democracy is not at all freedom in the expression of individual opinion.
It is only the demand for advertising space on the part of various
crowds for the publication of their shibboleths and propaganda. Each
crowd, while demanding this freedom for itself, seeks to deny it to
other crowds, and all unite in denying it to the non-crowd man wherever
possible. The Puritan's "right to worship according to the dictates of a
man's own conscience" did not apply to Quakers, Deists, or Catholics.
When Republicans were "black abolitionists" they would have regarded any
attempt to suppress _The Liberator_, as edited by William Lloyd
Garrison, as an assault upon the constitutional liberties of the whole
nation. But they are not now particularly interested in preserving the
constitutional liberties of the nation as represented in the right of
circulation of _The Liberator_, edited by Max Eastman. In Jefferson's
time, when Democrats were accused of "Jacobinism," they invoked the
"spirit of 1776" in opposition to the alien and sedition laws under
which their partisan propaganda suffered limitation. To-day, when they
are striving to outdo the Republicans in "Americanization propaganda,"
they actually stand sponsor for an espionage law which would have made
Jefferson or Andrew Jackson froth at the mouth. Socialists are convinced
that liberty is dead because Berger and Debs are convicted of uttering
opinions out of harmony with temporarily dominant crowd-ideas of
patriotism. But when Theodore Dreiser was put under the ban for the
crime of writing one of the few good novels produced in America, I do
not recall that Socialists held any meetings of protest in Madison
Square Garden. I have myself struggled in vain for three hours or more
on a street corner in Green Point trying to tell liberty-loving
Socialists the truth about the Gary schools. When the politicians in our
legislative assemblies were tricked into passing the obviously unliberal
Eighteenth Amendment, I was much interested in learning how the bulk of
the Socialists in the Cooper Union audiences felt about it. As I had
expected, they regarded it as an unpardonable infringement of personal
freedom, as a typical piece of American Puritan hypocrisy and
pharisaism. But they were, on the whole, in favor of it because they
thought it would be an aid to Bolshevist propaganda, since it would make
the working class still more discontented! Such is liberty in a
crowd-governed democracy.... It is nothing but the _liberty of crowds to
be crowds_.
The fourth liberty in democratic society to-day is freedom from moral and
intellectual responsibility. This is accomplished by the magic of
substituting the machinery of the law for self-government, bureaucratic
meddlesomeness for conscience, crowd-tyranny for personal decency.
Professor Faguet has called democracy the "cult of incompetence" and the
"dread of responsibility." He is not far wrong, but these epithets apply
not so much to democracy as such as to democracy under the heel of the
crowd. The original aim of democracy, so far as its philosophical
thinkers conceived of it, was to set genius free from the trammels of
tradition, realize a maximum of self-government, and make living
something of an adventure. But crowds do not so understand democracy.
Every crowd looks upon democracy simply as a scheme whereby it may have
its own way. We have seen that the crowd-mind as such is a device for
"kidding" ourselves, for representing the easiest path to the
enhancement of our self-feeling as something highly moral, for making
our personal right appear like universal righteousness, for dressing up
our will to lord it over others, as if it were devotion to impersonal
principle. As we have seen, the crowd therefore insists upon universal
conformity; goodness means only making everyone alike. By taking refuge
in the abstract and ready-made system of crowd-ideas, the unconscious
will to power is made to appear what it is not; the burden of
responsibility is transferred to the group with its fiction of absolute
truth. Le Bon noted the fact of the irresponsibility of crowds, but
thought that such irresponsibility was due to the fact that the crowd,
being an anonymous gathering, the individual could lose his identity in
the multitude. The psychology of the unconscious has provided us with
what I think is a better explanation, but the fact of irresponsibility
remains and is evident in all the influence of crowd-thinking upon
democratic institutions. The crowd-ideal of society is one in which
every individual is protected not only against exploitation, but against
temptation--protected therefore _against himself_. The whole tendency of
democracy in our times is toward just such inanity. Without the least
critical analysis of accepted moral dilemmas, we are all to be made
moral in spite of ourselves, regardless of our worth, without effort on
our part, moral in the same way that machines are moral, by reducing the
will to mere automatic action, leaving no place for choice and
uncertainty, having everyone wound up and oiled and regulated to run at
the same speed. Each crowd therefore strives to make its own moral
ideas the law of the land. Law becomes thus a sort of anthology of
various existing crowd-hobbies. In the end moral responsibility is
passed over to legislatures, commissions, detectives, inspectors, and
bureaucrats. Anything that "gets by" the public censor, however rotten,
we may wallow in with a perfect feeling of respectability. The right and
necessity of choosing our way is superseded by a system of statutory
taboos, which as often as not represent the survival values of the
meanest little people in the community--the kind who cannot look upon a
nude picture without a struggle with their perverted eroticism, or
entertain a significant idea without losing their faith.
