DEMOCRACY AND CROWD EXCITEMENT
THE CROWD-THEORY OF MODERN LIFE—THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CROWDS—MODERN
CONDITIONS FAVOR PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTAGION—DEMOCRACY A TRAINING IN
SELF-CONTROL—THE CROWD NOT ALWAYS IN THE WRONG—CONCLUSION; THE CASE OF
FRANCE.
Certain writers, impressed with the rise of vast democracies within
which space is almost eliminated by ease of communication, hold that we
are falling under the rule of Crowds, that is to say, of bodies of men
subject by their proximity to waves of impulsive sentiment and action,
quite like multitudes in physical contiguity. A crowd is well known to
be emotional, irrational and suppressive of individuality: democracy,
being the rule of the crowd, will show the same traits.
The psychology of crowds has been treated at length by Sighele,[71] Le
Bon[72] and other authors who, having made a specialty of the man in
the throng, are perhaps somewhat inclined to exaggerate the degree
in which he departs from ordinary personality. The crowd mind is
not, as is sometimes said, a quite different thing from that of the
individual (unless by individual is meant the higher self), but is
merely a collective mind of a low order which stimulates and unifies
the cruder impulses of its members. The men are there but they “descend
to meet.” The loss of rational control and liability to be stampeded
which are its main traits are no greater than attend almost any state
of excitement—the anger, fear, love and the like, of the man not in the
crowd.
And the intimidating effect of a throng on the individual—the
stage-fright, let us say, of an inexperienced speaker—is nothing
unique, but closely resembles that which we have all felt on first
approaching an imposing person; seeming to spring from that vague
dread of unknown power which pervades all conscious life. And like the
latter, it readily wears off, so that the practised orator is never
more self-possessed than with the crowd before him.
The peculiarity of the crowd-mind is mainly in the readiness with which
any communicable feeling is spread and augmented. Just as a heap of
firebrands will blaze when one or two alone will chill and go out, so
the units of a crowd “inflame each other by mutual sympathy and mutual
consciousness of it.”[73] This is much facilitated by the circumstance
that habitual activities are usually in abeyance, the man in a throng
being like one fallen overboard in that he is removed from his ordinary
surroundings and plunged into a strange and alarming element. At once
excited and intimidated, he readily takes on a suggested emotion—as of
panic, anger or self-devotion—and proceeds to reckless action.
It must be admitted that modern conditions enable such contagion to
work upon a larger scale than ever before, so that a wave of feeling
now passes through the people, by the aid of the newspaper, very
much as if they were physically a crowd—like the wave of resentment,
for instance, that swept over America when the battle-ship Maine was
destroyed in Havana harbor. The popular excitement over athletic
contests is a familiar example. During the foot-ball season the emotion
of the crowd actually present at a famous game is diffused throughout
the country by prompt and ingenious devices that depict the progress
of the play; and, indeed, it is just to get into this excitement, and
out of themselves and the humdrum of routine, that thousands of people,
most of whom know next to nothing of the game, read the newspapers and
stand about the bulletin boards. And when a war breaks out, the people
read the papers in quite the same spirit that the Roman populace went
to the arena, not so much from any depraved taste for blood, as to be
in the thrill. Even the so-called “individualism” of our time, and the
unresting pursuit of “business,” are in great part due to a contagion
of the crowd. People become excited by the game and want to be in it,
whether they have any definite object or not; and once in they think
they must keep up the pace or go under.
Is democracy, then, the rule of the crowd, and is there a tendency in
modern times toward the subjection of society to an irrational and
degenerate phase of the mind? This question, like others relating to
the trend of modern life, looks differently according to the points
of view from which it is approached. In general we may say that the
very changes which are drawing modern populations together into denser
wholes bring also a discipline in organization and self-control which
should remove them further and further from the mob state.
It is agreed by writers on the crowd that men are little likely to
be stampeded in matters regarding which they have a trained habit of
thought—as a fireman, for instance, will be apt to keep his head when
the fire-alarm sounds. And it is just the absence of this that is the
mark of a crowd, which is not made by mere numbers and contiguity,
but by group excitability arising from lack of stable organization. A
veteran army is not a crowd, however numerous and concentrated; and no
more perhaps is a veteran democracy, though it number twenty million
voters.
