THE MAKING OF CREEDS
My first course in philosophy was nothing less than a summary of the
important systems of thought put forward in Western Europe during the
last twenty-six hundred years. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we
did gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages. For the rest we
touched upon all the historic names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about
nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend approached me with a sour
look on his face. "You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail out of
this business. I agree with each philosopher as we study him. But when we
get to the next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally says the
other one was wrong. They can't all be right. Can they now?" I was too
much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him.
Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was
a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had
jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground
passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of
motives and facts and ideas was incredible. I began to feel the force of
Mr. John Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for social and
industrial reforms continue to ignore principles ... they will have to
pay the price which short-sighted empiricism always pays; with slow,
hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and
backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track toward an
unseen goal." The political theorists laid some claim to lighting up both
the track and the goal, and so I turned to them for help.
Now whoever has followed political theory will have derived perhaps two
convictions as a reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard their
systems as true and binding, and none of these systems are. No matter
which one you examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a Platonist or a
Benthamite in politics to-day. You cannot go to any of the great
philosophers even for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be fairly
complete, and relevant to American life. I returned to the sophomore
mood: "Each of these thinkers has contributed something, has had some
wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk the philosophers can't all be
right or all wrong."
But like so many theoretical riddles, this one rested on a very simple
piece of ignorance. The trouble was that without realizing it I too had
been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too was looking for
something that could not be found. That happened in this case to be
nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the
old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once
and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would
contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms,
foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of
action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was
on the point of damning the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to Marx.
This is what one may call the naïveté of the intellect. Its hope is that
some man living at one place on the globe in a particular epoch will,
through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize his experience for
all time and all space. It says in effect that there is never anything
essentially new under the sun, that any moment of experience sufficiently
understood would be seen to contain all history and all destiny--that the
intellect reasoning on one piece of experience could know what all the
rest of experience was like. Looked at more closely this philosophy means
that novelty is an illusion of ignorance, that life is an endless
repetition, that when you know one revolution of it, you know all the
rest. In a very real sense the world has no history and no future, the
race has no career. At any moment everything is given: our reason could
know that moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life would be like
the commuter's who travels back and forth on the same line every day.
There would be no inventions and no discoveries, for in the instant that
reason had found the key of experience everything would be unfolded. The
present would not be the womb of the future: nothing would be embryonic,
nothing would _grow_. Experience would cease to be an adventure in order
to become the monotonous fulfilment of a perfect prophecy.
This omniscience of the human intellect is one of the commonest
assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have,
it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the
child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic
egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole
systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity;
the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists,
materialists and determinists who believed in all sincerity that
"Science" was capable of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If
you want to see this faith in all its naïveté go into those quaint
rationalist circles where Herbert Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of
life," with only a few inessential details omitted.
Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has ever realized such hopes.
Mankind has certainly come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's
observation that one of its favorite games is called "Cheat the
Prophet."... "The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all
that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next
generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and
bury them nicely. They then go and do something else." Now this weakness
is not, as Mr. Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the clever
men. But it is a weakness, and many people have speculated about it. Why
in the face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the rocks of the
unexpected do men continue to believe that the intellect can transcend
the vicissitudes of experience?
For they certainly do believe it, and generally the more parochial their
outlook, the more cosmic their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for
the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try to believe that, however
finite we may be, our intellect is something apart from the cycle of our
life, capable by an Olympian detachment from human interests of a divine
thoroughness. Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins
by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame,
perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things
in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it
has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun
which can illuminate the world."
This is what most of us do in our search for a philosophy of politics. We
forget that the big systems of theory are much more like village
lamp-posts than they are like the sun, that they were made to light up a
particular path, obviate certain dangers, and aid a peculiar mode of
life. The understanding of the place of theory in life is a comparatively
new one. We are just beginning to see how creeds are made. And the
insight is enormously fertile. Thus Mr. Alfred Zimmern in his fine study
of "The Greek Commonwealth" says of Plato and Aristotle that no
interpretation can be satisfactory which does not take into account the
impression left upon their minds by the social development which made the
age of these philosophers a period of Athenian decline. Mr. Zimmern's
approach is common enough in modern scholarship, but the full
significance of it for the creeds we ourselves are making is still
something of a novelty. When we are asked to think of the "Republic" as
the reaction of decadent Greece upon the conservative temperament of
Plato, the function of theory is given a new illumination. Political
philosophy at once appears as a human invention in a particular
crisis--an instrument to fit a need. The pretension to finality falls
away.
