and Drift Mastery-Walter Lippman Introducation In the early months of 1914 widespread unemployment gave the anarchists in New York City an unusual opportunity for agitation. The newspapers and the police became hysterical, men were clubbed and arrested on the slightest provocation, meetings were dispersed. The issue was shifted, of course, from unemployment to the elementary rights of free speech and assemblage. Then suddenly, the city administration, acting through a new police commissioner, took the matter in hand, suppressed official lawlessness, and guaranteed the men who were conducting the agitation their full rights. This had a most disconcerting effect on the anarchists. They were suddenly stripped of all the dramatic effect that belongs to a clash with the police. They had to go back to the real issue of unemployment, and give some message to the men who had been following them. But they had no message to give: they knew what they were against but not what they were for, and their intellectual situation was as uncomfortable as one of those bad dreams in which you find yourself half-clothed in a public place. Without a tyrant to attack an immature democracy is always somewhat bewildered. Yet we have to face the fact in America that what thwarts the growth of our civilization is not the uncanny, malicious contrivance of the plutocracy, but the faltering method, the distracted soul, and the murky vision of what we call grandiloquently the will of the people. If we flounder, it is not because the old order is strong, but because the new one is weak. Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is not followed by a cooperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk. The issues that we face are very different from those of the last century and a half. The difference, I think, might be summed up roughly this way: those who went before inherited a conservatism and overthrew it; we inherit freedom, and have to use it. The sanctity of property, the patriarchal family, hereditary caste, the dogma of sin, obedience to authority, the rock of ages, in brief, has been blasted for us. Those who are young today are born into a world in which the foundations of the older order survive only as habits or by default. So Americans can carry through their purposes when they have them. If the standpatter is still powerful amongst us it is because we have not learned to use our power, and direct it to fruitful ends. The American conservative, it seems to me, fills the vacuum where democratic purpose should be. So far as we are concerned, then, the case is made out against absolutism, commercial oligarchy, and unquestioned creeds. The rebel program is stated. Scientific invention and blind social currents have made the old authority impossible in fact, the artillery fire of the iconoclasts has shattered its prestige. We inherit a rebel tradition. The dominant forces in our world are not the sacredness of property, nor the intellectual leadership of the priest; they are not the divinity of
the constitution, the glory of industrial push, Victorian sentiment, New England respectability, the Republican Party, or John D. Rockefeller. Our time, of course, believes in change. The adjective "progressive" is what we like, and the word "new," be it the New Nationalism of Roosevelt, the New Freedom of Wilson, or the New Socialism of the syndicalists. The conservatives are more lonely than the pioneers, for almost any prophet today can have disciples. The leading thought of our world has ceased to regard commercialism either as permanent or desirable, and the only real question among intelligent people is how business methods are to be altered, not whether they are to be altered. For no one, unafflicted with invincible ignorance, desires to preserve our economic system in its existing form. The business man has stepped down from his shrine; he is no longer an oracle whose opinion on religion, science, and education is listened to dumbly as the valuable by-product of a paying business. We have scotched the romance of success. In the emerging morality the husband is not regarded as the proprietor of his wife, nor the parents as autocrats over the children. We are met by women who are "emancipated"; for what we hardly know. We are not stifled by a classical tradition in art: in fact artists today are somewhat stunned by the rarefied atmosphere of their freedom. There is a wide agreement among thinking people that the body is not a filthy thing, and that to implant in a child the sense of sin is a poor preparation for a temperate life. The battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted prejudice, but against the chaos of a new freedom. This chaos is our real problem. So if the younger critics are to meet the issues of their generation they must give their attention, not so much to the evils of authority, as to the weaknesses of democracy. But how is a man to go about doing such a task? He faces an enormously complicated world, full of stirring and confusion and ferment. He hears of movements and agitations, criticisms and reforms, knows people who are devoted to "causes," feels angry or hopeful at different times, goes to meetings, reads radical books, and accumulates a sense of uneasiness and pending change. He can't, however, live with any meaning unless he formulates for himself a vision of what is to come out of the unrest. I have tried in this book to sketch such a vision for myself. At first thought it must seem an absurdly presumptuous task. But it is a task that everyone has to attempt if he is to take part in the work of his time. For in so far as we can direct the future at all, we shall do it by laying what we see against what other people see. This doesn't mean the constructing of utopias. The kind of vision which will be fruitful to democratic life is one that is made out of latent promise in the actual world. There is a future contained in the trust and the union, the new status of women, and the moral texture of democracy. It is a future that can in a measure be foreseen and bent somewhat nearer to our hopes. A knowledge of it gives a sanction to our efforts, a part in a larger career, and an invaluable sense of our direction. We make our vision, and hold it ready for any amendment that experience suggests. It is not a fixed picture, a row of shiny ideals which we can exhibit to mankind, and say: Achieve these or be damned. All we can do is to search the world as we find it, extricate the forces that seem to move it, and surround them with criticism and suggestion. Such a vision will inevitably reveal the bias of its author; that is to say it will be a human
hypothesis, not an oracular revelation. But if the hypothesis is honest and alive it should cast a little light upon our chaos. It should help us to cease revolving in the mere routine of the present or floating in a private utopia. For a vision of latent hope would be woven of vigorous strands; it would be concentrated on the crucial points of contemporary life, on that living zone where the present is passing into the future. It is the region where thought and action count. Too far ahead there is nothing but your dream; just behind, there is nothing but your memory. But in the unfolding present, man can be creative if his vision is gathered from the promise of actual things. The day is past, I believe, when anybody can pretend to have laid down an inclusive or a final analysis of the democratic problem. Everyone is compelled to omit infinitely more than he can deal with; everyone is compelled to meet the fact that a democratic vision must be made by the progressive collaboration of many people. Thus I have touched upon the industrial problem at certain points that seem to me of outstanding importance, but there are vast sections and phases of industrial enterprise that pass unnoticed. The points I have raised are big in the world I happen to live in, but obviously they are not the whole world. It is necessary, also, to inquire how "practical" you can be in a book of generalizations. That amounts to asking how detailed you can be. Well, it is impossible when you mention a minimum wage law, for example, to append a draft of the bill and a concrete set of rules for its administration. In human problems especially there is a vagueness which no one can escape entirely. Even the most voluminous study in three volumes of some legal question does not meet at every point the actual difficulties of the lawyer in a particular case. Generalization is always rough, and never entirely accurate. But it can be useful if it is made with a sense of responsibility to action. I have tried, therefore, to avoid gratuitously fine sentiments; I have tried to suggest nothing that with the information at my command doesn't seem at least probable. This book, then, is an attempt to diagnose the current unrest and to arrive at some sense of what democracy implies. It begins with the obvious drift of our time and gropes for the conditions of mastery. I have tried in the essays that follow to enter the American problem at a few significant points in order to trace a little of the immense suggestion that radiates from them. 1 hope the book will leave the reader, as it does me, with a sense of the varied talents and opportunities, powers and organizations that may contribute to a conscious revolution. I have not been able to convince myself that one policy, one party, one class, or one set of tactics, is as fertile as human need. It would be very easy if such a belief were possible. It would save time and energy and no end of grubbing: just to keep on repeating what you've learnt, eloquent, supremely confident, with the issues clean, a good fight and an inevitable triumph: Marx, or Lincoln, or Jefferson with you always as guide, counsellor and friend. All the thinking done by troubled dead men for the cocksure living; no class to consider but your own; no work that counts but yours; every party but your party composed of fools and rascals; only a formula to accept and a specific fight to win, it would be easy. It might work on the moon. Walter Lippmann July 17, 1914.
