THE DUAL ASPECT OF THE GROUP:
A UNION OF INDIVIDUALS, AN INDIVIDUAL IN A LARGER UNION
XXXIV. THE MORAL STATE AND CREATIVE CITIZENSHIP 333
XXXV. THE WORLD STATE 344
APPENDIX
THE TRAINING FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY 363
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEW STATE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEW STATE
INTRODUCTION
OUR political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually at
war, the nations of Europe are at one another’s throats—because we have
not yet learned how to live together. The twentieth century must find a
new principle of association. Crowd philosophy, crowd government, crowd
patriotism must go. The herd is no longer sufficient to enfold us.
Group organization is to be the new method in politics, the basis of our
future industrial system, the foundation of international order. Group
organization will create the new world we are now blindly feeling after,
for creative force comes from the group, creative power is evolved
through the activity of the group life.
We talk about the evils of democracy. We have not yet tried democracy.
Party or “interests” govern us with some fiction of the “consent of the
governed” which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of
what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the
crude ore of life.
We talk about the tragedy of individualism. The individual we do not
yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of
the individual. Our particularism—our _laissez-faire_, our
every-man-for-his-own-interests—has little to do with true
individualism, that is, with the individual as consciously responsible
for the life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes
his all.
Politics do not need to be “purified.” This thought is leading us
astray. Politics must be vitalized by a new method. “Representative
government,” party organization, majority rule, with all their
excrescences, are dead-wood. In their stead must appear the organization
of non-partisan groups for the begetting, the bringing into being, of
common ideas, a common purpose and a collective will.
Government by the people must be more than the phrase. We are told—The
people should do this, the people should do that, the people must be
given control of foreign policy, etc. etc. But all this is wholly
useless unless we provide the procedure within which the people _can_ do
this or that. What does the “sovereign will” of the people amount to
unless it has some way of operating? Or have we any “sovereign will?”
There is little yet that is practical in “practical politics.”
But method must not connote mechanics to any mind. Many of us are more
interested in the mechanism of life than in anything else. We keep on
putting pennies in the slot from sheer delight in seeing something come
out at the other end. All this must change. Machines, forms, images,
moulds—all must be broken up and the way prepared for our plastic life
to find plastic expression. The principle of democracy may be the
underlying unity of men, the method of democracy must be that which
allows the quickest response of our daily life to the common faith of
men.
Are we capable of a new method? Can the inventive faculty of the
American people be extended from mechanical things to political
organization? There is no use denying that we are at a crisis in our
history. Whether that crisis is to abound in acute moments which will
largely wreck us, or whether we are going to be wise enough to make the
necessary political and social adjustments—that is the crucial question
which faces America to-day.
Representative government has failed. It has failed because it was not a
method by which men could govern themselves. Direct government is now
being proposed. But direct government will never succeed if (1) it is
operated from within the party organization as at present, or (2) if it
consists merely in counting all the votes in all the ballot-boxes.
Ballot-box democracy is what this book is written to oppose.
No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does
not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the
individual. Up to the present moment we have never seen the individual.
Yet the search for him has been the whole long striving of our
Anglo-Saxon history. We sought him through the method of representation
and failed to find him. We sought to reach him by extending the suffrage
to every man and then to every woman and yet he eludes us. Direct
government now seeks the individual; but as we have not found him by
sending more men to the ballot-box, so we shall not find him by sending
men more often to the ballot-box. Are our constitutional conventions to
sit and congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they
are condemning us to a new form of our old particularism? The
ballot-box! How completely that has failed men, how completely it will
fail women. Direct government as at present generally understood is a
mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy
is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The
question before the American people to-day is—How is that genuine union
to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party
has always ignored him; it wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of
votes. The early reform associations had the same aim. Both wanted
voters not men. It makes little difference whether we follow the boss or
follow the good government associations, this is all herd
life—“following the lead”—democracy means a wholly different kind of
existence. To follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the
only force in the world which can make the Perfect Society—democracy
depends upon the creative power of every man.
We find the true man only through group organization. The potentialities
of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group
life. Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through
the group. Group organization must be the new method of politics because
the modes by which the individual can be brought forth and made
effective are the modes of practical politics.
But who is the individual we have been seeking, who is the individual we
are to find within the group? Certainly not the particularist
individual. Every man to count as one? That was once our slogan. Now we
have relegated it to a mechanical age. To-day we see that every man must
count for infinitely more than one because he is not part of a whole, a
cog in a machine, not even an organ in an organism, but from one point
of view the whole itself. A man said to me the other day, “That is not
democracy, that is mysticism.” But why mysticism? It is our daily life
as lived from hour to hour. We join with one group of men at work, with
another at play, another in our civic committee, another in our art
club. Man’s life is one of manifold relatings. His vote at the polls
must express not his particularist self, but the whole complex of his
related life, must express as much of the whole as these multiple
relations have brought into existence for him, through him. I find my
expression of the whole-idea, the whole-will, through my group life. The
group must always dictate the modes of activity for the individual. We
must put clearly before us the true individual with his infinite
relations, expressing his infinite relations, as the centre of politics,
as the meaning of democracy. The first purpose of genuine politics is to
make the vote of every man express the All at his special coign of
outlook. In every man is the potentiality of such expression. To call it
forth is the aim of all training, the end sought by all modes of real
living.
Thus group organization releases us from the domination of mere numbers.
Thus democracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood
except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy
rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a
collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.
Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing
forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must
contribute the whole of his complex life, as one which every single
being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of
democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.
Many men despise politics because they see that politics manipulate, but
make nothing. If politics are to be the highest activity of man, as they
should be, they must be clearly understood as creative.
What is there inherent in the group which gives it creative power? The
activity which produces the true individual is at the same time
interweaving him and others into a real whole. A genuine whole has
creative force. Does this seem “mystical?” The power of our corporations
depends upon this capability of men to interknit themselves into such
genuine relations that a new personality is thereby evolved. This is the
“real personality” of modern legal theory. Are our company directors and
corporation lawyers usually mystics?
The seeing of self as, with all other selves, creating, demands a new
attitude and a new activity in man. The fallacy of self-and-others fades
away and there is only self-in-and-through-others, only others so firmly
rooted in the self and so fruitfully growing there that sundering is
impossible. We must now enter upon modes of living commensurate with
this thought.
What American politics need to-day is positive principles. We do not
want to “regulate” our trusts, to “restrain” our bosses. The measure of
our progress is never what we give up, but what we add. It may be
necessary to prune the garden, but we do not make a pile of the dead
branches and take our guests to see them as evidence of the flourishing
state of the garden.
The group organization movement means the substitution of intention for
accident, of organized purpose for scattered desire. It rests on the
solid assumption that this is a man-made not a machine-made world, that
men and women are capable of constructing their own life, and that not
upon socialism or any rule or any order or any plan or any utopia can we
rest our hearts, but only on the force of a united and creative
citizenship.
We are asking for group organization in order to leap at once from the
region of theory, of which Americans are so fond, to a practical scheme
of living. We hear a good deal of academic talk about “the functioning
of the social mind”; what does it all amount to? We have no social mind
yet, so we have no functioning of the social mind. We want the directive
force of consciously integrated thought and will. All our ideas of
conscious self-determination lead us to a new method: it is not merely
that we must be allowed to govern ourselves, we must learn how to govern
ourselves; it is not only that we must be given “free speech,” we must
learn a speech that is free; we are not given rights, we create rights;
it is not only that we must invent machinery to get a social will
expressed, we must invent machinery that will get a social will created.
Politics have one task only—to create. To create? But what are politics
to create? The state? The state is now discredited in many quarters. The
extremists cry, “The state is dead, Down with the state.” And it is by
no means the extremists alone who are saying that our present state has
played us false and that therefore we are justified in abolishing it. An
increasing number of men are thinking what one writer has put into
words, “We have passed from the _régime_ of the state to that of the
groups.” We must see if it is necessary to abolish the state in order to
get the advantage of the group.
Many trickles have gone to feed the stream of reaction against the
state: (1) an economic and industrial progress which demands political
recognition, which demands that labor have a share in political power,
(2) the trend of philosophic thought towards pluralism and the whole
anti-intellectualistic tendency, (3) a progressive legal theory of the
“real personality” of groups, (4) a growing antagonism to the state
because it is supposed to embody the crowd mind: our electorate is seen
as a crowd hypnotized by the party leaders, big words, vague ideas and
loose generalizations, (5) our life of rapidly increasing intercourse
has made us see our voluntary associations as real and intimate, the
state as something remote and foreign to us, and (6) the increasing
alignment before the war of interests across state lines.
Every one of these reasons has force. Almost any one of these reasons is
sufficient to turn political theory into new channels, seeking new
currents of political life. Yet if our present state is taken from us
and we are left with our multiple group life, we are at once confronted
with many questions. Shall the new state be based on occupational groups
or neighborhood groups? Shall they form a unifying or a plural state?
Shall the group or the individual be the basis of politics? The
pluralist gives us the group as the unit of politics, but most of the
group theories of politics are as entirely particularistic as the old
“individualistic” theories; our particularism is merely transferred from
the individual to the group.
Pluralism is the most vital trend in political thought to-day, but there
are many dangers lurking in pluralism as at present understood. The
pluralists apotheosize the group; the average American, on the other
hand, is afraid of the group because he thinks of it chiefly in the form
of corporation and trust. Both make the same mistake: both isolate the
group. The group _in relation_ must be the object of our study if that
study is to be fruitful for politics. The pluralists have pointed out
diversity but no pluralist has yet answered satisfactorily the question
to which we must find an answer—What is to be done with this diversity?
