idea is becoming accepted that running water is an asset of society
which is not capable of private appropriation or ownership except under
regulations that protect the general interest. This tendency is changing
the whole water law of the western states.
Insistence on interest of society in dependent members of household.
With respect to children it is not the individual interest of the
parents, but the interest of society which is regarded.
Thus modern law is being based more and more upon a recognition of the
community principle.
When we sometimes hear a lawyer talk of such measures as old age
pensions as a matter of “social expediency,” we know that he has not yet
caught the community idea in law. Modern law considers individuals not
as isolated beings, but in their relation to the life of the whole
community. Thus in shortening the hours of work the courts can no longer
say this is an “unwarrantable interference” with individual liberty;
they have to consider the health of the individual in its relation to
his family and his work, also the use he will make of his leisure, the
need he has for time to perform his duties as citizen, etc. etc. Mr.
Pound points out with great clearness that relation is taking the place
of contract in modern law. Workmen’s compensation arises from the theory
of reciprocal rights and duties and liabilities which flow from a
relation. This he tells us was the common law conception until deflected
by contract; now we are going back to it and we do not ask the strict
terms of the contract, but what the relation demands.
Perhaps social psychology can give two warnings to this new tendency of
law. First this relation must not be a personal relation. I have spoken
several times of our modern legal system as based on relation, but this
must not be confused with the relation of the Middle Ages. Then the
fundamental truth of relation, that life is a web of relationships, was
felt intuitively, but it was worked out on its personal side. The feudal
age lived in the idea of relation, but the heart of the feudal system
was personal service. It was like loyalty to the party chief: right or
wrong, the vassal followed his lord to the battlefield and died with him
there. Because it was worked out on its personal side it had many
imperfections, and the inevitable reaction swung far away. Now the
pendulum is returning to relation as the truth of life, but it is to be
impersonal. Employers and employed must study the ideal relation and try
to actualize that. We seek always the law of true community.
Secondly, the relation itself must always be in relation. But these
warnings are not necessary for our progressive judges. It is interesting
to read the decisions of our common-law judges with this in view: to see
how often the search is for the law of the actual conditions and what
obligations those actual conditions create, not for a personal relation
with some abstract conception of a static relation. It is of a _relation
in relation_ that judges must, and often to-day do, consider: not
landlord and tenant as landlord and tenant, not master and servant as
master and servant, but of that relation in relation to other relations,
or, we might say, to society. This growing conception of a dynamic
relation in itself means a new theory of law.[59]
Thus our law to-day is giving up its deductions from juristic
conceptions, from the “body of rules” upon which trial procedure has so
largely rested, and is beginning to study the condition given with the
aim of reaching the law of that condition. Mr. Pound says distinctly
that law is to be no longer based on first principles, but on “the
conditions it is to govern.” And we are told that “Mr. Justice
Holmes has been unswerving in his resistance to any doctrinaire
interpretation,” that his decisions follow the actual conditions of life
even often against his own bias of thought.[60] The great value of Mr.
Justice Brandeis’ brief in the Oregon case concerning the
constitutionality of limiting the hours of women in industry, was his
insistence upon social facts. And Mr. Felix Frankfurter made an address
before the American Bar Association in August, 1915, the burden of which
was that “law must follow life.” His plea for a “creative” system of law
in the place of the crystallized system of the past which we are trying
with hopeless failure to apply to present conditions points the way with
force and convincingness to a New Society based on the evolving not the
static principle of life.
As our theory of the state no longer includes the idea of contractual
obligation, we begin to see the interdependence of state and law, that
neither is prior to the other. The same process which evolves the state
evolves the law. Law flows from our life, therefore it cannot be above
it. The source of the binding power of law is not in the consent of the
community, but in the fact that it has been produced by the community.
This gives us a new conception of law. Some writers talk of social
justice as if a definite idea of it existed, and that all we have to do
to regenerate society is to direct our efforts towards the realization
of this ideal. But the ideal of social justice is itself a collective
and a progressive development, that is, it is produced through our
associated life and it is produced anew from day to day. We do not want
a “perfect” law to regulate the hours of women in industry; we want that
kind of life which will make us, all of us, grow the best ideas about
the hours of women in industry, about women in industry, about women,
about industry.
We cannot assume that we possess a body of achieved ideas stamped in
some mysterious way with the authority of reason and justice, but even
were it true, the reason and justice of the past must give way to the
reason and justice of the present. You cannot bottle up wisdom—it won’t
keep—but through our associated life it may be distilled afresh at every
instant. We are coming now to see indeed that law is a social imperative
in the strict psychological sense, that is, that it gets its authority
through the power of group life. Wundt says, The development of law is a
process of the psychology of peoples, therefore law will forever be a
process of becoming.[61] Our obedience to law then must not be obedience
to past law, but obedience to that law which we with all the experience
of the past at our command, with all the vision of the future which the
past has taught us, with all the intelligence which vivid living in the
present has developed in us, are able to make for our generation, for
our country, for the world. We are told that one of the most salient
points in modern juristic thinking is its faith in the efficacy of
effort, its belief that law has been and may be made consciously.
When we look upon law as a thing we think of it as a finished thing; the
moment we look upon it as a process we think of it always in evolution.
Our law must take account of our social and economic conditions, and it
must do it again to-morrow and again day after to-morrow. We do not want
a new legal system with every sunrise, but we do want a method by which
our law shall be capable of assimilating from day to day what it needs
to act upon that life from which it has drawn its existence and to which
it must minister. The vital fluid of the community, its life’s blood,
must pass so continuously from the common will to the law and from the
law to the common will that a perfect circulation will be established.
We do not “discover” legal principles which it then behooves us to burn
candles before forever, but legal principles are the outcome of our
daily life. Our law therefore cannot be based on “fixed” principles: our
law must be intrinsic in the social process.
There has been a distinction made between legal principles and the
application of these principles: legal principles partook of the nature
of the absolute, and to our high-priests, the lawyers, fell the
privilege of applying them. But this is an artificial distinction. If
our methods could be such that the energy of lawyers, which now often
goes in making the concrete instance and the legal principle in some way
(by fiction, or twisting, or “interpreting”) fit each other, could help
evolve day by day a crescent law which is the outcome of our life as it
is to be applied to our life, an enormous amount of energy would be
saved for the development of our American people. It is static law and
our reverence for legal abstractions which has produced “privilege.” It
is dynamic law, as much as anything else, which will bring us the new
social order.
To sum up: Law should not be a “body” of knowledge; it should be
revitalized anew at every moment. Our judges cannot administer law by
knowing law alone. They have to be so closely in touch with a living,
growing society, so at one with the conceptions that are being evolved
by that society that their interpretations will be the method by which
our so-called “body of law” shall indeed be alive and grow in
correspondence with the growth of society. This is what gives to our
American supreme courts their large powers, and makes us choose for
judges not only men who understand law and who can be trusted for
accurate interpretation, but men who have a large comprehension of our
country’s needs, wide conceptions of social justice, and who have
creative minds—who can make legal interpretation contribute to the
structure of our government.[62] The modern lawyer must see, amidst all
the complexity of the twentieth-century world, where we are tending,
what our true purpose is, and the part law can take in making manifest
that purpose. The modern lawyer must create a new system of service. A
living law we demand to-day—this is always the law of the given
condition, never a “rule.”
-----
Footnote 48:
Col. Law Rev. 8, 610.
Footnote 49:
Pound, Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 20. The influence of
sociology on law has here been very marked. For further discussion of
a teleological jurisprudence, see ch. XXIX.
Footnote 50:
Duguit, L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive, 398–409, from
Jellinek, System der subjektiren öffentlichen Rechte, 193.
Footnote 51:
The whole legal history of associations and the development of
association law throws much light on the growth of the community idea.
Footnote 52:
Also, I recognize, because his “_droit objectif_” based on social
solidarity tends to sweep away contract. It is interesting to notice
that contract is being attacked from more than one point of view. The
bearing of all this on politics will be seen later, especially in ch.
XXIX, “Political Pluralism and Sovereignty.”
Footnote 53:
Quoted by Roscoe Pound in Col. Law Rev. 8, 616.
Footnote 54:
Statutes limiting the hours of labor were held unconstitutional,
railway corporations were held not to be required to furnish
discharged employees with a cause for dismissal, etc.
Footnote 55:
Harlan, J., in Mugler _v._ Kansas, 123 U. S. 623. Taken from Roscoe
Pound, Liberty of Contract, Yale Law Journal, 18, 468.
Footnote 56:
The End of Law as Developed in Legal Rules and Doctrine, Harv. Law
Rev. 27, 195–234.
Footnote 57:
“Statutes ... have taken many features of the subject out of the
domain of agreement and the tendency of judicial decision has been in
effect to attach rights and liabilities to the relation of insurer and
insured and thus to remove insurance from the category of contract.”
Footnote 58:
The old idea of “contributory negligence” is seen in the following
decision: “We must remember that the injury complained of is due to
the negligence of a fellow workman, for which the master is
responsible neither in law nor morals.” Durkin _v._ Coal Co. 171, Pa.
St. 193, 205. Quoted by Roscoe Pound in Yale Law Journal, 18, 467.
Footnote 59:
This is the “new natural law” of which Mr. Pound speaks as “the
revival of the idealist interpretation which is the enduring
possession of philosophical jurisprudence.” Formerly, we are told,
“equity imposed moral limitations. The law to-day is beginning to
impose social limitations.” Harv. Law Rev. 27, 227.
Footnote 60:
“The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes,” by Felix Frankfurter,
Harv. Law Rev. 29, 683–702.
