SEARCH FOR THE GREAT COMMUNITY
We have had occasion to refer in passing to the distinction between
democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of
government. The two are, of course, connected. The idea remains barren
and empty save as it is incarnated in human relationships. Yet in
discussion they must be distinguished. The idea of democracy is a wider
and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best.
To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the
family, the school, industry, religion. And even as far as political
arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a
mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation.
It will hardly do to say that criticisms of the political machinery
leave the believer in the idea untouched. For, as far as they are
justified--and no candid believer can deny that many of them are only
too well grounded--they arouse him to bestir himself in order that the
idea may find a more adequate machinery through which to work. What
the faithful insist upon, however, is that the idea and its external
organs and structures are not to be identified. We object to the common
supposition of the foes of existing democratic government that the
accusations against it touch the social and moral aspirations and ideas
which underlie the political forms. The old saying that the cure for
the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that
the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same
kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that
machinery. But the phrase may also indicate the need of returning to
the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it,
and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and re-make its
political manifestations.
Confining ourselves, for the moment, to political democracy, we must,
in any case, renew our protest against the assumption that the idea has
itself produced the governmental practices which obtain in democratic
states: General suffrage, elected representatives, majority rule, and
so on. The idea has influenced the concrete political movement, but it
has not caused it. The transition from family and dynastic government
supported by the loyalties of tradition to popular government was the
outcome primarily of technological discoveries and inventions working
a change in the customs by which men had been bound together. It was
not due to the doctrines of doctrinaires. The forms to which we are
accustomed in democratic governments represent the cumulative effect of
a multitude of events, unpremeditated as far as political effects were
concerned and having unpredictable consequences. There is no sanctity
in universal suffrage, frequent elections, majority rule, congressional
and cabinet government. These things are devices evolved in the
direction in which the current was moving, each wave of which involved
at the time of its impulsion a minimum of departure from antecedent
custom and law. The devices served a purpose; but the purpose was
rather that of meeting existing needs which had become too intense to
be ignored, than that of forwarding the democratic idea. In spite of
all defects, they served their own purpose well.
Looking back, with the aid which _ex post facto_ experience can give,
it would be hard for the wisest to devise schemes which, under the
circumstances, would have met the needs better. In this retrospective
glance, it is possible, however, to see how the doctrinal formulations
which accompanied them were inadequate, one-sided and positively
erroneous. In fact they were hardly more than political war-cries
adopted to help in carrying on some immediate agitation or in
justifying some particular practical polity struggling for recognition,
even though they were asserted to be absolute truths of human nature
or of morals. The doctrines served a particular local pragmatic need.
But often their very adaptation to immediate circumstances unfitted
them, pragmatically, to meet more enduring and more extensive needs.
They lived to cumber the political ground, obstructing progress, all
the more so because they were uttered and held not as hypotheses with
which to direct social experimentation but as final truths, dogmas. No
wonder they call urgently for revision and displacement.
Nevertheless the current has set steadily in one direction: toward
democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and
that this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself
shares in selecting its governors and determining their policies, are
a deposit of fact left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake
of doctrines and forms, however transitory the latter. They are not
the whole of the democratic idea, but they express it in its political
phase. Belief in this political aspect is not a mystic faith as if
in some overruling providence that cares for children, drunkards and
others unable to help themselves. It marks a well-attested conclusion
from historic facts. We have every reason to think that whatever
changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be
of a sort to make the interest of the public a more supreme guide and
criterion of governmental activity, and to enable the public to form
and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense
the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. The prime
difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which
a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as
to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily
precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery. We are not
concerned therefore to set forth counsels as to advisable improvements
in the political forms of democracy. Many have been suggested. It is no
derogation of their relative worth to say that consideration of these
changes is not at present an affair of primary importance. The problem
lies deeper; it is in the first instance an intellectual problem: the
search for conditions under which the Great Society may become the
Great Community. When these conditions are brought into being they will
make their own forms. Until they have come about, it is somewhat futile
to consider what political machinery will suit them.
In a search for the conditions under which the inchoate public now
extant may function democratically, we may proceed from a statement of
the nature of the democratic idea in its generic social sense.[11] From
the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible
share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities
of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to
need in the values which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of
the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members
of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common.
Since every individual is a member of many groups, this specification
cannot be fulfilled except when different groups interact flexibly and
fully in connection with other groups. A member of a robber band may
express his powers in a way consonant with belonging to that group and
be directed by the interest common to its members. But he does so only
at the cost of repression of those of his potentialities which can
be realized only through membership in other groups. The robber band
cannot interact flexibly with other groups; it can act only through
isolating itself. It must prevent the operation of all interests save
those which circumscribe it in its separateness. But a good citizen
finds his conduct as a member of a political group enriching and
enriched by his participation in family life, industry, scientific
and artistic associations. There is a free give-and-take: fullness of
integrated personality is therefore possible of achievement, since the
pulls and responses of different groups reënforce one another and their
values accord.
Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other
principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.
It is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the
tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final
limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain
such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with,
democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither
in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a
community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements.
The idea or ideal of a community presents, however, actual phases
of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and disturbing
elements, and are contemplated as having attained their limit of
development. Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are
appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and
where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic
desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good
shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness
of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of
democracy.
Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in
thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can
we reach an idea of democracy which is not utopian. The conceptions
and shibboleths which are traditionally associated with the idea of
democracy take on a veridical and directive meaning only when they
are construed as marks and traits of an association which realizes
the defining characteristics of a community. Fraternity, liberty and
equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions. Their
separate assertion leads to mushy sentimentalism or else to extravagant
and fanatical violence which in the end defeats its own aims. Equality
then becomes a creed of mechanical identity which is false to facts
and impossible of realization. Effort to attain it is divisive of the
vital bonds which hold men together; as far as it puts forth issue, the
outcome is a mediocrity in which good is common only in the sense of
being average and vulgar. Liberty is then thought of as independence of
social ties, and ends in dissolution and anarchy. It is more difficult
to sever the idea of brotherhood from that of a community, and hence
it is either practically ignored in the movements which identify
democracy with Individualism, or else it is a sentimentally appended
tag. In its just connection with communal experience, fraternity is
another name for the consciously appreciated goods which accrue from
an association in which all share, and which give direction to the
conduct of each. Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of
personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold
association with others: the power to be an individualized self
making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the
fruits of association. Equality denotes the unhampered share which
each individual member of the community has in the consequences of
associated action. It is equitable because it is measured only by need
and capacity to utilize, not by extraneous factors which deprive one
in order that another may take and have. A baby in the family is equal
with others, not because of some antecedent and structural quality
which is the same as that of others, but in so far as his needs for
care and development are attended to without being sacrificed to
the superior strength, possessions and matured abilities of others.
Equality does not signify that kind of mathematical or physical
equivalence in virtue of which any one element may be substituted
for another. It denotes effective regard for whatever is distinctive
and unique in each, irrespective of physical and psychological
inequalities. It is not a natural possession but is a fruit of the
community when its action is directed by its character as a community.
Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a
community. But association itself is physical and organic, while
communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually,
consciously sustained. Human beings combine in behavior as directly and
unconsciously as do atoms, stellar masses and cells; as directly and
unknowingly as they divide and repel. They do so in virtue of their
own structure, as man and woman unite, as the baby seeks the breast
and the breast is there to supply its need. They do so from external
circumstances, pressure from without, as atoms combine or separate
in presence of an electric charge, or as sheep huddle together from
the cold. Associated activity needs no explanation; things are made
that way. But no amount of aggregated collective action of itself
constitutes a community. For beings who observe and think, and whose
ideas are absorbed by impulses and become sentiments and interests,
“we” is as inevitable as “I.” But “we” and “our” exist only when the
consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of
desire and effort, just as “I” and “mine” appear on the scene only
when a distinctive share in mutual action is consciously asserted or
claimed. Human associations may be ever so organic in origin and firm
in operation, but they develop into societies in a human sense only as
their consequences, being known, are esteemed and sought for. Even if
“society” were as much an organism as some writers have held, it would
not on that account be society. Interactions, transactions, occur _de
facto_ and the results of interdependence follow. But participation in
activities and sharing in results are additive concerns. They demand
_communication_ as a prerequisite.
Combined activity happens among human beings; but when nothing else
happens it passes as inevitably into some other mode of interconnected
activity as does the interplay of iron and the oxygen of water. What
takes place is wholly describable in terms of energy, or, as we say
in the case of human interactions, of force. Only when there exist
_signs_ or _symbols_ of activities and of their outcome can the flux
be viewed as from without, be arrested for consideration and esteem,
and be regulated. Lightning strikes and rives a tree or rock, and the
resulting fragments take up and continue the process of interaction,
and so on and on. But when phases of the process are represented by
signs, a new medium is interposed. As symbols are related to one
another, the important relations of a course of events are recorded and
are preserved as meanings. Recollection and foresight are possible;
the new medium facilitates calculation, planning, and a new kind of
action which intervenes in what happens to direct its course in the
interest of what is foreseen and desired.
Symbols in turn depend upon and promote communication. The results
of conjoint experience are considered and transmitted. Events cannot
be passed from one to another, but meanings may be shared by means
of signs. Wants and impulses are then attached to common meanings.
They are thereby transformed into desires and purposes, which, since
they implicate a common or mutually understood meaning, present new
ties, converting a conjoint activity into a community of interest
and endeavor. Thus there is generated what, metaphorically, may be
termed a general will and social consciousness: desire and choice on
the part of individuals in behalf of activities that, by means of
symbols, are communicable and shared by all concerned. A community thus
presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings which are
appreciated and mutually referred by each to every other on the part
of those engaged in combined action. “Force” is not eliminated but is
transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments made possible
by means of symbols.
The work of conversion of the physical and organic phase of associated
behavior into a community of action saturated and regulated by mutual
interest in shared meanings, consequences which are translated into
ideas and desired objects by means of symbols, does not occur all at
once nor completely. At any given time, it sets a problem rather than
marks a settled achievement. We are born organic beings associated
with others, but we are not born members of a community. The young
have to be brought within the traditions, outlook and interests
which characterize a community by means of education: by unremitting
instruction and by learning in connection with the phenomena of overt
association. Everything which is distinctively human is learned, not
native, even though it could not be learned without native structures
which mark man off from other animals. To learn in a human way and to
human effect is not just to acquire added skill through refinement of
original capacities.