This is a great emancipation. Instead of clinging to the naïve belief
that Plato was legislating for all mankind, you can discuss his plans as
a temporary superstructure made for an historical purpose. You are free
then to appreciate the more enduring portions of his work, to understand
Santayana when he says of the Platonists, "their theories are so
extravagant, yet their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined
and beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies conscience
and utters our inmost hopes." This insight into the values of human life,
partial though it be, is what constitutes the abiding monument of Plato's
genius. His constructions, his formal creeds, his law-making and social
arrangements are local and temporary--for us they can have only an
antiquarian interest.
In some such way as this the sophomoric riddle is answered: no thinker
can lay down a course of action for all mankind--programs if they are
useful at all are useful for some particular historical period. But if
the thinker sees at all deeply into the life of his own time, his
theoretical system will rest upon observation of human nature. That
remains as a residue of wisdom long after his reasoning and his concrete
program have passed into limbo. For human nature in all its profounder
aspects changes very little in the few generations since our Western
wisdom has come to be recorded. These _aperçus_ left over from the great
speculations are the golden threads which successive thinkers weave into
the pattern of their thought. Wisdom remains; theory passes.
If that is true of Plato with his ample vision how much truer is it of
the theories of the littler men--politicians, courtiers and propagandists
who make up the academy of politics. Machiavelli will, of course, be
remembered at once as a man, whose speculations were fitted to an
historical crisis. His advice to the Prince was real advice, not a
sermon. A boss was telling a governor how to extend his power. The wealth
of Machiavelli's learning and the splendid penetration of his mind are
used to interpret experience for a particular purpose. I have always
thought that Machiavelli derives his bad name from a too transparent
honesty. Less direct minds would have found high-sounding ethical
sanctions in which to conceal the real intent. That was the nauseating
method of nineteenth century economists when they tried to identify the
brutal practices of capitalism with the beneficence of nature and the
Will of God. Not so Machiavelli. He could write without a blush that "a
prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which
men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to
act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion." The
apologists of business also justified a rupture with human decencies.
They too fitted their theory to particular purposes, but they had not the
courage to avow it even to themselves.
The rare value of Machiavelli is just this lack of self-deception. You
may think his morals devilish, but you cannot accuse him of quoting
scripture. I certainly do not admire the end he serves: the extension of
an autocrat's power is a frivolous perversion of government. His ideal
happens, however, to be the aim of most foreign offices, politicians and
"princes of finance." Machiavelli's morals are not one bit worse than the
practices of the men who rule the world to-day. An American Senate tore
up the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, and with the approval of the President
acted "contrary to fidelity" and friendship too; Austria violated the
Treaty of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Machiavelli's ethics
are commonplace enough. His head is clearer than the average. He let the
cat out of the bag and showed in the boldest terms how theory becomes an
instrument of practice. You may take him as a symbol of the political
theorist. You may say that all the thinkers of influence have been
writing advice to the Prince. Machiavelli recognized Lorenzo the
Magnificent; Marx, the proletariat of Europe.
At first this sounds like standing the world on its head, denying reason
and morality, and exalting practice over righteousness. That is neither
here nor there. I am simply trying to point out an illuminating fact
whose essential truth can hardly be disputed. The important social
philosophies are consciously or otherwise the servants of men's purposes.
Good or bad, that it seems to me is the way we work. We find reasons for
what we want to do. The big men from Machiavelli through Rousseau to Karl
Marx brought history, logic, science and philosophy to prop up and
strengthen their deepest desires. The followers, the epigones, may accept
the reasons of Rousseau and Marx and deduce rules of action from them.
But the original genius sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons
afterward. This amounts to saying that man when he is most creative is
not a rational, but a wilful animal.
The political thinker who to-day exercises the greatest influence on the
Western World is, I suppose, Karl Marx. The socialist movement calls him
its prophet, and, while many socialists say he is superseded, no one
disputes his historical importance. Now Marx embalmed his thinking in the
language of the Hegelian school. He founded it on a general philosophy of
society which is known as the materialistic conception of history.
Moreover, Marx put forth the claim that he had made socialism
"scientific"--had shown that it was woven into the texture of natural
phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia crowds three heavy volumes, so
elaborate and difficult that socialists rarely read them. I have known
one socialist who lived leisurely on his country estate and claimed to
have "looked" at every page of Marx. Most socialists, including the
leaders, study selected passages and let it go at that. This is a wise
economy based on a good instinct. For all the parade of learning and
dialectic is an after-thought--an accident from the fact that the
prophetic genius of Marx appeared in Germany under the incubus of Hegel.
Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he wrote three volumes to
justify it. Did not the Communist Manifesto appear many years before "Das
Kapital"?
