THE PROBLEM OF METHOD
Perhaps to most, probably to many, the conclusions which have been
stated as to the conditions upon which depends the emergence of the
Public from its eclipse will seem close to denial of the possibility
of realizing the idea of a democratic public. One might indeed point
for what it is worth to the enormous obstacles with which the rise of
a science of physical things was confronted a few short centuries ago,
as evidence that hope need not be wholly desperate nor faith wholly
blind. But we are not concerned with prophecy but with analysis. It
is enough for present purposes if the problem has been clarified:--if
we have seen that the outstanding problem of the Public is discovery
and identification of itself, and if we have succeeded, in however
groping a manner, in apprehending the conditions upon which the
resolution of the problem depends. We shall conclude with suggesting
some implications and corollaries as to method, not, indeed, as to the
method of resolution, but, once more, the intellectual antecedents of
such a method.
The preliminary to fruitful discussion of social matters is that
certain obstacles shall be overcome, obstacles residing in our present
conceptions of the method of social inquiry. One of the obstructions
in the path is the seemingly engrained notion that the first and the
last problem which must be solved is the relation of the individual
and the social:--or that the outstanding question is to determine the
relative merits of individualism and collective or of some compromise
between them. In fact, both words, individual and social, are
hopelessly ambiguous, and the ambiguity will never cease as long as we
think in terms of an antithesis.
In its approximate sense, anything is individual which moves and acts
as a unitary thing. For common sense, a certain spatial separateness
is the mark of this individuality. A thing is one when it stands,
lies or moves as a unit independently of other things, whether it be
a stone, tree, molecule or drop of water, or a human being. But even
vulgar common sense at once introduces certain qualifications. The
tree stands only when rooted in the soil; it lives or dies in the
mode of its connections with sunlight, air and water. Then too the
tree is a collection of interacting parts; is the tree more a single
whole than its cells? A stone moves, apparently alone. But it is moved
by something else and the course of its flight is dependent not only
upon initial propulsion but upon wind and gravity. A hammer falls,
and what was one stone becomes a heap of dusty particles. A chemist
operates with one of the grains of dust, and forthwith it disappears
in molecules, atoms and electrons--and then? Have we now reached a
lonely, but not lonesome, individual? Or does, perhaps, an electron
depend for its single and unitary mode of action upon its connections,
as much as the stone with which we started? Is its action also a
function of some more inclusive and interacting scene?
From another point of view, we have to qualify our approximate notion
of an individual as being that which acts and moves as a unitary
thing. We have to consider not only its connections and ties, but
the consequences with respect to which it acts and moves. We are
compelled to say that for some purposes, for some results, the tree
is the individual, for others the cell, and for a third, the forest
or the landscape. Is a book or a leaf or a folio or a paragraph, or a
printer’s em _the_ individual? Is the binding or the contained thought
that which gives individual unity to a book? Or are all of these things
definers of an individual according to the consequences which are
relevant in a particular situation? Unless we betake ourselves to the
stock resort of common sense, dismissing _all_ questions as useless
quibbles, it seems as if we could not determine an individual without
reference to differences made as well as to antecedent and contemporary
connections. If so, an individual, whatever else it is or is not, is
not just the spatially isolated thing our imagination inclines to take
it to be.
Such a discussion does not proceed upon a particularly high nor an
especially deep level. But it may at least render us wary of any
definition of an individual which operates in terms of separateness.
A _distinctive_ way of behaving in conjunction and _connection_ with
other distinctive ways of acting, not a self-enclosed way of acting,
independent of everything else, is that toward which we are pointed.
Any human being is in one respect an association, consisting of a
multitude of cells each living its own life. And as the activity of
each cell is conditioned and directed by those with which it interacts,
so the human being whom we fasten upon as individual _par excellence_
is moved and regulated by his associations with others; what he does
and what the consequences of his behavior are, what his experience
consists of, cannot even be described, much less accounted for, in
isolation.
But while associated behavior is, as we have already noted, a universal
law, the fact of association does not of itself make a society.
This demands, as we have also seen, perception of the consequences
of a joint activity and of the distinctive share of each element in
producing it. Such perception creates a common interest; that is
concern on the part of each in the joint action and in the contribution
of each of its members to it. Then there exists something truly social
and not merely associative. But it is absurd to suppose that a society
does away with the traits of its own constituents so that it can be set
over against them. It can only be set over against the traits which
they and their like present in some _other_ combination. A molecule of
oxygen in water may act in certain respects differently than it would
in some other chemical union. But as a constituent of water it acts as
water does as long as water is water. The only intelligible distinction
which can be drawn is between the behaviors of oxygen in _its_
different relations, and between those of water in _its_ relations to
various conditions, not between that of water and the oxygen which is
conjoined with hydrogen in water.
A single man when he is joined in marriage is different in that
connection to what he was as single or to what he is in some other
union, as a member, say, of a club. He has new powers and immunities,
new responsibilities. He can be contrasted with _himself_ as he behaves
in other connections. He may be compared and contrasted with his wife
in their distinctive rôles within the union. But _as_ a member of the
union he cannot be treated as antithetical to the union in which he
belongs. _As_ a member of the union, his traits and acts are evidently
those which he possesses in virtue of it, while those of the integrated
association are what they are in virtue of his status in the union. The
only reason we fail to see this, or are confused by the statement of
it, is because we pass so easily from the man in one connection to the
man in some other connection, to the man not as husband but as business
man, scientific investigator, church-member or citizen, in which
connections his acts and their consequences are obviously different to
those due to union in wedlock.
A good example of the fact and of the current confusion as to
its interpretation is found in the case of associations known as
limited liability joint-stock companies. A corporation as such is an
integrated collective mode of action having powers, rights, duties
and immunities different from those of its singular members _in their
other connections_. Its different constituents have also diverse
statuses--for example, the owners of stock from the officers and
directors in certain matters. If we do not bear the facts steadily
in mind, it is easy--as frequently happens--to create an artificial
problem. Since the corporation can do things which its individual
members, _in their many relationships outside of their connections in
the corporation_, cannot do, the problem is raised as to the relation
of the corporate collective union to that of individuals _as such_.
