whole and
the interests of the parts, are never to be pitted against each other.
As far as the United States represents an interpenetration of thought
and feeling and interest and will, it is carrying out the aims of
federalism.
We have not indeed a true federalism in the United States to-day; we are
now learning the lesson of federalism. Some one must analyze for us the
difference between centralization and true federalism, which is neither
nationalization, states-rights, nor balance, and then we must work for
true federalism. For the federal government to attempt to do that which
the states should do, or perhaps even are doing, means loss of force,
and loss of education-by-experience for the states. On the other hand,
not to see when federal action means at the same time local development
and national strength, means a serious retarding of our growth. It is
equally true that when the states attempt what the federal government
alone should undertake, the consequence is general muddle.
And it is by no means a question only of what the federal government
should do and what it should not do. It is a question of the _way_ of
doing. It is a question of guiding, where necessary, without losing
local initiative or local responsibility. It is a question of so framing
measures that true federation, not centralization, be obtained.
Recently, even before the war, the tendency has been towards increased
federal action and federal control, as seen, for instance, in the
control of railroad transportation, of vocational education etc. The
latter is an excellent example of the possibility of central action
being true federal and not nationalized action. The federal government
upon application from a state grants to that state an amount for
vocational education equal to what the state itself will appropriate.
The administration of the fund rests with the state. The federal
government thus makes no assumptions. It _recognizes existing facts_.
And it does not impose something from without. The state must understand
its needs, must know how those needs can best be satisfied; it must take
responsibility. The experience of one state joins with the experience of
other states to form a collective experience.
As we watch federalism being worked out in actual practice at
Washington, we see in that practice the necessity of a distinction which
has been emphasized throughout this book as the contribution of
contemporary psychology to politics: nationalization is the Hegelian
reconciliation, true federalism is the integration of present
psychology. This means a genuine integration of the interests of all the
parts. If our present tendency is towards nationalization, we must learn
the difference between that and federalism and change it into the
latter. We need a new order of statesmen in the world to-day—for our
nation, for our international league—those who understand federalism.
But I have been talking of federalism as the integration of parts (the
states). We should remember also, and this is of the greatest
importance, that the United States is not only to be the _states_ in
their united capacity, but it is to be all the men and women of the
United States in _their_ united capacity. This it seems difficult for
many Europeans to understand; it breaks across their traditional
conception of federalism which has been a league, a confederation of
“sovereign” parts, not a true federal state. We of Massachusetts feel
ourselves not first children of Massachusetts and then through
Massachusetts of the United States. We belong directly to the United
States not merely through Massachusetts. True federalism means that the
individual, not the group, is the unit. A true federal government acts
directly on its citizens, not merely through the groups.
America has not led the world in democracy through methods of
representation, social legislation, ballot laws or industrial
organization. She has been surpassed by other countries in all of these.
She leads the world in democracy because through federalism she is
working out the secret of the universe actively. Multiple citizenship in
its spontaneous unifying is the foundation of the new state. Federalism
and democracy go together, you do not decide to have one or the other as
your fancy may be. We did not establish federalism in the United States,
we are growing federalism. Cohesion imposed upon us externally will lack
in significance and duration. Federalism must live through: (1) the
reality of the group, (2) the expanding group, (3) the ascending group
or unifying process.
The federal state is the unifying state. The political pluralists,
following James, use the “trailing and”[126] argument to prove that we
can never have a unified state, that there is always something which
never gets included. I should use it to prove that we can and must have
a unify_ing_ state, that this “and” is the very unifying principle. The
“trailing and” is the deepest truth of psychology. It is because of this
“and” that our goal must always be the unified state—the unified state
to be attained through the federal form. Our spirit it is true is by
nature federal, but this means not infinite unrelation but infinite
possibility of relation, not infinite strung-alongness but infinite
seeking for the unifying of the strung-alongness. I forever discover
undeveloped powers. This is the glory of our exhaustless nature. We are
the expression of the principle of endless growth, of endless appearing,
and democracy must, therefore, so shape its forms as to allow for the
manifestation of each new appearing. I grow possibilities; new
opportunities should always be arising to meet these new possibilities.
Then through group and group and ascending group I actualize more and
more. The “trailing and” is man’s task for ever and ever—to drag in more
spirit, more knowledge, more harmony. Federalism is the only possible
form for the state because it leaves room for the new forces which are
coming through these spiritual “ands,” for the myriad centres of life
which must be forever springing up, group after group, within a vital
state. Our impulse is at one and the same time to develop self and to
transcend self. It is this ever transcending self which needs the
federal state. The federal state is not a unified state, I agree, but it
is a unifying state, not a “strung-along” state.
Thus it is the federal state which expresses the two fundamental
principles of life—the compounding of consciousness and the endless
appearings of new forces.
I have said that the pluralists’ mistaken interpretation of federalism
includes the particularist notions of “consent” and “rights” and
“balance,” and that all these come from a false conception of
sovereignty. What does the new psychology teach us of “consent”? Power
is generated within the true group not by one or several assuming
authority and the others “consenting,” but solely by the process of
intermingling. Only by the same method can the true state be grown.
If divorce is to be allowed between the state and this group or that,
what are the grounds on which it is to be granted? Will incompatibility
be sufficient? Are the manufacturing north and agricultural south of
Ireland incompatible? Does a certain trade association want, like Nora,
a “larger life”? The pluralists open the gates to too much. They wish to
throw open the doors of the state to labor: yes, they are right, but let
them beware what veiled shapes may slip between those open portals.
Labor must indeed be included in the state, it is our most immediate
task, but let us ponder well the method.
The pluralists assume that the unified state must always claim authority
over “other groups.”[127] But as he who expresses the unity of my group
has no authority over me but is simply the symbol and the organ of the
group, so that group which expresses the unity of all groups—that is,
the state—should have no authority _as a separate group_, but only so
far as it gathers up into itself the whole meaning of these constituent
groups. Just here is the crux of the disagreement between the upholders
of the pluralistic and of the true monistic state: the former think of
the other groups as “coextensive” or “complementary” to the state—the
state is one of the groups to which we owe obedience; to the latter they
and all individuals are the constituents of the state.[128]
I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community.[129] This
those pluralists cannot accept who take the consent of the group as part
of their theory of the state. They thereby keep themselves in the
contract stage of thinking, they thereby and in so far range themselves
with all particularists.[130]
Secondly, in the divided sovereignty theory the old particularist
doctrine of individual rights gives way merely to a new doctrine of
group rights, the “inherent rights” of trade-unions or ecclesiastical
bodies. “Natural rights” and “social compact” went together; the
“inherent rights” of groups again tend to make the federal bond a
compact.[131] The state resting on a numerical basis, composed of an
aggregate of individuals, gives way only to a state still resting on a
numerical basis although composed now of groups instead of individuals.
As in the old days the individuals were to be “free,” now the groups are
to be “independent.” These new particularists are as zealous and as
jealous for the group as any nineteenth-century “individualist” was for
the individual. Mr. Barker, who warns us, it is true, against inherent
rights which are not adjusted to other inherent rights, nevertheless
says, “If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists.
Our individuals are becoming groups. We no longer write Man _vs._ the
State but The Group _vs._ the State.” But does Mr. Barker really think
it progress to write Group _vs._ the State? If the principle of
individual _vs._ the state is wrong, what difference does it make
whether that individual is one man or a group of men? In so far as these
rights are based on function, we have an advance in political theory; in
so far as we can talk of group _vs._ the state, we are held in the
thralls of another form of social atomism. It is the pluralists
themselves who are always saying, when they oppose crowd-sovereignty,
that atomism means anarchy. Agreed, but atomism in any form, of groups
as well as individuals, means anarchy, and this they do not always seem
to realize.
Mr. Barker speaks of the present tendency “to restrict the activity of
the state in order to safeguard the rights of the groups.” Many
pluralists and syndicalists are afraid of the state because for them the
old dualism is unsolvable. But as I have tried to show in the chapter on
“Our Political Dualism” that the rights of the state and the citizen are
never, ideally, incompatible, so now we should understand that our
present task is to develop those political forms within which rights of
group and state can be approaching coincidence.
As long as we settle down within any one group, we are in danger of the
old particularism. Many a trade-unionist succumbs to this danger. Love
of a group will not get us out of particularism. We can have egoism of
the group as well as egoism of the individual. Indeed the group may have
all the evils of the individual—aggrandizement of self, exploitation of
others etc. Nothing will get us out of particularism but the constant
recognition that any whole is always the element of a larger whole.
Group life has two meanings, one as important as the other: (1) it looks
in to its own integrated, coördinated activity, (2) it sees that
activity in relation to other activities, in relation to a larger whole
of which it is a part. The group which does not look out deteriorates
into caste. The group which thinks only of itself is a menace to
society; the group which looks to its manifold relations is part of
social progress. President Wilson as head of a national group has just
as clear a duty to other national groups as to his own country.
Particularism of the individual is dead, in theory if not in practice.
Let us not now fall into the specious error of clinging to our
particularism while changing its name from individual to group.
The outcome of group particularism is the balance of power theory,
perhaps the most pernicious part of the pluralists’ doctrine. The
pluralist state is to be composed of sovereign groups. What is their
life to be? They are to be left alone to fight, to compete, or, word
most favored by this school, to balance. With de Maeztu the balance of
power is confessedly the corner-stone of the new state. “The dilemma
which would make us choose between the State and anarchy is false. There
is another alternative, that of plurality and the balance of powers, not
merely within the nation but in the family of nations.”[132]
But whenever you have balance in your premise, you have anarchy in your
conclusion.
The weakness of the reasoning involved in the balance of power argument
has been exposed in so much of the war literature of the last three
years, which has exploded the balance of power theory between nations,
that little further criticism is needed here. Unity must be our aim
to-day. When you have not unity, you have balance or struggle or
domination—of one over others. The nations of Europe refuse domination,
aim at balance, and war is the result.
It seems curious that these two movements should be going on side by
side: that we are giving up the idea of the balance of nations, that we
are refusing to think any longer in terms of “sovereign” nations, and
yet at the same time an increasing number of men should be advocating
balancing, “sovereign” groups within nations. The pluralists object to
unity, but unity and plurality are surely not incompatible. The true
monistic state is merely the multiple state working out its own unity
from infinite diversity. But the unifying state shows us what to do with
that diversity. What advantage is that diversity if it is to be always
“competing,” “fighting,” “balancing?” Only in the unifying state do we
get the full advantage of diversity where it is gathered up into
significance and pointed action.
The practical outcome of the balance theory will be first antagonistic
interests, then jealous interests, then competing interests, then
dominating interests—a fatal climax.
The trouble with the balance theory is that by the time the
representatives of the balancing groups meet, it is too late to expect
agreement. The chief objection to pluralism is, perhaps, that it is
usually merely a scheme of representation, that its advocates are
usually talking of the kind of roof they want before they have laid the
foundation stones. No theory of the state can have vitality which is
merely a plan of representation. The new state must rest on a new
conception of living, on a true understanding of the vital modes of
association. The reason why occupational representation must bring
balance and competition is because the integrating of differences, the
essential social process, does not take place far enough back in our
life. If Parliaments are composed of various groups or interests, the
unification of those interests has to take place in Parliament. But then
it is too late. The ideas of the different groups must mingle earlier
than Parliament. We must go further back than our legislatures for the
necessary unifying. We do not want legislatures full of opposing
interests. The ideas of the groups become too crystallized by the time
their representatives get to the Parliament, in fact they have often
hardened into prejudices. Moreover, the representatives could not go
against their constituencies, they would be pledged to specific
measures. The different groups would come together each to try to
prevail, not to go through the only genuine democratic process, that of
trying to integrate their ideas and interests.
When the desire to prevail is once keenly upon us, we behave very
differently than when our object is the seeking of truth. Suppose I am
the representative in Congress of a group or a party. A bill is under
consideration. I see a weakness in that bill; if I point it out some one
else may see a remedy for it and the bill may be immensely improved. But
do I do this? Certainly not. I am so afraid of the bill being lost if I
show any weakness in it that I keep this insight to myself and my
country loses just so much. I cannot believe that occupational
representation will foster truth seeking or truth speaking. It seems to
me quite a case of the frying pan into the fire. Compromise and swapping
will be the order in Parliaments based solely on the vocational
principle. The different interests must fight it out in Parliament. This
is fundamentally against democracy because it is against the
psychological foundation of democracy, the fundamental law of
association. Democracy depends on the blending, not the balancing, of
interests and thoughts and wills. Occupational representation assumes
that you secure the interests of the whole by securing the interests of
every class, the old particularist fallacy transferred to the group.