Footnote 61:
Quoted by Roscoe Pound in Harv. Law Rev. 25, 505.
Footnote 62:
It has been proposed that we should have trained business men on the
benches of our supreme courts as well as lawyers. I should think it
would be better for our lawyers to be so conversant with social facts
that this need not be necessary.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART II
THE TRADITIONAL DEMOCRACY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVI
DEMOCRACY NOT “LIBERTY” AND “EQUALITY”: OUR POLITICAL DUALISM
--------------
THE purpose of this book is to indicate certain changes which must be
made in our political methods in order that the group principle, the
most fruitful principle of association we have yet found, shall have
free play in our political life. In Part III we shall devote ourselves
specifically to that purpose. Here let us examine some of our past
notions of democracy and then trace the growth of true democracy in
America.
Democracy has meant to many “natural” rights, “liberty” and “equality.”
The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion
those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my
only rights are those which membership in a group gives me. The old idea
of natural rights postulated the particularist individual; we know now
that no such person exists. The group and the individual come into
existence simultaneously: with this group-man appear group-rights. Thus
man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society or
against society. Particularist rights are ruled out as everything
particularist is ruled out. When we accept fully the principle of rights
involved in the group theory of association, it will change the
decisions of our courts, our state constitutions, and all the concrete
machinery of government. The truth of the whole matter is that our only
concern with “rights” is not to protect them but to create them. Our
efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the rights which Heaven has
showered upon us, but in creating all the rights we shall ever have.[63]
As an understanding of the group process abolishes “individual rights,”
so it gives us a true definition of liberty. We have seen that the free
man is he who actualizes the will of the whole. I have no liberty except
as an essential member of a group. The particularist idea of liberty was
either negative, depending on the removal of barriers, or it was
quantitative, something which I had left over after the state had
restrained me in every way it thought necessary. But liberty is not
measured by the number of restraints we do not have, but by the number
of spontaneous activities we do have. Law and liberty are not like the
two halves of this page, mutually exclusive—one is involved in the
other. One does not decrease as the other increases. Liberty and law go
hand in hand and increase together in the larger synthesis of life we
are here trying to make.
We see that to obey the group which we have helped to make and of which
we are an integral part is to be free because we are then obeying
ourself. Ideally the state is such a group, actually it is not, but it
depends upon us to make it more and more so. The state must be no
external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be
myself acting as the state in every smallest detail of life. Expression,
not restraint, is always the motive of the ideal state.
There has been long a kind of balance theory prevalent: everything that
seems to have to do with the one is put on one side, everything that has
to do with the many, on the other, and one side is called individuality
and freedom, and the other, society, constraint, authority. Then the
balancing begins: how much shall we give up on one side and how much on
the other to keep the beautiful equilibrium of our daily life? How
artificial such balancing sounds! We are beginning to know now that our
freedom depends not on the weakness but on the strength of our
government, our government being the expression of a united people. We
are freer under our present sanitary laws than without them; we are
freer under compulsory education than without it. A highly organized
state does not mean restriction of the individual but his greater
liberty. The individual is restricted in an unorganized state. A greater
degree of social organization means a more complex, a richer, broader
life, means more opportunity for individual effort and individual choice
and individual initiative. The test of our liberty is not the number of
limitations put upon the powers of the state. The state is not an
extra-will. If we are the state we welcome Our liberty.
But liberty on the popular tongue has always been coupled with equality,
and this expression too needs revaluation. The group process shows us
that we are equal from two points of view: first, I am equal to every
one else as one of the necessary members of the group; secondly, each of
these essential parts is the tap from an infinite supply—in every man
lives an infinite possibility. But we must remember that there are no
mechanical, no quantitative equalities. Democracy in fact insists on
what are usually thought of as inequalities. Of course I am not “as good
as you”—it would be a pretty poor world if I were, that is if you were
no better than I am. Democracy without humility is inconceivable. The
hope of democracy is in its inequalities. The only real equality I can
ever have is to fill my place in the whole at the same time that every
other man is filling his place in the whole.
Much of our present class hatred comes from a distorted view of
equality. This doctrine means to many that I have as much “right” to
things as any one else, and therefore if I see any one having more
things than I have, it is proper to feel resentment against that person
or class. Much legislation, therefore, is directed to lopping off here
and there. But such legislation is a negative and therefore
non-constructive interpretation of equality. The trouble with much of
our reform is that it is based on the very errors which have brought
about the evils it is fighting. The trade-unionists say that the courts
give special privileges to employers and that they do not have equal
rights. But this is just the complaint of the employers: that the
unionists are doing them out of their time-honored equal rights.[64]
Our distorted ideas of rights and liberty and equality have been mixed
up with our false conception of the state, with the monstrous fallacy of
man _vs._ the state. But as we now see that the individual and society
are different aspects of the same process, so we see that the citizen
and the state are one, that their interests are identical, that their
aims are identical, that they are absolutely bound up together. Our old
political dualism is now disappearing. The state does not exist for the
individual or the individual for the state: we do not exalt the state
and subordinate the individual or, on the other hand, apotheosize the
individual and give him the state as his “servant.” _The state is not
the servant of the people._ The state must _be_ the people before it can
reach a high degree of effective accomplishment. The state is one of the
collective aspects of the individual; the individual is from one point
of view the distributive aspect of the state. The non-existence of
self-sufficing individuals gives us the whole of our new theory of
democracy. Those who govern and those who are governed are merely two
aspects of the common will. When we have a state truly representative of
our collective citizenship, then the fear of the state will disappear
because the antithesis between the individual and the state will have
disappeared.
To sum up: our present idea of the state is that it is not something
outside ourselves, that it must flow out from ourselves and control our
social life. But it must “control” our life by expressing it. The state
is always the great Yes, not the great No. Liberty and restraint are not
opposed, because ideally the expression of the social will in restraint
_is_ our freedom. The state has a higher function than either
restraining individuals or protecting individuals. It is to have a great
forward policy which shall follow the collective will of the people, a
collective will which embodied through our state, in our life, shall be
the basis of a progress yet undreamed of. When we can give up the notion
of individual rights, we shall have taken the longest step forward in
our political development. When we can give up the idea of national
rights—but it is too soon to talk of that yet.
-----
Footnote 63:
See ch. XXIX for the theory of “objective rights” now held by many as
the basis of the new state.
Footnote 64:
This is a hoary quarrel. From the beginning of our government it was
seen that the equal rights doctrine was a sword which could cut both
ways. Both Federalists and Republicans believed in equal rights: the
Federalists, therefore, wanted to protect individuals with a strong
government; the Republicans wanted a weak government so that
individuals could be let alone in the exercise of their equal rights.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVII
DEMOCRACY NOT THE MAJORITY: OUR POLITICAL FALLACY
--------------
IF many people have defined democracy as liberty and equal rights,
others have defined it as “the ascendancy of numbers,” as “majority
rule.” Both these definitions are particularistic. Democracy means the
will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not necessarily
represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or three-quarters vote,
nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is democratic when it is
approaching not a unanimous but an integrated will. We have seen that
the adding of similarities does not produce the social consciousness; in
the same way the adding of similar votes does not give us the political
will. We have seen that society is not an aggregation of units, of men
considered one by one; therefore we understand that the will of the
state is not discovered by counting.[65] This means a new conception of
politics: it means that the organization of men in small, local groups
must be the next form which democracy takes. Here the need and will of
every man and woman can appear and mingle with the needs and wills of
all to produce an all-will. Thus will be abolished the reign of numbers.
A crude view of democracy says that when the working-people realize
their power they can have what they want, since, their numbers being so
great, they can out-vote other classes. But the reason the
working-people have not already learned something so very obvious is
because it is not true—_we are never to be ruled by numbers alone_.
Moreover, a fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it
abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule:
the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into
committees—Committee of Fifty, Fifteen, Three—which in their turn
resolve themselves into a committee of one, and behold—the full-fledged
era of bosses is at hand, with the “consent of the governed” simply
because the governed are physically helpless to govern themselves. Many
men want majority rule so that they can be this committee of one; some
of our most worthy citizens are incipient Greek tyrants longing to give
us of their best—tyranny.
Many working-men are clamoring for majority rule in industry, yet we
know how often in their own organizations the rule of the many becomes
the rule of the few. If “industrial democracy” is to mean majority rule,
let us be warned by our experience of it in politics—it will rend
whoever dallies with it.
Yet it will be objected, “But what other means under the sun is there of
finding the common will except by counting votes?” We see already here
and there signs of a new method. In many committees, boards and
commissions we see now a reluctance to take action until all agree;
there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it long enough, we can
unify our ideas and our wills, and there is also a feeling that such
unification of will has value, that our work will be vastly more
effective in consequence. How different from our old methods when we
were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting
with us. Some one has said, “We count heads to save breaking them.” We
are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift
until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought.
We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it. We
are not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the
majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will.
This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted. Is this
the way diplomats meet? Is this the way competing industrial interests
adjust their differences? Not yet, but it must be. And what will help us
more than anything else is just to get rid of the idea that we ever meet
to get votes. The corruption in city councils, state legislatures,
Congress, is largely the outcome of the idea that the getting of votes
is the object of our meeting. The present barter in votes would not take
place if the unimportance of votes was once clearly seen.
