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Title: The Ethics of Coöperation
Author: James Hayden Tufts
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THE ETHICS OF COÖPERATION
* * * * *
Barbara Weinstock Lectures on The Morals of Trade
THE ETHICS OF COÖPERATION.
By JAMES H. TUFTS.
HIGHER EDUCATION AND BUSINESS STANDARDS.
By WILLARD EUGENE HOTCHKISS.
CREATING CAPITAL: MONEY-MAKING AS AN AIM IN BUSINESS.
By FREDERICK L. LIPMAN.
IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE?
By STANTON COIT.
SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM.
By JOHN BATES CLARK.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PRIVATE MONOPOLY AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP.
By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS.
COMMERCIALISM AND JOURNALISM.
By HAMILTON HOLT.
THE BUSINESS CAREER IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONS.
By ALBERT SHAW.
* * * * *
THE ETHICS OF COÖPERATION
by
JAMES H. TUFTS
Professor of Philosophy in the University of Chicago
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1918
Copyright, 1918, by the Regents of the
University of California
All Rights Reserved
Published September 1918
BARBARA WEINSTOCK
LECTURES ON THE MORALS OF TRADE
This series will contain essays by representative scholars and men of
affairs dealing with the various phases of the moral law in its bearing
on business life under the new economic order, first delivered at the
University of California on the Weinstock foundation.
THE ETHICS OF COÖPERATION
I
According to Plato's famous myth, two gifts of the gods equipped man
for living: the one, arts and inventions to supply him with the means
of livelihood; the other, reverence and justice to be the ordering
principles of societies and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.
Agencies for mastery over nature and agencies for coöperation among men
remain the two great sources of human power. But after two thousand
years, it is possible to note an interesting fact as to their relative
order of development in civilization. Nearly all the great skills and
inventions that had been acquired up to the eighteenth century were
brought into man's service at a very early date. The use of fire, the
arts of weaver, potter, and metal worker, of sailor, hunter, fisher,
and sower, early fed man and clothed him. These were carried to higher
perfection by Egyptian and Greek, by Tyrian and Florentine, but it
would be difficult to point to any great new unlocking of material
resources until the days of the chemist and electrician. Domestic
animals and crude water mills were for centuries in man's service, and
until steam was harnessed, no additions were made of new powers.
During this long period, however, the progress of human association
made great and varied development. The gap between the men of
Santander's caves, or early Egypt, and the civilization of a century
ago is bridged rather by union of human powers, by the needs and
stimulating contacts of society, than by conquest in the field of
nature. It was in military, political, and religious organization that
the power of associated effort was first shown. Army, state, and
hierarchy were its visible representatives. Then, a little over a
century ago, began what we call the industrial revolution, still
incomplete, which combined new natural forces with new forms of human
association. Steam, electricity, machines, the factory system,
railroads: these suggest the natural forces at man's disposal; capital,
credit, corporations, labor unions: these suggest the bringing together
of men and their resources into units for exploiting or controlling the
new natural forces. Sometimes resisting the political, military, or
ecclesiastical forces which were earlier in the lead, sometimes
mastering them, sometimes combining with them, economic organization
has now taken its place in the world as a fourth great structure, or
rather as a fourth great agency through which man achieves his greater
tasks, and in so doing becomes conscious of hitherto unrealized powers.
Early in this great process of social organization three divergent
types emerged, which still contend for supremacy in the worlds of
action and of valuation: dominance, competition, and coöperation. All
mean a meeting of human forces. They rest respectively on power,
rivalry, and sympathetic interchange. Each may contribute to human
welfare. On the other hand, each may be taken so abstractly as to
threaten human values. I hope to point out that the greatest of these
is coöperation, and that it is largely the touchstone for the others.
Coöperation and dominance both mean organization. Dominance implies
inequality, direction and obedience, superior and subordinate.
Coöperation implies some sort of equality, some mutual relation. It
does not exclude difference in ability or in function. It does not
exclude leadership, for leadership is usually necessary to make
coöperation effective. But in dominance the special excellence is kept
isolated; ideas are transmitted from above downward. In coöperation
there is interchange, currents flowing in both directions, contacts of
mutual sympathy, rather than of pride-humility, condescension-servility.
The purpose of the joint pursuit in organization characterized by
dominance may be either the exclusive good of the master or the joint
good of the whole organized group, but in any case it is a purpose
formed and kept by those few who know. The group may share in its
execution and its benefits, but not in its construction or in the
estimating and forecasting of its values. The purpose in coöperation is
joint. Whether originally suggested by some leader of thought or
action, or whether a composite of many suggestions in the give and take
of discussion or in experiences of common need, it is weighed and
adopted as a common end. It is not the work or possession of leaders
alone, but embodies in varying degrees the work and active interest of
all.