Moreover, it is often assumed that because the occupational group is
composed of men of similar interests we shall have agreement in the
occupational group; it is taken for granted that in these economic
groups the agreement of opinion necessary for voting will be automatic.
But do poets or carpenters or photographers think alike on more than a
very few questions? What we must do is to get behind these electoral
methods to some fundamental method which shall _produce_ agreement.
Moreover, if the Cabinet were made up of these warring elements,
administration would be almost impossible. Lloyd-George’s Cabinet at
present is hampered by too much “difference.” I have throughout, to be
sure, been advocating the compounding of difference as the secret of
politics, but the compounding must begin further back in our life than
Parliaments or Cabinets.
And if you had group representation in England would not the Cabinet be
made up of the most powerful of the groups, and would not a fear of
defeat at any particular time mean overtures to enough of the other
groups to make success in the Cabinet? And would not an entirely
improper amount of power drift to the Premier under these circumstances?
Have we any leaders who would, could any one trust himself to, guide the
British Cabinet for the best interests of Great Britain under such
conditions as these?
To sum up: a true federalism cannot rest on balance or group-rights or
consent. Authority, obedience, liberty, can never be understood without
an understanding of the group process. Some of the advocates of guild
socialism oppose function to authority and liberty, but we can have
function _and_ liberty _and_ authority: authority of the whole through
the liberty of all by means of the functions of each. These three are
inescapably united. A genuine group, a small or large group, association
or state, has the right to the obedience of its members. No group should
be sovereign over another group. The only right the state has to
authority over “other” groups is as far as those groups are constituent
parts of the state. All groups are not constituent parts of the state
to-day, as the pluralists clearly see. Possibly or probably all groups
never will be, but such perpetually self-actualizing unity should be the
process. Groups are sovereign over themselves, but in their relation to
the state they are interdependent groups, each recognizing the claims of
every other. Our multiple group life is the fact we have to reckon with;
unity is the aim of all our seeking. And with this unity will appear a
sovereignty spontaneously and joyfully acknowledged. In true federalism,
voided of division and balance, lies such sovereignty.
-----
Footnote 123:
Quoted by Duguit.
Footnote 124:
It must be remembered, however, that while in the Civil War we
definitely gave up the compact theory held by us since the Mayflower
compact, yet we did not adopt the organism theory. The federal state
we have tried and are trying to work out in America is based on the
principles of psychic unity described in chapter X. The giving up of
the “consent” theory does not bring us necessarily to the organic
theory of society.
Footnote 125:
Duguit says that the United States confers the rights of a state on a
territory. No, it recognizes that which already exists.
Footnote 126:
“The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always
escapes.... The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic
than like an empire or a kingdom.” “A Pluralistic Universe,” 321–322.
Footnote 127:
When they say that the passion for unity is the urge for a dominant
One, they think of the dominant One as outside.
Footnote 128:
One of the pluralists says, “I cannot see that ... sovereignty is the
unique property of any one association.” No, not sovereignty over
“others,” but sovereignty always belongs to any genuine group; as
groups join to form another real group, the sovereignty of the more
inclusive group is evolved—that is the only kind of state sovereignty
which we can recognize as legitimate. (See ch. XXIX on “Political
Pluralism and Sovereignty.”)
Footnote 129:
See ch. XV.
Footnote 130:
Mr. Laski is an exception to many writers on “consent.” When he speaks
of consent he is referring only to the actual facts of to-day. Denying
the sovereignty postulated by the lawyers (he says you can never find
in a community any one will which is certain of obedience), he shows
that as a matter of fact the state sovereignty we have now rests on
consent. I do not wish to confuse the issue between facts of the
present and hopes for the future, but I wish to make a distinction
between the “sovereignty” of the present end the sovereignty which I
hope we can grow. This distinction is implicit in Mr. Laski’s book,
but it is lacking in much of the writing on the “consent of the
governed.”
Footnote 131:
Wherever you have the social contract theory in any form, and assent
as the foundation of power, there is no social process going on; the
state is an arbitrary creation of men. Group organization to-day must
give up any taint whatever of the social contract and rest squarely
and fully on its legitimate psychological basis.
Footnote 132:
This is perhaps a remnant of the nineteenth-century myth that
competition is the mode of progress.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXII
POLITICAL PLURALISM (CONCLUDED)
--------------
I HAVE spoken of the endeavor of the pluralist school to look at things
as they are as one of its excellencies. But a progressive political
science must also decide what it is aiming at. It is no logical argument
against a sovereign state to say that we have not one at present, or
that our present particularistic states are not successful. Proof of
actual plural sovereignty does not constitute an argument against the
ideal of unified or rather a unifying sovereignty. The question is do we
want a unifying state? And if so, how can we set about getting it?
The old theory of the monistic state indeed tended to make the state
absolute. The pluralists are justified in their fear of a unified state
when they conceive it as a monster which has swallowed up everything
within sight. It reminds one of the nursery rhyme of one’s childhood:
Algy met a bear
The bear was bulgy
The bulge was Algy.
The pluralists say that the monistic state _absorbs_ its members. (This
is a word used by many writers).[133] But the ideal unified state is not
all-absorptive; it is all-inclusive—a very different matter: we are not,
individual or group, to be absorbed into a whole, we are to be
constituent members of the whole. I am speaking throughout of the ideal
unified state, which I call a unify_ing_ state.
The failure to understand a unifying state is responsible for the dread
on the one hand of a state which will “demand” our allegiance, and on
the other of our being left to the clash of “divided” allegiances. Both
these bugbears will disappear only through an understanding of how each
allegiance can minister to every other, and also through a realization
that no single group can embrace my life. It is true that the state as
state no more than family or trade-union or church can “capture my
soul.” But this does not mean that I must divide my allegiance; I must
find how I can by being loyal to each be loyal to all, to the whole. I
am an American with all my heart and soul and at the same time I can
work daily for Boston and Massachusetts. I can work for my nation
through local machinery of city or neighborhood. My work at office or
factory enriches my family life; my duty to my family is my most
pressing incentive to do my best work. There is no competing here, but
an infinite number of filaments cross and recross and connect all my
various allegiances. We should not be obliged to choose between our
different groups. Competition is not the soul of true federalism but the
interlocking of all interests and all activities.
The true state must gather up every interest within itself. It must take
our many loyalties and find how it can make them one. I have all these
different allegiances, I should indeed lead a divided and therefore
uninteresting life if I could not unify them, Life _would_ be “just one
damned thing after another.” The true state has my devotion because it
gathers up into itself the various sides of me, is the symbol of my
multiple self, is my multiple self brought to significance, to
self-realization. If you leave me with my plural selves, you leave me in
desolate places, my soul craving its meaning, its home. The home of my
soul is in the state.
But the true state does not “demand” my allegiance. It is the
spontaneously uniting, the instinctive self-unifying of our multiple
interests. And as it does not “demand” allegiance, so also it does not
“compete” with trade-unions etc., as the present state often does, for
my allegiance. We have been recently told that the tendency of the state
is to be intolerant of “any competing interest or faith or hope,” but if
it is, the cure is not to make it tolerant, but to make it recognize
that the very substance of its life is all these interests and faiths
and hopes. Every group which we join must increase our loyalty to the
state because the state must recognize fully every legitimate interest.
Our political machinery must not be such that I get what I need by
pitting the group which most clearly embodies my need against the state;
it must be such that my loyalty to my trade-union is truly part of my
loyalty to the state.
When I find that my loyalty to my group and my loyalty to the state
conflict (if I am a Quaker and my country is at war, or if I am a
trade-unionist and the commands of nation and trade-union clash at the
time of a strike), I must usually, as a matter of immediate action,
decide between these loyalties. But my duty to either group or state is
not thereby exhausted: I must, if my disapproval of war is to be neither
abandoned nor remain a mere particularist conviction, seek to change the
policy of my state in regard to its foreign relations; I must, knowing
that there can be no sound national life where trade-unions are pitted
against the state, seek to bring about those changes in our industrial
and political organization by which the interests of my trade-union can
become a constituent part of the interests of the state.
I feel capable of more than a multiple allegiance, I feel capable of a
unified allegiance. A unified allegiance the new state will claim, but
that is something very different from an “undivided” allegiance. It is,
to use James’ phrase again, a compounding of allegiances. “Multiple
allegiance” leaves us with the abnormal idea of competing groups.
“Supplementary allegiance” gives us too fragmentary an existence.
“Coöperative allegiance” comes nearer the truth. Can we not perhaps
imagine a coöperative or unified allegiance, all these various and
varying allegiances actually living in and through the other?
We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the unifying
power: it is the state-principle when two or three are gathered
together, when any differences are harmonized. Our problem is how all
the separate community sense and community loyalty and community
responsibility can be gathered up into larger community sense and
loyalty and control.
One thing more it is necessary to bear in mind in considering the
unified state, and that is that a unifying state is not a static state.
We, organized as the state, may issue certain commands to ourselves
to-day, but organized as a plastic state, those commands may change
to-morrow with our changing needs and changing ideals, and they will
change through _our_ initiative. The true state is neither an external
force nor an unchanging force. Rooted in our most intimate daily lives,
in those bonds which are at the same time the strongest and the most
pliant, the “absolutism” of the true state depends always upon _our_
activity. The objectors to the unified state seem to imply that it is
necessarily a ready-made state, with hard and fast articulations,
existing apart from us, imposing its commands upon us which we must
obey; but the truth is that the state must be in perfect flux and that
it is utterly dependent upon us for its appearance. In so far as we
actualize it, it appears to us; we recognize that it is wrong, then we
see it in a higher form and actualize that. The true state is not an
arbitrary creation. It is a process: a continual self-modification to
express its different stages of growth which each and all must be so
flexible that continual change of form is twin-fellow of continual
growth.
But every objection that can be raised against the pluralists does not I
believe take from them the right to leadership in political thought.
First, they prick the bubble of the present state’s right to supremacy.
They see that the state which has been slowly forming since the Middle
Ages with its pretences and unfulfilled claims has not won either our
regard or respect. Why then, they ask, should we render this state
obedience? “[The state must] prove itself by what it achieves.” With the
latter we are all beginning to agree.
Genuine power, in the sense not of power actually possessed, but in the
sense of a properly evolved power, is, we have seen, an actual
psychological process. Invaluable, therefore, is the implicit warning of
the pluralists that to attain this power is an infinite task.
Sovereignty is always a-growing; our political forms must keep closely
in touch with the specific stage of that growth. In rendering the state
obedience, we assume that the state has genuine power (because the
consequences of an opposite assumption would be too disastrous) while we
are trying to approximate it. The great lesson of Mr. Laski’s book is in
its implication that we do not have a sovereign state until we make one.
Political theory will not _create_ sovereignty, acts of Parliament
cannot _confer_ sovereignty, only living the life will turn us, subjects
indeed at present, into kings of our own destiny.
Moreover, recently some of the pluralists are beginning to use the
phrase coöperative sovereignty[134] which seems happily to be taking
them away from their earlier “strung-along” sovereignty. If they press
along this path, we shall all be eager to follow.
Secondly, they recognize the value of the group and they see that the
variety of our group life to-day has a significance which must be
immediately reckoned with in political method. Moreover they repudiate
the idea that the groups are given authority by the state. An able
political writer recently said, “All other societies rest on the
authority given by the state. The state itself stands self-sufficient,
self-directing....” It is this school of thought which the pluralists
are combating and thereby rendering invaluable service to political
theory.
Third, and directly connected with the last point, they plead for a
revivification of local life. It is interesting to note that the
necessity of this is recognized both by those who think the state has
failed and by those who wish to increase the power of the state. To the
former, the group is to be the substitute for the repudiated state. As
for the latter, the Fabians have long felt that local units should be
vitalized and educated and interested, for they thought that socialism
would begin with the city and other local units. Neighborhood education
and neighborhood organization is then the pressing problem of 1918. All
those who are looking towards a real democracy, not the pretence of one
which we have now, feel that the most imminent of our needs is the
awakening and invigorating, the educating and organizing of the local
unit. All those who in the humblest way, in settlement or community
centre, are working for this, are working at the greatest political
problem of the twentieth century.
