PART IV

HOW CAN THEY BE RELEASED?

XXVI

THE INESCAPABLE TASK

Capacity for high motivation, but doubt of the existence of such capacity because our performance is low; low performance due, not chiefly to external obstacles nor to remains of the beast in us, but to self-imposed bondage to our past and present selves, the instrument that binds us being that which is high, not low, in us, even our intelligence and reason--this is what we behold. The same intelligence that masters external circumstance by looking behind and before, by the same process subjects us to ourselves. On the other hand, intelligence chafes at the bondage that it has created, and knows itself as the agent of emancipation.

Such is our self-imprisoning, self-releasing, deeply paradoxical human nature. But there is a difference. We imprison ourselves automatically, but we do not automatically release ourselves. The door closes with a spring lock; it opens only by directed effort. At least, adherence to the _status quo_ requires as a rule little reflection, while release from it into something better requires much. In particular, the _habit_ of releasing myself from what I am and have been depends upon continuous alertness joined with self-detachment or objectivity with respect to myself.

Our greatest lack is a habit of self-release, a habit of being free and freely cooperative. Such a habit cannot be acquired by repetition of impulsive revolts or impulsive repentances, nor by jumping at novelties; it requires self-discipline; it depends upon practising a technic.

But a technic for freedom in the sphere of life’s values and policies can scarcely be said to exist. Scientific method is indeed the technic of free intelligence conceived as a disinterested observer of events; but something more than on-looking is involved in living. Our difficulty lies in inadequate procedures in the weighing of values and the choice of ends. Here, too, scientific method--as we shall presently see in more detail--is essential to freedom; we are not too enamored of science nor too ready to use its technic, but not enough so. Yet scientific method is only one factor in the technic of self-release. In the absence of the other factors, it becomes, in fact, a servant of inferior, reactionary, or even destructive ways of life, as we abundantly see at the present moment.

The inescapable task for our culture--for education, religion, social organization, and (I surmise) literature and the other arts--is to develop a technic for freedom in the sense of continuous release from continuously-forming precedents--release into selves that are neither precedent-ridden nor yet fidgety or flighty but creative.

This implies much more than readiness to participate in reform movements. Excitement over the dust and rubbish that have accumulated, or even willingness to clean Augean stables, does not get at causes; it deals only with the products of self-poisoning processes, not with the sources of the poison; it produces little beyond oscillation between the fulness of a vice and the emptiness of a virtue.

Even the religion that glories in its ascription of infinite value to persons has failed to develop a technic for releasing personality from its self-imposed limitations. Indeed, the maintenance of some of these limitations in the form of beliefs, institutions, and rules of conduct has been erected into a virtue.

Meantime, religion conducts a largely futile struggle against the bondage of sin. The churches pray, exhort, instruct, but all this is effective, for the most part, only with sins that already lack social standing. Current religion knows not how to deal with the deep depravity of our respectable faults, and indeed it scarcely recognizes them as faults. On the other hand, it magnifies petty virtues and a-dynamic goodness. It offers emotional elevation and a sense of selfhood through worship, but since God is rarely worshipped as a creative power here and now at work within the moral order, the worshipper’s self remains complacent and accommodating, an arrived and secure soul; it does not become a chrysalis breaking from its shell. Any adequate religion will call for a different way of paying respect to the Creator, and a different way of receiving him into our lives. Worship must come to include within itself a technic for continually transcending the religious self and the religious organization of yesterday and of today, a technic for free reconstruction within the whole realm of our deepest hopes, our highest ideals, our ultimate convictions, and our profoundest fellowships and loyalties.

Considerable liberty in the sense of toleration of dissent already exists, it is true, in large areas of Protestantism, but this is not the same as a technic for freedom. When we merely tolerate dissent, we the tolerators do not dissolve the special privilege claimed by our past and present selves; our own souls remain indoors, and we decline the responsibility for exploration and the changing of our maps.

What of the schools, then? Surely they are emancipators of personality? Yes and no. Education, as we moderns of the West practise it, contains the most remarkable ambiguity. For it sincerely intends to develop the specifically human capacity for intelligent self-control, but with equal sincerity it intends to keep the teacher (that is, the generation that is passing away) in control of the pupil (the generation that is arriving).

We justify this dualism, or at least keep it alive and respectable-looking, by the violent assumption that we who are about to die already possess wisdom, already know how to live, already incarnate pure intelligence to such a degree that the next generation cannot do better than walk in our footsteps. “Acquire self-control,” we say to the young, but we mean, “Form a habit of doing what we oldsters want you to do.” This reminds one of the old skit on the doctrine of predestination:

You can and you can’t; you will, and you won’t; You’ll be damned if you do, you’ll be damned if you don’t.

Or, still better, it illustrates Paul’s famous confession: “There is war in my members.... The good that I would do, I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do.” What we should do is to make our educational system a systematic warning against walking in our footsteps.

The whole conception of education as primarily a process of handing on the intelligence that we possess is an error. For intelligence is not a deposit that one can possess; it is not composed of particular mental acts and habits; endeavor to possess it, and you gather to yourself ashes and smoking embers--the flame has escaped you.

Under the surface of contemporary education these two irreconcilables are already in conflict. We are beginning to see that the prime function of schools is to put the young into possession of methods for inquiry and for testing. And in the light of this function we are beginning to ask, What is it to teach patriotism, or religious loyalty, or social-mindedness? The result is conflict that goes deeper than a contest between two finished views of the state or of the church or of social organization. It is a contest between two opposed ways of acquiring and holding views, opposed ways of dealing with standards, of handling ever-rising new issues, of choosing our loyalties.

The effect of making education an instrument whereby the wisdom of a departing generation shall control the arriving one never is what the theory of it calls for. Theoretically, the impartially selected best in contemporary civilization should be transmitted; actually some sort of partizanship is propagated. A state school in Canada and one in the United States, though they be within sight of each other, do not develop a common rationality in respect to either of the two countries or in respect to Great Britain. The teaching of what is called patriotism is the inculcation of partizanship and of the closed mind. There is nothing in it that enables pupils to discriminate between different varieties of patriotism, or that prepares them for a possibly unprecedented type.