Nothing is more instructive than a socialist "experience" meeting at
which everyone tries to tell how he came to be converted. These
gatherings are notoriously untruthful--in fact, there is a genial
pleasure in not telling the truth about one's salad days in the socialist
movement. The prevalent lie is to explain how the new convert, standing
upon a mountain of facts, began to trace out the highways that led from
hell to heaven. Everybody knows that no such process was actually lived
through, and almost without exception the real story can be discerned: a
man was dissatisfied, he wanted a new condition of life, he embraced a
theory that would justify his hopes and his discontent. For once you
touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs
are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. In the
language of philosophers, socialism as a living force is a product of the
will--a will to beauty, order, neighborliness, not infrequently a will to
health. Men desire first, then they reason; fascinated by the future,
they invent a "scientific socialism" to get there.
Many people don't like to admit this. Or if they admit it, they do so
with a sigh. Their minds construct a utopia--one in which all judgments
are based on logical inference from syllogisms built on the law of
mathematical probabilities. If you quote David Hume at them, and say that
reason itself is an irrational impulse they think you are indulging in a
silly paradox. I shall not pursue this point very far, but I believe it
could be shown without too much difficulty that the rationalists are
fascinated by a certain kind of thinking--logical and orderly
thinking--and that it is their will to impose that method upon other men.
For fear that somebody may regard this as a play on words drawn from some
ultra-modern "anti-intellectualist" source, let me quote Santayana. This
is what the author of that masterly series "The Life of Reason" wrote in
one of his earlier books: "The ideal of rationality is itself as
arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as
any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which
the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In
spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands rationality,
what really demands rationality, what makes it a good and indispensable
thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own nature, but our need
of it both in safe and economical action and in the pleasures of
comprehension." Because rationality itself is a wilful exercise one hears
Hymns to Reason and sees it personified as an extremely dignified
goddess. For all the light and shadow of sentiment and passion play even
about the syllogism.
The attempts of theorists to explain man's successes as rational acts and
his failures as lapses of reason have always ended in a dismal and misty
unreality. No genuine politician ever treats his constituents as
reasoning animals. This is as true of the high politics of Isaiah as it
is of the ward boss. Only the pathetic amateur deludes himself into
thinking that, if he presents the major and minor premise, the voter will
automatically draw the conclusion on election day. The successful
politician--good or bad--deals with the dynamics--with the will, the
hopes, the needs and the visions of men.
It isn't sentimentality which says that where there is no vision the
people perisheth. Every time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory
on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at
a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red
flag of the socialists; every song from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
to the "International"; every metrical conclusion to a great
speech--whether we stand at Armageddon, refuse to press upon the brow of
labor another crown of thorns, or call upon the workers of the world to
unite--every one of these slogans is an incitement of the will--an effort
to energize politics. They are attempts to harness blind impulses to
particular purposes. They are tributes to the sound practical sense of a
vision in politics. No cause can succeed without them: so long as you
rely on the efficacy of "scientific" demonstration and logical proof you
can hold your conventions in anybody's back parlor and have room to
spare.
I remember an observation that Lincoln Steffens made in a speech about
Mayor Tom Johnson. "Tom failed," said Mr. Steffens, "because he was too
practical." Coming from a man who had seen as much of actual politics as
Mr. Steffens, it puzzled me a great deal. I taxed him with it later and
he explained somewhat as follows: "Tom Johnson had a vision of Cleveland
which he called The City on the Hill. He pictured the town emancipated
from its ugliness and its cruelty--a beautiful city for free men and
women. He used to talk of that vision to the 'cabinet' of political
lieutenants which met every Sunday night at his house. He had all his
appointees working for the City on the Hill. But when he went out
campaigning before the people he talked only of three-cent fares and the
tax outrages. Tom Johnson didn't show the people the City on the Hill. He
didn't take them into his confidence. They never really saw what it was
all about. And they went back on Tom Johnson."
That is one of Mr. Steffens's most acute observations. What makes it
doubly interesting is that Tom Johnson confirmed it a few months before
he died. His friends were telling him that his defeat was temporary, that
the work he had begun was unchecked. It was plain that in the midst of
his suffering, with death close by, he found great comfort in that
assurance. But his mind was so realistic, his integrity so great that he
could not blink the fact that there had been a defeat. Steffens was
pointing out the explanation: "you did not show the people what you saw,
you gave them the details, you fought their battles, you started to
build, but you left them in darkness as to the final goal."
I wish I could recall the exact words in which Tom Johnson replied. For
in them the greatest of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical
weakness of opportunist politics.