It is forgotten that as members of the corporation the individuals
themselves are different, have different characteristics, rights and
duties, than they would possess if they were not its members and
different from those which they possess in other forms of conjoint
behavior. But what the individuals may do legitimately _as_ members of
the corporation in their respective corporate rôles, the corporation
does, and vice versa. A collective unity may be taken _either_
distributively _or_ collectively, but when taken collectively it is the
union of its distributive constituents, and when taken distributively,
it is a distribution of and within the collectivity. It makes nonsense
to set up an antithesis between the distributive phase and the
collective. An individual cannot be opposed to the association of which
he is an integral part nor can the association be set against its
integrated members.
But groups may be opposed to one another, and individuals may be
opposed to one another; and an individual as a member of different
groups may be divided within himself, and in a true sense have
conflicting selves, or be a relatively disintegrated individual. A
man may be one thing as a church member and another thing as a member
of the business community. The difference may be carried as if in
water-tight compartments, or it may become such a division as to entail
internal conflict. In these facts we have the ground of the common
antithesis set up between society and the individual. Then “society”
becomes an unreal abstraction and “_the_ individual” an equally unreal
one. Because _an_ individual can be disassociated from this, that and
the other grouping, since he need not be married, or be a church-member
or a voter, or belong to a club or scientific organization, there
grows up in the mind an image of a residual individual who is not a
member of any association at all. From this premise, and from this
only, there develops the unreal question of how individuals come to be
united in societies and groups: _the_ individual and _the_ social are
now opposed to each other, and there is the problem of “reconciling”
them. Meanwhile, the genuine problem is that of adjusting groups and
individuals to one another.
The unreal problem becomes particularly acute, as we have already noted
in another connection, in times of rapid social change, as when a
newly forming industrial grouping with its special needs and energies
finds itself in conflict with old established political institutions
and their demands. Then it is likely to be forgotten that the actual
problem is one of reconstruction of the ways and forms in which men
unite in associated activity. The scene presents itself as the struggle
of the individual as such to liberate himself from society as such and
to claim his inherent or “natural” self-possessed and self-sufficing
rights. When the new mode of economic association has grown strong and
exercises an overweening and oppressive power over other groupings, the
old fallacy persists. The problem is now conceived as that of bringing
individuals as such under the control of society as a collectivity. It
should still be put as a problem of readjusting social relationships;
or, from the distributive side, as that of securing a more equable
liberation of the powers of all individual members of all groupings.
Thus our excursion has brought us back to the theme of method, in
the interest of which the excursion was taken. One reason for the
comparative sterility of discussion of social matters is because so
much intellectual energy has gone into the supposititious problem of
the relations of individualism and collectivism at large, wholesale,
and because the image of the antithesis infects so many specific
questions. Thereby thought is diverted from the only fruitful
questions, those of investigation into factual subject-matter, and
becomes a discussion of concepts. The “problem” of the relation of
the concept of authority to that of freedom, of personal rights to
social obligations, with only a subsumptive illustrative reference
to empirical facts, has been substituted for inquiry into the
_consequences_ of some particular distribution, under given conditions,
of specific freedoms and authorities, and for inquiry into what altered
distribution would yield more desirable consequences.
As we saw in our early consideration of the theme of the public, the
question of what transactions should be left as far as possible to
voluntary initiative and agreement and what should come under the
regulation of the public is a question of time, place and concrete
conditions that can be known only by careful observation and reflective
investigation. For it concerns consequences; and the nature of
consequences and the ability to perceive and act upon them varies with
the industrial and intellectual agencies which operate. A solution,
or distributive adjustment, needed at one time is totally unfitted
to another situation. That social “evolution” has been either from
collectivism to individualism or the reverse is sheer superstition. It
has consisted in a continuous re-distribution of social integrations
on the one hand and of capacities and energies of individuals on the
other. Individuals find themselves cramped and depressed by absorption
of their potentialities in some mode of association which has been
institutionalized and become dominant. They may think they are
clamoring for a purely personal liberty, but what they are doing is
to bring into being a greater liberty to share in other associations,
so that more of their individual potentialities will be released and
their personal experience enriched. Life has been impoverished, not
by a predominance of “society” in general over individuality, but by
a domination of one form of association, the family, clan, church,
economic institutions, over other actual and possible forms. On the
other hand, the problem of exercising “social control” over individuals
is in its reality that of regulating the doings and results of some
individuals in order that a larger number of individuals may have a
fuller and deeper experience. Since both ends can be intelligently
attained only by knowledge of actual conditions in their modes of
operation and their consequences, it may be confidently asserted that
the chief enemy of a social thinking which would count in public
affairs is the sterile and impotent, because totally irrelevant,
channels in which so much intellectual energy has been expended.
The second point with respect to method is closely related. Political
theories have shared in the absolutistic character of philosophy
generally. By this is meant something much more than philosophies of
the Absolute. Even professedly empirical philosophies have assumed
a certain finality and foreverness in their theories which may be
expressed by saying that they have been non-historical in character.
They have isolated their subject-matter from its connections, and
any isolated subject-matter becomes unqualified in the degree of its
disconnection. In social theory dealing with human nature, a certain
fixed and standardized “individual” has been postulated, from whose
assumed traits social phenomena could be deduced. Thus Mill says in
his discussion of the logic of the moral and social sciences: “The
laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws
of the actions and passions of human beings united together in the
social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men; their
actions and passions are obedient to the laws of _individual_ human
nature.”[13] Obviously what is ignored in such a statement is that “the
actions and passions” of individual men are in the concrete what they
are, their beliefs and purposes included, because of the social medium
in which they live; that they are influenced throughout by contemporary
and transmitted culture, whether in conformity or protest. What is
generic and the same everywhere is at best the organic structure of
man, his biological make-up. While it is evidently important to take
this into account, it is also evident that none of the _distinctive_
features of _human_ association can be deduced from it. Thus, in spite
of Mill’s horror of the metaphysical absolute, his leading social
conceptions were, logically, absolutistic. Certain social laws,
normative and regulative, at all periods and under all circumstances of
proper social life were assumed to exist.