The effect of all this upon the intellectual progress and the freedom of
art in democratic society is obvious, and is just what, to one who
understands the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, might be expected. No
wonder de Tocqueville said he found less freedom of opinion in America
than elsewhere. Explain it as you will, the fact is here staring us in
the face. Genius in our democracy is not free. It must beg the
permission of little crowd-men for its right to exist. It must stand,
hat in hand, at the window of the commissioner of licenses and may gain
a permit for only so much of its inspiration as happens to be of
use-value to the uninspired. It must play the conformist, pretend to be
hydra-headed rather than unique, useful rather than genuine, a servant
of the "least of these" rather than their natural master. It must
advertise, but it may not prophesy. It may flatter and patronize the
stupid, but it may not stand up taller than they. In short, democracy
everywhere puts out the eyes of its Samson, cuts off his golden-rayed
locks, and makes him grind corn to fill the bellies of the Philistines.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century until now it has been
chiefly the business man, the political charlatan, the organizer of
trade, the rediscoverer of popular prejudices who have been preferred in
our free modern societies. Keats died of a broken heart; Shelley and
Wagner were exiled; Beethoven and Schubert were left to starve; Darwin
was condemned to hell fire; Huxley was denied his professorship;
Schopenhauer was ostracized by the élite; Nietzsche ate his heart out in
solitude; Walt Whitman had to be fed by a few English admirers, while
his poems were prohibited as obscene in free America; Emerson was for
the greater part of his life _persona non grata_ at his own college;
Ingersoll was denied the political career which his genius merited; Poe
lived and died in poverty; Theodore Parker was consigned to perdition;
Percival Lowell and Simon Newcomb lived and died almost unrecognized by
the American public. Nearly every artist and writer and public teacher
is made to understand from the beginning that he will be popular in just
the degree that he strangles his genius and becomes a vulgar,
commonplace, insincere clown.
On the other hand steel manufacturers and railroad kings, whose business
record will often scarcely stand the light, are rewarded with fabulous
millions and everyone grovels before them. When one turns from the
"commercialism," which everywhere seems to be the dominant and most
sincere interest in democratic society, when one seeks for spiritual
values to counterbalance this weight of materialism, one finds in the
prevailing spirit little more than a cult of naïve sentimentality.
It can hardly be denied that if Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Rabelais,
Montaigne, Cassanova, Goethe, Dostoievsky, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Rousseau, St.
Augustine, Milton, Nietzsche, Swinburne, Rossetti, or even Flaubert,
were alive and writing his masterpiece in America to-day, he would be
instantly silenced by some sort of society for the prevention of vice,
and held up to the public scorn and ridicule as a destroyer of our
innocence and a corrupter of public morals. The guardians of our
characters are ceaselessly expurgating the classics lest we come to harm
reading them. I often think that the only reason why the Bible is
permitted to pass through our mails is because hardly anyone ever reads
it.
It is this same habit of crowd-thinking which accounts to a great extent
for the dearth of intellectual curiosity in this country. From what we
have seen to be the nature of the crowd-mind, it is to be expected that
in a democracy in which crowds play an important part the condition
described by de Tocqueville will generally prevail. There is much truth
in his statement that it seems at first as if the minds of all the
Americans "were formed upon the same model." Spiritual variation will be
encouraged only in respect to matters in which one crowd differs from
another. The conformist spirit will prevail in all. Intellectual
leadership will inevitably pass to the "tight-minded." There will be
violent conflicts of ideas, but they will be crowd ideas.
