REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
There is a legend of a peasant who lived near Paris through the whole
Napoleonic era without ever having heard of the name of Bonaparte. A
story of that kind is enough to make a man hesitate before he indulges in
a flamboyant description of social changes. That peasant is more than a
symbol of the privacy of human interest: he is a warning against the
incurable romanticism which clings about the idea of a revolution.
Popular history is deceptive if it is used to furnish a picture for
coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into
a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an
episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy
to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked
while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was
being consummated. That is why it is so difficult for living people to
believe that they too are in the midst of great transformations. What
looks to us like an incredible rush of events sloping towards a great
historical crisis was to our ancestors little else than the occasional
punctuation of daily life with an exciting incident. Even to-day when we
have begun to speak of our age as a transition, there are millions of
people who live in an undisturbed routine. Even those of us who regard
ourselves as active in mothering the process and alert in detecting its
growth are by no means constantly aware of any great change. For even the
fondest mother cannot watch her child grow.
I remember how tremendously surprised I was in visiting Russia several
years ago to find that in Moscow or St. Petersburg men were interested in
all sorts of things besides the revolution. I had expected every Russian
to be absorbed in the struggle. It seemed at first as if my notions of
what a revolution ought to be were contradicted everywhere. And I assure
you it wrenched the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling
perambulators and children playing diavolo on the very square where
Bloody Sunday had gone into history. It takes a long perspective and no
very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be melodramatic about it. So
much is left out of history and biography which would spoil the effect.
The anti-climax is almost always omitted.
Perhaps that is the reason why Arnold Bennett's description of the siege
of Paris in "The Old Wives' Tale" is so disconcerting to many people. It
is hard to believe that daily life continues with its stretches of
boredom and its personal interests even while the enemy is bombarding a
city. How much more difficult is it to imagine a revolution that is to
come--to space it properly through a long period of time, to conceive
what it will be like to the people who live through it. Almost all social
prediction is catastrophic and absurdly simplified. Even those who talk
of the slow "evolution" of society are likely to think of it as a series
of definite changes easily marked and well known to everybody. It is what
Bernard Shaw calls the reformer's habit of mistaking his private emotions
for a public movement.
Even though the next century is full of dramatic episodes--the collapse
of governments and labor wars--these events will be to the social
revolution what the smashing of machines in Lancashire was to the
industrial revolution. The reality that is worthy of attention is a
change in the very texture and quality of millions of lives--a change
that will be vividly perceptible only in the retrospect of history.
The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution:
not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas
the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a
measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a
revolution, we must not jump to the assurance that no revolution can be
accomplished. True as it is that great changes are imperceptible, it is
no less true that they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for the
very reason that human life changes its quality so slowly, the panic over
political proposals is childish.
It is obvious, for instance, that the recall of judges will not
revolutionize the national life. That is why the opposition generated
will seem superstitious to the next generation. As I write, a convention
of the Populist Party has just taken place. Eight delegates attended the
meeting, which was held in a parlor. Even the reactionary press speaks in
a kindly way about these men. Twenty years ago the Populists were hated
and feared as if they practiced black magic. What they wanted is on the
point of realization. To some of us it looks like a drop in the bucket--a
slight part of vastly greater plans. But how stupid was the fear of
Populism, what unimaginative nonsense it was to suppose twenty years ago
that the program was the road to the end of the world.
One good deed or one bad one is no measure of a man's character: the Last
Judgment let us hope will be no series of decisions as simple as that.
"The soul survives its adventures," says Chesterton with a splendid sense
of justice. A country survives its legislation. That truth should not
comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that
public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try
big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation
could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in
them. Mistakes do not affect us so deeply as we imagine. Our prophecies
of change are subjective wishes or fears that never come to full
realization.
Those socialists are confused who think that a new era can begin by a
general strike or an electoral victory. Their critics are just a bit more
confused when they become hysterical over the prospect. Both of them
over-emphasize the importance of single events. Yet I do not wish to
furnish the impression that crises are negligible. They are extremely
important as symptoms, as milestones, and as instruments. It is simply
that the reality of a revolution is not in a political decree or the
scarehead of a newspaper, but in the experiences, feelings, habits of
myriads of men.
No one who watched the textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the
winter of 1912 can forget the astounding effect it had on the complacency
of the public. Very little was revealed that any well-informed social
worker does not know as a commonplace about the mill population. The
wretchedness and brutality of Lawrence conditions had been described in
books and magazines and speeches until radicals had begun to wonder at
times whether the power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was
discouragingly weak--an occasional government investigation, an
impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about
all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The
cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant
parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched
the most impervious: story after story came to our ears of hardened
reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent the strikers, of
politicians aroused to action, of social workers become revolutionary.
Daily conversation was shocked into some contact with realities--the
newspapers actually printed facts about the situation of a working class
population.
