Chapter XIV

SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE

1

A false ideal of democracy can lead only to disillusionment and to meddlesome tyranny. If democracy cannot direct affairs, then a philosophy which expects it to direct them will encourage the people to attempt the impossible; they will fail, but that will interfere outrageously with the productive liberties of the individual. The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

2

The source of that bewilderment lies, I think, in the attempt to ascribe organic unity and purpose to society. We have been taught to think of society as a body, with a mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a collection of men, women and children whose minds, souls and purposes are variously related. Instead of being allowed to think realistically of a complex of social _relations_, we have had foisted upon us by various great propagative movements the notion of a mythical entity, called Society, the Nation, the Community.

In the course of the nineteenth century society was personified under the influence largely of the nationalist and the socialist movements. Each of these doctrinal influences in its own way insisted upon treating the public as the agent of an overmastering social purpose. In point of fact, the real agents were the nationalist leaders and their lieutenants, the social reformers and their lieutenants. But they moved behind a veil of imagery. And the public was habituated to think that any one conforming to the stereotype of nationalism or of social welfare was entitled to support. What the nationalist rulers thought and did was the nation’s purpose, and the touchstone for all patriots; what the reformers proposed was the benevolent consciousness of the human race moving mysteriously but progressively toward perfection.

The deception was so generally practised that it was often practised sincerely. But to maintain the fiction that their purposes were the spirit of mankind, public men had to accustom themselves to telling the public only a part of what they told themselves. And, incidentally, they confessed to themselves only a part of the truth on which they were acting. Candor in public life became a question of policy and not a rule of life.

“He may judge rightly,” Mr. Keynes once said of Mr. Lloyd George,[27] “that this is the best of which a democracy is capable,—to be jockeyed, humbugged, cajoled along the right road. A prejudice for truth or for sincerity as a method may be a prejudice based on some æsthetic or personal standard inconsistent, in politics, with practical good. We cannot yet tell.”

We do know, as a matter of experience, that all the cards are not laid face up upon the table. For however deep the personal prejudice of the statesman in favor of truth as a method, he is almost certainly forced to treat truth as an element of policy. The evidence on this point is overwhelming. No statesman risks the safety of an army out of sheer devotion to truth. He does not endanger a diplomatic negotiation in order to enlighten everybody. He does not usually forfeit his advantages in an election in order to speak plainly. He does not admit his own mistakes because confession is so good for the soul. In so far as he has power to control the publication of truth, he manipulates it to what he considers the necessities of action, of bargaining, morale and prestige. He may misjudge the necessities. He may exaggerate the goodness of his aims. But where there is a purpose in public affairs there are also apparent necessities which weigh in the balance against the indiscreet expression of belief. The public man does not and cannot act on the fiction that his mind is also the public mind.

You cannot account for this, as angry democrats have done by dismissing all public men as dishonest. It is not a question of personal morals. The business man, the trade-union leader, the college president, the minister of religion, the editor, the critic and the prophet, all feel as Jefferson did when he wrote that “although we often wished to go faster we slackened our pace that our less ardent colleagues might keep pace with us ... [and] by this harmony of the bold with the cautious, we advanced with our constituents in undivided mass.”[28]

The necessity for an “undivided mass” makes men put truth in the second place. I do not wish to argue that the necessity is not often a real one. When a statesman tells me that it is not safe for him to disclose all the facts, I am content to trust him in this if I trust him at all. There is nothing misleading in a frank refusal to tell. The mischief comes in the pretense that all is being told, that the public is entirely in the confidence of the public man. And that mischief has its source in the sophistry that the public and all the individuals composing it are one mind, one soul, one purpose. It is seen to be an absurd sophistry, once we look it straight in the face. It is an unnecessary sophistry. For we do well enough with doctors, though we are ignorant of medicine, and with engine drivers, though we cannot drive a locomotive; why not, then, with a Senator, though we cannot pass an examination on the merits of an agricultural bill?