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Chapter 2-New Incentives We say in conversation: 'Oh, no, he's not a business man, he has a profession.' That sounds like an invidious distinction, and no doubt there is a good deal of caste and snobbery in the sentiment. But that isn't all there is. We imagine that men enter the professions by undergoing a special discipline to develop a personal talent. So their lives seem more interesting, and their incentives more genuine. The business man may feel that the scientist content with a modest salary is an improvident ass. But he also feels some sense of inferiority in the scientist's presence. For at the bottom there is a difference of quality in their lives, in the scientist's a dignity which the scramble for profit can never assume. The professions may be shot through with rigidity, intrigue, and hypocrisy: they have, nevertheless, a community of interest, a sense of craftsmanship, and a more permanent place in the larger reaches of the imagination. It is a very pervasive and subtle difference, but sensitive business men are aware of it. They are not entirely proud of their profit-motive: bankers cover it with a sense of importance, others mitigate it with charity and public work, a few dream of railroad empires and wildernesses tamed, and some reveal their sense of unworthiness by shouting with extra emphasis that they are not in business for their health. It is a sharp commentary on the psychological insight of the orthodox economist who maintains that the only dependable motive is profit. Most people repeat that parrot-fashion, but in the rub they don't act upon it. When we began to hear recently that radium might subdue cancer, there was a fairly unanimous demand that the small supply available should be taken over by the government and removed from the sphere of private exploitation. The fact is that men don't trust the profiteer in a crisis, or wherever the interest at stake is of essential importance. So the public regards a professor on the make as a charlatan, a doctor on the make as a quack, a woman on the make as an adventuress, a politician on the make as a grafter, a writer on the make as a hack, a preacher on the make as a hypocrite. For in science, art, politics, religion, the home, love, education, the pure economic motive, profiteering, the incentive of business enterprise is treated as a public peril. Wherever civilization is seen to be in question, the Economic Man of commercial theorists is in disrepute. I am not speaking in chorus with those sentimentalists who regard industry as sordid. They merely inherit an ancient and parasitic contempt for labor. I do not say for one instant that money is the root of evil, that rich men are less honest than poor, or any equivalent nonsense. I am simply trying to point out that there is in everyday life a widespread rebellion against the profit motive. That rebellion is not an attack on the creation of wealth. It is, on the contrary, a discovery that private commercialism is an antiquated, feeble, mean, and unimaginative way of dealing with the possibilities of modern industry.
The change is, I believe, working itself out under our very eyes. Each day brings innumerable plans for removing activities from the sphere of profit. Endowment, subsidy, state aid, endless varieties of consumers' and producers' cooperatives; public enterprise they have been devised to save the theater, to save science and invention, education and journalism, the market basket and public utilities from the life-sapping direction of the commercialist. What is the meaning of these protean efforts to supersede the profiteer if not that his motive produces results hostile to use, and that he is a usurper where the craftsman, the inventor and the industrial statesman should govern? There is no sudden substitution of sacrifice for selfishness. These experiments are being tried because commercialism failed to serve civilization: the cooperator intrenched behind his wiser organization would smile if you regarded him as a patient lamb on the altar of altruism. He knows that the old economists were bad psychologists and superficial observers when they described man as a slot machine set in motion by inserting a coin. It is often asserted that modern industry could never have been created had it not been given over to untrammeled exploitation by commercial adventurers. That may be true. There is no great point in discussing the question as to what might have happened if something else had happened in the past. Modern industry was created by the profiteer, and here it is, the great fact in our lives, blackening our cities, fed with the lives of children, a tyrant over men and women, turning out enormous stocks of produce, good, bad, and horrible. We need waste no time arguing whether any other motive could have done the work. What we are finding is that however effective profit may have been for inaugurating modern industry, it is failing as a method of realizing its promise. That is why men turned to cooperatives and labor unions; that is why the state is interfering more and more. These blundering efforts are the assertion of all the men and all those elements of their natures which commercialism has thwarted. No amount of argument can wipe out the fact that the profit-system has never commanded the wholehearted assent of the people who lived under it. There has been a continuous effort to overthrow it. From Robert Owen to John Stuart Mill, from Ruskin through Morris to the varied radicalism of our day, from the millionaire with his peace palaces to Henry Ford with his generous profit-sharing, through the consumer organizing a cooperative market, to the workingmen defying their masters and the economists by pooling their labor, you find a deep stream of uneasiness, of human restlessness against those impositions which are supposed to rest on the eternal principles of man's being. There is scarcely any need to press the point, for no one questions the statement that endowment, cooperation, or public enterprise are attempts to employ motives different from those of the profiteer. The only dispute is whether these new motives can be extended and made effective. It is, I think, a crucial question. It lies at the root of most theoretical objection to socialism in the famous 'human nature' argument. Far from being a trivial question, as socialist debaters like to pretend, it is the hardest nut they have to crack. They are proposing a reconstruction of human society, and in all honesty, they cannot dodge the question as to whether man as we know him is capable of what they ask. Persian, Mexican, Turkish and Chinese experience with constitutional democracies ought to show how easy it is, as Macaulay said, for a tailor to measure the clothes of all his customers by the Apollo Belvedere. In a matter like this there is little to choose between the socialist who is sure his plan will work and the 'anti' who is sure it will not. The profitmotive is attacked, that is certain; that more or less successful attempts are made to supplant it is obvious, but how far we can go, that remains an open question. We cannot answer it by analogy: it does not follow from the success of a cooperative grocery that the Steel Trust can be governed
on the same plan. If our expectations are to have any solidity we must find evidence for them in those great private industries which seem to be completely in the hands of profit. That is where the issues join. The theater has always been a stamping ground for 'queer' people; scholars are notoriously incompetent in 'business'; scientific research pays so well, is so undeniably valuable, that few dare grudge it a subsidy; public utilities, like the highways, are by tradition not business propositions; and cooperatives have had a stormy history. There are, of course, the army and navy, which no man wishes to see organized by private individuals on the make. The most conservative have doubted recently whether armaments should be manufactured for profit. Yet such analogies, impressive as they are, offer nothing conclusive. But if we find that in the staple industries like steel and oil a silent revolution is in progress, then we have a basis for action. If there the profit-motive is decadent and new incentives ready, then perhaps what look like irresponsible outcries and wanton agitation will assume the dignity of a new morality. In the last thirty years or so American business has been passing through a reorganization so radical that we are just beginning to grasp its meaning. At any rate for those of us who are young today the business world of our grandfathers is a piece of history that we can reconstruct only with the greatest difficulty. We know that the huge corporation, the integrated industry, production for a world market, the network of combinations, pools and agreements have played havoc with the older political economy. The scope of human endeavor is enormously larger, and with it has come, as Graham Wallas says, a general change of social scale. Human thought has had to enlarge its scale in order to meet the situation. That is why it is not very illuminating to say, for example, that the principles of righteousness are eternal and that the solution of every problem is in the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule in a village, and the Golden Rule for a nation of a hundred million people are two very different things. I might possibly treat my neighbor as myself, but in this vast modern world the greatest problem that confronts me is to find my neighbor and treat him at all. The size and intricacy which we have to deal with have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple generalizations of our ancestors. After all, they were not prophets, and the conservative today makes an inhuman demand when he expects them to have laid out a business policy for a world they never even imagined. If anyone thinks that the Fathers might have done this let him sit down and write a political economy for the year 1950. 'Since the Sherman Act was passed (1890),' says President Van Hise of Wisconsin University, 'a child born has attained its majority.'' Indeed he has, much to the surprise of the unwilling parents. Now a new business world has produced a new kind of business man. For it requires a different order of ability to conduct the Steel Trust, than it did to manage a primitive blast-furnace by means of a partnership. The giant corporation calls for an equipment unlike any that business has ever known: the minds of the managers are occupied with problems beyond the circle of ideas that interested the old-fashioned chop-whiskered merchants. They have to preserve intimate contact with physicists and chemists, there is probably a research laboratory attached to the plant. They have to deal with huge masses of workingmen becoming every day more articulate. They have to think about the kind of training our public schools give. They have to consider very concretely the psychology of races, they come into contact with the structure of credit, and a money squeeze due to the Balkan war makes a difference in their rate of output. They have to keep thousands of ignorant stockholders somewhere in the back of their mind, people who don't know the difference between puddling and pudding. They may find themselves an issue in a political campaign, and if they are to be successful they must estimate correctly the social temper