Coöperation and competition at first glance may seem more radically
opposed. For while dominance and coöperation both mean union of forces,
competition appears to mean antagonism. _They_ stand for combination;
_it_ for exclusion of one by another. Yet a deeper look shows that this
is not true of competition in what we may call its social, as
contrasted with its unsocial, aspect. The best illustration of what I
venture to call social competition is sport. Here is rivalry, and here
in any given contest one wins, the other loses, or few win and many
lose. But the great thing in sport is not to win; the great thing is
the game, the contest; and the contest is no contest unless the
contestants are so nearly equal as to forbid any certainty in advance
as to which will win. The best sport is found when no one contestant
wins too often. There is in reality a common purpose--the zest of
contest. Players combine and compete to carry out this purpose; and the
rules are designed so to restrict the competition as to rule out
certain kinds of action and preserve friendly relations. The contending
rivals are in reality uniting to stimulate each other. Without the
coöperation there would be no competition, and the competition is so
conducted as to continue the relation. Competition in the world of
thought is similarly social. In efforts to reach a solution of a
scientific problem or to discuss a policy, the spur of rivalry or the
matching of wits aids the common purpose of arriving at the truth.
Similar competition exists in business. Many a firm owes its success to
the competition of its rivals which has forced it to be efficient,
progressive. As a manufacturing friend once remarked to me: "When the
other man sells cheaper, you generally find he has found out something
you don't know."
But we also apply the term "competition" to rivalry in which there is
no common purpose; to contests in which there is no intention to
continue or repeat the match, and in which no rules control. Weeds
compete with flowers and crowd them out. The factory competes with the
hand loom and banishes it. The trust competes with the small firm and
puts it out of business. The result is monopoly. When plants or
inventions are thus said to compete for a place, there is frequently no
room for both competitors, and no social gain by keeping both in the
field. Competition serves here sometimes as a method of selection,
although no one would decide to grow weeds rather than flowers because
weeds are more efficient. In the case of what are called natural
monopolies, there is duplication of effort instead of coöperation.
Competition is here wasteful. But when we have to do, not with a
specific product, or with a fixed field such as that of street railways
or city lighting, but with the open field of invention and service, we
need to provide for continuous coöperation, and competition seems at
least one useful agency. To retain this, we frame rules against "unfair
competition." As the rules of sport are designed to place a premium
upon certain kinds of strength and skill which make a good game, so the
rules of fair competition are designed to secure efficiency for public
service, and to exclude efficiency in choking or fouling. In unfair
competition there is no common purpose of public service or of
advancing skill or invention; hence, no coöperation. The coöperative
purpose or result is thus the test of useful, as contrasted with
wasteful or harmful, competition.
There is also an abstract conception of coöperation, which, in its
one-sided emphasis upon equality, excludes any form of leadership, or
direction, and in fear of inequality allows no place for competition.
Selection of rulers by lot in a large and complex group is one
illustration; jealous suspicion of ability, which becomes a cult of
incompetence, is another. Refusals to accept inventions which require
any modification of industry, or to recognize any inequalities of
service, are others. But these do not affect the value of the principle
as we can now define it in preliminary fashion: union tending to secure
common ends, by a method which promotes equality, and with an outcome
of increased power shared by all.
II
What are we to understand by the Ethics of Coöperation? Can we find
some external standard of unquestioned value or absolute duty by which
to measure the three processes of society which we have named,
dominance, competition, coöperation? Masters of the past have offered
many such, making appeal to the logic of reason or the response of
sentiment, to the will for mastery or the claim of benevolence. To make
a selection without giving reasons would seem arbitrary; to attempt a
reasoned discussion would take us quite beyond the bounds appropriate
to this lecture. But aside from the formulations of philosophers,
humanity has been struggling--often rather haltingly and blindly--for
certain goods and setting certain sign-posts which, if they do not
point to a highway, at least mark certain paths as blind alleys. Such
goods I take to be the great words, liberty, power, justice; such signs
of blind paths I take to be rigidity, passive acceptance of what is.
But those great words, just because they are so great, are given
various meanings by those who would claim them for their own. Nor is
there complete agreement as to just what paths deserve to be posted as
leading nowhere. Groups characterized by dominance, cut-throat
competition, or coöperation, tend to work out each its own
interpretations of liberty, power, justice; its own code for the
conduct of its members. Without assuming to decide your choice, I can
indicate briefly what the main elements in these values and codes are.
The group of masters and servants will develop what we have learned to
call a morality of masters and a morality of slaves. This was
essentially the code of the feudal system. We have survivals of such a
group morality in our code of the gentleman, which in England still
depreciates manual labor, although it has been refined and softened and
enlarged to include respect for other than military and sportsman
virtues. The code of masters exalts liberty--for the ruling class--and
resents any restraint by inferiors or civilians, or by public opinion
of any group but its own. It has a justice which takes for its premise
a graded social order, and seeks to put and keep every man in his
place. But its supreme value is power, likewise for the few, or for the
state as consisting of society organized and directed by the ruling
class. Such a group, according to Treitschke, will also need war, in
order to test and exhibit its power to the utmost in fierce struggle
with other powers. It will logically honor war as good.