In the fourth place the pluralists see that the interest of the state is
not now always identical with the interests of its parts. It is to the
interest of England to win this war, they say, but England has yet to
prove that it is also for the interest of her working people.
In the fifth place, we may hail the group school as the beginning of the
disappearance of the crowd. Many people advocate vocational
representation because they see in it a method of getting away from our
present crowd rule, what they call numerical representation. They see
our present voters hypnotized by their leaders and manipulated by
“interests,” and propose the occupational group as a substitute for the
crowd. New political experiments must indeed be along this line. We must
guard only (1) that the “group” itself shall not be a crowd, (2) that
the union of groups shall not be a numerical union.
Finally, this new school contains the prophecy of the future because it
has with keenest insight seized upon the problem of identity, of
association, of federalism,[135] as the central problem of politics as
it is the central problem of life. The force of the pluralist school is
that it is not academic; it is considering a question which every
thoughtful person is asking himself. We are faced to-day with a variety
of group interests, with many objects demanding our enthusiasm and
devotion; our duty itself shines, not a single light showing a single
path, but shedding a larger radiance on a life which is most gloriously
not a path at all. Shall Boston or Washington hold me, my family, my
church, my union? With the complexity of interests increasing every day
on the outside, inside with the power of the soul to “belong” expanding
every day (the English and the French flags stir us hardly less than the
American now), with the psychologists talking of pluralism and the
political scientists of multiple sovereignty, with all this yet the soul
of man seeks unity in obedience to his essential nature. How is this to
be obtained? Social evolution is in the hands of those who can solve
this problem.
What is the law of politics that corresponds in importance to the law of
gravitation in the physical world? It is the law of interpenetration and
of multiples. I am the multiple man and the multiple man is the germ of
the unified state. If I live fully I become so enriched by the manifold
sides of life that I cannot be narrowed down to mere corporation or
church or trade-union or any other special group. The miracle of spirit
is that it can give itself utterly to all these things and yet remain
unimpaired, unexhausted, undivided. I am not a serial story to be read
only in the different instalments of my different groups. We do not give
a part to one group and a part to another, but we give our whole to each
and the whole remains for every other relation. Life escapes its
classifications and this is what some of the writers on group
organization do not seem to understand. This secret of the spirit is the
power of the federal principle. True federation multiplies each
individual. We have thought that federal government consisted of
mechanical, artificial, external forms, but really it is the spirit
which liveth and giveth life.
Let the pluralists accept this principle and they will no longer tell us
that they are torn by a divided allegiance. Let them carry their
pragmatism a step further and they will see that it is only by actual
living that we can understand an undivided allegiance. James tells us
that “Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in
living its own undivided life—it buds and bourgeons, changes and
creates.” This is the way we must understand an undivided allegiance. I
live forever the undivided life. As an individual I am the undivided
one, as the group-I, I am again the undivided one, as the state-I, I am
the undivided one—I am always and forever the undivided one, mounting
from height to height, always mounting, always the whole of me mounting.
-----
Footnote 133:
See p. 39, note.
Footnote 134:
Mr. Laski, I think.
Footnote 135:
It does not matter in the terms of which branch of study you express
it—philosophy, sociology, or political science—it is always the same
problem.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXIII
INCREASING RECOGNITION OF THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP
--------------
FROM the confessedly embryonic stage of thinking in which the movement
for group organization still is, two principal questions have emerged:
(1) shall the groups form a pluralistic or a unifying state, (2) shall
the economic group be the sole basis of representation? The first
question I have tried to answer, the second offers greater difficulties
with our present amount of experience. Men often discuss the
occupational vs. the neighborhood group on the pivotal question—which of
these is nearest a man? Benoist’s plea for the occupational group was
that politics must represent _la vie_. But, agreed as to that, we still
question whether the occupational group is the most complete embodiment
of _la vie_.
It is not, however, necessary to balance the advantages of neighborhood
and occupational group, for I am not proposing that the neighborhood
group take the place of the occupational. We may perhaps come to wish
for an integration of neighborhood and industrial groups—and other
groups too as their importance and usefulness demand—as their
“objective” value appears. In our neighborhood group we shall find that
we can correct many partial points of view which we get from our more
specialized groups. A director of a corporation will be more valuable to
his state and even to his corporation if he is at the same time the
member of a neighborhood group. It may be that we shall work out some
machinery by which the neighborhood group can include the occupational
group. All our functions must be expressed, but somewhere must come that
coördination which will give them their real effectiveness. We are not
yet ready to say what the machinery will be, only to recognize some of
the principles which should guide us in constructing that machinery. The
power of an individual is his power to live a vital group life. The more
your society is diversified in group life, the higher the stage of
civilization. Perhaps the destiny of the neighborhood group is to
interpret and correlate, to give full significance and value to, all the
spontaneous association which our increasingly fuller and more varied
life is constantly creating. It may be that the neighborhood group is
not so much to _include_ the others as to make each see its relation
through every other to every other.[136] The possible solution,
mentioned above, of the two houses of our legislatures and parliaments
dividing neighborhood and occupational representation, seems a little
crude now to our further analysis unless some practical integration is
being worked out at the same time in the local unit. But all this must
be a matter of experiment and experience, of patient trial and
open-minded observation.[137]
The salient fact, however, is that neighborhood and occupational groups,
either independently or one through the other, must both find
representation in the state. But we must remember that it is industry
which must be included in the state, not labor, but labor and capital.
This war certainly shows us the importance of the great organizations of
industry. Let them be integrated openly with the state on the side of
their public service, rather than allow a back-stairs connection on the
side of their “interests.” And let them be integrated in such manner
that labor itself is at last included in our political organization.
This will not be easy; as a matter of fact we have no more difficult, as
we have no more important, problem before us than the relation within
the state of one powerful organized body to another and of these bodies
to the state. The average American is against the growth of corporate
bodies. But this prejudice must go: we need strong corporate bodies not
to compete with the state but to minister to the state. Individualism
and concentrated authority have been struggling for supremacy with us
since the beginning of our government. From the beginning of our
government we have been seeking the synthesis of the two. That synthesis
is to be found in the recognition of organized groups, but not, I
believe, by taking away power from the state and giving to the group.
Some of the pluralists, in their reaction to the present fear of
powerful groups, advocate that groups should be given more and more
power. I agree with them so far, but their implication is that we shall
thereby have shorn the Samson locks of the state. This I do not believe
we want to do.
Every one sees the necessity to-day of the increase of state control as
a war measure, but some tell us that we should guard against its dangers
by giving to certain organizations within the state enough power to
“balance” the state. I insist that balance can never be the aim of sound
political method. We must first change our conception of the
state—substitute the Service State for the Sovereign State—then methods
must be devised within which such new conception can operate. We should,
indeed, give more and more power to the groups, or rather, because we
can never “give” power, we should recognize all the power which springs
up spontaneously within the state, and seek merely those methods by
which that self-generating power shall tend immediately to become part
of the strength of the state.
How absurd our logic has been. We knew that it took strong men to make a
strong state; we did not realize that those groups which represent the
whole industry and business of the country need not be rivals of the
state, but must be made to contribute to the state, must be the means by
which the state becomes great and powerful at the same time that it uses
that power for the well-being and growth of all. Our timidity has been
but the reflection of our ignorance. A larger understanding is what we
need to-day. There is no need to condemn the state, as do the
pluralists; there is no need to condemn our great corporate bodies, as
do their opponents. But full of distrust we shall surely be, on one side
or the other, until we come truly to understand a state and to create a
state which ministers continuously to its parts, while its parts from
hour to hour serve only the enhancement of its life, and through it, the
enhancement of the life of its humblest member.
The tendency to which we have long been subject, to do away with
everything which stood between man and the state, must go, but that does
not mean that we must fly to the other extreme and do away with either
the individual or the state. One of the chief weaknesses of political
pluralism is that it has so many of the earmarks of a reaction—the truth
is that we have groups _and_ man _and_ the state, all to deal with.
Neighborhood groups, economic groups, unifying groups, these have been
my themes, and yet the point which I wish to emphasize is not the kind
of group, but that the group whatever its nature shall be a genuine
group, that we can have no genuine state at all which does not rest on
genuine groups. Few trade-unionists in demanding that their organization
shall be the basis of the new state examine that organization to see
what right it has to make this demand. Most trade-unionists are
satisfied in their own organizations with a centralized government or an
outworn representative system. Labor can never have its full share in
the control of industry until it has learnt the secrets of the group
process. Collective bargaining must first be the result of a genuine
collective will before it can successfully pass on to directorate
representation, to complete joint control.[138]
It is significant that the guild socialists, in considering how
acrimonious disputes between guilds are to be avoided, say that “the
labor and brains of each Guild naturally [will evolve] a hierarchy to
which large issues of industrial policy might with confidence be
referred,” and “at the back of this hierarchy and finally dominating it,
is the Guild democracy....” But then guild socialism is to have no
different psychological basis from our present system. This is exactly
what we rely on now so patiently, so unsuccessfully—the lead of the few,
the following of the crowd, with the fiction that, as our government is
based on numbers, the crowd can always have what it wants; therefore, at
any moment what we have is what we have chosen—Tammany rule for
instance. We need a new method: the group process must be applied to
industrial groups as well as to neighborhood groups, to business groups,
to professional societies—to every form of human association. If the
labor question is to be solved by a system of economic control based on
economic representation instead of upon vital modes of association,
“industrial democracy” will fail exactly as so-called political
democracy has failed.
Perhaps this warning is particularly necessary at the present moment
because “group” control of industry seems imminent. Through the pressure
of the war guild socialism has made practical as well as theoretical
headway in England. There are two movements going on side by side, both
due it is true to the emergency of war, but neither of which will be
wholly lost when the war is over; it is the opinion of many, on the
contrary, that these movements are destined to shape a new state for
England. First, the government has assumed a certain amount of control
over munition plants, railroads, mines, breweries, flour mills and
factories of various kinds, and it has undertaken the regulation of
wages and prices, control of markets and food consumption, taxation of
profits etc.[139]
Secondly, at the same time that the state is assuming a larger control
of industry, it is inviting the workmen themselves to take part in the
control of industry. “The Whitley Report, adopted by the Reconstruction
Committee of the Cabinet, proposes not only a Joint Standing Industrial
Council for each great national industry, for the regular consideration
of matters affecting the progress and well-being of the trade, but
District Councils and Works Committees within each business upon which
capital and labor shall be equally represented.” These bodies will take
up “questions of standard wages, hours, overtime, apprenticeship, shop
discipline, ... technical training, industrial research and invention,
the adoption of improved machinery and processes, and all those matters
which are included under ‘scientific management.’”[140]
This is a step which goes far beyond arbitration and conciliation
boards. It gives to labor a positive share in the control of industry.
“Although it is not at present proposed to give any legal recognition to
this new machinery of economic government or any legal enforcement of
its decision, ... it may reasonably be expected that [these national
industrial councils] will soon become the effective legislature of the
industry.”
Most noteworthy is the general acceptance of this plan. “All classes
appear to be willing and even anxious to apply the principle of
representative self-government not only to the conduct of the great
trades but to their constituent businesses.” Undoubtedly the English
laborer has an increasing fear of bureaucracy and this is turning him
from state socialism: his practical experience during the war of
“tyrannical” bureaucracy in the government controlled industries has
lost state socialism many supporters.
The establishment of the Standing Industrial Councils is a step towards
guild socialism although (1) the determination of lines of production,
the buying and selling processes, questions of finance, everything in
fact outside shop-management, is at present left to the employers, and
(2) the capitalist is left in possession of his capital. But this
movement taken together with the one mentioned above, that is, the trend
towards state-ownership or joint ownership or partial control, has large
significance: the state to own the means of production, the producers to
control the conditions of production, seems like the next step in
industrial development, in government form,—the fact that these two go
together, that government form is to follow industrial development,
gives us large hope for the future.