Some of the pluralists tend to lose the individual in the group; others,
to abandon the state for the group. But the individual, the group, the
state—they are all there to be reckoned with—we cannot ignore or
minimize any one. The relation of individual to group, of group to
group, of individual and group to state—the part that labor is to have
in the new state—these are the questions to the consideration of which
this book is directed.
This book makes no attempt, however, to construct the new state, only to
offer certain suggestions. But before the details of a new order are
even hinted at, we must look far enough within for our practical
suggestions to have value. In Part I we shall try to find the
fundamental principles which must underlie the new state; in Part II we
shall see how far they are expressed in present political forms; in Part
III we shall consider how they can be expressed. When they are fully
expressed, then we shall have the true Federal State, then we shall see
appearing the World State.
To sum up this Introduction: The immediate problem of political science
is to discover the method of self-government. Industrial democracy, the
self-government of smaller nations, the “sovereignty” of an
International League, our own political power,—how are these to be
attained? Not by being “granted” or “conferred.” Genuine control, power,
authority are always a growth. Self-government is a psychological
process. It is with that psychological process that this book is largely
concerned. To free the way for that process is the task of practical
politics.
New surges of life are pounding at circumference and centre; we must
open the way for their entrance and onflow. To-day the individual is
submerged, smothered, choked by the crowd fallacy, the herd theory. Free
him from these, release his energies, and he with all other Freemen will
work out quick, flexible, constantly changing forms which shall respond
sensitively to every need.
Under our present system, social and economic changes necessary because
of changing social and economic conditions cannot be brought about. The
first reform needed in our political practice is to find some method by
which the government shall continuously represent the people. No state
can endure unless the political bond is being forever forged anew. The
organization of men in small local groups gives opportunity for this
continuous political activity which ceaselessly creates the state. Our
government forms cannot be fossils from a dead age, but must be
sensitive, mobile channels for the quick and quickening soul of the
individual to flow to those larger confluences which finally bring forth
the state. Thus every man _is_ the state at every moment, whether in
daily toil or social intercourse, and thus the state itself, leading a
myriad-membered life, is expressing itself as truly in its humblest
citizen as in its supreme assembly.
The principle of modern politics, the principle of creative citizenship,
must predominantly and preëminently body itself and be acknowledged by
every human being. Then will “practical politics” be for the first time
practical.
* * * * *
A few words of explanation seem necessary. I have no bibliography simply
because any list of references which I could give would necessarily be a
partial one since much of this book has come by wireless. Besides all
that is being written definitely of a new state, the air to-day is full
of the tentative, the partial, the fragmentary thought, the isolated
flash of insight from some genius, all of which is being turned to the
solution of those problems which, from our waking to our sleeping, face
us with their urgent demand. I am here trying to show the need of a wide
and systematic study of these problems, not pretending to be able to
solve them. Much interweaving of thought will be necessary before the
form of the new state appears to us.
Moreover, I have not traced the strands of thought which have led us to
our present ideas. That does not mean that I do not recognize the slow
building up of these ideas or all our indebtedness to the thinkers of
the past. I speak of principles as “new” which we all know were familiar
to Aristotle or Kant and are new to-day only in their application.
The word new is so much used in the present day—New Freedom, New
Democracy, New Society etc.—that it is perhaps well for us to remind
ourselves what we mean by this word. We are using the word new partly in
reaction to the selfishness of the nineteenth century, in reaction to a
world which has culminated in this war, but more especially in the sense
of the live, the real, in contrast to the inert, the dead. It is not a
time distinction—the “new” (the vital) claims fellowship with all that
is “new” (vital) in the past. When we speak of the “New” Freedom we mean
all the reality and truth which have accumulated in all the conceptions
of freedom up to the present moment. The “New” Society is the “Perfect
Society.” The “New” Life is the Vita Nuova, “when spring came to the
heart of Italy.”
It is I hope unnecessary to explain that in my frequent use of the term
“the new psychology,” I am not referring to any definitely formulated
body of thought; there are no writers who are expounding the new
psychology as such. By the “new psychology” I mean something now in the
making: I mean partly that group psychology which is receiving more
attention and gaining more influence every day, and partly I mean simply
that feeling out for a new conception of _modes of association_ which we
see in law, economics, ethics, politics, and indeed in every department
of thought. It is a short way of saying that we are now looking at
things not as entities but in relation. When our modern jurists speak of
the growing emphasis upon relation rather than upon contract—they are
speaking of the “new psychology.”
There is, however, another and very important aspect of contemporary
psychology closely connected with this one of relation. We are to-day
seeking to understand the sources of human motives,[1] and then to free
their channels so that these elemental springs of human activity (the
fundamental instincts of man) shall not be dammed but flow forth in
normal fashion, for normal man is constructive. A few years ago, for
instance, we were satisfied merely to condemn sabotage and repudiation
of law; now we are trying to discover the cause of this deviation from
the normal in order to see if it can be removed. This necessity for the
understanding of the nature and vital needs of men has not yet reached
full self-consciousness, but appears in diverse forms: as the
investigation of the I. W. W., as a study of “Human Nature in Politics,”
an examination of “The Great Society,” as child-study, as Y. M. C. A.
efforts to nourish all sides of men at the front, etc. etc. To-day the
new psychology speaks in many voices. Soon we may hope for some unified
formulation of all this varied and scattered utterance. Soon we may hope
also that the connection will be made between this aspect of
contemporary psychology and the group psychology upon which this book is
mainly founded.
I wish to add my reason for giving quotations from many writers whose
names I have not cited. This has been chiefly because often the sentence
or phrase quoted taken away from all context does not give a fair idea
of the writer’s complete thought, and I have used it not in an attempt
to refute these writers, but merely as illustrating certain tendencies
to which we are all more or less subject at present. Many of the writers
with whom I have disagreed in some particular have been in the main my
teachers and guides.
A certain amount of repetition has seemed necessary in order to look at
the same idea from a number of angles and to make different applications
of the same principle.
From a few friends I have received much help. My thanks are especially
due to my teacher and counsellor of many years, Miss Anna Boynton
Thompson, who went over the first copy of the manuscript with me and
gave to it the most careful consideration and criticism, offering
constantly invaluable suggestion and advice; to her unflagging and most
generous help the final form owes more than I can quite express. The
inception of the book is due to my friends and fellow-workers, Mrs.
Louis Brandeis, Mrs. Richard Cabot and Mr. Arthur Woodworth, as also
much of its thought to the stimulus of “group” discussion with them.
Mrs. Charles W. Mixter, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor H. A.
Overstreet, Professor W. Ernest Hocking and Mr. Roscoe Pound have read
the manuscript in full or in part and have given me many valuable
suggestions. I owe to my friend, Miss Isobel L. Briggs, daily help,
advice and encouragement in the development of the book, and the
revision of manuscript and proofs.
-----
Footnote 1:
See William McDougall, Social Psychology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART I
THE GROUP PRINCIPLE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
THE GROUP AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
--------------
POLITICS must have a technique based on an understanding of the laws of
association, that is, based on a new and progressive social psychology.
Politics alone should not escape all the modern tendency of scientific
method, of analysis, of efficiency engineering. The study of democracy
has been based largely on the study of institutions; it should be based
on the study of how men behave together. We have to deal, not with
institutions, or any mechanical thing, or with abstract ideas, or “man,”
or anything but just men, ordinary men. The importance of the new
psychology is that it acknowledges man as the centre and shaper of his
universe. In his nature all institutions are latent and perforce must be
adapted to this nature. Man not things must be the starting point of the
future.
But man in association, for no man lives to himself. And we must
understand further that the laws of association are the laws of the
group. We have long been trying to understand the relation of the
individual to society; we are only just beginning to see that there is
no “individual,” that there is no “society.” It is not strange,
therefore, that our efforts have gone astray, that our thinking yields
small returns for politics. The old psychology was based on the isolated
individual as the unit, on the assumption that a man thinks, feels and
judges independently. Now that we know that there is no such thing as a
separate ego, that individuals are created by reciprocal interplay, our
whole study of psychology is being transformed.
Likewise there is no “society” thought of vaguely as the mass of people
we see around us. I am always in relation not to “society” but to some
concrete group. When do we ever as a matter of fact think of “society”?
Are we not always thinking of our part in our board of directors or
college faculty, in the dinner party last night,[2] in our football
team, our club, our political party, our trade-union, our church?
Practically “society” is for every one of us a number of groups. The
recognition of this constitutes a new step in sociology analogous to the
contribution William James made in regard to the individual. James
brought to popular recognition the truth that since man is a complex of
experiences there are many selves in each one. So society as a complex
of groups includes many social minds. The craving we have for union is
satisfied by group life, groups and groups, groups ever widening, ever
unifying, but always groups. We sometimes say that man is spiritually
dependent upon society; what we are referring to is his psychic relation
to his groups. The vital relation of the individual to the world is
through his groups; they are the potent factors in shaping our lives.
Hence social psychology cannot be the application of the old individual
psychology to a number of people. A few years ago I went to a lecture on
“Social Psychology,” as the subject was announced. Not a word was said
except on the nervous systems and other aspects of individual
psychology, but at the last moment the lecturer told us that had there
been time he would have applied what he had said to social conditions!
It reminded me of our old acquaintance Silas Wegg who, when he wanted to
know something about Chinese metaphysics, first looked up China in the
encyclopedia and then metaphysics and put them together. The new
psychology must take people with their inheritance, their “tendencies,”
their environment, and then focus its attention on their interrelatings.
The most careful laboratory work must be done to discover the conditions
which make these interrelatings possible, which make these
interrelatings fruitful.