A group practicing cut-throat competition will simply reverse the
order: first, struggle to put rivals out of the field; then, monopoly
with unlimited power to control the market or possess the soil. It
appeals to nature's struggle for existence as its standard for human
life. It too sets a high value upon liberty in the sense of freedom
from control, but originating as it did in resistance to control by
privilege and other aspects of dominance, it has never learned the
defects of a liberty which takes no account of ignorance, poverty, and
ill health. It knows the liberty of nature, the liberty of the strong
and the swift, but not the liberty achieved by the common effort for
all. It knows justice, but a justice which is likely to be defined as
securing to each his natural liberty, and which therefore means
non-interference with the struggle for existence except to prevent
violence and fraud. It takes no account as to whether the struggle
kills few or many, or distributes goods widely or sparingly, or whether
indeed there is any room at the table which civilization spreads;
though it does not begrudge charity if administered under that name.
A coöperating group has two working principles: first, common purpose
and common good; second, that men can achieve by common effort what
they cannot accomplish singly. The first, reinforced by the actual
interchange of ideas and services, tends to favor equality. It implies
mutual respect, confidence, and good-will. The second favors a
constructive and progressive attitude, which will find standards
neither in nature nor in humanity's past, since it conceives man able
to change conditions to a considerable extent and thus to realize new
goods.
These principles tend toward a type of liberty different from those
just mentioned. As contrasted with the liberty of a dominant group,
coöperation favors a liberty for all, a liberty of live and let live, a
tolerance and welcome for variation in type, provided only this is
willing to make its contribution to the common weal. Instead of
imitation or passive acceptance of patterns on the part of the
majority, it stimulates active construction. As contrasted with the
liberty favored in competing groups, coöperation would emphasize
positive control over natural forces, over health conditions, over
poverty and fear. It would make each person share as fully as possible
in the knowledge and strength due to combined effort, and thus liberate
him from many of the limitations which have hitherto hampered him.
Similarly with justice. Coöperation's ethics of distribution is not
rigidly set by the actual interest and rights of the past on the one
hand, nor by hitherto available resources on the other. Neither natural
rights nor present ability and present service form a complete measure.
Since coöperation evokes new interests and new capacities, it is
hospitable to new claims and new rights; since it makes new sources of
supply available, it has in view the possibility at least of doing
better for all than can an abstract insistence upon old claims. It may
often avoid the deadlock of a rigid system. It is better to grow two
blades of grass than to dispute who shall have the larger fraction of
the one which has previously been the yield. It is better, not merely
because there is more grass, but also because men's attitude becomes
forward-looking and constructive, not pugnacious and rigid.
Power is likewise a value in a coöperating group, but it must be power
not merely used for the good of all, but to some extent controlled by
all and thus actually shared. Only as so controlled and so shared is
power attended by the responsibility which makes it safe for its
possessors. Only on this basis does power over other men permit the
free choices on their part which are essential to full moral life.
As regards the actual efficiency of a coöperating group, it may be
granted that its powers are not so rapidly mobilized. In small,
homogeneous groups, the loss of time is small; in large groups the
formation of public opinion and the conversion of this into action is
still largely a problem rather than an achievement. New techniques have
to be developed, and it may be that for certain military tasks the
military technique will always be more efficient. To the coöperative
group, however, this test will not be the ultimate ethical test. It
will rather consider the possibilities of substituting for war other
activities in which coöperation is superior. And if the advocate of war
insists that war as such is the most glorious and desirable type of
life, coöperation may perhaps fail to convert him. But it may hope to
create a new order whose excellence shall be justified of her children.
III
A glance at the past rôles of dominance, competition, and coöperation
in the institutions of government, religion, and commerce and industry,
will aid us to consider coöperation in relation to present
international problems.
Primitive tribal life had elements of each of the three principles we
have named. But with discovery by some genius of the power of
organization for war the principle of dominance won, seemingly at a
flash, a decisive position. No power of steam or lightning has been so
spectacular and wide-reaching as the power which Egyptian, Assyrian,
Macedonian, Roman, and their modern successors introduced and
controlled. Political states owing their rise to military means
naturally followed the military pattern. The sharp separation between
ruler or ruling group and subject people, based on conquest, was
perpetuated in class distinction. Gentry and simple, lord and villein,
were indeed combined in exploitation of earth's resources, but
coöperation was in the background, mastery in the fore. And when
empires included peoples of various races and cultural advance the
separation between higher and lower became intensified. Yet though
submerged for long periods, the principle of coöperation has asserted
itself, step by step and it seldom loses ground. Beginning usually in
some group which at first combined to resist dominance, it has made its
way through such stages as equality before the law, abolition of
special privileges, extension of suffrage, influence of public
sentiment, interchange of ideas, toward genuine participation by all in
the dignity and responsibility of political power. It builds a Panama
Canal, it maintains a great system of education, and has, we may easily
believe, yet greater tasks in prospect. It may be premature to predict
its complete displacement of dominance in our own day as a method of
government, yet who in America doubts its ultimate prevalence?