of the community. Diplomacy is closely related to the selling department, and perhaps at times they may have to dabble in Latin-American revolutions. Mr. Louis D. Brandeis commented on this change of scale in his testimony before the Committee on Interstate Commerce. 'Anyone who critically analyzes a business learns this: that success or failure of an enterprise depends usually upon one man.... Now while organization has made it possible for the individual man to accomplish infinitely more than he could before, aided as he is by new methods of communication, by the stenographer, the telephone, and system, still there is a limit for what one man can do well... When, therefore, you increase your business to a very great extent, and the multitude of problems increases with its growth, you will find, in the first place, that the man at the head has a diminishing knowledge of the facts, and, in the second place, a diminishing opportunity of exercising careful judgment upon them.' In this statement, you will find, I believe, one of the essential reasons why a man of Mr. Brandeis's imaginative power has turned against the modern trust. He does not believe that men can deal efficiently with the scale upon which the modern business world is organized. He has said quite frankly, that economic size is in itself a danger to democracy. This means, I take it, that American voters are not intelligent enough or powerful enough to dominate great industrial organizations. So Mr. Brandeis, in company with many important thinkers the world over, has turned de-centralizer. The experience of history justifies his position in many respects: there is no doubt that an organization like the Holy Roman Empire was too large for the political capacity of human beings. It is probably true that the Morgan empire had become unwieldy. It may be that the Steel Trust is too large for efficiency. The splendid civilizations of the past have appeared in small cities. Today if you go about the world you find that the small countries like Belgium, Holland, Denmark, are the ones that have come nearest to a high level of social prosperity. I once heard George Russell ( ), the Irish poet and reformer, say that an ideal state would be about the size of County Cork. Yet it is not very helpful to insist that size is a danger, unless you can specify what size. The senators asked Mr. Brandeis that question. They pressed him to state approximately what percentage of an industry he considered an effective unit. He hesitated between ten per cent and forty per cent, and could not commit himself. Obviously, or how could Mr. Brandeis be expected to know? Adam Smith thought the corporations of his day doomed to failure on the very same grounds that Mr. Brandeis urges against the modern corporation. Now the million dollar organization is not too large for efficiency and the billion dollar one may be. The ideal unit may fall somewhere between? Where? That is a problem which experiments alone can decide, experiments conducted by experts in the new science of administration. The development of that science is the only answer to the point Mr. Brandeis raises. Remarkable results have already been produced. Every one of us, for example, must wonder at times how the President of the United States ever does all the things the papers say he does. When, for example, does the man sleep? And is he omniscient? The fact is that administration is becoming an applied science, capable of devising executive methods for dealing with tremendous units. No doubt the
President with his increasing responsibilities is an overworked man. No doubt there are trusts badly administered. No doubt there are inflated monopolies created for purely financial reasons. But just what the limits of administrative science are, a legislature is no more capable of determining than was Mr. Brandeis. Only experience, only trial and ingenuity, can demonstrate, and in a research so young and so swift in its progress, any effort to assign by law an arbitrary limit is surely the most obvious meddling. Say to-day that one unit of business is impossible, tomorrow you may be confronted with an undreamt success. Here if anywhere is a place where negative prophecy is futile. It is well to remember the classic case of that great scientist Simon Newcomb, who said that man would never fly. Two years before that statement was made, the Wright brothers had made secret flights. It may well be that the best unit is smaller than some of the modern trusts. It does not follow that we must break up industry into units of administration whose ideal efficiency is spent in competing with one another. I can understand, for example, the desire of many people to see Europe composed of a larger number of small nations. But I take it that everyone wishes these small nations to cooperate in the creation of a common European civilization. So it is with business. The unit of administration may be whatever efficiency demands. It may be that the steel industry would gain if it were conducted by forty corporations. But at the same time there are advantages in common action which we cannot afford to abandon. Technical improvement must be for the whole industry, the labor market must be organized and made stable, output must be adjusted to a common plan. The appearance of federal organization seems to suggest a possible compromise in which the administrative need for decentralization is combined with the social demand for a unified industrial policy. No one, surely, proposes to revive the little business monarch who brooded watchfully over every operation in factory and office, called his workingmen by their pet names, and was impelled at almost every turn by Adam Smith's 'natural propensity to truck and barter.' For just as in political government 'the President' does a hundred things every day he may never even hear of, just as the English Crown acts constantly through some unknown civil servant at $1,500 a year, so in big business, the real government is passing into a hierarchy of managers and deputies, who, by what would look like a miracle to Adam Smith, are able to cooperate pretty well toward a common end. They are doing that, remember, in the first generation of administrative science. They come to it unprepared, from a nation that is suspicious and grudging. They have no tradition to work with, the old commercial morality of the exploiter and profiteer still surrounds these new rulers of industry. Perhaps they are unaware that they are revolutionizing the discipline, the incentives, and the vision of the business world. They do brutal and stupid things, and their essential work is obscured. But they are conducting business on a scale without precedent in history. The real news about business, it seems to me, is that it is being administered by men who are not profiteers. The managers are on salary, divorced from ownership and from bargaining. They represent the revolution in business-incentives at its very heart. For they conduct gigantic enterprises and they stand outside the higgling of the market, outside the shrewdness and strategy of competition. The motive of profit is not their personal motive. That is an astounding change. The administration of the great industries is passing into the hands of men who cannot halt before each transaction and ask themselves: what is my duty as the Economic Man looking for
immediate gain? They have to live on their salaries, and hope for promotion, but their day's work is not measured in profit. There are thousands of these men, each with responsibilities vaster than the patriarchs of industry they have supplanted. It is for the commercial theorists to prove that the 'ability' is inferior, and talent less available. It is no accident that the universities have begun to create graduate schools of businessadministration. Fifty years ago industry was an adventure or perhaps a family tradition. But today it is becoming a profession with university standing equal to that of law, medicine, or engineering. The universities are supplying a demand. It is big business, I believe, which has created that demand. For it is no longer possible to deal with the present scale of industry if your only equipment is what men used to call 'experience,' that is, a haphazard absorption of knowledge through the pores. Just as it is no longer possible to become a physician by living with doctors, just as law cannot be grasped by starting as a clerk in some attorney's office, so business requires a greater preparation than a man can get by being a bright, observant, studious, ambitious office boy, who saves his money and is good to his mother. What it will mean to have business administered by men with a professional training is a rather difficult speculation. That it is a very far-reaching psychological change, I have no doubt. The professions bring with them a fellowship in interest, a standard of ethics, an esprit de corps, and a decided discipline. They break up that sense of sullen privacy which made the old-fashioned business man so impervious to new facts and so shockingly ignorant of the larger demands of civilized life. I know that the professions develop their pedantry, but who was ever more finicky, more rigid in his thinking than the self-satisfied merchant? It would be idle to suppose that we are going suddenly to develop a nation of reasonable men. But at least we are going to have an increasing number of 'practical' men who have come in contact with the scientific method. That is an enormous gain over the older manufacturers and merchants. They were shrewd, hardworking, no doubt, but they were fundamentally uneducated. They had no discipline for making wisdom out of their experience. They had almost no imaginative training to soften their primitive ambitions. But doctors and engineers and professional men, generally, have something more than a desire to accumulate and outshine their neighbors. They have found an interest in the actual work they are doing. The work itself is in a measure its own reward. The instincts of workmanship, of control over brute things, the desire for order, the satisfaction of services rendered and uses created, the civilizing passions are given a chance to temper the primal desire to have and to hold and to conquer.