Some writers make “socially minded” tendencies on the part of
individuals the subject of social psychology, but such tendencies belong
still to the field of individual psychology. A social action is not an
individual initiative with social application.[3] Neither is social
psychology the determination of how far social factors determine the
individual consciousness. Social psychology must concern itself
primarily with the _interaction_ of minds.
Early psychology was based on the study of the individual; early
sociology was based on the study of society. But there is no such thing
as the “individual,” there is no such thing as “society”; there is only
the group and the group-unit—the social individual. Social psychology
must begin with an intensive study of the group, of the selective
processes which go on within it, the differentiated reactions, the
likenesses and unlikenesses, and the spiritual energy which unites them.
The acceptance and the living of the new psychology will do away with
all the progeny of particularistic psychology: consent of the governed,
majority rule, external leadership, industrial wars, national wars etc.
From the analysis of the group must come an understanding of
collective thought and collective feeling, of the common will and
concerted activity, of the true nature of freedom, the illusion of
self-and-others, the essential unity of men, the real meaning of
patriotism, and the whole secret of progress and of life as a genuine
interpenetration which produces true community.
All thinking men are demanding a new state. The question is—What form
shall that state take? No one of us will be able to give an answer until
we have studied men in association and have discovered the laws of
association. This has not been done yet, but already we can see that a
political science which is not based on a knowledge of the laws of
association gained by a study of the group will soon seem the crudest
kind of quackery. Syndicalism, in reaction to the so-called
“metaphysical” foundation of politics, is based on “objective rights,”
on function, on its conception of modes of association which shall
emphasize the object of the associated and not the relation of the
associated to one another. The new psychology goes a step further and
sees these as one, but how can any of these things be discussed
abstractly? Must we not first study men in association? Young men in the
hum of actual life, practical politicians, the members of constitutional
conventions, labor leaders—all these must base their work on the
principles of group psychology.
The fundamental reason for the study of group psychology is that no one
can give us democracy, we must learn democracy. To be a democrat is not
to decide on a certain form of human association, it is to learn how to
live with other men. The whole labor movement is being kept back by
people not knowing how to live together much more than by any deliberate
refusal to grant justice. The trouble with syndicalism is that its
success depends on group action and we know almost nothing of the laws
of the group.
I have used group in this book with the meaning of men associating
under the law of interpenetration as opposed to the law of the
crowd—suggestion and imitation. This may be considered an arbitrary
definition, but of course I do not care about the names, I only want to
emphasize the fact that men meet under two different sets of laws.
Social psychology may include both group psychology and crowd
psychology, but of these two group psychology is much the more
important. For a good many years now we have been dominated by the crowd
school, by the school which taught that people met together are governed
by suggestion and imitation, and less notice has been taken of all the
interplay which is the real social process that we have in a group but
not in a crowd. How men behave in crowds, and the relation of the crowd
conception of politics to democracy, will be considered in later
chapters. While I recognize that men are more often at present under the
laws of the crowd than of the group, I believe that progress depends on
the group, and, therefore, that the group should be the basis of a
progressive social psychology. The group process contains the secret of
collective life, it is the key to democracy, it is the master lesson for
every individual to learn, it is our chief hope for the political, the
social, the international life of the future.[4]
-----
Footnote 2:
Probably by no means a group, but tending in some instances in that
direction, as in the discussion or conference dinners now so common.
Footnote 3:
The old definition of the word social has been a tremendous drag on
politics. Social policies are not policies for the good of the people
but policies created by the people, etc. etc. We read in the work of a
continental sociologist, “When a social will is born in the brain of a
man,” but a social will never is born in the brain of a man.
Footnote 4:
This is essentially the process by which sovereignty is created.
Therefore chapters II-VI on The Group Process are the basis of the
conception of sovereignty given in Part III and of the relation of
that conception to the politics of reconstruction.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE IDEA
--------------
LET us begin at once to consider the group process. Perhaps the most
familiar example of the evolving of a group idea is a committee meeting.
The object of a committee meeting is first of all to create a common
idea. I do not go to a committee meeting merely to give my own ideas. If
that were all, I might write my fellow-members a letter. But neither do
I go to learn other people’s ideas. If that were all, I might ask each
to write me a letter. I go to a committee meeting in order that all
together we may create a group idea, an idea which will be better than
any one of our ideas alone, moreover which will be better than all of
our ideas added together. For this group idea will not be produced by
any process of addition, but by the interpenetration of us all. This
subtle psychic process by which the resulting idea shapes itself is the
process we want to study.
Let us imagine that you, I, A, B and C are in conference. Now what from
our observation of groups will take place? Will you say something, and
then I add a little something, and then A, and B, and C, until we have
together built up, brick-wise, an idea, constructed some plan of action?
Never. A has one idea, B another, C’s idea is something different from
either, and so on, but we cannot add all these ideas to find the group
idea. They will not add any more than apples and chairs will add. But we
gradually find that our problem can be solved, not indeed by mechanical
aggregation, but by the subtle process of the intermingling of all the
different ideas of the group. A says something. Thereupon a thought
arises in B’s mind. Is it B’s idea or A’s? Neither. It is a mingling of
the two. We find that A’s idea, after having been presented to B and
returned to A, has become slightly, or largely, different from what it
was originally. In like manner it is affected by C and so on. But in the
same way B’s idea has been affected by all the others, and not only does
A’s idea feel the modifying influence of each of the others, but A’s
ideas are affected by B’s relation to all the others, and A’s plus B’s
are affected by all the others individually and collectively, and so on
and on until the common idea springs into being.
We find in the end that it is not a question of my idea being
supplemented by yours, but that there has been evolved a composite idea.
But by the time we have reached this point we have become tremendously
civilized people, for we have learned one of the most important lessons
of life: we have learned to do that most wonderful thing, to say “I”
representing a whole instead of “I” representing one of our separate
selves. The course of action decided upon is what we all together want,
and I see that it is better than what I had wanted alone. It is what _I_
now want. We have all experienced this at committee meetings or
conferences.
We see therefore that we cannot view the content of the collective mind
as a holiday procession, one part after another passing before our
mental eyes; every part is bound up with every other part, every
tendency is conditioned by every other tendency. It is like a game of
tennis. A serves the ball to B. B returns the serve but his play is
influenced as largely by the way the ball has been served to him as it
is by his own method of return. A sends the ball back to B, but his
return is made up of his own play plus the way in which the ball has
been played to him by B plus his own original serve. Thus in the end
does action and reaction become inextricably bound up together.
I have described briefly the group process. Let us consider what is
required of the individual in order that the group idea shall be
produced. First and foremost each is to do his part. But just here we
have to get rid of some rather antiquated notions. The individual is not
to facilitate agreement by courteously (!) waiving his own point of
view. That is just a way of shirking. Nor may I say, “Others are able to
plan this better than I.” Such an attitude is the result either of
laziness or of a misconception. There are probably many present at the
conference who could make wiser plans than I alone, but that is not the
point, we have come together each to give something. I must not
subordinate myself, I must affirm myself and give my full positive value
to that meeting.
And as the psychic coherence of the group can be obtained only by the
full contribution of every member, so we see that a readiness to
compromise must be no part of the individual’s attitude. Just so far as
people think that the basis of working together is compromise or
concession, just so far they do not understand the first principles of
working together. Such people think that when they have reached an
appreciation of the necessity of compromise they have reached a high
plane of social development; they conceive themselves as nobly willing
to sacrifice part of their desire, part of their idea, part of their
will, in order to secure the undoubted benefit of concerted action. But
compromise is still on the same plane as fighting. War will
continue—between capital and labor, between nation and nation—until we
relinquish the ideas of compromise and concession.[5]
But at the same time that we offer fully what we have to give, we must
be eager for what all others have to give. If I ought not to go to my
group feeling that I must give up my own ideas in order to accept the
opinions of others, neither ought I to go to force my ideas upon others.
The “harmony” that comes from the domination of one man is not the kind
we want. At a board of directors’ meeting once Mr. E. H. Harriman said,
“Gentlemen, we must have coöperation. I insist upon it.” They
“coöperated” and all his motions were put through. At the end of the
meeting some one asked Mr. Harriman to define coöperation. “Oh, that’s
simple,” he said, “do as I say and do it damned quick.”
There are many people who conscientiously go to their group thinking it
their duty to impose their ideas upon others, but the time is coming
soon when we are going to see that we have no more right to get our own
way by persuading people than by bullying or bribing them. To take our
full share in the synthesis is all that is legitimate.[6]
Thus the majority idea is not the group idea. Suppose I belong to a
committee composed of five: of A, B, C, D and myself. According to the
old theory of my duties as a committee member I might say, “A agrees
with me, if I can get B to agree with me that will make a majority and I
can carry my point.” That is, we five can then present this idea to the
world as our group idea. But this is not a group idea, although it may
be the best substitute we can get for the moment. To a genuine group
idea every man must contribute what is in him to contribute. Thus even
the passing of a unanimous vote by a group of five does not prove the
existence of a group idea if two or three (or even one) out of
indifference or laziness or prejudice, or shut-upness, or a
misconception of their function, have not added their individual thought
to the creation of the group thought. No member of a group which is to
create can be passive. All must be active and constructively active.
It is not, however, to be constructively active merely to add a share:
it must be a share which is related to and bound up with every other
share. And it must be given in such a way that it fits in with what
others are giving. Some one said to me the other day, “Don’t you think
Mr. X talks better than anyone else in Boston?” Well the fact is that
Mr. X talks so well that I can never talk with him. Everything he says
has such a ring of finality, is such a rounding up of the whole
question, that it leaves nothing more to be said on the subject. This is
particularly the kind of thing to be avoided in a committee meeting or
conference.
