finalism," and in the other "radical mechanism." But whether the
universe exists but to reel off a divine plan conceived before all
worlds, or be but the mechanical swinging of the shuttle of cause and
effect, what difference is there if the point arrived at is the same? In
both cases this point was fixed before the beginning of time, and the
meaning of the universe is just that and nothing else, since that is
what it all comes to in the end.
Whether the hand which turns the crank of the world-machine be called
that of God or merely "Evolution," it is only a verbal difference; it is
in both cases "a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness." And
the righteousness? Why, it is just the righteousness of our own
crowd--in other words, the crowd's bill of rights painted in the sky by
our own wish-fancy, and dancing over our heads like an aurora borealis.
It is the history of all crowds that this dazzling pillar of fire in the
Arctic night is hailed as the "rosy-fingered dawn" of the Day of the
Lord.
Or, to change the figure somewhat, the faithful crowd has but to follow
its fiery cloud to the promised land which flows with milk and honey;
then march for an appointed time about the walls of the wicked bourgeois
Jericho, playing its propaganda tune until the walls fall down by magic
and the world is ours. _No revolution is possible without a miracle and
a brass band._
I have no desire to discourage those who have gone to work at the real
tasks of social reconstruction--certainly no wish to make this study an
apology for the existing social order. In the face of the ugly facts
which on every hand stand as indictments of what is called "capitalism,"
it is doubtful if anyone could defend the present system without
recourse to a certain amount of cynicism or cant. The widespread social
unrest which has enlisted in its service so much of the intellectual
spirit of this generation surely could never have come about without
provocation more real than the work of a mere handful of
"mischief-making agitators." The challenge to modern society is not
wholly of crowd origin.
But it is one thing to face seriously the manifold problems of
reconstruction of our social relations, and it is quite another thing to
persuade oneself that all these entangled problems have but one
imaginary neck which is waiting to be cut with a single stroke of the
sword of revolution in the hands of "the people." Hundreds of times I
have heard radicals, while discussing certain evils of present society,
say, "All these things are but symptoms, effects; to get rid of them you
must remove the cause." That cause is always, in substance, the present
economic system.
If this argument means that, instead of thinking of the various phases
of social behavior as isolated from one another, we should conceive of
them as so interrelated as to form something like a more or less
causally connected organic whole, I agree. But if it means something
else--and it frequently does--the argument is based upon a logical
fallacy. The word "system" is not a causal term; it is purely
descriptive. The facts referred to, whatever connections we may discover
among them, are not the effects of a mysterious "system" behind the
facts of human behavior; the facts themselves, taken together, are the
system.
The confusion of causal and descriptive ideas is a habit common to both
the intellectualist philosopher and the crowd-minded. It enables people
to turn their gaze from the empirical Many to the fictitious One, from
the real to the imaginary. The idea of a system behind, over, outside,
and something different from the related facts which the term "system"
is properly used to describe, whether that system be a world-system, a
logical system, or a social system, whether it be capitalism or
socialism, "system" so conceived is a favorite crowd-spook. It is the
same logical fallacy as if one spoke of the temperature of this May day
as the effect of the climate, when all know that the term climate is
simply (to paraphrase James) the term by which we characterize the
temperature, weather, etc., which we experience on this and other days.
We have already seen to what use the crowd-mind puts all such
generalizations.
A popular revolutionary philosophy of history pictures the procession of
the ages as made up of a pageant of spook-social systems, each distinct
from the others and coming in its appointed time. But social systems do
not follow in a row, like elephants in a circus parade--each huge beast
with its trunk coiled about the end of his predecessor's tail. The
greater part of this "evolutionary and revolutionary" pageantry is
simply dream-stuff. Those who try to march into Utopia in such an
imaginary parade are not even trying to reconstruct society; they are
sociological somnambulists.
The crowd-mind clings to such pageantry because, as we saw in another
connection, the crowd desires to believe that evolution guarantees its
own future supremacy. It then becomes unnecessary to solve concrete
problems. One need only possess an official program of the order of the
parade. In other words, the crowd must persuade itself that only one
solution of the social problem is possible, and that one inevitable--its
own.
Such thinking wholly misconceives the nature of the social problem. Like
all the practical dilemmas of life, this problem, assuming it to be in
any sense a single problem, is real just because more than one solution
is possible. The task here is like that of choosing a career. Whole
series of partially foreseen possibilities are contingent upon certain
definite choices. Aside from our choosing, many sorts of futures may be
equally possible. Our intervention at this or that definite point is an
act by which we will one series of possibilities rather than another
into reality. But the act of intervention is never performed once for
all. Each intervention leads only to new dilemmas, among which we must
again choose and intervene. It is mainly in order to escape from the
necessity of facing this terrifying series of unforeseeable dilemmas
that the crowd-man walketh in a vain show.