A healthy democracy is indeed a training in judgment and self-control
as applied to political action; and just as a fireman is at home on
trembling ladders and amidst choking fumes, so the free citizen learns
to keep his head amid the contending passions and opinions of a “fierce
democratie.” Having passed safely through many disturbances, he has
acquired a confidence in cool judgment and in the underlying stability
of things impossible to men who, living under a stricter control,
have had no such education. He knows well how to discount superficial
sentiment and “the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour.” It
is, then, the nature of ordered freedom to train veterans of politics,
secure against the wild impulses of a rabble—such as made havoc in
Paris at the close of the Franco-Prussian war—and in modern times,
when power cannot be kept away from the people, such a training is the
main guaranty of social stability. Is it not apparent to judicious
observers that our tough-fibred, loose-jointed society takes agitation
more safely than the more rigid structures of Europe?
Nor is it merely in politics that this is true, for it is the whole
tendency of a free system to train men to stand on their own feet and
resist the rush. In a fixed order, with little opening for initiative
or differentiated development, they scarcely realize themselves as
distinct and self-directing individuals, and from them one may expect
the traits of Le Bon’s _foules_; hardly from the shrewd farmers and
mechanics of American democracy.
It looks at first sight as if, because of their dense humanity, the
great cities in which the majority of the population are apparently to
live must tend to a mob like state of mind; but except in so far as
cities attract the worse elements of the people this is probably not
the case. Mob phenomena generally come from crowd excitement ensuing
upon a sluggish habit of life and serving as an outlet to the passions
which such a life stores up. We find the mob and the mob-like religious
revival in the back counties rather than among the cheerful and
animated people that throng the open places of New York or Chicago.
Moreover, it is hardly true that “the multitude is always in the
wrong”;[74] and conclusions may be no less sound and vital for
being reached under a certain exaltation of popular enthusiasm. The
individual engaged in private affairs and without the thrill of the
common life is not more apt to be at the height of his mental being
than the man in the crowd. A mingling of these influences seems to
produce the best results, and the highest rationality, while it
involves much plodding thought in its preparation, is likely to come to
definite consciousness and expression in moments of some excitement.
As it is the common experience of artists, poets and saints that their
best achievements are the outcome of long brooding culminating in a
kind of ecstasy, so the clearest notes of democracy may be struck in
times of exaltation like that which, in the Northern United States,
followed the attack on Fort Sumter. The impulsiveness which marks
popular feeling may express some brutal or trivial phase of human
nature, or some profound moral intuition, the only definite test being
the persistence of the sentiment which thus comes to light; and if it
proves to have the lasting warrant of the general conscience it may be
one of those voices of the people in which posterity will discover the
voice of God.
The view that the crowd is irrational and degenerate is characteristic
of an intricate society where reading has largely taken the place
of assembly as a stimulus to thought. In primitive times the social
excitement of religious and other festivals represented the higher
life; as it still does in backwoods communities, and to sluggish
temperaments everywhere. Even in the towns our higher sentiments are
largely formed in social meetings of one sort or another, accompanied
by music, acting, dancing or speech-making, which draw one out of the
more solitary currents of his thought and bring him into livelier unity
with his fellows.
There is really no solid basis in fact or theory for the view
that established democracy is the rule of an irresponsible crowd.
If not true of America, it fails as a general principle; and no
authoritative observer has found it to be the case here. Those who
hold the crowd-theory seem to be chiefly writers, whether French or
not, who generalize from the history of France. Without attempting
any discussion of this, I may suggest one or two points that we are
perhaps apt to overlook. It is, for one thing, by no means clear that
French democracy has shown itself to lack the power of self-control
and deliberate progress. Its difficulties—the presence of ancient
class divisions, of inevitable militarism, and the like—have been
immeasurably greater than ours, and its spirit one with which we do not
readily sympathize. France, I suppose, is little understood in England
or the United States, and we probably get our views too much from a
school of French writers whose zeal to correct her faults may tend to
exaggerate them. The more notorious excesses of the French or Parisian
populace—such as are real and not a fiction of hostile critics—seem to
have sprung from that exercise of power without training inevitable
in a country where democracy had to come by revolution. And, again,
a certain tendency to act in masses, and lack of vigorous local and
private initiative, which appears to characterize France, is much older
than the Revolution, and seems due partly to race traits and partly to
such historical conditions as the centralized structure inherited from
absolute monarchy.
FOOTNOTES:
[71] Scipio Sighele, La folla delinquente. French translation La foule
criminelle.
[72] Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules. English translation The
Crowd.
The whole subject, including the question of “prophylactics” against
the mob-mind, is well discussed in Professor E. A. Ross’s Social
Psychology.
[73] Whately in his note to Bacon’s essay on Discourse.
[74] Attributed to the Earl of Roscommon. See Bartlett’s Familiar
Quotations.
Sir Thomas Browne characteristically describes the multitude as “that
numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the
reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great
beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.” Religio Medici,
part ii, sec. 1. This is the very man that urged the burning of witches
after the multitude was ready to give it up.