The British Labor Party in 1917 formulated a careful plan for
reorganization with a declared object of common ownership of means of
production and “a steadily increasing participation of the organized
workers in the management.”[141] This wording is significant.
In America also the pressure of war has led to the recognition of labor
in the control of industry. Adjustment boards containing labor
representatives have been required of almost all private employers
signing contracts with the War and Navy Departments.[142] The policy of
the administration is to recognize collective bargaining. And the
President’s Mediation Commission, which imposed collective agreements on
the copper industry of Arizona, stated in its official report, “The
leaders of industry must ... [enable] labor to take its place as a
coöperator in the industrial enterprise.” Moreover, the workman is
gaining recognition not only in the management of the industry in which
he is engaged, but also at Washington. On most of the important
government boards which deal with matters affecting labor, labor is
represented. The work of the War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies
Board mark our advance in the treatment of labor questions.
The “National Party,” inaugurated in Chicago in October, 1917, composed
largely of socialists, had for one plank in its platform, “The chief
industries should be controlled by administrative boards upon which the
workers, the managers and the government should all be represented.”
Thus the old state socialism is passing.
In France long before the war we see the beginnings of syndicalism in
the steps taken to give to the actual teaching force of universities a
share in the administration of the department of education. In 1896–1897
university councils were established, composed of deans and two
delegates elected by each university faculty. While these councils are
under ministerial control, this is hailed as the beginning of
functionarist decentralization in France. In 1910 was organized the
representation of all the personnel of the service of post, telephone
and telegraph in regional and central councils of discipline, and also
advisory representation to the heads of the service.
The best part of syndicalism is its recognition that every department of
our life must be controlled by those who know most about that
department, by those who have most to do with that department. Teachers
should share both in the legislation and the administration affecting
education. Factory laws should not be made by a Parliament in which
factory managers and employees are not, or are only partially,
represented.
One movement toward syndicalism we see everywhere: the forming of
professional groups—commercial, literary, scientific, artistic—is as
marked as the forming of industrial groups. Any analysis of society
to-day must study its groupings faithfully. We are told too that in
France these professional groups are beginning to have political power,
as was seen in several large towns in the municipal elections before the
war. Similar instances are not wanting in England and America.
In Germany there are three strong “interest” organizations which have a
large influence on politics: the “Landlords’ League” which represents
the conservatives, the “Social Democrats” who represent labor, and the
“Hanseatic League for Manufactures, Trade and Industry” founded in 1909
with the express object of bringing forward its members as candidates
for the Reichstag and Landtags.[143]
We have an interesting instance in the United States of political
organization on occupational lines from which we may learn much—I refer
to the Nonpartisan league of North Dakota composed of farmers which,
inaugurated in 1915, in 1916–7 carried the state elections of North
Dakota, electing a farmer-governor, and putting their candidates in
three of the supreme court judgeships, and gaining 105 out of the 138
seats in the state legislature. The first object of the league was the
redress of economic injustice suffered by the farmer. They saw that this
must be done through concerted control of the political machinery. Of
the legislation they wished, they secured: (1) a new office of State
Inspector of Grains, Weights and Measures, (2) partial exemption of farm
improvements from taxation, (3) a new coöperative corporation law, and
(4) a law to prevent railroads from discriminating, in supplying
freight-cars, against elevators owned by farmers’ coöperative societies.
In 1917 a Farmers’ Nonpartisan League of the state of New York was
organized. In September, 1917, the North Dakota League became the
“National Nonpartisan League,” the organization spreading to several of
the neighboring states: Minnesota, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, etc. At
the North Dakota state primaries held in the summer of 1918, nearly all
the League’s candidates were nominated, thus insuring the continuance of
its control of the state government.
In Denmark we are told the battle rages between the agrarian party and
the labor party. More and more the struggle in Parliamentary countries
is becoming a struggle between interests rather than between parties
based on abstract principles. This must be fully taken into account in
the new state.
The hoped-for relation of industry to the state might be summed up thus:
we want a state which shall include industry without on the one hand
abdicating to industry, or on the other controlling industry
bureaucratically. The present plans for guild socialism or syndicate
control, while they point to a possible future development, and while
they may be a step on the way, as a scheme of political organization
have many weak points. Such experiments as the Industrial Councils of
England are interesting, but until further technique is worked out we
shall find that individual selfishness merely gives way to group
selfishness. From such experiments we shall learn much, but the new ship
of state cannot ride on such turbulent waters.
The part labor will take in the new state depends now largely upon labor
itself. Labor must see that it cannot reiterate its old cries, that it
need no longer demand “rights.” It is a question of a new conception of
the state and labor seeing its place within it. For a new state is
coming—we cannot be blind to the signs on every side, we cannot be deaf
to the voices within. Labor needs leaders to-day who are alive not to
the needs of labor, but to the needs of the whole state: then it will be
seen as a corollary how labor fits in, what the state needs from labor,
what labor needs from the state, what part labor is to have _in_ the
state.
-----
Footnote 136:
See pp. 199–201.
Footnote 137:
Some writers talk of trade representation vs. party organization as if
in the trade group you are rid of party. Have they studied the
politics of trade unionism? In neither the trade group nor the
neighborhood group do you automatically get rid of the party spirit.
That will be a slow growth indeed.
Footnote 138:
Yet perhaps the trade-union has been one of the truest groups, one of
the most effective teachers of genuine group lessons which we have yet
seen. Increased wages, improved conditions, are always for the group.
The trade-unionist feels group-wants; he seeks to satisfy these
through group action. Moreover the terms of a collective bargain
cannot be enforced without a certain amount of group solidarity. In
strikes workmen often sacrifice their own interests for what will
benefit the union: the individual—I may prefer his present wages to
the privations of a strike; the group-I wants to raise the wages of
the whole union.
Footnote 139:
I have not in this brief statement distinguished between government
“ownership,” “control,” “regulation,” etc. See “War-Time Control of
Industry” by Howard L. Gray.
Footnote 140:
“Representative Government in British Industry” by J. A. Hobson, in
_New Republic_, September 1, 1917.
Footnote 141:
See p. 120.
Footnote 142:
Following the precedent of England which provided, under the Munitions
of War act and other legislation, machinery (joint boards representing
employers and employed) for the prevention and adjustment of labor
disputes.
Footnote 143:
Christensen, “Politics and Crowd Morality,” p. 238.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART IV
THE DUAL ASPECT OF THE GROUP:
A UNION OF INDIVIDUALS, AN INDIVIDUAL IN A LARGER UNION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXXIV
THE MORAL STATE AND CREATIVE CITIZENSHIP
--------------
WE see now that the state as the appearance of the federal principle
must be more than a coördinating agency. It must appear as the great
moral leader. Its supreme function is moral ordering. What is morality?
The fulfilment of relation by man to man, since it is impossible to
conceive an isolated man: the father and mother appear in our mind and
with the three the whole infinite series. The state is the ordering of
this infinite series into their right relations that the greatest
possible welfare of the total may be worked out. This ordering of
relations is morality in its essence and completeness. The state must
gather up into itself all the moral power of its day, and more than
this, as our relations are widening constantly it must be the explorer
which discovers the kind of ordering, the kind of grouping, which best
expresses its intent.
But “things are rotten in Denmark.” The world is at present a moral
bankrupt, for nations are immoral and men worship their nations. We have
for centuries been thinking out the morals of individuals. The morality
of the state must now have equal consideration. We spring to that duty
to-day. We have the ten commandments for the individual; we want the ten
commandments for the state.
How is the state to gain moral and spiritual authority?
Only through its citizens in their growing understanding of the widening
promise of relation. The neighborhood group feeds the imagination
because we have daily to consider the wants of all in order to make a
synthesis of those wants; we have to recognize the rights of others and
adapt ourselves to them. Men must recognize and unify difference and
then the moral law appears in all its majesty in concrete form. This is
the universal striving. This is the trend of all nature—the harmonious
unifying of all. The call of the moral law is constantly to recognize
this. Our neighborhood group gives us preëminently the opportunity for
moral training, the associated groups continue it, the goal, the
infinite goal, the emergence of the all-inclusive state which is the
visible appearance of the total relativity of man in all right
connections and articulations.
The state accumulates moral power only through the spiritual activity of
its citizens. There is no state except through me. James’ deep-seated
antagonism to the idealists is because of their assertion that the
absolute is, always has been and always will be. The contribution of
pragmatism is that we must work out the absolute. You are drugging
yourselves, cries James, the absolute is real as far as you make it
real, as far as you bring forth in tangible, concrete form all its
potentialities. In the same way we have no state until we make one. This
is the teaching of the new psychology. We have not to “postulate” all
sorts of things as the philosophers do (“organic actuality of the moral
order” etc.), we have to _live_ it; if we can make a moral whole then we
shall know whether or not there is one. We cannot become the state
imaginatively, but only actually through our group relations. Stamped
with the image of All-State-potentiality we must be forever making the
state. We are pragmatists in politics as the new school of philosophy is
in religion: just as they say that we are one with God not by prayer and
communion alone, but by doing the God-deed every moment, so we are one
with the state by actualizing the latent state at every instant of our
lives. As God appears only through us, so is the state made visible
through the political man. We must gird up our loins, we must light our
lamp and set forth, we must _do_ it.
The federal state can be the moral state only through its being built
anew from hour to hour by the activity of all its members. We have had
within our memory three ideas of the individual’s relation to society:
the individual as deserving “rights” _from_ society, next with a duty
_to_ society, and now the idea of the individual as an activity _of_
society. Our relation to society is so close that there is no room for
either rights or duties. This means a new ethics and a new politics.
Citizenship is not a right nor a privilege nor a duty, but an activity
to be exercised every moment of the time. Democracy does not exist
unless each man is doing his part fully every minute, unless every one
is taking his share in building the state-to-be. This is the trumpet
call to men to-day. A creative citizenship must be made the force of
American political life, a trained, responsible citizenship always in
control creating always its own life. In most of the writing on American
politics we find the demand for a “creative statesmanship” as the most
pressing need of America to-day. It is indeed true that with so much
crystallized conservatism and chaotic radicalism we need leadership and
a constructive leadership, but the doctrine of true democracy is that
every man is and must be a creative citizen.
We are now awaking to this need. In the past the American conception of
government has been a machine-made not a man-made thing. We have wanted
a perfect machine which could be set going like an international
exhibition by pressing the button, but who is going to press the button?
We have talked about the public without thinking that we were the
public, of public opinion as something quite distinct from any opinion
of our own. It is partly because men have not wanted the trouble of
governing themselves that they have put all their faith in “good”
officials and “good” charters. “I hate this school, I wish it would burn
up,” wrote a boy home, “there’s too much old self-government about it,
you can’t have any fun.” Many of us have not wanted that kind of
government.
The idea of the state as a collection of units has fatally misled us in
regard to our duty as citizens. A man often thinks of his share in the
collective responsibility for Boston as a 1/500,000 part of the whole
responsibility. This is too small a part to interest him, and therefore
he often disregards such an infinitesimal duty altogether. Of course we
tell him about little drops of water, little grains of sand etc., but
hitherto such eloquence has produced little effect. This is because it
is untrue. We must somehow make it clear that the part of every man in a
great city is not analogous to the grain of sand in the desert, it is
not a 1/500,000 part of the whole duty. It is a part so bound up with
every other part that no fraction of a whole can represent it. It is
like the key of a piano, the value of which is not in its being 1/56 of
all the notes, but in its infinite relations to all the other notes. If
that note is lacking every other note loses its value.
Another twist in our ideas which has tended to reduce our sense of
personal responsibility has been that we have often thought of democracy
as a happy method by which all our particular limitations are lost sight
of in the general strength. Matthew Arnold said, “Democracy is a force
in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness
of each man taken by himself.” But there is no mysterious value in
people conceived of all together. A lot of ignorant or a lot of bad
people do not acquire wisdom and virtue the moment we conceive them
collectively. There is no alchemy by which the poornesses and weaknesses
of the individual get transmuted in the group; there is no trick by
which we can lose them in the whole. The truth is that all that the
individual has or is enhances society, all that the individual lacks,
detracts from society. The state will become a splendid thing when each
one of us becomes a splendid individual. Democracy does not mean being
lost in the mass, it means the contribution of every power I possess to
social uses. The individual is not lost in the whole, he makes the
whole.
