THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER
It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance for a nation to
sit still and wait for its scientists to report on their labors. The
notion is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist who does
not correct his logic by a constant reference to the movement of life. It
is true that statecraft must make human nature its basis. It is true that
its chief task is the invention of forms and institutions which satisfy
the inner needs of mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of those
needs and the technique of their satisfaction is hazy, unorganized and
blundering.
But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting for monographs from the
research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of
actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new
point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks
of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the
change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of
the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old
mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: a thousand
unconscious economic and social forces were compelling the change. Adam
Smith expressed the process, named it, idealized it and made it
self-conscious. Then because men were clearer about what they were doing,
they could in a measure direct their destiny.
That is but another way of saying that great revolutionary changes do not
spring full-armed from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes the
luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see better by the light of
him. His bias deflects their actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven
men who made the economics of the last century had much to do with the
halo which encircled the smutted head of industrialism. They put the
stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices, and of course it has
been the part of the academic mind to imitate them ever since. The
orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their
morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the
grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the
sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the
economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the
dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a
formless resentment by endowing it with intelligence and will.
So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to
put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if
there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile
taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping
our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays
like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy
pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,--vastly
confused in the tangled strains of the nation's interests. Clogged by the
confusion, half-choked by stupid blockades, largely unaware of their own
purposes, it is for criticism, organized research, and artistic
expression to free and to use these creative energies. They are to be
found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened women, in the
development of business, the diffusion of art and science, in the racial
mixtures, and many lesser interests which cluster about these greater
movements.
The desire for a human politics is all about us. It rises to the surface
in slogans like "human rights above property rights," "the man above the
dollar." Some measure of its strength is given by the widespread
imitation these expressions have compelled: politicians who haven't the
slightest intention of putting men above the dollar, who if they had
wouldn't know how, take off their hats to the sentiment because it seems
a key to popular enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men brought up,
let us say, in the Hanna school of politics. For here is this nation
which sixteen years ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word
"Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about size induces little but
excessive boredom. If you wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell
it how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself an echo of the past
talk to us young men about the Republican Party's understanding with God
in respect to bumper crops. But talk to us about "human rights," and
though you talk rubbish, we'll listen. For our desire is bent that way,
and anything which has the flavor of this new interest will rivet our
attention. We are still uncritical. It is only a few years since we began
to center our politics upon human beings. We have no training in that
kind of thought. Our schools and colleges have helped us hardly at all.
We still talk about "humanity" as if it were some strange and mystical
creature which could not possibly be composed of the grocer, the
street-car conductor and our aunts.
That the opinion-making people of America are more interested in human
welfare than in empire or abstract prosperity is an item that no
statesman can disregard in his thinking. To-day it is no longer necessary
to run against the grain of the deepest movements of our time. There is
an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be
measured in human happiness. This feeling has not always existed.
Historians tell us that the very idea of progress in well-being is not
much older than, say, Shakespeare's plays. As a general belief it is
still more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps be said to mark its
popularization. But as a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone
applied quickly to all the acts of statecraft in America it belongs to
the Twentieth Century. There were any number of people who long before
1900 saw that dollars and men could clash. But their insight had not won
any general acceptance. It is only within the last few years that the
human test has ceased to be the property of a small group and become the
convention of a large majority. A study of magazines and newspapers would
confirm this rather broad generalization. It would show, I believe, how
the whole quality of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced by
human values.
The statesman must look to this largely unorganized drift of desire. He
will find it clustering about certain big revolts--the unrest of women,
for example, or the increasing demands of industrial workers. Rightly
understood, these social currents would, I believe, lead to the central
issues of life, the vital points upon which happiness depends. They come
out of necessities. They express desire. They are power.
Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has
liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In
England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet
half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great
deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are
looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to
children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The vote has become
a convenient peg upon which to hang aspirations that are not at all sure
of their own meaning. In no insignificant number of cases the vote is a
cover by which revolutionary demands can be given a conventional front.