There are many people, moreover, who want to score, to be brilliant,
rather than to find agreement. Others come prepared with what they are
going to say and either this has often been said long before they get a
chance to speak, or, in any case, it allows no give-and-take, so they
contribute nothing; when we really learn the process our ideas will be
struck out by the interplay. To compare notes on what we have thought
separately is not to think together.
I asked a man once to join a committee I was organizing and he replied
that he would be very glad to come and give his advice. I didn’t want
him—and didn’t have him. I asked another man and he said he would like
very much to come and learn but that he couldn’t contribute anything. I
didn’t have him either—I hadn’t a school. Probably the last man thought
he was being modest and, therefore, estimable. But what I wanted was to
get a group of people who would deliberately work out a thing together.
I should have liked very much to have the man who felt that he had
advice to give if he had had also what we are now learning to call the
social attitude, that is, that of a man willing to take his place in the
group, no less and no more. This definition of social attitude is very
different from our old one—the willingness to give; my friend who wanted
to come and give advice had that, but that is a crude position compared
with the one we are now advocating.
It is clear then that we do not go to our group—trade-union, city
council, college faculty—to be passive and learn, and we do not go to
push through something we have already decided we want. Each must
discover and contribute that which distinguishes him from others, his
difference. The only use for my difference is to join it with other
differences. The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.[7] We
must have an imagination which will leap from the particular to the
universal. Our joy, our satisfaction, must always be in the more
inclusive aspect of our problem.
We can test our group in this way: do we come together to register the
results of individual thought, to compare the results of individual
thought in order to make selections therefrom, or do we come together to
create a common idea? Whenever we have a real group something new _is_
actually created. We can now see therefore that the object of group life
is not to find the best individual thought, but the collective thought.
A committee meeting isn’t like a prize show aimed at calling out the
best each can possibly produce and then the prize (the vote) awarded to
the best of all these individual opinions. The object of a conference is
not to get at a lot of different ideas, as is often thought, but just
the opposite—to get at one idea. There is nothing rigid or fixed about
thoughts, they are entirely plastic, and ready to yield themselves
completely to their master—the group spirit.[8]
I have given some of the conditions necessary for collective thinking.
In every governing board—city councils, hospital and library trustees,
the boards of colleges and churches, in business and industry, in
directors’ meetings—no device should be neglected which will help to
produce joint rather than individual thinking. But no one has yet given
us a scientific analysis of the conditions necessary or how to fulfil
them. We do not yet know, for instance, the best number to bring out the
group idea, the number, that is, which will bring out as many
differences as possible and yet form a whole or group. We cannot guess
at it but only get it through scientific experiments. Much laboratory
work has to be done. The numbers on Boards of Education, on Governors’
Commissions, should be determined by psychological as well as by
political reasons.
Again it is said that private sessions are undemocratic. If they
contribute to true collective thinking (instead of efforts to dazzle the
gallery), then, in so far, they are democratic, for there is nothing in
the world so democratic as the production of a genuine group will.
Mr. Gladstone must have appreciated the necessity of making conditions
favorable to joint thinking, for I have been told that at important
meetings of the Cabinet he planned beforehand where each member should
sit.
The members of a group are reciprocally conditioning forces none of
which acts as it would act if any one member were different or absent.
You can often see this in a board of directors: if one director leaves
the room, every man becomes slightly different.
When the conditions for collective thinking are more or less fulfilled,
then the expansion of life will begin. Through my group I learn the
secret of wholeness.[9] The inspiration of the group is proportionate to
the degree in which we do actually identify ourselves with the whole and
think that _we_ are doing this, not Mr. A and Mr. B and I, but we, the
united we, the singular not the plural pronoun we. (We shall have to
write a new grammar to meet the needs of the times, as non-Euclidean
geometries are now being published.) Then we shall no longer have a
feeling of individual triumph, but feel only elation that the group has
accomplished something. Much of the evil of our political and social
life comes from the fact that we crave personal recognition and personal
satisfaction; as soon as our greatest satisfaction is group
satisfaction, many of our present problems will disappear. When one
thinks of one’s self as part of a group, it means keener moral
perceptions, greater strength of will, more enthusiasm and zest in life.
We shall enjoy living the social life when we understand it; the things
which we do and achieve together will give us much greater happiness
than the things we do and achieve by ourselves. It has been asked what,
in peace, is going to take the place of those songs men sing as they
march to battle which at the same time thrill and unite them. The songs
which the hearts of men will sing as they go forward in life with one
desire—the song of the common will, the social will of man.
Men descend to meet? This is not my experience. The _laissez-aller_
which people allow themselves when alone disappears when they meet. Then
they pull themselves together and give one another of their best. We see
this again and again. Sometimes the ideal of the group stands quite
visibly before us as one which none of us is quite living up to by
himself. We feel it there, an impalpable, substantial thing in our
midst. It raises us to the n^{th} power of action, it fires our minds
and glows in our hearts and fulfils and actuates itself no less, but
rather on this very account, because it has been generated only by our
being together.
-----
Footnote 5:
This is the heart of the latest ethical teaching based on the most
progressive psychology: between two apparently conflicting courses of
action, _a_ and _b_, _a_ is not to be followed and _b_ suppressed, nor
_b_ followed and _a_ suppressed, nor must a compromise between the two
be sought, but the process must always be one of integration. Our
progress is measured by our ability to proceed from integration to
integration.
Footnote 6:
This statement may be misunderstood unless there is borne in mind at
the same time: (1) the necessity for the keenest individual thinking
as the basis of group thinking, and (2) that every man should maintain
his point of view until it has found its place in the group thought,
that is, until he has been neither overruled nor absorbed but
integrated.
Footnote 7:
We must not of course confuse the type of unifying spoken of here (an
integration), which is a psychological process, with the
“reconciliation of opposites,” which is a logical process.
Footnote 8:
I am sometimes told that mine is a counsel of perfection only to be
realized in the millenium, but we cannot take even the first step
until we have chosen our path.
Footnote 9:
The break in the English Cabinet in 1915, which led to the coalition
Cabinet, came when both Kitchener and Churchill tried to substitute
individual for group action.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE IDEA
(CONTINUED)
--------------
WHAT then is the essence of the group process by which are evolved the
collective thought and the collective will? It is an acting and
reacting, a single and identical process which brings out differences
and integrates them into a unity. The complex reciprocal action, the
intricate interweavings of the members of the group, is the social
process.
We see now that the process of the many becoming one is not a
metaphysical or mystical idea; psychological analysis shows us how we
can at the same moment be the self and the other, it shows how we can be
forever apart and forever united. It is by the group process that the
transfiguration of the external into the spiritual takes place, that is,
that what seems a series becomes a whole. The essence of society is
difference, related difference. “Give me your difference” is the cry of
society to-day to every man.[10]
But the older sociology made the social mind the consciousness of
likeness. This likeness was accounted for by two theories chiefly: the
imitation theory and the like-response-to-like-stimuli theory. It is
necessary to consider these briefly, for they have been gnawing at the
roots of all our political life.
To say that the social process is that merely of the spread of
similarities is to ignore the real nature of the collective thought, the
collective will. Individual ideas do not become social ideas when
communicated. The difference between them is one of kind. A collective
thought is one evolved by a collective process. The essential feature of
a common thought is not that it is held in common but that it has been
produced in common.
Likewise if every member of a group has the same thought, that is not a
group idea: when all respond simultaneously to the same stimulus, it
cannot be assumed that this is in obedience to a collective will. When
all the men in a street run round the corner to see a procession, it is
not because they are moved by a collective thought.
Imitation indeed has a place in the collective life, it is one of the
various means of coadaptation between men, but it is only a part and a
part which has been fatally overemphasized.[11] It is one of the fruits
of particularism. “Imitation” has been made the bridge to span the gap
between the individual and society, but we see now that there is no gap,
therefore no bridge is necessary.
The core of the social process is not likeness, but the harmonizing of
difference through interpenetration.[12] But to be more accurate,
similarity and difference can not be opposed in this external way—they
have a vital connection. Similarities and differences make up the
differentiated reactions of the group; that is what constitutes their
importance, not their likeness or unlikeness as such. I react to a
stimulus: that reaction may represent a likeness or an unlikeness.
Society is the unity of these differentiated reactions. In other words
the process is not that merely of accepting or rejecting, it is bound up
in the interknitting. In that continuous coördinating which constitutes
the social process both similarity and difference have a place. Unity is
brought about by the reciprocal adaptings of the reactions of
individuals, and this reciprocal adapting is based on both agreement and
difference.
To push our analysis a little further, we must distinguish between the
given similarity and the achieved similarity. The common at any moment
is always the given: it has come from heredity, biological influences,
suggestion and imitation, and the previous workings of the law of
interpenetration. All the accumulated effect of these is seen in our
habits of thinking, our modes of living. But we cannot rest in the
common. The surge of life sweeps through the given similarity, the
common ground, and breaks it up into a thousand differences. This
tumultuous, irresistible flow of life is our existence: the unity, the
common, is but for an instant, it flows on to new differings which
adjust themselves anew in fuller, more varied, richer synthesis. The
moment when similarity achieves itself as a composite of working,
seething forces, it throws out its myriad new differings. The torrent
flows into a pool, works, ferments, and then rushes forth until all is
again gathered into the new pool of its own unifying.
This is the process of evolution. Social progress is to be sure
coadapting, but coadapting means always that the fresh unity becomes the
pole of a fresh difference leading to again new unities which lead to
broader and broader fields of activity.