Even now so far as a majority has power it is not by the brute force of
numbers; it is because there has been a certain amount of unifying; it
has real power directly in proportion to the amount of unifying. The
composition of a political majority depends at present partly on
inheritance and environment (which includes sentiment and prejudice),
partly on the mass-induced idea (the spread of thought and feeling
throughout a community by suggestion), and partly on some degree of
integration of the different ideas and the different forces of that
particular society. Its power is in proportion to the amount of this
integration. When we use the expression “artificial majority” we mean
chiefly one which shows little integration, and we have all seen how
quickly such majorities tend to melt away when the artificial stimulus
of especially magnetic leadership or of an especially catchy and
jingoistic idea is withdrawn. Moreover a majority meaning a
preponderance of votes can easily be controlled by a party or an
“interest”; majorities which represent unities are not so easily
managed. Group organization is, above everything else perhaps, to
prevent the manipulation of helpless majorities.
But “helpless majority” may sound amusing to those who are telling us of
the tyranny of majorities. From one point of view indeed majority rule
tends to become majority tyranny, so we do not want a majority in either
case, either as a tyrant or as an inert mass. But those who talk of the
tyranny of majorities are usually those who are advocating the “rights
of minorities.” If it is necessary to expose the majority fallacy, it is
equally necessary to show that the present worship of minorities in
certain quarters is also unsound. There is no inherent virtue in a
minority. If as a matter of fact we cannot act forcefully without a
certain amount of complacency, then perhaps it is a good thing for those
in a minority to flatter themselves that of twenty people nine are more
apt to be right than eleven. It may be one of those false assumptions
more useful than a true one, and in our pragmatic age we shall not deny
its value. Still sour grapes hang sometimes just as high and no higher
than the majority, and it seems possible to find a working assumption
that will work even better than this. In fact the assumption that the
minority is always right is just as much an error as the assumption that
the majority is always right. The right is not with the majority or
minority because of preponderance of numbers or because of lack of
preponderance of numbers.
But many people tell us seriously that this is not a question of opinion
at all, but of fact: all the great reforms of the past, they say, whose
victories are now our common heritage, were inaugurated by an
intelligent and devoted few. You can indeed point to many causes led by
a faithful minority triumphing in the end over a numerical and inert
majority, but this minority was usually a majority of those who thought
on the subject at all.
But all talk of majority and minority is futile. It is evident that we
must not consider majority versus minority, but only the methods by
which unity is attained. Our fetich of majorities has held us back, but
most of the plans for stopping the control of majorities look to all
kinds of bolstering up of minorities. This keeps majorities and
minorities apart, whereas they have both one and only use for us—their
contribution to the all-will. Because such integration must always be
the ideal in a democracy, we cannot be much interested in those methods
for giving the minority more power on election day. The integration must
begin further back in our life than this.
I know a woman of small school education, but large native intelligence,
who spends her time between her family and the daily laundry work she
does to support that family, who, when she goes to her Mothers’ Club at
the “School Centre” penetrates all the superficialities she may find
there, and makes every other woman go home with higher standards for her
home, her children and herself. The education of children, the
opportunities of employment for girls and boys, sanitation, housing, and
all the many questions which touch one’s everyday life are considered in
a homely way on those Thursday afternoons. Sometime these women will
vote on these questions, but a true intermingling of majority and
minority will have taken place before election day.
Moreover, while representation of the minority, as proportional
representation,[66] is always an interesting experiment, just because it
is a method of representation and not a mode of association the party
can circumvent it. We are told that minority representation tried in the
lower house of the Illinois legislature has been completely subverted to
their own ends by the politicians. And also that in Belgium, where
proportional representation has been introduced, this system has become
a tool in the hands of the dominant party. No electoral or merely
representative method can save us.
Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main concern
of politics is _modes of association_. We do not want the rule of the
many or the few; we must find that method of political procedure by
which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we
are truly ruled by the will of the whole. We shall have democracy only
when we learn to produce this will through group organization—when young
men are no longer lectured to on democracy, but when they are made into
the stuff of democracy.
-----
Footnote 65:
This view of democracy was well satirized by some one, I think Lord
Morley, who said, “I do not care who does the voting as long as I do
the counting.”
Footnote 66:
Proportional representation is interesting to the view put forward in
this book because it is a method to bring out all the differences.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVIII
DEMOCRACY NOT THE CROWD: OUR POPULAR DELUSION
--------------
WHEN we define democracy as the “rule of the whole,” this is usually
understood as the rule of all, and unless we fully understand the
meaning of “all,” we run the danger of falling a victim to the crowd
fallacy. The reaction to our long years of particularism, of “individual
rights” and “liberty,” which led to special privilege and all the evils
in its train, has brought many to the worship of the crowd. Walt Whitman
sang of men “en masse.” Many of our recent essayists and poets and
novelists idealize the crowd. Miss Jane Harrison in her delightful
volume, “Alpha and Omega,” says, “Human life is lived to the full only
in and through the herd.” There is an interesting group of young poets
in France[67] who call themselves Unanimistes because they believe in
the union of all, that an “Altogetherness” is the supreme fact of life.
Mr. Ernest Poole in “The Harbor” glorifies the crowd, and the New York
“_Tribune_” said of this book, “‘The Harbor’ is the first really notable
novel produced by the New Democracy,” thus identifying the new democracy
with the crowd. Another writer, looking at our present social and
political organization and finding it based largely on class and
therefore unsound, also leaps to the conclusion that our salvation rests
not on this individual or that, this class or that, this body of people
or that, but on all together, on “this mass-life, seething, tumultuous,
without compass or guide or will or plan.”
This school is doing good service in leading us from the few or the many
to the all, in preaching that the race contains within itself the power
of its own advancement; but this power which the race contains within
itself is not got through its being a crowd, “without guide or will or
plan,” but just because it contains the potentialities of guide, will,
plan, all within itself, through its capability of being a true society,
that is, through its capability of adopting group methods. It is in the
group that we get that complex interpenetration which means both
modification and adjustment and at the same time coöperation and
fulfilment. The group process, not the crowd or the herd, is the social
process. Out of the intermingling, interacting activities of men and
women surge up the forces of life: powers are born which we had not
dreamed of, ideas take shape and grow, forces are generated which act
and react on each other. This is the dialectic of life. But this
upspringing of power from our hidden sources is not the latent power of
the mass but of the group. It is useless to preach “togetherness” until
we have devised ways of making our togetherness fruitful, until we have
thought out the methods of a genuine, integrated togetherness. Anything
else is indeed “blubbering sentimentality,” as Bismarck defined
democracy.
But there are two sets of people who are victims of the crowd fallacy:
those who apotheosize the crowd and those who denounce the crowd; both
ignore the group. The latter fear the crowd because they see in the
crowd the annihilation of the individual. They are opposed to what they
call collective action because they say that this is herd action and
does not allow for individual initiative. We are told, “Man loses his
identity in a crowd,” “The crowd obliterates the individual mind.” Quite
true, but these writers do not see that the crowd is not the only form
of association, that man may belong to a group rather than to a crowd,
and that a group fulfils, not wipes out his individuality. The
collective action of the group not only allows but consists of
individual initiative, of an individual initiative that has learned how
to be part of a collective initiative.
Collective thought, moreover, is often called collective mediocrity. But
the collective thought evolved by the group is not collective
mediocrity. On the contrary there is always a tendency for the group
idea to express the largest degree of psychic force there is in a group,
ideally it would always do so. Herein lies the difference between the
group idea and the mass idea. When we hear it stated as a commonplace of
human affairs that combined action is less intelligent than individual
action, we must point out that it all depends upon whether it is a crowd
combination or a group combination. The insidious error that democracy
means the “average” is at the root of much of our current thought.
The confusion of democratic rule and mass rule, the identification of
the people with the crowd, has led many people to denounce democracy.
One writer, thinking the collective man and the crowd man the same,
condemns democracy because of his condemnation of the crowd man. Another
speaks of “the crowd-mind or the state,” and therefore abandons the
state. All these writers think that the more democracy, the more
complete the control of the crowd. Our faith in democracy means a
profound belief that this need not be true. Moreover this idea that the
crowd man must necessarily be the unit of democracy has led many to
oppose universal suffrage because they have seen it as a particularist
suffrage, giving equal value, they say, to the enlightened and the
unenlightened. True democracy frees us from such particularist point of
view. It is the group man, not the crowd man, who must be the unit of
democracy.
The philosophy of the all is supposed, by its advocates, to be opposed
to the philosophy of the individual, but it is interesting to notice
that the crowd theory and the particularistic theory rest on the same
fallacy, namely, looking on individuals one by one: the crowd doctrine
is an attempt to unite mechanically the isolated individuals we have so
ardently believed in. This is the danger of the crowd. The crowd idea of
sovereignty is thoroughly atomistic. This is sometimes called an era of
crowds, sometimes an era of individuals: such apparent opposition of
judgment need not confuse us, the crowd spirit and the particularistic
spirit are the same; that spirit will continue to corrupt politics and
disrupt society until we replace it by the group spirit.
The crowd theory, like the particularist doctrine, has been strengthened
by the upholders of the imitation theory of society. Many of our
political as well as our sociological writers have seen life as some
exceptional individual suggesting and the crowd following without
reasoning, without effort of mind or will. Even Bagehot, who did so much
to set us in the right way of thinking, overemphasizes the part of
imitation. What he says of the “imitative part of our natures” is indeed
true, but by not mentioning the creative part of our natures more
explicitly, he keeps himself in the crowd school.
It is true that at present the people are to a large extent a mass led
by those who suggest. The suggestion and imitation of sociology are the
leading and following of politics—the leadership of the boss and the
following of the mass. The successful politician is one who understands
crowds and how to dominate them. He appeals to the emotions, he relies
on repetition, he invents catch phrases. The crowd follows. As long as
the corner-stone of our political philosophy is the theory that the
individual originates and society accepts, of course any man who can get
the people to “accept” will do so. This is the fallacy at the foundation
of our political structure. When we have a genuine democracy, we shall
not have the defective political machinery of the present, but some
method by which people will be able not to accept or reject but to
create group or whole ideas, to produce a genuine collective will.