Yet we are so deeply indoctrinated with the notion of union based upon identity, that we are most reluctant to admit that there is room in the world for different and more or less separate purposes. The monistic theory has an air of great stability about it; we are afraid if we do not hang together we shall all hang separately. The pluralistic theory, as its leading advocate, Mr. Laski, has pointed out, seems to carry with it “a hint of anarchy.”[29] Yet the suggestion is grossly exaggerated. There is least anarchy precisely in those areas of society where separate functions are most clearly defined and brought into orderly adjustment; there is most anarchy in those twilight zones between nations, between employers and employees, between sections and classes and races, where nothing is clearly defined, where separateness of purpose is covered up and confused, where false unities are worshiped, and each special interest is forever proclaiming itself the voice of the people and attempting to impose its purpose upon everybody as the purpose of all mankind.

3

To this confusion liberalism has with the kindest intentions contributed greatly. Its main insight was into the prejudices of the individual; the liberal discovered a method of proving that men are finite, that they cannot escape from the flesh. From the so-called age of enlightenment down to our day the heavy guns of criticism have been used to make men realize that they submit, as Bacon said, the shadows of things to the desires of the mind. Once the resistance was broken by proof that man belonged to the natural world, his pretensions to absolute certainty were attacked from every quarter. He was shown the history of his ideas and of his customs, and he was driven to acknowledge that they were bounded by time and space and circumstance. He was shown that there is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion purged of desire, for the man who holds the opinion must stand at some point in space and time and can see not the whole world but only the world as seen from that point. So men learned that they saw a little through their own eyes, and much more through reports of what other men thought they had seen. They were made to understand that all human eyes have habits of vision, which are often stereotyped, which always throw facts into a perspective; and that the whole of experience is more sophisticated than the naïve mind suspects. For its pictures of the world are drawn from things half heard and of things half seen; they deal with the shadows of things unsteadily, and submit unconsciously to the desires of the mind.

It was an amazing and unsettling revelation, and liberalism never quite knew what to do with it. In a theater in Moscow a certain M. Yevreynoff carried the revelation to one of its logical conclusions. He produced the monodrama.[30] This is a play in which the action, the setting and all the characters are seen by the audience through the eyes of one character only, as the hero sees them, and they take on the quality which his mind imagines they possess. Thus in the old theater, if the hero drank too much, he reeled in the midst of a sober environment. But in M. Yevreynoff’s supremely liberal theater, if I understand Mr. Macgowan’s account of it correctly, the drunkard will not reel about the lamppost; two lampposts will reel about him, and he will be dressed, because that is the way he feels, like Napoleon Bonaparte.

M. Yevreynoff has troubled me a good deal, for he seemed to have finished off the liberal with a fool’s cap, and left him sitting in a world that does not exist, except as so many crazy mirrors reflecting his own follies one upon the other. But then I recalled that M. Yevreynoff’s logic was defective and make-believe. He had all the time stood soberly outside his own drunken hero, and so had his audience; the universe had not after all gone up in the smoke of one fantasy; the drunken hero had his point of view, but, after all, there were others, just as authentic, with which in the course of his career he might collide. There might be a policeman, for example, with fantasies to be sure, but his own, who would break in upon the monodrama and remind the hero, and us, that when we submit the shadows of things to the desires of the mind we do not submit the things themselves.

But while all this does vindicate the sanity of the liberal criticism, it does not answer the question: since every action has to be taken by somebody, since everybody is in some degree a drunken hero with two lampposts teetering about him, how can any common good be furthered by this creature who is dominated by his special purposes? The answer was that it could be furthered by taming his purposes, enlightening them and fitting them into each other as the violin and the drum are fitted together into the orchestra. The answer was not acceptable in the nineteenth century, when men, in spite of all their iconoclasm, were still haunted by the phantom of identity. So liberals refused to write harmonious but separate parts for the violinist and the drummer. They made, instead, a noble appeal to their highest instincts. They spoke over the heads of men to man.

These general appeals were as vague as they were broad. They gave particular men no clue as to how to behave sincerely, but they furnished them with an excellent masquerade when they behaved arbitrarily. Thus the trappings of liberalism came into the service of commercial exploiters, of profiteers and prohibitionists and jingoes, of charlatans and the makers of buncombe.

For liberalism had burned down the barn to roast the pig. The discovery of prejudice in all particular men gave the liberal a shock from which he never recovered. He was so utterly disconcerted by his own discovery of a necessary but perfectly obvious truth, that he took flight into generalities. The appeal to everybody’s conscience gave nobody a clue how to act; the voter, the politician, the laborer, the capitalist had to construct their own codes _ad hoc_, accompanied perhaps by an expansive liberal sentiment, but without intellectual guidance from liberal thought. In time, when liberalism had lost its accidental association with free trade and _laissez faire_, through their abandonment in practice, it sadly justified itself as a necessary and useful spirit, as a kind of genial spook worth having around the place. For when individual men, guided by no philosophy but their own temporary rationalizations, got themselves embroiled, the spook would appear and in a peroration straighten out the more arbitrary biases they displayed.