Thus no one of course undertakes to deny the obvious fact that in order
to have a society a certain amount of similarity must exist. In one
sense society rests on likeness: the likeness between men is deeper than
their difference. We could not have an enemy unless there was much in
common between us. With my friend all the aims that we share unite us.
In a given society the members have the same interests, the same ends,
in the main, and seek a common fulfilment. Differences are always
grounded in an underlying similarity. But all this kind of “similarity”
isn’t worth mentioning because we _have_ it. The very fact that it is
common to us all condemns it from the point of view of progress.
Progress does not depend upon the similarity which we _find_ but upon
the similarity which we _achieve_.
The new psychology, therefore, gives us individual responsibility as the
central fact of life because it demands that we grow our own
like-mindedness. To-day we are basing all our hopes not on the given
likeness but the created unity. To rest in the given likeness would be
to annihilate social progress. The organization of industry and the
settlement of international relations must come under the domination of
this law. The Allies are fighting to-day with one impulse, one desire,
one aim, but at the peace table many differences will arise between
them. The progress of the whole world at that moment will depend upon
the “similarity” we can create. This “similarity” will consist of all we
now hold in common and also, of the utmost importance for the
continuance of civilization, upon our ability to unify our differences.
If we go to that peace table with the idea that the new world is to be
based on that community of interest and aim which now animates us, the
disillusion will be great, the result an overwhelming failure.
Let us henceforth, therefore, use the word unifying instead of
similarity to represent the basis of association. And let us clearly
understand that unifying is a process involving the continuous activity
of every man. To await “variation-giving” individuals would be to make
life a mere chance. We cannot wait for new ideas to appear among us, we
must ourselves produce them. This makes possible the endless creation of
new social values. The old like-minded theory is too fortuitous, too
passive and too negative to attract us; creating is the divine
adventure.
Let us imagine a group of people whom we know. If we find the life of
that group consisting chiefly of imitation, we see that it involves no
activity of the real self but crushes and smothers it. Imitation
condemns the human race. Even if up to the present moment imitation has
been a large factor in man’s development, from this moment on such a
smothering of all the forces of life must cease.
If we have, however, among this group “like-response,” that is if there
spring up like thoughts and feelings, we find a more dignified and
worthy life—fellowship claims us with all its joys and its enlargement
of our single self. But there is no progress here. We give ourselves up
to the passive enjoyment of that already existing. We have found our
kindred and it comforts us. How much greater enhancement comes from that
life foreshadowed by the new psychology where each one is to go forth
from his group a richer being because each one has taken and put into
its right membership all the vital differences of all the others. The
like-mindedness which the new psychology demands is the like-mindedness
which is brought about by the enlargement of each by the inflowing of
every other one. Then I go forth a new creature. But to what do I go
forth? Always to a new group, a new “society.” There is no end to this
process. A new being springs forth from every fresh contact. My nature
opens and opens to thousands of new influences. I feel countless new
births. Such is the glory of our common every-day life.
Imitation is for the shirkers, like-mindedness for the comfort lovers,
unifying for the creators.
The lesson of the new psychology is then: Never settle down within the
theory you have chosen, the cause you have embraced; know that another
theory, another cause exists, and seek that. The enhancement of life is
not for the comfort-lover. As soon as you succeed—real success means
something arising to overthrow your security.
In all the discussion of “similarity” too much importance has been put
upon analogies from the animal world.[13] We are told, for instance, and
important conclusions are drawn in regard to human society, that the
gregarious instinct of any animal receives satisfaction only through the
presence of animals similar to itself, and that the closer the
similarity the greater the satisfaction. True certainly for animals, but
it is this fact which keeps them mere animals. As far as the irrational
elements of life give way to the rational, interpenetration becomes the
law of association. Man’s biological inheritance is not his only life.
And the progress of man means that this inheritance shall occupy a less
and less important place relatively.
It has been necessary to consider the similarity theory, I have said,
because it has eaten its way into all our thought.[14] Many people
to-day seem to think that progress depends upon a number of people all
speaking loudly together. The other day a woman said to me that she
didn’t like the _Survey_ because it has on one page a letter from a
conservative New York banker and on another some radical proposal for
the reconstruction of society; she said she preferred a paper which took
one idea and hammered away on that. This is poor psychology. It is the
same reasoning which makes people think that certain kindred souls
should come together, and then by a certain intensified thinking and
living together some noble product will emerge for the benefit of the
world. Such association is based on a wrong principle. However various
the reasons given for the non-success of such experiments as Brook Farm,
certain religious associations, and certain artistic and literary groups
who have tried to live together, the truth is that most of them have
died simply of non-nutrition. The bond created had not within it the
variety which the human soul needs for its nourishment.
Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through
variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor
absorbed.[15] Anarchy means unorganized, unrelated difference;
coördinated, unified difference belongs to our ideal of a perfect social
order. We don’t want to avoid our adversary but to “agree with him
quickly”; we must, however, learn the technique of agreeing. As long as
we think of difference as that which divides us, we shall dislike it;
when we think of it as that which unites us, we shall cherish it.
Instead of shutting out what is different, we should welcome it because
it is different and through its difference will make a richer content of
life. The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics
or industry or international life: every difference that is swept up
into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference
which is ignored feeds _on_ society and eventually corrupts it.
Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, I repeat, makes unity. Indeed as we go
from groups of the lower types to groups of the higher types, we go from
those with many resemblances to those with more and more striking
differences. The higher the degree of social organization the more it is
based on a very wide diversity among its members. The people who think
that London is the most civilized spot in the world give as evidence
that it is the only city in which you can eat a bun on a street corner
without being noticed. In London, in other words, difference is expected
of us. In Boston you cannot eat a bun on the street corner, at least not
without unpleasant consequences.
Give _your_ difference, welcome _my_ difference, unify _all_ difference
in the larger whole—such is the law of growth. The unifying of
difference is the eternal process of life—the creative synthesis, the
highest act of creation, the at-onement. The implications of this
conception when we come to define democracy are profound.
And throughout our participation in the group process we must be ever on
our guard that we do not confuse differences and antagonisms, that
diversity does not arouse hostility. Suppose a friend says something
with which I do not agree. It may be that instantly I feel antagonistic,
feel as if we were on opposite sides, and my emotions are at once tinged
with some of the enmity which being on opposite sides usually brings.
Our relations become slightly strained, we change the subject as soon as
possible, etc. But suppose we were really civilized beings, then we
should think: “How interesting this is, this idea has evidently a larger
content than I realized; if my friend and I can unify this material, we
shall separate with a larger idea than either of us had before.” If my
friend and I are always trying to find the things upon which we agree,
what is the use of our meeting? Because the consciousness of agreement
makes us happy? It is a shallow happiness, only felt by people too
superficial or too shut-up or too vain to feel that richer joy which
comes from having taken part in an act of creation—created a new thought
by the uniting of differences. A friendship based on likenesses and
agreements alone is a superficial matter enough. The deep and lasting
friendship is one capable of recognizing and dealing with all the
fundamental differences that must exist between any two individuals, one
capable therefore of such an enrichment of our personalities that
together we shall mount to new heights of understanding and endeavor.
Some one ought to write an essay on the dangers to the soul of
congeniality. Pleasant little glows of feeling can never be fanned into
the fire which becomes the driving force of progress.
In trying to explain the social process I may have seemed to over
emphasize difference as difference. Difference as difference is
non-existent. There is only difference which carries within itself the
power of unifying. It is this latent power which we must forever and
ever call forth. Difference in itself is not a vital force, but what
accompanies it is—the unifying spirit.
Throughout my description of the group process I have taken
committee-meetings, conferences etc. for illustration, but really the
object of every associating with others, of every conversation with
friends, in fact, should be to try to bring out a bigger thought than
any one alone could contribute. How different our dinner parties would
be if we could do this. And I mean without too labored an effort, but
merely by recognizing certain elementary rules of the game. Creation is
always possible when people meet; this is the wonderful interest of
life. But it depends upon us so to manage our meetings that there shall
be some result, not just a frittering away of energy, unguided because
not understood. All our private life is to be public life. This does not
mean that we cannot sit with a friend by our fireside; it does mean
that, private and gay as that hour may be, at the same time that very
intimacy and lightness must in its way be serving the common cause, not
in any fanciful sense, but because there is always the consciousness of
my most private concerns as tributary to the larger life of men. But
words are misleading: I do not mean that we are always to be thinking
about it—it must be such an abiding sense that we never think of it.
Thus the new psychology teaches us that the core of the group process is
creating. The essential value of the new psychology is that it carries
enfolded within it the obligation upon every man to live the New Life.
In no other system of thought has the Command been so clear, so
insistent, so compelling. Every individual is necessary to the whole. On
the other hand, every member participates in that power of a whole which
is so much greater than the addition of its separate forces. The
increased strength which comes to me when I work with others is not a
numerical thing, is not because I feel that ten of us have ten times the
strength of one. It is because all together we have struck out a new
power in the universe. Ten of us may have ten, or a hundred, or a
thousand times the strength of one—or rather you cannot measure it
mathematically at all.
The law of the group is not arbitrary but intrinsic. Nothing is more
practical for our daily lives than an understanding of this. The
group-spirit is the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night—it is
our infallible guide—it is the Spirit of democracy. It has all our love
and all our devotion, but this comes only when we have to some extent
identified ourselves with It, or rather perhaps identified It with all
our common, every-day lives. We can never dominate another or be
dominated by another; the group-spirit is always our master.
-----
Footnote 10:
Free speech is not an “individual” right; society needs every man’s
difference.