Because we have invented some governmental machinery by which clever
politicians can rule with the entirely artificial “assent” of their
constituencies, does not mean that we know anything about democracy.
It is the ignoring of the group which is retarding our political
development. A recent writer on political science says that a study of
the interaction between individual and crowd is the basis of politics,
and that “the will of nations or states is the sum of individual wills
fashioned in accordance with crowd psychology.” In so far as this is
true it is to be steadily opposed. Many writers imply that we must
either believe in homogeneity, similarity, uniformity (the herd, the
crowd), or lose the advantages of fellowship in order to discover and
assert our own particularistic ideals. But our alternatives are not the
individual and the crowd: the choice is not between particularism with
all its separatist tendencies, and the crowd with its levelling, its
mediocrity, its sameness, perhaps even its hysteria; there is the
neglected group. Democracy will not succeed until assemblages of people
are governed consciously and deliberately by group laws. We read, “No
idea can conquer until a crowd has inscribed it on its banner.” I should
say, “No idea can finally conquer which has not been created by those
people who inscribe it on their banner.” The triumph of ideas will never
come by crowds. Union, not hypnotism, is the law of development. There
can be no real spiritual unity in the mass life, only in the group life.
Whether the people of America shall be a crowd, under the laws of
suggestion and imitation, or follow the laws of the group, is the
underlying problem of to-day.
The promise for the future is that there now is in associations of men
an increasing tendency for the laws of the group rather than the laws of
the crowd to govern. Our most essential duty to the future is to see
that that tendency prevail. As we increase the conscious functioning of
the group we shall inevitably have less and less of the unconscious
response, chauvinists will lose their job, and party bosses will have to
change their tactics. People as a matter of fact are not as suggestible
as formerly. Men are reading more widely and they are following less
blindly what they read.
This largely increased reading, due to reduction in price, spread of
railroads, rural delivery, and lessening hours of industry, is often
spoken of as making men more alike in their views. Tarde spoke of the
“public,” which he defined as the people sitting at home reading
newspapers, as a mental collectivity because of this supposed tendency.
Christensen confirms this when he says that the people reading the
newspapers are “a scattered crowd.” The usually accepted opinion is that
the daily press is making us more and more into crowds, but that is not
my experience. A man with his daily paper may be obeying the group law
or the crowd law as he unites his own thoughts with the thoughts of
others or as he is merely amenable to suggestion from others, and it
seems to me we see a good deal of the former process. The newspaper
brings home to us vividly what others are feeling and thinking. It
offers many suggestions; we see less and less tendency to “swallow these
whole,” the colloquial counterpart of the technical “imitation.” These
suggestions are freely criticized, readers do a good deal of thinking
and the results are fairly rational. The reader more and more I believe
is selecting, is unifying difference. The result of all this is that
men’s minds are becoming more plastic, that they are deciding less by
prejudice and hypnotism and more by judgment. And it must be remembered
that a man is not necessarily a more developed person because he rejects
his newspaper’s theories than if he accepts them; the developed man is
the group man and the group man neither accepts nor rejects, but joins
his own thought with that of all he reads to make new thought. The group
man is never sterile, he always brings forth.[68]
Democracy can never mean the domination of the crowd. The helter-skelter
strivings of an endless number of social atoms can never give us a fair
and ordered world. It may be true that we have lived under the
domination either of individuals or of crowds up to the present time,
but now is the moment when this must be deliberately challenged. The
party boss must go, the wise men chosen by the reform associations must
go, the crowd must be abandoned. The idea of the All has gripped us—but
the idea has not been made workable, we have yet to find the way. We
have said, “The people must rule.” We now ask, “How are they to rule?”
It is the technique of democracy which we are seeking. We shall find it
in group organization.
-----
Footnote 67:
Arcos, Romains and Vildrac are the chief of these. Romains, who has
written “La Vie Unanime,” is the most interesting for our present
purpose, for his togetherness is so plainly that of the herd:
... “quelle joie
De fondre dans ton corps [le ville] immense
oú l’on a chaud!”
Here is our old friend, the wild ox, in the mask of the most civilized
(perhaps) portion of our most civilised (perhaps) nation. Again
“Nous sommes indistincts: chacun de nous est mort;
Et la vie unanime est notre sépulture.”
Footnote 68:
Other results of the increased reading of newspapers and magazines are
that large questions are driving out trivial interests (I find this
very marked in the country), and the enormous amount of publicity now
given everything finds a channel to the public through the press. The
reports of commissions, like the Industrial Relations Commission, the
surveys, like the Pittsburgh Survey, the reports of foundations, like
the Russell Sage, the reports of the rapidly increasing bureaus of
research, like the New York Municipal Bureau, all find their way to us
through the columns of our daily or weekly or monthly. Therefore we
have more material on which to found individual thinking.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XIX
THE TRUE DEMOCRACY
--------------
DEMOCRACY is the rule of an interacting, interpermeating whole. The
present advocates of democracy have, therefore, little kinship with
those ardent writers of the past who when they said they believed in the
people were thinking of working-men only. A man said to me once, “I am
very democratic, I thoroughly enjoy a good talk with a working-man.”
What in the world has that to do with democracy? Democracy is faith in
humanity, not faith in “poor” people or “ignorant” people, but faith in
every living soul. Democracy does not enthrone the working-man, it has
nothing to do with sympathy for the “lower classes”; the champions of
democracy are not looking down to raise any one up, they recognize that
all men must face each other squarely with the knowledge that the
give-and-take between them is to be equal.
The enthusiasts of democracy to-day are those who have caught sight of a
great spiritual unity which is supported by the most vital trend in
philosophical thought and by the latest biologists and social
psychologists. It is, above all, what we have learnt of the psychical
processes of association which makes us believe in democracy. Democracy
is every one building the single life, not my life and others, not the
individual and the state, but my life bound up with others, the
individual which _is_ the state, the state which _is_ the individual.
“When a man’s eye shall be single”—do we quite know yet what that means?
Democracy is the fullest possible acceptance of the single life.
Thus democracy, although often considered a centrifugal tendency, is
rather a centripetal force. Democracy is not a spreading out: it is not
the extension of the suffrage—its merely external aspect—it is a drawing
together; it is the imperative call for the lacking parts of self. It is
the finding of the one will to which the will of every single man and
woman must contribute. We want women to vote not that the suffrage may
be extended to women but that women may be included in the suffrage: we
want what they may have to add to the whole. Democracy is an infinitely
including spirit. We have an instinct for democracy because we have an
instinct for wholeness; we get wholeness only through reciprocal
relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations. Democracy
is really neither extending nor including merely, but creating wholes.
This is the primitive urge of all life. This is the true nature of man.
Democracy must find a form of government that is suited to the nature of
man and which will express that nature in its manifold relations. Or
rather democracy is the self-creating process of life appearing as the
true nature of man, and through the activity of man projecting itself
into the visible world in fitting form so that its essential oneness
will declare itself. Democracy then is not an end, we must be weaving
all the time the web of democracy.
The idea of democracy as representing the all-will gives us a new idea
of aristocracy. We believe in the few but not as opposed to the many,
only as included in all. This makes a tremendous change in political
thought. We believe in the influence of the good and the wise, but they
must exert their influence within the social process; it must be by
action and reaction, it must be by a subtle permeation, it must be
through the sporting instinct to take back the ball which one has
thrown. The wise can never help us by standing on one side and trying to
get their wisdom across to the unwise. The unwise can never help us
(what has often been considered the most they could do for the world) by
a passive willingness for the wise to impose their wisdom upon them. We
need the intermingling of all in the social process. We need our
imperfections as well as our perfections. So we offer what we have—our
unwisdom, our imperfections—on the altar of the social process, and it
is only by this social process that the wonderful transmutation can take
place which makes of them the very stuff of which the Perfect Society is
to be made. Imperfection meets imperfection, or imperfection meets
perfection; it is the _process_ which purifies, not the “influence” of
the perfect on the imperfect. This is what faith in democracy means.
Moreover, there is the ignorance of the ignorant and the ignorance of
the wise; there is the wisdom of the wise and the wisdom of the
ignorant. Both kinds of ignorance have to be overcome, one as much as
the other; both kinds of wisdom have to prevail, one as much as the
other.
In short, there is not a static world for the wise to influence. This
truth is the blow to the old aristocracy. But we need the wise within
this living, moving whole, this never-ceasing action and interaction,
and this truth is the basis of our new conception of aristocracy.
Democracy is not opposed to aristocracy—it includes aristocracy.
As biology shows us nature evolving by the power within itself, so
social psychology shows us society evolving by the power of its own
inner forces, of _all_ its inner forces. There is no passive material
within it to be guided by a few. There is no dead material in a true
democracy.
When people see the confusion of our present life, its formlessness and
planlessness, the servile following of the crowd, the ignorance of the
average man, his satisfaction in his ignorance, the insignificance of
the collective life, its blindness and its hopelessness, they say they
do not believe in democracy. But this is not democracy. The so-called
evils of democracy—favoritism, bribery, graft, bossism—are the evils of
our lack of democracy, of our party system and of the abuses which that
system has brought into our representative government. It is not
democracy which is “on trial,” as is so often said, but it is we
ourselves who are on trial. We have been constantly trying to see what
democracy meant from the point of view of institutions, we have never
yet tried to see what it meant from the point of view of men.