There is a type of radical who has an idea that he can insinuate advanced
ideas into legislation without being caught. His plan of action is to
keep his real program well concealed and to dole out sections of it to
the public from time to time. John A. Hobson in "The Crisis of
Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can
recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men
have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the
manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by
sophistical notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens calls
these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction
of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of
monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of
existing Municipal or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the
sole springs of action." Well may Mr. Hobson inquire, _"Now, what
provision is made for generating the motor power of progress in
Collectivism?"_
No amount of architect's plans, bricks and mortar will build a house.
Someone must have the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic
state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the good sense of its program. It
must find popular feeling, organize it, and make that the motive power of
government. If you study the success of Roosevelt the point is
re-enforced. He is a man of will in whom millions of people have felt the
embodiment of their own will. For a time Roosevelt was a man of destiny
in the truest sense. He wanted what a nation wanted: his own power
radiated power; he embodied a vision; Tom, Dick and Harry moved with his
movement.
No use to deplore the fact. You cannot stop a living body with nothing at
all. I think we may picture society as a compound of forces that are
always changing. Put a vision in front of one of these currents and you
can magnetize it in that direction. For visions alone organize popular
passions. Try to ignore them or box them up, and they will burst forth
destructively. When Haywood dramatizes the class struggle he uses class
resentment for a social purpose. You may not like his purpose, but unless
you can gather proletarian power into some better vision, you have no
grounds for resenting Haywood. I fancy that the demonstration of King
Canute settled once and for all the stupid attempt to ignore a moving
force.
A dynamic conception of society always frightens a great number of
people. It gives politics a restless and intractable quality. Pure reason
is so gentlemanly, but will and the visions of a people--these are
adventurous and incalculable forces. Most politicians living for the day
prefer to ignore them. If only society will stand fairly still while
their career is in the making they are content to avoid the actualities.
But a politician with some imaginative interest in genuine affairs need
not be seduced into the learned folly of pretending that reality is
something else than it is. If he is to influence life he must deal with
it. A deep respect is due the Schopenhauerian philosopher who looks upon
the world, finds that its essence is evil, and turns towards insensitive
calm. But no respect is due to anyone who sets out to reform the world by
ignoring its quality. Whoever is bent upon shaping politics to better
human uses must accept freely as his starting point the impulses that
agitate human beings. If observation shows that reason is an instrument
of will, then only confusion can result from pretending that it isn't.
I have called this misplaced "rationality" a piece of learned folly,
because it shows itself most dangerously among those thinkers about
politics who are divorced from action. In the Universities political
movements are generally regarded as essentially static, cut and dried
solids to be judged by their logical consistency. It is as if the stream
of life had to be frozen before it could be studied. The socialist
movement was given a certain amount of attention when I was an
undergraduate. The discussion turned principally on two points: were
rent, interest and dividends _earned_? Was collective ownership of
capital a feasible scheme? And when the professor, who was a good
dialectician, had proved that interest was a payment for service
("saving") and that public ownership was not practicable, it was assumed
that socialism was disposed of. The passions, the needs, the hopes that
generate this world-wide phenomenon were, I believe, pocketed and ignored
under the pat saying: "Of course, socialism is not an economic policy,
it's a religion." That was the end of the matter for the students of
politics. It was then a matter for the divinity schools. If the same
scholastic method is in force there, all that would be needed to crush
socialism is to show its dogmatic inconsistencies.
The theorist is incompetent when he deals with socialism just because he
assumes that men are determined by logic and that a false conclusion will
stop a moving, creative force. Occasionally he recognizes the wilful
character of politics: then he shakes his head, climbs into an ivory
tower and deplores the moonshine, the religious manias and the passions
of the mob. Real life is beyond his control and influence because real
life is largely agitated by impulses and habits, unconscious needs,
faith, hope and desire. With all his learning he is ineffective because,
instead of trying to use the energies of men, he deplores them.
Suppose we recognize that creeds are instruments of the will, how would
it alter the character of our thinking? Take an ancient quarrel like that
over determinism. Whatever your philosophy, when you come to the test of
actual facts you find, I think, all grades of freedom and determinism.
For certain purposes you believe in free will, for others you do not.
Thus, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, no determinist is prevented from saying
"if you please" to the housemaid. In love, in your career, you have no
doubt that "if" is a reality. But when you are engaged in scientific
investigation, you try to reduce the spontaneous in life to a minimum.
Mr. Arnold Bennett puts forth a rather curious hybrid when he advises us
to treat ourselves as free agents and everyone else as an automaton. On
the other hand Prof. Münsterberg has always insisted that in social
relations we must always treat everyone as a purposeful, integrated
character.
Your doctrine, in short, depends on your purpose: a theory by itself is
neither moral nor immoral, its value is conditioned by the purpose it
serves. In any accurate sense theory is to be judged only as an effective
or ineffective instrument of a desire: the discussion of doctrines is
technical and not moral. A theory has no intrinsic value: that is why the
devil can talk theology.