In pointing out the futility of present-day revolutionary
crowd-thinking, I am only striving to direct, in however small a degree,
our thought and energies into channels which lead toward desired
results. It is not by trombones that we are to redeem society, nor is
the old order going to tumble down like the walls of Jericho, and a
complete new start be given. Civilization cannot be wiped out and begun
all over again. It constitutes the environment within which our
reconstructive thinking must, by tedious effort, make certain definite
modifications. Each such modification is a problem in itself, to be
dealt with, not by belief in miracle, but by what Dewey calls "creative
intelligence." Each such modification must be achieved by taking all the
known facts, which are relevant, into account. As such it is a new
adaptation, and the result of a series of such adaptations may be as
great and radical a social transformation as one may have the courage
to set as the goal of a definite policy of social effort. But there is a
world of difference between social thinking of this kind, where faith is
a working hypothesis, and that which ignores the concrete problems that
must be solved to reach the desired goal, and, after the manner of
crowds, dreams of entering fairyland, or of pulling a new world _en
bloc_ down out of the blue, by the magic of substituting new tyrannies
for old.
Revolutionary crowd-thinking is not "creative intelligence." It is
_hocus-pocus_, a sort of social magic formula like the "mutabor" in the
Arabian Nights; it is an _Aladdin's-lamp_ philosophy. And here we may
sum up this part of our argument. The idea of the revolution is to the
crowd a symbol, the function of which is compensation for the burdens of
the struggle for existence, for the feeling of social inferiority, and
for desires suppressed by civilization. It is an imaginary escape from
hard reality, a new-world system in which the ego seeks refuge, a
defense mechanism under the compulsive influence of which crowds behave
like somnambulistic individuals. It is the apotheosis of the under crowd
itself and the transcendental expression and justification of its will
to rule. It is made up of just those broad generalizations which are of
use in keeping that crowd together. It gives the new crowd unction in
its fight with the old, since it was precisely these same dream-thoughts
which the old crowd wrote on its banners in the day when it, too, was
blowing trumpets outside the walls of Jericho.
VIII
THE FRUITS OF REVOLUTION--NEW CROWD-TYRANNIES FOR OLD
So much for the psychology of the revolutionary propaganda. Now let us
look at what happens in the moment of revolutionary outbreak. We have
dwelt at some length on the fact that a revolution occurs when a new
crowd succeeds in displacing an old one in position of social control.
At first there is a general feeling of release and of freedom. There is
a brief period of ecstasy, of good will, a strange, almost mystical
magnanimity. A flood of oratory is released in praise of the "new day of
the people." Everyone is a "comrade." Everyone is important. There is an
inclination to trust everyone. This Easter-morning state of mind
generally lasts for some days--until people are driven by the pinch of
hunger to stop talking and take up again the routine tasks of daily
living. We have all read how the "citizens" of the French Revolution
danced in the streets for sheer joy in their new-won liberty. Those who
were in Petrograd during the days which immediately followed the
downfall of the Tsar bear witness to a like almost mystical sense of the
general goodness of human kind and of joy in human fellowship.
With the return to the commonplace tasks of daily life, some effort, and
indeed further rationalization, is needed to keep up the feeling that
the new and wonderful age has really come to stay. Conflicts of interest
and special grievances are viewed as involving the vital principles of
the Revolution. People become impatient and censorious. There is a
searching of hearts. People watch their neighbors, especially their
rivals, to make sure that nothing in their behavior shall confirm the
misgivings which are vaguely felt in their own minds. The rejoicing and
comradeship which before were spontaneous are now demanded. Intolerance
toward the vanquished crowd reappears with increased intensity, not a
little augmented by the knowledge that the old enemies are now at "the
people's" mercy.
There is a demand for revenge for old abuses. The displaced crowd likely
as not, foreseeing the doom which awaits its members, seeks escape by
attempting a counter-revolution. A propaganda of sympathy is carried on
among members of this same class who remain in the dominant crowd in
communities not affected by the revolution. There is secret plotting
and suspicion of treason on every hand. People resort to extravagant
expressions of their revolutionary principles, not only to keep up their
own faith in them, but to show their loyalty to the great cause. The
most fanatical and uncompromising members of the group gain prominence
because of their excessive devotion. By the very logic of
crowd-thinking, leadership passes to men who are less and less competent
to deal with facts and more and more extreme in their zeal. Hence the
usual decline from the Mirabeaus to the Dantons and Cariers, and from
these to the Marats and Robespierres, from the Milukoffs to the
Kerenskys and from the Kerenskys to the Trotzkys. With each excess the
crowd must erect some still new defense against the inevitable
disclosure of the fact that the people are not behaving at all as if
they were living in the kingdom of heaven. With each farther deviation
from the plain meaning of facts, the revolution must resort to more
severe measures to sustain itself, until finally an unsurmountable
barrier is reached, such as the arrival on the scene of a Napoleon. Then
the majority are forced to abandon the vain hope of really attaining
Utopia, and content themselves with fictions to the effect that what
they have really _is_ Utopia--or with such other mechanisms as will
serve to excuse and minimize the significance of existing facts and put
off the complete realization of the ideal until some future stage of
progress. It is needless to add that those who have most profited by the
revolutionary change are also most ready to take the lead in persuading
their neighbors to be content with these rational compromises.