And why? The reason is not far to seek. The Lawrence strikers did
something more than insist upon their wrongs; they showed a disposition
to right them. That is what scared public opinion into some kind of
truth-telling. So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest
of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them.
But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence,
when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently
no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the
avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look
at the problem more intelligently.
We are not civilized enough to meet an issue before it becomes acute. We
were not intelligent enough to free the slaves peacefully--we are not
intelligent enough to-day to meet the industrial problem before it
develops a crisis. That is the hard truth of the matter. And that is why
no honest student of politics can plead that social movements should
confine themselves to argument and debate, abandoning the militancy of
the strike, the insurrection, the strategy of social conflict.
Those who deplore the use of force in the labor struggle should ask
themselves whether the ruling classes of a country could be depended upon
to inaugurate a program of reconstruction which would abolish the
barbarism that prevails in industry. Does anyone seriously believe that
the business leaders, the makers of opinion and the politicians will, on
their own initiative, bring social questions to a solution? If they do it
will be for the first time in history. The trivial plans they are
introducing to-day--profit-sharing and welfare work--are on their own
admission an attempt to quiet the unrest and ward off the menace of
socialism.
No, paternalism is not dependable, granting that it is desirable. It will
do very little more than it feels compelled to do. Those who to-day bear
the brunt of our evils dare not throw themselves upon the mercy of their
masters, not though there are bread and circuses as a reward. From the
groups upon whom the pressure is most direct must come the power to deal
with it. We are not all immediately interested in all problems: our
attention wanders unless the people who are interested compel us to
listen.
Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of
progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them
and it is weak. Often in the course of these essays I have quoted from H.
G. Wells. I must do so again: "Every party stands essentially for the
interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in
the exciting community, and every party has its scientific minded and
constructive leading section, with well defined hinterlands formulating
its social functions in a public spirited form, and its
superficial-minded following confessing its meannesses and vanities and
prejudices. No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of
living, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed
to co-operate in the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that
capacity for aggression upon other classes lies the essential driving
force of modern affairs."
The truth of this can be tested in the socialist movement. There is a
section among the socialists which regards the class movement of labor as
a driving force in the socialization of industry. This group sees clearly
that without the threat of aggression no settlement of the issues is
possible. Ordinarily such socialists say that the class struggle is a
movement which will end classes. They mean that the self-interest of
labor is identical with the interests of a community--that it is a kind
of social selfishness. But there are other socialists who speak
constantly of "working-class government" and they mean just what they
say. It is their intention to have the community ruled in the interests
of labor. Probe their minds to find out what they mean by labor and in
all honesty you cannot escape the admission that they mean industrial
labor alone. These socialists think entirely in terms of the factory
population of cities: the farmers, the small shop-keepers, the
professional classes have only a perfunctory interest for them. I know
that no end of phrases could be adduced to show the inclusiveness of the
word labor. But their intention is what I have tried to describe: they
are thinking of government by a factory population.
They appeal to history for confirmation: have not all social changes,
they ask, meant the emergence of a new economic class until it dominated
society? Did not the French Revolution mean the conquest of the feudal
landlord by the middle-class merchant? Why should not the Social
Revolution mean the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie? That
may be true, but it is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame
admission that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for
exalting the unconscious failures of other revolutions into deliberate
models for the next one. Just because the capacity of aggression in the
middle class ran away with things, and failed to fuse into any decent
social ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as possible to repeat
the mistake.
The lesson of it all, it seems to me, is this: that class interests are
the driving forces which keep public life centered upon essentials. They
become dangerous to a nation when it denies them, thwarts them and
represses them so long that they burst out and become dominant. Then
there is no limit to their aggression until another class appears with
contrary interests. The situation might be compared to those hysterias in
which a suppressed impulse flares up and rules the whole mental life.
Social life has nothing whatever to fear from group interests so long as
it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of
national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so
foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence,
that is what renders social co-operation impossible, that is what makes
catastrophes the method of change.
The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for
insurrections rests in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and
endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in
the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting
viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own
overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class
war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and
their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a
struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted
men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a
civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the
powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter.
The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan,
Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of
to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.
It seems to me that Roosevelt never spoke more wisely or as a better
friend of civilization than the time when he said at New York City on
March 20, 1912, that "the woes of France for a century and a quarter have
been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of
unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had
pre-Revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up
all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon
reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot;
and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They
gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of
the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled
extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with
convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alterations
of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went
through misery to a shattered goal."
Profound changes are not only necessary, but highly desirable. Even if
this country were comfortably well-off, healthy, prosperous, and
educated, men would go on inventing and creating opportunities to amplify
the possibilities of life. These inventions would mean radical
transformations. For we are bent upon establishing more in this nation
than a minimum of comfort. A liberal people would welcome social
inventions as gladly as we do mechanical ones. What it would fear is a
hard-shell resistance to change which brings it about explosively.