The doctrine of evolution modified this idea of method only
superficially. For “evolution” was itself often understood
non-historically. That is, it was assumed that there is a predestined
course of fixed stages through which social development must proceed.
Under the influence of concepts borrowed from the physical science
of the time, it was taken for granted that the very possibility
of a social science stood or fell with the determination of fixed
uniformities. Now every such logic is fatal to free experimental social
inquiry. Investigation into empirical facts was undertaken, of course,
but its results had to fit into certain ready-made and second-hand
rubrics. When even _physical_ facts and laws are perceived and used,
social change takes place. The phenomena and laws are not altered,
but invention based upon them modifies the human situation. For there
is at once an effort to regulate their impact in life. The discovery
of malaria does not alter its existential causation, intellectually
viewed, but it does finally alter the facts from which the production
of malaria arises, through draining and oiling swamps, etc., and by
taking other measures of precaution. If the laws of economic cycles
of expansion and depression were understood, means would at once be
searched for to mitigate if not to do away with the swing. When men
have an idea of how social agencies work and their consequences are
wrought, they at once strive to secure consequences as far as desirable
and to avert them if undesirable. These are facts of the most ordinary
observation. But it is not often noted how fatal they are to the
identification of social with physical uniformities. “Laws” of social
life, when it is genuinely human, are like laws of engineering. If you
want certain results, certain means must be found and employed. The key
to the situation is a clear conception of consequences wanted, and of
the technique for reaching them, together with, of course, the state
of desires and aversions which causes some consequences to be wanted
rather than others. All of these things are functions of the prevalent
culture of the period.
While the backwardness of social knowledge and art is of course
connected with retarded knowledge of human nature, or psychology, it
is also absurd to suppose that an adequate psychological science would
flower in a control of human activities similar to the control which
physical science has procured of physical energies. For increased
knowledge of human nature would directly and in unpredictable ways
modify the workings of human nature, and lead to the need of new
methods of regulation, and so on without end. It is a matter of
analysis rather than of prophecy to say that the primary and chief
effect of a better psychology would be found in education. The growth
and diseases of grains and hogs are now recognized as proper subjects
of governmental subsidy and attention. Instrumental agencies for a
similar investigation of the conditions which make for the physical and
moral hygiene of the young are in a state of infancy. We spend large
sums of money for school buildings and their physical equipment. But
systematic expenditure of public funds for scientific inquiry into the
conditions which affect the mental and moral development of children is
just beginning, and demands for a large increase in this direction are
looked upon askance.
Again, it is reported that there are more beds in hospitals and asylums
for cases of mental disturbance and retardation than for all diseases
combined. The public pays generously to take care of the results of bad
conditions. But there is no comparable attention and willingness to
expend funds to investigate the causes of these troubles. The reason
for these anomalies is evident enough. There is no conviction that the
sciences of human nature are far enough advanced to make public support
of such activities worth while. A marked development of psychology and
kindred subjects would change this situation. And we have been speaking
only of antecedent conditions of education. To complete the picture
we have to realize the difference which would be made in the methods
of parents and teachers were there an adequate and generally shared
knowledge of human nature.
But such an educational development, though intrinsically precious
to the last degree, would not entail a control of human energies
comparable to that which already obtains of physical energies. To
imagine that it would is simply to reduce human beings to the plane of
inanimate things mechanically manipulated from without; it makes human
education something like the training of fleas, dogs and horses. What
stands in the way is not anything called “free-will,” but the fact that
such a change in educational methods would release new potentialities,
capable of all kinds of permutations and combinations, which would then
modify social phenomena, while this modification would in its turn
affect human nature and its educative transformation in a continuous
and endless procession.
The assimilation of human science to physical science represents,
in other words, only another form of absolutistic logic, a kind of
physical absolutism. We are doubtless but at the beginning of the
possibilities of control of the physical conditions of mental and moral
life. Physiological chemistry, increased knowledge of the nervous
system, of the processes and functions of glandular secretions, may in
time enable us to deal with phenomena of emotional and intellectual
disturbance before which mankind has been helpless. But control of
these conditions will not determine the uses to which human beings
will put their normalized potentialities. If any one supposes that it
will, let him consider the applications of such remedial or preventive
measures to a man in a state of savage culture and one in a modern
community. Each, as long as the conditions of the social medium
remained substantially unaltered, will still have his experience and
the direction of his restored energies affected by the objects and
instrumentalities of the human environment, and by what men at the time
currently prize and hold dear. The warrior and merchant would be better
warriors and merchants, more efficient, but warriors and merchants
still.
These considerations suggest a brief discussion of the effect of the
present absolutistic logic upon the method and aims of education,
not just in the sense of schooling but with respect to all the ways
in which communities attempt to shape the disposition and beliefs of
their members. Even when the processes of education do not aim at
the unchanged perpetuation of existing institutions, it is assumed
that there must be a mental picture of some desired end, personal
and social, which is to be attained, and that this conception of a
fixed determinate end ought to control educative processes. Reformers
share this conviction with conservatives. The disciples of Lenin and
Mussolini vie with the captains of capitalistic society in endeavoring
to bring about a formation of dispositions and ideas which will conduce
to a preconceived goal. If there is a difference, it is that the former
proceed more consciously. An experimental social method would probably
manifest itself first of all in surrender of this notion. Every care
would be taken to surround the young with the physical and social
conditions which best conduce, as far as freed knowledge extends, to
release of personal potentialities. The habits thus formed would have
entrusted to them the meeting of future social requirements and the
development of the future state of society. Then and then only would
all social agencies that are available operate as resources in behalf
of a bettered community life.
