CONCLUSIONS--THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE NATIONAL PURPOSES
I
INDIVIDUAL VS. COLLECTIVE EDUCATION
Hitherto we have been discussing the ways in which existing American
economic and political methods and institutions should be modified in
order to make towards the realization of the national democratic ideal.
In course of this discussion, it has been taken for granted that the
American people under competent and responsible leadership could
deliberately plan a policy of individual and social improvement, and
that with the means at their collective disposal they could make headway
towards its realization. These means consisted, of course, precisely in
their whole outfit of political, economic, and social institutions; and
the implication has been, consequently, that human nature can be raised
to a higher level by an improvement in institutions and laws. The
majority of my readers will probably have thought many times that such
an assumption, whatever its truth, has been overworked. Admitting that
some institutions may be better than others, it must also be admitted
that human nature is composed of most rebellious material, and that the
extent to which it can be modified by social and political institutions
of any kind is, at best, extremely small. Such critics may,
consequently, have reached the conclusion that the proposed system of
reconstruction, even if desirable, would not accomplish anything really
effectual or decisive towards the fulfillment of the American national
Promise.
It is no doubt true that out of the preceding chapters many sentences
could be selected which apparently imply a credulous faith in the
possibility of improving human nature by law. It is also true that I
have not ventured more than to touch upon a possible institutional
reformation, which, in so far as it was successful in its purpose,
would improve human nature by the most effectual of all means--that is,
by improving the methods whereby men and women are bred. But if I have
erred in attaching or appearing to attach too much efficacy to legal and
institutional reforms, the error or its appearance was scarcely
separable from an analytic reconstruction of a sufficient democratic
ideal. Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human
perfectibility. If human nature cannot be improved by institutions,
democracy is at best a more than usually safe form of political
organization; and the only interesting inquiry about its future would
be: How long will it continue to work? But if it is to work better as
well as merely longer, it must have some leavening effect on human
nature; and the sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of the
leaven. For him the practical questions are: How can the improvement
best be brought about? and, How much may it amount to?
As a matter of fact, Americans have always had the liveliest and
completest faith in the process of individual and social improvement and
in accepting the assumption, I am merely adhering to the deepest and
most influential of American traditions. The better American has
continually been seeking to "uplift" himself, his neighbors, and his
compatriots. But he has usually favored means of improvement very
different from those suggested hereinbefore. The real vehicle of
improvement is education. It is by education that the American is
trained for such democracy as he possesses; and it is by better
education that he proposes to better his democracy. Men are uplifted by
education much more surely than they are by any tinkering with laws and
institutions, because the work of education leavens the actual social
substance. It helps to give the individual himself those qualities
without which no institutions, however excellent, are of any use, and
with which even bad institutions and laws can be made vehicles of grace.
The American faith in education has been characterized as a
superstition; and superstitious in some respects it unquestionably is.
But its superstitious tendency is not exhibited so much in respect to
the ordinary process of primary, secondary, and higher education. Not
even an American can over-emphasize the importance of proper teaching
during youth; and the only wonder is that the money so freely lavished
on it does not produce better results. Americans are superstitious in
respect to education, rather because of the social "uplift" which they
expect to achieve by so-called educational means. The credulity of the
socialist in expecting to alter human nature by merely institutional and
legal changes is at least equaled by the credulity of the good American
in proposing to evangelize the individual by the reading of books and by
the expenditure of money and words. Back of it all is the underlying
assumption that the American nation by taking thought can add a cubit to
its stature,--an absolute confidence in the power of the idea to create
its own object and in the efficacy of good intentions.
Do we lack culture? We will "make it hum" by founding a new university
in Chicago. Is American art neglected and impoverished? We will enrich
it by organizing art departments in our colleges, and popularize it by
lectures with lantern slides and associations for the study of its
history. Is New York City ugly? Perhaps, but if we could only get the
authorities to appropriate a few hundred millions for its
beautification, we could make it look like a combination of Athens,
Florence, and Paris. Is it desirable for the American citizen to be
something of a hero? I will encourage heroes by establishing a fund
whereby they shall be rewarded in cash. War is hell, is it? I will work
for the abolition of hell by calling a convention and passing a
resolution denouncing its iniquities. I will build at the Hague a Palace
of Peace which shall be a standing rebuke to the War Lords of Europe.
Here, in America, some of us have more money than we need and more good
will. We will spend the money in order to establish the reign of the
good, the beautiful, and the true.
This faith in a combination of good intentions, organization, words, and
money is not confined to women's clubs or to societies of amiable
enthusiasts. In the state of mind which it expresses can be detected the
powerful influence which American women exert over American men; but its
guiding faith and illusion are shared by the most hard-headed and
practical of Americans. The very men who have made their personal
successes by a rigorous application of the rule that business is
business--the very men who in their own careers have exhibited a shrewd
and vivid sense of the realities of politics and trade; it is these men
who have most faith in the practical, moral, and social power of the
Subsidized Word. The most real thing which they carry over from the
region of business into the region of moral and intellectual ideals is
apparently their bank accounts. The fruits of their hard work and their
business ability are to be applied to the purpose of "uplifting" their
fellow-countrymen. A certain number of figures written on a check and
signed by a familiar name, what may it not accomplish? Some years ago at
the opening exercises of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Mr. Andrew
Carnegie burst into an impassioned and mystical vision of the
miraculously constitutive power of first mortgage steel bonds. From his
point of view and from that of the average American there is scarcely
anything which the combination of abundant resources and good intentions
may not accomplish.
The tradition of seeking to cross the gulf between American practice and
the American ideal by means of education or the Subsidized Word is not
be dismissed with a sneer. The gulf cannot be crossed without the
assistance of some sort of educational discipline; and that discipline
depends partly on a new exercise of the "money power" now safely
reposing in the strong boxes of professional millionaires. There need be
no fundamental objection taken to the national faith in the power of
good intentions and re-distributed wealth. That faith is the immediate
and necessary issue of the logic of our national moral situation. It
should be, as it is, innocent and absolute; and if it does not remain
innocent and absolute, the Promise of American Life can scarcely be
fulfilled.
A faith may, however, be innocent and absolute without being
inexperienced and credulous. The American faith in education is by way
of being credulous and superstitious, not because it seeks individual
and social amelioration by what may be called an educational process,
but because the proposed means of education are too conscious, too
direct, and too superficial. Let it be admitted that in any one decade
the amount which can be accomplished towards individual and social
amelioration by means of economic and political reorganization is
comparatively small; but it is certainly as large as that which can be
accomplished by subsidizing individual good intentions. Heroism is not
to be encouraged by cash prizes any more than is genius; and a man's
friends should not be obliged to prove that he is a hero in order that
he may reap every appropriate reward. A hero officially conscious of his
heroism is a mutilated hero. In the same way art cannot become a power
in a community unless many of its members are possessed of a native and
innocent love of beautiful things; and the extent to which such a
possession can be acquired by any one or two generations of
traditionally inartistic people is extremely small. Its acquisition
depends not so much upon direct conscious effort, as upon the growing
ability to discriminate between what is good and what is bad in their
own native art. It is a matter of the training and appreciation of
American artists, rather than the cultivation of art. Illustrations to
the same effect might be multiplied. The popular interest in the Higher
Education has not served to make Americans attach much importance to the
advice of the highly educated man. He is less of a practical power in
the United States than he is in any European country; and this fact is
in itself a sufficient commentary on the reality of the American faith
in education. The fact is, of course, that the American tendency to
disbelieve in the fulfillment of their national Promise by means of
politically, economically, and socially reconstructive work has forced
them into the alternative of attaching excessive importance to
subsidized good intentions. They want to be "uplifted," and they want to
"uplift" other people; but they will not use their social and political
institutions for the purpose, because those institutions are assumed to
be essentially satisfactory. The "uplifting" must be a matter of
individual, or of unofficial associated effort; and the only available
means are words and subsidies.
There is, however, a sense in which it is really true that the American
national Promise can be fulfilled only by education; and this aspect of
our desirable national education can, perhaps, best be understood by
seeking its analogue in the training of the individual. An individual's
education consists primarily in the discipline which he undergoes to fit
him both for fruitful association with his fellows and for his own
special work. Important as both the liberal and the technical aspect of
this preliminary training is, it constitutes merely the beginning of a
man's education. Its object is or should be to prepare him both in his
will and in his intelligence to make a thoroughly illuminating use of
his experience in life. His experience,--as a man of business, a
husband, a father, a citizen, a friend,--has been made real to him, not
merely by the zest with which he has sought it and the sincerity with
which he has accepted it, but by the disinterested intelligence which he
has brought to its understanding. An educational discipline which has
contributed in that way to the reality of a man's experience has done as
much for him as education can do; and an educational discipline which
has failed to make any such contribution has failed of its essential
purpose. The experience of other people acquired at second hand has
little value,--except, perhaps, as a means of livelihood,--unless it
really illuminates a man's personal experience.
Usually a man's ability to profit by his own personal experience depends
upon the sincerity and the intelligence which he brings to his own
particular occupation. The rule is not universal, because some men are,
of course, born with much higher intellectual gifts than others; and to
such men may be given an insight which has little foundation in any
genuine personal experience. It remains true, none the less, for the
great majority of men, that they gather an edifying understanding of men
and things just in so far as they patiently and resolutely stick to the
performance of some special and (for the most part) congenial task.
Their education in life must be grounded in the persistent attempt to
realize in action some kind of a purpose--a purpose usually connected
with the occupation whereby they live. In the pursuit of that purpose
they will be continually making experiments--opening up new lines of
work, establishing new relations with other men, and taking more or less
serious risks. Each of these experiments offers them an opportunity both
for personal discipline and for increasing personal insight. If a man is
capable of becoming wise, he will gradually be able to infer from this
increasing mass of personal experience, the extent to which or the
conditions under which he is capable of realizing his purpose; and his
insight into the particular realities of his own life will bring with
it some kind of a general philosophy--some sort of a disposition and
method of appraisal of men, their actions, and their surroundings.
Wherever a man reaches such a level of intelligence, he will be an
educated man, even though his particular job has been that of a
mechanic. On the other hand, a man who fails to make his particular task
in life the substantial support of a genuine experience remains
essentially an unenlightened man.