Chapter 9-Drift
It seems as if the most obvious way of reacting toward evil were to consider it a lapse from grace. The New Freedom, we are told, is 'only the old revived and clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern America.' Everywhere you hear it: that the people have been 'deprived' of ancient rights, and legislation is framed on the notion that we can recover the alleged democracy of early America. I once read in a learned magazine an essay on 'The Oblivescence of the Disagreeable.' As I remember it, the writer was trying to demonstrate what he regarded as a very hopeful truth --that
men tend to forget pain more easily than pleasure. That is -no doubt a comfortable faculty, but it plays havoc with history. For in regard to those early days of the Republic, most of our notions are marked by a well-nigh total oblivescence of the disagreeable. We find it very difficult to remember that there were sharp class divisions in the young Republic, that suffrage was severely restricted, that the Fathers were a very conscious upper class determined to maintain their privileges. Nations make their histories to fit their illusions. That is why reformers are so anxious to return to early America. What they know of it comes to them filtered through the golden lies of school-books and hallowed by the generous loyalty of their childhood. Men generally find in the past what they miss in the present. During the Paterson strike ot 1913, I heard a very drastic I.W.W. agitator tell a meeting of silk-weavers that they had fallen low since the days of the great Chief Justice Marshall. In those days there were no rich and poor, and the Constitution had not yet been abrogated by an impudent Chief of Police! Yet in the days of Marshall even the most peaceful trade union was outlawed, and as for the doctrines of the I.W.W.,-- imagine the sentiments of Alexander Hamilton. A few years ago I was living in Boston when an old gentleman, unhappy over the trend of democracy, published a book to glorify the American Tories. It consisted largely of intimate details from the private lives of the revolutionary heroes. Boston wouldn't have the book, true or untrue. So the old gentleman was denounced and his book forgotten. For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden age. The modern puritan locates it in the period of the most famous ancestors from whom he can claim descent. That ancestor regretted the loss of Eden. Rousseau's millennial dream was a 'state of nature.' Hardheaded Adam Smith had his 'original state' which was all that England wasn't. I know literary men who lament the passing of the eighteenth century coffee house, and New York is full of artists who dream of Parisian cafs. Zionists go back to David and Solomon; Celtic revivalists worry about Kathleen ni Houlihan; Chesterton dreams of Merrie England; scholars yearn for Fifth Century Athens; there is a considerable vogue to-day for certain of the earlier Egyptian dynasties, and some people, more radical than others, regard civilization itself as a disease. The prototype of all revivals is each man's wistful sense of his own childhood. There is something infinitely pathetic in the way we persist in recalling what is by its very nature irrevocable. Perhaps each of us is touched by unuttered disappointments, and life has not the taste we anticipated. The weary man sinks back into the past, like a frightened child into its mother's arms. He glorifies what is gone when he fears what is to come. That is why discontented husbands have a way of admiring the cakes that mother used to bake. Beaten nations live in the exploits of their ancestors, and all exiles lament by the waters of Babylon. The curse of Ireland, of Poland, of Alsace is that they cannot forget what they were. There are no people who cling so ardently to a family tree as do those who have come down in the world. The men who were beaten by the trusts will never see the promise of the trusts. Whenever the future is menacing and unfamiliar, whenever the day's work seems insurmountable, men seek some comfort in the warmth of memory. Only those who are really at home in their world find life more interesting as they mature. Experience for them not an awful
chance, but a prize they can win and embrace. They need no romance to make life tolerable. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. They will falter before their problems, will deal with them half-heartedly and with diffidence. Their allegiance is not to the world. And they will never give themselves entirely to the task of making for themselves on this earth and in their age an adequate and civilized home. The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness inevitable. The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism, in which the 'natural' humanity in each man is adored as the savior of society. You meet this faith throughout the thousand and one communistic experiments and new religions in which America is so abundant. 'If only you let men alone, they'll be good,' a typical American reformer said to me the other day. He believed, as most Americans do, in the unsophisticated man, in his basic kindliness and his instinctive practical sense. A critical outlook seemed to the reformer an inhuman one; he distrusted, as Bryan does, the appearance of the expert; he believed that whatever faults the common man might show were due to some kind of Machiavellian corruption. He had the American dream, which may be summed up, I think, the statement that the undisciplined man is the salt of the Earth. So when the trusts appeared, when the free land was gone, and America had been congested into a nation, the only philosophy with any weight of tradition behind it was a belief in the virtues of he spontaneous, enterprising, untrained and unsocialized man. Trust promoters cried: Let us alone. The little business men cried: We're the natural men, so let us alone. And the public cried: We're the most natural of all, so please do stop interfering with us. Muckraking gave an utterance to the small business men and to the larger public, who dominated reform politics. What did they do? They tried by all the machinery and power they could muster to restore a business world in which each man could again be left to his own will--a world that needed no cooperative intelligence. In the Sherman Act is symbolized this deliberate attempt to recreate an undeliberate society. No group of people, except the socialists, wished to take up the enormous task of disciplining business to popular need. For the real American was dreaming of the Golden Age in which he could drift with impunity. But there has arisen in our time a large group of people who look to the future. They talk a great deal about their ultimate goal. Many of them do not differ in any essential way from those who dream of a glorious past. They put Paradise before them instead of behind them. They are going to be so rich, so great, and so happy some day that any concern about to-morrow seems a bit sordid. They didn't fall from Heaven, as the reactionaries say, but they are going to Heaven with the radicals. Now this habit of reposing in the sun of a brilliant future is very enervating. It opens a chasm between fact and fancy, and the whole fine dream is detached from the living zone of the present. At the only point where effort and intelligence are needed, that point where to-day is turning into tomorrow, there these people are not found. At the point where human direction counts most they do not direct. So they are like most anarchists, wild in their dreams and unimportant in their deed. They cultivate a castle in Spain and a fiat in Harlem; a princess in the air and a drudge in the kitchen. Then too there are the darlings of evolution. They are quite certain that evolution, as they put it, is ever onward and upward. For them all things conspire to achieve that well-known, though