To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of
communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive
member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its beliefs,
desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of
organic powers into human resources and values. But this translation is
never finished. The old Adam, the unregenerate element in human nature,
persists. It shows itself wherever the method obtains of attaining
results by use of force instead of by the method of communication
and enlightenment. It manifests itself more subtly, pervasively and
effectually when knowledge and the instrumentalities of skill which
are the product of communal life are employed in the service of wants
and impulses which have not themselves been modified by reference to
a shared interest. To the doctrine of “natural” economy which held
that commercial exchange would bring about such an interdependence
that harmony would automatically result, Rousseau gave an adequate
answer in advance. He pointed out that interdependence provides just
the situation which makes it possible and worth while for the stronger
and abler to exploit others for their own ends, to keep others in a
state of subjection where they can be utilized as animated tools.
The remedy he suggested, a return to a condition of independence
based on isolation, was hardly seriously meant. But its desperateness
is evidence of the urgency of the problem. Its negative character
was equivalent to surrender of any hope of solution. By contrast it
indicates the nature of the only possible solution: the perfecting
of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely
shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may
inform desire and effort and thereby direct action.
This is the meaning of the statement that the problem is a moral one
dependent upon intelligence and education. We have in our prior account
sufficiently emphasized the rôle of technological and industrial
factors in creating the Great Society. What was said may even have
seemed to imply acceptance of the deterministic version of an economic
interpretation of history and institutions. It is silly and futile to
ignore and deny economic facts. They do not cease to operate because
we refuse to note them, or because we smear them over with sentimental
idealizations. As we have also noted, they generate as their result
overt and external conditions of action and these are known with
various degrees of adequacy. What actually happens in consequence
of industrial forces is dependent upon the presence or absence of
perception and communication of consequences, upon foresight and its
effect upon desire and endeavor. Economic agencies produce one result
when they are left to work themselves out on the merely physical level,
or on that level modified only as the knowledge, skill and technique
which the community has accumulated are transmitted to its members
unequally and by chance. They have a different outcome in the degree in
which knowledge of consequences is equitably distributed, and action
is animated by an informed and lively sense of a shared interest. The
doctrine of economic interpretation as usually stated ignores the
transformation which meanings may effect; it passes over the new medium
which communication may interpose between industry and its eventual
consequences. It is obsessed by the illusion which vitiated the
“natural economy”: an illusion due to failure to note the difference
made in action by perception and publication of its consequences,
actual and possible. It thinks in terms of antecedents, not of the
eventual; of origins, not fruits.
We have returned, through this apparent excursion, to the question in
which our earlier discussion culminated: What are the conditions under
which it is possible for the Great Society to approach more closely
and vitally the status of a Great Community, and thus take form in
genuinely democratic societies and state? What are the conditions under
which we may reasonably picture the Public emerging from its eclipse?
The study will be an intellectual or hypothetical one. There will be no
attempt to state how the required conditions might come into existence,
nor to prophesy that they will occur. The object of the analysis will
be to show that _unless_ ascertained specifications are realized, the
Community cannot be organized as a democratically effective Public. It
is not claimed that the conditions which will be noted will suffice,
but only that at least they are indispensable. In other words, we shall
endeavor to frame a hypothesis regarding the democratic state to stand
in contrast with the earlier doctrine which has been nullified by the
course of events.
Two essential constituents in that older theory, as will be recalled,
were the notions that each individual is of himself equipped with the
intelligence needed, under the operation of self-interest, to engage
in political affairs; and that general suffrage, frequent elections of
officials and majority rule are sufficient to ensure the responsibility
of elected rulers to the desires and interests of the public. As we
shall see, the second conception is logically bound up with the first
and stands or falls with it. At the basis of the scheme lies what
Lippmann has well called the idea of the “omni-competent” individual:
competent to frame policies, to judge their results; competent to
know in all situations demanding political action what is for his
own good, and competent to enforce his idea of good and the will to
effect it against contrary forces. Subsequent history has proved that
the assumption involved illusion. Had it not been for the misleading
influence of a false psychology, the illusion might have been detected
in advance. But current philosophy held that ideas and knowledge were
functions of a mind or consciousness which originated in individuals
by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a
function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition,
upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned.
Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits
acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of
society, not ready-made inherent powers. The fact that man acts from
crudely intelligized emotion and from habit rather than from rational
consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate
that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and
political philosophy. The measure of truth which it contains was
derived from observation of a relatively small group of shrewd business
men who regulated their enterprises by calculation and accounting,
and of citizens of small and stable local communities who were so
intimately acquainted with the persons and affairs of their locality
that they could pass competent judgment upon the bearing of proposed
measures upon their own concerns.
Habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the
most part under the influence of the customs of a group. The organic
structure of man entails the formation of habit, for, whether we
wish it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, every act effects
a modification of attitude and set which directs future behavior.
The dependence of habit-forming upon those habits of a group which
constitute customs and institutions is a natural consequence of the
helplessness of infancy. The social consequences of habit have been
stated once for all by James: “Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of
society, its most precious conservative influence. It alone is what
keeps us within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of
fortune from the uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest
and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought
up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea
through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
country-man to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months
of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and
the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon
the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of
a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are
fitted and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social
strata from mixing.”