National education in its deeper aspect does not differ from individual
education. Its efficiency ultimately depends upon the ability of the
national consciousness to draw illuminating inferences from the course
of the national experience; and its power to draw such inferences must
depend upon the persistent and disinterested sincerity with which the
attempt is made to realize the national purpose--the democratic ideal of
individual and social improvement. So far as Americans are true to that
purpose, all the different aspects of their national experience will
assume meaning and momentum; while in so far as they are false thereto,
no amount of "education" will ever be really edifying. The fundamental
process of American education consists and must continue to consist
precisely in the risks and experiments which the American nation will
make in the service of its national ideal. If the American people balk
at the sacrifices demanded by their experiments, or if they attach
finality to any particular experiment in the distribution of political,
economic, and social power, they will remain morally and intellectually
at the bottom of a well, out of which they will never be "uplifted" by
the most extravagant subsidizing of good intentions and noble words.
The sort of institutional and economic reorganization suggested in the
preceding chapters is not, consequently, to be conceived merely as a
more or less dubious proposal to improve human nature by laws. It is to
be conceived as (possibly) the next step in the realization of a
necessary collective purpose. Its deeper significance does not consist
in the results which it may accomplish by way of immediate improvement.
Such results may be worth having; but at best they will create almost as
many difficulties as they remove. Far more important than any practical
benefits would be the indication it afforded of national good faith. It
would mean that the American nation was beginning to educate itself up
to its own necessary standards. It would imply a popular realization
that our first experiment in democratic political and economic
organization was founded partly on temporary conditions and partly on
erroneous theories. A new experiment must consequently be made; and the
great value of this new experiment would derive from the implied
intellectual and moral emancipation. Its trial would demand both the
sacrifice of many cherished interests, habits, and traditions for the
sake of remaining true to a more fundamental responsibility and a much
larger infusion of disinterested motives into the economic and political
system. Thus the sincere definite decision that the experiment was
necessary, would probably do more for American moral and social
amelioration than would the specific measures actually adopted and
tried. Public opinion can never be brought to approve any effectual
measures, until it is converted to a constructive and consequently to a
really educational theory of democracy.
Back of the problem of educating the individual lies the problem of
collective education. On the one hand, if the nation is rendered
incapable of understanding its own experience by the habit of dealing
insincerely with its national purpose, the individual, just in so far as
he himself has become highly educated, tends to be divided from his
country and his fellow-countrymen. On the other hand, just in so far as
a people is sincerely seeking the fulfillment of its national Promise,
individuals of all kinds will find their most edifying individual
opportunities in serving their country. In aiding the accomplishment of
the collective purpose by means of increasingly constructive
experiments, they will be increasing the scope and power of their own
individual action. The opportunities, which during the past few years
the reformers have enjoyed to make their personal lives more
interesting, would be nothing compared to the opportunities for all
sorts of stirring and responsible work, which would be demanded of
individuals under the proposed plan of political and economic
reorganization. The American nation would be more disinterestedly and
sincerely fulfilling its collective purpose, partly because its more
distinguished individuals had been called upon to place at the service
of their country a higher degree of energy, ability, and unselfish
devotion. If a nation, that is, is recreant to its deeper purpose,
individuals, so far as they are well educated, are educated away from
the prevailing national habits and traditions; whereas when a nation is
sincerely attempting to meet its collective responsibility, the better
individuals are inevitably educated into active participation in the
collective task.
The reader may now be prepared to understand why the American faith in
education has the appearance of being credulous and superstitious. The
good average American usually wishes to accomplish exclusively by
individual education a result which must be partly accomplished by
national education. The nation, like the individual, must go to school;
and the national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its
schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at
the realization of the collective purpose. If the action is not aimed at
the collective purpose, a nation will learn little even from its
successes. If its action is aimed at the collective purpose, it may
learn much even from its mistakes. No process of merely individual
education can accomplish the work of collective education, because the
nation is so much more than a group of individuals. Individuals can be
"uplifted" without "uplifting" the nation, because the nation has an
individuality of its own, which cannot be increased without the
consciousness of collective responsibilities and the collective official
attempt to redeem them. The processes of national and individual
education should, of course, parallel and supplement each other. The
individual can do much to aid national education by the single-minded
and intelligent realization of his own specific purposes; but all
individual successes will have little more than an individual interest
unless they frequently contribute to the work of national construction.
The nation can do much to aid individual education; but the best aid
within its power is to offer to the individual a really formative and
inspiring opportunity for public service. The whole round of superficial
educational machinery--books, subsidies, resolutions, lectures,
congresses--may be of the highest value, provided they are used to
digest and popularize the results of a genuine individual and national
educational experience, but when they are used, as so often at present,
merely as a substitute for well-purposed individual and national action,
they are precisely equivalent to an attempt to fly in a vacuum.
That the direct practical value of a reform movement may be equaled or
surpassed by its indirect educational value is a sufficiently familiar
idea--an idea admirably expressed ten years ago by Mr. John Jay Chapman
in the chapter on "Education" in his "Causes and Consequences." But the
idea in its familiar form is vitiated, because the educational effect of
reform is usually conceived as exclusively individual. Its effect
_must_, indeed, be considered wholly as an individual matter, just so
long as reform is interpreted merely as a process of purification. From
that point of view the collective purpose has already been fulfilled as
far as it can be fulfilled by collective organization, and the _only_
remaining method of social amelioration is that of the self-improvement
of its constituent members. As President Nicholas Murray Butler of
Columbia says, in his "True and False Democracy": "We must not lose
sight of the fact that the corporate or collective responsibility which
it (socialism) would substitute for individual initiative is only such
corporate or collective responsibility as a group of these very same
individuals could exercise. Therefore, socialism is primarily an attempt
to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding them together, in
the hope that they will cancel each other." But what is all organization
but an attempt, not to overcome man's individual imperfections by adding
them together, so much as to make use of many men's varying individual
abilities by giving each a sufficient sphere of exercise? While all men
are imperfect, they are not all imperfect to the same extent. Some have
more courage, more ability, more insight, and more training than others;
and an efficient organization can accomplish more than can a mere
collection of individuals, precisely because it may represent a standard
of performance far above that of the average individual. Its merit is
simply that of putting the collective power of the group at the service
of its ablest members; and the ablest members of the group will never
attain to an individual responsibility commensurate with their powers,
until they are enabled to work efficiently towards the redemption of the
collective responsibility. The nation gives individuality an increased
scope and meaning by offering individuals a chance for effective
service, such as they could never attain under a system of collective
irresponsibility. Thus under a system of collective responsibility the
process of social improvement is absolutely identified with that of
individual improvement. The antithesis is not between nationalism and
individualism, but between an individualism which is indiscriminate, and
an individualism which is selective.
II
CONDITIONS OF INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION
It is, then, essential to recognize that the individual American will
never obtain a sufficiently complete chance of self-expression, until
the American nation has earnestly undertaken and measurably achieved the
realization of its collective purpose. As we shall see presently, the
cure for this individual sterility lies partly with the individual
himself or rather with the man who proposes to become an individual; and
under any plan of economic or social organization, the man who proposes
to become an individual is a condition of national as well as individual
improvement. It is none the less true that any success in the
achievement of the national purpose will contribute positively to the
liberation of the individual, both by diminishing his temptations,
improving his opportunities, and by enveloping him in an invigorating
rather than an enervating moral and intellectual atmosphere.
It is the economic individualism of our existing national system which
inflicts the most serious damage on American individuality; and American
individual achievement in politics and science and the arts will remain
partially impoverished as long as our fellow-countrymen neglect or
refuse systematically to regulate the distribution of wealth in the
national interest. I am aware, of course, that the prevailing American
conviction is absolutely contradictory of the foregoing assertion.
Americans have always associated individual freedom with the unlimited
popular enjoyment of all available economic opportunities. Yet it would
be far more true to say that the popular enjoyment of practically
unrestricted economic opportunities is precisely the condition which
makes for individual bondage. Neither does the bondage which such a
system fastens upon the individual exist only in the case of those
individuals who are victimized by the pressure of unlimited economic
competition. Such victims exist, of course, in large numbers, and they
will come to exist in still larger number hereafter; but hitherto, at
least, the characteristic vice of the American system has not been the
bondage imposed upon its victims. Much more insidious has been the
bondage imposed upon the conquerors and their camp-followers. A man's
individuality is as much compromised by success under the conditions
imposed by such a system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may
tend to make his individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the
work is determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself
thereby usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal
independence or any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American
business men are one from another in temperament, circumstances, and
habits, they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their
individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate
measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its
results in cash.
Consider for a moment what individuality and individual independence
really mean. A genuine individual must at least possess some special
quality which distinguishes him from other people, which unifies the
successive phases and the various aspects of his own life and which
results in personal moral freedom. In what way and to what extent does
the existing economic system contribute to the creation of such genuine
individuals? At its best it asks of every man who engages in a business
occupation that he make as much money as he can, and the only conditions
it imposes on this pursuit of money are those contained in the law of
the land and a certain conventional moral code. The pursuit of money is
to arouse a man to individual activity, and law and custom determine the
conditions to which the activity must conform. The man does not become
an individual merely by obeying the written and unwritten laws. He
becomes an individual because the desire to make money releases his
energy and intensifies his personal initiative. The kind of individuals
created by such an economic system are not distinguished one from
another by any special purpose. They are distinguished by the energy and
success whereby the common purpose of making money is accompanied and
followed. Some men show more enterprise and ingenuity in devising ways
of making money than others, or they show more vigor and zeal in taking
advantage of the ordinary methods. These men are the kind of individuals
which the existing economic system tends to encourage; and critics of
the existing system are denounced, because of the disastrous effect upon
individual initiative which would result from restricting individual
economic freedom.
But why should a man become an individual because he does what everybody
else does, only with more energy and success? The individuality so
acquired is merely that of one particle in a mass of similar particles.
Some particles are bigger than others and livelier; but from a
sufficient distance they all look alike; and in substance and meaning
they all are alike. Their individual activity and history do not make
them less alike. It merely makes them bigger or smaller, livelier or
more inert. Their distinction from their fellows is quantitative; the
unity of their various phases a matter of repetition; their independence
wholly comparative. Such men are associated with their fellows in the
pursuit of a common purpose, and they are divided from their fellows by
the energy and success with which that purpose is pursued. On the other
hand, a condition favorable to genuine individuality would be one in
which men were divided from one another by special purposes, and
reunited in so far as these individual purposes were excellently and
successfully achieved.