What we have termed the absolutistic logic ends, as far as method
in social matters is concerned, in a substitution of discussion of
concepts and their logical relations to one another for inquiry.
Whatever form it assumes, it results in strengthening the reign of
dogma. Their contents may vary, but dogma persists. At the outset we
noted in discussion of the state the influence of methods which look
for causal forces. Long ago, physical science abandoned this method and
took up that of detection of correlation of events. Our language and
our thinking is still saturated with the idea of laws which phenomena
“obey.” But in his actual procedures, the scientific inquirer into
physical events treats a law simply as a stable correlation of changes
in what happens, a statement of the way in which one phenomenon, or
some aspect or phase of it, varies when some other specified phenomenon
varies. “Causation” is an affair of historical sequence, of the order
in which a series of changes takes place. To know cause and effect is
to know, in the abstract, the formula of correlation in change, and, in
the concrete, a certain historical career of sequential events. The
appeal to causal forces at large not only misleads inquiry into social
facts, but it affects equally seriously the formation of purposes and
policies. The person who holds the doctrine of “individualism” or
“collectivism” has his program determined for him in advance. It is not
with him a matter of finding out the particular thing which needs to
be done and the best way, under the circumstances, of doing it. It is
an affair of applying a hard and fast doctrine which follows logically
from his preconception of the nature of ultimate causes. He is exempt
from the responsibility of discovering the concrete correlation of
changes, from the need of tracing particular sequences or histories of
events through their complicated careers. He knows in advance the sort
of thing which must be done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the
thinker knew in advance what must happen, so that all he had to do was
to supply a logical framework of definitions and classifications.
When we say that thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not
absolutistic, we have then in mind a certain logic of method,
not, primarily, the carrying on of experimentation like that of
laboratories. Such a logic involves the following factors: First,
that those concepts, general principles, theories and dialectical
developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge be
shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, that policies and
proposals for social action be treated as working hypotheses, not
as programs to be rigidly adhered to and executed. They will be
experimental in the sense that they will be entertained subject to
constant and well-equipped observation of the consequences they entail
when acted upon, and subject to ready and flexible revision in the
light of observed consequences. The social sciences, if these two
stipulations are fulfilled, will then be an apparatus for conducting
investigation, and for recording and interpreting (organizing) its
results. The apparatus will no longer be taken to be itself knowledge,
but will be seen to be intellectual means of making discoveries of
phenomena having social import and understanding their meaning.
Differences of opinion in the sense of differences of judgment as to
the course which it is best to follow, the policy which it is best
to try out, will still exist. But opinion in the sense of beliefs
formed and held in the absence of evidence will be reduced in quantity
and importance. No longer will views generated in view of special
situations be frozen into absolute standards and masquerade as eternal
truths.
This phase of the discussion may be concluded by consideration of
the relation of experts to a democratic public. A negative phase of
the earlier argument for political democracy has largely lost its
force. For it was based upon hostility to dynastic and oligarchic
aristocracies, and these have largely been bereft of power. The
oligarchy which now dominates is that of an economic class. It claims
to rule, not in virtue of birth and hereditary status, but in virtue
of ability in management and of the burden of social responsibilities
which it carries, in virtue of the position which superior abilities
have conferred upon it. At all events, it is a shifting, unstable
oligarchy, rapidly changing its constituents, who are more or less
at the mercy of accidents they cannot control and of technological
inventions. Consequently, the shoe is now on the other foot. It is
argued that the check upon the oppressive power of this particular
oligarchy lies in an intellectual aristocracy, not in appeal to an
ignorant, fickle mass whose interests are superficial and trivial, and
whose judgments are saved from incredible levity only when weighted
down by heavy prejudice.
It may be argued that the democratic movement was essentially
transitional. It marked the passage from feudal institutions to
industrialism, and was coincident with the transfer of power from
landed proprietors, allied to churchly authorities, to captains of
industry, under conditions which involved an emancipation of the masses
from legal limitations which had previously hemmed them in. But, so it
is contended in effect, it is absurd to convert this legal liberation
into a dogma which alleges that release from old oppressions confers
upon those emancipated the intellectual and moral qualities which fit
them for sharing in regulation of affairs of state. The essential
fallacy of the democratic creed, it is urged, is the notion that a
historic movement which effected an important and desirable release
from restrictions is either a source or a proof of capacity in those
thus emancipated to rule, when in fact there is no factor common in the
two things. The obvious alternative is rule by those intellectually
qualified, by expert intellectuals.
This revival of the Platonic notion that philosophers should be kings
is the more taking because the idea of experts is substituted for that
of philosophers, since philosophy has become something of a joke, while
the image of the specialist, the expert in operation, is rendered
familiar and congenial by the rise of the physical sciences and by
the conduct of industry. A cynic might indeed say that the notion
is a pipe-dream, a revery entertained by the intellectual class in
compensation for an impotence consequent upon the divorce of theory
and practice, upon the remoteness of specialized science from the
affairs of life: the gulf being bridged not by the intellectuals but by
inventors and engineers hired by captains of industry. One approaches
the truth more nearly when one says that the argument proves too much
for its own cause. If the masses are as intellectually irredeemable
as its premise implies, they at all events have both too many desires
and too much power to permit rule by experts to obtain. The very
ignorance, bias, frivolity, jealousy, instability, which are alleged
to incapacitate them from share in political affairs, unfit them still
more for passive submission to rule by intellectuals. Rule by an
economic class may be disguised from the masses; rule by experts could
not be covered up. It could be made to work only if the intellectuals
became the willing tools of big economic interests. Otherwise they
would have to ally themselves with the masses, and that implies, once
more, a share in government by the latter.