The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted conservatives
have guessed. Certainly the elimination of "male" from the suffrage
qualifications will not end the feminist agitation. From the angle of
statecraft the future of the movement may be said to depend upon the wise
use of this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend to know in detail
how this can be done. But I am certain that the task of leadership is to
organize aspiration in the service of the real interests of life. To-day
women want--what? They are ready to want something: that describes fairly
the condition of most suffragettes. Those who like Ellen Key and Olive
Shreiner and Mrs. Gilman give them real problems to think about are
drafting that energy into use. By real problems I mean problems of love,
work, home, children. They are the real interests of feminism because
they have produced it.
The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of needs, they point the course
of invention, they are the energies which animate a social program. The
most ideally conceived plan of the human mind has only a slight interest
if it does not harness these instinctive forces. That is the great lesson
which the utopias teach by their failure--that schemes, however nicely
arranged, cannot be imposed upon human beings who are interested in other
things. What ailed Don Quixote was that he and his contemporaries wanted
different things; the only ideals that count are those which express the
possible development of an existing force. Reformers must never forget
that three legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine one.
In actual life, yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements,"
"causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political
psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business
of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid
people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the
ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but
rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that
only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example,
could on the surface be more trivial than an interest in baseball scores.
Yet during the campaign of 1912 the excitement was so great that Woodrow
Wilson said on the stump he felt like apologizing to the American people
for daring to be a presidential candidate while the Giants and the Red
Sox were playing for the championship. Baseball (not so much for those
who play it), is a colossal phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds
in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious excitement and an
abstract relief from the monotony of their own lives. What a second-hand
civilization it is that grows passionate over a scoreboard with little
electric lights! What a civilization it is that has learned to enjoy its
sport without even seeing it! If ever there was a symptom that this
nation needed leisure and direct participation in games, it is that poor
scrawny substitute for joy--the baseball extra.
It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses need. And
statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and
loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would
see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks
very different--the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous
to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph. But that is
only because we have not accustomed ourselves to thinking of social
events as answers to human needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
syndicalists? What are they driving at? What gift to civilization is in
the impetus behind them? They are human beings, and they want human
things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken about them. They
seem to want things badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot deal
with them. Anarchism--men die for that, they undergo intolerable insults.
They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free
spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have
the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our
domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them
entirely in our thinking?
We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal of agitations. Our
present method is to discuss whether the proposals are right and
feasible. We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally we decide that
any agitation foreign to our settled habits is wrong. And we bolster up
our satisfaction by pointing to some mistake of logic or some puerility
of statement. That done, we feel the agitation is deplorable and can be
ignored unless it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it in jail.
But a genuine statecraft would go deeper. It would know that even God has
been defended with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations. I
use the word sympathetic literally. For it would try to understand the
inner feeling which had generated what looks like a silly demand. To-day
it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible food, and we let him
go hungry because he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because he
asks for the wrong food. So with agitations. Their specific plans may be
silly, but their demands are real. The hungers and lusts of mankind have
produced some stupendous follies, but the desires themselves are no less
real and insistent.
The important thing about a social movement is not its stated platform
but the source from which it flows. The task of politics is to understand
those deeper demands and to find civilized satisfactions for them. The
meaning of this is that the statesman must be more than the leader of a
party. Thus the socialist statesman is not complete if he is a good
socialist. Only the delusion that his truth is the whole truth, his party
the human race, and his program a panacea, will produce that singleness
of vision.
The moment a man takes office he has no right to be the representative of
one group alone. He has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular
agitations with the general welfare. That is why great agitators should
not accept office. Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to
make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to
deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a
disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely
partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and
the statesman are both needed. But they have different functions, and it
is unjust to damn one because he hasn't the virtues of the other.
The statesman to-day needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward
to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into
the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft
committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and
women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their
discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power.
Standing upon the prestige which that gives he must guide and purify the
social demands he finds at work. He is the translator of agitations. For
this task he must be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable of
understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order to fuse it into a
civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need
not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It
is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a
professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty
formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius
stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and
all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his
supreme business to see that the servants of life stay in their
place--that government, industry, "causes," science, all the creatures of
man do not succeed in their perpetual effort to become the masters.