Catastrophes are disastrous to radical and conservative alike: they do
not preserve what was worth maintaining; they allow a deformed and often
monstrous perversion of the original plan. The emancipation of the slaves
might teach us the lesson that an explosion followed by reconstruction is
satisfactory to nobody.
Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute.
The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current
until it overflowed the countryside. Fight labor's demands to the last
ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes
itself sovereign, and takes what it used to ask. That is a poor way for a
nation to proceed. For the insurgent become master is a fanatic from the
struggle, and as George Santayana says, he is only too likely to redouble
his effort after he has forgotten his aim.
Nobody need waste his time debating whether or not there are to be great
changes. That is settled for us whether we like it or not. What is worth
debating is the method by which change is to come about. Our choice, it
seems to me, lies between a blind push and a deliberate leadership,
between thwarting movements until they master us, and domesticating them
until they are answered.
When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party on a platform of social
reform he crystallized a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of
resentment into the agora of political discussion. He performed the real
task of a leader--a task which has essentially two dimensions. By
becoming part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered a power of
effectiveness: by formulating a program for insurgency he translated it
into terms of public service.
What Roosevelt did at the middle-class level, the socialists have done at
the proletarian. The world has been slow to recognize the work of the
Socialist Party in transmuting a dumb muttering into a civilized program.
It has found an intelligent outlet for forces that would otherwise be
purely cataclysmic. The truth of this has been tested recently in the
appearance of the "direct actionists."
They are men who have lost faith in political socialism. Why? Because,
like all other groups, the socialists tend to become routineers, to slip
into an easy reiteration. The direct actionists are a warning to the
Socialist Party that its tactics and its program are not adequate to
domesticating the deepest unrest of labor. Within that party, therefore,
a leadership is required which will ride the forces of "syndicalism" and
use them for a constructive purpose. The brilliant writer of the "Notes
of the Week" in the English New Age has shown how this might be done. He
has fused the insight of the syndicalist with the plans of the
collectivists under the name of Guild Socialism.
His plan calls for co-management of industry by the state and the labor
union. It steers a course between exploitation by a bureaucracy in the
interests of the consumer--the socialist danger--and oppressive
monopolies by industrial unions--the syndicalist danger. I shall not
attempt to argue here either for or against the scheme. My concern is
with method rather than with special pleadings. The Guild Socialism of
the "New Age" is merely an instance of statesmanlike dealing with a new
social force. Instead of throwing up its hands in horror at one
over-advertised tactical incident like sabotage, the "New Age" went
straight to the creative impulse of the syndicalist movement.
Every true craftsman, artist or professional man knows and sympathizes
with that impulse: you may call it a desire for self-direction in labor.
The deepest revolt implied in the term syndicalism is against the
impersonal, driven quality of modern industry--against the destruction of
that pride which alone distinguishes work from slavery. Some such impulse
as that is what marks off syndicalism from the other revolts of labor.
Our suspicion of the collectivist arrangement is aroused by the picture
of a vast state machine so horribly well-regulated that human impulse is
utterly subordinated. I believe too that the fighting qualities of
syndicalism are kept at the boiling point by a greater sense of outraged
human dignity than can be found among mere socialists or unionists. The
imagination is more vivid: the horror of capitalism is not alone in the
poverty and suffering it entails, but in its ruthless denial of life to
millions of men. The most cruel of all denials is to deprive a human
being of joyous activity. Syndicalism is shot through with the assertion
that an imposed drudgery is intolerable--that labor at a subsistence wage
as a cog in a meaningless machine is no condition upon which to found
civilization. That is a new kind of revolt--more dangerous to capitalism
than the demand for higher wages. You can not treat the syndicalists like
cattle because forsooth they have ceased to be cattle. "The damned
wantlessness of the poor," about which Oscar Wilde complained, the cry
for a little more fodder, gives way to an insistence upon the chance to
be interested in life.
To shut the door in the face of such a current of feeling because it is
occasionally exasperated into violence would be as futile as locking up
children because they get into mischief. The mind which rejects
syndicalism entirely because of the by-products of its despair has had
pearls cast before it in vain. I know that syndicalism means a revision
of some of our plans--that it is an intrusion upon many a glib prejudice.
But a human impulse is more important than any existing theory. We must
not throw an unexpected guest out of the window because no place is set
for him at table. For we lose not only the charm of his company: he may
in anger wreck the house.
* * * * *
Yet the whole nation can't sit at one table: the politician will object
that all human interests can't be embodied in a party program. That is
true, truer than most politicians would admit in public. No party can
represent a whole nation, although, with the exception of the socialists,
all of them pretend to do just that. The reason is very simple: a
platform is a list of performances that are possible within a few years.