The opinions about which people differ are for the most part ready-made.
They are concerned with the choice of social mechanisms, but hardly with
valuations. With nearly all alike, there is a notion that mankind may be
redeemed by the magic of externally manipulating the social environment.
There is a wearisome monotony of professions of optimism, idealism,
humanitarianism, with little knowledge of what these terms mean.
I am thinking of all those young people who, in the decade and a half
which preceded the war, represented the finished product of our
colleges and universities. What a stretch of imagination is needed
before one may call these young people educated! How little of
intellectual interest they have brought back from school to their
respective communities! How little cerebral activity they have stirred
up! Habits of study, of independent thinking, have seldom been acquired.
The "educated" have possibly gained a little in social grace; they have
in some cases learned things which are of advantage to them in the
struggle for position. Out of the confused mass of unassimilated
information which they dimly remember as the education which they "got,"
a sum of knowledge doubtless remains which is greater in extent than
that possessed by the average man, but, though greater in extent, this
knowledge is seldom different in kind. There is the same superficiality,
the same susceptibility to crowd-thinking on every subject. The mental
habits of American democracy are probably best reflected to-day by the
"best-seller" novel, the _Saturday Evening Post_, the Chautauqua, the
Victrola, the moving picture.
Nearly everyone in America can read, for the "schoolhouse is the bulwark
of democratic freedom." However, with the decrease in illiteracy there
has gone a corresponding lowering of literary and intellectual
standards, a growing timidity in telling the truth, and a passion for
the sensationally commonplace. If it be true that before people may be
politically free they must be free to function mentally, one wonders how
much of an aid to liberty the public schools in this country have been,
or if, with their colossal impersonal systems and stereotyped methods of
instruction, they have not rather on the whole succeeded chiefly in
making learning uninteresting, dulling curiosity and killing habits of
independent thinking. There is probably no public institution where the
spirit of the crowd reigns to the extent that it does in the public
school. The aim seems to be to mold the child to type, make him the
good, plodding citizen, teaching him only so much as some one thinks it
is to the public's interest that he should know. I am sure that everyone
who is familiar with the actions of the school authorities in New York
City during the two years, 1918 and 1919, will be impelled to look
elsewhere for much of that liberty which is supposed to go with
democracy.
Some years ago I conducted a little investigation into the mental habits
of the average high-school graduate. An examination was made of twenty
or more young people who had been out of school one year. This is
doubtless too limited a number to give the findings great general
significance, but I give the results in brief for what they are worth.
These students had been in school for eleven years. I thought that they
ought at least to have a minimum of general cultural information and to
be able to express some sort of opinion about the commonplaces of our
spiritual heritage. The questions asked were such as follow: What is the
difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
of the United States? What is a dicotyledon? Does the name Darwin mean
anything to you? Have you ever heard of William James? What is the
significance of the battle of Tours? Who was Thomas Jefferson? There
were twenty questions in all. The average grade, even with the most
liberal marking, was 44.6. The general average was raised by one pupil
who made a grade of 69. But then we should not be too severe upon the
public-school graduate. One of the brightest college graduates I know
left a large Eastern institution believing that Karl Marx was a
philologist. Another, a graduate from a Western college, thought that
Venus de Milo was an Italian count who had been born without any arms. I
know a prominent physician, whose scientific training is such that he
has been a lecturer in a medical college, who believes that Heaven is
located just a few miles up in the sky, beyond the Milky Way. These are
doubtless exceptional cases, but how many persons with university
degrees are there who have really caught the spirit of the humanistic
culture, or have ever stopped to think why the humanities are taught in
our colleges? How many are capable of discriminating criticism of works
of music, or painting, literature, or philosophy? My own experience
convinces me, and I am sure that other public teachers who have had a
like experience will bear witness to the same lamentable fact, that such
little genuine intellectual interest as there is in this country is
chiefly confined to immigrant Jews, our American youth being, on the
whole, innocent of it. The significance of this fact is obvious, as is
its cause. Due to the conformist spirit of the dominant crowd,
native-born Americans are losing their intellectual leadership.