The influence of habit is decisive because all distinctively human
action has to be learned, and the very heart, blood and sinews of
learning is creation of habitudes. Habits bind us to orderly and
established ways of action because they generate ease, skill and
interest in things to which we have grown used and because they
instigate fear to walk in different ways, and because they leave us
incapacitated for the trial of them. Habit does not preclude the use
of thought, but it determines the channels within which it operates.
Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habits. The sailor,
miner, fisherman and farmer think, but their thoughts fall within
the framework of accustomed occupations and relationships. We dream
beyond the limits of use and wont, but only rarely does revery become
a source of acts which break bounds; so rarely that we name those in
whom it happens demonic geniuses and marvel at the spectacle. Thinking
itself becomes habitual along certain lines; a specialized occupation.
Scientific men, philosophers, literary persons, are not men and women
who have so broken the bonds of habits that pure reason and emotion
undefiled by use and wont speak through them. They are persons of a
specialized infrequent habit. Hence the idea that men are moved by an
intelligent and calculated regard for their own good is pure mythology.
Even if the principle of self-love actuated behavior, it would still
be true that the _objects_ in which men find their love manifested, the
objects which they take as constituting their peculiar interests, are
set by habits reflecting social customs.
These facts explain why the social doctrinaires of the new industrial
movement had so little prescience of what was to follow in consequence
of it. These facts explain why the more things changed, the more they
were the same; they account, that is, for the fact that instead of
the sweeping revolution which was expected to result from democratic
political machinery, there was in the main but a transfer of vested
power from one class to another. A few men, whether or not they were
good judges of their own true interest and good, were competent judges
of the conduct of business for pecuniary profit, and of how the new
governmental machinery could be made to serve their ends. It would
have taken a new race of human beings to escape, in the use made of
political forms, from the influence of deeply engrained habits, of
old institutions and customary social status, with their inwrought
limitations of expectation, desire and demand. And such a race, unless
of disembodied angelic constitution, would simply have taken up the
task where human beings assumed it upon emergence from the condition
of anthropoid apes. In spite of sudden and catastrophic revolutions,
the essential continuity of history is doubly guaranteed. Not only are
personal desire and belief functions of habit and custom, but the
objective conditions which provide the resources and tools of action,
together with its limitations, obstructions and traps, are precipitates
of the past, perpetuating, willy-nilly, its hold and power. The
creation of a _tabula rasa_ in order to permit the creation of a new
order is so impossible as to set at naught both the hope of buoyant
revolutionaries and the timidity of scared conservatives.
Nevertheless, changes take place and are cumulative in character.
Observation of them in the light of their recognized consequences
arouses reflection, discovery, invention, experimentation. When
a certain state of accumulated knowledge, of techniques and
instrumentalities is attained, the process of change is so accelerated,
that, as to-day, it appears externally to be the dominant trait. But
there is a marked lag in any corresponding change of ideas and desires.
Habits of opinion are the toughest of all habits; when they have become
second nature, and are supposedly thrown out of the door, they creep
in again as stealthily and surely as does first nature. And as they
are modified, the alteration first shows itself negatively, in the
disintegration of old beliefs, to be replaced by floating, volatile
and accidentally snatched up opinions. Of course there has been an
enormous increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by mankind,
but it does not equal, probably, the increase in the amount of errors
and half-truths which have got into circulation. In social and human
matters, especially, the development of a critical sense and methods
of discriminating judgment has not kept pace with the growth of
careless reports and of motives for positive misrepresentation.
What is more important, however, is that so much of knowledge is
not knowledge in the ordinary sense of the word, but is “science.”
The quotation marks are not used disrespectfully, but to suggest
the technical character of scientific material. The layman takes
certain conclusions which get into circulation to be science. But
the scientific inquirer knows that they constitute science only in
connection with the methods by which they are reached. Even when true,
they are not science in virtue of their correctness, but by reason of
the apparatus which is employed in reaching them. This apparatus is so
highly specialized that it requires more labor to acquire ability to
use and understand it than to get skill in any other instrumentalities
possessed by man. Science, in other words, is a highly specialized
language, more difficult to learn than any natural language. It is an
artificial language, not in the sense of being factitious, but in that
of being a work of intricate art, devoted to a particular purpose and
not capable of being acquired nor understood in the way in which the
mother tongue is learned. It is, indeed, conceivable that sometime
methods of instruction will be devised which will enable laymen to read
and hear scientific material with comprehension, even when they do not
themselves use the apparatus which is science. The latter may then
become for large numbers what students of language call a passive, if
not an active, vocabulary. But that time is in the future.
For most men, save the scientific workers, science is a mystery in
the hands of initiates, who have become adepts in virtue of following
ritualistic ceremonies from which the profane herd is excluded. They
are fortunate who get as far as a sympathetic appreciation of the
methods which give pattern to the complicated apparatus: methods of
analytic, experimental observation, mathematical formulation and
deduction, constant and elaborate check and test. For most persons,
the reality of the apparatus is found only in its embodiments in
practical affairs, in mechanical devices and in techniques which
touch life as it is lived. For them, electricity is _known_ by means
of the telephones, bells and lights they use, by the generators and
magnetos in the automobiles they drive, by the trolley cars in which
they ride. The physiology and biology they are acquainted with is
that they have learned in taking precautions against germs and from
the physicians they depend upon for health. The science of what might
be supposed to be closest to them, of human nature, was for them an
esoteric mystery until it was applied in advertising, salesmanship and
personnel selection and management, and until, through psychiatry, it
spilled over into life and popular consciousness, through its bearings
upon “nerves,” the morbidities and common forms of crankiness which
make it difficult for persons to get along with one another and with
themselves. Even now, popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush
and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine
man.