The truth is that individuality cannot be dissociated from the pursuit
of a disinterested object. It is a moral and intellectual quality, and
it must be realized by moral and intellectual means. A man achieves
individual distinction, not by the enterprise and vigor with which he
accumulates money, but by the zeal and the skill with which he pursues
an exclusive interest--an interest usually, but not necessarily,
connected with his means of livelihood. The purpose to which he is
devoted--such, for instance, as that of painting or of running a
railroad--is not exclusive in the sense of being unique. But it becomes
exclusive for the individual who adopts it, because of the single-minded
and disinterested manner in which it is pursued. A man makes the purpose
exclusive for himself by the spirit and method in which the work is
done; and just in proportion as the work is thoroughly well done, a
man's individuality begins to take substance and form. His individual
quality does not depend merely on the display of superior enterprise
and energy, although, of course, he may and should be as enterprising
and as energetic as he can. It depends upon the actual excellence of the
work in every respect,--an excellence which can best be achieved by the
absorbing and exclusive pursuit of that alone. A man's individuality is
projected into his work. He does not stop when he has earned enough
money, and he does not cease his improvements when they cease to bring
in an immediate return. He is identified with his job, and by means of
that identification his individuality becomes constructive. His
achievement, just because of its excellence, has an inevitable and an
unequivocal social value. The quality of a man's work reunites him with
his fellows. He may have been in appearance just as selfish as a man who
spends most of his time in making money, but if his work has been
thoroughly well done, he will, in making himself an individual, have
made an essential contribution to national fulfillment.
Of course, a great deal of very excellent work is accomplished under the
existing economic system; and by means of such work many a man becomes
more or less of an individual. But in so far as such is the case, it is
the work which individualizes and not the unrestricted competitive
pursuit of money. In so far as the economic motive prevails,
individuality is not developed; it is stifled. The man whose motive is
that of money-making will not make the work any more excellent than is
demanded by the largest possible returns; and frequently the largest
possible returns are to be obtained by indifferent work or by work which
has absolutely no social value. The ordinary mercenary purpose always
compels a man to stop at a certain point, and consider something else
than the excellence of his achievement. It does not make the individual
independent, except in so far as independence is merely a matter of cash
in the bank; and for every individual on whom it bestows excessive
pecuniary independence, there are many more who are by that very
circumstance denied any sort of liberation. Even pecuniary independence
is usually purchased at the price of moral and intellectual bondage.
Such genuine individuality as can be detected in the existing social
system is achieved not because of the prevailing money-making motive,
but in spite thereof.
The ordinary answer to such criticisms is that while the existing
system may have many faults, it certainly has proved an efficient means
of releasing individual energy; whereas the exercise of a positive
national responsibility for the wholesome distribution of wealth would
tend to deprive the individual of any sufficient initiative. The claim
is that the money-making motive is the only one which will really arouse
the great majority of men, and to weaken it would be to rob the whole
economic system of its momentum. Just what validity this claim may have
cannot, with our present experience, be definitely settled. That to
deprive individuals suddenly of the opportunities they have so long
enjoyed would be disastrous may be fully admitted. It may also be
admitted that any immediate and drastic attempt to substitute for the
present system a national regulation of the distribution of wealth or a
national responsibility for the management even of monopolies or
semi-monopolies would break down and would do little to promote either
individual or social welfare. But to conclude from any such admissions
that a systematic policy of promoting individual and national
amelioration should be abandoned in wholly unnecessary. That the
existing system has certain practical advantages, and is a fair
expression of the average moral standards of to-day is not only its
chief merit, but also its chief and inexcusable defect. What a
democratic nation must do is not to accept human nature as it is, but to
move in the direction of its improvement. The question it must answer
is: How can it contribute to the increase of American individuality? The
defender of the existing system must be able to show either (1) that it
does contribute to the increase of American individuality; or that (2)
whatever its limitations, the substitution of some better system is
impossible.
Of course, a great many defenders of the existing system will
unequivocally declare that it does contribute effectually to the
increase of individuality, and it is this defense which is most
dangerous, because it is due, not to any candid consideration of the
facts, but to unreasoning popular prejudice and personal
self-justification. The existing system contributes to the increase of
individuality only in case individuality is deprived of all serious
moral and intellectual meaning. In order to sustain their assertion they
must define individuality, not as a living ideal, but as the
psychological condition produced by any individual action. In the light
of such a definition every action performed by an individual would
contribute to individuality; and, conversely, every action performed by
the state, which conceivably could be left to individuals, would
diminish individuality. Such a conception derives from the early
nineteenth century principles of an essential opposition between the
state and the individual; and it is a deduction from the common
conception of democracy as nothing but a finished political organization
in which the popular will prevails. As applied in the traditional
American system this conception of individuality has resulted in the
differentiation of an abundance of raw individual material, but the raw
material has been systematically encouraged to persist only on condition
that it remained undeveloped. Properly speaking, it has not encouraged
individualism at all. Individuality is necessarily based on genuine
discrimination. It has encouraged particularism. While the particles
have been roused into activity, they all remain dominated by
substantially the same forces of attraction and repulsion. But in order
that one of the particles may fulfill the promise of a really separate
existence, he must pursue some special interest of his own. In that way
he begins to realize his individuality, and in realizing his
individuality he is coming to occupy a special niche in the national
structure. A national structure which encourages individuality as
opposed to mere particularity is one which creates innumerable special
niches, adapted to all degrees and kinds of individual development. The
individual becomes a nation in miniature, but devoted to the loyal
realization of a purpose peculiar to himself. The nation becomes an
enlarged individual whose special purpose is that of human amelioration,
and in whose life every individual should find some particular but
essential function.
It surely cannot be seriously claimed that the improvement of the
existing economic organization for the sake of contributing to the
increase of such genuine individuals is impossible. If genuine
individuality depends upon the pursuit of an exclusive interest,
promoted most certainly and completely by a disinterested motive, it
must be encouraged by enabling men so far as possible to work from
disinterested motives. Doubtless this is a difficult, but it is not an
impossible task. It cannot be completely achieved until the whole basis
of economic competition is changed. At present men compete chiefly for
the purpose of securing the most money to spend or to accumulate. They
must in the end compete chiefly for the purpose of excelling in the
quality of their work that of other men engaged in a similar occupation.
And there are assuredly certain ways in which the state can diminish the
undesirable competition and encourage the desirable competition.
The several economic reforms suggested in the preceding chapter would,
so far as they could be successfully introduced, promote more
disinterested economic work. These reforms would not, of course,
entirely do away with the influence of selfish acquisitive motives in
the economic field, because such motives must remain powerful as long as
private property continues to have a public economic function. But they
would at least diminish the number of cases in which the influence of
the mercenary motive made against rather than for excellence of work.
The system which most encourages mere cupidity is one which affords too
many opportunities for making "easy money," and our American system has,
of course, been peculiarly prolific of such opportunities. As long as
individuals are allowed to accumulate money from mines, urban real
estate, municipal franchises, or semi-monopolies of any kind, just to
that extent will the economic system of the country be poisoned, and its
general efficiency impaired. Men will inevitably seek to make money in
the easiest possible way, and as long as such easy ways exist fewer
individuals will accept cordially the necessity of earning their living
by the sheer excellence of achievement. On the other hand, in case such
opportunities of making money without earning it can be eliminated,
there will be a much closer correspondence than there is at present
between the excellence of the work and the reward it would bring. Such a
correspondence would, of course, be far from exact. In all petty kinds
of business innumerable opportunities would still exist of earning more
money either by disregarding the quality of the work or sometimes by
actually lowering it. But at any rate it would be work which would earn
money, and not speculation or assiduous repose in an easy chair.
In the same way, just in so far as industry became organized under
national control for the public benefit, there would be a much closer
correspondence between the quality of the work and the amount of the
reward. In a well-managed corporation a man is promoted because he does
good work, and has shown himself capable of assuming larger
responsibilities and exercising more power. His promotion brings with it
a larger salary, and the chance of obtaining a larger salary doubtless
has much to do with the excellence of the work; but at all events a man
is not rewarded for doing bad work or for doing no work at all. The
successful employee of a corporation has not become disinterested in his
motives. Presumably he will not do any more work than will contribute to
his personal advancement; and if the standard of achievement in his
office is at all relaxed, he will not be kept up to the mark by an
exclusive and disinterested devotion to the work itself. Still, under
such conditions a man might well become better than his own motives.
Whenever the work itself was really interesting, he might become
absorbed in it by the very momentum of his habitual occupation, and this
would be particularly the case provided his work assumed a technical
character. In that case he would have to live up to the standard, not
merely of an office, but of a trade, a profession, a craft, an art, or a
science; and if those technical standards were properly exacting, he
would be kept up to the level of his best work by a motive which had
almost become disinterested. He could not fall below the standard, even
though he derived no personal profit from striving to live up to it,
because the traditions and the honor of his craft would not let him.
The proposed economic policy of reform, in so far as it were successful,
would also tend to stimulate labor to more efficiency, and to diminish
its grievances. The state would be lending assistance to the effort of
the workingman to raise his standard of living, and to restrict the
demoralizing effect of competition among laborers who cannot afford to
make a stand on behalf of their own interest. It should, consequently,
increase the amount of economic independence enjoyed by the average
laborer, diminish his "class consciousness" by doing away with his class
grievances, and intensify his importance to himself as an individual. It
would in every way help to make the individual workingman more of an
individual. His class interest would be promoted by the nation in so
far as such promotion was possible, and could be adjusted to a general
policy of national economic construction. His individual interest would
be left in his own charge; but he would have much more favorable
opportunities of redeeming the charge by the excellence of his
individual work than he has under the existing system. His condition
would doubtless still remain in certain respects unsatisfactory, for the
purpose of a democratic nation must remain unfulfilled just in so far as
the national organization of labor does not enable all men to compete on
approximately equal terms for all careers. But a substantial step would
be made towards its improvement, and the road marked, perhaps, for still
further advance.