Religion presents a fascinating mixture of coöperation with dominance
on the one hand, and exclusiveness on the other. The central fact is
the community, which seeks some common end in ritual, or in beneficent
activity. But at an early period leaders became invested, or invested
themselves, with a sanctity which led to dominance. Not the power of
force, but that of mystery and the invisible raised the priest above
the level of the many. And, on another side, competition between rival
national religions, like that between states, excluded friendly
contacts. Jew and Samaritan had no dealings; between the followers of
Baal and Jehovah there was no peace but by extermination. Yet it was
religion which confronted the _Herrenmoral_ with the first reversal of
values, and declared, "So shall it not be among you. But whosoever will
be great among you let him be your minister." And it was religion which
cut across national boundaries in its vision of what Professor Royce so
happily calls the Great Community. Protest against dominance resulted,
however, in divisions, and although coöperation in practical activities
has done much to prepare the way for national understanding, the
hostile forces of the world to-day lack the restraint which might have
come from a united moral sentiment and moral will.
In the economic field the story of dominance, coöperation, and
competition is more complex than in government and religion. It
followed somewhat different courses in trade and in industry. The
simplest way to supply needs with goods is to go and take them; the
simplest way to obtain services is to seize them. Dominance in the
first case gives piracy and plunder, when directed against those
without; fines and taxes, when exercised upon those within; in the
second case, it gives slavery or forced levies. But trade, as a
voluntary exchange of presents, or as a bargaining for mutual
advantage, had likewise its early beginnings. Carried on at first with
timidity and distrust, because the parties belonged to different
groups, it has developed a high degree of mutual confidence between
merchant and customer, banker and client, insurer and insured. By its
system of contracts and fiduciary relations, which bind men of the most
varying localities, races, occupations, social classes, and national
allegiance, it has woven a new net of human relations far more
intricate and wide-reaching than the natural ties of blood kinship. It
rests upon mutual responsibility and good faith; it is a constant force
for their extension.
The industrial side of the process has had similar influence toward
union. Free craftsmen in the towns found mutual support in guilds, when
as yet the farm laborer or villein had to get on as best he could
unaided. The factory system itself has been largely organized from
above down. It has very largely assumed that the higher command needs
no advice or ideas from below. Hours of labor, shop conditions, wages,
have largely been fixed by "orders," just as governments once ruled by
decrees. But as dominance in government has led men to unite against
the new power and then has yielded to the more complete coöperation of
participation, so in industry the factory system has given rise to the
labor movement. As for the prospects of fuller coöperation, this may be
said already to have displaced the older autocratic system within the
managing group, and the war is giving an increased impetus to extension
of the process.
Exchange of goods and services is indeed a threefold coöperation: it
meets wants which the parties cannot themselves satisfy or cannot well
satisfy; it awakens new wants; it calls new inventions and new forces
into play. It thus not only satisfies man's existing nature, but
enlarges his capacity for enjoyment and his active powers. It makes not
only for comfort, but for progress.
IV
If trade and industry, however, embody so fully the principle of
coöperation, how does it come about that they have on the whole had a
rather low reputation, not only among the class groups founded on
militarism, but among philosophers and moralists? Why do we find the
present calamities of war charged to economic causes? Perhaps the
answer to these questions will point the path along which better
coöperation may be expected.
There is, from the outset, one defect in the coöperation between buyer
and seller, employer and laborer. The coöperation is largely
unintended. Each is primarily thinking of his own advantage, rather
than that of the other, or of the social whole; he is seeking it in
terms of money, which as a material object must be in the pocket of one
party or of the other, and is not, like friendship or beauty, sharable.
Mutual benefit is the result of exchange--it need not be the motive.
This benefit comes about as if it were arranged by an invisible hand,
said Adam Smith. Indeed, it was long held that if one of the bargainers
gained, the other must lose. And when under modern conditions labor is
considered as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest market
by an impersonal corporate employer, there is a strong presumption
against the coöperative attitude on either side.