Religious education in the church school, likewise, is partizan. It is directed towards the perpetuation of a specific loyalty, not towards the capacity and the habit of weighing loyalties. Even if Christians already have the truth, this does not justify partizan methods in teaching it; for the truth, one would guess, requires no special privilege. Indeed, it is worth asking whether partizanship on behalf of a good thing does not always obscure its goodness. Would it be un-Christian so to teach the young that they should freshly and freely weigh Christianity and its alternatives, my denomination and other denominations, our civilization and other actual or possible ones?

Because we do not thus educate we have churches that have no technic for correcting their corporate errors, no technic for squarely meeting new situations, no technic for getting denominations together even when these denominations know that they ought to do it. Moreover, no just balance is held between majorities and minorities in the churches, or between laymen and clergy or clerical officers.

Whether the need for conversion is greater in church education or in state education might be questioned; in any case the spiritual sickness of both is the same, and the remedy is the same. Both display a self-imprisonment of the spirit, though both aspire to freedom; both take steps towards freedom, but hesitate, fear, and compromise or become inefficient from both points of view. In this juncture our inescapable duty is to go forward, not into discrete freedoms doled out piecemeal, but into freedom as an all-inclusive technic and habit whereby we shall continuously outgrow ourselves both individually and collectively.

Some parts of such a technic are now in process of experimental development. We shall in due time point them out. Other parts we have still to seek. The assumption under which the seeking must proceed is that the technic of freedom is not a pattern that we impose upon conduct, but itself a manifestation of freedom, and therefore something more like friendship or worship.

XXVII

THE FUNCTION OF MINORITIES

To say “freedom” is to be reminded of the old, old story of the struggle of apparent weakness against obvious power; the desperate straits of a truth against which men stop their ears; the plight of the simply human as against the institutional; the contrast between injustice in obscure corners and massive but inert virtue in the market-place.

Freedom connotes minorities. There is no instance of a majority that, having become secure in its power, spontaneously secretes freedom from within itself for any considerable time. It appears to be about as easy for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle as for those who have power over men to cultivate freedom in the same men. Even under constitutions that guarantee individual liberty, actual liberty exists, if at all, through continuous struggle of a dissatisfied few against the lethargy of a satisfied many. The only exceptions that I can think of are the few teachers and parents who, imbued with respect for the personalities of the young, endeavor to educate them through their freedom instead of by canalizing their minds.

Our reliance must be, then, not upon might and power, but upon the kind of spiritual strength that can reside in those who are accounted weak. Let us consider, then, the function of minorities, and the more effective methods of performing this function. This subject is strangely neglected, and when not neglected, strangely misunderstood. It is a truism of history that the privileges that we enjoy simply because we are men were won for us from reluctant power first of all through the daring dreams, and then the daring struggle, of a few. We glory in these early minorities, or minor forces as the world measures force, yet for the most part our present citizens regard it as a misfortune to be in a minority, especially if it is small and its triumph seems far away. Pity or contempt towards those who are “different” is the conventional thing among us, but when have success and power, however unjust, been contemptible?

Up to the present time we in America have almost entirely failed to develop and utilize the capacities of political minorities. The popular assumption is that the function of a minority party is to win the next election, and then to rule as the majority party. If the election goes against us, we think that the next thing to do is to expire or to make terms with the dominant majority, as Mr. Roosevelt did after a single defeat of the Progressive Party, and as Democratic leaders have done for many years when their party has been out of power. The assumed principle is, Win the election, or else give up, or compromise and divide the benefits.

But this leaves out of account one of the chief services that a minority might perform, especially a minority that maintains a continuous existence through a long period of defeats. This service is nothing less than helping the majority party to use its power more wisely than it is capable of using it without outside help. To make the party in power think twice before acting; to make it aware that all that is hidden will be brought to light; to make it conscious that nothing is settled until it is settled right; and to keep alive the idea that the last and the least of our citizens must be taken into account--this is a service that the majority cannot perform for itself, and that neither a short-lived nor compromising minority can perform, but only a minority whose convictions are deep enough to sustain it indefinitely.

Whatever party or individual is in power, real grievances exist; somebody is oppressed, or exploited, or thwarted in his legitimate claims. It is the function of the minority to listen to his cry and to become voice for him in the centers of administration and legislation. It is likewise the function of the minority to keep its thinking “ahead of the game” and to initiate ideas that require to be mulled over before action is taken. When a vital idea is apprehended it is to be talked about, and thought through, and revised, and kept before people’s minds until it has the effect that is its due.

I have spoken as if the tools of a political minority were weapons, and as if strife were of the essence of the technic that freedom requires. But herein I have merely used existing notions of politics in order to point the way to something better. That strife is not the process whereby minorities can best perform most of their functions will be shown in a subsequent section. At the present moment what most concerns us is to perceive that minorities are a normal part of any live society, political or other; to ascertain the needs that only minorities can meet, and in the light of what we thus find to set forth some items in a rational policy for individual conduct.

First of all, we need to give more attention than is customary to the effects of power upon those who wield it, and we need to educate the young with direct reference to these effects. The reason for continuous universal education with respect to this matter is the all-pervasiveness of the problem and of the difficulty. We have to deal not only with power lodged in officers of state, but also in parents, employers, labor leaders, investors, clergymen and ecclesiastical officers, and leaders in many civic groups; not only with power lodged in adults but also the power of the young over one another in play and social relations; finally, we have to do not merely with the conduct of leaders, but also with that of members of majorities or of other dominant groups. Education on this point is needed not only in order to put those who wield power upon guard against themselves, but also to make the generality of men reasonably critical towards their leaders, and towards all dominant parties or groups. In short, the whole populace should acquire a habit of sensitiveness towards all power and authority wheresoever it is lodged.

Let us see, now, what the dangers are. They have their center in the fact that consciousness of possessing power tends to divert the possessor’s attention from main issues to subordinate ones. The experience of being a cause, and of being able to bring things to pass, is enjoyable; therefore it seeks to prolong itself as though it were a good _per se_, whereas it is really good only when its consequences, on the whole, are wholesome. Thus the stake that one properly has in one’s selfhood becomes exaggerated and distorted. This produces in the victim at one time undue respect for precedents that he himself has created, at other times undue responsiveness to the seductions of the moment. The resulting pseudo-virtue of consistency, and the obverse pseudo-virtue of “adaptability” or “practicality” alike put one’s present self into the foreground instead of the issues that the self should be meeting.