A more serious objection is that expertness is most readily attained in
specialized technical matters, matters of administration and execution
which postulate that general policies are already satisfactorily
framed. It is assumed that the policies of the experts are in the main
both wise and benevolent, that is, framed to conserve the genuine
interests of society. The final obstacle in the way of any aristocratic
rule is that in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the
masses, the best do not and cannot remain the best, the wise cease to
be wise. It is impossible for high-brows to secure a monopoly of such
knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs. In the
degree in which they become a specialized class, they are shut off from
knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve.
The strongest point to be made in behalf of even such rudimentary
political forms as democracy has already attained, popular voting,
majority rule and so on, is that to some extent they involve a
consultation and discussion which uncover social needs and troubles.
This fact is the great asset on the side of the political ledger. De
Tocqueville wrote it down almost a century ago in his survey of the
prospects of democracy in the United States. Accusing a democracy of
a tendency to prefer mediocrity in its elected rulers, and admitting
its exposure to gusts of passion and its openness to folly, he pointed
out in effect that popular government is educative as other modes of
political regulation are not. It forces a recognition that there are
common interests, even though the recognition of what they are is
confused; and the need it enforces of discussion and publicity brings
about some clarification of what they are. The man who wears the shoe
knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert
shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.
Popular government has at least created public spirit even if its
success in informing that spirit has not been great.
A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to
become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in
social matters is not knowledge at all. The ballot is, as often said, a
substitute for bullets. But what is more significant is that counting
of heads compels prior recourse to methods of discussion, consultation
and persuasion, while the essence of appeal to force is to cut short
resort to such methods. Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as
foolish as its critics charge it with being. But it never is _merely_
majority rule. As a practical politician, Samuel J. Tilden, said a long
time ago: “The means by which a majority comes to be a majority is
the more important thing”: antecedent debates, modification of views
to meet the opinions of minorities, the relative satisfaction given
the latter by the fact that it has had a chance and that next time it
may be successful in becoming a majority. Think of the meaning of the
“problem of minorities” in certain European states, and compare it with
the status of minorities in countries having popular government. It
is true that all valuable as well as new ideas begin with minorities,
perhaps a minority of one. The important consideration is that
opportunity be given that idea to spread and to become the possession
of the multitude. No government by experts in which the masses do
not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be
anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few. And
the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative
specialists to take account of the needs. The world has suffered more
from leaders and authorities than from the masses.
The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods
and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is _the_
problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends
essentially upon freeing and perfecting the processes of inquiry and of
dissemination of their conclusions. Inquiry, indeed, is a work which
devolves upon experts. But their expertness is not shown in framing and
executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon
which the former depend. They are technical experts in the sense that
scientific investigators and artists manifest _expertise_. It is not
necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry
on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the
ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others
upon common concerns.
It is easy to exaggerate the amount of intelligence and ability
demanded to render such judgments fitted for their purpose. In the
first place, we are likely to form our estimate on the basis of
present conditions. But indubitably one great trouble at present is
that the data for good judgment are lacking; and no innate faculty of
mind can make up for the absence of facts. Until secrecy, prejudice,
bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance
are replaced by inquiry and publicity, we have no way of telling how
apt for judgment of social policies the existing intelligence of the
masses may be. It would certainly go much further than at present.
In the second place, _effective_ intelligence is not an original,
innate endowment. No matter what are the differences in native
intelligence (allowing for the moment that intelligence can be native),
the actuality of mind is dependent upon the education which social
conditions effect. Just as the specialized mind and knowledge of the
past is embodied in implements, utensils, devices and technologies
which those of a grade of intelligence which could not produce them can
now intelligently use, so it will be when currents of public knowledge
blow through social affairs.
The level of action fixed by _embodied_ intelligence is always the
important thing. In savage culture a superior man will be superior
to his fellows, but his knowledge and judgment will lag in many
matters far behind that of an inferiorly endowed person in an advanced
civilization. Capacities are limited by the objects and tools at hand.
They are still more dependent upon the prevailing habits of attention
and interest which are set by tradition and institutional customs.
Meanings run in the channels formed by instrumentalities of which, in
the end, language, the vehicle of thought as well as of communication,
is the most important. A mechanic can discourse of ohms and amperes
as Sir Isaac Newton could not in his day. Many a man who has tinkered
with radios can judge of things which Faraday did not dream of. It is
aside from the point to say that if Newton and Faraday were now here,
the amateur and mechanic would be infants beside them. The retort only
brings out the point: the difference made by different objects to think
of and by different meanings in circulation. A more intelligent state
of social affairs, one more informed with knowledge, more directed by
intelligence, would not improve original endowments one whit, but it
would raise the level upon which the intelligence of all operates. The
height of this level is much more important for judgment of public
concerns than are differences in intelligence quotients. As Santayana
has said: “Could a better system prevail in our lives a better order
would establish itself in our thinking. It has not been for want of
keen senses, or personal genius, or a constant order in the outer
world, that mankind has fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and
superstition. It has been for want of good character, good example, and
good government.” The notion that intelligence is a personal endowment
or personal attainment is the great conceit of the intellectual class,
as that of the commercial class is that wealth is something which they
personally have wrought and possess.
A point which concerns us in conclusion passes beyond the field of
intellectual method, and trenches upon the question of practical
re-formation of social conditions. In its deepest and richest sense
a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse.
This is why the family and neighborhood, with all their deficiencies,
have always been the chief agencies of nurture, the means by which
dispositions are stably formed and ideas acquired which laid hold on
the roots of character. The Great Community, in the sense of free and
full intercommunication, is conceivable. But it can never possess
all the qualities which mark a local community. It will do its final
work in ordering the relations and enriching the experience of local
associations. The invasion and partial destruction of the life of the
latter by outside uncontrolled agencies is the immediate source of
the instability, disintegration and restlessness which characterize
the present epoch. Evils which are uncritically and indiscriminately
laid at the door of industrialism and democracy might, with greater
intelligence, be referred to the dislocation and unsettlement of local
communities. Vital and thorough attachments are bred only in the
intimacy of an intercourse which is of necessity restricted in range.