The great problem here is, therefore: How can men be brought to seek
consciously what now they unintentionally produce? How can the man
whose ends are both self-centered and ignoble be changed into the man
whose ends are wide and high? Something may doubtless be done by
showing that a narrow selfishness is stupid. If we rule out monopoly
the best way to gain great success is likely to lie through meeting
needs of a great multitude; and to meet these effectively implies
entering by imagination and sympathy into their situation. The business
maxim of "service," the practices of refunding money if goods are
unsatisfactory, of one price to all, of providing sanitary and even
attractive factories and homes, and of paying a minimum wage far in
excess of the market price, have often proved highly remunerative. Yet,
I should not place exclusive, and perhaps not chief, reliance on these
methods of appeal. They are analogous to the old maxim, honesty is the
best policy; and we know too well that while this holds under certain
conditions,--that is, among intelligent people, or in the long run,--it
is often possible to acquire great gains by exploiting the weak,
deceiving the ignorant, or perpetrating a fraud of such proportions
that men forget its dishonesty in admiration at its audacity. In the
end it is likely to prove that the level of economic life is to be
raised not by proving that coöperation will better satisfy selfish and
ignoble interests, but rather by creating new standards for measuring
success, new interests in social and worthy ends, and by strengthening
the appeal of duty where this conflicts with present interests. The one
method stakes all on human nature as it is; the other challenges man's
capacity to listen to new appeals and respond to better motives. It is,
if you please, idealism; but before it is dismissed as worthless,
consider what has been achieved in substituting social motives in the
field of political action. There was a time when the aim in political
life was undisguisedly selfish. The state, in distinction from the
kinship group or the village community, was organized for power and
profit. It was nearly a gigantic piratical enterprise, highly
profitable to its managers. The shepherd, says Thrasymachus in Plato's
dialogue, does not feed his sheep for their benefit, but for his own.
Yet now, what president or minister, legislator or judge, would
announce as his aim to acquire the greatest financial profit from his
position? Even in autocratically governed countries, it is at least the
assumption that the good of the state does not mean solely the prestige
and wealth of the ruler.
A great social and political order has been built up, and we all hold
that it must not be exploited for private gain. It has not been created
or maintained by chance. Nor could it survive if every man sought
primarily his own advantage and left the commonwealth to care for
itself. Nor in a democracy would it be maintained, provided the
governing class alone were disinterested, deprived of private property,
and given education, as Plato suggested. The only safety is in the
general and intelligent desire for the public interest and common
welfare. At this moment almost unanimous acceptance of responsibility
for what we believe to be the public good and the maintenance of
American ideals--though it brings to each of us sacrifice and to many
the full measure of devotion--bears witness to the ability of human
nature to adopt as its compelling motives a high end which opposes
private advantage.
Is the economic process too desperate a field for larger motives? To me
it seems less desperate than the field of government in the days of
autocratic kings. One great need is to substitute a different standard
of success for the financial gains which have seemed the only test. Our
schools of commerce are aiming to perform this service, by introducing
professional standards. A physician is measured by his ability to cure
the sick, an engineer by the soundness of his bridge and ship; why not
measure a railroad president by his ability to supply coal in winter,
to run trains on time, and decrease the cost of freight, rather than by
his private accumulations? Why not measure a merchant or banker by
similar tests?
Mankind has built up a great economic system. Pioneer, adventurer,
inventor, scientist, laborer, organizer, all have contributed. It is as
essential to human welfare as the political system, and like that
system it comes to us as an inheritance. I can see no reason why it
should be thought unworthy of a statesman or a judge to use the
political structure for his own profit, but perfectly justifiable for a
man to exploit the economic structure for private gain. This does not
necessarily exclude profit as a method of paying for services, and of
increasing capital needed for development, but it would seek to adjust
profits to services, and treat capital, just as it regards political
power, as a public trust in need of coöperative regulation and to be
used for the general welfare.
But the war is teaching with dramatic swiftness what it might have
needed decades of peace to bring home to us. We _are_ thinking of the
common welfare. High prices may still be a rough guide to show men's
needs, but we are learning to raise wheat because others need it--not
merely because the price is high. Prices may also be a rough guide to
consumption, but we are learning that eating wheat or sugar is not
merely a matter of what I can afford. It is a question of whether I
take wheat or sugar away from some one else who needs it--the soldier
in France, the child in Belgium, the family of my less fortunate
neighbor. The great argument for not interfering with private exchange
in all such matters has been that if prices should by some authority be
kept low in time of scarcity, men would consume the supply too rapidly;
whereas if prices rise in response to scarcity, men at once begin to
economize and so prevent the total exhaustion of the supply. We now
reflect that if prices of milk rise it does not mean uniform
economy--it means cutting off to a large degree the children of the
poor and leaving relatively untouched the consumption of the
well-to-do. Merely raising the _price_ of meat or wheat means taking
these articles from the table of one class to leave them upon the table
of another. War, requiring, as it does, the united strength and purpose
of the whole people, has found this method antiquated. In Europe
governments have said to their peoples: we _must_ all think of the
common weal; we _must_ all share alike. In this country, the appeal of
the food administrator, though largely without force of law, has been
loyally answered by the great majority. It is doubtless rash to predict
how much peace will retain of what war has taught, but who of us will
again say so easily, "My work or leisure, my economy or my luxury, is
my own affair, if I can afford it?" Who can fail to see that common
welfare comes not without common intention?