Footnote 11:
It has been overemphasized in two ways: first, many of the writers on
imitation ignore the fact that the other law of association, that of
interpenetrating, is also in operation in our social life, as well as
the fact that it has always been the fundamental law of existence;
secondly, they speak as if it were _necessary_ for human beings to be
under the law of imitation, not that it is merely a stage in our
development.
Footnote 12:
This is the alpha and omega of philosophical teaching: Heraclitus
said, “Nature desires eagerly opposites and out of them it completes
its harmony, not out of similars.” And James, twenty-four hundred
years later, has given his testimony that the process of life is to
“compenetrate.”
Footnote 13:
Also the group-units of early societies are studied to the exclusion
of group-units within modern complex society.
Footnote 14:
Even some of our most advanced thinking, which repudiates the
like-minded theory and takes pains to prove that imitation is not an
instinct, nevertheless falls into some of the errors implicit in the
imitation theory.
Footnote 15:
When we come in Part III to consider the group process in relation to
certain political methods now being proposed, we shall find that part
of the present disagreement of opinion is verbal. I therefore give
here a list of words which can be used to describe the genuine social
process and a list which gives exactly the wrong idea of it. Good
words: integrate, interpenetrate, interpermeate, compenetrate,
compound, harmonize, correlate, coördinate, interweave, reciprocally
relate or adapt or adjust, etc. Bad words: fuse, melt, amalgamate,
assimilate, weld, dissolve, absorb, reconcile (if used in Hegelian
sense), etc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE FEELING
--------------
THE unification of thought, however, is only a part of the social
process. We must consider, besides, the unification of feeling,
affection, emotion, desire, aspiration—all that we are. The relation of
the feelings to the development of the group has yet to be sufficiently
studied. The analysis of the group process is beginning to show us the
origin and nature of the true sympathy. The group process is a rational
process. We can no longer therefore think of sympathy as “contagion of
feeling” based on man’s “inherited gregarious instinct.” But equally
sympathy cannot belong to the next stage in our development—the
particularistic. Particularistic psychology, which gave us ego and
alter, gave us sympathy going across from one isolated being to another.
Now we begin with the group. We see in the self-unifying of the group
process, and all the myriad unfoldings involved, the central and
all-germinating activity of life. The group creates. In the group, we
have seen, is formed the collective idea, “similarity” is there
achieved, sympathy too is born within the group—it springs forever from
interrelation. The emotions I feel when apart belong to the phantom ego;
only from the group comes the genuine feeling _with_—the true sympathy,
the vital sympathy, the just and balanced sympathy.
From this new understanding of sympathy as essentially involved in the
group process, as part of the generating activity of the group, we learn
two lessons: that sympathy cannot antedate the group process, and that
it must not be confused with altruism. It had been thought until
recently by many writers that sympathy came before the social process.
Evidences were collected among animals of the “desire to help” other
members of the same species, and the conclusion drawn that sympathy
exists and that the result is “mutual aid.” But sympathy cannot antedate
the activity. We do not however now say that there is an “instinct” to
help and then that sympathy is the result of the helping; the feeling
and the activity are involved one in the other.
It is asked, Was Bentham right in making the desire for individual
happiness the driving force of society, or was Comte right in saying
that love for our fellow creatures is as “natural” a feeling as
self-interest? Many such questions, which have long perplexed us, will
be answered by a progressive social psychology. The reason we have found
it difficult to answer such questions is because we have thought of
egoistic or altruistic feelings as preëxisting; we have studied action
to see what precedent characteristics it indicated. But when we begin to
see that men possess no characteristics apart from the unifying process,
then it is the process we shall study.
Secondly, we can no longer confuse sympathy and altruism. Sympathy, born
of our union, rises above both egoism and altruism. We see now that a
classification of ego feelings and alter feelings is not enough, that
there are always whole feelings to be accounted for, that true sympathy
is sense of community, consciousness of oneness. I am touched by a story
of want and suffering, I send a check, denying myself what I have
eagerly desired in order to do so,—is that sympathy? It is the old
particularistic sympathy, but it is not the sympathy which is a group
product, which has come from the actual intermingling of myself with
those who are in want and suffering. It may be that I do more harm than
good with my check because I do not really know what the situation
demands. The sympathy which springs up within the group is a productive
sympathy.
But, objects a friend, if I meet a tramp who has been drinking whiskey,
I can feel only pity for him, I can have no sense of oneness. Yes, the
tramp and I are bound together by a thousand invisible bonds. He is a
part of that society for which I am responsible. I have not been doing
my entire duty; because of that a society has been built up which makes
it possible for that tramp to exist and for whiskey drinking to be his
chief pleasure.
A good illustration of both the errors mentioned—making sympathy
antedate the group process and the confusion of sympathy and altruism—we
see frequently in the discussion of coöperation in the business world.
The question often asked, “Does modern coöperation depend upon
self-interest or upon sympathy?” is entirely misleading as regards the
real nature of sympathy. Suppose six manufacturers meet to discuss some
form of union. There was a time when we should have been told that if
each man were guided entirely by what would benefit his own plant,
trusting the other five to be equally interested each in his own,
thereby the interest of all would be evolved. Then there came a time
when many thinkers denied this and said, “Coöperation cannot exist
without some feeling of altruism; every one of those manufacturers must
go to the meeting with the feeling that the interests of the other five
should be considered as well as his own; he must be guided as much by
sympathy as by self-interest.” But our new psychology teaches us that
what these men need most is not altruistic feelings, but a consciousness
of themselves as a new unit and a realization of the needs of that unit.
The process of forming this new unit generates such realization which is
sympathy. This true sympathy, therefore, is not a vague sentiment they
bring with them; it springs from their meeting to be in its turn a vital
factor in their meeting. The needs of that new unit may be so different
from that of any one of the manufacturers alone that altruistic feelings
might be wasted! The new ethics will never preach alter feelings but
whole feelings. Sympathy is a whole feeling; it is a recognition of
oneness. Perhaps the new psychology has no more interesting task than to
define for us that true sympathy which is now being born in a society
which is shedding its particularistic garments and clothing itself in
the mantle of wholeness.
To sum up: sympathy is not pity, it is not benevolence, it is one of the
goals of the future, it cannot be actualized until we can think and feel
together. At present we confuse it with altruism and all the
particularist progeny, but sympathy is always a group product;
benevolence, philanthropy, tenderness, fervor, ardor, pity, may be
possible to me alone, but sympathy is not possible alone. The
particularist stage has been necessary to our development, but we stand
now on the threshold of another age: we see there humanity consciously
generating its own activity, its own purpose and all that it needs for
the accomplishment of that purpose. We must now fit ourselves to cross
that threshold. Our faces have turned to a new world; to train our
footsteps to follow the way is now our task.
This means that we must live the group life. This is the solution of our
problems, national and international. Employers and employed cannot be
exhorted to feel sympathy one for the other; true sympathy will come
only by creating a community or group of employers and employed. Through
the group you find the details, the filling-out of Kant’s universal law.
Kant’s categorical imperative is general, is empty; it is only a blank
check. But through the life of the group we learn the content of
universal law.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE WILL
--------------
FROM the group process arise social understanding and true sympathy. At
the same moment appears the social will which is the creative will. Many
writers are laying stress on the _possibilities_ of the collective will;
what I wish to emphasize is the necessity of _creating_ the collective
will. Many people talk as if the collective will were lying round loose
to be caught up whenever we like, but the fact is we must go to our
group and see that it is brought into existence.
Moreover, we go to our group to learn the process. We sometimes hear the
advantages of collective planning spoken of as if an act of Congress or
Parliament could substitute collective for individual planning! But it
is only by doing the deed that we shall learn this doctrine. We learn
how to create the common will in our groups, and we learn here not only
the process but its value. When I can see that agreement with my
neighbor for larger ends than either of us is pursuing alone is of the
same essence as capital and labor learning to think together, as Germany
and the Allies evolving a common will, then I am ready to become a part
of the world process. To learn how to evolve the social will day by day
with my neighbors and fellow-workers is what the world is demanding of
me to-day. This is getting into the inner workshop of democracy.
Until we learn this lesson war cannot stop, no constructive work can be
done. The very essence and substance of democracy is the creating of the
collective will. Without this activity the forms of democracy are
useless, and the aims of democracy are always unfulfilled. Without this
activity both political and industrial democracy must be a chaotic,
stagnating, self-stultifying assemblage. Many of the solutions offered
to-day for our social problems are vitiated by their mechanical nature,
by assuming that if society were given a new form, the socialistic for
instance, what we desire would follow. But this assumption is not true.
The deeper truth, perhaps the deepest, is that _the will to will the
common will_ is the core, the germinating centre of that large, still
larger, ever larger life which we are coming to call the true democracy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
THE UNITY OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS
--------------
WE have seen that the common idea and the common will are born together
in the social process. One does not lead to the other, each is involved
in the other. But the collective thought and the collective will are not
yet complete, they are hardly an embryo. They carry indeed within
themselves their own momentum, but they complete themselves only through
activity in the world of affairs, of work, of government. This
conception does away with the whole discussion, into which much ardor
has gone, of the priority of thought or action in the social life. There
is no order. The union of thought and will and activity by which the
clearer will is generated, the social process, is a perfect unity.
We see this in our daily life where we do not finish our thought,
construct our will, and then begin our actualizing. Not only the
actualizing goes on at the same time, but its reactions help us to shape
our thought, to energize our will. We have to digest our social
experience, but we have to have social experience before we can digest
it. We must learn and build and learn again through the building, or we
must build and learn and build again through the learning.