Again, however, must the reader be warned that the important thing is
the constructive purpose, and not the means proposed for its
realization. Whenever the attempt at its realization is made, it is
probable that other and unforeseen measures will be found necessary; and
even if a specific policy proposed were successfully tried, this would
constitute merely an advance towards the ultimate end. The ultimate end
is the complete emancipation of the individual, and that result depends
upon his complete disinterestedness. He must become interested
exclusively in the excellence of his work; and he can never become
disinterestedly interested in his work as long as heavy responsibilities
and high achievements are supposed to be rewarded by increased pay. The
effort equitably to adjust compensation to earnings is ultimately not
only impossible, but undesirable, because it necessarily would foul the
whole economic organization--so far as its efficiency depended on a
generous rivalry among individuals. The only way in which work can be
made entirely disinterested is to adjust its compensation to the needs
of a normal and wholesome human life.
Any substantial progress towards the attainment of complete individual
disinterestedness is far beyond the reach of contemporary collective
effort, but such disinterestedness should be clearly recognized as the
economic condition both of the highest fulfillment which democracy can
bestow upon the individual and of a thoroughly wholesome democratic
organization. Says Mr. John Jay Chapman in the chapter on "Democracy,"
in his "Causes and Consequences": "It is thought that the peculiar merit
of democracy lies in this: that it gives every man a chance to pursue
his own ends. The reverse is true. The merit lies in the assumption
imposed upon every man that he shall serve his fellow-men.... The
concentration of every man on his own interests has been the danger and
not the safety of democracy, for democracy contemplates that every man
shall think first of the state and next of himself.... Democracy assumes
perfection in human nature." But men will always continue chiefly to
pursue their own private ends as long as those ends are recognized by
the official national ideal as worthy of perpetuation and encouragement.
If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man
shall serve his fellow-men, the organization of democracy should be
gradually adapted to that assumption. The majority of men cannot be made
disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any
expenditure of subsidized words, or even by a grave and manifest public
need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to
become disinterested in their individual purposes, and how can they be
disinterested except in a few little spots as long as their daily
occupation consists of money seeking and spending in conformity with a
few written and unwritten rules? In the complete democracy a man must in
some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to
his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is
dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between
private and public interests. To ask an individual citizen continually
to sacrifice his recognized private interest to the welfare of his
countrymen is to make an impossible demand, and yet just such a
continual sacrifice is apparently required of an individual in a
democratic state. The only entirely satisfactory solution of the
difficulty is offered by the systematic authoritative transformation of
the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion to
a special object.
American public opinion has not as yet begun to understand the relation
between the process of national education by means of a patient attempt
to realize the national purpose and the corresponding process of
individual emancipation and growth. It still believes that democracy is
a happy device for evading collective responsibilities by passing them
on to the individual; and as long as this belief continues to prevail,
the first necessity of American educational advance is the arousing of
the American intellectual conscience. Behind the tradition of national
irresponsibility is the still deeper tradition of intellectual
insincerity in political matters. Americans are almost as much afraid of
consistent and radical political thinking as are the English, and with
nothing like as much justification. Jefferson offered them a seductive
example of triumphant intellectual dishonesty, and of the sacrifice of
theory to practice, whenever such a sacrifice was convenient.
Jefferson's example has been warmly approved by many subsequent
intellectual leaders. Before Emerson and after, mere consistency has
been stigmatized as the preoccupation of petty minds; and our American
superiority to the necessity of making ideas square with practice, or
one idea with another, has been considered as an exhibition of
remarkable political common sense. The light-headed Frenchmen really
believed in their ideas, and fell thereby into a shocking abyss of
anarchy and fratricidal bloodshed, whereas we have avoided any similar
fate by preaching a "noble national theory" and then practicing it just
as far as it suited our interests or was not too costly in time and
money. No doubt, we also have had our domestic difficulties, and were
obliged to shed a good deal of American blood, because we resolutely
refused to believe that human servitude was not entirely compatible with
the loftiest type of democracy; but then, the Civil War might have been
avoided if the Abolitionists had not erroneously insisted on being
consistent. The way to escape similar trouble in the future is to go on
preaching ideality, and to leave its realization wholly to the
individual. We can then be "uplifted" by the words, while the resulting
deeds cannot do us, as individuals, any harm. We can continue to
celebrate our "noble national theory" and preserve our perfect
democratic system until the end of time without making any of the
individual sacrifices or taking any of the collective risks, inseparable
from a systematic attempt to make our words good.
The foregoing state of mind is the great obstacle to the American
national advance; and its exposure and uprooting is the primary need of
American education. In agitating against the traditional disregard of
our full national responsibility, a critic will do well to dispense with
the caution proper to the consideration of specific practical problems.
A radical theory does not demand in the interest of consistency an
equally radical action. It only demands a sincere attempt to push the
application of the theory as far as conditions will permit, and the
employment of means sufficient probably to accomplish the immediate
purpose. But in the endeavor to establish and popularize his theory, a
radical critic cannot afford any similar concessions. His own opinions
can become established only by the displacement of the traditional
opinions; and the way to displace a traditional error is not to be
compromising and conciliatory, but to be as uncompromising and as
irritating as one's abilities and one's vision of the truth will permit.
The critic in his capacity as agitator is living in a state of war with
his opponents; and the ethics of warfare are not the ethics of
statesmanship. Public opinion can be reconciled to a constructive
national programme only by the agitation of what is from the traditional
standpoint a body of revolutionary ideas.
In vigorously agitating such a body of revolutionary ideas, the critic
would be doing more than performing a desirable public service. He would
be vindicating his own individual intellectual interest. The integrity
and energy of American intellectual life has been impaired for
generations by the tradition of national irresponsibility. Such
irresponsibility necessarily implies a sacrifice of individual
intellectual and moral interests to individual and popular economic
interests. It could not persist except by virtue of intellectual and
moral conformity. The American intellectual habit has on the whole been
just about as vigorous and independent as that of the domestic animals.
The freedom of opinion of which we boast has consisted for the most part
in uttering acceptable commonplaces with as much defiant conviction as
if we were uttering the most daring and sublimest heresies. In making
this parade of the uniform of intellectual independence, the American is
not consciously insincere. He is prepared to do battle for his
convictions, but his really fundamental convictions he shares with
everybody else. His differences with his fellow-countrymen are those of
interest and detail. When he breaks into a vehement proclamation of his
faith, he is much like a bull, who has broken out of his stall, and goes
snorting around the barnyard, tossing everybody within reach of his
horns. A bull so employed might well consider that he was offering the
world a fine display of aggressive individuality, whereas he had in
truth been behaving after the manner of all bulls from the dawn of
domestication. No doubt he is quite capable of being a dangerous
customer, in case he can reach anybody with his horns; but on the other
hand how meekly can he be led back into the stall by the simple device
of attaching a ring to his nose. His individuality always has a tender
spot, situated in much the same neighborhood as his personal economic
interests. If this tender spot is merely irritated, it will make him
rage; but when seized with a firm grip he loses all his defiance and
becomes as aggressive an individual as a good milch cow.
The American intellectual interest demands, consequently, a different
sort of assertion from the American economic or political interest.
Economically and politically the need is for constructive regulation,
implying the imposition of certain fruitful limitations upon traditional
individual freedom. But the national intellectual development demands
above all individual emancipation. American intelligence has still to
issue its Declaration of Independence. It has still to proclaim that in
a democratic system the intelligence has a discipline, an interest, and
a will of its own, and that this special discipline and interest call
for a new conception both of individual and of national development. For
the time being the freedom which Americans need is the freedom of
thought. The energy they need is the energy of thought. The moral unity
they need cannot be obtained without intensity and integrity of thought.
III
ATTEMPTS AT INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION
Americans believe, of course, that they enjoy perfect freedom of
opinion, and so they do in form. There is no legal encouragement of any
one set of opinions. There is no legal discouragement of another set of
opinions. They have denied intellectual freedom to themselves by
methods very much more insidious than those employed by a despotic
government. A national tradition has been established which prevents
individuals from desiring freedom; and if they should desire and obtain
it, they are prevented from using it. The freedom of American speech and
thought has not been essentially different from the freedom of speech
which a group of prisoners might enjoy during the term of their
imprisonment. The prisoners could, of course, think and talk much as
they pleased, but there was nobody but themselves to hear; and in the
absence both of an adequate material, discipline, and audience, both the
words and thoughts were without avail. The truth is, of course, that
intellectual individuality and independence were sacrificed for the
benefit of social homogeneity and the quickest possible development of
American economic opportunities; and in this way a vital relation has
been established for Americans between the assertion of intellectual
independence or moral individuality and the adoption of a nationalized
economic and political system.
During the Middle Period American individual intelligence did, indeed,
struggle gallantly to attain freedom. The intellectual ferment at that
time was more active and more general than it is to-day. During the
three decades before the war, a remarkable outbreak of heresy occurred
all over the East and middle West. Every convention of American life was
questioned, except those unconscious conventions of feeling and thought
which pervaded the intellectual and moral atmosphere. The Abolitionist
agitation was the one practical political result of this ferment, but
many of these free-thinkers wished to emancipate the whites as well as
the blacks. They fearlessly challenged substantially all the established
institutions of society. The institutions of marriage and the state
fared frequently as ill as did property and the church. Radical,
however, as they were in thought, they were by no means revolutionary in
action. The several brands of heresy differed too completely one from
another to be melted into a single political agitation and programme.
The need for action spent itself in the formation of socialistic
communities of the most varied kind, the great majority of which were
soon either disbanded or transformed. But whatever its limitations the
ferment was symptomatic of a genuine revolt of the American spirit
against the oppressive servitude of the individual intelligence to the
social will, demanded by the popular democratic system and tradition.
The revolt, however, with all the sincere enthusiasm it inspired, was
condemned to sterility. It accomplished nothing and could accomplish
nothing for society, because it sought by individual or unofficial
associated action results which demanded official collective action; and
it accomplished little even for the individual, because it was not the
outcome of any fruitful individual discipline. The emancipated idea was
usually defined by seeking the opposite of the conventional idea.