Meanwhile the technological application of the complex apparatus which
is science has revolutionized the conditions under which associated
life goes on. This may be known as a fact which is stated in a
proposition and assented to. But it is not known in the sense that men
understand it. They do not know it as they know some machine which they
operate, or as they know electric light and steam locomotives. They do
not understand _how_ the change has gone on nor _how_ it affects their
conduct. Not understanding its “how,” they cannot use and control its
manifestations. They undergo the consequences, they are affected by
them. They cannot manage them, though some are fortunate enough--what
is commonly called good fortune--to be able to exploit some phase of
the process for their own personal profit. But even the most shrewd and
successful man does not in any analytic and systematic way--in a way
worthy to compare with the knowledge which he has won in lesser affairs
by means of the stress of experience--know the system within which he
operates. Skill and ability work within a framework which we have not
created and do not comprehend. Some occupy strategic positions which
give them advance information of forces that affect the market; and
by training and an innate turn that way they have acquired a special
technique which enables them to use the vast impersonal tide to turn
their own wheels. They can dam the current here and release it there.
The current itself is as much beyond them as was ever the river by the
side of which some ingenious mechanic, employing a knowledge which
was transmitted to him, erected his saw-mill to make boards of trees
which he had not grown. That within limits those successful in affairs
have knowledge and skill is not to be doubted. But such knowledge
goes relatively but little further than that of the competent skilled
operator who manages a machine. It suffices to employ the conditions
which are before him. Skill enables him to turn the flux of events this
way or that in his own neighborhood. It gives him no control of the
flux.
Why should the public and its officers, even if the latter are termed
statesmen, be wiser and more effective? The prime condition of a
democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight
which does not yet exist. In its absence, it would be the height of
absurdity to try to tell what it would be like if it existed. But
some of the conditions which must be fulfilled if it is to exist can
be indicated. We can borrow that much from the spirit and method of
science even if we are ignorant of it as a specialized apparatus. An
obvious requirement is freedom of social inquiry and of distribution
of its conclusions. The notion that men may be free in their thought
even when they are not in its expression and dissemination has been
sedulously propagated. It had its origin in the idea of a mind complete
in itself, apart from action and from objects. Such a consciousness
presents in fact the spectacle of mind deprived of its normal
functioning, because it is baffled by the actualities in connection
with which alone it is truly mind, and is driven back into secluded and
impotent revery.
There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all
consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts
publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts
thinking on social affairs. Without freedom of expression, not even
methods of social inquiry can be developed. For tools can be evolved
and perfected only in operation; in application to observing, reporting
and organizing actual subject-matter; and this application cannot occur
save through free and systematic communication. The early history of
physical knowledge, of Greek conceptions of natural phenomena, proves
how inept become the conceptions of the best endowed minds when those
ideas are elaborated apart from the closest contact with the events
which they purport to state and explain. The ruling ideas and methods
of the human sciences are in much the same condition to-day. They are
also evolved on the basis of past gross observations, remote from
constant use in regulation of the material of new observations.
The belief that thought and its communication are now free simply
because legal restrictions which once obtained have been done away
with is absurd. Its currency perpetuates the infantile state of social
knowledge. For it blurs recognition of our central need to possess
conceptions which are used as tools of directed inquiry and which are
tested, rectified and caused to grow in actual use. No man and no mind
was ever emancipated merely by being left alone. Removal of formal
limitations is but a negative condition; positive freedom is not a
state but an act which involves methods and instrumentalities for
control of conditions. Experience shows that sometimes the sense of
external oppression, as by censorship, acts as a challenge and arouses
intellectual energy and excites courage. But a belief in intellectual
freedom where it does not exist contributes only to complacency in
virtual enslavement, to sloppiness, superficiality and recourse to
sensations as a substitute for ideas: marked traits of our present
estate with respect to social knowledge. On one hand, thinking deprived
of its normal course takes refuge in academic specialism, comparable
in its way to what is called scholasticism. On the other hand, the
physical agencies of publicity which exist in such abundance are
utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning
of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the
“featuring” of passing incidents in a way which violates all the
moving logic of continuity, and which leaves us with those isolated
intrusions and shocks which are the essence of “sensations.”
It would be a mistake to identify the conditions which limit free
communication and circulation of facts and ideas, and which thereby
arrest and pervert social thought or inquiry, merely with overt forces
which are obstructive. It is true that those who have ability to
manipulate social relations for their own advantage have to be reckoned
with. They have an uncanny instinct for detecting whatever intellectual
tendencies even remotely threaten to encroach upon their control. They
have developed an extraordinary facility in enlisting upon their side
the inertia, prejudices and emotional partisanship of the masses by use
of a technique which impedes free inquiry and expression. We seem to be
approaching a state of government by hired promoters of opinion called
publicity agents. But the more serious enemy is deeply concealed in
hidden entrenchments.
Emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the
mass of men create the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment
and opinion only take advantage. Men have got used to an experimental
method in physical and technical matters. They are still afraid of
it in human concerns. The fear is the more efficacious because like
all deep-lying fears it is covered up and disguised by all kinds of
rationalizations. One of its commonest forms is a truly religious
idealization of, and reverence for, established institutions; for
example in our own politics, the Constitution, the Supreme Court,
private property, free contract and so on. The words “sacred” and
“sanctity” come readily to our lips when such things come under
discussion. They testify to the religious aureole which protects the
institutions. If “holy” means that which is not to be approached nor
touched, save with ceremonial precautions and by specially anointed
officials, then such things are holy in contemporary political life.
As supernatural matters have progressively been left high and dry
upon a secluded beach, the actuality of religious taboos has more and
more gathered about secular institutions, especially those connected
with the nationalistic state.[12] Psychiatrists have discovered that
one of the commonest causes of mental disturbance is an underlying
fear of which the subject is not aware, but which leads to withdrawal
from reality and to unwillingness to think things through. There is a
social pathology which works powerfully against effective inquiry into
social institutions and conditions. It manifests itself in a thousand
ways; in querulousness, in impotent drifting, in uneasy snatching at
distractions, in idealization of the long established, in a facile
optimism assumed as a cloak, in riotous glorification of things “as
they are,” in intimidation of all dissenters--ways which depress and
dissipate thought all the more effectually because they operate with
subtle and unconscious pervasiveness.
The backwardness of social knowledge is marked in its division into
independent and insulated branches of learning. Anthropology, history,
sociology, morals, economics, political science, go their own ways
without constant and systematized fruitful interaction. Only in
appearance is there a similar division in physical knowledge. There is
continuous cross-fertilization between astronomy, physics, chemistry
and the biological sciences. Discoveries and improved methods are so
recorded and organized that constant exchange and intercommunication
take place. The isolation of the humane subjects from one another is
connected with their aloofness from physical knowledge. The mind still
draws a sharp separation between the world in which man lives and the
life of man in and by that world, a cleft reflected in the separation
of man himself into a body and a mind, which, it is currently supposed,
can be known and dealt with apart. That for the past three centuries
energy should have gone chiefly into physical inquiry, beginning
with the things most remote from man such as heavenly bodies, was
to have been expected. The history of the physical sciences reveals
a certain order in which they developed. Mathematical tools had to
be employed before a new astronomy could be constructed. Physics
advanced when ideas worked out in connection with the solar system
were used to describe happenings on the earth. Chemistry waited on
the advance of physics; the sciences of living things required the
material and methods of physics and chemistry in order to make headway.
Human psychology ceased to be chiefly speculative opinion only when
biological and physiological conclusions were available. All this is
natural and seemingly inevitable. Things which had the most outlying
and indirect connection with human interests had to be mastered in some
degree before inquiries could competently converge upon man himself.
Nevertheless the course of development has left us of this age in
a plight. When we say that a subject of science is technically
specialized, or that it is highly “abstract,” what we practically mean
is that it is not conceived in terms of its bearing upon human life.
All _merely_ physical knowledge is technical, couched in a technical
vocabulary communicable only to the few. Even physical knowledge which
does affect human conduct, which does modify what we do and undergo,
is also technical and remote in the degree in which its bearings are
not understood and used. The sunlight, rain, air and soil have always
entered in visible ways into human experience; atoms and molecules and
cells and most other things with which the sciences are occupied affect
us, but not visibly. Because they enter life and modify experience in
imperceptible ways, and their consequences are not realized, speech
about them is technical; communication is by means of peculiar symbols.
One would think, then, that a fundamental and ever-operating aim would
be to translate knowledge of the subject-matter of physical conditions
into terms which are generally understood, into signs denoting human
consequences of services and disservices rendered. For ultimately all
consequences which enter human life depend upon physical conditions;
they can be understood and mastered only as the latter are taken into
account. One would think, then, that any state of affairs which tends
to render the things of the environment unknown and incommunicable by
human beings in terms of their own activities and sufferings would be
deplored as a disaster; that it would be felt to be intolerable, and to
be put up with only as far as it is, at any given time, inevitable.
But the facts are to the contrary. Matter and the material are words
which in the minds of many convey a note of disparagement. They are
taken to be foes of whatever is of ideal value in life, instead of as
conditions of its manifestation and sustained being. In consequence
of this division, they do become in fact enemies, for whatever is
consistently kept apart from human values depresses thought and
renders values sparse and precarious in fact. There are even some who
regard the materialism and dominance of commercialism of modern life
as fruits of undue devotion to physical science, not seeing that the
split between man and nature, artificially made by a tradition which
originated before there was understanding of the physical conditions
that are the medium of human activities, is the benumbing factor. The
most influential form of the divorce is separation between pure and
applied science. Since “application” signifies recognized bearing upon
human experience and well-being, honor of what is “pure” and contempt
for what is “applied” has for its outcome a science which is remote
and technical, communicable only to specialists, and a conduct of
human affairs which is haphazard, biased, unfair in distribution of
values. What is applied and employed as the alternative to knowledge
in regulation of society is ignorance, prejudice, class-interest and
accident. Science is converted into knowledge in its honorable and
emphatic sense _only_ in application. Otherwise it is truncated,
blind, distorted. When it is then applied, it is in ways which explain
the unfavorable sense so often attached to “application” and the
“utilitarian”: namely, use for pecuniary ends to the profit of a few.