No creed possesses any final sanction. Human beings have desires that are
far more important than the tools and toys and churches they make to
satisfy them. It is more penetrating, in my opinion, to ask of a creed
whether it served than whether it was "true." Try to judge the great
beliefs that have swayed mankind by their inner logic or their empirical
solidity and you stand forever, a dull pedant, apart from the interests
of men. The Christian tradition did not survive because of Aquinas or
fall before the Higher Criticism, nor will it be revived because someone
proves the scientific plausibility of its doctrine. What we need to know
about the Christian epic is the effect it had on men--true or false, they
have believed in it for nineteen centuries. Where has it helped them,
where hindered? What needs did it answer? What energies did it transmute?
And what part of mankind did it neglect? Where did it begin to do
violence to human nature?
Political creeds must receive the same treatment. The doctrine of the
"social contract" formulated by Hobbes and made current by Rousseau can
no longer be accepted as a true account of the origin of society.
Jean-Jacques is in fact a supreme case--perhaps even a slight
caricature--of the way in which formal creeds bolster up passionate
wants. I quote from Prof. Walter's introduction in which he says that
"The Social Contract _showed to those who were eager to be convinced_
that no power was legitimate which was guilty of abuses. It is no wonder
that its author was buried in the Pantheon with pompous procession, that
the framers of the new Constitution, Thouret and Lièyes and La Fayette,
did not forget and dared not forget its doctrines, that it was the
text-book and the delight of Camille Desmoulins and Danton and St. Just,
that Robespierre read it through once every day." In the perspective of
history, no one feels that he has said the last word about a philosophy
like Rousseau's after demonstrating its "untruth." Good or bad, it has
meant too much for any such easy disposal. What shall we call an idea,
objectively untrue, but practically of the highest importance?
The thinker who has faced this difficulty most radically is Georges Sorel
in the "Reflexions sur la Violence." His doctrine of the "social myth"
has seemed to many commentators one of those silly paradoxes that only a
revolutionary syndicalist and Frenchman could have put forward. M. Sorel
is engaged in presenting the General Strike as the decisive battle of the
class struggle and the core of the socialist movement. Now whatever else
he may be, M. Sorel is not naïve: the sharp criticism of other socialists
was something he could not peacefully ignore. They told him that the
General Strike was an idle dream, that it could never take place, that,
even if it could, the results would not be very significant. Sidney Webb,
in the customary Fabian fashion, had dismissed the General Strike as a
sign of socialist immaturity. There is no doubt that M. Sorel felt the
force of these attacks. But he was not ready to abandon his favorite idea
because it had been shown to be unreasonable and impossible. Just the
opposite effect showed itself and he seized the opportunity of turning an
intellectual defeat into a spiritual triumph. This performance must have
delighted him to the very bottom of his soul, for he has boasted that his
task in life is to aid in ruining "le prestige de la culture bourgeoise."
M. Sorel's defence of the General Strike is very startling. He admits
that it may never take place, that it is not a true picture of the goal
of the socialist movement. Without a blush he informs us that this
central gospel of the working class is simply a "myth." The admission
frightens M. Sorel not at all. "It doesn't matter much," he remarks,
"whether myths contain details actually destined to realization _in the
scheme_ of an historical future; they are not astrological almanacks; it
may even be that nothing of what they express will actually happen--as in
the case of that catastrophe which the early Christians expected. Are we
not accustomed in daily life to recognizing that the reality differs very
greatly from the ideas of it that we made before we acted? Yet that
doesn't hinder us from making resolutions.... Myths must be judged as
instruments for acting upon present conditions; all discussion about the
manner of applying them concretely to the course of history is senseless.
_The entire myth is what counts...._ There is no use then in reasoning
about details which might arise in the midst of the class struggle ...
even though the revolutionists should be deceiving themselves through and
through in making a fantastic picture of the general strike, this picture
would still have been a power of the highest order in preparing for
revolution, so long as it expressed completely all the aspirations of
socialism and bound together revolutionary ideas with a precision and
firmness that no other methods of thought could have given."
It may well be imagined that this highly sophisticated doctrine was
regarded as perverse. All the ordinary prejudices of thought are
irritated by a thinker who frankly advises masses of his fellow-men to
hold fast to a belief which by all the canons of common sense is nothing
but an illusion. M. Sorel must have felt the need of closer statement,
for in a letter to Daniel Halèvy, published in the second edition, he
makes his position much clearer. "Revolutionary myths ..." we read,
"enable us to understand the activity, the feelings, and the ideas of a
populace preparing to enter into a decisive struggle; _they are not
descriptions of things, but expressions of will_." The italics are mine:
they set in relief the insight that makes M. Sorel so important to our
discussion. I do not know whether a quotation torn from its context can
possibly do justice to its author. I do know that for any real grasp of
this point it is necessary to read M. Sorel with great sympathy.