Individuality was considered to be a matter of being somehow and anyhow
different from other people. There was no authentic intellectual
discipline behind the agitation. The pioneer democrat with all his
limitations embodied the only living national body of opinion, and he
remained untainted by this outburst of heresy. He deprived it of all
vitality by depriving its separate explosions, Abolitionism excepted, of
all serious attention. He crushed it far more effectually by
indifference than he would have by persecution. When the shock of the
Civil War aroused Americans to a realization of the unpleasant political
realities sometimes associated with the neglect of a "noble national
theory," the ferment subsided without leaving behind so much as a loaf
of good white bread.
For practical political purposes it exhausted itself, as I have said, in
Abolitionism, and in that movement both its strength and weakness are
writ plain. Its revolt on behalf of emancipation was courageous and
sincere. The patriotism which inspired it recognized the need of
justifying its protestantism by a better conception of democracy. But
the heresy was as incoherent and as credulous as the antithetic
orthodoxy. It sought to accomplish an intellectual revolution without
organizing either an army or an armament--just as the pioneer democrat
expected to convert untutored enthusiasm into acceptable technical work,
and a popular political and economic atomism into a substantially
socialized community. In its meaning and effect, consequently, the
revolt was merely negative and anti-national. It served a constructive
democratic purpose only by the expensive and dubious means of
instigating a Civil War. If any of the other heresies of the period, as
well as Abolitionism, had developed into an effective popular agitation,
they could have obtained a similar success only by means of incurring a
similar danger. The intellectual ideals of the movement were not
educational, and its declaration of intellectual independence issued in
as sterile a programme for the Republic of American thought as did the
Declaration of Political Independence for the American national
democracy.
In truth all these mid-century American heretics were not heretics at
all in relation to really stupefying and perverting American tradition.
They were sturdily rebellious against all manner of respectable methods,
ideas, and institutions, but none of them dreamed of protesting against
the real enemy of American intellectual independence. They never dreamed
of associating the moral and intellectual emancipation of the individual
with the conscious fulfillment of the American national purpose and with
the patient and open-eyed individual and social discipline thereby
demanded. They all shared the illusion of the pioneers that somehow a
special Providential design was effective on behalf of the American
people, which permitted them as individuals and as a society to achieve
their purposes by virtue of good intentions, exuberant enthusiasm, and
enlightened selfishness. The New World and the new American idea had
released them from the bonds in which less fortunate Europeans were
entangled. Those bonds were not to be considered as the terms under
which excellent individual and social purposes were necessarily to be
achieved. They were bad habits, which the dead past had imposed upon the
inhabitants of the Old World, and from which Americans could be
emancipated by virtue of their abundant faith in human nature and the
boundless natural opportunities of the new continent.
Thus the American national ideal of the Middle Period was essentially
geographical. The popular thinkers of that day were hypnotized by the
reiterated suggestion of a new American world. Their fellow-countrymen
had obtained and were apparently making good use of a wholly
unprecedented amount of political and economic freedom; and they jumped
to the conclusion that the different disciplinary methods which limited
both individual and social action in Europe were unnecessary. Just as
the Jacksonian Democracy had finally vindicated American political
independence by doing away with the remnants of our earlier political
colonialism, so American moral and intellectual independence demanded a
similar vindication. This geographical protestantism was in a measure
provoked, if not justified, by the habit of colonial dependence upon
Europe in matters of opinion, which so many well-educated Americans of
that period continued to cherish. But it was based upon the illusion
that the economic and social conditions of the Middle Period, which
favored temporarily a mixture of faith and irresponsibility, freedom and
formlessness, would persist and could be translated into terms of
individual intellectual and moral discipline. In truth, it was, of
course, a great mistake to conceive Americanism as intellectually and
morally a species of Newer-Worldliness. A national intellectual ideal
did not divide us from Europe any more than did a national political
ideal. In both cases national independence had no meaning except in a
system of international, intellectual, moral, and political relations.
American national independence was to be won, not by means of a perverse
opposition to European intellectual and moral influence, but by a
positive and a thorough-going devotion to our own national democratic
ideal.
The national intellectual ideal could afford to be as indifferent to the
sources of American intellectual life as the American political ideal
was to the sources of American citizenship. The important thing was and
is, not where our citizens or our special disciplinary ideals come from,
but what use we make of them. Just as economic and political Americanism
has been broad enough and vital enough to make a place in the American
social economy for the hordes of European immigrants with their many
diverse national characteristics, so the intellectual basis of
Americanism must be broad enough to include and vigorous enough to
assimilate the special ideals and means of discipline necessary to every
kind of intellectual or moral excellence. The technical ideals and
standards which the typical American of the Middle Period instinctively
under-valued are neither American nor European. They are merely the
special forms whereby the several kinds of intellectual eminence are to
be obtained. They belong to the nature of the craft. Those forms and
standards were never sufficiently naturalized in America during the
Colonial Period, because the economic and social conditions of the time
did not justify such naturalization. The appropriate occasion for the
transfer was postponed until after American political independence had
been secured; and when occasion did not arise, the naturalness of the
transfer was perverted and obscured by political preconceptions.
The foregoing considerations throw a new light upon the mistake made by
the American heretics of the Middle Period. In so far as their assertion
of American intellectual independence was negative, it should not have
been a protest against "feudalism," social classification, social and
individual discipline, approved technical methods, or any of those
social forms and intellectual standards which so many Americans vaguely
believed to be exclusively European. It should have been a protest
against a sterile and demoralizing Americanism--the Americanism of
national irresponsibility and indiscriminate individualism. The bondage
from which Americans needed, and still need, emancipation is not from
Europe, but from the evasions, the incoherence, the impatience, and the
easy-going conformity of their own intellectual and moral traditions. We
do not have to cross the Atlantic in order to hunt for the enemies of
American national independence and fulfillment. They sit at our
political fireside and toast their feet on its coals. They poison
American patriotic feeling until it becomes, not a leaven, but a kind of
national gelatine. They enshrine this American democratic ideal in a
temple of canting words which serves merely as a cover for a religion of
personal profit. American moral and intellectual emancipation can be
achieved only by a victory over the ideas, the conditions, and the
standards which make Americanism tantamount to collective
irresponsibility and to the moral and intellectual subordination of the
individual to a commonplace popular average.
The heretics of the Middle Period were not cowardly, but they were
intellectually irresponsible, undisciplined, and inexperienced. Sharing,
as they did, most of the deeper illusions of their time, they did not
vindicate their own individual intellectual independence, and they
contributed little or nothing to American national intellectual
independence. With the exception of a few of the men of letters who had
inherited a formative local tradition, their own personal careers were
examples not of gradual individual fulfillment, but at best of
repetition and at worst of degeneracy. Like the most brilliant
contemporary Whig politicians, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster,
their intellectual individuality was gradually cheapened by the manner
in which it was expressed; and it is this fact which makes the case of
Lincoln, both as a politician and a thinker, so unique and so
extraordinary. The one public man of this period who did impose upon
himself a patient and a severe intellectual and moral discipline, who
really did seek the excellent use of his own proper tools, is the man
who preëminently attained national intellectual and moral stature. The
difference in social value between Lincoln and, say, William Lloyd
Garrison can be measured by the difference in moral and intellectual
discipline to which each of these men submitted. Lincoln sedulously
turned to account every intellectual and moral opportunity which his
life afforded. Garrison's impatient temper and unbalanced mind made him
the enthusiastic advocate of a few distorted and limited ideas. The
consequence was that Garrison, although apparently an arch-heretic, was
in reality the victim of the sterile American convention which makes
willful enthusiasm, energy, and good intentions a sufficient substitute
for necessary individual and collective training. Lincoln, on the other
hand, was in his whole moral and intellectual make-up a living protest
against the aggressive, irresponsible, and merely practical Americanism
of his day; while at the same time in the greatness of his love and
understanding he never allowed his distinction to divide him from his
fellow-countrymen. His was the unconscious and constructive heresy which
looked in the direction of national intellectual independence and
national moral union and good faith.
IV
MEANS OF INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION
We are now in a position to define more clearly just how the American
individual can assert his independence, and how in asserting his
independence he can contribute to American national fulfillment. He
cannot make any effective advance towards national fulfillment merely by
educating himself and his fellow-countrymen as individuals to a higher
intellectual and moral level, because an essential condition of really
edifying individual education is the gradual process of collective
education by means of collective action and formative collective
discipline. On the other hand, this task of collective education is far
from being complete in itself. It necessarily makes far greater demands
upon the individual than does a system of comparative collective
irresponsibility. It implies the selection of peculiarly competent,
energetic, and responsible individuals to perform the peculiarly
difficult and exacting parts in a socially constructive drama; and it
implies, as a necessary condition of such leadership, a progressively
higher standard of individual training and achievement, unofficial as
well as official, throughout the whole community. The process of
educating men of moral and intellectual stature sufficient for the
performance of important constructive work cannot be disentangled from
the process of national fulfillment by means of intelligent collective
action. American nationality will never be fulfilled except under the
leadership of such men; and the American nation will never obtain the
necessary leadership unless it seeks seriously the redemption of its
national responsibility.
Such being the situation in general, how can the duty and the
opportunity of the individual at the present time best be defined? Is he
obliged to sit down and wait until the edifying, economic, political,
and social transformation has taken place? Or can he by his own
immediate behavior do something effectual both to obtain individual
emancipation and to accelerate the desirable process of social
reconstruction? This question has already been partially answered by the
better American individual; and it is, I believe, being answered in the
right way. The means which he is taking to reach a more desirable
condition of individual independence, and inferentially to add a little
something to the process of national fulfillment, consist primarily and
chiefly in a thoroughly zealous and competent performance of his own
particular job; and in taking this means of emancipation and fulfillment
he is both building better and destroying better than he knows.
The last generation of Americans has taken a better method of asserting
their individual independence than that practiced by the heretics of the
Middle Period. Those who were able to gain leadership in business and
politics sought to justify their success by building up elaborate
industrial and political organizations which gave themselves and their
successors peculiar individual opportunities. On the other hand, the men
of more specifically intellectual interests tacitly abandoned the
Newer-Worldliness of their predecessors and began unconsciously but
intelligently to seek the attainment of some excellence in the
performance of their own special work. In almost every case they
discovered that the first step in the acquisition of the better
standards of achievement was to go abroad. If their interests were
scholarly or scientific, they were likely to matriculate at one of the
German universities for the sake of studying under some eminent
specialist. If they were painters, sculptors, or architects, they
flocked to Paris, as the best available source of technical instruction
in the arts. Wherever the better schools were supposed to be, there the
American pupils gathered; and the consequence was during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century a steady and considerable improvement
in the standard of special work and the American schools of special
discipline. In this way there was domesticated a necessary condition and
vehicle of the liberation and assertion of American individuality.