Is it possible for local communities to be stable without being static,
progressive without being merely mobile? Can the vast, innumerable
and intricate currents of trans-local associations be so banked and
conducted that they will pour the generous and abundant meanings of
which they are potential bearers into the smaller intimate unions
of human beings living in immediate contact with one another? Is it
possible to restore the reality of the lesser communal organizations
and to penetrate and saturate their members with a sense of local
community life? There is at present, at least in theory, a movement
away from the principle of territorial organization to that of
“functional,” that is to say, occupational, organization. It is true
enough that older forms of territorial association do not satisfy
present needs. It is true that ties formed by sharing in common work,
whether in what is called industry or what are called professions,
have now a force which formerly they did not possess. But these ties
can be counted upon for an enduring and stable organization, which
at the same time is flexible and moving, only as they grow out of
immediate intercourse and attachment. The theory, as far as it relies
upon associations which are remote and indirect, would if carried into
effect soon be confronted by all the troubles and evils of the present
situation in a transposed form. There is no substitute for the vitality
and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment.
It is said, and said truly, that for the world’s peace it is necessary
that we understand the peoples of foreign lands. How well do we
understand, I wonder, our next door neighbors? It has also been said
that if a man love not his fellow man whom he has seen, he cannot
love the God whom he has not seen. The chances of regard for distant
peoples being effective as long as there is no close neighborhood
experience to bring with it insight and understanding of neighbors do
not seem better. A man who has not been seen in the daily relations of
life may inspire admiration, emulation, servile subjection, fanatical
partisanship, hero worship; but not love and understanding, save as
they radiate from the attachments of a near-by union. Democracy must
begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
It is outside the scope of our discussion to look into the prospects
of the reconstruction of face-to-face communities. But there is
something deep within human nature itself which pulls toward settled
relationships. Inertia and the tendency toward stability belong to
emotions and desires as well as to masses and molecules. That happiness
which is full of content and peace is found only in enduring ties with
others, which reach to such depths that they go below the surface
of conscious experience to form its undisturbed foundation. No one
knows how much of the frothy excitement of life, of mania for motion,
of fretful discontent, of need for artificial stimulation, is the
expression of frantic search for something to fill the void caused by
the loosening of the bonds which hold persons together in immediate
community of experience. If there is anything in human psychology to be
counted upon, it may be urged that when man is satiated with restless
seeking for the remote which yields no enduring satisfaction, the human
spirit will return to seek calm and order within itself. This, we
repeat, can be found only in the vital, steady, and deep relationships
which are present only in an immediate community.
The psychological tendency can, however, manifest itself only when
it is in harmonious conjunction with the objective course of events.
Analysis finds itself in troubled waters if it attempts to discover
whether the tide of events is turning away from dispersion of energies
and acceleration of motion. Physically and externally, conditions have
made, of course, for concentration; the development of urban, at the
expense of rural, populations; the corporate organization of aggregated
wealth, the growth of all sorts of organizations, are evidence enough.
But enormous organization is compatible with demolition of the ties
that form local communities and with substitution of impersonal bonds
for personal unions, with a flux which is hostile to stability. The
character of our cities, of organized business and the nature of the
comprehensive associations in which individuality is lost, testify also
to this fact. Yet there are contrary signs. “Community” and community
activities are becoming words to conjure with. The local is the
ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists. It is easy to
point to many signs which indicate that unconscious agencies as well as
deliberate planning are making for such an enrichment of the experience
of local communities as will conduce to render them genuine centers of
the attention, interest and devotion for their constituent members.
The unanswered question is how far these tendencies will reëstablish
the void left by the disintegration of the family, church and
neighborhood. We cannot predict the outcome. But we can assert with
confidence that there is nothing intrinsic in the forces which have
effected uniform standardization, mobility and remote invisible
relationships that is fatally obstructive to the return movement of
their consequences into the local homes of mankind. Uniformity and
standardization may provide an underlying basis for differentiation and
liberation of individual potentialities. They may sink to the plane
of unconscious habituations, taken for granted in the mechanical
phases of life, and deposit a soil from which personal susceptibilities
and endowments may richly and stably flower. Mobility may in the end
supply the means by which the spoils of remote and indirect interaction
and interdependence flow back into local life, keeping it flexible,
preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past,
and furnishing it with the elements of a variegated and many-hued
experience. Organization may cease to be taken as an end in itself.
Then it will no longer be mechanical and external, hampering the
free play of artistic gifts, fettering men and women with chains of
conformity, conducing to abdication of all which does not fit into
the automatic movement of organization as a self-sufficing thing.
Organization as a means to an end would reënforce individuality and
enable it to be securely itself by enduing it with resources beyond its
unaided reach.
Whatever the future may have in store, one thing is certain. Unless
local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately
resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself. But if
it be re-established, it will manifest a fullness, variety and freedom
of possession and enjoyment of meanings and goods unknown in the
contiguous associations of the past. For it will be alive and flexible
as well as stable, responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in
which it is enmeshed. While local, it will not be isolated. Its larger
relationships will provide an exhaustible and flowing fund of meanings
upon which to draw, with assurance that its drafts will be honored.
Territorial states and political boundaries will persist; but they will
not be barriers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from
his fellows; they will not be hard and fast divisions whereby external
separation is converted into inner jealousy, fear, suspicion and
hostility. Competition will continue, but it will be less rivalry for
acquisition of material goods, and more an emulation of local groups
to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual
and artistic wealth. If the technological age can provide mankind with
a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in
a humane age. It will take its place as an instrumentality of shared
and communicated experience. But without passage through a machine age,
mankind’s hold upon what is needful as the precondition of a free,
flexible and many-colored life is so precarious and inequitable that
competitive scramble for acquisition and frenzied use of the results of
acquisition for purposes of excitation and display will be perpetuated.