Instead of “one’s self” in this description, we may read, upon occasion, “one’s party,” “one’s church,” “one’s set,” or “one’s institution”; the truth of the description is unaffected. In short, consciousness of power tends to beget self-will in individuals and in groups.

Not only does this self-will tend to dislocate issues _ab initio_; it also cumulatively surrounds itself with products of its own that wall it off from surrounding realities. One now uses “vested interests” as the measure of other interests; one measures one’s efficiency by the ratio between planned result and actual result, not realizing that the lack of a better plan, a wider horizon, spells inefficiency; one consorts with persons of like mind, whether partners or beneficiaries, erects their joint opinion into an orthodoxy, and becomes callous towards outsiders and towards unaccustomed ideas; at last the fate that was implicit in the situation from the beginning fulfils its measure--incapacity to reconstruct from within, and ignoble terror before the danger of explosion from without.

It is scarcely needful to dwell upon the less subtle consequences of possessing power, such as exaggeration of the importance of security for oneself and one’s possessions; secretiveness; the temptation to employ illegitimate means and to justify them by the importance of the ends in view, and the danger, at last, of conscienceless corruption.

Let no one think that this is a description merely of political

## parties, cliques, office-holders, and bosses, nor that the economic

sphere is the only one that needs to be considered along with the political. No; the psychology of the matter applies to the whole experience of wielding power. Many years ago a woman became, as she thought, disillusioned concerning a leader who was widely known for his utterly unselfish devotion to the common weal. “For,” said she, “I have learned that in his family he is dictatorial to the point of tyranny, whereas outside his family he teaches and practises the exact opposite.” It was my privilege to point out that there is here no psychological inconsistency. “He was born into a social system that took for granted that a husband and father would be the ‘head of the family,’ and as such would make decisions for the whole family, and employ the family means to carry his decisions through. From this root his domestic habits grew as grows the grass. On the other hand, outside the family he encountered a contrary set of assumptions, and he developed a contrasting set of habits. These habits truly reveal his capacity for sensitive response to persons; if he were to start his family experience _de novo_ under the assumptions of the new day, with no consciousness of the old-fashioned power as ‘head of the family,’ he would form domestic habits that would satisfy you.”

Knowledge of the psychology of power is needed in our religious organizations. For here additional emotional sanctions gather around the conduct of clerical leaders, and around institutional acts, past and present. The religiousness of both leader and led reinforces the tendencies that have been described, and then partly overlooks, partly hushes up, partly defends, and partly sanctifies the results.

One great communion, the Roman Catholic, not only concentrates all power in a hierarchy, but also identifies the authority of the hierarchy with the authority of an unchanging God. Theoretically it does not follow that all priestly acts and policies are sound, for distinction is made between the bishop or the Pope acting as an individual and the same person wielding divine authority. Nevertheless in practice this distinction tends to fade out. What the Pope says “goes” without anybody’s stopping to inquire whether or not it is _ex cathedra_. If the bishops in the United States adopt a policy--concerning parochial schools, say--that they have a perfect right to reject or to reconsider, opposition to it is instantly branded as disloyalty to the church. A bishop has been known to go as far as to assert that it is improper to discuss and evaluate episcopal conduct except in official conclaves. In this situation the moral necessity of institutional self-criticism is unprovided for. Minorities can scarcely function at all. Even when oppressive use of power is made by an occasional ecclesiastic, there is no known way to resist it without being accused of straight disloyalty to Mother Church; and when a high official becomes prideful, puffed up, and notorious for pompous display, no way is at hand for deflating him.

Protestant bodies, though they offer far more opportunity for reconstruction from within, even providing organs for lay participation therein, nevertheless do not escape the tendencies that accompany the exercise of power, nor provide adequate means for resisting these tendencies. The immunities of officialdom, though they be not denominated in the bond, are there. “Respect for the cloth” leads to the coddling of theological students; by means of easy tests it certifies intellectual weakness along with strength, and then piously puts up with the resulting qualities of pulpit and pastoral skill.

For how many of the sermons preached last Sunday was there any real occasion? Where real occasion for a sermon existed, was the needed and serviceable sermon forthcoming? What is an efficient or successful minister? The point of this question is not that ministers are human, fallible, and of varying degrees of ability, but that the immunity from real tests that their official position gives them misleads both them and their parishioners. Keeping the church machinery going and attracting support for it, or even increasing the membership, does not of itself indicate anything as to what is happening within the spiritual life. Here, as in politics, industry, and education, the possession of power generates illusions.

A striking example of this illusory self-involution is the continuance of denominational competition in rural communities after the facts and the wickedness of it have been exposed. Denominational officers responsible for this condition have become so far ankylosed by the poison of officialdom that they take only the feeblest steps towards reform, and meantime the laity, though it does not believe in this competition, contributes the money for keeping it going.

Nothing will effectively counteract these tendencies except a further development within Protestantism of the functions of minorities. Among other things, we need a more critical church press and also more periodicals devoted to religion but entirely independent of official support. We must ask more questions, and questions with a sharper point. We must not hesitate to bring about losses of some kinds of power in order that spiritual powers of better quality may be released. Genial humor and good-natured satire might well be employed as one antidote to the sense of personal enlargement that so commonly attends elevation to office. If we Protestants gasp at the effect upon Catholic “dignitaries” of the authority that they wield, we should at least snicker out loud at the effect upon our own bishops.

## Active, unabashed, good-natured minorities are needed wherever our

life is organized, and indeed wherever, organized or not, we move in masses. We owe a debt to anybody who employs unfashionable good taste. There is room for coteries of persons bent upon reaching out beyond the conventional to the beautiful and the true. We need minorities in morals, too; minorities that will openly place the weak points over against the strong points in current moral standards as well as practice, and that will also pay the cost of experiments in living upon a higher plane. We cannot have moral evolution without in some way abandoning old standards and adopting new ones. If this abandoning and adopting is desultory, hit-and-miss, and especially if it is compelled to be secret, evolution becomes unduly slow and costly, or else unduly fast and costly. The rational procedure is to recognize that there is a place for minorities that seriously experiment with reconstructions for the benefit of all. The widespread moral confusion and haste of the present day is a natural result of the lack of critical minorities thinking and experimenting in the open during the preceding two or three generations when the conditions of existence were being rapidly transformed by economic forces.