A similar transformation has been taking place in the technical aspects
of American industry. In this field the individual has not been obliged
to make his own opportunities to the same extent as in business,
politics, and the arts. The opportunities were made for him by the
industrial development of the country. Efficient special work soon
became absolutely necessary in the various branches of manufacture, in
mining, and in the business of transportation; and in the beginning it
was frequently necessary to import from abroad expert specialists. The
technical schools of the country were wholly inadequate to supply the
demand either for the quantity or the quality of special work needed.
When, for instance, the construction of railroads first began, the only
good engineering school in the country was West Point, and the
consequence was that many army officers became railroad engineers. But
little by little the amount and the standard of technical instruction
improved; while at the same time the greater industrial organizations
themselves trained their younger employees with ever increasing
efficiency. Of late years even farming has become an occupation in which
special knowledge is supposed to have certain advantages. In every kind
of practical work specialization, founded on a more or less arduous
course of preparation, is coming to prevail; and in this way
individuals, possessing the advantages of the necessary gifts and
discipline, are obtaining definite and stimulating opportunities for
personal efficiency and independence.
It would be a grave mistake to conclude, however, that the battle is
already won--that the individual has already obtained in any department
of practical or intellectual work sufficient personal independence or
sufficiently edifying opportunities. The comparatively zealous and
competent individual performer does not, of course, feel so much of an
alien in his social surroundings as he did a generation or two ago. He
can usually obtain a certain independence of position, a certain amount
of intelligent and formative appreciation, and a sufficiently
substantial measure of reward. But he has still much to contend against
in his social, economic, and intellectual environment. His independence
is precarious. In some cases it is won with too little effort. In other
cases it can be maintained only at too great a cost. His rewards, if
substantial, can be obtained as readily by sacrificing the integrity of
his work as by remaining faithful thereto. The society in which he
lives, and which gives him his encouragement and support, has the
limitations of a clique. Its encouragement is too conscious; its support
too willful. Beyond a certain point its encouragement becomes indeed
relaxing rather than stimulating, and the aspiring individual is placed
in the situation of having most to fear from the inhabitants of his own
household. His intellectual and moral environment is lukewarm. He is
encouraged to be an individual, but not too much of an individual. He is
encouraged to do good work, but not to do always and uncompromisingly
his best work. He is trusted, but he is not trusted enough. He believes
in himself, but he does not believe as much in himself and in his
mission as his own highest achievement demands. He is not sufficiently
empowered by the idea that just in so far as he does his best work, and
only his best work, he is contributing most to national as well as
personal fulfillment.
What the better American individual particularly needs, then, is a
completer faith in his own individual purpose and power--a clearer
understanding of his own individual opportunities. He needs to do what
he has been doing, only more so, and with the conviction that thereby he
is becoming not less but more of an American. His patriotism, instead of
being something apart from his special work, should be absolutely
identified therewith, because no matter how much the eminence of his
personal achievement may temporarily divide him from his
fellow-countrymen, he is, by attaining to such an eminence, helping in
the most effectual possible way to build the only fitting habitation for
a sincere democracy. He is to make his contribution to individual
improvement primarily by making himself more of an individual. The
individual as well as the nation must be educated and "uplifted" chiefly
by what the individual can do for himself. Education, like charity,
should begin at home.
An individual can, then, best serve the cause of American individuality
by effectually accomplishing his own individual emancipation--that is,
by doing his own special work with ability, energy, disinterestedness,
and excellence. The scope of the individual's opportunities at any one
time will depend largely upon society, but whatever they amount to, the
individual has no excuse for not making the most of them. Before he can
be of any service to his fellows, he must mold himself into the
condition and habit of being a good instrument. On this point there can
be no compromise. Every American who has the opportunity of doing
faithful and fearless work, and who proves faithless to it, belongs to
the perfect type of the individual anti-democrat. By cheapening his own
personality he has cheapened the one constituent of the national life
over which he can exercise most effectual control; and thereafter, no
matter how superficially patriotic and well-intentioned he may be, his
words and his actions are tainted and are in some measure corrupting in
their social effect.
A question will, however, immediately arise as to the nature of this
desirable individual excellence. It is all very well to say that a man
should do his work competently, faithfully, and fearlessly, but how are
we to define the standard of excellence? When a man is seeking to do his
best, how shall he go about it? Success in any one of these individual
pursuits demands that the individual make some sort of a personal
impression. He must seek according to the nature of the occupation a
more or less numerous popular following. The excellence of a painter's
work does not count unless he can find at least a small group of patrons
who will admire and buy it. The most competent architect can do nothing
for himself or for other people unless he attracts clients who will
build his paper houses. The playwright needs even a larger following. If
his plays are to be produced, he must manage to amuse and to interest
thousands of people. And the politician most of all depends upon a
numerous and faithful body of admirers. Of what avail would his
independence and competence be in case there were nobody to accept his
leadership? It is not enough, consequently, to assert that the
individual must emancipate himself by means of excellent and
disinterested work. His emancipation has no meaning, his career as an
individual no power, except with the support of a larger or smaller
following. Admitting the desirability of excellent work, what kind of
workmanlike excellence will make the individual not merely independent
and incorruptible, but powerful? In what way and to what end shall he
use the instrument, which he is to forge and temper, for his own
individual benefit and hence for that of society?
These questions involve a real difficulty, and before we are through
they must assuredly be answered; but they are raised at the present
stage of the discussion for the purpose of explicitly putting them aside
rather than for the purpose of answering them. The individual
instruments must assuredly be forged and tempered to some good use, but
before we discuss their employment let us be certain of the instruments
themselves. Whatever that employment may be and however much of a
following its attainment may demand, the instrument must at any rate be
thoroughly well made, and in the beginning it is necessary to insist
upon merely instrumental excellence, because the American habit and
tradition is to estimate excellence almost entirely by results. If the
individual will only obtain his following, there need be no close
scrutiny as to his methods. The admirable architect is he who designs
an admirably large number of buildings. The admirable playwright is he
who by whatever means makes the hearts of his numerous audiences
palpitate. The admirable politician is he who succeeds somehow or anyhow
in gaining the largest area of popular confidence. This tradition is the
most insidious enemy of American individual independence and
fulfillment. Instead of declaring, as most Americans do, that a man may,
if he can, do good work, but that he _must_ create a following, we
should declare that a man may, if he can, obtain a following, but that
he _must_ do good work. When he has done good work, he may not have done
all that is required of him; but if he fails to do good work, nothing
else counts. The individual democrat who has had the chance and who has
failed in that essential respect is an individual sham, no matter how
much of a shadow his figure casts upon the social landscape.
The good work which for his own benefit the individual is required to
do, means primarily technically competent work. The man who has
thoroughly mastered the knowledge and the craft essential to his own
special occupation is by way of being the well-forged and well-tempered
instrument. Little by little there have been developed in relation to
all the liberal arts and occupations certain tested and approved
technical methods. The individual who proposes to occupy himself with
any one of these arts must first master the foundation of knowledge, of
formal traditions, and of manual practice upon which the superstructure
is based. The danger that a part of this fund of technical knowledge and
practice may at any particular time be superannuated must be admitted;
but the validity of the general rule is not affected thereby. The most
useful and effective dissenters are those who were in the beginning
children of the Faith. The individual who is too weak to assert himself
with the help of an established technical tradition is assuredly too
weak to assert himself without it. The authoritative technical tradition
associated with any one of the arts of civilization is merely the net
result of the accumulated experience of mankind in a given region. That
experience may or may not have been exhaustive or adequately defined;
but in any event its mastery by the individual is merely a matter of
personal and social economy. It helps to prevent the individual from
identifying his whole personal career with unnecessary mistakes. It
provides him with the most natural and serviceable vehicle for
self-expression. It supplies him with a language which reduces to the
lowest possible terms the inevitable chances of misunderstanding. It is
society's nearest approach to an authentic standard in relation to the
liberal arts and occupations; and just so far as it is authentic society
is justified in imposing it on the individual.
The perfect type of authoritative technical methods are those which
prevail among scientific men in respect to scientific work. No scientist
as such has anything to gain by the use of inferior methods or by the
production of inferior work. There is only one standard for all
scientific investigators--the highest standard; and so far as a man
falls below that standard his inferiority is immediately reflected in
his reputation. Some scientists make, of course, small contributions to
the increase of knowledge, and some make comparatively large
contributions; but just in so far as a man makes any contribution at
all, it is a real contribution, and nothing makes it real but the fact
that it is recognized. In the Hall of Science exhibitors do not get
their work hung upon the line because it tickles the public taste, or
because it is "uplifting," or because the jury is kindly and wishes to
give the exhibitor a chance to earn a little second-rate reputation. The
same standard is applied to everybody, and the jury is incorruptible.
The exhibit is nothing if not true, or by way of becoming or being
recognized as true.
A technical standard in any one of the liberal or practical arts cannot
be applied as rigorously as can the standard of scientific truth,
because the standard itself is not so authentic. In all these arts many
differences of opinion exist among masters as to the methods and forms
which should be authoritative; and in so far as such is the case, the
individual must be allowed to make many apparently arbitrary personal
choices. The fact that a man has such choices to make is the
circumstance which most clearly distinguishes the practice of an art
from that of a science, but this circumstance, instead of being an
excuse for technical irresponsibility or mere eclecticism, should, on
the contrary, stimulate the individual more completely to justify his
choice. In his work he is fighting the battle not merely of his own
personal career, but of a method, of a style, of an idea, or of an
ideal. The practice of the several arts need not suffer from diversity
of standard, provided the several separate standards are themselves
incorruptible. In all the arts--and by the arts I mean all disinterested
and liberal practical occupations--the difficulty is not that
sufficiently authoritative standards do not exist, but that they are not
applied. The standard which is applied is merely that of the
good-enough. The juries are either too kindly or too lax or too much
corrupted by the nature of their own work. They are prevented from being
incorruptible about the work of other people by a sub-conscious
apprehension of the fate of their own performances--in case similar
standards were applied to themselves. Just in so far as the second-rate
performer is allowed to acquire any standing, he inevitably enters into
a conspiracy with his fellows to discourage exhibitions of genuine and
considerable excellence, and, of course, to a certain extent he
succeeds. By the waste which he encourages of good human appreciation,
by the confusion which he introduces into the popular critical
standards, he helps to effect a popular discrimination against any
genuine superiority of achievement.