It is concerned with more or less immediate proposals, and in a nation
split up by class, sectional and racial interests, these proposals are
sure to arouse hostility. No definite industrial and political platform,
for example, can satisfy rich and poor, black and white, Eastern creditor
and Western farmer. A party that tried to answer every conflicting
interest would stand still because people were pulling in so many
different directions. It would arouse the anger of every group and the
approval of its framers. It would have no dynamic power because the
forces would neutralize each other.
One comprehensive party platform fusing every interest is impossible and
undesirable. What is both possible and desirable is that every group
interest should be represented in public life--that it should have
spokesmen and influence in public affairs. This is almost impossible
to-day. Our blundering political system is pachydermic in its
irresponsiveness. The methods of securing representation are unfit
instruments for any flexible use. But the United States is evidently not
exceptional in this respect. England seems to suffer in the same way. In
May, 1912, the "Daily Mail" published a series of articles by H. G. Wells
on "The Labour Unrest." Is he not describing almost any session of
Congress when he says that "to go into the House of Commons is to go
aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner
where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialized Assembly
which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our
affairs?" Further on Wells remarks that "this diminishing actuality of
our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day.... In
Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections.
What really happens at a general election is that the party
organizations--obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious
funds--appoint about 1200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we
so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled
angry way, to strike off the names of about half these selected
gentlemen."
A cynic might say that the people can't go far wrong in politics because
they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is
unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the
money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents
in the interest of a mediocre regularity.
But suppose that politics were made responsive--suppose that the forces
of the community found avenues of expression into public life. Would not
our legislatures be cut up into antagonistic parties, would not the
conflicts of the nation be concentrated into one heated hall? If you
really represented the country in its government, would you not get its
partisanship in a quintessential form? After all group interests in the
nation are diluted by space and time: the mere separation in cities and
country prevents them from falling into the psychology of the crowd. But
let them all be represented in one room by men who are professionally
interested in their constituency's prejudices and what would you
accomplish but a deepening of the cleavages? Would the session not become
an interminable wrangle?
Nobody can answer these questions with any certainty. Most prophecies are
simply the masquerades of prejudice, and the people who love stability
and prefer to let their own well-being alone will see in a sensitive
political system little but an invitation to chaos. They will choose
facts to adorn their fears. History can be all things to all men: nothing
is easier than to summon the Terror, the Commune, lynchings in the
Southern States, as witnesses to the excesses and hysterias of the mob.
Those facts will prove the case conclusively to anyone who has already
made up his mind on the subject. Absolute democrats can also line up
their witnesses: the conservatism of the Swiss, Wisconsin's successful
experiments, the patience and judgment of the Danes. Both sides are
remarkably sure that the right is with them, whereas the only truth about
which an observer can be entirely certain is that in some places and in
certain instances democracy is admittedly successful.
There is no absolute case one way or the other. It would be silly from
the experience we have to make a simple judgment about the value of
direct expression. You cannot lump such a mass of events together and
come to a single conclusion about them. It is a crude habit of mind that
would attempt it. You might as well talk abstractly about the goodness or
badness of this universe which contains happiness, pain, exhilaration and
indifference in a thousand varying grades and quantities. There is no
such thing as Democracy; there are a number of more or less democratic
experiments which are not subject to wholesale eulogy or condemnation.
The questions about the success of a truly representative system are
pseudo-questions. And for this reason: success is not due to the system;
it does not flow from it automatically. The source of success is in the
people who use the system: as an instrument it may help or hinder them,
but they must operate it. Government is not a machine running on straight
tracks to a desired goal. It is a human work which may be facilitated by
good tools.
That is why the achievements of the Swiss may mean nothing whatever when
you come to prophesy about the people of New York. Because Wisconsin has
made good use of the direct primary it does not follow that it will
benefit the Filipino. It always seems curious to watch the satisfaction
of some reform magazines when China or Turkey or Persia imitates the
constitutional forms of Western democracies. Such enthusiasts postulate a
uniformity of human ability which every fact of life contradicts.
Present-day reform lays a great emphasis upon instruments and very little
on the skilful use of them. It says that human nature is all right, that
what is wrong is the "system." Now the effect of this has been to
concentrate attention on institutions and to slight men. A small step
further, institutions become an end in themselves. They may violate human
nature as the taboo does. That does not disturb the interest in them very
much, for by common consent reformers are to fix their minds upon the
"system."
A machine should be run by men for human uses. The preoccupation with the
"system" lays altogether too little stress on the men who operate it and
the men for whom it is run. It is as if you put all your effort into the
working of a plough and forgot the farmer and the consumer. I state the
case baldly and contradiction would be easy. The reformer might point to
phrases like "human welfare" which appear in his writings. And yet the
point stands, I believe. The emphasis which directs his thinking bears
most heavily upon the mechanics of life--only perfunctorily upon the
ability of the men who are to use them.
Even an able reformer like Mr. Frederic C. Howe does not escape entirely.