A striking exception to the attitude of the average American in the
matter of his personal responsibility was Mr. John Jay Chapman’s visit
to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, to do penance for “that blot on American
history”—the burning a negro to death in the public square of
Coatesville—because he felt that “it was not the wickedness of
Coatesville but the wickedness of all America.”
But there are signs to-day of a new spirit among us. We have begun to be
restless under our present political forms: we are demanding that the
machine give way to the man, we want a world of men governed by the will
of men. What signs have we that we are now ready for a creative
citizenship?
Every one is claiming to-day a share in the larger life of society. Each
of us wants to pour forth in community use the life that we feel welling
up within us. Citizens’ associations, civic clubs and forums are
springing up every day in every part of the country. Men are seeking
through direct government a closer share in law-making. The woman
suffrage movement, the labor movement, are parts of this vital and
irresistible current. They have not come from surface springs, their
sources are deep in the life forces of our age. There is a more
fundamental cause of our present unrest than the superficial ones given
for the woman movement, or the selfish ones given for our labor
troubles: it is not the “demand for justice” from women nor the
“economic greed” of labor, but the desire for one’s place, for each to
give his share, for each to control his own life—this is the underlying
thought which is so profoundly moving both men and women to-day.
But a greater awakening has come since April, 1917. It has taken the
ploughshare of fire to reveal our true selves: this war is running the
furrows deep in the hearts of men and turning up desires of which they
were unconscious themselves in their days of ease. Men are flocking to
Washington at the sacrifice of business and personal interests willing
to pour out their all for the great stake of democracy; the moment came
when the possession of self-government was imperilled and all leapt
forward ready to lay down their lives to preserve it. This war has
revealed the deeper self with its deeper wishes to every man and he sees
that he prizes beyond life the power to govern himself. Now is the
moment to use all this rush of patriotism and devotion and love of
liberty and willingness to serve, and not let it sink back again into
its hidden and subterranean depths. Let us develop the kind of
institutions which will call forth and utilize these powers and energies
for peace as for war, for the works of peace are glorious if men can but
see the goal. Let us make a fitting abiding place for men’s innate
grandeur. Let us build high the walls of democracy and enlarge its
courts for our daily dwelling.
Then must men understand that in peace as in war ours is to be a life of
endeavor, of work, of conscious effort towards conscious ends. The
ordinary man is not to do his work and then play a little in order to
refresh himself, with the understanding that the world of industry and
the government of his country are to be run by experts. They are to be
run by him and he is to prepare himself to tackle his job. The
leisure-time problem is not how the workman can have more time for play,
it is how he can have more time for association, to take his share in
the integrated thought and will and responsibility which is to make the
new world. The “good citizen” is not he who obeys the laws, but he who
has an active sense of being an integral part of the state. This is the
essence and the basis of effective good citizenship. We are not part of
a nation because we are living within its boundaries, because we feel in
sympathy with it and have accepted its ideas, because we have become
naturalized. We are part of a nation only in so far as we are helping to
make that nation.
For this we must provide methods by which every man is enabled to take
his part. We are no longer to put business and political affairs in the
hands of one set of men and then appoint another set as watch-dogs over
them, with the people at best a sort of chorus in the background, at the
worst practically non-existent. But we are so to democratize our
industrial and our political methods that all will have a share in
policy and in responsibility. Exhortation to good citizenship is
useless. We get good citizenship by creating those forms within which
good citizenship can operate, by making it possible to acquire the habit
of good citizenship by the practice of good citizenship.
The neighborhood group gives the best opportunity for the training and
for the practice of citizenship. The leader of a neighborhood group
should be able to help every one discover his greatest ability, he
should see the stimulus to apply, the path of approach, that the
constituents of his neighborhood should not merely serve, but should
serve in exactly that way which will best fit themselves into the
community’s needs. The system of war registration where men and women
record what they are best able to do, might, through the medium of the
neighborhood group, be applied to the whole country. The chief object of
neighborhood organization is not to right wrongs, as is often supposed,
but to found more firmly and build more widely the right.
Moreover, neighborhood organization gives us a definite objective for
individual responsibility. We cannot understand our duty or perform our
duty unless it is a duty to _something_. It is because of the erroneous
notion that the individual is related to “society” rather than to a
group or groups that we can trace much of our lack of responsibility. A
man trusts vaguely that he is doing his duty to “society,” but such
vagueness gets him nowhere. There is no “society,” and therefore he
often does no duty. But let him once understand that his duty is to his
group—to his neighborhood group, to his industrial group—and he will
begin to see his duty as a specific, concrete thing taking definite
shape for him.
But my gospel is not for a moment of citizenship as a mere duty. We must
bring to politics passion and joy. It is not through the cramping and
stultification of desire that life is nobly lived, it is through seeing
life in its fulness. We want to use the whole of man. You cannot put
some of his energies on one side and some on the other and say some are
good and some bad—all are good and should be put to good use. Men follow
their passions and should do so, but they must purify their passions,
educate them, discipline and direct them. We turn our impulses to wrong
uses, but our impulses are not wrong. The forces of life should be used,
not stifled. It is not corruption, dishonesty, we have to fight; it is
ignorance, lack of insight, desires not transmuted. We want a state
which will transmute the instincts of men into the energies of the
nation. You cannot dam the stream entirely, you can only see that it
flows so as to irrigate and fructify. It all comes down to our fear of
men. If we could believe in men, if we could see that circle which
unites human passion and divine achievement as a halo round the head of
each human being, then social and political reorganization would no
longer be a hope but a fact. The old individualism feared men; the
corner-stone of the new individualism is faith in men. We need a
constructive faith and a robust faith, faith in men, in this world, in
this day, in the Here and the Now.
From the belief of savages in the spirits who ruled their fate to the
“power outside ourselves that makes for righteousness,” through the weak
man’s reliance on luck and the strong man’s reliance on his isolated
individuality, we have had innumerable forms of the misunderstanding of
responsibility. But all this is now changing. The distinguishing mark of
our age is that we are coming to a keen sense of personal
responsibility, that we are taking upon ourselves the blame for all our
evils, the charge for all our progress. We are beginning to realize that
the redemptive power is within the social bond, that we have creative
evolution only through individual responsibility.
The old ways of thinking are breaking up. The New Life is before us. Are
we ready? Are we making ourselves ready? A new man is needed for the New
Life—a man who understands self-discipline, who understands training,
who is willing to purge himself of his particularist desires, who is
conscious of relations as the stuff of his existence.
To sum up this chapter: the moral state is the task of man. This must be
achieved through the creative power of man as brought into visibility
and actuality through his group life. The great cosmic force in the womb
of humanity is latent in the group as its creative energy; that it may
appear the individual must do his duty every moment. We do not get the
whole power of the group unless every individual is given full value, is
giving full value. It is the creative spontaneity of each which makes
life march on irresistibly to the purposes of the whole. Our social and
political organization must be such that this group life is possible. We
hear much of “the wasted forces of our nation.” The neighborhood
organization movement is a movement to use some of the wasted forces of
this nation—it is the biggest movement yet conceived for conservation.
Have we more “value” in forests and water-power in America than in human
beings? The new generation cries, “No, this release of the spiritual
energy of human beings is to be the salvation of the nation, for the
life of all these human beings is the nation.” The success of democracy
depends (1) upon the degree of responsibility it is possible to arouse
in every man and woman, (2) on the opportunity they are given to
exercise that responsibility. The new democracy depends upon you and me.
It depends upon you and me because there is no one else in the world but
you and me. If I pledge myself to the new democracy and you pledge
yourself to the new democracy, a new motor force will be born in the
world.
We need to-day new principles. We can reform and reform but all this is
on the surface. What we have got to do is to change some of the
fundamental ideas of our American life. This is not being disloyal to
our past, it is exactly the opposite. Let us be loyal to our inheritance
and tradition, but let us understand what that inheritance and tradition
truly is. It is not _our_ tradition to stick to an outworn past, a
conventional ideal, a rigid religion. We are children of men who have
not been afraid of new continents or new ideas. In our blood is the
impulse to leap to the highest we can see, as the wills of our fathers
fixed themselves on the convictions of their hearts. To spring forward
and then to follow the path steadfastly is forever the duty of
Americans. We must _live_ democracy.
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XXXV
THE WORLD STATE
--------------
WE have seen the true state emerging through the working of the
federal principle, dual in its nature: (1) created by the law of
interpenetration, the unifying of difference, and (2) representing the
multiple man in his essential nature. Through the further working of
this principle the world-state appears.
The lesson of the group is imperative for our international relations.
No “alliances,” no balance of power, no agreements, no Hague tribunals
will now satisfy us; we know that it is only by creating a genuine
community of nations that we can have stability and growth—world peace,
world progress. What are the contributions of group psychology to the
League of Nations?
There is no way out of the hell of our present European situation until
we find a method of compounding difference. Superficial moralists try to
get us to like some other nationality by emphasizing all the things we
have in common, but war can never cease until we see the value of
differences, that they are to be maintained not blotted out. The
white-man’s burden is not to make others like himself. As we see the
value of the individual, of every individual, so we must see the value
of each nation, that all are needed. The pacifists have wanted us to
tolerate our enemies and the more extreme ones to turn the other cheek
when smitten. But tolerance is intolerable. And we cannot dwell among
enemies. The ideal of this planet inhabited by Christian enemies all
turning the cheek does not seem to me a happy one. We must indeed, as
the extreme militarists tell us, “wipe out” our enemies, but we do not
wipe out our enemies by crushing them. The old-fashioned hero went out
to conquer his enemy; the modern hero goes out to disarm his enemy
through creating a mutual understanding.
The failure of international society in the past is a fact fraught with
deep significance: the differences between nations are not to be
overcome by one class of people in a country uniting with the same class
in another country. The upper classes of Petrograd, Berlin, Paris and
London have very much the same manners and habits. This has not brought
peace. Artists the world over have a common language. Workingmen have
tried to break down international barriers by assuming that their
interests were so identical that they could unite across these barriers.
But this has failed to bring peace as the other _rapprochements_ have
failed. Why? Because they are all on the wrong track. International
peace is never coming by an increase of similarities (this is the
old-fashioned crowd-philosophy); international peace is coming by the
frankest and fullest kind of recognition of our differences.
Internationalism and cosmopolitanism must not be confused. The aim of
cosmopolitanism is for all to be alike; the aim of internationalism is a
rich content of widely varying characteristic and experience.
If it were true that we ought to increase the likenesses between
nations, then it would be legitimate for each nation to try to impose
its ideals upon others. In that case England would try to spread her
particular brand of civilization, and Germany hers, for if some one kind
of civilization has to prevail, each will want it to be his own. There
is not room on this planet for a lot of similar nations, but only for a
lot of different nations. A group of nations must create a group culture
which shall be broader than the culture of one nation alone. There must
be a world-ideal, a whole-civilization, in which the ideals and the
civilization of every nation can find a place. The ideal of one nation
is not antagonistic to the ideal of another, nor do these ideals exist
in a row side by side, but these different kinds of civilization are
bound up in one another. I am told that this is mysticism. It is the
most practical idea I have found in the world.
It is said that a mighty struggle is before us by-and-by when East meets
West, and in that shock will be decided which of these civilizations
shall rule the world—that this is to be the great world-decision. No,
the great world-decision is that each nation needs equally every other,
therefore each will not only protect, but foster and increase the other
that thereby it may increase its own stature.
Perhaps one of the most useful lessons to be learned from the group
process is a new definition of patriotism. Patriotism must not be
herd-instinct. Patriotism must be the individual’s rational,
self-conscious building of his country every moment. Loyalty means
always to create your group, not to wave a flag over it.[144] We need a
patriotism which is not “following the lead” but involved in a process
in which all take part. In the place of sentimental patriotism we want a
common purpose, a purpose evolved by the common life, to be used for the
common life. Some of our biologists mislead us when they talk of the
homogeneity of the herd as the aim of nations. The nation may be a herd
at present. What we have to do is to make it a true group.