Individual independence and fulfillment is conditioned on the technical
excellence of the individual's work, because the most authentic standard
is for the time being constituted by excellence of this kind. An
authentic standard must be based either upon acquired knowledge or an
accepted ideal. Americans have no popularly accepted ideals which are
anything but an embarrassment to the aspiring individual. In the course
of time some such ideals may be domesticated--in which case the
conditions of individual excellence would be changed; but we are dealing
with the present and not with the future. Under current conditions the
only authentic standard must be based, not upon the social influence of
the work, but upon its quality; and a standard of this kind, while it
falls short of being complete, must always persist as one indispensable
condition of final excellence. The whole body of acquired technical
experience and practice has precisely the same authority as any other
body of knowledge. The respect it demands is similar to the respect
demanded by science in all its forms. In this particular case the
science is neither complete nor entirely trustworthy, but it is
sufficiently complete and trustworthy for the individual's purpose, and
can be ignored only at the price of waste, misunderstanding, and partial
inefficiency and sterility.
A standard of uncompromising technical excellence contains, however, for
the purpose of this argument, a larger meaning than that which is
usually attached to the phrase. A technically competent performance is
ordinarily supposed to mean one which displays a high degree of manual
dexterity; and a man who has acquired such a degree of dexterity is also
supposed to be the victim of his own mastery. No doubt such is
frequently the case; but in the present meaning the thoroughly competent
individual workman becomes necessarily very much more of an individual
than any man can be who is merely the creature of his own technical
facility and preoccupation. I have used the word art not in the sense
merely of fine art, but in the sense of all liberal and disinterested
practical work; and the excellent performance of that work demands
certain qualifications which are common to all the arts as well as
peculiar to the methods and materials of certain particular arts and
crafts. These qualifications are both moral and intellectual. They
require that no one shall be admitted to the ranks of thoroughly
competent performers until he is morally and intellectually, as well as
scientifically and manually, equipped for excellent work, and these
appropriate moral and intellectual standards should be applied as
incorruptibly as those born of specific technical practices.
A craftsman whose merits do not go beyond technical facility is probably
deficient in both the intellectual and moral qualities essential to good
work. The rule cannot be rigorously applied, because the boundaries
between high technical proficiency and some very special examples of
genuine mastery are often very indistinct. Still, the majority of
craftsmen who are nothing more than, manually dexterous are rarely
either sincere or disinterested in their personal attitude towards their
occupation. They have not made themselves the sort of moral instrument
which is capable of eminent achievement, and whenever unmistakable
examples of such a lack of sincerity and conviction are distinguished,
they should in the interest of a complete standard of special excellence
meet with the same reprobation as would manual incompetence. It must
not be inferred, however, that the standard of moral judgment applied to
the individual in the performance of his particular work is identical
with a comprehensive standard of moral practice. A man may be an
acceptable individual instrument in the service of certain of the arts,
even though he be in some other respects a tolerably objectionable
person. A single-minded and disinterested attempt to obtain mastery of
any particular occupation may in specific instances force a man to
neglect certain admirable and in other relations essential qualities. He
may be a faithless husband, a treacherous friend, a sturdy liar, or a
professional bankrupt, without necessarily interfering with the
excellent performance of his special job. A man who breaks a road to
individual distinction by such questionable means may always be tainted;
but he is a better public servant than would be some comparatively
impeccable nonentity. It all depends on the nature and the requirements
of the particular task, and the extent to which a man has really made
sacrifices in order to accomplish it. There are many special jobs which
absolutely demand scrupulous veracity, loyalty in a man's personal
relations, or financial integrity. The politician who ruins his career
in climbing down a waterspout, or the engineer who prevents his
employers from trusting his judgment and conscience in money matters,
cannot plead in extenuation any other sort of instrumental excellence.
They have deserved to fail, because they have trifled with their job;
and it may be added that serious moral delinquencies are usually grave
hindrances to a man's individual efficiency.
From the intellectual point of view also technical competence means
something more than manual proficiency. Just as the master must possess
those moral qualities essential to the integrity of his work, so he must
possess the corresponding intellectual qualities. All the liberal arts
require, as a condition of mastery, a certain specific and considerable
power of intelligence; and this power of intelligence is to be sharply
distinguished from all-round intellectual ability. From our present
point of view its only necessary application concerns the problems of a
man's special occupation. Every special performer needs the power of
criticising the quality and the subject-matter of his own work. Unless
he has great gifts or happens to be brought up and trained under
peculiarly propitious conditions, his first attempts to practice his
art will necessarily be experimental. He will be sure to commit many
mistakes, not merely in the choice of alternative methods and the
selection of his subject-matter, but in the extent to which he
personally can approve or disapprove of his own achievements. The
thoroughly competent performer must at least possess the intellectual
power of profiting from this experience. A candid consideration of his
own experiments must guide him in the selection of the better methods,
in the discrimination of the more appropriate subject-matter, in the
avoidance of his own peculiar failings, and in the cultivation of his
own peculiar strength. The technical career of the master is up to a
certain point always a matter of growth. The technical career of the
second-rate man is always a matter of degeneration or at best of
repetition. The former brings with it its own salient and special form
of enlightenment based upon the intellectual power to criticise his own
experience and the moral power to act on his own acquired insight. To
this extent he becomes more of a man by the very process of becoming
more of a master.
The intellectual power required to criticise one's own experience with a
formative result will of course vary considerably in different
occupations. Technical mastery of the occupation of playwriting,
criticism, or statesmanship, will require more specifically intellectual
qualities than will be demanded by the competent musician or painter.
But no matter how much intelligence may be needed, the way in which it
should be used remains the same. Mere industry, aspiration, or a fluid
run of ideas make as meager an equipment for a politician, a
philanthropist, or a critic as they would for an architect; and
absolutely the most dangerous mistake which an individual can make is
that of confusing admirable intentions expressed in some inferior manner
with genuine excellence of achievement. If such men succeed, they are
corrupting in their influence. If they fail, they learn nothing from
their failure, because they are always charging up to the public,
instead of to themselves, the responsibility for their inferiority.
The conclusion is that at the present time an individual American's
intentions and opinions are of less importance than his power of giving
them excellent and efficient expression. What the individual can do is
to make himself a better instrument for the practice of some
serviceable art; and by so doing he can scarcely avoid becoming also a
better instrument for the fulfillment of the American national Promise.
To be sure, the American national Promise demands for its fulfillment
something more than efficient and excellent individual instruments. It
demands, or will eventually demand, that these individuals shall love
and wish to serve their fellow-countrymen, and it will demand
specifically that in the service of their fellow-countrymen, they shall
reorganize their country's economic, political, and social institutions
and ideas. Just how the making of competent individual instruments will
of its own force assist the process of national reconstruction, we shall
consider presently; but the first truth to drive home is that all
political and social reorganization is a delusion, unless certain
individuals, capable of edifying practical leadership, have been
disciplined and trained; and such individuals must always and in some
measure be a product of self-discipline. While not only admitting but
proclaiming that the processes of individual and social improvement are
mutually dependent, it is equally true that the initiative cannot be
left to collective action. The individual must begin and carry as far as
he can the work of his own emancipation; and for the present he has an
excuse for being tolerably unscrupulous in so doing. By the successful
assertion of his own claim to individual distinction and eminence, he is
doing more to revolutionize and reconstruct the American democracy than
can a regiment of professional revolutionists and reformers.
Professional socialists may cherish the notion that their battle is won
as soon as they can secure a permanent popular majority in favor of a
socialistic policy; but the constructive national democrat cannot
logically accept such a comfortable illusion. The action of a majority
composed of the ordinary type of convinced socialists could and would in
a few years do more to make socialism impossible than could be
accomplished by the best and most prolonged efforts of a majority of
malignant anti-socialists. The first French republicans made by their
behavior another republic out of the question in France for almost sixty
years; and the second republican majority did not do so very much
better. When the republic came in France it was founded by men who were
not theoretical democrats, but who understood that a republic was for
the time being the kind of government best adapted to the national
French interest. These theoretical monarchists, but practical
republicans, were for the most part more able, more patriotic, and
higher-minded men than the convinced republicans; and in all probability
a third republic, started without their coöperation, would also have
ended in a dictatorship. Any substantial advance toward social
reorganization will in the same way be forced by considerations of
public welfare on a majority of theoretical anti-socialists, because it
is among this class that the most competent and best disciplined
individuals are usually to be found. The intellectual and moral ability
required, not merely to conceive, but to realize a policy of social
reorganization, is far higher than the ability to carry on an ordinary
democratic government. When such a standard of individual competence has
been attained by a sufficient number of individuals and is applied to
economic and social questions, some attempt at social reorganization is
bound to be the result,--assuming, of course, the constructive relation
already admitted between democracy and the social problem.
The strength and the weakness of the existing economic and social system
consist, as we have observed, in the fact that it is based upon the
realities of contemporary human nature. It is the issue of a
time-honored tradition, an intense personal interest, and a method of
life so habitual that it has become almost instinctive. It cannot be
successfully attacked by any body of hostile opinion, unless such a body
of opinion is based upon a more salient individual and social interest
and a more intense and vital method of life. The only alternative
interest capable of putting up a sufficiently vigorous attack and
pushing home an occasional victory is the interest of the individual in
his own personal independence and fulfillment--an interest which, as we
have seen, can only issue from integrity and excellence of individual
achievement. An interest of this kind is bound in its social influence
to make for social reorganization, because such reorganization is in
some measure a condition and accompaniment of its own self-expression;
and the strength of its position and the superiority of its weapons are
so decisive that they should gradually force the existing system to give
way. The defenses of that system have vulnerable points; and its
defenders are disunited except in one respect. They would be able to
repel any attack delivered along their whole line; but their binding
interest is selfish and tends under certain conditions to divide them
one from another without bestowing on the divided individuals the energy
of independence and self-possession. Their position can be attacked at
its weaker points, not only without meeting with combined resistance,
but even with the assistance of some of their theoretical allies. Many
convinced supporters of the existing order are men of superior merit,
who are really fighting against their own better individual interests;
and they need only to taste the exhilaration of freedom in order better
to understand its necessary social and economical conditions. Others,
although men of inferior achievement, are patriotic and well-intentioned
in feeling; and they may little by little be brought to believe that
patriotism in a democracy demands the sacrifice of selfish interests and
the regeneration of individual rights. Men of this stamp can be made
willing prisoners by able and aggressive leaders whose achievements have
given them personal authority and whose practical programme is based
upon a sound knowledge of the necessary limits of immediate national
action. The disinterested and competent individual is formed for
constructive leadership, just as the less competent and independent, but
well-intentioned, individual is formed more or less faithfully to follow
on behind. Such leadership, in a country whose traditions and ideals are
sincerely democratic, can scarcely go astray.