At present, the application of physical science is rather _to_ human
concerns than _in_ them. That is, it is external, made in the interests
of its consequences for a possessing and acquisitive class. Application
_in_ life would signify that science was absorbed and distributed; that
it was the instrumentality of that common understanding and thorough
communication which is the precondition of the existence of a genuine
and effective public. The use of science to regulate industry and trade
has gone on steadily. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century was the precursor of the industrial revolution of the
eighteenth and nineteenth. In consequence, man has suffered the impact
of an enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any
corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs. Knowledge
divided against itself, a science to whose incompleteness is added an
artificial split, has played its part in generating enslavement of men,
women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to
tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and
discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal
exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives
and noxious gases in times of war. Man, a child in understanding of
himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power.
He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is
largely a matter of accident. The instrumentality becomes a master and
works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own--not because it has
a will but because man has not.
The glorification of “pure” science under such conditions is a
rationalization of an escape; it marks a construction of an asylum of
refuge, a shirking of responsibility. The true purity of knowledge
exists not when it is uncontaminated by contact with use and service.
It is wholly a moral matter, an affair of honesty, impartiality
and generous breadth of intent in search and communication. The
adulteration of knowledge is due not to its use, but to vested bias
and prejudice, to one-sidedness of outlook, to vanity, to conceit of
possession and authority, to contempt or disregard of human concern in
its use. Humanity is not, as was once thought, the end for which all
things were formed; it is but a slight and feeble thing, perhaps an
episodic one, in the vast stretch of the universe. But for man, man is
the center of interest and the measure of importance. The magnifying
of the physical realm at the cost of man is but an abdication and a
flight. To make physical science a rival of human interests is bad
enough, for it forms a diversion of energy which can ill be afforded.
But the evil does not stop there. The ultimate harm is that the
understanding by man of his own affairs and his ability to direct them
are sapped at their root when knowledge of nature is disconnected from
its human function.
It has been implied throughout that knowledge is communication as well
as understanding. I well remember the saying of a man, uneducated
from the standpoint of the schools, in speaking of certain matters:
“Sometime they will be found out and not only found out, but they
will be known.” The schools may suppose that a thing is known when
it is found out. My old friend was aware that a thing is fully known
only when it is published, shared, socially accessible. Record and
communication are indispensable to knowledge. Knowledge cooped up in
a private consciousness is a myth, and knowledge of social phenomena
is peculiarly dependent upon dissemination, for only by distribution
can such knowledge be either obtained or tested. A fact of community
life which is not spread abroad so as to be a common possession is
a contradiction in terms. Dissemination is something other than
scattering at large. Seeds are sown, not by virtue of being thrown
out at random, but by being so distributed as to take root and have a
chance of growth. Communication of the results of social inquiry is
the same thing as the formation of public opinion. This marks one of
the first ideas framed in the growth of political democracy as it will
be one of the last to be fulfilled. For public opinion is judgment
which is formed and entertained by those who constitute the public
and is about public affairs. Each of the two phases imposes for its
realization conditions hard to meet.
Opinions and beliefs concerning the public presuppose effective and
organized inquiry. Unless there are methods for detecting the energies
which are at work and tracing them through an intricate network of
interactions to their consequences, what passes as public opinion will
be “opinion” in its derogatory sense rather than truly public, no
matter how widespread the opinion is. The number who share error as to
fact and who partake of a false belief measures power for harm. Opinion
casually formed and formed under the direction of those who have
something at stake in having a lie believed can be _public_ opinion
only in name. Calling it by this name, acceptance of the name as a
kind of warrant, magnifies its capacity to lead action estray. The more
who share it, the more injurious its influence. Public opinion, even if
it happens to be correct, is intermittent when it is not the product of
methods of investigation and reporting constantly at work. It appears
only in crises. Hence its “rightness” concerns only an immediate
emergency. Its lack of continuity makes it wrong from the standpoint
of the course of events. It is as if a physician were able to deal
for the moment with an emergency in disease but could not adapt his
treatment of it to the underlying conditions which brought it about.
He may then “cure” the disease--that is, cause its present alarming
symptoms to subside--but he does not modify its causes; his treatment
may even affect them for the worse. Only continuous inquiry, continuous
in the sense of being connected as well as persistent, can provide the
material of enduring opinion about public matters.
There is a sense in which “opinion” rather than knowledge, even under
the most favorable circumstances, is the proper term to use--namely,
in the sense of judgment, estimate. For in its strict sense, knowledge
can refer only to what _has_ happened and been done. What is still _to
be_ done involves a forecast of a future still contingent, and cannot
escape the liability to error in judgment involved in all anticipation
of probabilities. There may well be honest divergence as to policies to
be pursued, even when plans spring from knowledge of the same facts.
But genuinely public policy cannot be generated unless it be informed
by knowledge, and this knowledge does not exist except when there is
systematic, thorough, and well-equipped search and record.
Moreover, inquiry must be as nearly contemporaneous as possible;
otherwise it is only of antiquarian interest. Knowledge of history is
evidently necessary for connectedness of knowledge. But history which
is not brought down close to the actual scene of events leaves a gap
and exercises influence upon the formation of judgments about the
public interest only by guess-work about intervening events. Here, only
too conspicuously, is a limitation of the existing social sciences.