From some of the current concepts of education one would infer that in the school and college world at least minorities must be flourishingly performing their indispensable functions. One would expect students to obtain a material part of their training in rationality from belonging to this or that minority, and from the reciprocal modification of majorities and minorities by each other. Some experience of this kind is had, in fact, in self-government schemes of some sorts; yet it appears that the educational possibilities of majority-minority situations are rarely worked out either by pupils acting alone or by pupils acting under the guidance of supervisors. Instead of the learning of deficiencies and the enlargement of horizon that should result from the interplay of groups, we find, too often, cock-crowing by the victorious majority and a sense of futility upon the part of the defeated minority.

This in the elementary and secondary schools. When we come to the colleges, we find conditions even worse. The majority-minority relations are so irrational that anything more ominous for the future of society can scarcely be found. “Campus customs,” often trivial, sometimes offensive, are enforced upon every last student with the ruthlessness of a Czarist régime. If one refuses, say, to wear a green cap, one is thrown into water or otherwise manhandled; or, if physical penalties have been abolished, there are psychical penalties not less compelling. The faculty of a certain college is proud to have rooted physical violence completely out of the campus; yet on the same campus there is a law that a freshman must deliver a match to any upper-class man who demands one, and another law permits any upper-class man to examine the socks that any freshman is wearing. “What would happen to a freshman who refused to submit to these laws?” a visitor asked. The reply was that if he persisted in his disobedience life would be made so miserable for him that he would leave college. The visitor asked again, “What would happen if a freshman sent to the college paper a dignified communication in opposition to these customs?” The editor answered that the communication would not be printed, but that if it were printed the writer would suffer the penalty.

The quality of such campus laws must be judged by the effects upon both those who command and those who obey. The pain, physical or mental, even though it amount to cruelty, is not the worst of the matter, by any means. A deeper wound by far is inflicted upon the perpetrators themselves through the closing of their minds to thought and to the conditions of rational social existence. Where minorities have no voice, the mind of the majority decays. Perhaps the clearest sign of what really happens here is the sheepish submissiveness of the minority, and the salving of its sores by the thought that next year one will have the privilege of tormenting somebody else.

“All the general student offices for the next three years have been allotted. Even the freshmen who are to hold office in their senior year have been picked out,” said one who knew. “How was it done?” “Oh, politicians from the fraternities put their heads together and distributed the plums.” “But how about the elections? Can these politicians deliver the vote?” “Certainly.”

This may be an extreme case, but certainly “delivering the votes” is common upon our campuses, and partizanship is taken as normal. Majority-minority relations are made up of deals, combinations, sharp practices, squabbles, and occasional corruption of the ballot. The minutes of a certain chapter of a fraternity actually contain the record of a motion, duly made and carried, that the chapter combine with other fraternities therein named to get and divide the college offices.

When we find such things in Pennsylvania colleges, or Ohio colleges, or Illinois colleges, we are justified in asking whether academic experience may not be contributing to the gang politics and the political corruption proved to have been present in these states. Though the means for proving a connection are lacking, the likelihood of it is sufficient to give pause to the wise. At least this can be asserted, that this sort of college experience contains no corrective for this sort of political conduct.

One looks in vain for anything in the teaching or the administration of colleges that promises to go far in the opposite direction. Professors, who might be expected to be wise in such rudimentary matters of the education of intelligence, are handicapped by lack of reasonable minority-majority relations within their faculty. College administration is in too many respects autocratic; a professor has too much reason to suppose that minorities are unwelcome and futile. The contacts of students with such mentors, whether in the classroom or outside it, will not go far towards curing the ills of the campus.

Nor will the cure come, as far as now appears, from presidents and deans. The “administrative mind,” admirable as it is for its ability to fit human and other factors together in a general scheme, is the victim of its own strength. It thinks of human problems in terms of possible manipulation by a manager; it seeks quick results, and it is tempted to value them above fine human relations; it fits men into its own plan instead of developing in men a capacity to make plans. Prediction is, of course, precarious, but the present indications are that our best reliance for reform in this part of higher education is upon the students themselves. Their power, measured in administrative scales, is minor, but they are capable of attaining the spirit that overtops all mechanics of administration. We know this because of what we already see in individuals and minority groups upon many campuses. Students are beginning to ask to be educated! And much of the best criticism of the mass-folly of collegians comes from collegians themselves. The growth of these minorities in number, in size, in insight, and in articulateness is to be expected. There is room for hope that some day minorities upon the campus will perform their true educational function.

The indispensable functions of minorities, then, are these: To bring into the open any oppression, injustice, untruth, failure or defect that the powers that be are committing or permitting or failing to perceive; to apprehend and to define new issues, especially in situations in which the majority has a strong motive for continuing the _status quo_; to bring it to pass that ideas shall be thrashed out before action is taken; to protect the ruling majority from becoming the victim of its own power; finally, being convinced where truth and right lie, to stick to the conviction through thick and thin without compromise unless right reason shows that the conviction is erroneous. Let any minority that pursues this policy become the majority if it can; let it secure control if it can by fair and open means, and then let it beware of its own power, and let it accept help from minorities that now will arise in their turn.

The most important changes that are to occur tomorrow are in the keeping of some minority now in existence or soon to arise. The most creative thought will take its rise from discontent and criticism, not from fattened respectability. The most significant part of society in state, in church, in the industrial order, in education, is some minority. Minorities can be wise or foolish. It is not necessarily creditable to walk with the few nor discreditable to march with the many (but only dangerous!). Nevertheless, the most significant part of any society is some minority in which creative changes are germinating. Without minorities society, as an order of reason, would perish.

XXVIII

RELEASE THROUGH COOPERATIVE THINKING

That release from the trammels of selfhood is to be found in some sort of self-identification with other selves is one of the surest insights men have achieved through millennial ponderings upon the meaning of life. But the nature and the process of this mingling of personalities have been variously conceived. Sympathy, particularly with sufferers; oneness with a congregation of worshippers; obedience, as of soldiers to a commander; fellowship through common loyalty to a person, a cause, or an institution; friendship and affection; “letting go” in a crowd, as in religious frenzies ancient and modern, in drinking bouts, or in a football game--all these have recommended themselves as modes of emancipation. All of them do in fact bring a sense of enlargement; we are here on track of some conceivably universal good. Yet the contrasts and the clashes between these heterogeneous modes of self-enlargement warn us to think twice. When we do think twice, we shall ask from what we need to be released, and into what, and what is the final result of each of these types of experience.