Yet even in this disembodied state liberalism is important. It tends to awaken a milder spirit; it softens the hardness of action. But it does not dominate action, because it has eliminated the actor from its scheme of things. It cannot say: You do this and you do that, as all ruling philosophies must. It can only say: That isn’t fair, that’s selfish, that’s tyrannical. Liberalism has been, therefore, a defender of the under dog, and his liberator, but not his guide, when he is free. Top dog himself, he easily leaves his liberalism aside, and to liberals the sour reflection that they have forged a weapon of release but not a way of life.

The liberals have misunderstood the nature of the public to which they appealed. The public in any situation is, in fact, merely those persons, indirectly concerned, who might align themselves in support of one of the actors. But the liberal took no such uninflated view of the public. He assumed that all mankind was within hearing, that all mankind when it heard would respond homogeneously because it had a single soul. His appeal to this cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested intuition in everybody was equivalent to an appeal to nobody.

No such fallacy is to be found in the political philosophies which active men have lived by. They have all assumed, as a matter of course, that in the struggle against evil it was necessary to call upon some specific agent to do the work. Even when the thinker was out of temper with the human race, he had always hitherto made somebody the hero of his campaign. It was the peculiarity of liberalism among theories which have played a great part in the world that it attempted to eliminate the hero entirely.

Plato would certainly have thought this strange: his _Republic_ is a tract on the proper education of a ruling class. Dante, in the turmoil of thirteenth century Florence, seeking order and stability, addressed himself not to the conscience of Christendom but to the Imperial Party. The great state builders of modern times, Hamilton, Cavour, Bismarck, Lenin, each had in mind somebody, some group of real people, who were to realize his program. The agents in the theory have varied, of course; here they are the landlords, then the peasants, or the unions, or the military class, or the manufacturers; there are theories addressed to a church, to the ruling classes in particular nations, to some nation or race. The theories are always, except in the liberal philosophy, addressed to somebody.

By comparison the liberal philosophy has an air of vague unworldiness. Yet the regard of men for it has been persistent; somehow or other with all the lapses in its logic and with all its practical weaknesses it touches a human need. These appeals from men to man: are they not a way of saying that men desire peace, that there is a harmony attainable in which all men can live and let live? It seems so to me. The attempt to escape from particular purposes into some universal purpose, from personality into something impersonal, is, to be sure, a flight from the human problem, but it is at the same time a demonstration of how we wish to see that problem solved. We seek an adjustment, as perfect as possible, as untroubled as it was before we were born. Even if man were a fighting animal, as some say he is, he would wish for a world in which he could fight perfectly, with enemies fleet enough to extend him and not too fleet to elude him. All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms. Because liberalism could not accommodate the universal need of adjustment to the permanence and the reality of individual purpose, it remained an incomplete, a disembodied philosophy. It was frustrated over the ancient problem of the One and the Many. Yet the problem is not so insoluble once we cease to personify society. It is only when we are compelled to personify society that we are puzzled as to how many separate organic individuals can be united in one homogeneous organic individual. This logical underbrush is cleared away if we think of society not as the name of a thing but as the name of all the adjustments between individuals and their things. Then, we can say without theoretical qualms what common sense plainly tells us is so: it is the individuals who act, not society; it is the individuals who think, not the collective mind; it is the painters who paint, not the artistic spirit of the age; it is the soldiers who fight and are killed, not the nation; it is the merchant who exports, not the country. It is their relations with each other that constitute a society. And it is about the ordering of those relations that the individuals not executively concerned in a specific disorder may have public opinions and may intervene as a public.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] John Maynard Keynes, _A Revision of the Treaty_, p. 4.

[28] In a letter to William Wirt, cited by John Sharp Williams, _Thomas Jefferson_, p. 7.

[29] Harold J. Laski, _Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty_, p. 24.

[30] Kenneth Macgowan, _The Theatre of Tomorrow_, pp. 249–50.