unmentioned far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves. They seem to imply as Moody suggested: I, I, last product of the toiling ages, Goal of heroic feet that never lagged, though A little thing in trousers, slightly jagged. How the conservative goes to work with the idea of evolution has been ably exposed by William English Walling. First, assume 'progress' by calling it inevitable: this obviates the necessity for any practical change just now. Then assert the indubitable fact that real progress is very slow: and infer that wisdom consists in deprecating haste. Now when you have called progress inevitable and imperceptible, have you done about all that philosophy could do to justify impotence. The radical view of evolution is more optimistic, but not more intelligent. In fact, it is generally all optimism and little else. For though it doesn't quite dare to say that whatever is, is right, it does assume that whatever is going to be, is going to be right. I believe that G. K. Chesterton once called this sort of thing progressivism by the calendar. There is complete confidence that whatever is later in time is better in fact, that the next phase is the desirable one, that all change is 'upward,' that God and Nature are collaborating in our blithe ascent to the Superman. Such an outlook undermines judgment and initiative, deliberate effort, invention, plan, and sets you adrift on the currents of time, hoping for impossible harbors. In a constructive social movement the harm done is immeasurable. The most vivid illustration is that of the old-fashioned, fatalistic Marxian socialists. They have an implicit faith that human destiny is merely the unfolding of an original plan, some of the sketches of which are in their possession, thanks to the labors of Karl Marx. Strictly speaking, these men are not revolutionists as they believe themselves to be; they are the interested pedants of destiny. They are God's audience, and they know the plot so well that occasionally they prompt Him. In their system all that education, unions, leadership and thought can do is to push along what by the theory needs no pushing. These socialists are like the clown Marceline at the Hippodrome, who is always very busy assisting in labor that would be done whether he were there or not. They face the ancient dilemma of fatalism: whatever they do is right, and nothing they do matters. Go to almost any socialist meeting and you'll hear it said that socialism would come if the Socialist Party had never been heard from. Perhaps so. But why organize a Socialist Party? Of course, socialists don't act upon their theory. They are too deeply impressed with the evil that exists, too eager for the future that they see, to trust entirely in the logic of events. They do try to shape that future. But their old fatalism hampers them enormously the moment any kind of action is proposed. They are out of sympathy with conservative trade unionism, but they are still more hostile to the I.W.W. In politics they despise the reformer, but when they themselves obtain office they do nothing that a hundred 'bourgeois' reformers haven't done before them. The Socialist Party in this country has failed to develop a practical program for labor or a practical
program for politics. It claims to have a different philosophy from that of trade unionists or reformers, but when you try to judge the difference by its concrete results, it is imperceptible. The theory and the temper of orthodox socialism are fatalistic, and no fatalist can really give advice. Theory and practice are widely sundered in the American socialist movement. There is a stumbling revolt which lives from hand to mouth, a catch-as-catch-can struggle, and then far removed from it, standing in majesty, a great citadel of dogma almost impervious to new ideas. For in the real world, destiny is one of the aliases of drift. Closely related in essence, though outwardly quite different, is what might be called the panacea habit of mind. Beginning very often in some penetrating insight or successful analysis, this sort of mind soon becomes incapable of seeing anything besides that portion of reality which sustains the insight and is subject to the analysis. A good idea, in short, becomes a fixed idea. One group of American socialists can see only the advantage of strikes, another of ballots. One reformer sees the advantages of the direct primaries in Wisconsin: they become the universal solvent of political evil. You find engineers who don't see why you can't build society on the analogy of a steam engine; you find lawyers, like Taft, who see in the courts an intimation of heaven; sanitation experts who wish to treat the whole world as one vast sanitarium; lovers who wish to treat it as one vast happy family; education enthusiasts who wish to treat it as one vast nursery. No one who undertook to be the Balzac of reform by writing its Human Comedy could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life. The most amazing of all are people who deal with the currency question. Somehow or other, long meditation seems to produce in them a feeling that they are dealing with the crux of human difficulties. Then there is the panacea most frequently propounded by voluble millionaires: the high cost of living is the cost of high living, and thrift is the queen of the virtues. Sobriety is another virtue, highly commended, -- in fact there are thousands of people who seriously regard it as the supreme social virtue. To those of us who are sober and still discontented, the effort to found a political party on a colossal Don't is not very inspiring. After thrift and sobriety, there is always efficiency, a word which covers a multitude of confusions. No one in his senses denies the importance of efficient action, just as no one denies thrift and sober living. It is only when these virtues become the prime duty of man that we rejoice in the poet who has the courage to glorify the vagabond, preach a saving indolence, and glorify Dionysus. Be not righteous overmuch is merely a terse way of saying that virtue can defeat its own ends. Certainly, whenever a negative command like sobriety absorbs too much attention, and morality is obstinate and awkward, then living men have become cluttered in what was meant to serve them. There are thousands to-day who, out of patience with almost everything, believe passionately that some one change will set everything right. In the first rank stand the suffragettes who believe that votes for women will make men chaste. I have just read a book by a college professor which announces that the short ballot will be as deep a revolution as the abolition of slavery. There are innumerable Americans who believe that a democratic constitution would create a democracy. Of course, there are single taxers so single-minded that they believe a happy civilization would result from the socialization of land values. Everything else that seems to be needed would follow spontaneously if only the land monopoly were abolished.