A recent book is devoted to a glowing eulogy of "Wisconsin, an Experiment
in Democracy." In a concluding chapter Mr. Howe states the philosophy of
the experiment. "What is the explanation of Wisconsin?" he asks. "Why has
it been able to eliminate corruption, machine politics, and rid itself of
the boss? What is the cause of the efficiency, the thoroughness, the
desire to serve which animate the state? Why has Wisconsin succeeded
where other states have uniformly failed? I think the explanation is
simple. It is also perfectly natural. It is traceable to democracy, to
the political freedom which had its beginning in the direct primary law,
and which has been continuously strengthened by later laws"; some pages
later, "Wisconsin assumed that the trouble with our politics is not with
our people, but with the machinery with which the people work.... It has
established a line of vision as direct as possible between the people and
the expression of their will." The impression Mr. Howe evidently wishes
to leave with his readers is that the success of the experiment is due to
the instruments rather than to the talent of the people of Wisconsin.
That would be a valuable and comforting assurance to propagandists, for
it means that other states with the same instruments can achieve the same
success. But the conclusion seems to me utterly unfounded. The reasoning
is perilously like that of the gifted lady amateur who expects to achieve
greatness by imitating the paint box and palette, oils and canvases of an
artist.
Mr. Howe's own book undermines his conclusions. He begins with an account
of La Follette--of a man with initiative and a constructive bent. The
forces La Follette set in motion are commented upon. The work of Van Hise
is shown. What Wisconsin had was leadership and a people that responded,
inventors, and constructive minds. They forged the direct primary and the
State University out of the impetus within themselves. No doubt they were
fortunate in their choice of instruments. They made the expression of the
people's will direct, yet that will surely is the more primary thing. It
makes and uses representative systems: but you cannot reverse the
process. A man can manufacture a plough and operate it, but no amount of
ploughs will create a man and endow him with skill.
All sorts of observers have pointed out that the Western States adopt
reform legislation more quickly than the Eastern. Yet no one would
seriously maintain that the West is more progressive because it has
progressive laws. The laws are a symptom and an aid but certainly not the
cause. Constitutions do not make people; people make constitutions. So
the task of reform consists not in presenting a state with progressive
laws, but in getting the people to want them.
The practical difference is extraordinary. I insist upon it so much
because the tendency of political discussion is to regard government as
automatic: a device that is sure to fail or sure to succeed. It is sure
of nothing. Effort moves it, intelligence directs it; its fate is in
human hands.
* * * * *
The politics I have urged in these chapters cannot be learned by rote.
What can be taught by rule of thumb is the administration of precedents.
That is at once the easiest and the most fruitless form of public
activity. Only a low degree of intelligence is required and of effort
merely a persistent repetition. Men fall into a routine when they are
tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its
burdens. It was a profound observation when Bernard Shaw said that men
dread liberty because of the bewildering responsibility it imposes and
the uncommon alertness it demands. To do what has always been done, to
think in well-cut channels, to give up "the intolerable disease of
thought," is an almost constant demand of our natures. That is perhaps
why so many of the romantic rebels of the Nineteenth Century sank at last
into the comforting arms of Mother Church. That is perhaps the reason why
most oldish men acquire information, but learn very little. The
conservative who loves his routine is in nine cases out of ten a creature
too lazy to change its habits.
Confronted with a novelty, the first impulse is to snub it, and send it
into exile. When it becomes too persistent to be ignored a taboo is
erected and threats of fines and condign punishment are made if it
doesn't cease to appear. This is the level of culture at which Sherman
Anti-Trust acts are passed, brothels are raided, and labor agitators are
thrown into jail. If the taboo is effective it drives the evil under
cover, where it festers and emits a slow poison. This is the price we pay
for the appearance of suppression. But if the problem is more heavily
charged with power, the taboo irritates the force until it explodes. Not
infrequently what was once simply a factor of life becomes the dominating
part of it. At this point the whole routineer scheme of things collapses,
there is a period of convulsion and Cæsarean births, and men weary of
excitement sink back into a newer routine. Thus the cycle of futility is
completed.
The process bears as much resemblance to statecraft as sitting backward
on a runaway horse does to horsemanship. The ordinary politician has no
real control, no direction, no insight into the power he rides. What he
has is an elevated, though temporary seat. Real statesmanship has a
different ambition. It begins by accepting human nature. No routine has
ever done that in spite of the conservative patter about "human nature";
mechanical politics has usually begun by ignoring and ended by violating
the nature of men.
To accept that nature does not mean that we accept its present character.
It is probably true that the impulses of men have changed very little
within recorded history. What has changed enormously from epoch to epoch
is the character in which these impulses appear. The impulses that at one
period work themselves out into cruelty and lust may at another produce
the richest values of civilized life. The statesman can affect that
choice. His business is to provide fine opportunities for the expression
of human impulses--to surround childhood, youth and age with homes and
schools, cities and countryside that shall be stocked with interest and
the chance for generous activity.