We must not ignore the fact that there is among the educated here a
small and, let us hope, growing group of youthful "intellectuals." But
in the first place the proportion of these to the whole mass is
tragically small. In the second place intellectual liberalism has been
content for the most part to tag along behind the labor movement, as if
the chief meaning of the intellectual awakening were economic. It is no
disparagement of labor to say that the intellect in this country of
crowds has also other work to do, and that, until it strikes out for
itself, neither the labor movement nor anything else will rise above
commonplace crowd dilemmas. Too much of our so-called intellectualism is
merely the substitution of ready-made proletarian crowd-ideas for the
traditional crowd-ideas which pass for thinking among the middle
classes.
All the facts which have been pointed out above are the inevitable
consequences of government by crowds. There can be no real liberty with
crowds because there can be no personal independence. The psychic
mechanisms of the crowd are hostile to conscious personality. The
independent thinker cannot be controlled by catchwords. In our day
intellectual freedom is not smothered in actual martyr fires, but it is
too often strangled in the cradle. The existence of new values, a thing
which will inevitably happen where the human spirit is left free in its
creative impulses, is disturbing to the crowd-mind. Education must
therefore be made "safe for democracy"; it must be guarded carefully
lest the youth become an original personal fact, a new spiritual
creation. I realize the element of truth in the statement often made,
that there is already too much spiritual originality in the youths of
this generation. I am not contending that certain phases of egoism
should not be checked by education. A solid intellectual basis must be
created which will make social living possible. The trouble is,
however, that this task is done too well. It is the merely useful man,
not the unusual man, whom the crowd loves. Skill is encouraged, for,
whether it be skill in serving or in demanding service, skill in itself
does not upset existing crowd-values. Reflection is "wicked" for it
leads to doubt, and doubt is non-gregarious behavior. Education ceases
to be the path of spiritual freedom; it becomes a device for harnessing
the spirit of youth in the treadmill of the survival-values of the
crowd. It is also the revenge of the old against the young, a way of
making them less troublesome. It teaches the rules for success in a
crowd-governed world while taking advantage of the natural credulity of
childhood to draw the curtain with such terrifying mummery about the
figure of wisdom that the average mind, never having the daring or
curiosity to lift it, will remain to its dying day a dullard and a
mental slave without suspecting the fact. Every "dangerous" thought is
denatured and expurgated. The student is skillfully insulated from any
mental shock that might galvanize him into original intellectual life.
The classic languages are taught for purposes of "discipline." After six
or seven years' study of Greek literature in the accepted manner one may
be able to repeat most of the rules of Goodwin's _Greek Grammar_, and
pride himself upon being a cultivated person, knowing in the end less
of the language than a bootblack from modern Athens knows of it, or than
a waiter from Bologna knows of English after one year's residence in
Greenwich Village. And the all-important thing is that never once has
the student been given a glimpse of the beautiful free pagan life which
all this literature is about.
Science is taught that the student, if he has ability, may learn how to
make a geological survey of oil lands, construct and operate a cement
factory, make poison gas, remove infected tonsils, or grow a culture of
bacteria; but should he cease to hold popular beliefs about the origin
of life or the immortality of the soul it is well for him to keep the
tragic fact to himself. Those who teach history, economics, and
political science in such a way as to stimulate independence of thinking
on the part of the students are likely to be dismissed from their
faculties by the practical business men who constitute the boards of
trustees of our institutions of higher learning; the purpose of these
sciences is to make our youth more patriotic. Finally, the average
instructor receives less pay than a policeman, or a headwaiter, and the
unconscious reason for this is all of a piece with the psychology of the
crowd-mind. The ignorant man's resentment toward superiority, or
"highbrowism," is thereby vindicated. Moreover, the integrity of the
complex of ruling crowd-ideas is less endangered. There is less
likelihood of its being undermined in the process of education when
vigorous, independent spirits are diverted from intellectual pursuits by
richer prizes offered in other fields, and the task of instruction
therefore left largely to the underfed and timid who are destined by
temperament to trot between the shafts.