The syndicalists suffer from this habit of mind in an acute form. They refuse to consider any scheme for the reorganization of industry. All that will follow, they say, if only you can produce a General Strike. But obviously you might paralyze society, you might make the proletariat supreme, and still leave the proletariat without the slightest idea of what to do with the power it had won. What happens is that men gain some insight into society and concentrate their energy upon it. Then when the facts rise up in their relentless complexity, the only way to escape them is to say: Never mind, do what I advocate, and all these other things shall be added unto you. There is still another way of reacting toward a too complicated world. That way is to see so much good in every reform that you can't make up your mind where to apply your own magnificent talents. The result is that you don't apply your talents at all. Reform produces its Don Quixotes who never deal with reality; it produces its Brands who are single-minded to the brink of ruin; and it produces its Hamlets and its Rudins who can never make up their minds. What is common to them all is a failure to deal with the real world in the light of its possibilities. To try to follow all the aliases of drift is like attacking the hydra by cutting off its heads. The few examples given here of how men shirk self-government might be extended indefinitely. They are as common to radicals as to conservatives. You can find them flourishing in an orthodox church and among the most rebellious socialists. Men will do almost anything but govern themselves. They don't want the responsibility. In the main, they are looking for some benevolent guardian, be it a 'good man in office' or a perfect constitution, or the evolution of nature. They want to be taken in charge. If they have to think for themselves they turn either to the past or to a distant future: but they manage to escape the real effort of the imagination which is to weave a dream into the turning present. They trust to destiny, a quick one or a slow one, and the whole task of judging events is avoided. They turn to automatic devices: human initiative can be ignored. They forbid evil, and then they feel better. They settle on a particular analogy, or a particular virtue, or a particular policy, and trust to luck that everything else will take care of itself. But no one of these substitutes for self-government is really satisfactory, and the result is that a state of chronic rebellion appears. That is our present situation. The most hopeful thing about it is that through the confusion we can come to some closer understanding of why the modern man lacks stability, why his soul is scattered. We may, perhaps, be able to see a little better just what self-government implies. The chronic rebellion is evident enough. I have a friend who after the Lawrence strike was a great admirer of the I.W.W. He told me about it one day with tears in his eyes. Two months later I met him, and he was cursing: 'They're so successful that they're getting ready to throw So-andSo out of the I.W.W. for heresy.' It one of the ironies of the labor movement that it preaches solidarity, and seems to propagate by fission. For there is large truth in the saying that the only thing anarchists hate more than tyrants is an anarchist who differs with them. Indeed the bitterness between the 'red' and the 'yellow' unions is at least as great as the bitterness between the unions and the employers. The I.W.W. hates the American Federation of Labor and many
political socialists with a vindictiveness that makes no distinction between them and the ost tyrannical boss: Revolt within the world of revolt is an institution. If any capitalist thinks he is the object of abuse, he ought to come and hear a debate between the Detroit I.W.W. and the Chicago I.W.W., between believers in 'direct' and in 'political' action, between 'State Socialists' and Syndicalists. The sects of the rebellious are like the variety of the Protestant lurches, and they are due to a similar cause. Once the churches ad cut off from the deeply-rooted central tradition of Rome, they continued to cut off from each other. Now Protestantism was an effort at a little democracy in religion, and its history is amazingly like that of all the other revolts from the old absolutisms. For once men had broken loose from the cohesion and obedience of the older life, the floundering of democracy began. It was not so easy to become self-governing as it was to bowl over a tyrant. And the long history of schisms is really the story of how men set up a substitute for authority, and had to revolt against it. To a man standing on the firm foundation of an ancient faith, the instability of self-government is its just punishment, and no doubt he smiles at the folly of men who give up security and peace for a mess of revolt. After Protestantism, the Romantic movement and the birth of political democracy. It is hardly necessary to recall what troubled spirits the romanticists were, how terrible the disillusionments. Their histories were with few exceptions tragic: and the 'unending pursuit of the ever-fleeting object of desire' led many of them back into the arms of the Catholic Church. One has only to read the lives of the men whose names stand out in the nineteenth century to realize that the epoch of revolt produced tortured and driven spirits. Whatever their virtues, and they are many, they never attained that inner harmony whose outward sign is a cordial human life. No one has felt this more poignantly than the modern artist. Lost in the clamor of commercialism, many painters seem to insist that if they can't make themselves admired they will at least make themselves heard. And of course, if you live in a world of studios, drawingrooms and cards, amidst idle people in little cliques, you have to draw attention to yourself from the outside world in some other way than by decorating or interpreting human life. The modern artist can secure attention, but he can't hold it. For the world is so complex that he can't find common experiences and common aspirations to deal with. And because he can't do this, he can't become artist to a nation. He has to be satisfied with a cult. So he specializes on some aspect of form, exaggerates some quality of line, and produces art that only a few people would miss if it disappeared. Then he denounces the philistine public. But in his heart he is unsatisfied with his work, and so he too develops a habit of chronic rebellion: a school is no sooner founded when there is a secession. The usual manifesto is published (they all say about the same thing): authority and classicism are denounced in the name of youth and adventure. 'All I want,' said a friend of mine who paints, 'is to bewilder and fascinate' ...'All we need is wiggle,' said another. 'To be alive is to rebel,' said a third. But I venture to suggest that what the rebels are rebelling against is not a classical authority: none exists to-day that has any compelling force. They are in rebellion against something within themselves; there are conflicts in their souls for which they have found no solution; and their revolt is the endless pursuit of what their own disharmony will never let them find.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. This certitude for which Matthew Arnold cries, where has it gone? Classicists, like Prof. Babbitt of Harvard, or Mr. Paul Elmore More, say that it has gone with the shattering of external authority in the debacle of Romanticism and the French Revolution. Their remedy for the chaos and ineptitude of modern life is a return to what they describe as eternal forms of justice and moderation. They would revive authority with its dominating critics like Boileau. Romanticism for them is a lapse from grace, full of sweet sin, and they hope to return to the Golden Age of the classics. I don't see how this dream can succeed. Their solution is built on a wild impossibility, for in order to realize it they will have to abolish machinery and communication, newspapers and popular books. They will have to call upon some fairy to wipe out the memory of the last hundred years, and they will have to find a magician who can conjure up a church and a monarchy that men will obey. They can't do any of these things, though they can bewail the fact and display their grief by unremitting hostility to the modern world. But though their remedy is, I believe, altogether academic, their diagnosis does locate the spiritual problem. We have lost authority. We are 'emancipated' from an ordered world. We drift. The loss of something outside ourselves which we can obey is a revolutionary break with our habits. Never before have we had to rely so completely upon ourselves. No guardian to think for us, no precedent to follow without question, no lawmaker above, only ordinary men set to deal with heart-breaking perplexity. All weakness comes to the surface. We are homeless in a jungle of machines and untamed powers that haunt and lure the imagination. Of course, our culture is confused, our thinking spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born into the twentieth century. Our ancestors thought they knew their way from birth through all eternity: we are puzzled about the day after to-morrow. What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts didn't free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim. Chapter 13-Poverty, Chastity, Obedience Poverty, chastity, and obedience are not the ideals of a self-governing people. Occasionally, however, some well-fed old gentleman announces that it would be wrong to abolish want