I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political thinking. And indeed, why
shouldn't he? What reality could there be in comments upon American
politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of Roosevelt? If he is
wholly evil, as many say he is, then the American democracy is
preponderantly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth Century,
Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few presidents have spoken in our
history. And that he has spoken well, who in the perspective of time will
deny? Sensitive to the original forces of public opinion, no man has had
the same power of rounding up the laggards. Government under him was a
throbbing human purpose. He succeeded, where Taft failed, in preventing
that drought of invention which officialism brings. Many people say he
has tried to be all things to all men--that his speeches are an attempt
to corral all sorts of votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a
truth. A more generous interpretation would be to say that he had tried
to be inclusive, to attach a hundred sectional agitations to a national
program. Crude: of course he was crude; he had a hemisphere for his
canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he tried to be the leader of factions at war
with one another. A late convert: he is a statesman and not an
agitator--his business was to meet demands when they had grown to
national proportions. No end of possibilities have slipped through the
large meshes of his net. He has said some silly things. He has not been
subtle, and he has been far from perfect. But his success should be
judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness of the opposition, by
the intellectual qualities of the nation he represented. When we remember
that he was trained in the Republican politics of Hanna and Platt, that
he was the first President who shared a new social vision, then I believe
we need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roosevelt stand as the working
model for a possible American statesman at the beginning of the Twentieth
Century.
Critics have often suggested that Roosevelt stole Bryan's clothes. That
is perhaps true, and it suggests a comparison which illuminates both men.
It would not be unfair to say that it is always the function of the
Roosevelts to take from the Bryans. But it is a little silly for an
agitator to cry thief when the success of his agitation has led to the
adoption of his ideas. It is like the chagrin of the socialists because
the National Progressive Party had "stolen twenty-three planks," and it
makes a person wonder whether some agitators haven't an overdeveloped
sense of private property.
I do not see the statesman in Bryan. He has been something of a voice
crying in the wilderness, but a voice that did not understand its own
message. Many people talk of him as a prophet. There is a great deal of
literal truth in that remark, for it has been the peculiar work of Bryan
to express in politics some of that emotion which has made America the
home of new religions. What we know as the scientific habit of mind is
entirely lacking in his intellectual equipment. There is a vein of
mysticism in American life, and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet. His
insights are those of the gifted evangelist, often profound and always
narrow. It is absurd to debate his sincerity. Mr. Bryan talks with the
intoxication of the man who has had a revelation: to skeptics that always
seems theatrical. But far from being the scheming hypocrite his enemies
say he is, Mr. Bryan is too simple for the task of statesmanship. No
bracing critical atmosphere plays about his mind: there are no cleansing
doubts and fruitful alternatives. The work of Bryan has been to express a
certain feeling of unrest--to embody it in the traditional language of
prophecy. But it is a shrewd turn of the American people that has kept
him out of office. I say this not in disrespect of his qualities, but in
definition of them. Bryan does not happen to have the naturalistic
outlook, the complete humanity, or the deliberative habit which modern
statecraft requires. He is the voice of a confused emotion.
Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is Bryan's chief defect--the scientific
habit of holding facts in solution. His mind is lucid and flexible, and
he has the faculty of taking advice quickly, of stating something he has
borrowed with more ease and subtlety than the specialist from whom he got
it. Woodrow Wilson's is an elegant and highly refined intellect, nicely
balanced and capable of fine adjustment. An urbane civilization produced
it, leisure has given it spaciousness, ease has made it generous. A mind
without tension, its roots are not in the somewhat barbarous
under-currents of the nation. Woodrow Wilson understands easily, but he
does not incarnate: he has never been a part of the protest he speaks.
You think of him as a good counsellor, as an excellent presiding officer.