Meanwhile, however, the revolutionary leaders have set up a dictatorship
of their own, which, while necessary to "save the revolution," is itself
a practical negation of the revolutionary dream of a free world. This
dictatorship, finally passing into the hands of the more competent
element of the revolutionary crowd, justifies itself to the many;
professing and requiring of all a verbal assent to the revolutionary
creed of which its very existence is a fundamental repudiation. This
group becomes in time the nucleus about which society finally settles
down again in comparative peace and equilibrium.
In general, then, it may be said that a revolution does not and cannot
realize the age-long dream of a world set free. Its results may be
summed up as follows: a newly dominant crowd, a new statement of old
beliefs, new owners of property in the places of the old, new names for
old tyrannies. Looking back over the history of the several great tidal
waves of revolution which have swept over the civilization which is
to-day ours, it would appear that one effect of them has been to
intensify the hold which crowd-thinking has upon all of us, also to
widen the range of the things which we submit to the crowd-mind for
final judgment. In confirmation of this it is to be noted that it is on
the whole those nations which have been burnt over by both the
Reformation and the eighteenth-century revolution which exhibit the most
chauvian brand of nationalism and crowd-patriotism. It is these same
nations also which have most highly depersonalized their social
relationships, political structures, and ideals. It is these nations
also whose councils are most determined by spasms of crowd-propaganda.
The modern man doubtless has a sense of self in a degree unknown--except
by the few--in earlier ages, but along with this there exists in "modern
ideas," a complete system of crowd-ideas with which the conscious self
comes into conflict at every turn. Just how far the revolutionary crowds
of the past have operated to provide the stereotyped forms in which
present crowd-thinking is carried on, it is almost impossible to learn.
But that their influence has been great may be seen by anyone who
attempts a psychological study of "public opinion."
Aside from the results mentioned, I think the deposit of revolutionary
movements in history has been very small. It may be that, in the
general shake-up of such a period, a few vigorous spirits are tossed
into a place where their genius has an opportunity which it would
otherwise have failed to get. But it would seem that on the whole the
idea that revolutions help the progress of the race is a hoax. Where
advancement has been achieved in freedom, in intelligence, in ethical
values, in art or science, in consideration for humanity, in
legislation, it has in each instance been achieved by unique
individuals, and has spread chiefly by personal influence, never gaining
assent except among those who have power to recreate the new values won
in their own experience.
Whenever we take up a new idea as a crowd, we at once turn it into a
catchword and a fad. Faddism, instead of being merely a hunger for the
new is rather an expression of the crowd-will to uniformity. To be
"old-fashioned" and out of date is as truly to be a nonconformist as to
be a freak or an originator. Faddism is neither radicalism nor a symptom
of progress. It is a mark of the passion for uniformity or _the
conservatism of the crowd-mind_. It is change; but its change is
insignificant.
It is often said that religious liberty is the fruit of the Reformation.
If so it is an indirect result and one which the reformers certainly
did not desire. They sought liberty only for their own particular
propaganda, a fact which is abundantly proved by Calvin's treatment of
Servetus and of the Anabaptists, by Luther's attitude toward the Saxon
peasants, by the treatment of Catholics in England, by the whole history
of Cromwell's rule, by the persecution of Quakers and all other
"heretics" in our American colonies--Pennsylvania, I believe,
excepted--down to the date of the American Revolution.
It just happened that Protestantism as _the religion of the bourgeois_
fell into the hands of a group, who, outside their religious-crowd
interests were destined to be the greatest practical beneficiaries of
the advancement of applied science. Between applied science and science
as a cultural discipline--that is, science as a humanistic study--the
line is hard to draw. The Humanist spirit of the sciences attained a
certain freedom, notwithstanding the fact that the whole Reformation was
really a reactionary movement against the Renaissance; in spite,
moreover, of the patent fact that the Protestant churches still,
officially at least, resist the free spirit of scientific culture.
It is to the free spirits of the Italian Renaissance, also to the
Jeffersons and Franklins and Paines, the Lincolns and Ingersolls, the
Huxleys and Darwins and Spencers, the men who dared alone to resist the
religious crowd-mind and to undermine the abstract ideas in which it had
intrenched itself, to whom the modern world owes its religious and
intellectual liberty.