If life could be made mechanical, our method would be correct, but as
mechanics is creature and life its superabounding creator, such method
is wholly wrong. When people say that the cure for the evils of
democracy is more democracy, they usually mean that while we have some
“popular” institutions, we have not enough, and that when we get enough
“popular” institutions, our inadequacies will be met. But no form is
going to fulfil our needs. This is important to remember just now, with
all the agitation for “democratic control.” You cannot establish
democratic control by legislation: it is not democratic control to allow
the people to assent to or refuse a war decided on by diplomats; there
is only one way to get democratic control—by people learning how to
evolve collective ideas. The essence of democracy is not in
institutions, is not even in “brotherhood”; it is in that organizing of
men which makes most sure, most perfect, the bringing forth of the
common idea. Democracy has one task only—to free the creative spirit of
man. This is done through group organization. We are sometimes told that
democracy is an attitude and must grow up in the hearts of men. But this
is not enough. Democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving
the will of the people. For this reason the study of group psychology is
a necessary preliminary to the study of democracy. Neither party bosses
nor unscrupulous capitalists are our undoing, but our own lack of
knowing how to do things together.
The startling truth that the war is bringing home to many of us is that
unity must be something more than a sentiment, it must be an actual
system of organization. We are now beginning to see that if you want the
fruits of unity, you must _have_ unity, a real unity, a coöperative
collectivism. Unity is neither a sentiment nor an intellectual
conception, it is a psychological process produced by actual psychic
interaction.
How shall we gain a practical understanding of this essential unity of
man? By practising it with the first person we meet; by approaching
every man with the consciousness of the complexity of his needs, of the
vastness of his powers. Much is written of the power of history and
tradition in giving unity to a community or nation. This has been
overemphasized. If this were the only way of getting unity, there would
be little hope for the future in America, where we have to make a unity
of people with widely differing traditions, and little hope for the
future in Europe where peace is unthinkable unless the past can be
forgotten and new ties made on the basis of mutual understanding and
mutual obligation. To have democracy we must live it day by day.
Democracy is the actual commingling of men in order that each shall have
continuous access to the needs and the wants of others. Democracy is not
a form of government; the democratic soul is born within the group and
then it develops its own forms.
Democracy then is a great spiritual force evolving itself from men,
utilizing each, completing his incompleteness by weaving together all in
the many-membered community life which is the true Theophany. The world
to-day is growing more spiritual, and I say this not in spite of the
Great War, but because of all this war has shown us of the inner forces
bursting forth in fuller and fuller expression. The Great War has been
the Great Call to humanity and humanity is answering. It is breaking
down the ramparts to free the way for the entrance of a larger spirit
which is to fill every single being by interflowing between them all.
France, England, America—how the beacon lights flash from one to the
other—the program of the British Labor Party, the speeches of our
American President, the news of the indomitable courage of France—these
are like the fires in Europe on St. John’s Eve, which flash their
signals from hill-top to hill-top. Even the school children of France
and America write letters to each other. American men and women are
working for the reconstruction of France as they would work for the
reconstruction of their own homes—and all this because we are all
sharing the same hope. A new faith is in our hearts. The Great War is
the herald of another world for men. The coming of democracy is the
spiritual rebirth. We have been told that our physical birth and life
are not all, that we are to be born again of water and the spirit. Not
indeed of _water_ and spirit, but of _blood_ and spirit, are the warring
children of men, a groaning, growing humanity, coming to the Great
Rebirth.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XX
THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
--------------
THE two problems of democracy to-day are: (1) how to make the individual
politically effective, and (2) how to give practical force to social
policies. Both of these mean that the individual is at last recognized
in political life. The history of democracy has been the history of the
steady growth towards individualism. The hope of democracy rests on the
individual. It is all one whether we say that democracy is the
development of the social consciousness, or that democracy is the
development of individualism; until we have become in some degree
socially conscious we shall not realize the value of the individual. It
is not insignificant that a marked increase in the appreciation of
social values has gone hand in hand with a growing recognition of the
individual.
From the Middle Ages the appreciation of the individual has steadily
grown. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was an individualistic
movement. The apotheosis of the individual, however, soon led us astray,
involving as it did an entirely erroneous notion of the relation of the
individual to society, and gave us the false political philosophy of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men thought of individuals as
separate and then had to invent fictions to join them, hence the social
contract fiction. The social contract theory was based on the idea of
the state as an aggregate of units; it therefore followed that the
rights of those units must be maintained. Thus individual rights became
a kind of contractual rights. And during the nineteenth century,
fostered by Bentham’s ideas of individual happiness, by the
_laissez-faire_ of the Manchester school and the new industrial order,
by Herbert Spencer’s interpretations of the recent additions to
biological knowledge, by Mill, etc., the doctrine of “individual rights”
became more firmly entrenched. Government interference was strenuously
resisted, “individual” freedom was the goal of our desire, “individual”
competition and the survival of the fittest the accredited method of
progress. The title of Herbert Spencer’s book, “The Man versus the
State,” implies the whole of this false political philosophy built on an
unrelated individual.
But during the latter part of the nineteenth century there began to grow
up, largely at first through the influence of T. H. Green, influenced in
his turn by Kant and Hegel, an entirely different theory of the state.
The state was now not to be subordinate to the individual, but it was to
be the fulfilment of the individual. Man was to get his rights and his
liberty from membership in society. Green had at once a large influence
on the political thought of England and America, and gradually, with
other influences, upon practical politics. The growing recognition of
the right and duty of the state to foster the life of its members, so
clearly and unequivocally expressed in the social legislation of Lloyd
George, we see as early as the Education Act of 1870, the Factory Act of
1878 (which systematized and extended previous Factory Acts), and the
various mines and collieries acts from 1872.
I do not mean to imply that the growing activity of the state was due
entirely or mainly to the change of theory in regard to the individual
and the state; when the disastrous results of _laissez-faire_ were seen,
then people demanded state regulation of industry. Theory and practice
have acted and reacted on each other. Some one must trace for us, step
by step, the interaction of theory and practice in regard to the
individual and his relation to society, from the Middle Ages down to the
present day.[69]
What has been the trend of our development in America? Particularism was
at its zenith when our government was founded. Our growth has been away
from particularism and towards a true individualism.[70]
It is usual to say that the framers of our constitution were
individualists and gave to our government an individualistic turn. We
must examine this. They did safeguard and protect the individual in his
life and property, they did make the bills of rights an authoritative
part of our constitutions, they did make it possible for individuals to
aggrandize themselves at the expense of society, their ideal of justice
was indeed of individual not of social justice. And yet all this was
negative. The individual was given no large positive function. The
individual was feared and suspected. Our early constitutions showed no
faith in men: the Massachusetts constitution expressly stated that it
was not a government of men. The law of the land was embodied in written
documents with great difficulty of amendment just because the people
were not trusted. As we look at the crudities of the Declaration of
Independence, as we examine our aristocratic state constitutions, as we
study our restricted federal constitution, as we read the borrowed
philosophy of our early statesmen, we see very little indication of
modern democracy with its splendid faith in man, but a tendency towards
aristocracy and a lack of real individualism on every side.
To be sure it was at the same time true that the government was given no
positive power. Every one was thoroughly frightened of governments which
were founded on status and resulted in arbitrary authority. The
executive power was feared, therefore it was so equipped as to be
unequal to its task; the legislative power was feared, so the courts
were given power over the legislatures, were allowed to declare their
acts valid or invalid; the national government was feared, therefore
Congress was given only certain powers. Power was not granted because no
man and no institution was trusted. The will to act could not be a
motive force in 1789, because no embodiment of the will was trusted; the
framers of our constitutions could not conceive of a kind of will which
could be trusted. Fear, not faith, suspicion not trust, were the
foundation of our early government. The government had, therefore, no
large formative function, it did not look upon itself as a large social
power. As the individual was to be protected, the government was to
protect. All our thinking in the latter part of the eighteenth century
was rooted in the idea of a weak government; this has been thought to
show our individualism.[71]
But our government as imagined by its founders did not work.[72] Our
system of checks and balances gave no real power to any department.
Above all there was no way of fixing responsibility. A condition of
chaos was the result. Such complicated machinery was almost unworkable;
there was no way of getting anything done under our official system.
Moreover, the individual was not satisfied with his function of being
protected, he wanted an actual share in the government. Therefore an
extra-official system was adopted, the party organization. The two chief
reasons for this adoption were: (1) to give the individual some share in
government, (2) to give the government a chance to carry out definite
policies, to provide some kind of a unifying power.
What effect has party organization had on the individual and on
government? The domination of the party gives no real opportunity to the
individual: originality is crushed; the aim of all party organization is
to turn out a well-running voting machine. The party is not interested
in men but in voters—an entirely different matter. Party organization
created artificial majorities, but gave to the individual little power
in or connection with government. The basic weakness of party
organization is that the individual gets his significance only through
majorities. Any method which looks to the fulfilment of the individual
through the domination of majorities is necessarily not only partial but
false. The present demand that the nation shall have the full power of
the individual is the heaviest blow that party organization has ever
received.
Now consider, on the other hand, what party organization has done for
the government. The powers of government moved steadily to political
bosses and business corporations. Boss-rule, party domination and
combinations of capital filled in the gaps in the system of government
we inaugurated in the eighteenth century. The marriage of business and
politics, while it has been the chief factor in entrenching the party
system, was the outcome of that system, or rather it was the outcome of
the various unworkabilities of our official government. The expansion of
big business, with its control of politics, evasion of law, was
inevitable; we simply had no machinery adequate to our need, namely, the
development of a vast, untouched continent. The urge of that development
was an overwhelming force which swept irresistibly on, carrying
everything before it, swallowing up legal disability, creating for
itself extra-legal methods. We have now, therefore, a system of party
organization and political practice which subverts all our theories.