Whether his imagination is fibrous enough to catch the inwardness of the
mutterings of our age is something experience alone can show. Wilson has
class feeling in the least offensive sense of that term: he likes a world
of gentlemen. Occasionally he has exhibited a rather amateurish effort to
be grimy and shirt-sleeved. But without much success: his contact with
American life is not direct, and so he is capable of purely theoretical
affirmations. Like all essentially contemplative men, the world has to be
reflected in the medium of his intellect before he can grapple with it.
Yet Wilson belongs among the statesmen, and it is fine that he should be
in public life. The weakness I have suggested is one that all statesmen
share in some degree: an inability to interpret adequately the world they
govern. This is a difficulty which is common to conservative and radical,
and if I have used three living men to illustrate the problem it is only
because they seem to illuminate it. They have faced the task and we can
take their measurement. It is no part of my purpose to make any judgment
as to the value of particular policies they have advocated. I am
attempting to suggest some of the essentials of a statesman's equipment
for the work of a humanly centered politics. Roosevelt has seemed to me
the most effective, the most nearly complete; Bryan I have ventured to
class with the men who though important to politics should never hold
high executive office; Wilson, less complete than Roosevelt, is worthy of
our deepest interest because his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is
crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship.
Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been able to see the problem
that any finely adapted statecraft must meet. It is a problem that would
hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician: "Though he (the statesman)
cannot himself keep the life of the nation as a whole in his mind, he can
at least make sure that he is taking counsel with those who know...." It
is not important that Wilson in stating the difficulty should put it as
if he had in a measure solved it. He hasn't, because taking counsel is a
means to understanding the nation as a whole, and that understanding
remains almost as arduous and requires just as fibrous an imagination, if
it is gleaned from advisers.
To think of the whole nation: surely the task of statesmanship is more
difficult to-day than ever before in history. In the face of a clotted
intricacy in the subject-matter of politics, improvements in knowledge
seem meager indeed. The distance between what we know and what we need to
know appears to be greater than ever. Plato and Aristotle thought in
terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of
a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and
inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before, plumped down
on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. We have to deal
with all grades of life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men who
differ in sense of fact, in ideal, in the very groundwork of morals. And
we have to take into account not the simple opposition of two classes,
but the hostility of many,--the farmers and the factory workers and all
the castes within their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal
organization of business. Ours is a problem in which deception has become
organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which
the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered
people. Nor can we keep to the problem within our borders. Whether we
wish it or not we are involved in the world's problems, and all the winds
of heaven blow through our land.
* * * * *
It is a great question whether our intellects can grasp the subject. Are
we perhaps like a child whose hand is too small to span an octave on the
piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated, but the natural
ideals of people are so varied and contradictory that action halts in
despair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon the mind, and the
results are all about us: everyone has known the neutral thinkers who
stand forever undecided before the complications of life, who have, as it
were, caught a glimpse of the possibilities of knowledge. The sight has
paralyzed them. Unless they can act with certainty, they dare not act at
all.
That is merely one of the temptations of theory. In the real world,
action and thought are so closely related that one cannot wait upon the
other. We cannot wait in politics for any completed theoretical
discussion of its method: it is a monstrous demand. There is no pausing
until political psychology is more certain. We have to act on what we
believe, on half-knowledge, illusion and error. Experience itself will
reveal our mistakes; research and criticism may convert them into wisdom.
But act we must, and act as if we knew the nature of man and proposed to
satisfy his needs.
In other words, we must put man at the center of politics, even though we
are densely ignorant both of man and of politics. This has always been
the method of great political thinkers from Plato to Bentham. But one
difference we in this age must note: they made their political man a
dogma--we must leave him an hypothesis. That is to say that our task is
to temper speculation with scientific humility.
A paradox there is here, but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men
made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured
disease before they knew medicine. Art came before æsthetics, and
righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other.
Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by action, and action is guided by
hypothesis. If it is a paradox to ask for a human politics before we
understand humanity or politics, it is what Mr. Chesterton describes as
one of those paradoxes that sit beside the wells of truth.
* * * * *
We make our picture of man, knowing that, though it is crude and unjust,
we have to work with it. If we are wise we shall become experimental
towards life: then every mistake will contribute towards knowledge. Let
the exploration of human need and desire become a deliberate purpose of
statecraft, and there is no present measure of its possibilities.
