OPEN CLASSES
THE NATURE OF OPEN CLASSES—WHETHER CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS IS
DESIRABLE—FELLOWSHIP AND COÖPERATION DEFICIENT IN OUR SOCIETY—CLASS
ORGANIZATION IN RELATION TO FREEDOM.
With the growth of freedom classes come to be more open, that is,
more based on individual traits and less upon descent. Competition
comes actively into play and more or less efficiently fulfils its
function[113] of assigning to each one an appropriate place in the
whole. The theory of a free order is that every one is born to serve
mankind in a certain way, that he finds out through a wise system of
education and experiment what that way is, and is trained to enter upon
it. In following it he does the best possible both for the service of
society and his own happiness. So far as classes exist they are merely
groups for the furtherance of efficiency through coöperation, and their
membership is determined entirely by natural fitness.
This ideal condition is never attained on a large scale. In practice
the men who find work exactly suited to them and at the same time
acceptable to society are at the best somewhat exceptional—though habit
reconciles most of us—and classes are never wholly open or wholly
devoted to the general good.
The problem of finding where men belong, of adapting personal gifts to
a complex system, is indeed one of extreme difficulty, and is in no
way solved by facile schemes of any sort. There are, fundamentally,
only two principles available to meet it, that of inheritance or
caste and that of competition. While the former is a low principle,
the latter is also, in many of its phases, objectionable, involving
waste of energy and apt to degenerate into anarchy. There are always
difficulties on either hand, and the actual organization of life
is ever a compromise between the aspiration toward freedom and the
convenience of status.
We may assume, then, that in contemporary life we have to do with a
society in which the constitution of classes, so far as we have them,
is partly determined by inheritance and partly by a more or less open
competition, which is, again, more or less effective in placing men
where they rightly belong.
If classes are open and men make their way from one into another, it
is plain that they cannot be separate mental wholes as may be the
case with castes. The general state of things becomes one of facile
intercourse, and those who change class will not forget the ideas
and associations of youth. Non-hereditary classes may have plenty
of solidarity and class spirit—consider, for instance, the mediæval
clergy—and their activity may also be of a special and remote sort,
like that of an astronomical society, but after all there will be
something democratic about them; they will share the general spirit of
the whole in which they are rooted. They mean only specialization in
consciousness, where caste means separation.
The question whether there is or ought to be “class-consciousness”
in a democratic society is a matter of definitions. If we mean a
division of feeling that goes deeper than the sense of national unity
and separates the people into alien sections, then there is no such
thing in the United States on any important scale (leaving aside the
race question), and we may hope there never will be. But if we mean
that along with an underlying unity of sentiment and ideals there
are currents of thought and feeling somewhat distinct and often
antagonistic, the answer is that class-consciousness in this sense
exists and is more likely to increase than to diminish. A country of
newspapers, popular education and manhood suffrage has passed the stage
in which sentiments or interests can flow in separate channels; but
there is nothing to prevent the people forming self-assertive groups in
reference to economic and social questions, as they do in politics.
Class-consciousness along these lines will probably increase with
growing interest in the underlying controversies, but I do not
anticipate that this increase will prove the dreadful thing which some
imagine. A “class-war” would indeed be a calamity, but why expect it?
I see no reason unless it be a guilty conscience or an unbelief in
moral forces. A certain sort of agitators expect and desire a violent
struggle, because they see privilege defiant and violence seems to
them the shortest way to get at it; and on the other hand, there are
many in the enjoyment of privilege who feel in their hearts that they
deserve nothing better than to have it taken away from them: but these
are naïve views that ignore the solidity of the present order, which
ensures that any change must be gradual and make its way by reason.
Orderly struggle is the time-honored method of adjusting controversies
among a free people, and why should we assume that it will degenerate
into anarchy and violence at just this point? Will not feeling be
rather better than worse when a vague sense of injustice has had a
chance to try itself out in a definite and positive self-assertion?
It is to be remembered, moreover, that in a society where groups
interlace as much as they do with us a conflict of class interests is,
in great degree, not a conflict of persons but rather one of ideas in a
common social medium—since many persons belong to more than one class.
Only under conditions of caste would a class war of the sort predicted
by some theorists be likely to come to pass. I am not sure that it
would be more fantastic to expect a literal war between Democrats and
Republicans than between the parties—hardly less united by common
social and economic interests—of Labor and Capital.
It seems equally mistaken to say, on the one hand, that all
class-consciousness is bad, or, on the other, that we ought above
all things to gird ourselves for the class-struggle. The just view
apparently is that we should have in this matter, as elsewhere,
difference on a basis of unity. Class loyalty in the pursuit of right
ends is good; but like all such sentiments it should be subordinate to
a broad justice and kindness. If there is no class-consciousness men
become isolated, degraded and ineffective; if there is too much, or the
wrong kind, the group becomes separate and forgets the whole. Let there
be “diversities of gifts but the same spirit.”