One must grant at least that he has made an accurate observation. The
history of the world is full of great myths which have had the most
concrete results. M. Sorel cites primitive Christianity, the Reformation,
the French Revolution and the Mazzini campaign. The men who took part in
those great social movements summed up their aspiration in pictures of
decisive battles resulting in the ultimate triumph of their cause. We in
America might add an example from our own political life. For it is
Theodore Roosevelt who is actually attempting to make himself and his
admirers the heroes of a new social myth. Did he not announce from the
platform at Chicago--"we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord"?
Let no one dismiss M. Sorel then as an empty paradoxer. The myth is not
one of the outgrown crudities of our pagan ancestors. We, in the midst of
our science and our rationalism, are still making myths, and their force
is felt in the actual affairs of life. They convey an impulse, not a
program, nor a plan of reconstruction. Their practical value cannot be
ignored, for they embody the motor currents in social life.
Myths are to be judged, as M. Sorel says, by their ability to express
aspiration. They stand or fall by that. In such a test the Christian
myth, for example, would be valued for its power of incarnating human
desire. That it did not do so completely is the cause of its decline.
From Aucassin to Nietzsche men have resented it as a partial and stunting
dream. It had too little room for profane love, and only by turning the
Church of Christ into the Church Militant could the essential Christian
passivity obtain the assent of aggressive and masculine races. To-day
traditional Christianity has weakened in the face of man's interest in
the conquest of this world. The liberal and advanced churches recognize
this fact by exhibiting a great preoccupation with everyday affairs. Now
they may be doing important service--I have no wish to deny that--but
when the Christian Churches turn to civics, to reformism or socialism,
they are in fact announcing that the Christian dream is dead. They may
continue to practice some of its moral teachings and hold to some of its
creed, but the Christian impulse is for them no longer active. A new
dream, which they reverently call Christian, has sprung from their
desires.
During their life these social myths contain a nation's finest energy. It
is just because they are "not descriptions of things, but expressions of
will" that their influence is so great. Ignore what a man desires and you
ignore the very source of his power; run against the grain of a nation's
genius and see where you get with your laws. Robert Burns was right when
he preferred poetry to charters. The recognition of this truth by Sorel
is one of the most impressive events in the revolutionary movement.
Standing as a spokesman of an actual social revolt, he has not lost his
vision because he understands its function. If Machiavelli is a symbol of
the political theorist making reason an instrument of purpose, we may
take Sorel as a self-conscious representative of the impulses which
generate purpose.
It must not be supposed that respect for the myth is a discovery of
Sorel's. He is but one of a number of contemporary thinkers who have
reacted against a very stupid prejudice of nineteenth century science to
the effect that the mental habits of human beings were not "facts."
Unless ideas mirrored external nature they were regarded as beneath the
notice of the scientific mind. But in more recent years we have come to
realize that, in a world so full of ignorance and mistake, error itself
is worthy of study. Our untrue ideas are significant because they
influence our lives enormously. They are "facts" to be investigated. One
might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's
analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss
the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd,
or objectively untrue. William James might also be cited for his defense
of those beliefs that are beyond the realm of proof. His essay, "The Will
to Believe," is a declaration of independence, which says in effect that
scientific demonstration is not the only test of ideas. He stated the
case for those beliefs which influence life so deeply, though they fail
to describe it. James himself was very disconcerting to many scientists
because he insisted on expressing his aspirations about the universe in
what his colleague Santayana calls a "romantic cosmology": "I am far from
wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more probable than
conventional idealism or the Christian Orthodoxy. All three are in the
region of dramatic system-making and myth, to which probabilities are
irrelevant."
It is impossible to leave this point without quoting Nietzsche, who had
this insight and stated it most provocatively. In "Beyond Good and Evil"
Nietzsche says flatly that "the falseness of an opinion is not for us any
objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most
strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering,
life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing...." Then he
comments on the philosophers. "They all pose as though their real
opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a
cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic...; whereas, in fact, a
prejudiced proposition, idea, or 'suggestion,' which is generally their
heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments
sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be
regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices,
which they dub 'truths'--and _very_ far from having the conscience which
bravely admits this to itself; very far from having the good taste or the
courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn
friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.... It has
gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has
consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of
involuntary and unconscious autobiography, and, moreover, that the moral
(or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital
germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.... Whoever considers
the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they
may have acted as _inspiring_ genii (or as demons and cobolds) will find
that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that
each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the
ultimate end of existence and the legitimate _lord_ over all the other
impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and, as _such_, attempts to
philosophize."