As a rule, we struggle to be released without first inquiring into the nature of our bondage, and as a result we hail as salvation almost any experience that promotes the flow of self-forgetting emotion. Real release, in any large and permanent sense, must be that which brings to fruition the motive that is in all and through all our motivation--to be a rational, self-guiding self in a society of such selves; and the chains that must be struck off are the specific ones that we ourselves have forged through partial and defective self-activity in the past.

I shall take for granted, without devoting a section to discussing the point, that current thought is right, along with considerable ancient thought, when it values friendship, affection, and generally sympathetic relations between individuals as, in some degree, the actual attainment of the life of reason. The same is true of the experience of beauty, of delight in truth, and of play. All these are genuinely emancipating experiences. They are a rational good in themselves, and they fit into the framework of rationality in the larger relations. It is in these larger relations that our problem is, in practice, farthest from solution. In the modern world the individual is obliged to make specific reactions to extensive social masses and forces; further, many of these reactions must be made by the individual as a member of some class, organization, or institution. Here is where the shoe of precedent pinches most; here is where the capacity of the individual to achieve any large freedom is most in question.

It is perhaps scarcely necessary to argue that dividing the world of persons into a few who command and a many who obey is neither practicable nor inherently rational. The impossibility of it and the irrationality rest back upon the same fact, namely, that both those who command and those who obey know themselves and one another as persons. There is something present all ’round that is stronger than force. A full measure of obedience never can be exacted from the many, and the few cannot bring themselves to exact it. It is fascinating to witness the possessors of power compromising with themselves in the use of it; it is inspiring to see strength of spirit in those who are shorn of power. Persons just have to get together upon the sheer basis of personality.

There is a kind of freedom, as also a kind of get-together, in herd-action, no doubt. For such action takes down the bars and lets something inside of us caper. This capering may be lightsome, as in a New Orleans Mardi Gras or a New York City election-night jamboree; or it may be strenuous, as in mass support of a football team engaged in a hard game; or it may be destructive, as in an angry mob. By emotional release of this sort people can be made to cohere on behalf of an institution, a party, or a cause. Consequently leaders of many interests--political, economic, religious--have developed a technic for causing people to move in herds when, because of emotional release, they think they are acting freely as individuals.

It is not to be denied that release of this general type, though it be partial, though it lends itself to self-deception, though it be dangerous, may be serviceable at times. Leastways, one can scarcely fail to sympathize when minds long subjected to a narrow and numbing routine break loose and go on a spiritual picnic! There are times when frolicsome nonsense brings benefits deeper than the momentary satisfaction. We must not forget that even our better and wiser selves perpetually rebreathe the partly exhausted air that issues from our own lungs. We ever need the open! Further, when alternatives have been weighed and a decision reached, it may sometimes be the part of wisdom, though it be dangerous, to put all our energy into an executive act, postponing further thought for the time being.

But mass-action in which critical thought is not a concurrent item never is wholly safe. It is least dangerous in play-activities in which the many actually play, not merely look on; it is most perilous when a whole population, or a class in society, or a party, acts as a unit under the inspiration of some high sentiment, religious, patriotic, or other. For now concentration of mind upon a given end that stirs deep emotion not merely postpones thought, but controls thought. The mind is now ready to affirm or deny anything whatever in the interest of its consuming passion; or, if ‘interest’ rather than ‘passion’ is the type of control, unlimited ingenuity is employed in digging out evidence that we are already acting wisely and fairly.

At this point the problem of release of our powers takes this form: How are the functions of thought to be performed and made effective where men act in groups, societies, classes, and masses? A special phase of this problem concerns the method of rational action where conflict arises or is threatened between two sets of persons.

A phrase that has been coming into use recently, “cooperative thinking” points the way to a solution, the only possible solution, of this problem. There are two aspects of it. One is “thinking” in the strict sense of active inquiry by analytic methods; the other is “cooperation” as contrasted, on the one hand, with thinking in solitude, and on the other hand, with the strife-and-victory attitude and habit.

Such thinking is, of course, not an invention, nor a new discovery. It exists in circles of friends who muse by the fireside without desire to win victories over one another; it exists in some families and partnerships, in which the members pool their views and thereby attain harmony of action; it characterizes the old Quaker type of deliberation in which there was much silence and listening, but freedom to speak, with the final word of the chairman (no vote having been taken), “It seems to be the sense of the meeting that ...”; it can be witnessed in assemblies in the interest of scientific research, when each

## participant in discussion takes the attitude of inquiry.

What has to be done with this already old experience of thinking together is threefold: To extend the practice from these restricted groups to other groups and to the larger aggregations of men; to extend it from the few interests in which it is now recognized to all interests that call for corporate action; and to dig deeper into the nature and the conditions of cooperative thinking, particularly in areas of conflict, and to improve the technic of it.

In view of some items of recent history, some readers may ask, “Do you mean discussion method, so called? If so, then, ...?” If by discussion method we are to understand a particular _a, b, c_, procedure, this is not what I mean, for I am not convinced that cooperative thinking is restricted to any one, or any other number, of particular procedures. Even in the few examples to which allusion has been made there is great variety. On the other hand, there is distinct advantage in the formulation of specific procedures that have been successful--formulations that, most of all, enable persons assembling together for the first time to find their own mind and discern their problems most promptly.[9]

The leading promoters of discussion method, whatever the particular technic that they favor, appear to have in mind the same goal, on the whole, as that which I have defined. If the goal, and the roads that lead towards it, have not always been clearly seen, I am willing to think that this is incidental to the newness and the incompleteness of some phases of our experience in this field. Consequently, if I now point out some misconceptions and pitfalls, it is not because I wish to hold back the movement that goes under the name of discussion method, but because I believe that it represents in important measure a principle of rationality itself.

First, then, genuinely cooperative thinking must be something more than a friendly adjustment of conflicting present interests, or pooling of present desires. Let us gladly grant that arbitration, pooling, and adjustment by compromise have their place. When opponents--say, employers and employes--“get their feet under the same table,” something is likely to be gained, even if conflicting desires are adjusted without inquiry into the validity of any of them. But in the end we must distinguish between the two questions, How can I get what I want with the least friction? and, What wants, of myself and of others, are reasonable?

