THE EXTENSION OF PRIMARY IDEALS
PRIMARY IDEALS UNDERLIE DEMOCRACY AND CHRISTIANITY—WHY THEY ARE NOT
ACHIEVED ON A LARGER SCALE—WHAT THEY REQUIRE FROM PERSONALITY—FROM
SOCIAL MECHANISM—THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPENSATION.
It will be found that those systems of larger idealism which are most
human and so of most enduring value, are based upon the ideals of
primary groups. Take, for instance, the two systems that have most
vitality at the present time—democracy and Christianity.
The aspirations of ideal democracy—including, of course, socialism,
and whatever else may go by a special name—are those naturally
springing from the playground or the local community; embracing
equal opportunity, fair play, the loyal service of all in the common
good, free discussion, and kindness to the weak. These are renewed
every day in the hearts of the people because they spring from and
are corroborated by familiar and homely experience. Moreover, modern
democracy as a historical current is apparently traceable back to the
village community life of the Teutonic tribes of northern Europe,
from which it descends through English constitutional liberty and the
American and French revolutions to its broad and deep channels of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
And Christianity, as a social system, is based upon the family, its
ideals being traceable to the domestic circle of a Judaean carpenter.
God is a kind father; men and women are brothers and sisters; we are
all members one of another, doing as we would be done by and referring
all things to the rule of love. In so far as the church has departed
from these principles it has proved transient; these endure because
they are human.
But why is it that human nature is not more successful in achieving
these primary aims? They appear to be simple and reasonable, and one
asks why they are so little realized, why we are not, in fact, a moral
whole, a happy family.
It is not because we do not wish it. There can be no doubt, I should
say, that, leaving aside a comparatively few abnormal individuals,
whose influence is small, men in general have a natural allegiance to
the community ideal, and would gladly see it carried out on a large as
well as a small scale. And nearly all imaginative and aspiring persons
view it with enthusiasm, and would devote themselves to it with some
ardor and sacrifice if they saw clearly how they could do so with
effect. It is easy to imagine types of pure malignity in people of whom
we have little knowledge, but who ever came to know any one intimately
without finding that he had somewhere in him the impulses of a man and
a brother?
The failure to realize these impulses in practice is, of course, due
in part to moral weakness of a personal character, to the fact that
our higher nature has but an imperfect and transient mastery of our
lower, so that we never live up to our ideals. But going beyond this
and looking at the matter from the standpoint of the larger mind, the
cause of failure is seen to be the difficulty of organization. Even if
our intentions were always good, we should not succeed, because, to
make good intentions effective, they must be extended into a system.
In attempting to do this our constructive power is used up and our
ideals confused and discouraged. We are even led to create a kind of
institutions which, though good in certain aspects, may brutalize
or ossify the individual, so that primary idealism in him is almost
obliterated. The creation of a moral order on an ever-growing scale is
the great historical task of mankind, and the magnitude of it explains
all shortcomings.
From personality the building of a moral order requires not only good
impulses but character and capacity. The ideal must be worked out
with steadfastness, self-control, and intelligence. Even families and
fellowships, though usually on a higher level than more elaborate
structures, often break down, and commonly from lack of character in
their members. But if it is insufficient here, how much less will it
suffice for a righteous state. Our new order of life, with its great
extension of structure and its principle of freedom, is an ever severer
test of the political and moral fibre of mankind, of its power to hold
itself together in vast, efficient, plastic wholes. Whatever races or
social systems fail to produce this fibre must yield ascendency to
those which succeed.
This stronger personality depends also upon training; and whatever
peoples succeed in being righteous on a great scale will do so only by
adding to natural capacity an education suited to the growing demands
of the situation—one at the same time broad and special, technical and
humane. There can be no moral order that does not live in the mind of
the individual.
Besides personality—or rather correlative with it—there must be an
adequate mechanism of communication and organization. In small groups
the requirements of structure are so simple as to make little trouble,
but in proportion as the web of relations extends and diversifies,
they become more and more difficult to meet without sacrificing human
nature; so that, other things equal, the freedom and real unity of
the system are likely to vary inversely with its extent. It is only
because other things have not remained equal, because the mechanism has
been improved, that it has become possible, in a measure, to reconcile
freedom with extent.
Communication must be full and quick in order to give that promptness
in the give-and-take of suggestions upon which moral unity depends.
Gesture and speech ensure this in the face-to-face group; but only the
recent marvellous improvement of communicative machinery makes a free
mind on a great scale even conceivable. If there is no means of working
thought and sentiment into a whole by reciprocation, the unity of the
group cannot be other than inert and unhuman. This cause alone would
account for the lack of extended freedom previous to the nineteenth
century.
There must also be forms and customs of rational organization, through
which human nature may express itself in an orderly and effective
manner. Even children learn the need of regular discussion and
decision, while all bodies of adults meeting for deliberation find that
they can think organically only by observance of the rules which have
been worked out for such occasions. And if we are to have great and
stable nations, it is easy to see that these rules of order must become
a body of law and custom including most, if not all, of the familiar
institutions of society. These are a product of progressive invention,
trial, and survival as much as the railroad or the factory, and they
have in the long run the same purpose, that of the fuller expression of
human nature in a social system.
As might be expected from these conditions, there is a principle
of compensation at work in the growth of the larger mind. The more
betterment there is, the more of vital force, of human reason, feeling,
and choice, goes into it; and, as these are limited, improvement in one
respect is apt to be offset, at least in part or temporarily, by delay
or retrogression in others.
Thus a rapid improvement in the means of communication, as we see in
our own time, supplies the basis for a larger and freer society, and
yet it may, by disordering settled relations, and by fixing attention
too much upon mechanical phases of progress, bring in conditions of
confusion and injustice that are the opposite of free.
A very general fact of early political history is deterioration
by growth. The small state cannot escape its destiny as part of a
larger world, but must expand or perish. It grows in size, power, and
diversity by the necessities of its struggle for existence—as did
Rome, Athens, and a hundred other states—but in so doing sacrifices
human nature to military expediency and develops a mechanical or
despotic structure. This, in the long run, produces weakness, decay,
and conquest, or perhaps revolt and revolution. The requirements
of human nature—both direct, as expressed in social idealism, and
indirect, as felt in the ultimate weakness and failure of systems
which disregard them—are irrepressible. Gradually, therefore, through
improvement and through the survival of higher types in conflict, a
type of larger structure is developed which less sacrifices these
requirements.
Much of what is unfree and unhuman in our modern life comes from mere
inadequacy of mental and moral energy to meet the accumulating demands
upon it. In many quarters attention and effort must be lacking, and
where this is the case social relations fall to a low plane—just as a
teacher who has too much to do necessarily adopts a mechanical style
of instruction. So what we call “red tape” prevails in great clerical
offices because much business is done by persons of small ability, who
can work only under rule. And great bureaucratic systems, like the
Russian Empire, are of much the same nature.
In general the wrongs of the social system come much more from
inadequacy than from ill intention. It is indeed not to be expected
that all relations should be fully rational and sympathetic; we have to
be content with infusing reason and sympathy into what is most vital.
Society, then, as a moral organism, is a progressive creation,
tentatively wrought out through experiment, struggle, and survival.
Not only individuals but ideas, institutions, nations, and races do
their work upon it and perish. Its ideals, though simple in spirit, are
achieved through endless elaboration of means.
It will be my further endeavor to throw some light upon this striving
whole by considering certain phases of its organization, such as
Communication, Public Opinion, Sentiment, Classes, and Institutions;
always trying to see the whole in the part, the part in the whole, and
human nature in both.
_PART II_
COMMUNICATION