What Nietzsche has done here is, in his swashbuckling fashion, to cut
under the abstract and final pretensions of creeds. Difficulties arise
when we try to apply this wisdom in the present. That dogmas _were_
instruments of human purposes is not so incredible; that they still _are_
instruments is not so clear to everyone; and that they will be, that they
should be--this seems a monstrous attack on the citadel of truth. It is
possible to believe that other men's theories were temporary and merely
useful; we like to believe that ours will have a greater authority.
It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet
that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do. Many of us
are ready to grant that in the past men's motives were deeper than their
intellects: we forgive them with a kind of self-righteousness which says
that they knew not what they did. But to follow the great tradition of
human wisdom deliberately, with our eyes open in the manner of Sorel,
that seems a crazy procedure. A notion of intellectual honor fights
against it: we think we must aim at final truth, and not allow
autobiography to creep into speculation.
Now the trouble with such an idol is that autobiography creeps in anyway.
The more we censor it, the more likely it is to appear disguised, to fool
us subtly and perhaps dangerously. The men like Nietzsche and James who
show the wilful origin of creeds are in reality the best watchers of the
citadel of truth. For there is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature
of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train
of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God
will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
From the political point of view, another observation is necessary. The
creed of a Rousseau, for example, is active in politics, not for what it
says, but for what people think it says. I have urged that Marx found
scientific reasons for what he wanted to do. It is important to add that
the people who adopted his reasons for what they wanted to do were not
any too respectful of Marx's reasons. Thus the so-called materialistic
philosophy of Karl Marx is not by any means identical with the theories
one hears among Marxian socialists. There is a big distortion in the
transmitting of ideas. A common purpose, far more than common ideas,
binds Marx to his followers. And when a man comes to write about his
philosophy he is confronted with a choice: shall the creed described be
that of Marx or of the Marxians?
For the study of politics I should say unhesitatingly that it is more
important to know what socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers,
think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing
with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the
actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for
two reasons--because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine
Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant
to our subject.
Relevant it is in that it suggests the importance of style, of
propaganda, the popularization of ideas. The host of men who stand
between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic
transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius
usually hates his disciples. It is interesting to notice the explanation
given by Frau Förster-Nietzsche for her brother's quarrel with Wagner.
She dates it from the time when Nietzsche, under the guise of Wagnerian
propaganda, began to expound himself. The critics and interpreters are
themselves creative. It is really unfair to speak of the Marxian
philosophy as a political force. It is juster to speak of the Marxian
tradition.
So when I write of Marx's influence I have in mind what men and women in
socialist meetings, in daily life here in America, hold as a faith and
attribute to Marx. There is no pretension whatever to any critical study
of "Das Kapital" itself. I am thinking rather of stuffy halls in which an
earnest voice is expounding "the evolution of capitalism," of little
groups, curious and bewildered, listening in the streets of New York to
the story of the battle between the "master class" and the "working
class," of little red pamphlets, of newspapers, and cartoons--awkward,
badly printed and not very genial, a great stream of spellbinding and
controversy through which the aspirations of millions are becoming
articulate:
The tradition is saying that "the system" and not the individual is at
fault. It describes that system as one in which a small class owns the
means of production and holds the rest of mankind in bondage. Arts,
religions, laws, as well as vice and crime and degradation, have their
source in this central economic condition. If you want to understand our
life you must see that it is determined by the massing of capital in the
hands of a few. All epochs are determined by economic arrangements. But a
system of property always contains within itself "the seeds of its own
destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest a change: a dispossessed
class compels it. So mankind has progressed through savagery, chattel
slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or the capitalism of to-day. This age
is pregnant with the socialism of to-morrow.
So roughly the tradition is handed on. Two sets of idea seem to dominate
it: we are creatures of economic conditions; a war of classes is being
fought everywhere in which the proletariat will ultimately capture the
industrial machinery and produce a sound economic life as the basis of
peace and happiness for all. The emphasis on environment is insistent.
Facts are marshaled, the news of the day is interpreted to show that men
are determined by economic conditions. This fixation has brought down
upon the socialists a torrent of abuse in which "atheism" and
"materialism" are prevailing epithets. But the propaganda continues and
the philosophy spreads, penetrating reform groups, social workers,
historians, and sociologists.
It has served the socialist purpose well. To the workingmen it has
brought home the importance of capturing the control of industry.