An illustration of the principle is easily found in industrial conflicts. In most contests between capital and labor, each party occupies a fixed base of assumed self-interest. Now and then, it is true, a declaration is heard that the interest of the employer and the interest of the worker are at bottom one; but this is interpreted as meaning, according to one’s starting point, either that high profits for the employer carry with them benefits for the worker in the way of wages, or that high wages for the worker increase the prosperity of the investor by stabilizing labor and by enabling workers to buy goods. Meantime, evidence accumulates that something is wrong with the assumptions that underlie this type of thought. Are not the interests of capital and the interests of labor, as they are here understood, fundamentally antagonistic to each other and to the common weal? Clearly, the great task of thought and of conference between these two--rather three--interests is to face unflinchingly the true nature of the ends that each party seeks, and to evaluate them all by weighing them in the same scales.

A parallel instance is the habit of excluding from conferences between nations questions of “vital interest,” “national honor,” “purely domestic concern,” or a specified topic such as the Monroe Doctrine. What is the implication of such reservations? Is it that we desire the privilege of acting arbitrarily? Or, is it that we possess a rationality that others do not possess? Or, finally, is it that we distrust thought as a guide where our emotions are most intense?

How is cooperative thinking related to debating? Undoubtedly debate, which proceeds by settled rules, is a splendid step on the road from squabbling to peace. The rules of order for deliberative assemblies are a mighty achievement of reason. They make mere force take a back seat. For they make it possible for the last man to be heard. They provide for pause, a second thought, amendment and postponement; they enable minorities actually to modify the thinking of majorities, and they are one instrument of a genuinely common will--a will proved to be common by the loyal acquiescence of minorities in final decisions by vote. Nevertheless, debate is only a half-way house. For it is a clash between conclusions already held rather than a seeking for deeper insight. Moreover, because it has the form and uses a method of conflict, it is not favorable to friendly and candid examination of motives. It is not a method of self-criticism, nor of help to others in self-criticism.

Discussion method, even in its present forms, is a clear addition to the tools of reason. For it does not endeavor to make one’s initial position prevail. Rather, its attitude is that of seeking to know rather than seeking to convince or to win. It is a method of mutual self-modification. It smooths the path towards the larger truths, which are always the potentially common-to-all rather than the particular-tome. Its hardest task and its severest test will be found in the necessity, ultimately, of submitting to mutual scrutiny our basic assumptions, which represent our deepest-rooted and most persistent desires.

Cooperative revision of conduct in the realm of basic desires through analytical thought! Release from our self-bound selves by what one may dare call the intellectual love of one another! This is the goal towards which cooperative thought must move. In the end, nothing less will suffice.

We shall be tempted to content ourselves with a less radical good, a less radical rationality than this. We shall be tempted not only by timidity and desire for special privileges, but also by our regard for what is really good within one another. The evil in life is due chiefly to misplaced and displaced desires that are not fundamentally evil but fundamentally good. There is reason, always, for respect, considerateness, gentleness, therefore. Any attempt to think cooperatively must rely upon bringing the reasonableness of such attitudes to clear consciousness. But at once we are tempted, even out of regard for one another, to soften issues, or to pool interests rather than weigh our wants, or to equilibrate our present views instead of deepening our problem and obtaining fresh data.

There is no painless operation that can cure us of our deeper irrationalities. Discussion, when it is good, does not anesthetize its participants, nor make them dozy with the sweet food of specious solutions for problems, but keeps them awake by the prick of self-criticism. When discussion is at its best it treads the dangerous edge where intrenched interests and supposedly sacred convictions practice the philosophy of preparedness.

Sometimes cooperative thinking must manifest its virtues by producing repentance. For, though a kernel of good impulse can be found in our conduct, the direction that conduct takes often is destructive. I can administer spiritual poison to myself through my love of life; when I pursue my just rights I can become insensitive and cruel; I can become so absorbed in the mechanisms and immediate motives of my occupation that I fail of ethical perspective. For me, in such situations, there is no salvation into rationality without an about-face.

No method of conference will render minorities dispensable. In even the sincerest discussion we need participants who have the “show me” spirit. Always there is a residuum of problem or of evidence not yet mastered; always there is the one-sidedness of men; always there will be leaders who are in danger of dominating the thought of others; friendliness may produce an illusory sense of unanimity or of having solved a problem; and even while discussion is going on conditions in the world are changing and problems are shifting. Discussion groups in which minorities fade out should be carefully scrutinized.

The promotion of discussion method has brought to the fore still another set of interesting and important questions. Are all questions whatsoever to be treated as open? However we answer this query, are we to set down as prejudiced every mind that tenaciously holds that condition _a_ is right, condition _b_ wrong, and change _c_ required? Does cooperative thinking imply that such an individual is to act as if he did not see what he is sure that he does see? And does it justify in others an everlasting “Perhaps so; perhaps not”? Is nothing ever to be taken as settled? Does willingness to consider the other man’s point of view estop us from action that may, from his point of view, constitute antagonism?

The rational answers to these questions appear to be as follows: The only sense in which we can properly assume that all questions are open is that everyone should be ready to weigh specific evidence when it is offered and to go after evidence upon specific proof that it is needed. The most learned man, and the ethically insightful one, can be at home in a discussion group upon this condition; he cannot be at home if the notion of open-mindedness is so applied as to make specific grounds and sharp distinctions seem unimportant. The open mind is not the same as the empty mind, as has been said; it is far more likely to be the full mind. That is, readiness to listen, to weigh, and to revise, rather than non-committance, is the essential requirement. Truly cooperative thinking will not make pussy-cats of us all; there still will be prophets, and they will express convictions that have point. They will be helped, however, to be circumspect, even though, as seems to be inevitable, conduct will result that, from some points of view, constitutes antagonism.

Cooperative thinking thus understood offers a marvellous emancipation to us who are caught in the web of selfhood. An emancipation both negative and positive, both from something and into something. It offers, to begin with, as real a “letting go” as the emotional sprees that simulate freedom. When I enter wholeheartedly into discussion, as we are coming to understand this term, I rise out of my inhibitions, my strains, my defence-attitudes, my feeling that the weal or the woe of myself, my party, my institution, or society in general is hanging by a thread that I am holding between my fingers. What a relief! And what a smoothing out of the wrinkles of the mind ensues when one casts out pride of being right, and, instead of being embarrassed when one is found to be in error, rejoices in being set right. This is one phase of the becoming “as a little child” that Jesus recommended.