Theoretically the people have the power, but really the government is
the primaries, the conventions, the caucuses. Officials hold from the
party. Party politics became corrupt because party government was
irresponsible government. The insidious power of the machine is due to
its irresponsibility.
The evils of our big business have not come because Americans are prone
to cheat, because they want to get the better of their fellows, because
their greed is inordinate, their ambition domineering. Individuals have
not been to blame, but our whole system. It is the system which must be
changed. Our constitutions and laws made possible the development of big
business; our courts were not “bought” by big business, but legal
decision and business practice were formed by the same inheritance and
tradition. The reformation of neither will accomplish the results we
wish, but the nation-wide acceptance, through all classes and all
interests, of a different point of view.
The next step was the wave of reform that swept over the country. The
motive was excellent; the method poor. The method was poor because the
same method was adopted which these reform movements were organized to
fight, one based on pure crowd philosophy. It was a curious case of
astigmatism. The trouble was that the reformers did not see accurately
what they were fighting; they were fighting essentially the
non-recognition of the individual, but they did not see this, so they
went on basing all their own work on the non-appreciation of men. Their
essential weakness was the weakness of the party machine—all their
efforts were turned to the voter not the man. Their triumphs were always
the triumphs of the polls. Their methods were principally three: change
in the forms of government (charters, etc.), the nomination of “good”
men to office, and exhortation to induce “the people” to elect them.
The idea of “good” men in office was the fetich of many reform
associations. They thought that their job was to find three or four
“good” men and then once a year to hypnotize the electorate to “do their
duty” and put these men into office, and then all would go well if
before another year three or four more good men could be found. What a
futile and childish idea which leaves out of account the whole body of
citizenship! It is only through this main body of citizenship that we
can have a decent government and a sound social life. That is, in other
words, it is only by a genuine appreciation of the individual, of every
single individual, that there can be any reform movement with strength
and constructive power. The wide-spread fallacy that good officials make
a good city is one which lies at the root of much of our thinking and
insidiously works to ruin our best plans, our most serious efforts. This
extraordinary belief in officials, this faith in the panacea of a change
of charters, must go. If our present mechanical government is to turn
into a living, breathing, pulsing life, it must be composed of an entire
citizenship educated and responsible.
This the reform associations now recognize, in some cases partially, in
some cases fully. The good government association of to-day has a truer
idea of its function. The campaign for the election of city officials is
used as a means of educating the mass of citizens: besides the
investigation and publication of facts, there is often a clear showing
of the aims of government and an enlightening discussion of method. Such
associations have always considered the interests of the city as a
whole; they have not appealed, like the party organizations, to local
sentiment.
I have spoken of the relation of the reform movement of the last of the
nineteenth century to the body of citizenship. What was its relation to
government? The same spirit applied to government meant patching,
mending, restraining, but it did not mean constructive work, it had not
a formative effect on our institutions. Against any institution that has
to be guarded every moment lest it do evil, there is a strong a priori
argument that it should not exist. This until recently has not been
sufficiently taken into account. Now, however, in the beginning of the
twentieth century, we see many evidences that the old era of restraint
is over and the constructive period of reform begun. We see it, for
instance, in our Bureaus of Municipal Research; we see it in the more
progressive sections of our state constitutional conventions. But the
chief error of the nineteenth-century reformers was not that they were
reactionary, nor that they were timid, nor that they were insincere, nor
that they were hedgers. They were wanting in neither sincerity nor
courage. Their error was simply that they did not appreciate the value
of the individual. Individualism instead of being something we are
getting away from, is something we are just catching sight of.
And if our institutions were founded on a false political philosophy
which taught “individual rights,” distorted ideas of liberty and
equality, and thought of man versus the state, if our political
development was influenced by a false social psychology which saw the
people as a crowd and gave them first to the party bosses and next to
the social reformers, our whole material development was dominated by a
false economic philosophy which saw the greatest good of all obtained by
each following his own good in his own way. This did not mean the
development of individuals but the crushing of individuals—of all but a
few. The Manchester school of economics, which was bound to flourish
extensively under American conditions, combined with a narrow legal
point of view, which for a hundred years interpreted our constitutions
in accordance with an antiquated philosophy and a false psychology, to
make particularism the dominant note in American life.
The central point of our particularism was the idea of being let alone.
First, the _individual_ was to be let alone, the pioneer on his
reclaimed land or the pioneer of industry. But when men saw that their
gains would be greater by some sort of combination, then the _trusts_
were to be let alone—freedom of contract was called liberty! Our courts,
completely saturated with this philosophy, let the trusts alone. The
interpretations of our courts, our corrupt party organization, our
institutions and our social philosophy, hastened and entrenched the
monopolistic age. Natural rights meant property rights. The power of
single men or single corporations at the end of the nineteenth century
marked the height of our particularism, of our subordination of the
state to single members. They were like _pâté de foie gras_ made by the
enlargement of the goose’s liver. It is usual to disregard the goose.
The result of our false individualism has been non-conservation of our
national resources, exploitation of labor, and political corruption. We
see the direct outcome in our slums, our unregulated industries, our
“industrial unrest,” etc.
But egotism, materialism, anarchy are not true individualism. To-day,
however, we have many evidences of the steadily increasing appreciation
of the individual and a true understanding of his place in society, his
relation to the state. Chief among these are: (1) the movement towards
industrial democracy, (2) the woman movement, (3) the increase of direct
government, and (4) the introduction of social programs into party
platforms. These are parallel developments from the same root. What we
have awakened to now is the importance of every single man.
The first, the trend towards industrial democracy, will, in its relation
to the new state, be considered later. The second, the woman movement,
belongs to the past rather than to the present. Its culmination has
overrun the century mark and makes what is really a nineteenth-century
movement seem as if it belonged to the twentieth. It belongs to the past
because it is merely the end of the movement for the extension of the
suffrage. Our suffrage rested originally in many states on property
distinctions; in New Hampshire there was a religious and property
qualification,—only Protestant tax-payers could vote. Gradually it
became manhood suffrage, then the immigrants were admitted, later the
negroes, then Colorado opened its suffrage to women, and now in thirteen
states women have the full suffrage. The essence of the woman movement
is not that women as women should have the vote, but that women as
individuals should have the vote. There is a fundamental distinction
here.
The third and fourth indications of the growth of democracy, or the
increase of individualism (I speak of these always as synonymous)—the
tendency towards more and more direct government and the introduction of
social programs into party platforms—will be considered in the next
chapter together with a third tendency in American politics which is
bound up with these two: I refer to the increase of administrative
responsibility.
* * * * *
The theory of government based on individual rights no longer has a
place in modern political theory; it no longer guides us entirely in
legislation but has yielded largely to a truer practice; yet it still
occupies a large place in current thought, in the speeches of our
practical politicians, in our institutions of government, and in America
in our law court decisions. This being so it is important for us to look
for the reasons. First, there are of course always many people who trail
along behind. Secondly, partly through the influence of Green and
Bosanquet, the idea of contract has been slowly fading away, and many
people have been frightened at its disappearance because Hegelianism,
even in the modified form in which it appears in English theory, _seems_
to enthrone the state and override the individual.[73] Third, the large
influence which Tarde, Le Bon, and their followers have had upon us with
their suggestion and imitation theories of society—theories based on a
pure particularism. The development of social and political organization
has been greatly retarded by this school of sociology. Fourth, our
economic development is still associated in the minds of many with the
theories of individual rights.
A more penetrating analysis of society during recent years, however, has
uncovered the true conception of individualism hidden from the first
within the “individualistic” movement. All through history we see the
feeling out for the individual; there are all the false trails followed
and there are the real steps taken. The false trails led to the
individual rights of politics, the _laissez-faire_ of economics and our
whole false particularism. The real steps have culminated in our ideas
of to-day. To substitute for the fictitious democracy of equal rights
and “consent of the governed,” the living democracy of a united,
responsible people is the task of the twentieth century. We seek now the
method.
-----
Footnote 69:
Also the development of the relation of individualistic theories to
the rise and decline of the doctrines regarding the national state.
Footnote 70:
I do not wish, however, to minimize the truly democratic nature of our
local institutions.
Footnote 71:
While it is true that there were undemocratic elements in the mental
equipment and psychological bent of our forefathers, and it is these
which I have emphasized because from them came our immediate
development, it is equally true that there were also sound democratic
elements to which we can trace our present ideas of democracy. Such
tracing even in briefest form there is not space for here.
Footnote 72:
It became at once evident that a government whose chief function was
to see that individual rights, property rights, state rights, were not
invaded, was hardly adequate to unite our colonies with all their
separatist instincts, or to meet the needs of a rapidly developing
continent. Our national government at once adopted a constructive
policy. Guided by Hamilton it assumed constructive powers authority
for which could be found in the constitution only by a most liberal
construction of its terms. When Jefferson, an antinationalist,
acquired Louisiana in 1803, it seemed plain that no such restricted
national government as was at first conceived could possibly work.
Footnote 73:
These English writers to whom our debt is so large are not responsible
for this, but their misinterpreters.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXI
AFTER DIRECT GOVERNMENT—WHAT?