The second great defect in our economic order, from the point of view
of coöperation, has been the inequality of its distribution. This has
been due largely to competition when parties were unequal, not merely
in their ability, but in their opportunity. And the most serious,
though not the most apparent, aspect of this inequality, has not been
that some have more comfort or luxuries to enjoy; it is the fact that
wealth means power. In so far as it can set prices on all that we eat,
wear, and enjoy, it is controlling the intimate affairs of life more
thoroughly than any government ever attempted. In so far as it controls
natural resources, means of transportation, organization of credit, and
the capital necessary for large-scale manufacturing and marketing, it
can set prices. The great questions then are, as with political power:
How can this great power be coöperatively used? Is it serving all or a
few?
Two notable doctrines of the courts point ways for ethics. The first is
that of property affected with public interest. Applied thus far by the
courts to warehouses, transportation, and similar public services, what
limits can we set ethically to the doctrine that power of one man over
his fellows, whether through his office, or through his property, is
affected with public interest?
The police power, which sets the welfare of all above private property
when these conflict, is a second doctrine whose ethical import far
outruns its legal applications.
Yet it is by neither of these that the most significant progress has
been made toward removing that handicap of inequality which is the
chief injustice of our economic system. It is by our great educational
system, liberal in its provisions, generously supported by all classes,
unselfishly served, opening to all doors of opportunity which once were
closed to the many, the most successful department of our democratic
institutions in helping and gaining confidence of all--a system of
which this University of California is one of the most notable leaders
and the most useful members--that fair conditions for competition and
intelligent coöperation in the economic world are increasingly
possible.
V
What bearing has this sketch of the significance and progress of
coöperation upon the international questions which now overshadow all
else? Certainly the world cannot remain as before: great powers
struggling for empire; lesser powers struggling for their separate
existence; great areas of backward peoples viewed as subjects for
exploitation; we ourselves aloof. It must then choose between a future
world order based on dominance, which means world empire; a world order
based on nationalism joined with the non-social type of competition,
which means, every nation the judge of its own interests, continuance
of jealousies and from time to time the recurrence of war; and a world
order based on nationalism plus international coöperation, "to
establish justice, to provide for common defense, to promote the
general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves
and our posterity."
It is not necessary to discuss in this country the principle of
dominance and world empire. It contradicts our whole philosophy. Safety
for dominance lies only in a civilization of discipline from above
down, in ruthless repression of all thinking on the part of the subject
class or race.
Nor can I see any genuine alternative in what some advocate--reliance
by each nation on its own military strength as the sole effective
guarantee for its interests. After the military lessons of this war,
the concentration of scientific, economic, and even educational
attention upon military purposes would almost inevitably be vastly in
excess of anything previously conceived. What limits can be set to the
armies of France and Great Britain if these are to protect those
countries from a German empire already double its previous extent, and
taking steps to control the resources of eastern Europe and the near
East? What navy could guarantee German commerce against the combined
forces of Great Britain and the United States? What limits to the
frightfulness yet to be discovered by chemist and bacteriologist? What
guarantee against the insidious growth of a militarist attitude even in
democratically minded peoples if the constant terror of war exalts
military preparations to the supreme place? Something has changed the
Germany of other days which many of us loved even while we shrank from
its militarist masters. Is it absolutely certain that nothing can
change the spirit of democratic peoples? At any rate, America, which
has experimented on a larger scale with coöperation--political,
economic, and religious--than any other continent, may well assert
steadily and insistently that this is the more hopeful path. It may
urge this upon distrustful Europe.
The obstacles to coöperation are:
1. The survival of the principle of dominance, showing itself in desire
for political power and prestige, and in certain conceptions of
national honor.
2. The principle of non-social competition, exhibited in part in the
political policy of eliminating weaker peoples, and conspicuously in
foreign trade when the use of unfair methods relies upon national power
to back up its exploitation or monopoly.
3. The principle of nationalistic sentiment, itself based on
coöperation, on social tradition and common ideals, but bound up so
closely with political sovereignty and antagonisms as to become
exclusive instead of coöperative in its attitude toward other cultures.
The principle of dominance deters from coöperation, not only the people
that seeks to dominate, but peoples that fear to be dominated or to
become involved in entangling alliances. Doubtless a policy of
aloofness was long the safe policy for us. We could not trust political
liberty to an alliance with monarchies, even as with equal right some
European peoples might distrust the policies of a republic seemingly
controlled by the slavery interest. At the present time one great power
professes itself incredulous of the fairness of any world tribunal;
smaller powers fear the commanding influence of the great; new national
groups just struggling to expression fear that a league of nations
would be based on present status and therefore give them no
recognition, or else a measure of recognition conditioned by past
injustices rather than by future aspirations and real desert. All these
fears are justified in so far as the principle of dominance is still
potent. The only league that can be trusted by peoples willing to live
and let live, is one that is controlled by a coöperative spirit. And
yet who can doubt that this spirit is spreading? Few governments are
now organized on the avowed basis that military power, which embodies
the spirit of dominance, should be superior to civil control, and even
with them the principle of irresponsible rule, despite its
reinforcement by military success, is likely to yield to the spirit of
the age when once the pressure of war is removed which now holds former
protesters against militarism solid in its support. For all powers that
are genuine in their desire for coöperation there is overwhelming
reason to try it; for only by the combined strength of those who accept
this principle can liberty and justice be maintained against the
aggression of powers capable of concentrating all their resources with
a suddenness and ruthlessness in which dominance is probably superior.