We have said that consideration of this particular condition of the
generation of democratic communities and an articulate democratic
public carries us beyond the question of intellectual method into that
of practical procedure. But the two questions are not disconnected.
The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be
solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a
reality. Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication
by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a
vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech.
Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect
association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of
the creation of a true public. But it and its results are but tools
after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face
relationships by means of direct give and take. Logic in its
fulfillment recurs to the primitive sense of the word: dialogue. Ideas
which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but
soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought. It, like
the acquisition of material wealth, marks a diversion of the wealth
created by associated endeavor and exchange to private ends. It is more
genteel, and it is called more noble. But there is no difference in
kind.
In a word, that expansion and reënforcement of personal understanding
and judgment by the cumulative and transmitted intellectual wealth of
the community which may render nugatory the indictment of democracy
drawn on the basis of the ignorance, bias and levity of the masses, can
be fulfilled only in the relations of personal intercourse in the local
community. The connections of the ear with vital and out-going thought
and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the
eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator. Publication is
partial and the public which results is partially informed and formed
until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth. There is no
limit to the liberal expansion and confirmation of limited personal
intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social
intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another
in the communications of the local community. That and that only
gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap
of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its
communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses
the local community as its medium.
FOOTNOTES
[1] W. H. Hudson, “A Traveller in Little Things,” pp. 110–112.
[2] Judges make rules of law. On the “will” theory this is an
encroachment on the legislative function. Not so, if the judges further
define conditions of action.
[3] “A Treatise on Human Nature,” Part II, sec. vii.
[4] Hocking, “Man and the State,” p. 51.
[5] Ayers, “Science: The False Messiah,” Chapter IV, The Lure of
Machinery.
[6] The one obvious exception concerns the tools of waging war. With
respect to them, the state has often shown itself as greedy as it has
been reluctant and behindhand with reference to other inventions.
[7] This is a convenient place for making explicit a qualification
which has to be understood throughout but which is slighted in the
text. The words “government” and “officers” are taken functionally, not
in terms of some particular structure which is so familiar to us that
it leaps to the eyes when these words are used. Both words in their
functional meaning are much wider in application than what is meant
when we speak, say, of the government and officers of Great Britain or
the United States. In households, for example, there have usually been
rule and “heads”; the parents, for most purposes the father, have been
officers of the family interest. The “patriarchal family” presents an
emphatic intensification, on account of comparative isolation of the
household from other social forms, of what exists in lesser degree in
almost all families. The same sort of remark applies to the use of
the term “states,” in connection with publics. The text is concerned
with modern conditions, but the hypothesis propounded is meant to hold
good generally. So to the patent objection that the state is a very
modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of
those _structures_ which go by the name of states, yet all history, or
almost all, records the exercise of analogous _functions_. The argument
concerns these functions and the mode of their operation, no matter
what word be used, though for the sake of brevity the word “state,”
like the words “government” and “officer,” has been freely employed.
[8] This last position promptly called forth a protest from the head of
the utilitarian school, Jeremy Bentham.
[9] C. H. Cooley, “Social Organization,” Ch. iii, on “Primary Groups.”
[10] See Walter Lippmann’s “The Phantom Public.” To this as well as
to his “Public Opinion,” I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness, not
only as to this particular point, but for ideas involved in my entire
discussion even when it reaches conclusions diverging from his.
[11] The most adequate discussion of this ideal with which I am
acquainted is T. V. Smith’s “The Democratic Way of Life.”
[12] The religious character of nationalism has been forcibly brought
out by Carleton Hayes, in his “Essays on Nationalism,” especially Chap.
IV.
[13] J. S. Mill, Logic, Book VI, ch. 7, sec. I. Italics mine.
INDEX
Absolutism, in method, 194–202
Amusements, rivals to political interest, 139
Anarchism, 26
Aristotle, 4, 8, 138
Art, of communication, 182–84
Association, a universal fact, 22–23, 34, 151, 181;
distinctive traits of human, 24;
revolt against, 88, 98–100;
economic, 105–07;
and democracy, 143;
rigid and flexible, 148;
distinguished from community, 151–53;
domination of isolated, 194;
territorial and functional, 212–13.
See _Community_, _Groups_, _Society_
Attachment, a political need, 140, 214
Ayers, C. E., 59 n.
Bentham, J., 54 n.
Biological, and social, 11–12, 152, 195
Business, rival to political interest, 138;
political control by, 182.
See _Economic Forces_
Carlyle, T., 102, 110
Causal forces, and state, 9, 17–21, 25, 36, 37, 47, 53, 65, 66;
versus the causal order, 201–02
Child Labor Amendment, 121
Common Interest, nature of, 17, 34–35.
See _Consequences, Public_
Communication, a public function, 60, 208;
social necessity of, 152, 217–19;
necessary to knowledge, 176–79;
an art, 182–84.
See _Symbols_
Community, 38;
and society, 98, 157;
conditioning wants, 105–06;
and communication, 152–54;
importance of local, 211–19.
See _Great Society_
Comparative Method, 47
Conjoint Behavior, see _Association_
Conscience, private, origin of, 49–50
Consequences, importance of for politics, 12–13, 15, 17, 24–25, 27,
32, 39, 43, 47, 65, 126, 156, 197;
effect of expansion, 47–57;
and rules of law, 56;
effect of enduring, 57–62;
effect of irreparable, 62–64;
relation to state and government, 66–69;
to antithesis of individual and social, 193
Control, political, 12, 16;
of human nature, 197–99
Cooley, C. H., 97 n.
Corporations, illustration of relation of individual and social, 190
Democracy, political, 77;
significance of, 83;
historic genesis, 83–87;
alleged unity, 83;
pure, 94;
and “individualism”, 86–96;
inchoate, 109;
pessimism about, 110;
American, 111–15;
as a moral idea, 143–44;
machinery of
political, 143–46;
nature of ideal, 147–51;
and experts, 203–08;
and local community, 212
Descartes, R., 88
De Tocqueville, 20
Direct Action, 31
Dissemination, and social knowledge, 176–77;
physical means of, 179;
and art, 182–84.