V
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM
The preceding section was concluded with a statement, which the majority
of its readers will find extremely questionable and which assuredly
demands some further explanation. Suppose it to be admitted that
individual Americans do seek the increase of their individuality by
competent and disinterested special work. In what way will such work and
the sort of individuality thereby developed exercise a decisive
influence on behalf of social amelioration? We have already expressly
denied that a desire to succor their fellow-countrymen or an ideal of
social reorganization is at the present time a necessary ingredient in
the make-up of these formative individuals. Their individual excellence
has been defined exclusively in terms of high but special technical
competence; and the manner in which these varied and frequently
antagonistic individual performers are to coöperate towards socially
constructive results must still remain a little hazy. How are these
eminent specialists, each of whom is admittedly pursuing unscrupulously
his own special purpose, to be made serviceable in a coherent national
democratic organization? How, indeed, are these specialists to get at
the public whom they are supposed to lead? Many very competent
contemporary Americans might claim that the real difficulty in relation
to the social influence of the expert specialist has been sedulously
evaded. The admirably competent individual cannot exercise any
constructive social influence, unless he becomes popular; and the
current American standards being what they are, how can an individual
become popular without more or less insidious and baleful compromises?
The gulf between individual excellence and effective popular influence
still remains to be bridged; and until it is bridged, an essential stage
is lacking in the transition from an individually formative result to
one that is also socially formative.
Undoubtedly, a gulf does exist in the country between individual
excellence and effective popular influence. Many excellent specialists
exercise a very small amount of influence, and many individuals who
exercise apparently a great deal of influence are conspicuously lacking
in any kind of excellence. The responsibility for this condition is
usually fastened upon the Philistine American public, which refuses to
recognize genuine eminence and which showers rewards upon any
second-rate performer who tickles its tastes and prejudices. But it is
at least worth inquiring whether the responsibility should not be
fastened, not upon the followers, but upon the supposed leaders. The
American people are what the circumstances, the traditional leadership,
and the interests of American life have made them. They cannot be
expected to be any better than they are, until they have been
sufficiently shown the way; and they cannot be blamed for being as bad
as they are, until it is proved that they have deliberately rejected
better leadership. No such proof has ever been offered.
Some disgruntled Americans talk as if in a democracy the path of the
aspiring individual should be made peculiarly safe and easy. As soon as
any young man appears whose ideals are perched a little higher than
those of his neighbors, and who has acquired some knack of performance,
he should apparently be immediately taken at his own valuation and
loaded with rewards and opportunities. The public should take off its
hat and ask him humbly to step into the limelight and show himself off
for the popular edification. He should not be obliged to make himself
interesting to the public. They should immediately make themselves
interested in him, and bolt whatever he chooses to offer them as the
very meat and wine of the mind. But surely one does not need to urge
very emphatically that popularity won upon such easy terms would be
demoralizing to any but very highly gifted and very cool-headed men. The
American people are absolutely right in insisting that an aspirant for
popular eminence shall be compelled to make himself interesting to them,
and shall not be welcomed as a fountain of excellence and enlightenment
until he has found some means of forcing his meat and his wine down
their reluctant throats. And if the aspiring individual accepts this
condition as tantamount to an order that he must haul down the flag of
his own individual purpose in order to obtain popular appreciation and
reward, it is he who is unworthy to lead, not they who are unworthy of
being led. The problem and business of his life is precisely that of
keeping his flag flying at any personal cost or sacrifice; and if his
own particular purpose demands that his flying flag shall be loyally
saluted, it is his own business also to see that his flag is well worthy
of a popular salutation. In occasional instances these two aspects of a
special performer's business may prove to be incompatible. Every real
adventure must be attended by risks. Every real battle involves a
certain number of casualties. But better the risk and the wounded and
the dead than sham battles and unearned victories.
There is only one way in which popular standards and preferences can be
improved. The men whose standards are higher must learn to express their
better message in a popularly interesting manner. The people will never
be converted to the appreciation of excellent special performances by
argumentation, reproaches, lectures, associations, or persuasion. They
will rally to the good thing, only because the good thing has been made
to look good to them; and so far as individual Americans are not capable
of making their good things look good to a sufficient number of their
fellow-countrymen, they will on the whole deserve any neglect from which
they may suffer. They themselves constitute the only efficient source of
really formative education. In so far as a public is lacking, a public
must be created. They must mold their followers after their own
likeness--as all aspirants after the higher individual eminence have
always been obliged to do.
The manner in which the result is to be brought about may be traced by
considering the case of the contemporary American architect--a case
which is typical because, while popular architectural preferences are
inferior, the very existence of the architect depends upon his ability
to please a considerable number of clients. The average well-trained
architect in good standing meets this situation by designing as well as
he can, consistent with the building-up an abundant and lucrative
practice. There are doubtless certain things which he would not do even
to get or keep a job; but on the whole it is not unfair to say that his
first object is to get and to keep the job, and his second to do good
work. The consequence is that, in compromising the integrity of his
work, he necessarily builds his own practice upon a shifting foundation.
His work belongs to the well-populated class of the good-enough. It can
have little distinctive excellence; and it cannot, by its peculiar force
and quality, attract a clientele. Presumably, it has the merit of
satisfying prevailing tastes; but the architect, who is designing only
as well as popular tastes will permit, suffers under one serious
disadvantage. There are hundreds of his associates who can do it just as
well; and he is necessarily obliged to face demoralizing competition.
Inasmuch as it is not his work itself that counts, he is obliged to
build up his clientele by other means. He is obliged to make himself
personally popular, to seek social influence and private "pulls"; and
his whole life becomes that of a man who is selling his personality
instead of fulfilling it. His relations with his clients suffer from the
same general condition. They have come to him, not because they are
particularly attracted by his work and believe in it, but, as a rule,
because of some accidental and arbitrary reason. His position,
consequently, is lacking in independence and authority. He has not
enough personal prestige as a designer to insist upon having his own way
in all essential matters. He tends to become too much of an agent,
employed for the purpose of carrying out another man's wishes, instead
of a professional expert, whose employer trusts his judgment and leans
loyally on his advice.
Take, on the other hand, the case of the exceptional architect who
insists upon doing his very best. Assuming sufficient ability and
training, the work of the man who does his very best is much more likely
to possess some quality of individual merit, which more or less sharply
distinguishes it from that of other architects. He has a monopoly of his
own peculiar qualities. Such merit may not be noticed by many people;
but it will probably be noticed by a few. The few who are attracted will
receive a more than usually vivid impression. They will talk, and begin
to create a little current of public opinion favorable to the designer.
The new clients who come to him will be influenced either by their
appreciation of the actual merit of the work or by this approving body
of opinion. They will come, that is, because they want _him_ and believe
in his work. His own personal position, consequently, becomes much more
independent and authoritative than is usually the case. He is much less
likely to be embarrassed by ignorant and irrelevant interference. He can
continue to turn out designs genuinely expressive of his own individual
purpose. If he be an intelligent as well as a sincere and gifted
designer, his work will, up to a certain point, grow in distinction and
individuality; and as good or better examples of it become more
numerous, it will attract and hold an increasing body of approving
opinion. The designer will in this way have gradually created his own
special public. He will be molding and informing the architectural taste
and preference of his admirers. Without in any way compromising his own
standards, he will have brought himself into a constructive relation
with a part at least of the public, and the effect of his work will soon
extend beyond the sphere of his own personal clientele. In so far as he
has succeeded in popularizing a better quality of architectural work, he
would be by way of strengthening the hands of all of his associates who
were standing for similar ideals and methods.
It would be absurd to claim that every excellent and competent special
performer who sticks incorruptibly to his individual purpose and
standard can succeed in creating a special public, molded somewhat by
his personal influence. The ability to succeed is not given to
everybody. It cannot always be obtained by sincere industry and able and
single-minded work. The qualities needed in addition to those mentioned
will vary in different occupations and according to the accidental
circumstances of different cases; but they are not always the qualities
which a man can acquire. Men will fail who have deserved to succeed and
who might have succeeded with a little more tenacity or under slightly
more favorable conditions. Men who have deserved to fail will succeed
because of certain collateral but partly irrelevant merits--just as an
architect may succeed who is ingenious about making his clients' houses
comfortable and building them cheap. In a thousand different ways an
individual enterprise, conceived and conducted with faith and ability,
may prove to be abortive. Moreover, the sacrifices necessary to success
are usually genuine sacrifices. The architect who wishes to build up a
really loyal following by really good work must deliberately reject many
possible jobs; and he must frequently spend upon the accepted jobs more
money than is profitable. But the foregoing is merely tantamount to
saying, as we have said, that the adventure involves a real risk. A
resolute, intelligent man undertakes a doubtful and difficult
enterprise, not because it is sure to succeed, but because if it
succeeds, it is worth the risk and the cost, and such is the case with
the contemporary American adventurer. The individual independence,
appreciation, and fulfillment which he secures in the event of success
are assuredly worth a harder and a more dangerous fight than the one by
which frequently he is confronted. In any particular case a man, as we
have admitted, may put up a good fight without securing the fruits of
victory, and his adventure may end, not merely in defeat, but in
self-humiliation. But if any general tendency exists to shirk, or to
back down, or to place the responsibility for personal ineptitude on the
public, it means, not that the fight was hopeless, but that the warriors
were lacking in the necessary will and ability.