In this work there are many guides. A vague common tradition is in the
air about us--it expresses itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in the
uncritical theater. Every merchant has his stock of assumptions about the
mental habits of his customers and competitors; the prostitute hers; the
newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had a few; the vaudeville stage has a
number. We test these notions by their results, and even "practical
people" find that there is more variety in human nature than they had
supposed.
We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the
world--introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very
considerably--that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our
neighbors is to know ourselves. For after all, the only experience we
really understand is our own. And that, in the least of us, is so rich
that no one has yet exhausted its possibilities. It has been said that
every genuine character an artist produces is one of the characters he
might have been. By re-creating our own suppressed possibilities we
multiply the number of lives that we can really know. That as I
understand it is the psychology of the Golden Rule. For note that Jesus
did not set up some external fetich: he did not say, make your neighbor
righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said do as you would be done by.
Assume that you and he are alike, and you can found morals on humanity.
But experience has enlarged our knowledge of differences. We realize now
that our neighbor is not always like ourselves. Knowing how unjust other
people's inferences are when they concern us, we have begun to guess that
ours may be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct becomes at once an
impossible ideal, and the willingness to live and let live assumes high
place among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks that "it takes all
sorts of people to make a world," and half-protestingly men accept
Bernard Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as you would that they
should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
We learn perhaps that there is no contradiction in speaking of "human
nature" while admitting that men are unique. For all deepening of our
knowledge gives a greater sense of common likeness and individual
variation. It is folly to ignore either insight. But it is done
constantly, with no end of confusion as a result. Some men have got
themselves into a state where the only view that interests them is the
common humanity of us all. Their world is not populated by men and women,
but by a Unity that is Permanent. You might as well refuse to see any
differences between steam, water and ice because they have common
elements. And I have seen some of these people trying to skate on steam.
Their brothers, blind in the other eye, go about the world so sure that
each person is entirely unique, that society becomes like a row of
packing cases, each painted on the inside, and each containing one ego
and its own.
Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others. That
is not the only use of art, for its function is surely greater and more
ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowledge of human nature. Nor
is that its only use even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art
enters politics as a "moral equivalent" for evil, a medium by which
barbarous lusts find civilized expression. It is, too, an ideal for
labor. But my purpose here is not to attempt any adequate description of
the services of art. It is enough to note that literature in particular
elaborates our insight into human life, and, therefore, enables us to
center our institutions more truly.
Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is absorbed into the common
knowledge of the age. Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers
all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays and novels have
indeed an overwhelming political importance, as the "moderns" have
maintained. But it lies not in the preaching of a doctrine or the
insistence on some particular change in conduct. That is a shallow and
wasteful use of the resources of art. For art can open up the springs
from which conduct flows. Its genuine influence is on what Wells calls
the "hinterland," in a quickening of the sense of life.
Art can really penetrate where most of us can only observe. "I look and I
think I see," writes Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.... (But) my
senses and my consciousness ... give me no more than a practical
simplification of reality ... in short, we do not see the actual things
themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels
affixed to them." Who has not known this in thinking of politics? We talk
of poverty and forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy--we forget
the vagrant. Some of our best-intentioned political schemes, like reform
colonies and scientific jails, turn out to be inhuman tyrannies just
because our imagination does not penetrate the sociological label. "We
move amidst generalities and symbols ... we live in a zone midway between
things and ourselves, external to things, external also to ourselves."
This is what works of art help to correct: "Behind the commonplace,
conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual
mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they attain
in its undefiled essence."
This directness of vision fertilizes thought. Without a strong artistic
tradition, the life and so the politics of a nation sink into a barren
routine. A country populated by pure logicians and mathematical
scientists would, I believe, produce few inventions. For creation, even
of scientific truth, is no automatic product of logical thought or
scientific method, and it has been well said that the greatest
discoveries in science are brilliant guesses on insufficient evidence. A
nation must, so to speak, live close to its own life, be intimate and
sympathetic with natural events. That is what gives understanding, and
justifies the observation that the intuitions of scientific discovery and
the artist's perceptions are closely related. It is perhaps not
altogether without significance for us that primitive science and poetry
were indistinguishable. Nor is it strange that latter-day research should
confirm so many sayings of the poets. In all great ages art and science
have enriched each other. It is only eccentric poets and narrow
specialists who lock the doors. The human spirit doesn't grow in
sections.