But this is a letting go, not into a controlling emotion, but into a more limber use of intelligence. The change is like that which a tennis player, or a piano player, experiences when he learns how to relax his wrist. Questions now bob up where they were not suspected; one sees hitherto unrealized meanings in the other fellow’s thought; one’s own notions now appear in a new perspective, and one actually understands one’s own ideas better than before; the as-yet-unknown and the as-yet-unfinished come out of the shadows and show themselves for what they are, and therefore the lure of study increases. New possibilities now seem worth trying, and expectancy of unprecedented good is nourished.

Here are conditions that favor invention, originality, and creativeness. There is, first, release from tensions; then, vivid consciousness of a problem; next, stimulation by varied data and alternatives, and finally, criticism of all proposed solutions. No doubt the climax of creativity will occur as a rule in moments of solitary reflection, but this free fellowship of mind prepares the way. It starts the appropriate mood and attitude; it helps define our discontents; it gets us out of our ruts. Cooperative _thinking_ does not flatten out the individual; rather, it saves him from the merely type-reactions of both himself and his professional and social environment.

A little way back we contemplated the pseudo-emancipation of herd action. Let us close this section by noticing the opposite pseudo-emancipation of smart minds that are not cooperative. We have had in recent years not a little free-lance criticism of everything in our civilization. With much of the “de-bunking” that has resulted, these pages have shown sympathy. But much of this criticism fails to attain complete objectivity because the critic takes no means to correct his own necessarily faulty personal equation. His personality, his theory of the universe, or his dominant mood so mingles with his description of actualities that the final effect is the pitting of a newly conventionalized individual against older conventions. This will be found in fiction, in essay, and in criticism. These authors feel, perhaps, that they are exercising great freedom, whereas in fact much of their capacity for apprehending fact, for critical judgment, and for reconstruction is bound by their solitariness or their partizanship. Full emancipation comes only through some form of cooperative thinking.

XXIX

MY INTRACTABLE SELF

The problem of releasing our powers is the problem of both mastering and submitting to the process of becoming a person. A submission that is also a mastering! Here is the paradox of rationality in a finite and growing being. A sort of dialectic is involved: Self-affirmation, followed by self-denial, and then realization that this denial of self is in reality a higher and fuller affirmation of selfhood.

I am not conscious, when I say this, of being under the influence of Hegel, and certainly I do not regard this process as abstractly logical. It is not the logical inconsistency of our self-assertiveness that is so troublesome, but the consequences of it in pain, injustice, sensuality, on the one hand, and on the other hand the numbing of high motives of which we are by nature capable.

This interplay of apparent opposites appears in the large in the majority-minority-majority cycle. Power in the majority gives rise from within itself to power-in-weakness in a minority; this after struggle grows into the major self-affirmation of the society in question, and then, in turn, a new minority is required.

A parallel cycle is fulfilled in the individual through the medium of cooperative thinking. Before the experience of cooperative thinking he affirms or believes or acts upon the basis of a narrow experience; cooperative thinking submits his case to a wider, more varied experience, in which he ceases to take himself as the majority; but behold, this submission frees and intensifies his own individuality, whereupon the cycle begins over again.

The point in this cycle at which the chief obstacles to the growth of persons are encountered is the second step--the denial of one’s accumulated self. The chief hindrances are emotional. They are fear of the unknown, and reaching after utter security (which in fact one never experiences until one ceases to grasp after it); pride (which does one the dishonor of identifying oneself with one’s possessions or products); sensitiveness to opposition or contradiction (which easily becomes either pugnacity, or argumentativeness, or smartness, or the habit of being on the defensive); and indolent contentment with the merely good, coupled with only languid approval of the better. In all these states the self withdraws from actuality, covering its eyes as if they could not bear the light. Consequently, a prime necessity, if we are to be released from bondage to self, is the attainment of objectivity, particularly objectivity towards our own sensitive points.

There are several trails that lead into or at least towards this fruitful mountain valley. The scientific study of man helps; learning what others think about us helps; a third trail, which is the least laborious and painful, is laughter. I mean the laughter, not of scorn or derision, but of humorous sympathy. Put yourself into some funny classification, even if it be only partly or remotely true, and lo, you are playing with yourself instead of making of your little self such a dreadfully serious matter! Humor in this sense--not the biting-dog sense--is a method of objectivity or truth-finding. It has a wondrous capacity to make small things look small, and large things large. “Just think, mother!” a humorous magazine makes a freshly graduated collegian say, as he holds up his “sheepskin,” “Now I’m an educated man!”

Genial humor, moreover, is a normal expression of confidence in the meaningfulness of life. When I laugh good-humoredly at my own foibles I as much as say, “I wasn’t all there, was I?” When Immanuel Kant, who was less than five feet tall, stumbled and fell, he rose smiling, saying that it was no matter, he wasn’t tall enough to fall far! The meaning of comedy is that we look straight at the incongruities in ourselves without being abashed or losing our self-respect--_we_ are free and happy in spite of our blunders, more free and happy because we do not dodge the fact of our blundering. The stage comedy that we enjoy most is the one that most completely hits off the characteristic foibles of humanity in the large, that is of us the spectators. Here we play with our selfhood, see deeper into it, and renew our confidence that we can be rational.

Man is like a bear in a cage, says Robert Frost--so different from a bear freely roaming, so ridiculous, yet ... But see for yourself how humor without acerbity works.

THE BEAR

By Robert Frost

The bear puts both arms round the tree above her And draws it down as if it were a lover And its choke-cherries lips to kiss goodby, Then lets it snap back upright in the sky. Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall. (She’s making her cross-country in the fall.) Her great weight creaks the barbed wire in the staples As she flings over and off down through the maples, Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair. Such is the uncaged progress of the bear. The world has room to make a bear feel free. The universe seems cramped to you and me. Man acts more like a poor bear in a cage That all day fights a nervous inward rage, His mood rejecting all his mind suggests. He paces back and forth and never rests The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet, The telescope at one end of his beat, And at the other end the microscope, Two instruments of nearly equal hope, And in conjunction giving quite a spread. Or if he rests from scientific tread, ’Tis only to sit back and sway his head Through ninety-odd degrees of arc it seems, Between two metaphysical extremes. He sits back on his fundamental butt With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut (He almost looks religious but he’s not), And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek, At one extreme agreeing with one Greek, At the other agreeing with another Greek, Which may be thought but only so to speak. A baggy figure equally pathetic When sedentary and when peripatetic.