Government can play a leading part in this work, for with the decadence
of the church it has become the only truly catholic organization in the
land. Its task is essentially to carry out programs of service, to add
and build and increase the facilities of life. Repression is an
insignificant part of its work; the use of the club can never be
applauded, though it may be tolerated _faute de mieux_. Its use is a
confession of ignorance.
A sensitively representative machinery will probably serve such
statesmanship best. For the easy expression of public opinion in
government is a clue to what services are needed and a test of their
success. It keeps the processes of politics well ventilated and reminds
politicians of their excuse for existence.
In that kind of statesmanship there will be a premium on inventiveness,
on the ingenuity to devise and plan. There will be much less use for
lawyers and a great deal more for scientists. The work requires
industrial organizers, engineers, architects, educators, sanitists to
achieve what leadership brings into the program of politics.
This leadership is the distinctive fact about politics. The statesman
acts in part as an intermediary between the experts and his constituency.
He makes social movements conscious of themselves, expresses their needs,
gathers their power and then thrusts them behind the inventor and the
technician in the task of actual achievement. What Roosevelt did in the
conservation movement was typical of the statesman's work. He recognized
the need of attention to natural resources, made it public, crystallized
its force and delegated the technical accomplishment to Pinchot and his
subordinates.
* * * * *
But creative statesmanship requires a culture to support it. It can
neither be taught by rule nor produced out of a vacuum. A community that
clatters along with its rusty habits of thought unquestioned, making no
distinction between instruments and idols, with a dull consumption of
machine-made romantic fiction, no criticism, an empty pulpit and an
unreliable press, will find itself faithfully mirrored in public affairs.
The one thing that no democrat may assume is that the people are dear
good souls, fully competent for their task. The most valuable leaders
never assume that. No one, for example, would accuse Karl Marx of
disloyalty to workingmen. Yet in 1850 he could write at the demagogues
among his friends: "While we draw the attention of the German workman to
the _undeveloped state_ of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the
national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the
grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of
the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetich of the words, 'the
people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.'" John Spargo quotes
this statement in his "Life." Marx, we are told, could use phrases like
"democratic miasma." He never seems to have made the mistake of confusing
democracy with demolatry. Spargo is perfectly clear about this
characteristic of Marx: "He admired most of all, perhaps, that fine
devotion to truth as he understood it, and disregard of popularity which
marked Owen's life. Contempt for popular opinion was one of his most
strongly developed characteristics. He was fond, says Liebknecht, of
quoting as his motto the defiant line of Dante, with which he afterwards
concluded his preface to 'Das Kapital':
'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.'"
It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set the intellectual standard
of socialism on the most vigorous intellectual basis he could find. He
knew better than to be satisfied with loose thinking and fairly good
intentions. He knew that the vast change he contemplated needed every
ounce of intellectual power that the world possessed. A fine boast it was
that socialism was equipped with all the culture of the age. I wonder
what he would have thought of an enthusiastic socialist candidate for
Governor of New York who could write that "until men are free the world
has no need of any more literary efforts, of any more paintings, of any
more poems. It is better to have said one word for the emancipation of
the race than to have written the greatest novel of the times.... The
world doesn't need any more literature."
I will not venture a guess as to what Marx would have said, but I know
what we must say: "Without a literature the people is dumb, without
novels and poems, plays and criticism, without books of philosophy, there
is neither the intelligence to plan, the imagination to conceive, nor the
understanding of a common purpose. Without culture you can knock down
governments, overturn property relations, you can create excitement, but
you cannot create a genuine revolution in the lives of men." The reply of
the workingmen in 1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria, "a new
terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if you please, contains this interesting
objection: "Because although those comrades who intend to emigrate with
Cabet may be eager Communists, yet they still possess too many of the
faults and prejudices of present-day society by reason of their past
education to be able to get rid of them at once by joining Icaria."
That simple statement might be taken to heart by all the reformers and
socialists who insist that the people are all right, that only
institutions are wrong. The politics of reconstruction require a nation
vastly better educated, a nation freed from its slovenly ways of
thinking, stimulated by wider interests, and jacked up constantly by the
sharpest kind of criticism. It is puerile to say that institutions must
be changed from top to bottom and then assume that their victims are
prepared to make the change. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or
short ballots make a democracy out of an illiterate people. Those
portions of America where there are voting booths but no schools cannot
possibly be described as democracies. Nor can the person who reads one
corrupt newspaper and then goes out to vote make any claim to having
registered his will. He may have a will, but he has not used it.
For politics whose only ideal is the routine, it is just as well that men
shouldn't know what they want or how to express it. Education has always
been a considerable nuisance to the conservative intellect. In the
Southern States, culture among the negroes is openly deplored, and I do
not blame any patriarch for dreading the education of women. It is out of
culture that the substance of real revolutions is made. If by some magic
force you could grant women the vote and then keep them from schools and
colleges, newspapers and lectures, the suffrage would be no more
effective than a Blue Law against kissing your wife on Sunday. It is
democratic machinery with an educated citizenship behind it that embodies
all the fears of the conservative and the hopes of the radical.
Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts,
their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their
table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific
training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire.
All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
Without a favorable culture political schemes are a mere imposition. They
will not work without a people to work them.
The real preparation for a creative statesmanship lies deeper than
parties and legislatures. It is the work of publicists and educators,
scientists, preachers and artists. Through all the agents that make and
popularize thought must come a bent of mind interested in invention and
freed from the authority of ideas. The democratic culture must, with
critical persistence, make man the measure of all things. I have tried
again and again to point out the iconoclasm that is constantly necessary
to avoid the distraction that comes of idolizing our own methods of
thought. Without an unrelaxing effort to center the mind upon human uses,
human purposes, and human results, it drops into idolatry and becomes
hostile to creation.
The democratic experiment is the only one that requires this wilful
humanistic culture. An absolutism like Russia's is served better when the
people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity
to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a
vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That
prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their
own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of
those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them.
But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens. A view of life
in which man obediently allows himself to be made grist for somebody
else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of
self-government. You cannot long deny external authorities in government
and hold to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident that the
nineteenth century questioned a great deal more than the sovereignty of
kings. The revolt went deeper and democracy in politics was only an
aspect of it. The age might be compared to those years of a boy's life
when he becomes an atheist and quarrels with his family. The nineteenth
century was a bad time not only for kings, but for priests, the classics,
parental autocrats, indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the Aristotelian
Poetics and the validity of logic. If disobedience is man's original
virtue, as Oscar Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily virtuous
century. Not a little of the revolt was an exuberant rebellion for its
own sake. There were also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to
orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The transvaluation of values was
performed by many hands into all sorts of combinations.
There have been other periods of revolution. Heresy is just a few hours
younger than orthodoxy. Disobedience is certainly not the discovery of
the nineteenth century. But the quality of it is. I believe Chesterton
has hold of an essential truth when he says that this is the first time
men have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels claimed to be more
orthodox than the Church, to have gone back to the true authorities. The
radicals of recent times proclaim that there is no orthodoxy, no doctrine
that men must accept without question.
Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily. They have their invisible
popes, called Art, Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a
catechism. But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be
self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the
half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many
queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has
taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another
connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism. It would not
be difficult to find a similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From
Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a "man-made" world to the lady
who would like to vote about her taxes, there is a feeling that woman
must be something more than a passive creature. Walter Pater might be
quoted in his conclusion to the effect that "the theory or idea or system
which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of experience, in
consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some
abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only
conventional, has no real claim upon us." The desire for self-direction
has made a thousand philosophies as contradictory as the temperaments of
the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration is at hand: Nietzsche advising
the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him
and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that
_laughed_!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn
to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of
defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly:
Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none of the
bourgeois morality, and becomes most eloquent when he attacks other
revolutionists.
I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in the hundreds of artists
and thinkers that are making the thought of our times. There is a kind of
"professional reconciler" of opposites who likes to lump all the
prominent rebels together and refer to them affectionately as "us
radicals." Yet that there is a common impulse in modern thought which
strives towards autonomy is true and worth remarking. In some men it is
half-conscious, in others a minor influence, but almost no one of weight
escapes the contagion of it entirely. It is a new culture that is being
prepared. Without it there would to-day be no demand for a creative
statesmanship which turns its back upon the routine and the taboo, kings
and idols, and non-human purposes. It does more. It is making the
atmosphere in which a humanly centered politics can flourish. The fact
that this culture is multiform and often contradictory is a sign that
more and more of the interests of life are finding expression. We should
rejoice at that, for profusion means fertility; where a dead uniformity
ceases, invention and ingenuity flourish.
Perhaps the insistence on the need of a culture in statecraft will seem
to many people an old-fashioned delusion. Among the more rigid socialists
and reformers it is not customary to spend much time discussing mental
habits. That, they think, was made unnecessary by the discovery of an
economic basis of civilization. The destinies of society are felt to be
too solidly set in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direction.
Where there is no choice, of what importance is opinion?
All propaganda is, of course, a practical tribute to the value of
culture. However inevitable the process may seem, all socialists agree
that its inevitability should be fully realized. They teach at one time
that men act from class interests: but they devote an enormous amount of
energy to making men conscious of their class. It evidently matters to
that supposedly inevitable progress whether men are aware of it. In
short, the most hardened socialist admits choice and deliberation,
culture and ideals into his working faith. He may talk as if there were
an iron determinism, but his practice is better than his preachment.