Internationalism must be based upon group units, not upon herd or crowd
units, that is, upon people united not by herd instinct but by group
conviction. If a nation is a crowd, patriotism is mere hypnotism; if a
nation is a true federal state built up of interlocking and ascending
groups, then patriotism is self-evolved. When you are building up an
association or a nation you have to preach loyalty; later it is part of
the very substance which has been built.
Then genuine loyalty, a self-evolved loyalty, will always lead the way
to higher units. Nationalism looks out as well as in. It means, in
addition to its other meanings, every nation being responsible to a
larger whole. It is this new definition of patriotism which America is
now learning. It is this new patriotism which must be taught our
children, which we must repeat to one another on our special patriotic
day, July 4th, and on every occasion when we meet. This new patriotism
looks in, it looks out: we have to learn that we are not wholly
patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we
are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take
her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations. Nationalism is
not my nation for itself or my nation against others or my nation
dominating others, but simply my nation taking its part as “an equal
among equals.”
Shall this hideous war go on simply because people will not understand
nationalism? Nationalism and internationalism are not opposed. We do not
lop off just enough patriotism to our country to make enough for a
world-state: he who is capable of the greatest loyalty to his own
country is most ready for a wider loyalty. There is possible no
world-citizenship the ranks of which are to be filled by those who do
not care very much for their own country. We have passed through a
period when patriotism among cultivated people seemed often to be at a
discount—the ideal was to be “citizens of the world.” But we see now
that we can never be “citizens of the world” until we learn how to be
citizens of America or England or France. Internationalism is not going
to swallow up nationalism. Internationalism will accentuate, give point,
significance, meaning, value, reality, to nationalism.
Whether we can have a lasting peace or not depends upon whether we have
advanced far enough to be capable of loyalty to a higher unit, not as a
substitute for our old patriotism to our country, but in addition to it.
Peace will come by the group consciousness rising from the national to
the international unit. This cannot be done through the imagination
alone but needs actual experiments in world union, or rather experiments
first in the union of two or more nations. Men go round lecturing to
kind-hearted audiences and say, “Can you not be loyal to something
bigger than a nation?” And the kind-hearted audiences reply, “Certainly,
we will now, at your very interesting suggestion, be loyal to a league
of nations.” But this is only a wish on their part, its realization can
never come by _wishing_ but only by _willing_, and willing is a process,
you have to put yourself in a certain place from which to will. We must,
in other words, try experiments with a league of nations, and out of the
actual life of that league will come loyalty to it. We are not ready for
the life of the larger group because some teacher of ethics has taught
us “to respect other men’s loyalties.” We are ready for it when our
experience has incorporated into every tissue of our thought-life the
knowledge that we need other men’s loyalties. Loyalty, therefore, is not
the chickens running back to the coop, also it is not a sentiment which
we decide arbitrarily to adopt, it is the outcome of a process, the
process of belonging.
Of course there must be some motive for the larger union: we shall
probably first get nations into an international league through their
economic interests; then when we have a genuine union the sense of
belonging begins. When men have felt the need of larger units than
nations and have formed “alliances,” they have not felt that they
belonged to these alliances. The sense of belonging ended at the British
Empire or the German Empire. But the reason Germany became one empire
and Italy one nation was because an economic union brought it home to
the people daily that they were Italians, not Venetians, Germans, not
Bavarians. We must feel the international bond exactly as we feel the
national bond. Some one in speaking of the difficulties of
internationalism has said, “It is easier to make sacrifices for those
whom you know well, your own countrymen, than for strangers.” But
internationalism has not come when we decide that we are willing to make
sacrifices for strangers. This fallacy has been the stumbling block of
some of the pacifists. To make sacrifices for “strangers” will never
succeed. We make sacrifices for our own nation because of group feeling.
We shall make sacrifices for a league of nations when we get the same
feeling of a bond.
We may, perhaps, look forward to Europe going through something of the
same process which we have gone through in the United States. The
colonies joined in a federal government. The union was something
entirely apart from themselves. The men of Massachusetts were first and
last men of Massachusetts. We belonged for good reasons to a larger
unit, but it was only very slowly that we gained any actual feeling of
belonging to the United States, of loving it because we were a
constituent part of it, because we were helping to make it, not just as
an external authority to which we had promised loyalty. The American
colonies did not undertake to look pleasant and be kind to one another,
they went to work and learned how to live together. And state jealousy
has been diminished every year, not by any one preaching to us, but by
the process of living together. This is what may happen in a league of
nations.
The great lesson of the group process, in which all others are involved,
is that particularism, however magnified, is no longer possible. There
is no magic by which selfishness becomes patriotism the moment we can
invoke the nation. The change must be this: as we see now that a nation
cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely protecting the rights of
its members, so we must see that we can have no sound condition of world
affairs merely by the protection of each individual nation—that is the
old theory of individual rights. Each nation must play its part in some
larger whole. Nations have fought for national rights. These are as
obsolete as the individual rights of the last century. What raises this
war to a place never reached by any war before is that the Allies are
not fighting for national rights. As long as history is read the
contribution of America to the Great War will be told as America’s
taking her stand squarely and responsibly on the position that national
particularism was in 1917 dead.
And as we are no longer to talk of the “rights” of nations, so no longer
must “independent” nations be the basis of union. In our present
international law a sovereign nation is one that is independent of other
nations—surely a complete legal fiction. And when stress is laid on
independence in external relations as the nature of sovereignty, it is
but a step to the German idea that independence of others can develop
into authority over others. This tendency is avoided when we think of
sovereignty: (1) as _looking in_, as authority over its own members, as
the independence which is the result of the complete interdependence of
those members; and when we at the same time (2) think of this
independence as _looking out_ to other independences to form through a
larger interdependence the larger sovereignty of a larger whole.
Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the
keynote of the relations of individuals within a nation. As no man can
be entirely free except through his perfected relation to his group, so
no nation can be truly independent until a genuine union has brought
about interdependence. As we no longer think that every individual has a
final purpose of his own independent of any community, so we no longer
think that each nation has a “destiny” independent of the “destiny” of
other nations.
The error of our old political philosophy was that the state always
looks in: it has obligations to its members, it has none to other
states; it merely enters into agreements with them for mutual benefit
thereby obtained. International law of the future must be based not on
nations as “sovereigns” dealing with one another, but on nations as
members of a society dealing with one another. The difference in these
conceptions is enormous. We are told that cessions of sovereignty must
be the basis of an international government. We cannot have a lasting
international union until we entirely reform such notions of
sovereignty: that the power of the larger unit is produced mechanically
by taking away bits of power from all the separate units. Sovereignty is
got by giving to every unit its fullest value and thereby giving birth
to a new power—the power of a larger whole. We must give up “sovereign”
nations in the old sense, but with our present definition of sovereignty
we may keep all the real sovereignty we have and then unite to evolve
together a larger sovereignty.
This idea must be carefully worked out: we can take each so-called
“sovereign power” which we are thinking of “delegating” to a League of
Nations and we can see that that delegating does not make us individual
nations less “sovereign” and less “free” but more so—it is the Great
Paradox of our time. The object of every proper “cession” of sovereignty
is to make us freer than ever before. Is it to be “sovereign” and “free”
for nations suspiciously and fearfully to keep sleepless watch on one
another while they build ship for ship, plane for plane? Have England
and Germany been proudly conscious of their “freedom” when thinking of
Central Africa? When the individual nations give up their separate
sovereignty—as regards their armaments, as regards the control of the
regions which possess the raw materials, as regards the great waterways
of the world, as regards, in fact, all which affects their joint
lives—the falling chains of a real slavery will reverberate through the
world. For unrelated sovereignty, with world conditions as they are
to-day, is slavery.
The idea of “sovereign” nations must go as completely as is disappearing
the idea of sovereign individuals. The isolation of sovereign nations is
so utterly complete that they cannot really (and I mean this literally)
even see each other. The International League is the one solution for
the relation of nations. Whenever we say we can have a “moral”
international law on any other basis, we write ourselves down pure
sentimentalists.
There are many corollaries to this project. We do not need, for
instance, a more vigorous protection of neutrals, but the abolition of
neutrals. The invasion of the rights of neutrals in this war by both
sides shows that we can no longer have neutrals in our scheme of union;
all must come within the bond.
Further, diplomatic relations will be entirely changed. “Honor among
thieves” means loyalty to your group: while to lie or to try to get the
better of your own particular group is an unpardonable offence, you may
deceive an outsider. We see now the psychological reason for this.
Diplomatic lying will not go until diplomatists instead of treating with
one another as members of alien groups consider themselves all as
members of one larger group—the League of Nations.
Moreover, one nation cannot injure another merely; the injury will be
against the community, and the community of nations will look upon it as
such. Under our present international system the attack of one nation on
another is the same as the attack of one outlaw on another. But under a
civilized international system, the attack of one individual on another
is an attack on society and the whole society must punish it. The
punishment, however, will not consist in keeping the offender out of the
alliance. If the Allies win, Germany should not be punished by keeping
her out of a European league; she must be shown how to take her place
within it. And it must be remembered that we do not join a league of
nations solely to work out our relations to one another, but to learn to
work for the larger whole, for international values. Until this lesson
is learned no league of nations can be successful.
Finally, the League of Nations is against the theory of the balance of
power, but this has been already considered in the chapter on The
Federal State.
To sum up all these particularist fallacies: live and let live can never
be our international motto. _Laissez-faire_ fails as ignominiously in
international relations as within a single nation. Our new motto must
be, Live in such manner that the fulness of life may come to all. This
is “the ledge and the leap” for twentieth-century thought.
Organized coöperation is in the future to be the basis of international
relations. We are international in our interests. We do not want an
American education, an English education, a French education.
“Movements” seek always an international society. We have international
finance. Our standards of living are becoming internationalized.
Socially, economically, in the world of thought, national barriers are
being broken down. It is only in politics that we are national. This
must soon change: with all these _rapprochements_ we cannot be told much
longer of fundamental differences between us which can be settled only
by murdering each other.
People thought that Italy could not be united, that the duchies of
Germany would never join. Cavour and Bismark had indeed no easy part.
But if one hundred millions of people in Central Europe can be made to
see the evils of separation, cannot others? With our greater facilities
of communication, with our increased commercial intercourse and our
increased realization of the interdependence of nations (a manufacturing
nation cannot get along without the food-producing nations, etc.), this
ought not now to be impossible. Or has the single state exhausted our
political ability? Are we willing to acknowledge this? We have had very
little idea yet of a community of nations. The great fault of Germany is
not that she overestimates her own power of achievement, which is indeed
marvellous, but that she has never yet had any conception of a community
of nations. Let her apply all her own theory of the subordination of the
individual to the whole to the subordination of Germany to an allied
Europe, and she would be a most valuable member of a European league.
The group process thus shows us that a genuine community of nations
means the correlation of interests, the development of an international
ethics, the creation of an international will, the self-evolving of a
higher loyalty, and above all and including all, the full responsibility
of every nation for the welfare of every other.
With such an aim before us courts of arbitration seem a sorry makeshift.
We are told that as individuals no longer fight duels but take their
disputes into the courts, so nations must now arbitrate, that is, take
their dispute to some court. But what has really ousted duels has not
been the courts but a different conception of the relation between men;
so what will do away with war will not be courts of arbitration, but a
different conception of the relations between nations. We need machinery
not merely for settling disputes but for preventing disputes from
arising; not merely for interpreting past relations, but for giving
expression to new relations; not merely to administer international law,
but to make international law—not a Hague court but an international
legislature.
A community of nations needs a constitution, not treaties. Treaties are
of the same nature as contract. Just as in internal law contract is
giving way to the truer theory of community, so the same change must
take place in international law. It is true that the first step must be
more progressive treaties before we can hope for a closer union, but let
us keep clearly before us the goal in order that in making these
treaties they shall be such that they will open the way in time to a
real federation, to an international law based not on “sovereign”
nations.
We have already seen that it is the _creation_ of a collective will
which we need most in our social and political life, not the enforcing
of it; it is the same with a league of nations—we must create an
international will. We want neither concession nor compromise. And a
vague “brotherhood” is certainly not enough. As we have seen the group
as the workshop for the making of the collective will, so we see that we
cannot have an international will without creating a community of
nations. Group psychology will revolutionize international law. The
group gets its authority through the power it has _in itself_ of
integrating ideas and interests. No so-called collective will which is
not a genuine collective will, that is, which is not evolved by this
process, will have real authority; therefore no stable international
relations are possible except those founded on the creation of an actual
community of nations.