I shall not press the point for it would lead us far afield. It is enough
that we remember the close alliance of art, science and politics in
Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith. We in America have
divorced them completely: both art and politics exist in a condition of
unnatural celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor to the futility and
opacity of our political thinking? We have handed over the government of
a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a class of men who deal in the
most verbal and unreal of all human attainments.
A lively artistic tradition is essential to the humanizing of politics.
It is the soil in which invention flourishes and the organized knowledge
of science attains its greatest reality. Let me illustrate from another
field of interests. The religious investigations of William James were a
study, not of ecclesiastical institutions or the history of creeds. They
were concerned with religious experience, of which churches and rituals
are nothing but the external satisfaction. As Graham Wallas is
endeavoring to make human nature the center of politics, so James made it
the center of religions. It was a work of genius, yet no one would claim
that it is a mature psychology of the "Varieties of Religious
Experience." It is rather a survey and a description, done with the eye
of an artist and the method of a scientist. We know from it more of what
religious feeling is like, even though we remain ignorant of its sources.
And this intimacy humanizes religious controversy and brings
ecclesiasticism back to men.
Like most of James's psychology, it opens up investigation instead of
concluding it. In the light even of our present knowledge we can see how
primitive his treatment was. But James's services cannot be
overestimated: if he did not lay even the foundations of a science, he
did lay some of the foundations for research. It was an immense
illumination and a warming of interest. It threw open the gates to the
whole landscape of possibilities. It was a ventilation of thought.
Something similar will have to be done for political psychology. We know
how far off is the profound and precise knowledge we desire. But we know
too that we have a right to hope for an increasing acquaintance with the
varieties of political experience. It would, of course, be drawn from
biography, from the human aspect of history and daily observation. We
should begin to know what it is that we ought to know. Such a work would
be stimulating to politician and psychologist. The statesman's
imagination would be guided and organized; it would give him a
starting-point for his own understanding of human beings in politics. To
the scientists it would be a challenge--to bring these facts under the
light of their researches, to extend these researches to the borders of
those facts.
The statesman has another way of strengthening his grip upon the
complexity of life. Statistics help. This method is neither so conclusive
as the devotees say, nor so bad as the people who are awed by it would
like to believe. Voting, as Gabriel Tarde points out, is our most
conspicuous use of statistics. Mystical democrats believe that an
election expresses the will of the people, and that that will is wise.
Mystical democrats are rare. Looked at closely an election shows the
quantitative division of the people on several alternatives. That choice
is not necessarily wise, but it is wise to heed that choice. For it is a
rough estimate of an important part of the community's sentiment, and no
statecraft can succeed that violates it. It is often immensely suggestive
of what a large number of people are in the future going to wish.
Democracy, because it registers popular feeling, is at least trying to
build truly, and is for that reason an enlightened form of government. So
we who are democrats need not believe that the people are necessarily
right in their choice: some of us are always in the minority, and not a
little proud of the distinction. Voting does not extract wisdom from
multitudes: its real value is to furnish wisdom about multitudes. Our
faith in democracy has this very solid foundation: that no leader's
wisdom can be applied unless the democracy comes to approve of it. To
govern a democracy you have to educate it: that contact with great masses
of men reciprocates by educating the leader. "The consent of the
governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an
insurance against benevolent despots as well. In a rough way and with
many exceptions, democracy compels law to approximate human need. It is a
little difficult to see this when you live right in the midst of one. But
in perspective there can be little question that of all governments
democracy is the most relevant. Only humane laws can be successfully
enforced; and they are the only ones really worth enforcing. Voting is a
formal method of registering consent.