In this discussion of the government of crowds I have ignored
consideration of the mechanisms of political and social organizations
which usually characterize the treatment of this subject. It is not that
I wish to divert attention from the necessity of more practical and just
social arrangements and political forms of organizations. These we must
achieve. But the facts which ultimately make for our freedom or slavery
are of the mind. The statement that we cannot be politically or
economically a free people until we attain mental freedom is a
platitude, but it is one which needs special emphasis in this day when
all attention is directed to the external form of organization.
No tyranny was ever for long maintained by force. All tyrannies begin
and end in the tyranny of ideas uncritically accepted. It is of just
such ideas that the conscious thinking of the crowd consists, and it is
ultimately from the crowd as a psychological mechanism that tyranny as
such proceeds. Democracy in America fails of freedom, not because of our
political constitution, though that would doubtless be modified by a
people who were more free at heart; it fails because freedom of opinion,
intellectual alertness, critical thinking about fundamentals, is not
encouraged. There is, moreover, little promise of greater freedom in the
various revolutionary crowds who to-day want freedom only to add to the
number of crowds which pester us. And for this we have, whether we are
radicals or reactionaries or simply indifferent, no one to blame but
ourselves and our own crowd-thinking.
X
EDUCATION AS A POSSIBLE CURE FOR CROWD-THINKING
We have seen that Democracy in and of itself is no more sure a guarantee
of liberty than other forms of government. This does not necessarily
mean that we have been forced by our psychological study into an
argument against the idea of democracy as such. In fact, it cannot be
denied that this form of human association may have decided advantages,
both practical and spiritual, if we set about in the right way to
realize them. It does not follow that, because the franchise is
exercised by all, democracy must necessarily be an orgy of mob rule. If,
under our modern political arrangements, it has been shown that the
crowd presumes to regulate acts and thought processes hitherto
considered purely personal matters, it is also true that the dominance
of any particular crowd has, in the long run, been rendered less
absolute and secure by the more openly expressed hostility of rival
crowds. But crowd-behavior has been known in all historic periods.
Democracy cannot be said to have caused it. It may be a mere accident
of history that the present development of crowd-mindedness has come
along with that of democratic institutions. Democracy has indeed given
new kinds of crowds their hope of dominance. It has therefore been made
into a cult for the self-justification of various modern crowds.
The formula for realizing a more free and humane common life will not be
found in any of the proffered cure-alls and propagandas which to-day
deafen our ears with their din. Neither are we now in such possession of
the best obtainable social order that one would wish to preserve the
_status quo_ against all change, which would mean, in other words, the
survival of the present ruling crowds. Many existing facts belie the
platitudes which these crowds speak in their defense, just as they lay
bare the hidden meaning of the magic remedies which are proposed by
counter-crowds. There is no single formula for social redemption, and
the man who has come to himself will refuse to invest his faith in any
such thing--which does not mean, however, that he will refuse to
consider favorably the practical possibilities of any proposed plan for
improving social conditions.
The first and greatest effort must be to _free democracy from
crowd-mindedness, by liberating our own thinking_. The way out of this
complex of crowd compulsions is the solitary part of self-analysis and
intellectual courage. It is the way of Socrates, and Protagoras, of
Peter Abelard, and Erasmus, and Montaigne, of Cervantes and Samuel
Butler, of Goethe, and Emerson, of Whitman and William James.
Just here I know that certain conservatives will heartily agree with me.
"That is it," they will say; "begin with the individual." Yes, but which
individual shall we begin with? Most of those who speak thus mean, begin
with some other individual. Evangelize the heathen, uplift the poor,
Americanize the Bolshevists, do something to some one which will make
him like ourselves; in other words, bring him into our crowd. The
individual with whom I would begin is myself. Somehow or other if I am
to have individuality at all it will be by virtue of being an
individual, a single, "separate person." And that is a dangerous and at
present a more or less lonely thing to do. But the problem is really one
of practical psychology. We must come out of the crowd-self, just as,
before the neurotic may be normal, he must get over his neurosis. To do
that he must trace his malady back to its source in the unconscious, and
learn the meaning of his conscious behavior as it is related to his
unconscious desires. Then he must do a difficult thing--he must _accept
the fact of himself at its real worth_.