What interests us most in all the war literature is any proposed
_method_ of union. The importance of an international league as a peace
plan is that you can never aim directly at peace, peace is what you get
through other things. Much of the peace propaganda urges us to choose
peace rather than war. But the decision between “war” or “peace” never
lies within our power. These are mere words to gather up in convenient
form of expression an enormous amount that is underneath. All sorts of
interests compete, all sorts of ideas compete or join: if they can join,
we have peace; if they must compete, we have war. But war or peace is
merely an outcome of the process; peace or war has come, by other
decisions, long before the question of peace or war ever arises.
All our hope therefore of future international relations lies, not in
the ethical exhortations of the pacifists, nor in plans for an economic
war, but in the recognition of the possibility of a community of
nations.
In making a plea for some experiment in international coöperation, I
remember, with humiliation, that we have fought because it is the easy
way. Fighting solves no problems. The problems which brought on this war
will all be there to be settled when the war ends. But we have war as
the line of least resistance. We have war when the mind gives up its job
of agreeing as too difficult.[145] It is often stated that conflict is a
necessity of the human soul, and that if conflict should ever disappear
from among us, individuals would deteriorate and society collapse. But
the effort of agreeing is so much more strenuous than the comparatively
easy stunt of fighting that we can harden our spiritual muscles much
more effectively on the former than the latter. Suppose I disagree with
you in a discussion and we make no effort to join our ideas, but “fight
it out.” I hammer away with my idea, I try to find all the weakest parts
of yours, I refuse to see anything good in what you think. That is not
nearly so difficult as trying to recognize all the possible subtle
interweavings of thought, how one part of your thought, or even one
aspect of one part, may unite with one part or one aspect of one part of
mine etc. Likewise with coöperation and competition in business:
coöperation is going to prove so much more difficult than competition
that there is not the slightest danger of any one getting soft under it.
The choice of war or peace is not the choice between effort and
stagnation. We have thought of peace as the lambs lying down together
after browsing on the consciousness of their happy agreements. We have
thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have
thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The
opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of
rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences. I knew a
young business man who went to the Spanish war who said when he came
back that it had been as good as going to a sanitarium; he had simply
obeyed commands and had not made a decision or thought a thought since
he left home. From war to peace is not from the strenuous to the easy
existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to
the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life.
If, however, peace means for you simply the abstinence from bloodshed,
if it means instead of the fight of the battlefield, the fight of
employer and employed, the fight of different interests in the
legislature, the fight of competing business firms, that is a different
matter. But if you are going to try to _solve_ the problems of capital
and labor, of competing business interests, of differing nations, it is
a tougher job than standing up on the battlefield.
We are told that when the North Sea fishermen found that they were
bringing flabby codfish home to market, they devised the scheme of
introducing one catfish into every large tank of codfish. The consequent
struggle hardened the flesh of the fish and they came firm to market.
The conclusion usually drawn from all such stories is that men need
fighting to keep them in moral condition. But what I maintain is that if
we want to train our moral muscles we are devising a much harder job for
them if we try to agree with our catfish than to fight him.
Civilization calls upon us to “Agree with thine adversary.” It means a
supreme effort on our part, and the future of the world depends upon
whether we can make this effort, whether we are equal to the cry of
civilization to the individual man, to the individual nation. It is a
supreme effort because it is not, as sometimes thought, a matter of
feeling. To feel kindly, to desire peace—no, we must summon every force
of our natures, trained minds and disciplined characters, to find the
_methods_ of agreement. We may be angry and fight, we may feel kindly
and want peace—it is all about the same. The world will be regenerated
by the people who rise above both these passive ways and heroically
seek, by whatever hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which
people _can_ agree.
What has this young twentieth century gone out to fight? Autocracy? The
doctrine of the right of might? Yes, and wherever found, in Germany or
among ourselves. And wherever found these rest on the consciousness of
separateness. It is the conviction of separateness which has to be
conquered before civilization can proceed. Community must be the
foundation stone of the New State.
* * * * *
The history of modern times from the point of view of political science
is the history of the growth of democracy; from the point of view of
social psychology it is the history of the growth of the social
consciousness. These two are one. But the mere consciousness of the
social bond is not enough. Frenssen said of Jörn Uhl, “He became
conscious of his soul, but it was empty and he had now to furnish it.”
We have become conscious of a social soul, we have now to give it
content. It is a long way from the maxim, “Religion is an affair between
man and his Maker,” to the cry of Mazzini, “Italy is itself a religion,”
but we surely to-day have come to see in the social bond and the
Creative Will, a compelling power, a depth and force, as great as that
of any religion we have ever known. We are ready for a new revelation of
God. It is not coming through any single man, but through the men and
men who are banding together with one purpose, in one consecrated
service, for a great fulfilment. Many of us have felt bewildered in a
confused and chaotic world. We need to focus both our aspirations and
our energy; we need to make these effective and at the same time to
multiply them by their continuous use. This book is a plea for the more
abundant life: for the fulness of life and the growing life. It is a
plea against everything static, against the idea that there need be any
passive material within the social bond. It is a plea for a splendid
progress dependent upon every splendid one of us. We need a new faith in
humanity, not a sentimental faith or a theological tenet or a
philosophical conception, but an active faith in that creative power of
men which shall shape government and industry, which shall give form
equally to our daily life with our neighbor and to a world league.
-----
Footnote 144:
See pp. 58–59.
Footnote 145:
It has usually been supposed that wars have been the all-important
element in consolidating nations; I do not want to disregard this
element, I want only to warn against its over emphasis. Moreover, the
way in which wars have had a real and permanent influence in the
consolidation of nations is by the pressure which they have exerted
upon them in showing them that efficiency is obtained by the closest
coöperation and coördination of all our activities, by a high degree
of internal organization.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX
THE TRAINING FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY
--------------
THE training for the new democracy must be from the cradle—through
nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our
life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government classes or
current events courses or lessons in civics. It is to be acquired only
through those modes of living and acting which shall teach us how to
grow the social consciousness. This should be the object of all day
school education, of all night school education, of all our supervised
recreation, of all our family life, of our club life, of our civic life.
When we change our ideas of the relation of the individual to society,
our whole system of education changes. What we want to teach is
interdependence, that efficiency waits on discipline, that discipline is
obedience to the whole of which I am a part. Discipline has been a word
long connected with school life—when we know how to teach _social_
discipline, then we shall know how to “teach school.”
The object of education is to fit children into the life of the
community.[146] Every coöperative method conceivable, therefore, must be
used in our schools for this end. It is at school that children should
begin to learn group initiative, group responsibility—in other words
social functioning. The group process must be learnt by practice. We
should therefore teach subjects which require a working together, we
should have group recitations, group investigations, and a gradual plan
of self-government. Every child must be shown his place in the life that
builds and his relation to all others who are building. All the little
daily and hourly experiences of his interrelations must be constantly
interpreted to him. Individual competition must, of course, disappear.
All must see that the test of success is ability to work with others,
not to surpass others.
Group work is, indeed, being introduced into our more progressive
schools. Manual training, especially when the object made is large
enough to require the work of two or more, cooking classes, school
papers, printing classes etc., give opportunity for organization into
groups with the essential advantage of the group: coördinated effort.
Moreover, we should have, and are beginning to have, group recitations.
A recitation should not be to test the pupil but to create something.
Every pupil should be made to feel that his point of view is slightly
different from any one’s else, and that, therefore, he has something to
contribute. He is not to “recite” something which the teacher knows
already; he is to contribute not only to the ideas of his fellow-pupils
but also to those of his teacher. And this is not impossible even for
the youngest. Once when I was in Paris I made the acquaintance of little
Michael, a charming English boy of five, who upon being taken to the
Louvre by his mother and asked what he thought of the Mona Lisa,
replied, with a most pathetic expression, “I don’t think she looks as if
she liked little boys.” That was certainly a contribution to Mona Lisa
criticism.
But after the child has been taught in his group recitation to
contribute his own point of view, he must immediately be shown that he
cannot over-insist upon it; he must be taught that it is only a part of
the truth, that he should be eager for all the other points of view,
that all together they can find a point of view which no one could work
out alone. In other words we can teach collective thinking through group
recitations.
A group recitation may give each pupil the feeling that a whole is being
created: (1) by different points of view being brought out and
discussed, and (2) by every one contributing something different: one
will do some extra reading, one will bring clippings from newspapers and
periodicals, one will take his camera to the Art Museum and take
pictures of the casts. Thus we get life, and the lesson of life, into
that hour. Thus may we learn the obligation and the joy of “belonging,”
not only when our school goes to play some other school, but in every
recitation hour of the day. The old idea was that no one should help
another in a recitation; the new idea is that every one is to help every
one else. The kind of competition you have in a group recitation is
whether you have added as much as any one else. You now feel responsible
not only for your contribution but that the recitation as a whole should
be a worthy thing. Such an aim will overcome much of the present
class-room indifference.
Many more of the regular school activities could be arranged on a group
basis than is now thought possible—investigation for instance. This is a
big word, but the youngest children sent out to the woods in spring are
being taught “original research.”
Again, every good teacher teaches her pupils to “assemble” his different
thoughts, shows them that a single thought is not useful, but only as it
is connected with others. The modern teacher is like the modern curator
who thinks the group significance of a particular classification more
important than the significance of each isolated piece. The modern
teacher does not wish his pupils’ minds to be like an old-fashioned
museum—a hodge-podge of isolated facts—but a useful workshop.
Again, to learn genuine discussion should be considered an essential
part of our education. Every child must be trained to meet the clash of
difference—difference of opinion, difference of interest—which life
brings. In some universities professors are putting aside one hour a
week for a discussion hour. This should be done in all colleges and
schools, and then it should be seen to that it is genuine discussion
that takes place in that hour.
Moreover, in many schools supervised playground and gymnasium activities
are being established, athletic clubs encouraged, choruses and dramatic
leagues developed, not only because of their value from the health or
art point of view, but because they teach the social lesson.
The question of self-government in the schools is too complicated a
subject and has met with too many difficulties, notwithstanding its
brilliant successes, to take up here, but undoubtedly some amount of
self-control can be given to certain groups, and in the upper grades to
whole schools, and when this can be done no training for democracy is
equal to the practice of democracy.
The aim is to create such a mental atmosphere for children that it is
natural for them to wish to take their part, to make them understand
that citizenship is not obeying the laws nor voting, nor even being
President,[147] but that all the visions of their highest moments, all
the aspirations of their spiritual nature can be satisfied through their
common life, that only thus do we get “practical politics.”
In our industrial schools it is obviously easier to carry further the
teaching of coördinated effort than in the regular day schools.
Our evening schools must adopt the methods of the more progressive day
schools, and must, as they are doing in many cases, add to the usual
activities of evening schools.
The most conscious and deliberate preparation for citizenship is given
by the “School Centres” now being established all over the United
States. The School Centre movement is a movement to mould the future, to
direct evolution instead of trusting to evolution. The subject of this
book has been the necessity for community organization, but the ability
to meet this necessity implies that we know how to do that most
difficult thing in the world—work with other people: that we are ready
to sacrifice individual interests to the general good, that we have a
fully developed sense of responsibility, that we are trained in
initiative and action. But this is not true. If the School Centres are
to fill an important place in neighborhood life, they must not only give
an opportunity for the development of neighborhood consciousness and
neighborhood organization, but they must train up young people to be
ready for neighborhood organization. We who believe in the School Centre
as one of the most effective means we have for reconstructing city life
believe that the School Centre can furnish this training. We hear
everywhere of the corruption of American municipal politics, but why
should the next generation do any better than the present unless we are
training our young men and women to a proper understanding of the
meaning of good citizenship and the sense of their own responsibility?
The need of democracy to-day is a trained citizenship. We must
deliberately train for citizenship as for music, art or trade. The
School Centres are, in fact, both the prophecy of the new democracy and
a method of its fulfilment. They provide an opportunity for its
expression, and at the same time give to men and women the opportunity
for the training needed to bring it to its highest expression.