But all statistical devices are open to abuse and require constant
correction. Bribery, false counting, disfranchisement are the cruder
deceptions; they correspond to those enrolment statistics of a large
university which are artificially fed by counting the same student
several times if his courses happen to span two or three of the
departments. Just as deceptive as plain fraud is the deceptive ballot. We
all know how when the political tricksters were compelled to frame a
direct primary law in New York they fixed the ballot so that it botched
the election. Corporations have been known to do just that to their
reports. Did not E. H. Harriman say of a well-known statistician that he
could make an annual report tell any story you pleased? Still subtler is
the seven-foot ballot of stupid, good intentions--the hyperdemocratic
ballot in which you are asked to vote for the State Printer, and succeed
only in voting under the party emblem.
Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts. You and I are
forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That
impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real
masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes
the results. For all the conclusions in the end rest upon their accuracy,
honesty, energy and insight. Of course, in an obvious census like that of
the number of people personal bias counts for so little that it is lost
in the grand total. But the moment you begin inquiries into subjects
which people prefer to conceal, the weakness of statistics becomes
obvious. All figures which touch upon sexual subjects are nothing but the
roughest guesses. No one would take a census of prostitution,
illegitimacy, adultery, or venereal disease for a statement of reliable
facts. There are religious statistics, but who that has traveled among
men would regard the number of professing Christians as any index of the
strength of Christianity, or the church attendance as a measure of
devotion? In the supremely important subject of literacy, what
classification yet devised can weigh the culture of masses of people? We
say that such a percentage of the population cannot read or write. But
the test of reading and writing is crude and clumsy. It is often
administered by men who are themselves half-educated, and it is shot
through with racial and class prejudice.
The statistical method is of use only to those who have found it out.
This is achieved principally by absorbing into your thinking a lively
doubt about all classifications and general terms, for they are the basis
of statistical measurement. That done you are fairly proof against
seduction. No better popular statement of this is to be found than H. G.
Wells' little essay: "Skepticism of the Instrument." Wells has, of
course, made no new discovery. The history of philosophy is crowded with
quarrels as to how seriously we ought to take our classifications: a
large part of the battle about Nominalism turns on this, the Empirical
and Rational traditions divide on it; in our day the attacks of James,
Bergson, and the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation of
this old struggle. Wells takes his stand very definitely with those who
regard classification "as serviceable for the practical purposes of life"
but nevertheless "a departure from the objective truth of things."
"Take the word chair," he writes. "When one says chair, one thinks
vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think of
armchairs and reading-chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs,
chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become
settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts,
those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and
Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is
this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent
joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or
chairishness that you gave me." Think then of the glib way in which we
speak of "the unemployed," "the unfit," "the criminal," "the
unemployable," and how easily we forget that behind these general terms
are unique individuals with personal histories and varying needs.
Even the most refined statistics are nothing but an abstraction. But if
that truth is held clearly before the mind, the polygons and curves of
the statisticians can be used as a skeleton to which the imagination and
our general sense of life give some flesh and blood reality. Human
statistics are illuminating to those who know humanity. I would not trust
a hermit's inferences about the statistics of anything.
It is then no simple formula which answers our question. The problem of a
human politics is not solved by a catch phrase. Criticism, of which these
essays are a piece, can give the direction we must travel. But for the
rest there is no smooth road built, no swift and sure conveyance at the
door. We set out as if we knew; we act on the notions of man that we
possess. Literature refines, science deepens, various devices extend it.
Those who act on the knowledge at hand are the men of affairs. And all
the while, research studies their results, artists express subtler
perceptions, critics refine and adapt the general culture of the times.
There is no other way but through this vast collaboration.
There is no short cut to civilization. We say that the truth will make us
free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change. Nor
do I see a final state of blessedness. The world's end will surely find
us still engaged in answering riddles. This changing focus in politics is
a tendency at work all through our lives. There are many experiments. But
the effort is half-conscious; only here and there does it rise to a
deliberate purpose. To make it an avowed ideal--a thing of will and
intelligence--is to hasten its coming, to illumine its blunders, and, by
giving it self-criticism, to convert mistakes into wisdom.