Yet coöperation for protection of liberty and justice is liable to fall
short of humanity's hopes unless liberty and justice be themselves
defined in a coöperative sense. The great liberties which man has
gained, as step by step he has risen from savagery, have not been
chiefly the assertion of already existing powers or the striking-off of
fetters forged by his fellows. They have been _additions_ to previous
powers. Science, art, invention, associated life in all its forms, have
opened the windows of his dwelling, have given possibilities to his
choice, have given the dream and the interpretation which have set him
free from his prison. The liberty to which international coöperation
points is not merely self-direction or self-determination, but a larger
freedom from fear, a larger freedom from suspicion, a fuller control
over nature and society, a new set of ideas, which will make men free
in a far larger degree than ever before.
Similarly justice needs to be coöperatively defined. A justice that
looks merely to existing status will not give lasting peace. Peoples
change in needs as truly as they differ in needs. But no people can be
trusted to judge its own needs any more than to judge its own right. A
justice which adheres rigidly to vested interests, and a justice which
is based on expanding interests, are likely to be deadlocked unless a
constructive spirit is brought to bear. Abstract rights to the soil, to
trade, to expansion, must be subordinate to the supreme question: How
can peoples live together and help instead of destroy? This can be
approached only from an international point of view.
The second obstacle, unsocial competition, is for trade what dominance
is in politics. It prevents that solution for many of the delicate
problems of international life which coöperation through trade might
otherwise afford. Exchange of goods and services by voluntary trade
accomplishes what once seemed attainable only by conquest or slavery.
If Germany or Japan or Italy needs iron or coal; if England needs
wheat, or if the United States sugar, it is possible, or should be
possible, to obtain these without owning the country in which are the
mines, grain, and sugar cane. The United States needs Canada's
products; it has no desire to own Canada. But in recent years the
exchange of products has been subjected to a new influence. National
self-interest has been added to private self-interest. This has
intensified and called out many of the worst features of antagonism and
inequality.
Few in this country have realized the extent to which other countries
have organized their foreign commerce on national lines. We are now
becoming informed as to the carefully worked-out programmes of
commercial education, merchant marines, trade agreements, consular
service, financial and moral support from the home government, and
mutual aid among various salesmen of the same nationality living in a
foreign country. We are preparing to undertake similar enterprises. We
are reminded that "eighty per cent of the world's people live in the
countries bordering on the Pacific Ocean, and that as a result of the
rearrangement of trade routes, San Francisco's chance of becoming the
greatest distributing port of the Pacific for goods _en route_ to the
markets of the Orient, are now more promising than ever before." Can
the United States take part in this commerce in such a way as to help,
not hinder, international progress in harmony? Not unless we remember
that commerce may be as predatory as armies, and that we must provide
international guarantees against the exclusive types of competition
which we have had to control by law in our own domestic affairs. An
Indian or an African may be deprived of his possessions quite as
effectively by trade as by violence. We need at least as high standards
of social welfare as in domestic commerce. I cannot better present the
situation than by quoting from a recent article by Mr. William Notz in
the "Journal of Political Economy" (Feb. 1918):
During the past twenty-five years competition in the world markets
became enormously keen. In the wild scramble for trade the
standards of honest business were disregarded more and more by all
the various rival nations. In the absence of any special regulation
or legislation, it appeared as though a silent understanding
prevailed in wide circles that foreign trade was subject to a code
of business ethics widely at variance with the rules observed in
domestic trade. What was frowned upon as unethical and poor
business policy, if not illegal at home, was condoned and winked at
or openly espoused when foreign markets formed the basis of
operations and foreigners were the competitors. High-minded men of
all nations have long observed with concern the growing tendency of
modern international trade toward selfish exploitation,
concession-hunting, cut-throat competition, and commercialistic
practices of the most sordid type. Time and again complaints have
been voiced, retaliatory measures threatened, and more than once
serious friction has ensued.
Mr. Notz brings to our attention various efforts by official and
commercial bodies looking toward remedies for such conditions and
toward official recognition by all countries of unfair competition as a
penal offense.
What more do we need than fair competition to constitute the
coöperative international life which we dreamed yesterday and now must
consider, not merely as a dream, but as the only alternative to a
future of horror?
Free trade has been not unnaturally urged as at least one condition.