Their material comes too late, too far after the event, to enter
effectively into the formation of public opinion about the immediate
public concern and what is to be done about it.
A glance at the situation shows that the physical and external means
of collecting information in regard to what is happening in the world
have far outrun the intellectual phase of inquiry and organization of
its results. Telegraph, telephone, and now the radio, cheap and quick
mails, the printing press, capable of swift reduplication of material
at low cost, have attained a remarkable development. But when we ask
what sort of material is recorded and how it is organized, when we ask
about the intellectual form in which the material is presented, the
tale to be told is very different. “News” signifies something which
has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the
old and regular. But its _meaning_ depends upon relation to what it
imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be
determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what
has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without
coördination and consecutiveness, events are not events, but mere
occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening
proceeds. Hence even if we discount the influence of private interests
in procuring suppression, secrecy and misrepresentation, we have here
an explanation of the triviality and “sensational” quality of so much
of what passes as news. The catastrophic, namely, crime, accident,
family rows, personal clashes and conflicts, are the most obvious forms
of breaches of continuity; they supply the element of shock which is
the strictest meaning of sensation; they are the _new_ par excellence,
even though only the date of the newspaper could inform us whether they
happened last year or this, so completely are they isolated from their
connections.
So accustomed are we to this method of collecting, recording and
presenting social changes, that it may well sound ridiculous to say
that a genuine social science would manifest its reality in the daily
press, while learned books and articles supply and polish tools of
inquiry. But the inquiry which alone can furnish knowledge as a
precondition of public judgments must be contemporary and quotidian.
Even if social sciences as a specialized apparatus of inquiry were
more advanced than they are, they would be comparatively impotent in
the office of directing opinion on matters of concern to the public as
long as they are remote from application in the daily and unremitting
assembly and interpretation of “news.” On the other hand, the tools of
social inquiry will be clumsy as long as they are forged in places and
under conditions remote from contemporary events.
What has been said about the formation of ideas and judgments
concerning the public apply as well to the distribution of the
knowledge which makes it an effective possession of the members of
the public. Any separation between the two sides of the problem is
artificial. The discussion of propaganda and propagandism would alone,
however, demand a volume, and could be written only by one much more
experienced than the present writer. Propaganda can accordingly
only be mentioned, with the remark that the present situation is
one unprecedented in history. The political forms of democracy and
quasi-democratic habits of thought on social matters have compelled
a certain amount of public discussion and at least the simulation of
general consultation in arriving at political decisions. Representative
government must at least seem to be founded on public interests as they
are revealed to public belief. The days are past when government can
be carried on without any pretense of ascertaining the wishes of the
governed. In theory, their assent must be secured. Under the older
forms, there was no need to muddy the sources of opinion on political
matters. No current of energy flowed from them. To-day the judgments
popularly formed on political matters are so important, in spite of all
factors to the contrary, that there is an enormous premium upon all
methods which affect their formation.
The smoothest road to control of political conduct is by control of
opinion. As long as interests of pecuniary profit are powerful, and
a public has not located and identified itself, those who have this
interest will have an unresisted motive for tampering with the springs
of political action in all that affects them. Just as in the conduct of
industry and exchange generally the technological factor is obscured,
deflected and defeated by “business,” so specifically in the management
of publicity. The gathering and sale of subject-matter having a public
import is part of the existing pecuniary system. Just as industry
conducted by engineers on a factual technological basis would be a
very different thing from what it actually is, so the assembling and
reporting of news would be a very different thing if the genuine
interests of reporters were permitted to work freely.
One aspect of the matter concerns particularly the side of
dissemination. It is often said, and with a great appearance of
truth, that the freeing and perfecting of inquiry would not have any
especial effect. For, it is argued, the mass of the reading public is
not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate
investigation. Unless these are read, they cannot seriously affect
the thought and action of members of the public; they remain in
secluded library alcoves, and are studied and understood only by a
few intellectuals. The objection is well taken save as the potency of
art is taken into account. A technical high-brow presentation would
appeal only to those technically high-brow; it would not be news to
the masses. Presentation is fundamentally important, and presentation
is a question of art. A newspaper which was only a daily edition of a
quarterly journal of sociology or political science would undoubtedly
possess a limited circulation and a narrow influence. Even at that,
however, the mere existence and accessibility of such material would
have some regulative effect. But we can look much further than that.
The material would have such an enormous and widespread human bearing
that its bare existence would be an irresistible invitation to a
presentation of it which would have a direct popular appeal. The
freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in other words, is as
much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on
public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Men’s conscious
life of opinion and judgment often proceeds on a superficial and
trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level. The function of
art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and
routine consciousness. Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight,
the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which
the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire
and thought. This process is art. Poetry, the drama, the novel, are
proofs that the problem of presentation is not insoluble. Artists have
always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward
happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion,
perception and appreciation.
We have but touched lightly and in passing upon the conditions which
must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community;
a society in which the ever-expanding and intricately ramifying
consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense
of that word, so that an organized, articulate Public comes into being.
The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate,
vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the
physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life
into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it
will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will
come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and
enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its
consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art
of full and moving communication.