The training in the School Centres consists of: group-activities,
various forms of civic clubs and classes, and practice in
self-government.
First, we have in the Centres those activities which require working
together, such as dramatic and choral clubs, orchestras and bands, civic
and debating clubs, folk-dancing and team-games. We want choral unions
and orchestras, to be sure, because they will enrich the community life
at the same time that they emphasize the neighborhood bond, we want
civic and debating clubs because we all need enlightenment on the
subjects taken up in these clubs, but the primary reason for choosing
such activities is that they are group activities where each learns to
identify himself with a social whole. This is the first lesson for all
practical life. Take two young men in business. One says of his firm,
“_They_ are doing so and so”: his attitude is that the business is a
complete whole, without him, to which he may indeed be ministering in
some degree. Another young man who has been a few weeks with an
old-established firm says “_We_ have done so and so for years,” “_Our_
policy is so and so.” You perhaps smile but you know that he possesses
one of the chief requirements for rising.
In our group the centre of consciousness is transferred from our private
to our associate life. Thus through our group activities does
neighborhood life become a preparation for neighborhood life; thus does
it prepare us for the pouring out of strength and strain and effort in
the common cause.
Then the consciousness of the solidarity of the group leads directly to
a sense of responsibility, responsibility in a group and for a group.
Sooner or later every one in a democracy must ask himself, what am I
worth to society? Our effort in the Centres is to help the birth of that
moment. This is the social lesson: for people to understand that their
every act, their work, their home-life, the kind of recreation they
demand, the kind of newspapers they read, the bearing of their children,
the bringing up of their children—that all these so-called private acts
create the city in which they live. It is not just when we vote, or meet
together in political groups, or when we take part in some charitable or
philanthropic or social scheme, that we are performing our duty to
society. Every single act of our life should be looked at as a social
act.
Moreover, we learn responsibility for our group as well as to our group.
We used to think, “I must do right no matter what anyone else does.” Now
we know how little that exhausts our duty; we must feel an equally keen
responsibility for our whole group.
These then are the lessons which we hope group activities will
teach—solidarity, responsibility and initiative,—how to take one’s place
worthily in a self-directed, self-governing community.
In the first year of one of our Boston Centres, the people of a certain
nationality asked if they might meet regularly at the Centre. At their
first meeting, however, they broke up without accomplishing anything,
without even deciding to meet again, simply because those present had
never learned how to do things with other people. Each man seemed a
little island by himself. They explained to me the fact that they made
no plans for further meeting by saying that they found they did not know
parliamentary law, and some of them must learn parliamentary law before
they could organize. I did not feel, however, that that was the real
reason. I was sure it was because they had never been accustomed to do
things in groups—they had probably never belonged to a basket-ball team
or a dramatic club—and we have to learn the trick of association as we
have to learn anything else.
But the Centres prepare for citizenship not only by group activities but
also by direct civic teaching. This takes the form not only of lectures,
classes in citizenship, but also of societies like the “junior city
councils” or the “legislatures” where municipal and state questions are
discussed, and young men’s and young women’s civic clubs. And it must be
remembered that the chief value of these clubs is not the information
acquired, not even the interest aroused, but the lesson learned of
genuine discussion with all the advantages therefrom.[148]
But I have written as if it were our young people who were to be
educated by the group activities of the Centres, as if the young people
were to have the training for democracy and the older people the
exercise of democracy. Nothing could be further from my thoughts. The
training for democracy can never cease while we exercise democracy. We
older ones need it exactly as much as the younger ones. That education
is a continuous process is a truism. It does not end with graduation
day; it does not end when “life” begins. Life and education must never
be separated. We must have more life in our universities, more education
in our life. Chesterton says of H. G. Wells, “One can lie awake nights
and hear him grow.” That it might be said of all of us! We need
education all the time and we all need education. The “ignorant vote”
does not (or should not) mean the vote of the ignorant, we get an
ignorant vote very often from educated people; an ignorant vote means
ignorance of some particular subject.
A successful business man said to me the other day, “I graduated from
college with honors, but all I learned there has done me little good
directly. What I got out of college was an attitude towards life: that
life was a matter of constantly learning, that my education had begun
and was going on as long as I lived.” Then he went on to say, “This is
the attitude I want somehow to get into my factory. Boys and girls come
to me with the idea, ‘School is over, learning is behind me, now work
begins.’ This is all wrong. I am now planning a school in connection
with my factory, not primarily on account of what they will learn in the
school, but in order to make them see that their life of steady learning
is just beginning and that their whole career depends on their getting
this attitude.” Now this is what we want the Centres to do for people:
to help them acquire the attitude of learning, to make them see that
education is for life, that it is as valuable for adults as for young
people.
We have many forms of adult education: extension courses, continuation
and night schools, correspondence schools, courses in settlements, Young
Men’s Christian Associations etc. And yet all these take a very small
per cent of our adult population. Where are people to get this necessary
education? Our present form of industry does not give enough. Tending a
machine all day is not conducive to thought;[149] a man thus employed
gets to rely entirely on his foreman. The man who lets his foreman do
his thinking for him all day tends to need a political boss at night. We
must somehow counteract the paralyzing effect of the methods of modern
industry. In the School Centre we have an opportunity for adult
education in the only forms in which many people, tired out with the
day’s work, can take it: discussion, recreation, group activities and
self-governing clubs. The enormous value of that rapidly spreading
movement, the forum movement, and its connection with the School
Centres, there is space here only to mention.
Many people, however, even if not the majority, are eager and hungry for
what one man spoke to me of as “real education.” University extension
work is spreading rapidly and in many cases adapting itself marvellously
to local needs; a much closer connection could be made between the
opportunities of the university and the training of the citizen for his
proposed increased activity in the state by having university extension
work a recognized part of the School Centre, so that every one, the
farmer or the humblest workman, might know that even although he cannot
give all his time to college life, he may have the advantage of its
training. In the School Centre should be opportunity for the study of
social and economic conditions, the work of constitutional conventions,
the European situation and our relation to it, the South American
situation and our relation to it, etc. etc.
Moreover, we must remember when we say we all need more education, that
even if we could be “entirely” educated, so to speak, at any one minute,
the next minute life would have set new lessons for us. The world is
learning all the time about health, food values, care of children etc.
All that science discovers must be spread. Adult education means largely
the assimilation of new ideas; from this point of view no one can deny
its necessity.
I have said that the Centres prepare for citizenship through group
activities, through civic clubs and classes and through actual practice
in self-government. The Centres may be a real training in
self-government, a real opportunity for the development of those
qualities upon which genuine self-direction depends, by every club or
group being self-governed, and the whole Centre self-directed and
self-controlled by means of delegates elected from each club meeting
regularly in a Central Council. If we want a nation which shall be
really self-governed not just nominally self-governed, we must train up
our young people in the ways of self-direction.
Moreover, the development of responsibility and self-direction will be
the most effective means of raising standards. We are hearing a great
deal just now of regulated recreation, regulated dance halls etc. We
must give regulation a secondary place. There is something better than
this which ought to be the aim of all recreation leaders, that is, to
educate our young people to want higher standards by interpreting their
own experience to them and by getting them to think in terms of cause
and effect. You can force a moral code on people from above yet this
will change them very little, but by a system of self-governing clubs
with leaders who know how to lead, we can make real progress in
educating people to higher standards. This is true of athletic games as
well as of dances. We find, indeed, that it is true of all parts of our
Centre work. Through the stormy paths of club election of officers, I
have seen leaders often guide their young men to an understanding of
honest politics. It is usually easier, it is true, to do _for_ people,
it is easier to “regulate” their lives, but it is not the way to bring
the results we wish. We need education, not regulation.
Self-government in the Centres then means not only the election of
officers and the making of a constitution, but a real management of club
and Centre affairs, the opportunity to take initiative, to make choices
and decisions, to take responsibility. The test of our success in the
Centres will always be how far we are developing the self-shaping
instinct. But we must remember that we have not given self-government by
allowing the members of a club to record their votes. Many people think
a neighborhood association or club is self-governing if a question is
put to them and every one votes upon it. But if a club is to be really
self-governed it must first learn collective thinking. This is not a
process which can be hurried, it will take time and that time must not
be grudged. Collective thinking must be reverenced as an act of
creation. The time spent in evolving the group spirit is time spent in
creating the dynamic force of our civilization.
Moreover each Centre should be begun, directed and supported (as far as
possible) by the adult people of a community acting together for that
end. A Centre should not be an undertaking begun by the School Committee
and run by the School Committee, but each Centre should be organized by
local initiative, to serve local needs, through methods chosen by the
people of a district to suit that particular district. The ideal School
Centre is a Community Centre. A group of citizens asks for the use of a
schoolhouse after school hours, with heat, light, janitor, and a
director to make the necessary connection between the local undertaking
and the city department. Then that group of citizens is responsible for
the Centre: for things worth while being done in the schoolhouse, and
for the support of the activities undertaken. By the time such a School
Centre is organized by such an association of citizens, neighbors will
have become acquainted with one another in a more vital way than before,
and they will have begun to learn how to think and to act together as a
neighborhood unit.
We are coming to a more general realization of this. In the municipal
buildings in the parks of Chicago, the people are not given free
lectures, free moving pictures, free music, free dances etc.; they are
invited to develop their own activities. To the Recreation Centres of
New York, operated by the Board of Education, are being added the
Community Centres controlled by local boards of neighbors. In Boston we
have under the School Committee a department of “The Extended Use of
School Buildings,” and the aim is to get the people of each district to
plan, carry out and supervise what civic, educational and recreational
activities they wish in the schoolhouses.
A Chicago minister said the other day that the south side of Chicago was
the only part of the city where interest in civic problems and community
welfare could be aroused, and this he said was because of the South
Park’s work in field houses, clubrooms and gymnasiums for the last ten
or twelve years.
When the chairman of the Agricultural Council of Defense of Virginia
asked a citizen of a certain county what he thought the prospects were
of being able to rouse the people in his county in regard to an
increased food production, the prompt reply was, “On the north side of
the county we shall have no trouble because we have several Community
Leagues there, but on the south side it will be a hard job.”
The School or Community Centre is the real continuation school of
America, the true university of true democracy.
---------------------
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
-----
Footnote 146:
The western states feel that they are training members of society and
not individuals and that is why it seems proper to them to take public
money to found state universities.
Footnote 147:
A little girl I know said, “Mother, if women get the vote, shall I
_have_ to be President?”
Footnote 148:
See pp. 208–212.
Footnote 149:
Also men have less opportunity for discussion at work than formerly.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Notes
Hyphenation has not been regularized, and remains as printed.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
Archaic and non-standard spelling has been retained. Instances of what
seem to be obvious printer’s errors have been corrected. Changes made
are listed below:
Pg. 20: Corrected typo: ‘Social Psycology’ to ‘Psychology’
Pg. 34: Changed comma for period at end of sentence: ‘a collective
will,’ to ‘will.’
Pg. 43: Corrected typo: ‘rather perhaps indentified’ to ‘identified’
Pg. 98: Added umlaut for consistency: ‘compatible with cooperation’ to
‘coöperation’
Pg. 123: Added accent as in other instances: ‘L’Etat, Le Droit
Objectif’ to ‘L’État’
Pg. 205: Corrected typo: ‘these inner forces most’ to ‘must’
Pg. 234: Added missing punctuation after abbreviation: ‘education,
sanitation etc,’ to ‘etc.,’
Pg. 255: Corrected typo: ‘only shall we undersand’ to ‘understand’
Pg. 273: Corrected typo: ‘either law or a rigat’ to ‘right’
Pg. 274: Added missing accent: ‘métaphysique ou religieux’ to ‘oú’
Pg. 278: Corrected typo: ‘through the varous’ to ‘various’
Pg. 311: Corrected typo: ‘we are to be constitutent’ to ‘constituent’
Pg. 334: Added umlaut for consistency: ‘pre-eminently the opportunity’
to ‘preëminently’
Pg. 336: Corrected typo: ‘city is not analagous’ to ‘analogous’
Pg. 347: Corrected typo: ‘a nation is a crowd, partiotism’ to
‘patriotism’
Pg. 353: Corrected typo: ‘consider themeslves’ to ‘themselves’
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