because poverty is such an excellent training ground for character. The sentiment does not attract the poor, of course, and even the friends of the old gentleman wish that he had not made an ass of himself. And of course, there are not many modern people who could agree with the mediaeval theory that celibacy is more blessed than marriage. They prefer a father and a mother to a monk and a nun, and St. Paul's dictum that it is better to marry than burn will not seem to them a very noble tribute to the family. As to obedience, they continue to like it pretty well in other people, no doubt, and yet their greatest admiration goes out to those who stand on their own feet. These mediaeval vows are the true discipline of authority. In their absolute form they were meant only for those who sought absolute perfection. But to ordinary mortals, who could accept them only in moderation, they were still the best atmosphere for a world in which democracy was impossible. I do not mean to imply that the Church deliberately created an ideal which sapped the possibility of self-government. That would be to endow the Church with an inconceivably deliberate intelligence. All I mean is that in the undemocratic world which the Church dominated, ideals grew up which expressed the truth about that world. The desire for self-government has become vivid with the accumulation of a great surplus of wealth. Man to-day has at last seen the possibility of freeing himself from his supreme difficulty. It wasn't easy to think much of the possibilities of this world while he lived on the edge of starvation. Resignation to hardship was a much more natural outlook. But in the midst of plenty, the imagination becomes ambitious, rebellion against misery is at last justified, and dreams have a basis in fact. Of course, there are immense sections of the globe where the hard conditions of the older life still prevail, and there the ideal of democracy is still a very ineffective phrase. But the United States has for the most part lifted itself out of primitive hardship, and that fact, more than our supposedly democratic constitution, is what has justified in some measure the hope which inspires our history. We have been far from wise with the great treasure we possessed, and no nation has such cause for shame at the existence of poverty. We have only our short-sighted selves to blame. But the blunders are not fatal: American wealth has hardly been tapped. And that is why America still offers the greatest promise to democracy. The first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole population well above the misery line. To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state. For those who go below the line of civilized decency not only suffer wretchedly: they breed the poisons of self-government. They form the famous slum proletariat about whom even the socialists despair. Occasionally some dramatic figure rises out of them, occasionally they mutter and rebel and send the newspapers into a panic. But for the purposes of constructive revolution this submerged mass is of little use, for it is harassed, beaten, helpless. These last will not be first. They may scare the rest of us into a little reform. But out of sheer wretchedness will come little of the material or the power of democracy, for as Walter Weyl has said, 'A man or a class, crushed to earth--is crushed to earth.' Unfit for self-government, they are the most easily led, the most easily fooled, and the most easily corrupted. You can't build a modern nation out of Georgia crackers, poverty-stricken
negroes, the homeless and helpless of the great cities. They make a governing class essential. They are used by the forces of reaction. Once in a while they are used by revolutionists for agitation, but always they are used. Before you can begin to have democracy you need a country in which everyone has some stake and some taste of its promise. Now to link chastity with poverty as one of the props of absolutism is to prepare for yourself a peck of trouble. 'Do you advocate unchastity?' shrieks the frightened person. As unchastity means to most people promiscuity, I say emphatically, 'No, it isn't unchastity that we wish.' We don't wish poverty, but that doesn't mean that we are for parvenus and millionaires. And so for sex, we don't seek Don Juans or ascetics, we seek fathers and mothers, and a life that isn't swamped by sex. Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied. Those who can't have a piece of flesh, said Nietzsche, often grasp at a piece of spirit. I must confess I never saw anything very noble or pure in the dreams of St. Theresa. And as for St. Anthony in the Wilderness-- surely that was no solution of the sex problem. But it was a wonderful way of cementing loyalty, to deny men and women a human life, and suggest that they marry the Church. The mediaeval vow of chastity did not mean a sudden disappearance of the sexual life: it meant a concentration of that life upon the spiritual authority. With poverty and chastity effectively enforced, there would have been very little need to preach obedience. That was necessary only because human nature didn't permit of any thoroughgoing application of the first two vows. Had the Church achieved its full ambition, to be glorious and rich amidst poverty, to offer the only spiritual compensation to thwarted lives, then the Church would have had few disloyal sons. But as it didn't succeed completely, it had to demand the third vow--obedience---as a kind of extra prop if the other two failed. It is no wonder then, that the upholders of authority recognize in the labor movement and the women's awakening their mortal foes, or that Ibsen in that classic prophecy of his, should have seen in these same movements the two greatest forces for human emancipation. They are the power through which there will be accomplished that transvaluation of values which democracy means. They are pointed toward a frank worldliness, a cooperation among free people, they are pointed away from submissive want, balked impulse, and unquestioned obedience. We can begin to see, then, a little of what democratic culture implies. There was a time, not so long ago, when scholars, and 'cultured people' generally, regarded Ruskin's interest in political economy as the unfortunate perversion of a man who was born to better things. We do no longer regard it as 'sordid' to take an interest in economic problems. I have met artists who deplore Mr. George Russell's interest in agricultural cooperation as unworthy of the poet who is known to the world by the mystic letters . The interest of the working-class in its bread and butter problem is still occasionally the chance for a scolding about its 'materialism.' But in the main, modern democrats recognize that the abolition of poverty is the most immediate question before the world to-day, and they have imagination enough to know that the success of the war against poverty will be the conquest of new territory for civilized life.
So too, the day is passing when the child is taught to regard the body as a filthy thing. We train quite frankly for parenthood, not for the ecstasies of the celibate. Our interest in sex is no longer to annihilate it, but to educate it, to find civilized opportunities for its expression. We hope to organize industry and housekeeping so that normal mating shall not be a monstrously difficult problem. And there is an increasing number of people who judge sexual conduct by its results in the quality of human life. They don't think that marriage justifies licentiousness, nor will they say that every unconventional union is necessarily evil. They know the tyrannies that indissoluble marriage produces, and they are beginning to know the equal oppressions of what is called 'Free love.' They are becoming concrete and realistic about sex. They are saying that where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create. They desire such a family not because they are afraid not to advocate it, but because they have reason to believe that this is the most fruitful way of ordering human life. When we speak of the modern intellect we mean this habit of judging rules by their results instead of by their sources. The fact that an idea is old or that it is 'advanced,' that the Pope said it or Bernard Shaw, all that is of no decisive importance. The real question always turns on what an idea is worth in the satisfaction of human desire. Objections will arise at once. It will be said that you can't judge rules of life or beliefs by their results, because many an idea of the greatest value may at first be very disagreeable. In other words, it is often necessary to sacrifice immediate advantages to distant results. That is perfectly true, of course, and the balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics. Will you weigh action by its results on this particular venture, or on your whole life, or by its results on your generation, or on the generations to come? There is no simple answer to those questions. Every human being makes his own particular compromise. There are few people so concentrated on the immediate that they don't look ahead a little, if it's only to the extent of taking out a life insurance policy. There have been a few fanatics who lived so absolutely for the millennium that they made a little hell for their companions. But the wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity. The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat. But of course, to act for results instead of in response to authority requires a readiness of thought that no one can achieve at all times. You cannot question everything radically at every moment. You have to do an infinite number of acts without thinking about their results. I have to follow the orders of my physician. We all of us have to follow the lead of specialists. And so, it is easy to score points against anyone who suggests that modern thought is substituting the pragmatic test by results for the old obedience to authority. It can't do that altogether. We cannot be absolute pragmatists. But we judge by results as much as we can, as much as our human limitations allow. Where we have to accept dogmas without question we do so not because we have any special awe of them, but because we know that we are too ignorant, or too
busy, to analyze them through. I know how un-philosophical this will sound to those who worship neatness in thought. Well, if they can find some surer key to the complexity of life, all power to them. But let them be careful that they are not building a theory which is symmetrical only on the printed page. Nothing is easier than to simplify life and then make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life. If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair,--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there. In some such spirit as I have tried to suggest, the modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves. Chapter 14-Mastery The Dyaks of Borneo, it is said, were not accustomed to chopping down a tree, as white men do, by notching out V-shaped cuts. 'Hence,' says Mr. Marett~ in telling the story, 'any Dyak caught imitating the European fashion was punished by a fine. And yet so well aware were they that this method was an improvement on their own that, when they could trust each other not to tell, they would surreptitiously use it.' If you went to an elder of the Dyak race and asked him why the newer method was forbidden, he would probably have told you that it was wrong. The answer would not have satisfied you, but the Dyak would have inquired no further. What was wrong was filled with impending calamity. Now, of course, there is no end of conservatism today which is just as instinctive, just as fearful of unimagined evil, and just as dumbly irrational as the Dyaks. I have heard a middle-aged woman say 'It isn't done' as if the voice of the universe spoke through her. But there is a rationalized conservatism. If you go to an elder of the Boston race and ask why new projects are so unexceptionally bad, he will tell you that without reverence for tradition life becomes unsettled, and a nation loses itself for lack of cohesion. These essays are based upon that observation, but added to it is the observation, just as important, that tradition will not work in the complexity of modern life. For if you ask Americans to remain true to the traditions of all their Fathers, there would be a pretty confusion if they followed your advice. There is great confusion, as it is, due in large measure to the persistency with which men follow tradition in a world unsuited to it. They modify a bit, however, they apply 'the rule of reason' to their old loyalties, and so a little adjustment is possible. But there can be no real cohesion for America in following scrupulously the inherited ideals of our people. Between the Sons of the Revolution, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Orangemen, the plantation life of the South, the refugees from Russia, the Balkan Slavs, there is in their traditions a conflict of prejudice and custom that would make all America as clamorous