We sit around the council table not blank pages but made up of all our
past experiences. Then we evolve a so-called common will, then we take
it into the concrete world to see if it will work. In so far as it does
work, it proves itself; in so far as it does not, it generates the
necessary idea to make it “common.” Then again we test and so on and so
on. In our work always new and necessary modifications arise which again
in actualizing _themselves_, again modify themselves. This is the
process of the generation of the common will. First it appears as an
ideal, secondly it works itself out in the material sphere of life,
thereby generating itself in a new form and so on forever and ever. All
is a-making. This is the process of creating the absolute or Good Will.
To elevate General Welfare into our divinity makes a golden calf of it,
erects it as something external to ourselves with an absolute nature of
its own, whereas it is the ever new adjusting of ever new relatings to
one another. The common will never finds perfection but is always
seeking it. Progress is an infinite advance towards the infinitely
receding goal of infinite perfection.
How important this principle is will appear later when we apply these
ideas to politics. Democratic ideals will never advance unless we are
given the opportunity of constantly embodying them in action, which
action will react on our ideals. Thought and will go out into the
concrete world in order to generate their own complete form. This gives
us both the principle and the method of democracy. A democratic
community is one in which the common will is being gradually created by
the civic activity of its citizens. The test of democracy is the fulness
with which this is being done. The practical thought for our
political life is that the collective will exists only through its
self-actualizing and self-creating in new and larger and more perfectly
adjusted forms.
Thus the unity of the social process becomes clear to us. We now gain a
conception of “right,” of purpose, of loyalty to that purpose, not as
particularistic ideas but as arising within the process.
RIGHT
We are evolving now a system of ethics which has three conceptions in
regard to right, conscience and duty which are different from much of
our former ethical teaching: (1) we do not follow right, we create
right, (2) there is no private conscience, (3) my duty is never to
“others” but to the whole.
First, we do not follow right merely, we create right. It is often
thought vaguely that our ideals are all there, shining and splendid, and
we have only to apply them. But the truth is that we have to create our
ideals. No ideal is worth while which does not grow from our actual
life. Some people seem to keep their ideals all carefully packed away
from dust and air, but arranged alphabetically so that they can get at
them quickly in need. But we can never take out a past ideal for a
present need. The ideal which is to be used for our life must come out
from that very life itself. The only way our past ideals can help us is
in moulding the life which produces the present ideal; we have no
further use for them. But we do not discard them: we have built them
into the present—we have used them up as the cocoon is used up in making
the silk. It has been sometimes taught that given the same situation,
the individual must repeat the same behavior. But the situation is never
the same, the individual is never the same; such a conception has
nothing to do with life. We cannot do our duty in the old sense, that is
of following a crystallized ideal, because our duty is new at every
moment.
Moreover, the knowledge of what is due the whole is revealed within the
life of the whole. This is above everything else what a progressive
ethics must teach—not faithfulness to duty merely, but faithfulness to
the life which evolves duty. Indeed “following our duty” often means
mental and moral atrophy. Man cannot live by tabus; that means
stagnation. But as one tabu after another is disappearing, the call is
upon us deliberately to build our own moral life. Our ethical sense will
surely starve on predigested food. It is we by our acts who
progressively construct the moral universe; to follow some preconceived
body of law—that is not for responsible moral beings. In so far as we
obey old standards without interpenetrating them with the actual world,
we are abdicating our creative power.
Further, the group in its distributive aspect is bringing such new
elements into the here and now that life is wholly changed, and the
ethical commands therein involved are different, and therefore the task
of the group is to discover the new formulation which these new elements
demand. The moral law thus gathers to itself all the richness of
science, of art, of all the fulness of our daily living.
The group consciousness of right thus developed becomes our daily
imperative. No mandate from without has power over us. There are many
forms of the fallacy that the governing and the governed can be two
different bodies, and this one of conforming to standards which we have
not created must be recognized as such before we can have any sound
foundation for society. When the ought is not a mandate from without, it
is no longer a prohibition but a self-expression. As the social
consciousness develops, ought will be swallowed up in will. We are some
time truly to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of
continuous willing, not of restraints and prohibition. Morality is not
the refraining from doing certain things—it is a constructive force.
So in the education of our young people it is not enough to teach them
their “duty,” somehow there must be created for them to live in a world
of high purpose to which their own psychic energies will instinctively
respond. The craving for self-expression, self-realization, must see
quite naturally for its field of operation the community. This is the
secret of education: when the waters of our life are part of the sea of
human endeavor, duty will be a difficult word for our young people to
understand; it is a glorious consciousness we want, not a painstaking
conscience. It is ourselves soaked with the highest, not a Puritanical
straining to fulfil an external obligation, which will redeem the world.
Education therefore is not chiefly to teach children a mass of things
which have been true up to the present moment; moreover it is not to
teach them to learn about life as fast as it is made, not even to
interpret life, but above and beyond everything, to create life for
themselves. Hence education should be largely the training in making
choices. The aim of all proper training is not rigid adherence to a
crystallized right (since in ethics, economics or politics there is no
crystallized right), but the power to make a new choice at every moment.
And the greatest lesson of all is to know that every moment _is_ new.
“Man lives in the dawn forever. Life is beginning and nothing else but
beginning. It begins ever-lastingly.”
We must breed through the group process the kind of man who is not
fossilized by habit, but whose eye is intent on the present situation,
the present moment, present values, and can decide on the forms which
will best express them in the actual world.
To sum up this point: morality is never static; it advances as life
advances. You cannot hang your ideals up on pegs and take down no. 2 for
certain emergencies and no. 4 for others. _The true test of our morality
is not the rigidity with which we adhere to standard, but the loyalty we
show to the life which constructs standards._ The test of our morality
is whether we are living not to follow but to create ideals, whether we
are pouring our life into our visions only to receive it back with its
miraculous enhancement for new uses.
Secondly, I have said that the conception of right as a group product,
as coming from the ceaseless interplay of men, shows us that there is no
such thing as an individual conscience in the sense in which the term is
often used. As we are to obey no ideals dictated by others or the past,
it is equally important that we obey no ideal set up by our unrelated
self. To obey the moral law is to obey the social ideal. The social
ideal is born, grows and shapes itself through the associated life. The
individual cannot alone decide what is right or wrong. We can have no
true moral judgment except as we live our life with others. It is said,
“Every man is subject only to his own conscience.” But what is my
conscience? Has it not been produced by my time, my country, my
associates? To make a conscience by myself would be as difficult as to
try to make a language by myself.[16]
It is sometimes said, on the other hand, “The individual must yield his
right to judge for himself; let the majority judge.” But the individual
is not for a moment to yield his right to judge for himself; he can
judge better for himself if he joins with others in evolving a
synthesized judgment. Our individual conscience is not absorbed into a
national conscience; our individual conscience must be incorporated in a
national conscience as one of its constituent members.[17] Those of us
who are not wholly in sympathy with the conscientious objectors do not
think that they should yield to the majority. When we say that their
point of view is too particularistic, we do not mean that they should
give up the dictates of their own conscience to a collective conscience.
But we mean that they should ask themselves whether their conscience is
a freak, a purely personal, conscience, or a properly evolved
conscience. That is, have they tried, not to saturate themselves with
our collective ideals, but to take their part in evolving collective
standards by freely giving and taking. Have they lived the life which
makes possible the fullest interplay of their own ideas with all the
forces of their time? Before they range themselves against society they
must ask themselves if they have taken the opportunities offered them to
help form the ideas which they are opposing. I do not say that there is
no social value in heresy, I only ask the conscientious objectors to ask
themselves whether they are claiming the “individual rights” we have
long outgrown.
What we want is a related conscience, a conscience that is intimately
related to the consciences of other men and to all the spiritual
environment of our time, to all the progressive forces of our age. The
particularistic tendency has had its day in law, in politics, in
international relations and as a guiding tendency in our daily lives.
We have seen that a clearer conception to-day of the unity of the social
process shows us: first, that we are not merely to follow but to create
“right,” secondly, that there is no private conscience, and third, that
my duty is never to “others” but to the whole. We no longer make a
distinction between selfishness and altruism.[18] An act done for our
own benefit may be social and one done for another may not be. Some
twenty or thirty years ago our “individual” system of ethics began to be
widely condemned and we have been hearing a great deal of “social”
ethics. But this so-called “social” ethics has meant only my duty to
“others.” There is now emerging an idea of ethics entirely different
from the altruistic school, based not on the duty of isolated beings to
one another, but on integrated individuals acting as a whole, evolving
whole-ideas, working for whole-ideals. The new consciousness is of a
whole.
PURPOSE
As right appears with that interrelating, germinating activity which we
call the social process, so purpose also is generated by the same
process. The goal of evolution most obviously must evolve itself. How
self-contradictory is the idea that evolution is the world-process and
yet that some other power has made the goal for it to reach. The truth
is that the same process which creates all else creates the very
purpose. That purpose is involved in the process, not prior to process,
has far wider reaching consequences than can be taken up here. The whole
philosophy of cause and effect must be rewritten. If the infinite task
is the evolution of the whole, if our finite tasks are wholes of varying
degrees of scope and perfection, the notion of causality must have an
entirely different place in our system of thought.
The question is often asked, “What is the proposed unity of European
nations after the war to be for?” This question implies that the
alliance will be a mere method of accomplishing certain purposes,
whereas it is the union which is the important thing. With the union the
purpose comes into being, and with its every step forward, the purpose
changes. No one would say that the aims of the Allies to-day are the
same as in 1914, or even as in April, 1917. As the alliance develops,
the purpose steadily shapes itself.