--------------
WE have outgrown our political system. We must face this frankly. We
had, first, government by law,[74] second, government by parties and big
business, and all the time some sort of fiction of the “consent of the
governed” which we said meant democracy. But we have never had
government by the people. The third step is to be the development of
machinery by which the fundamental ideas of the people can be got at and
embodied; further, by which we can grow fundamental ideas; further
still, by which we can prepare the soil in which fundamental ideas can
grow. Direct government will we hope lead to this step, but it cannot
alone do this. How then shall it be supplemented? Let us look at the
movement for direct government with two others closely connected with
it—the concentration of administrative responsibility and the increase
of social legislation—three movements which are making an enormous
change in American political life. Then let us see if we can discover
what idea it is necessary to add to those involved in these three
movements, in other words what new principle is needed in modern
politics.
We are at present trying to secure (1) a more efficient government, and
(2) a real not a nominal control of government by the people. The
tendency to transfer power to the American citizenship, and the tendency
towards efficient government by the employment of experts and the
concentration of administrative authority, are working side by side in
American political life to-day. These two tendencies are not opposed,
and if the main thesis of this book has been proved, it is understood by
this time why they are not opposed. Democracy I have said is not
antithetical to aristocracy, but includes aristocracy. And it does not
include it accidentally, as it were, but aristocracy is a necessary part
of democracy. Therefore administrative responsibility and expert service
are as necessary a part of genuine democracy as popular control is a
necessary accompaniment of administrative responsibility. They are
parallel in importance. Some writers seem to think that because we are
giving so much power to our executives, we must safeguard our “liberty”
by giving at the same time ultimate authority to the people. While this
is of course so in a way, I believe a truer way of looking at the matter
is to see centralized responsibility and popular control, not one
dependent on the other, but both as part of the same thing—our new
democracy.
Both our city and our state governments are being reorganized. We have
long felt that city government should be concentrated in the hands of a
few experts. The old idea that any honest citizen was fit for most
public offices is rapidly disappearing. Over three hundred cities have
adopted the commission form of government, and there is a growing
movement for the city-manager plan. But at the same time we must have a
participant electorate. We can see three stages in our thinking: (1) our
early American democracy thought that public offices could be filled by
the average citizen; (2) our reform associations thought that the
salvation of our cities depended on expert officials; (3) present
thinking sees the necessity of combining expert service and an active
electorate.[75]
The increasing number of states which are holding, or are considering
holding, constitutional conventions for the reconstruction of state
governments shows the wide-spread dissatisfaction with our state
machinery. The principal object of nearly all of these conventions is
increased efficiency through concentration of responsibility. In our
fear of abuse of power there has been no one to use power; we must
change this if we are to have administrative efficiency. Most of the
schemes for a reconstruction of state governments are based on (1)
concentration of executive leadership in the hands of the governor, and
(2) direct responsibility to the electorate. The former implies
appointment of administrative officials by the governor, an executive
budget, and readjustment in the relation of executive and legislative so
that the governor can introduce and defend bills. The latter
necessitates the ability of the electorate to criticize work done and
plans proposed.
Therefore the tendency towards an effective responsibility through the
increased power of our executive does not mean that less is required of
citizens, but more. To the initiative, referendum and recall is to be
added the general control by the people themselves of our state
policies. Executive leadership may reduce the power of legislatures, but
it will increase the power of the electorate both directly and
indirectly: indirectly by weakening party organization, and directly by
giving the people more and more control. It has been suggested, for
instance, that in any dispute between governor and legislature the
people might be called on to decide, either directly by passing on the
proposed legislation itself, or by a new election. At any rate ultimate
control must somehow be with the people. That this was not sufficiently
provided for in the New York constitution submitted to the voters of New
York a few years ago was one of the reasons for its rejection. What
frightened the men of New York was undoubtedly the increased power of
the state administrative without any corresponding increase in
democratic control. To increase at the same time democratic control and
administrative responsibility, while not an easy thing to do, is the
task of our new constitutions.
With regard to direct government we are at present making two mistakes:
first, in thinking that we can get any benefit from it if it is operated
from within the party organization;[76] secondly, in thinking that it is
merely to record, that it is based on counting, on the preponderance of
votes.
The question staring us in the face in American politics to-day is—What
possible good can direct government do us if party organization remains
in control? The movement for direct primaries, popular choice of United
States senators, presidential primaries, initiative and referendum, the
recall etc., will bear little fruit unless something is done at the same
time to break the power of the party. Many people tell us that our
present party system, with its method of caucuses, conventions, bosses
etc., has failed, and they are now looking to the direct primary as
their hope, but the direct primary in itself will not free us from the
tyranny of party rule. Look at this much-lauded direct primary and see
what it is actually giving us: the political machines have known from
the beginning how to circumvent it, it often merely increases the power
of the boss, and at its best it is accomplishing no integrating of the
American people—the real task of democracy. No development of party
machinery or reform of party machinery is going to give us the will of
the people, only a new method.
Moreover, merely giving more power to the people does not automatically
reduce the hold of the party; some positive measures must be taken if
direct government is not to fail exactly as representative government
has failed. The faith in direct government as a sure panacea is almost
pathetic when we remember how in the past one stronghold after another
has been captured by the party. Much has been written by advocates of
direct government to show that it will destroy the arbitrary power of
the party, destroy its relation to big business, etc., but we see little
evidence of this. We all know, and we can see every year if we watch the
history of referendum votes, that the party organization is quite able
to use “direct government” for its own ends. Direct government worked by
the machine will be subject to much the same abuses as representative
government. And direct and representative government cannot be
synthesized by executive leadership alone. All that is said in favor of
the former may be true, but it can never be made operative unless we are
able to find some way of breaking the power of the machine. Direct
government can be beneficial to American politics only if accompanied by
the organization of voters in non-partisan groups for the production of
common ideas and a collective purpose. Of itself direct government can
never become the responsible government of a people.
I have said that direct government will never succeed if operated from
within the party organization, nor if it is considered, as it usually
is, merely a method by which the people can accept or reject what is
proposed to them. Let us now look at the second point. We have seen that
party organization does not allow group methods, that the party is a
crowd: suggestion by the boss, imitation by the mass, is the rule. But
direct government also may and probably will be crowd government if it
is merely a means of counting. As far as direct government can be given
the technique of a genuine democracy, it is an advance step in political
method, but the trouble is that many of its supporters do not see this
necessity; they have given it their adherence because of their belief in
majority rule, in their belief that to count one and one and one is to
get at the will of the people. But for each to count as one means crowd
rule—of course the party captures us. Yet even if it did not, we do not
want direct government if we are to fall from party domination into the
tyranny of numbers. That every man was to count as one was the
contribution of the old psychology to politics; the new psychology goes
deeper and further,—it teaches that each is to be the whole at one
point. This changes our entire conception of politics. Voting at the
polls is not to be the expression of one man after another. My vote
should not be my freak will any more than it should be my adherence to
party, but my individual expression of the common will. The
particularist vote does not represent the individual will because the
evolution of the individual will is bound up in a larger evolution.
Therefore, _my duty as a citizen is not exhausted by what I bring to the
state; my test as a citizen is how fully the whole can be expressed in
or through me_.
The vote in itself does not give us democracy—we have yet to learn
democracy’s method. We still think too much of the solidarity of the
vote; what we need is solidarity of purpose, solidarity of will. To make
my vote a genuine part of the expression of the collective will is the
first purpose of politics; it is only through group organization that
the individual learns this lesson, that he learns to be an effective
political member. People often ask, “Why is democracy so unprogressive?”
It is just because we have not democracy in this sense. As long as the
vote is that of isolated individuals, the tendency will be for us to
have an unprogressive vote. This state of things can be remedied, first,
by a different system of education, secondly, by giving men
opportunities to exercise that fundamental intermingling with others
which is democracy. To the consideration of how this can be accomplished
Part III is mainly directed.
But I am making no proposal for some hard and fast method by which every
vote shall register the will of a definite, fixed number of men rather
than of one man. I am talking of a new method of living _by_ which the
individual shall learn to be part of social wholes, _through_ which he
shall express social wholes. The individual not the group must be the
basis of organization. But the individual is created by many groups, his
vote cannot express his relation to one group; it must ideally, I have
said, express the whole from his point of view, actually it must express
as much of the whole as the variety of his group life makes
possible.[77]
When shall we begin to understand what the ballot-box means in our
political life? _It creates nothing_—it merely registers what is already
created. If direct government is to be more than ballot-box democracy it
must learn not to record what is on the surface, but to dig down
underneath the surface. No “democracy” which is based on a preponderance
of votes can ever succeed. The essence of democracy is an educated and
responsible citizenship evolving common ideas and _willing_ its own
social life. The dynamic thought is the thought which represents the
most complete synthesis. In art the influence of a school does not
depend upon the number of its adherents, but upon the extent to which
that school represents a synthesis of thought. This is exactly so in
politics. Direct government must create. It can do this through group
organization. We are at the cross-roads now: shall we give the
initiative and referendum to a crowd or to an interpenetrating group?
To sum up: the corruption of politics is due largely to the conception
of the people as a crowd. To change this idea is, I believe, the first
step in the reform of our political life. Unless this is done before we
make sweeping changes in the mechanism of government, such changes will
not mean progress. If the people are a crowd capable of nothing but
imitation, what is the use of all the direct government we are trying to
bring about, how can a “crowd” be considered capable of political
decisions? Direct government gives to every one the right to express his
opinion. The question is whether that opinion is to be his particularist
opinion or the imitation of the crowd or the creation of the group. The
party has dominated us in the past chiefly because we have truly
believed the people to be a crowd. When we understand the law of
association as the law of psychic interplay, then indeed shall we be on
the way towards the New Democracy.
Direct government will not succeed if it is operated through the party
organization; it will not succeed even if separated from party control
if it means the crowd in another guise. To be successful direct
government must be controlled by some method not yet brought into
practical politics. When we have an organized electorate, we shall begin
to see the advantages of direct government.