as the Stock Exchange on a busy day. Nor is there going to be lasting inspiration for Bulgarian immigrants in the legend of the Mayflower. The only possible cohesion now is a loyalty that looks forward. America is preeminently the country where there is practical substance in Nietzsche's advice that we should live not for our fatherland but for our children's land. To do this men have to substitute purpose for tradition: and that is, I believe, the profoundest change that has ever taken place in human history. We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means. The massive part of man's life has always been, and still is, subconscious. The influence of his intelligence seems insignificant in comparison with attachments and desires, brute forces, and natural catastrophes. Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are. And so we have come to call mysterious everything that counts, and the more mysterious the better some of us pretend to think it is. We drift into our work, we fall in love, and our lives seem like the intermittent flicker of an obstinate lamp. War panics, and financial panics, revivals, fads sweep us before them. Men go to war not knowing why, hurl themselves at cannon as if they were bags of flour, seek impossible goals, submit to senseless wrongs, for mankind lives to-day only in the intervals of a fitful sleep. There is indeed a dreaming quality in life: moved as it is from within by unconscious desires and habits, and from without by the brute forces of climate and soil and wind and tide. There are stretches in every day when we have no sense of ourselves at all, and men often wake up with a start: 'Have I lived as long as I'm supposed to have lived? ...Here I am, this kind of person who has passed through these experiences--well, I didn't quite know it.' That, I think, is the beginning of what we call reflection: a desire to realize the drama in which we are acting, to be awake during our own lifetime. When we cultivate reflection by watching ourselves and the world outside, the thing we call science begins. We draw the hidden into the light of consciousness, record it, compare phases of it, note its history, experiment, reflect on error, and we find that our conscious life is no longer a trivial iridescence, but a progressively powerful way of domesticating the brute. This is what mastery means: the substitution of conscious intention for unconscious striving. Civilization, it seems to me, is just this constant effort to introduce plan where there has been clash, and purpose into the jungles of disordered growth. But to shape the world nearer to the heart's desire requires a knowledge of the heart's desire and of the world. You cannot throw yourself blindly against unknown facts and trust to luck that the result will be satisfactory. Yet from the way many business men, minor artists, and modern philosophers talk you would think that the best world can be created by the mere conflict of economic egotisms, the mere
eruption of fantasy, and the mere surge of blind instinct. There is to-day a widespread attempt to show the futility of ideas. Now in so far as this movement represents a critical insight into the emotional basis of ideas, it is a fundamental contribution to human power. But when it seeks to fall back upon the unconscious, when the return to nature is the ideal of a deliberate vegetable, this movement is like the effort of the animal that tried to eat itself: the tail could be managed and the hind legs, but the head was an insurmountable difficulty. You can have misleading ideas, but you cannot escape ideas. To give up theory, to cease formulating your desire is not to reach back, as some people imagine, to profounder sources of inspiration. It is to put yourself at the mercy of stray ideas, of ancient impositions or trumped-up fads. Accident becomes the master, the accident largely of your own training, and you become the plaything of whatever happens to have accumulated at the bottom of your mind, or to find itself sanctified in the newspaper you read and the suburb that suited your income. There have been fine things produced in the world without intention. Most of our happiness has come to us, I imagine, by the fortunate meeting of events. But happiness has always been a precarious incident, elusive and shifting in an unaccountable world. In love, especially, men rejoice and suffer through what are to them mysterious ways. Yet when it is suggested that the intelligence must invade our unconscious life, men shrink from it as from dangerous and clumsy meddling. It is dangerous and clumsy now, but it is the path we shall have to follow. We have to penetrate the dreaming brute in ourselves, and make him answerable to our waking life. It is a long and difficult process, one for which we are just beginning to find a method. But there is no other way that offers any hope. To shove our impulses underground by the taboo is to force them to virulent and uncontrolled expression. To follow impulse wherever it leads means the satisfaction of one impulse at the expense of all the others. The glutton and the rake can satisfy only their gluttonous and rakish impulses, and that isn't enough for happiness. What civilized men aim at is neither whim nor taboo, but a frank recognition of desire, disciplined by a knowledge of what is possible, and ordered by the conscious purpose of their lives. There is a story that experimental psychology grew from the discovery that two astronomers trying to time the movement of the same heavenly body reached different results. It became necessary then to time the astronomers themselves in order to discount the differences in the speed of their reactions. Now whether the story is literally true or not, it is very significant. For it symbolizes the essential quality of modern science--its growing self-consciousness. There have been scientific discoveries all through the ages. Heron of Alexandria invented a steam-turbine about 200 B.C. They had gunpowder in Ancient China. But these discoveries lay dormant, and they appear to us now as interesting accidents. What we have learned is to organize invention deliberately, to create a record for it and preserve its continuity, to subsidize it, and surround it with criticism. We have not only scientific work, but a philosophy of science, and that philosophy is the source of fruitful scientific work. We have become conscious about scientific method; we have set about studying the minds of scientists. This gives us an infinitely greater control of human invention, for we are learning to control the inventor. We are able already to discount some of the limitations of those engaged in research: we should not, for example, send a man who was color blind to report on the protective coloring of animals; we begin to see how much it matters in many investigations whether the student is an auditory or a visualizing type. Well, psychology opens up greater possibilities than this for the conscious control of scientific
progress. It has begun to penetrate emotional prejudice, to show why some men are so deeply attached to authority, why philosophers have such unphilosophical likes and dislikes. We ask now of an economist, who his friends are, what his ambitions, his class bias. When one thinker exalts absolute freedom, another violent repression, we have ceased to take such ideas at their face value, and modern psychology, especially the school of Freud, has begun to work out a technique for cutting under the surface of our thoughts. The power of criticizing the scientific mind is, I believe, our best guarantee for the progress of scientific discovery. This is the inner sanctuary of civilized power. For when science becomes its own critic it assures its own future. It is able, then, to attack the source of error itself; to forestall its own timidities, and control its own bias. If the scientific temper were as much a part of us as the faltering ethics we now absorb in our childhood, then we might hope to face our problems with something like assurance. A mere emotion of futurity, that sense of 'vital urge' which is so common to-day, will fritter itself away unless it comes under the scientific discipline, where men use language accurately, know fact from fancy, search out their own prejudice, are willing to learn from failures, and do not shrink from the long process of close observation. Then only shall we have a substitute for authority. Rightly understood science is the culture under which people can live forward in the midst of complexity, and treat life not as something given but as something to be shaped. Custom and authority will work in a simple and unchanging civilization, but in our world only those will conquer who can understand. There is nothing accidental then in the fact that democracy in politics is the twin-brother of scientific thinking. They had to come together. As absolutism falls, science arises. It is selfgovernment. For when the impulse which overthrows kings and priests and unquestioned creeds becomes self-conscious we call it science. Inventions and laboratories, Greek words, mathematical formulae, fat books, are only the outward sign of an attitude toward life, an attitude which is self-governing, and most adequately named humanistic. Science is the irreconcilable foe of bogeys, and therefore, a method of laying the conflicts of the soul. It is the unfrightened, masterful and humble approach to reality--the needs of our natures and the possibilities of the world. The scientific spirit is the discipline of democracy, the escape from drift, the outlook of a free man. Its direction is to distinguish fact from fancy; its 'enthusiasm is for the possible'; its promise is the shaping of fact to a chastened and honest dream.