_The Nation_, April 18, 1928, p. 447.

Humor helps us to be objective in even the most serious and sacred matters. In the sermons of some of the most spiritually illuminated and illuminating preachers of our day laughter is continually near the surface, and often above the surface. The chuckle of the congregation is not a sign that the mind has been distracted by unspiritual influences, but that the point has got home. “I wonder,” said a distinguished theologian, “whether God has a sense of humor?”

The laughter that makes us objective towards our limitations and yet confident of our powers is not the same as the laughter of Lazarus in Eugene O’Neill’s play. The point that Lazarus strives and strives to make convincing is that selfhood is really insignificant and that lightsome laughter is the appropriate mood for dealing with this fact. As the drama was staged--magnificently staged--at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, the laughter that Lazarus evoked in others was not lightsome. Even his own “followers” did not attain to happy humor, and the masks that they wore expressed abandon without the salt of thought. _Thinking laughter_ was reserved for Lazarus alone, but his philosophy and his laugh never, in fact, blended with each other. In spite of the fact that he applied hope-bearing terms such as “life” and “God” to the lifeless and undivine dust into which we are to be resolved, he could not make laughter really natural and free in the contemplation of such a destiny; it was, instead, an irruption suggestive of a pathological condition.

The kind of lightsomeness that releases the bound self is the kind that expresses belief in the significance of selfhood. Its function is, not to solve our problems, but to take the stiffness out of the joints of our mind. The main work has still to be done by rigorous thinking and--as I have more than once hinted--by vigorous repenting.

In some situations repenting is the only way in which straight thinking can perform its functions. By repentance I mean the frank, unequivocal realization and acknowledgment (to oneself at least) that one has been in the wrong in a sense so deep that the self expressed therein must be disavowed, together with the positive espousal of a contrary selfhood.

In any such reversal of self there will be emotion, but not necessarily any standard emotion. Upon this point there is much misunderstanding and unfinished thinking. The most common view of repentance is that it is the climax of chagrin, a humiliating experience, or even a grovelling of spirit that anyone who respects himself would shun if he could. This notion arose, no doubt, through the grovelling of “subjects” before a human “sovereign” whom they had offended. Then, the qualities of a human sovereign having been ascribed to God, religion made of repentance the abject thing of our tradition.

The ability to repent is one of the noblest attributes of man. The act is a privilege, not a dour necessity. It is, or can be, free growth from within, a normal event in rational living on the part of finite beings; therefore to be expected, provided for in our life-policies, and lived through in dignity rather than abjectness.

The emotions that can occur in such a crisis cover a whole spectrum from self-loathing to gladness. The state that we most need to cultivate is gladness or joy that we are able to break through the shell of self into a larger world. What a hell our selfhood would be if one could no longer repent of anything! Repentance is not the winter’s grave of our self-respect; it is the springtime of it.

It is needless to ask what class in society is impoverishing itself most by neglecting the grace of repentance. For nearly every class and institution has built up one or another defence-mechanism whereby it employs some supposed virtue of its own as a justification for continuing on its present course. Neither in the State nor in the church; neither in education nor in business and industry; neither in the family nor in the larger social groupings, do we find the habit of facing faults in a manly and rational way; in none of them does one hear the spring-song of growth through repentance.

Nor is this note audible in the vocalizations of most of our _intelligentsia_ who occupy themselves so much with the fact of their own emancipation and the lack of it in their contemporaries. The function of the critic is both important and permanent, but the goal of criticism is neither the chagrin that depresses the powers of another, nor yet inflation of the critic’s self-esteem through applause from the irresponsible. As in games the best sort of sportsmanship encourages and helps a competitor to do his best, so the discoverer of our defects should so reveal us to ourselves that we desire to improve ourselves. Criticism at its best is a sympathetic entering into the problems of others; it is not taking “pot shots” at them. When the problem for another is to achieve repentance, the problem for the critic is to make repentance seem attractive as well as necessary.

The writer or the speaker who merely utters flings at our faults suffers in his own person the same sort of closing-up or self-involution that he produces in those whom he “lambastes” or denounces. Lacking the sympathy or the humor to enter into the human-nature situation of another, he forfeits the capacity of self-criticism also. He becomes opinionated, dogmatic, sometimes intolerant, and at last careless of fact and unable to repent of his own follies.

Some of our difficulty, as I have indicated, arises from habits and traditions generated by experience under arbitrary governments, when citizens had compelling motive for concealment and for putting the best foot forward. But in addition we must admit that our nature spontaneously shrinks from paying the cost of freedom; it longs for joy, but fears to grasp it. Self-overcoming, therefore, and self-discipline are indispensable.

Hence the peculiar service of the self-disciplined individuals who openly reverse themselves with evident happiness. We know how the young are helped to be self-critical and at the same time self-confident when a parent or a teacher makes amends for his errors, either intellectual or administrative. The late Josiah Strong told with utter simplicity how he, a Christian minister, discovered that his preaching had misconstrued the Gospel, and how through self-reversal he experienced a kind of joyful conversion (see My Religion in Everyday Life). Harry Emerson Fosdick has experienced, we may be sure, a sense of happy emancipation as he has publicly abandoned positions that he publicly took during the War. The revivalist, Gypsy Smith, having repeated in public a story that was damaging and offensive to the then Mayor Hylan, “took it all back” in public without qualification or self-excuse. One can safely guess that a few more acts like these on the part of preachers and evangelists would recommend religion more effectively than rivers of argument, denunciation, and pleading.

Is it Quixotic to hope for an ultimate reversal of the popular assumption that of course every individual and organization will be on the defensive with respect to what he or it is and is doing? May not this defensive attitude at last be seen to be what it verily is, weakness rather than strength? May not repentance become the expected thing, acquiring the dignity and the educational force that belong to any necessary aspect of our rationality? The growth of cooperative thinking is one sign that this hope is not entirely without ground. Even “rights” and “vital interests” will be safer when this day comes than they are now. Demonstrate that you are unarmed, and others will lay down their arms; then you can “talk it over.” Where wrong has been done, an unreserved acknowledgment of it has time and again smitten the hardness of men’s spirits, and streams of generosity have burst forth. Often and often what we most need is someone who will take the initiative in repentance.

The diagnosis of humanity’s sickness that was made in