Tariffs certainly isolate. To say to a country: "You shall manufacture
nothing unless you own the raw material; you shall sell nothing unless
at prices which I fix," is likely to provoke the reply: "Then I must
acquire lands in which raw materials are found; I must acquire colonies
which will buy my products." Trade agreements mean coöperation for
those within, unless they are one-sided and made under duress; in any
case they are exclusive of those without. Free trade, the open door,
seems to offer a better way. But free trade in name is not free trade
unless the parties are really free--free from ignorance, from pressure
of want. If one party is weak and the other unscrupulous; if one
competitor has a lower standard of living than the other, freedom of
trade will not mean genuine coöperation. Such coöperation as means good
for all requires either an equality of conditions between traders and
laborers of competing nations and of nations which exchange goods, or
else an international control to prevent unfair competition,
exploitation of weaker peoples, and lowering of standards of living.
Medical science is giving an object lesson which may well have a wide
application. It is seeking to combat disease in its centers of
diffusion. Instead of attempting to quarantine against the Orient, it
is aiding the Orient to overcome those conditions which do harm alike
to Orient and Occident. Plague, anthrax, yellow fever, cannot exist in
one country without harm to all. Nor in the long run can men reach true
coöperation so long as China and Africa are a prize for the exploiter
rather than equals in the market. Not merely in the political sense,
but in its larger meanings democracy here is not safe without democracy
there. Education, and the lifting of all to a higher level, is the
ultimate goal. And until education, invention, and intercommunication
have done their work of elevation, international control must protect
and regulate.
In many respects the obstacle to international coöperation which is
most difficult to remove is the strong and still growing sentiment of
nationality. This is not, like dominance, a waning survival of a cruder
method of social order; it is a genuine type of coöperation. Rooted as
it is in a historic past, in community of ideals and traditions, and
usually of language and art, it wakens the emotional response to a
degree once true only of religion. Born of such a social tradition, the
modern may be said in truth mentally and spiritually, as well as
physically, to be born a Frenchman or a German, a Scotchman or Irishman
or Englishman. He may be content to merge this inheritance in an empire
if he can be senior partner, but the struggles of Irish, Poles, Czechs,
and South Slavs, the Zionist movement, the nationalistic stirrings in
India, with their literary revivals, their fierce self-assertions, seem
to point away from internationalism rather than toward it. The Balkans,
in which Serb, Bulgar, Roumanian, and Greek have been developing this
national consciousness, have been the despair of peacemakers.
The strongest point in the nationalist programme is, however, not in
any wise opposed to coöperation, but rather to dominance or non-social
competition. The strongest point is the importance of diversity
combined with group unity for the fullest enrichment of life and the
widest development of human capacity. A world all of one sort would not
only be less interesting, but less progressive. We are stimulated by
different customs, temperaments, arts, and ideals. But all this is the
strongest argument for genuine coöperation, since by this only can
diversity be helpful, even as it is only through diversity in its
members that a community can develop fullest life. A world organization
based on the principle that any single group is best and therefore
ought to rule, or to displace all others, would be a calamity. A world
organization which encourages every member to be itself would be a
blessing.
Why do nationalism and internationalism clash? Because this national
spirit has rightly or wrongly been bound up so intimately with
political independence. Tara's harp long hangs mute when Erin is
conquered. Poland's children must not use a language in which they
might learn to plot against their masters. A French-speaking Alsatian
is suspected of disloyalty. Professor Dewey has recently pointed out
that in the United States we have gone far toward separating culture
from the state, and suggests that this may be the path of peace for
Europe. We allow groups to keep their religion, their language, their
song festivals. It may perhaps be claimed that this maintenance of
distinct languages and separate cultures is a source of weakness in
such a crisis as we now face. Yet it may well be urged, on the other
hand, that a policy less liberal would have increased rather than
diminished disunion and disloyalty.
VI
The student of human progress is likely to be increasingly impressed
with the interaction between ideas and institutions. How far does man
build and shape institutions to give body to his ideas? How far is it
the organized life with its social contacts, its give and take, its
enlargement of its membership to see life _sub specie communitatis_,
which itself brings ideas to birth? Desire may bring the sexes
together, but it is the association and organized relationships of the
family which transform casual to permanent affection and shape our
conceptions of its values. A herding instinct or a common need of
defense or of food supplies may bring together early groups, and will
to power may begin the state, but it is the living together which
generates laws and wakens the craving for liberty and the struggle for
justice. Seer and poet doubtless contribute to progress by their
kindling appeals to the imagination and sympathy; the philosopher may,
as Plato claimed for him, live as citizen of a perfect state which has
no earthly being, and shape his life according to its laws; but mankind
in general has learned law and right, as well as the arts of use and
beauty, in the school of life in common.
So it is likely to be with international coöperation. Fears and hopes
now urge it upon a reluctant, incredulous world. But the
beginnings--scientific, legal, commercial, political--timid and
imperfect though they be, like our own early confederation, will work
to reshape those who take part. Mutual understanding will increase with
common action. When men work consistently to create new resources
instead of treating their world as a fixed system, when they see it as
a fountain, not as a cistern, they will gradually gain a new spirit.
The Great Community must create as well as prove the ethics of
coöperation.
_The Riverside Press_
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A
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