Yet there are necessities in social life. To all the purposes of politics
it is settled, for instance, that the trust will never be "unscrambled"
into small competing businesses. We say in our argument that a return to
the days of the stage-coach is impossible or that "you cannot turn back
the hands of the clock." Now man might return to the stage-coach if that
seemed to him the supreme goal of all his effort, just as anyone can
follow Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of the clock if he
pleases. But nobody can recover his yesterdays no matter how much he
abuses the clock, and no man can expunge the memory of railroads though
all the stations and engines were dismantled.
"From this survival of the past," says Bergson, "it follows that
consciousness cannot go through the same state twice." This is the real
necessity that makes any return to the imagined glories of other days an
idle dream. Graham Wallas remarks that those who have eaten of the tree
of knowledge cannot forget--"Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops
in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us
to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on principle.' But
since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us
to eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we must face in all our
calculations, and so in politics too, is that you cannot recover what is
passed. That is why educated people are not to be pressed into the
customs of their ignorance, why women who have reached out for more than
"Kirche, Kinder und Küche" can never again be entirely domestic and
private in their lives. Once people have questioned an authority their
faith has lost its naïveté. Once men have tasted inventions like the
trust they have learned something which cannot be annihilated. I know of
one reformer who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate talks with
powerful conservatives. He explains them to themselves: never after do
they exercise their power with the same unquestioning ruthlessness.
Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never
be a repetition of the past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The
application of it to politics is not difficult because politics is one of
the interests of life. We can learn from him in what sense we are bound.
"The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the
nature of the artist, by colors spread out on the palette; but even with
the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could
have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would
have been to produce it before it was produced...." The future is
explained by the economic and social institutions which were present at
its birth: the trust and the labor union, all the "movements" and
institutions, will condition it. "Just as the talent of the painter is
formed or deformed--in any case, is modified--under the very influence of
the work he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue,
modifies our personality, being indeed the new form we are just assuming.
It is then right to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is
necessary to add also, that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and
that we are creating ourselves continually."
What I have called culture enters into political life as a very powerful
condition. It is a way of creating ourselves. Make a blind struggle
luminous, drag an unconscious impulse into the open day, see that men are
aware of their necessities, and the future is in a measure controlled.
The culture of to-day is for the future an historical condition. That is
its political importance. The mental habits we are forming, our
philosophies and magazines, theaters, debates, schools, pulpits and
newspapers become part of an active past which as Bergson says "follows
us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our
earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to
join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain
leave it outside."
Socialists claim that because the McNamara brothers had no
"class-consciousness," because they were without a philosophy of society
and an understanding of the labor movement their sense of wrong was bound
to seek out dynamite. That is a profound truth backed by abundant
evidence. If you turn, for example, to Spargo's Life of Karl Marx you see
that all through his career Marx struggled with the mere
insurrectionists. It was the men without the Marxian vision of growth and
discipline who were forever trying to lead little marauding bands against
the governments of Europe. The fact is worth pondering: the Marxian
socialists, openly declaring that all authority is a temporary
manifestation of social conditions, have waged what we must call a war of
culture against the powers of the world. They have tried to arouse in
workingmen the consciousness of an historical mission--the patience of
that labor is one of the wonders of the age. But the McNamaras had a
culture that could help them not at all. They were Catholics, Democrats
and old-fashioned trade-unionists. Religion told them that authority was
absolute and eternal, politics that Jefferson had said about all there
was to say, economics insisted that the struggle between labor and
capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life told them that society was
brutal: an episode like the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to
blasphemy and dynamite.
Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and terrorism, are compounded
of courage, indignation and ignorance. Civilization has much to fear from
the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but the preaching of "class
consciousness," far from being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized
as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic interests.
Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a revolutionary period and
nothing is so important as to be aware of it. The measure of our
self-consciousness will more or less determine whether we are to be the
victims or the masters of change. Without philosophy we stumble along.
The old routines and the old taboos are breaking up anyway, social forces
are emerging which seek autonomy and struggle against slavery to
non-human purposes. We seem to be moving towards some such statecraft as
I have tried to suggest. But without knowledge of it that progress will
be checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for a splendid human
civilization are all about us. They need to be used. For that there must
be a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of impulses, competent
to ward off the idols of its own thought, hospitable to novelty and
sufficiently inventive to harness power.
Why this age should have come to be what it is, why at this particular
time the whole drift of thought should be from authority to autonomy
would be an interesting speculation. It is one of the ultimate questions
of politics. It is like asking why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was
singled out as the luminous point of the Western World. We do not know
enough to cut under such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why there
was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries man seems extraordinarily
creative. Perhaps the Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of
change, and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to the great
surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease of travel, the popularizing of
knowledge, the break-down of frontiers have given us a new interest in
human life by showing how temporary are all its instruments. Certainly
placid or morose acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves either to
ideas or to other men, it will be because they do not know they are
slaves. Their intention is to be free. Their desire is for a full and
expressive life and they do not relish a lop-sided and lamed humanity.
For the age is rich with varied and generous passions.