The same is true of political liberty. England, which is the most free
country in the world to-day, never really experienced the revolutionary
crowd-movement of the eighteenth century. Instead, the changes came by a
process of gradual reconstruction. And it is with just such an
opportunist reconstructive process that England promises now to meet and
solve the problems of the threatened social revolution. In contrast with
Russia, Socialism in England has much ground for hope of success. The
radical movement in England is on the whole wisely led by men who with
few exceptions can think realistically and pragmatically, and refuse to
be swept off their feet by crowd-abstractions. The British Labor party
is the least crowd-minded of any of the socialistic organizations of our
day. The Rochdale group has demonstrated that if it is co-operation that
people desire as a solution of the economic problem, the way to solve it
is to co-operate along definite and practicable lines; the co-operators
have given up belief in the miracle of Jericho. The British trade-union
movement has demonstrated the fact that organization of this kind
succeeds in just the degree that it can rise above crowd-thinking and
deal with a suggestion of concrete problems according to a statesmanlike
policy of concerted action.
To be sure it cannot be denied that the social reconstruction in England
is seriously menaced by the tendency to crowd-behavior. At best it
reveals hardly more than the superior advantage to the whole community
of a slightly less degree of crowd-behavior; but when compared with the
Socialist movement in Russia, Germany, and the United States, it would
seem that radicalism in England has at least a remote promise of
reaching a working solution of the social problem; and that is more than
can at present be said for the others.
In the light of what has been said about the psychology of revolution, I
think we may hazard an opinion about the vaunted "Dictatorship of the
Proletariat"--an idea that has provided some new catchwords for the
crowd which is fascinated by the soviet revolution in Russia. Granting
for the sake of argument that such a dictatorship would be desirable
from any point of view--I do not see how the mere fact that people work
proves their capacity to rule, horses also work--would it be possible? I
think not. Even the temporary rule of Lenin in Russia can hardly be
called a rule of the working class. Bolshevist propaganda will have it
that such a dictatorship of the working class is positively necessary
if we are ever to get away from the abuses of present "capitalistic
society." Moreover, it is argued that this dictatorship of the organized
workers could not be undemocratic, for since vested property is to be
abolished and everyone forced to work for his living, all will belong to
the working class, and therefore the dictatorship of the proletariat is
but the dictatorship of all.
In the first place, assuming that it is the dictatorship of all who
survive the revolution, this dictatorship of all over each is not
liberty for anyone; it may leave not the tiniest corner where one may be
permitted to be master of himself. The tyranny of all over each is as
different from freedom as is pharisaism from spiritual living.
Again, what is there to show that this imagined dictatorship of all is
to be shared equally by all, and if not have we not merely set up a new
privileged class--the very thing which the Socialist Talmud has always
declared it is the mission of the workers to destroy forever? While the
workers are still a counter-crowd, struggling for power against the
present ruling class, they are of course held together by a common
cause--namely, their opposition to capital. But with labor's triumph,
everybody becomes a worker, and there is no one longer to oppose. That
which held the various elements of labor together in a common crowd of
revolt has now ceased to exist, "class consciousness" has therefore no
longer any meaning. Labor itself has ceased to exist _as a class_ by
reason of its very triumph. What then remains to hold its various
elements together in a common cause? Nothing at all. The solidarity of
the workers vanishes, when the struggle which gave rise to that
solidarity ceases. There remains now nothing but the humanitarian
principle of the solidarity of the human race. Solidarity has ceased to
be an economic fact, and has become purely "ideological."
Since by hypothesis everyone is a worker, the dictatorship of the
workers is a dictatorship based not on labor as such, but upon a
universal human quality. It would be quite as truly a dictatorship of
everyone if based upon any other common human quality--say, the fact
that we are all bipeds, that we all have noses, or the fact of the
circulation of the blood. As the purely proletarian character of this
dictatorship becomes meaningless, the crowd-struggle switches from that
of labor as a whole against capital, to a series of struggles within the
dominant labor group itself.
The experience of Russia has even now shown that if the soviets are to
save themselves from nation-wide bankruptcy, specially trained men must
be found to take charge of their industrial and political activities.
Long training is necessary for the successful management of large
affairs, and becomes all the more indispensable as industry, education,
and political affairs are organized on a large scale. Are specially
promising youths to be set apart from early childhood to prepare
themselves for these positions of authority? Or shall such places be
filled by those vigorous few who have the ambition and the strength to
acquire the necessary training while at the same time working at their
daily tasks? In either case an _intellectual class_ must be developed.
Does anyone imagine that this new class of rulers will hesitate to make
use of every opportunity to make itself a privileged class?