Every teleological view will be given up when we see that purpose is not
“preëxistent,” but involved in the unifying act which is the life
process. It is man’s part to create purpose and to actualize it. From
the point of view of man we are just in the dawn of self-consciousness,
and his purpose is dimly revealing itself to him. The life-force
wells up in us for expression—to direct it is the privilege of
self-consciousness.[19]
LOYALTY
As this true purpose evolves itself, loyalty springs into being. Loyalty
is awakened through and by the very process which creates the group. The
same process which organizes the group energizes it. We cannot “will” to
be loyal. Our task is not to “find” causes to awaken our loyalty, but to
live our life fully and loyalty issues. A cause has no part in us or we
in it if we have fortuitously to “find” it.
Thus we see that we do not love the Beloved Community because it is
lovable—the same process which makes it lovable produces our love for
it. Moreover it is not enough to love the Beloved Community, we must
find out how to create it. It is not there for us to accept or reject—it
exists only through us. Loyalty to a collective will which we have not
created and of which we are, therefore, not an integral part, is
slavery. We belong to our community just in so far as we are helping to
make that community; then loyalty follows, then love follows. Loyalty
means the consciousness of oneness, the full realization that we succeed
or fail, live or die, are saved or damned together. The only unity or
community is one we have made of ourselves, by ourselves, for
ourselves.[20]
Thus the social process is one all-inclusive, Self-sufficing process.
The vital impulse which is produced by all the reciprocally interacting
influences of the group is also itself the generating and the vivifying
power. Social unity is not a sterile conception but an active force. It
is a double process—the activity which goes to make the unity and the
activity which flows from the unity. There is no better example of
centripetal and centrifugal force. All the forces which are stored up in
the unity flow forth eternally in activity. We create the common will
and feel the spiritual energy which flows into us from the purpose we
have made, for the purpose which we seek.
-----
Footnote 16:
This does not, however, put us with those biologists who make
conscience a “gregarious instinct” and—would seem to be willing to
keep it there. This is the insidious herd fallacy which crops up
constantly in every kind of place. We may to-day partake largely of
the nature of the herd, our conscience may be to some extent a herd
conscience, but such is not the end of man for it is not the true
nature of man—man does not find his expression in the herd.
Footnote 17:
To a misunderstanding of this point are due some of the fallacies of
the political pluralists (see ch. XXXII).
Footnote 18:
See p. 45.
Footnote 19:
This view of purpose is not necessarily antagonistic to the “interest”
school of sociology, but we may perhaps look forward to a new and
deeper analysis of self-interest. And the view here put forward is not
incompatible with the “objective” theory of association (see ch. XXIX)
nor with the teleological school of jurisprudence (see ch. XV), it
merely emphasizes another point of view—a point of view which tends to
synthesize the “subjective” and “objective” theories of law. But those
jurists who say that a group is governed by its purpose and leave the
matter there are making a thing-in-itself of the purpose; we are
governed by the purpose, yes, but we are all the time evolving the
purpose. Modern jurists wish a dynamic theory of law—only such a
conception of purpose as is revealed by group psychology will give
value to a teleological school of jurisprudence.
Footnote 20:
In a relation even of two I am not faithful to the other person but to
my conception of the relation in the whole. Loyalty is always to the
group idea not to the group-personnel. This must change our idea of
patriotism.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
THE INDIVIDUAL
--------------
AS the collective idea and the collective will, right and purpose, are
born within the all-sufficing social process, so here too the individual
finds the wellspring of his life. The visible form in which this
interplay of relations appears is society and the individual. A man is a
point in the social process rather than a unit in that process, a point
where forming forces meet straightway to disentangle themselves and
stream forth again. In the language of the day man is at the same time a
social factor and a social product.
People often talk of the social mind as if it were an abstract
conception, as if only the individual were real, concrete. The two are
equally real. Or rather the only reality is the relating of one to the
other which creates both. Our sundering is as artificial and late an act
as the sundering of consciousness into subject and object. The only
reality is the interpenetrating of the two into experience. Late
intellectualism abstracts for practical purposes the ego from the world,
the individual from society.
But there is no way of separating individuals, they coalesce and
coalesce, they are “confluent,” to use the expression of James, who
tells us that the chasm between men is an individualistic fiction, that
we are surrounded by fringes, that these overlap and that by means of
these I join with others. It is as in Norway when the colors of the
sunset and the dawn are mingling, when to-day and to-morrow are at the
point of breaking, or of uniting, and one does not know to which one
belongs, to the yesterday which is fading or the coming hour—perhaps
this is something like the relation of one to another: to the onlookers
from another planet our colors might seem to mingle.
The truth about the individual and society has been already implied, but
it may be justifiable to develop the idea further because of the
paramount importance for all our future development of a clear
understanding of the individual. Our nineteenth-century legal theory
(individual rights, contract, “a man can do what he likes with his own,”
etc.) was based on the conception of the separate individual.[21] We can
have no sound legal doctrine, and hence no social or political progress,
until the fallacy of this idea is fully recognized. The new state must
rest on a true conception of the individual. Let us ask ourselves
therefore for a further definition of individuality than that already
implied.
The individual is the unification of a multiplied variety of reactions.
But the individual does not react to society. The interplay constitutes
both society on the one hand and individuality on the other:
individuality and society are evolving together from this constant and
complex action and reaction. Or, more accurately, the relation of the
individual to society is not action and reaction, but infinite
interactions by which both individual and society are forever a-making:
we cannot say if we would be exact that the individual acts upon and is
acted upon, because that way of expressing it implies that he is a
definite, given, finished entity, and would keep him apart merely as an
agent of the acting and being acted on. We cannot put the individual on
one side and society on the other, we must understand the complete
interrelation of the two. Each has no value, no existence without the
other. The individual is created by the social process and is daily
nourished by that process. There is no such thing as a self-made man.
What we think we possess as individuals is what is stored up from
society, is the subsoil of social life. We soak up and soak up and soak
up our environment all the time.
Of what then does the individuality of a man consist? Of his relation to
the whole, not (1) of his apartness nor (2) of his difference alone.
Of course the mistake which is often made in thinking of the individual
is that of confusing the physical with the real individual. The physical
individual is seen to be apart and therefore apartness is assumed of the
psychic or real individual. We think of Edward Fitzgerald as a recluse,
that he got his development by being alone, that he was largely outside
the influences of society. But imagine Fitzgerald’s life with his books.
It undoubtedly did not suit his nature to mix freely with other people
in bodily presence, but what a constant and vivid living with others his
life really was. How closely he was in vital contact with the thoughts
of men.
We must bear in mind that the social spirit itself may impose apartness
on a man; the method of uniting with others is not always that of
visible, tangible groups. The pioneer spirit is the creative spirit even
if it seems to take men apart to fulfil its dictates. On the other hand
the solitary man is not necessarily the man who lives alone; he may be
one who lives constantly with others in all the complexity of modern
city life, but who is so shut-up or so set upon his own ideas that he
makes no real union with others.
Individuality is the capacity for union. The measure of individuality is
the depth and breadth of true relation. I am an individual not as far as
I am apart from, but as far as I am a part of other men. Evil is
non-relation. The source of our strength is the central supply. You may
as well break a branch off the tree and expect it to live. Non-relation
is death.
I have said that individuality consists neither of the separateness of
one man from the other, nor of the differences of one man from the
other. The second statement is challenged more often than the first.
This comes from some confusion of ideas. My individuality is difference
springing into view as relating itself with other differences. The act
of relating is the creating act. It is vicious intellectualism to say,
“Before you relate you must have things to relate, therefore the
differences are more elemental: there are (1) differences which (2)
unite, therefore uniting is secondary.” The only fact, the only truth,
is the creative activity which appears as the great complex we call
humanity. The activity of creating is all. It is only by _being_ this
activity that we grasp it. To view it from the outside, to dissect it
into its different elements, to lay these elements on the dissecting
table as so many different individuals, is to kill the life and feed the
fancy with dead images, empty, sterile concepts. But let us set about
relating ourselves to our community in fruitful fashion, and we shall
see that our individuality is bodying itself forth in stronger and
stronger fashion, our difference shaping itself in exact conformity with
the need of the work we do.
For we must remember when we say that the essence of individuality is
the relating of self to other difference, that difference is not
something static, something given, that it also is involved in the world
of becoming. This is what experience teaches me—that society needs my
difference, not as an absolute, but just so much difference as will
relate me. Differences develop within the social process and are united
through the social process. Difference which is not capable of relation
is eccentricity. Eccentricity, caprice, put me outside, bring anarchy;
true spontaneity, originality, belong not to chaos but to system. But
spontaneity must be coördinated; irrelevancy produces nothing, is
insanity. It is not my uniqueness which makes me of value to the whole
but my power of relating. The nut and the screw form a perfect
combination not because they are different, but because they exactly fit
into each other and together can perform a function which neither could
perform alone, or which neither could perform half of alone or any part
of alone. It is not that the significance of the nut and screw is
increased by their coming together, they have no significance at all
unless they do come together. The fact that they have to be different to
enter into any fruitful relation with each other is a matter of
derivative importance—derived from the work they do.
Another illustration is that of the specialist. It is not a knowledge of
his specialty which makes an expert of service to society, but his
insight into the relation of his specialty to the whole. Thus it implies
not less but more relation, because the entire value of that
specialization is that it is part of something. Instead of isolating him
and giving him a narrower life, it gives him at once a broader life
because it binds him more irrevocably to the whole. But the whole works
both ways: the specialist not only contributes to the whole, but all his
relations to the whole are embodied in his own particular work.
Thus difference is only a part of the life process. To exaggerate this
part led to the excessive and arrogant individualism of the nineteenth
century. It behooves us children of the twentieth century to search
diligently after the law of unity that we may effectively marshal and
range under its dominating sway all the varying diversities of life.