See _Communication_
Dynastic States, 89
Economic Determinism, 118–89, 155–56
Economic Forces and Politics, 89–93, 98, 100, 103–07, 114, 118–20,
129–31, 141–42, 144, 155, 175, 182
Education, and social control, 197–99;
and absolutistic method, 200;
and political democracy, 206–08
Electoral College, 111
Emerson, R. W., 217
Equality, nature of, 149–50
Experimental Method, in politics, 194–202;
defined, 203
Experts, importance of, 123–25, 136–37;
and democracy, 203–04
Factions, 119
Facts, and meanings, 3;
physical and social, 6–7, 11–12;
and theories, 17
Farmers, condition of, 129–30
Gerontocracy, 78
Government, and the public, 27–28, 32, 33, 37, 65–69;
as representative, 76;
dynastic, 81–82;
fear of, 86, 90, 92;
economic control of, 107;
and opinion, 192–93
Great Society, The, 96, 98, 126, 128, 142, 147, 155, 157, 184
Groups, and the state, 4, 26, 71–73;
local, 41–42.
See _Community_
Habit, political effects, 61, 169;
and “individualism,” 158–61
Hayes, C., 170 n.
Hegel, G. W. F., 28, 71
History, continuity of, 161;
contemporaneous, 179
Hocking, W. E., quoted, 57
Hudson, W. H., quoted, 40–41
Hume, D., 56
Individual, antithesis to social, 13–15, 23, 63, 88, 147, 151,
186–191;
and acts, 18, 21;
and officials, 18, 75, 82;
and invention, 58;
economic, 91;
as fiction, 102, 157–58;
defined, 186–88
Individualism, origin of, 22, 87–94;
and private property, 61;
explanation of, 98–102;
influence, 116;
economic, 134;
and collectivism, 186–193;
and method, 195.
See _Psychology_
Instincts, and social theory, 9–12
Intelligence, necessary for social facts, 12, 24, 151–62, 188;
and democracy, 208–10;
embodied, 200–01.
See _Consequences_, _Knowledge_
Interdependence, 155
James, W., quoted, 159–60
Justice, and property, 92
Kings’s Peace, 48
Knowledge, political, 162–67;
divided, 175;
and communication, 176–79, 218–19
Labor Legislation, 62
_Laissez-faire_, 91, 134
Law, not command, 53–54;
nature of, 54–57;
“natural,” 90, 95, 102, 155;
social and physical, 196–97
Legal Institutions, 16, 47
Liberalism, 134
Liberty, made an end in itself, 86;
and “individualism,” 98–100, 192–94;
nature of, 150;
of thought, 168–70;
and uniformity, 215–16
Lippmann, W., 116 n, 158
Locke, J., on natural rights, 87
Macaulay, 102
Majorities and Minorities, 207–08
Materialism, 173–74
Method, problem of, 192–203
Mill, J., theory of democratic government, 93–95
Mill, J. S., 195
Mobility, social effect, 140
Nationalism, 170
News, 179–81
Officers, agents of public, 16, 17, 33, 35, 67–68, 75;
dual capacity, 77, 82;
selection of, 78–82
Opinion, 177, 179
Parties, 119–21
Paternalism, 62
Perception, see _Intelligence, Consequences_
Pioneer Conditions, effect on American democracy, 111
Pluralism, political, 73–74
_Populus_, defined, 16
Private, defined, 15.
See _Public_.
Prohibition, 132–33
Propaganda, 181–82
Property, and government, 91–93.
See _Economic Forces_.
Psychology, of habit, 61, 159–60;
of individualism, 88;
of private consciousness, 100, 158;
social effects of science of, 197–99
Public, and private, 12–17, 47–52;
and political agencies, 31, 35, 38, 67;
marks of, 39–64;
ownership, 61;
democratic, 77;
education, 112–13;
eclipse of, 115, 122, 131, 137, 185;
problem of, 125, 185, 208, 216;
complexity of, 126;
as intellectual problem, 152;
and publicity, 167–171, 219;
and opinion, 177
Railways, and government, 133–34
Reason, and the state, 20;
and law, 55–57
Religion, and social institutions, 41, 49, 169–70
Rights, natural, 87, 95, 102
Rousseau, J. J., 155
Rulers, see _Officers, Government_
Santayana, G., quoted, 211
Science, distinction from knowledge, 163–65, 172;
social and physical, 171, 179, 199;
and the press, 181–82;
applied, 172–76;
method, 201
Smith, Adam, 13, 89
Smith, T. V., 147 n
“Socialization,” 70
Society, human, 24–25;
and states, 26–29, 69–74, 147–49.
See _Association_, _Community_, _Consequences_, _Great Society_,
_Groups_, _Individual_, _Public_.
Spencer, H., 63, 79
Symbols, social import of, 141–42, 152–54, 218
Tariff, 131–32
Theocracy, 41, 49, 80
Tilden, S. J., 208
Theories, political, 4, 5, 8, 85.
See _Causal Forces_, _Economic Forces_, _Individualism_, _Mill,
J._, _Utilitarianism_
Toleration, 49–51
Tradition, revolt against, 86
Utilitarianism, 91
Wallas, G., 96
Wants, individualistic theory of, 102;
socially conditioned, 103–04
War, and selection of rulers, 79;
the World, 127–28
Whitman, Walt, 184
Will, as cause of state, 20, 38;
and the command theory of law, 53;
and government, 68;
general, 153
Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 96–97
Workers, political neglect and emancipation, 99–100.
See _Economic Forces_
Transcriber’s Notes
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages on which they were
referenced, have been collected, renumbered, and placed just before the
Index.
Some page numbers in the Table of Contents are out of sequence, as they
were in the original book.
The correct spelling of the name, “Ayers”, likely is “Ayres”.