* * * * *
At the beginning of this chapter three closely related movements in
American politics were mentioned. The third must now be considered—the
introduction of social programs into party platforms.
We have had three policies in legislation: (1) the let-alone policy,[78]
(2) the regulation policy, and now (3) the constructive policy is just
appearing.
In order to get away from the consequences of _laissez-faire_, we
adopted, at the end of the nineteenth century, an almost equally
pernicious one, the regulation theory. The error at the bottom of the
“regulation” idea of government is that people may be allowed to do as
they please (_laissez-faire_) until they have built up special rules and
privileges for themselves, and then they shall be “regulated.” The
regulation theory of government is that we are to give every opportunity
for efficiency to come to the top in order that we shall get the benefit
of that efficiency, but at the same time our governmental machinery is
to be such that efficiency is to be shorn of its power before it can do
any harm—a sort of automatic blow-off. Gauge your boiler (society) at
what it will stand without bursting, then when our ablest people get to
that point the blow-off will make society safe.
But the most salient thing about present American politics is that we
are giving up both our let-alone and our regulation policies in favor of
a constructive policy. There has been a steady and comprehensible growth
of democracy from this point of view, that is, of the idea of the
function of government being not merely to protect, to adjust, to
restrain, and all the negative rest of it, but that the function of
government should be to build, to construct the life of its people. We
think now that a constructive social policy is more democratic than the
protection of men in their individual rights and property. In 1800 the
opposite idea prevailed, and Jefferson, not Hamilton, was considered the
Democrat. We must reinterpret or restate the fundamental principles of
democracy.
But why do we consider our present constructive social policies more
democratic? Are they necessarily so? Has not paternalistic Germany
constructive social policies for her people? Social legislation in
England and America means an increase of democracy because it is a
movement which is in England and America bound up with other democratic
movements.[79] In America we see at the same time the trend towards (1)
an increase of administrative responsibility, (2) an increase of direct
control by the people, (3) an increase of social legislation. Not one of
these is independent of the other two. They have acted and reacted on
one another. Men have not first been given a more direct share in
government and then used their increased power to adopt social policies.
The two have gone on side by side. Moreover, the adoption of social
policies has increased the powers of government and, therefore, it has
more and more come to be seen that popular control of government is
necessary. At the same time the making of campaign issues out of social
policies has at once in itself made all the people more important in
politics. Or it is equally true to say that giving the people a closer
share in government means that our daily lives pass more naturally into
the area of politics. Hence we see, from whichever point we begin, that
these three movements are bound together.
Thus in America there is growing recognition of the fact that social
policies are not policies invented for the good of the people, but
policies created by the people. The regulation theory was based on the
same fallacy as the let-alone theory, namely, that government is
something external to the structural life of the people. Government
cannot leave us alone, it cannot regulate us, it can only express us.
The scope of politics should be our whole social life. Our present idea
of an omnipresent, ever-active, articulate citizenship building up its
own life within the frame of politics is the most fruitful idea of
modern times.
Moreover, social legislation is an indication of the growth of
democracy, the increase of individualism, because it is legislation for
the individual. We have had legislation to protect home industries, we
have encouraged agriculture, we have helped the railroads by concessions
and land grants, but we have not until recently had legislation for the
individual. Social legislation means legislation for the individual man:
health laws, shorter hours of work, workmen’s compensation, old age
pensions, minimum wage, prevention of industrial accidents, prohibition
of child labor, etc. Over and over again our social legislation is
pointed to as a reaction against individualism. On the contrary it shows
an increase of genuine individualism. The _individual_ has never been so
appreciated as in the awakening _social_ world of to-day.
This is not a contradiction of what is said in chapter XV, that law
according to its most progressive exponents is to serve not individuals,
but the community; that modern law thinks of men not as separate
individuals, but in their relation to one another. Modern law
synthesizes the idea of individual and community through its view of the
social individual as the community-unit. Law used to be for the
particularist individual; now it serves the community, but the
community-unit is the social individual.
In our most recent books we see the expression “the new individualism.”
The meaning of this phrase, although never used by him, is clearly
implied in the writings of Mr. Roscoe Pound. He says “As a social
institution the interests with which law is concerned are social
interests, but the chiefest of these social interests is one in the full
human life of the individual.” Here is expressed the essential meaning
of the new individualism—that it is a synthesis of individual and
society. That the social individual, the community-unit, is becoming
“the individual” for law is the most promising sign for the future of
political method. When Mr. Pound says that the line between public law
and private law in jurisprudence is nothing more than a convenient mode
of expression, he shows us the old controversy in regard to the state
and the individual simply fading away.
Social legislation, direct government, concentration of administrative
responsibility, are then indications of the growth of democracy? Yes,
but only indications. They can mean an actual increase of democracy only
if they are accompanied by the development of those methods which shall
make every man and his daily needs the basis and the substance of
politics.
-----
Footnote 74:
With the executive and legislative limited in their powers, the
decisions of the courts gradually came, especially as they developed
constructive powers, to be a body of law which guided the American
people.
Footnote 75:
For ways of doing this see Part III.
Footnote 76:
We used to think frequent elections democratic. Now we know that they
mean simply an increase of party influence and a decrease of official
responsibility.
Footnote 77:
See ch. XXX, “Political Pluralism and Functionalism.”
Footnote 78:
_Laissez-faire_ was popular when there were great numbers of
individual producers. When the large-scale business system made
wage-earners of these, there was the beginning of the break-down of
_laissez-faire_.
Footnote 79:
Besides the more obvious one of “universal suffrage.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART III
GROUP ORGANIZATION DEMOCRACY’S METHOD
1. THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP
2. THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXII
NEIGHBORHOOD NEEDS THE BASIS OF POLITICS
--------------
POLITICS are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or
method, or is this the guiding moment?
We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of
politics as entirely outside our daily life manipulated by those set
apart for the purpose. The methods by which the party platform is
constructed are not those which put into it the real issues before the
public; the tendency is to put in what will elect candidates or to cover
up the real issues by generalities. But just so long as we separate
politics and our daily life, just so long shall we have all our present
evils. Politics can no longer be an extra-activity of the American
people, they must be a means of satisfying our actual wants.
We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the work we
do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we live, the water
we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for bringing up our
children, that in fact the whole area of our daily life should
constitute politics. There is no line where the life of the home ends
and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private
life and my public life. A man I know tells me that he “wouldn’t touch
politics with a ten-foot pole,” but how can he help touching politics?
He may not like the party game, but politics shape the life he leads
from hour to hour. When this is once understood no question in history
will seem more astonishing than the one so often reiterated in these
days, “Should woman be given a place in politics?” Woman _is_ in
politics; no power under the sun can put her out.
Politics then must satisfy the needs of the people. What are the needs
of the people? Nobody knows. We know the supposed needs of certain
classes, of certain “interests”; these can never be woven into the needs
of the people. Further back we must go, down into the actual life from
which all these needs spring, down into the daily, hourly living with
all its innumerable cross currents, with all its longings and
heart-burnings, with its envies and jealousies perhaps, with its
unsatisfied desires, its embryonic aspirations, and its power, manifest
or latent, for endeavor and accomplishment. The needs of the people are
not now articulate: they loom out of the darkness, vague, big,
portentously big, but dumb because of the separation of men. To open up
this hinterland of our life the cross currents now burrowing under
ground must come to the surface and be openly acknowledged.
We work, we spend most of our waking hours working for some one of whose
life we know nothing, who knows nothing of us; we pay rent to a landlord
whom we never see or see only once a month, and yet our home is our most
precious possession; we have a doctor who is with us in the crucial
moments of birth and death, but whom we ordinarily do not meet; we buy
our food, our clothes, our fuel, of automatons for the selling of food,
clothes and fuel. We know all these people in their occupational
capacity, not as men like ourselves with hearts like ours, desires like
ours, hopes like ours. And this isolation from those who minister to our
lives, to whose lives we minister, does not bring us any nearer to our
neighbors in their isolation. For every two or three of us think
ourselves a little better than every other two or three, and this
becomes a dead wall of separation, of misunderstanding, of antagonism.
How can we do away with this artificial separation which is the dry-rot
of our life? First we must realize that each has something to give.
Every man comes to us with a golden gift in his heart. Do we dare,
therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by myself on my little self-made
pedestal, I narrow myself down to my own personal equation of error. If
I go to all my neighbors, my own life increases in multiple measure. The
aim of each of us should be to live in the lives of all. Those fringes
which connect my life with the life of every other human being in the
world are the inlets by which the central forces flow into me. I am a
worse lawyer, a worse teacher, a worse doctor if I do not know these
wider contacts. Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with every
other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in isolation.
But it must be a significant union, never a mere coming together. How we
waste immeasurable force in much of our social life in a mere tossing of
the ball, on the merest externality and travesty of a common life which
we do not penetrate for the secret at its heart. The quest of life and
the meaning of life is reality. We may flit on the surface as gnats in
the sunlight, but in each of us, however overlaid, is the hunger and
thirst for realness, for substance. We must plunge down to find our
treasure. The core of a worthy associated life is the call of reality to
reality, the calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the
depths forever more and more. To go to meet our fellows is to go out and
let the winds of Heaven blow upon us—we throw ourselves open to every
breath and current which spring from this meeting of life’s vital
forces.
Some of us are looking for the remedy for our fatal isolation in a
worthy and purposeful neighborhood life. Our proposal is that people
should organize themselves into neighborhood groups to express their
daily life, to bring to the surface the needs, desires and aspirations
of that life, that these needs should become the substance of politics,
and that these neighborhood groups should become the recognized
political unit.