Economic determinism has been an antidote to mere preaching of goodness,
to hero-worship and political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to
concentrate attention on the ownership of capital: whenever any other
interest like religion or patriotism threatened to diffuse that
attention, socialist leaders have always been ready to show that the
economic fact is more central. Dignity and prestige were supplied by
making economics the key of history; passion was chained by building
paradise upon it.
In all the political philosophies there is none so adapted to its end.
Every sanction that mankind respects has been grouped about this one
purpose--the control of capital. It is as if all history converged upon
the issue, and the workers in the cause feel that they carry within them
the destiny of the race. Start anywhere, with an orthodox socialist and
he will lead you to this supreme economic situation. Tyrannies and race
hatred, national rivalries, sex problems, the difficulties of artistic
endeavor, all failures, crimes, vices--there is not one which he will not
relate to private capitalism. Nor is there anything disingenuous about
this focusing of the attention: a real belief is there. Of course you
will find plenty of socialists who see other issues and who smile a bit
at the rigors of economic determinism. In these later days there is in
fact, a decided loosening in the creed. But it is fair to say that the
mass of socialists hold this philosophy with as much solemnity as a
reformer held his when he wrote to me that the cure for obscenity was the
taxation of land values and absolute free trade.
Singlemindedness has done good service. It has bound the world together
and has helped men to think socially. Turning their attention away from
the romanticism of history, the materialistic philosophy has helped them
to look at realities. It has engendered a fine concern about average
people, about the voiceless multitudes who have been left to pass
unnoticed. Not least among the blessings is a shattering of the
good-and-bad-man theory: the assassination of tyrants or the adoration of
saviors. A shallow and specious other-worldliness has been driven out: an
other-worldliness which is really nothing but laziness about this one.
And if from a speculative angle the Marxian tradition has shaded too
heavily the economic facts, it was at least a plausible and practical
exaggeration.
But the drawbacks are becoming more and more evident as socialism
approaches nearer to power and responsibility. The feeling that man is a
creature and not a creator is disastrous as a personal creed when you
come to act. If you insist upon being "determined by conditions" you do
hesitate about saying "I shall." You are likely to wait for something to
determine you. Personal initiative and individual genius are poorly
regarded: many socialists are suspicious of originality. This philosophy,
so useful in propaganda, is becoming a burden in action. That is another
way of saying that the instrument has turned into an idol.
For while it is illuminating to see how environment moulds men, it is
absolutely essential that men regard themselves as moulders of their
environment. A new philosophical basis is becoming increasingly necessary
to socialism--one that may not be "truer" than the old materialism but
that shall simply be more useful. Having learned for a long time what is
done to us, we are now faced with the task of doing. With this changed
purpose goes a change of instruments. All over the world socialists are
breaking away from the stultifying influence of the outworn determinism.
For the time is at hand when they must cease to look upon socialism as
inevitable in order to make it so.
Nor will the philosophy of class warfare serve this new need. That can be
effective only so long as the working-class is without sovereignty. But
no sooner has it achieved power than a new outlook is needed in order to
know what to do with it. The tactics of the battlefield are of no use
when the battle is won.
I picture this philosophy as one of deliberate choices. The underlying
tone of it is that society is made by man for man's uses, that reforms
are inventions to be applied when by experiment they show their
civilizing value. Emphasis is placed upon the devising, adapting,
constructing faculties. There is no reason to believe that this view is
any colder than that of the war of class against class. It will generate
no less energy. Men to-day can feel almost as much zest in the building
of the Panama Canal as they did in a military victory. Their domineering
impulses find satisfaction in conquering things, in subjecting brute
forces to human purposes. This sense of mastery in a winning battle
against the conditions of our life is, I believe, the social myth that
will inspire our reconstructions. We shall feel free to choose among
alternatives--to take this much of socialism, insert so much syndicalism,
leave standing what of capitalism seems worth conserving. We shall be
making our own house for our own needs, cities to suit ourselves, and we
shall believe ourselves capable of moving mountains, as engineers do,
when mountains stand in their way.
And history, science, philosophy will support our hopes. What will
fascinate us in the past will be the records of inventions, of great
choices, of those alternatives on which destiny seems to hang. The
splendid epochs will be interpreted as monuments of man's creation, not
of his propulsion. We shall be interested primarily in the way nations
established their civilization in spite of hostile conditions. Admiration
will go out to the men who did not submit, who bent things to human use.
We may see the entire tragedy of life in being driven.
Half-truths and illusions, if you like, but tonic. This view will suit
our mood. For we shall be making and the makers of history will become
more real to us. Instead of urging that issues are inevitable, instead of
being swamped by problems that are unavoidable, we may stand up and
affirm the issues we propose to handle. Perhaps we shall say with
Nietzsche:
"Let the value of everything be determined afresh by you."