The present state of things as regards fellowship and coöperation
in special groups is, on the whole, one of deficiency rather than
excess. The confusion or “individualism” that we see in literature,
art, religion and industry means a want of the right kind of class
unity and spirit. There is a lack of mutual aid and support not only
among hand-workers, where it is much needed, but also among scholars,
artists, professional men, writers and men of affairs. The ordinary
business or professional man hardly feels himself a member of any
brotherhood larger than the family; with his wife and children about
him he stands in the midst of a somewhat cold and jostling world,
keeping his feet as best he can and seeking a mechanical security in
bank-account and life insurance—being less fortunate in this regard,
perhaps, than the trades-unionist, who has been forced by necessity to
stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellows and give and take sacrifice
for the common good. And much the same is true of scholars and artists:
they are likely not to draw close enough together to keep one another
warm and foster the class ideals which lead the individual on to a
particular kind of efficiency: there is a lack of those snug nests of
special tradition and association in which more settled civilizations
are rich.
Organization, of certain kinds, is no doubt more extensive and
elaborate than ever before, and organization, it may be said, involves
the interdependence, the unity, of parts. But will this be a conscious
and moral unity? In a high kind of organization it will; but rapid
growth may give us a system that is mechanical rather than, in the
higher sense, social. When organization quickly extends there is a
tendency to lower its type, as a rubber band becomes thinner the more
you stretch it; the relations grow less human, and so may degrade
instead of elevating the individual’s relation to his whole. In a
measure this has taken place in our life. The vast structure of
industry and commerce remains, for the most part, unhumanized, and
whether it proves a real good or not depends upon our success or
failure in making it vital, conscious, moral. There is union on a low
plane and isolation on a higher. The progress of communication has
supplied the mechanical basis for a spiritual organization far beyond
anything in the past; but this remains unachieved. On the whole, in the
words of Miss Jane Addams, with whom this is a cherished idea, “The
situation demands the consciousness of participation and well-being
which comes to the individual when he is able to see himself ‘in
connection and coöperation with the whole’; it needs the solace of
collective art inherent in collective labor.”[114]
It is indeed probable that the growth of class fellowship will help to
foster that spirit of art in work which we so notably lack, and the
repose and content which this brings. There is truth in the view that a
confused and standardless competition destroys art, which requires not
only a group ideal but a certain deliberation, a chance to brood over
things and work perfection into them. When the workman is more sure of
his position, when he feels his fellows at his shoulder and knows that
the quality of his work will be appreciated, he will have more courage
and patience to be an artist. We all draw our impulse toward perfection
not from vulgar opinion or from our pay, but from the approval of
fellow craftsmen. The truth, little seen in our day, is that all work
should be done in the spirit of art, and that no society is humanly
organized in which this is not chiefly the case.
It is also true that closer fellowship—dominated by good ideals—should
bring the sympathetic and moral motives to diligence and efficiency
into more general action, and relegate the ‘work or starve’ motive
more to the background. Some of us love our work and are eager to
do it well; others have to be driven. Is this because the former
are naturally a superior sort of people, because the work itself is
essentially more inviting, or because the social conditions are such
that sympathy and fellowship are more enlisted with it? Allowing
something for the first two, I suspect the third is the principal
reason. What work is there that would not be pleasant in moderate
quantities, in good fellowship, and in the feeling of service? No great
proportion, I imagine, of our task. Washing dishes is not thought
desirable, and yet men do it joyfully when they go camping together.
Class organization is not, as some people assert, necessarily hostile
to freedom. All organization is, properly, a means through which
freedom is sought. As conditions change, men are compelled to find new
forms of union through which to express themselves, and the rise of
industrial classes is of this nature.
In fact, the question of freedom, as applied to class conditions, has
two somewhat distinct aspects. These are:
1. Freedom to rise from one class into another, freedom of individual
opportunity, or _carrière ouverte aux talents_. This is chiefly for the
man of exceptional capacity and ambition. It is important, but not
more so than the other, namely:
2. Freedom of classes, or, what is the same thing, of those individuals
who have not the wish or power to depart from the sphere of life in
which circumstance has placed them. It means justice, opportunity,
humane living, for the less privileged groups as groups; not
opportunity to get out of them but to be something in them; a chance
for the teamster to have comfort, culture and good surroundings for
himself and his family without ceasing to be a teamster.
The first of these has been much better understood in America than the
second. That it is wrong to keep a man down who might rise is quite
familiar, but that those who cannot rise, or do not care to, have also
just claims is almost a novel idea, though they are evidently that
majority for whom our institutions are supposed to exist. Owing to a
too exclusive preoccupation with ideals of enterprise and ambition,
a certain neglect, and even reproach, have rested upon those who do
quietly the plain work of life.
Ours, if you think of it, is rather too much success on the tontine
plan, where one puts all he has into a pool in the hope of being one of
a few survivors to get what the rest lose; it would be better to take
to heart that idea of Emerson’s that each may succeed in his own way,
without putting others down. It is a great thing that every American
boy may aspire to be president of the United States, or of the Standard
Oil Company, but it is equally important that he should have a chance
for full and wholesome life in the more probable condition of clerk or
mill hand. While we must admire the heroes of Samuel Smiles, we may
remember that they do and should constitute only a small minority of
the human race.
And the main guaranty for freedom of this latter sort is some kind of
class organization which shall resist the encroachment and neglect of
which the weaker parties in society are in constant danger. Those who
have wealth, position, knowledge, leisure, may perhaps dispense with
formal organization (though in fact it is those who are strong already
who most readily extend their strength in this way), but the multitudes
who have nothing but their human nature to go upon must evidently stand
together or go to the wall.
FOOTNOTES:
[113] I make frequent use of this word to mean an activity which
furthers some general interest of the social group. It differs from
“purpose” in not necessarily implying intention.
[114] Democracy and Social Ethics, 219.