Chapter XV

ABSENTEE RULERS

1

The practical effect of the monistic theories of society has been to rationalize that vast concentrating of political and economic power in the midst of which we live. Since society was supposed to have organic purposes of its own, it came to seem quite reasonable that these purposes should be made manifest to a people by laws and decisions from a central point. Somebody had to have a purpose revealed to him which could be treated as the common purpose; if it was to be accepted it had to be enforced by command; if it was really to look like the national purpose, it had to be handed down as a rule binding upon all. Thus men could say with Goethe:

“And then a mighty work completed stands, One mind suffices for a thousand hands.”[31]

In this fashion the eulogies of the Great Society have been made. Two thousand years ago it was possible for whole civilizations as mature as the Chinese and the Greco-Roman to coexist in total indifference to one another. Today the food supplies, the raw materials, the manufactures, the communications and the peace of the world constitute one great system which cannot be thrown severely out of balance in any part without disturbing the whole.

Looked at from the top, the system in its far-flung and intricate adjustments has a certain grandeur. It might, as some hopeful persons think, even ultimately mean the brotherhood of man since all men living in advanced communities are now in quite obvious fashion dependent upon one another. But the individual man cannot look at the system steadily from the top or see it in its ultimate speculative possibilities. For him it means in practice, along with the rise in certain of his material standards of life, a nerve-wracking increase of the incalculable forces that bear upon his fate. My neighbor in the country who borrowed money to raise potatoes which he cannot sell for cash looks at the bills from the village store asking for immediate cash payments, and does not share the philosophic hopeful view of the interdependence of the world. When unseen commission merchants in New York City refuse his potatoes, the calamity is as dumfounding as a drought or a plague of locusts.

The harvest in September of the planting in May is now determined not only by wind and weather, which his religion has from time immemorial justified, but by a tangle of distant human arrangements of which only loose threads are in his hands. He may live more richly than his ancestors; he may be wealthier and healthier and, for all he knows, even happier. But he gambles with the behavior of unseen men in a bewildering way. His relations with invisibly managed markets are decisively important for him; his own foresight is not dependable. He is a link in a chain that stretches beyond his horizon.

The rôle that salesmanship and speculation play is a measure of the spread between the work men do and the results. To market the output of Lancashire, says Dibblee,[32] “the merchants and warehousemen of Manchester and Liverpool, not to mention the marketing organizations in other Lancashire towns, have a greater capital employed than that required in all the manufacturing industries of the cotton trade.” And, according to Anderson’s calculations,[33] the grain received at Chicago in 1915 was sold sixty-two times in futures, as well as an unknown number of times in spot transactions. Where men produce for invisible and uncertain markets “the initial plans of enterprisers”[34] cannot be adequate. The adjustments, often very crude and costly, are effected by salesmanship and speculation.

Under these conditions neither the discipline of the craftsman who controls his process from beginning to end nor the virtues of thrift, economy and work are a complete guide to a successful career. Defoe in his _Complete English Tradesman_[35] could say that “trade is not a ball where people appear in masque and act a part to make sport ... but is a plain, visible scene of honest life ... supported by prudence and frugality” ... and so “prudent management and frugality will increase any fortune to any degree.” Benjamin Franklin might opine that “he that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary expenses excepted) will certainly become rich, if that Being who governs the world, to whom all should look for a blessing on their honest endeavors, doth not in His wise providence, otherwise determine.” Young men were until quite recently exhorted in the very words of Defoe and Franklin, though Franklin’s rather canny allowance for the whims of the Almighty was not always included. But of late the gospel of success contains less about frugality and more about visions and the message of business. This new gospel, beneath all its highfalutin cant, points dimly though excitedly to the truth that for business success a man must project his mind over an invisible environment.

This need has bred an imperious tendency to organization on a large scale. To defend themselves against the economic powers of darkness, against great monopolies or a devastating competition, the farmers set up great centralized selling agencies. Business men form great trade associations. Everybody organizes, until the number of committees and their paid secretaries cannot be computed. The tendency is pervasive. We have had, if I remember correctly, National Smile Week. At any rate we have had Nebraska which discovered that if you wish to prohibit liquor in Nebraska you must prohibit it everywhere. Nebraska cannot live by itself alone, being too weak to control an international traffic. We have had the socialist who was convinced that socialism can maintain itself only on a socialist planet. We have had Secretary Hughes who was convinced that capitalism could exist only on a capitalist planet. We have had all the imperialists who could not live unless they advanced the backward races. And we have had the Ku Klux Klansmen who were persuaded that if you organized and sold hate on a country-wide scale there would be lots more hate than there was before. We have had the Germans before 1914 who were told they had to choose between “world power or downfall,” and the French for some years after 1919 who could not be “secure” in Europe unless every one else was insecure. We have had all conceivable manifestations of the impulse to seek stability in an incalculable environment by standardizing for one’s own apparent convenience all those who form the context of one’s activity.

It has entailed perpetual effort to bring more and more men under the same law and custom, and then, of course, to assume control of the lawmaking and law-enforcing machinery in this larger area. The effect has been to concentrate decision in central governments, in distant executive offices, in caucuses and in steering committees. Whether this concentration of power is good or bad, permanent or passing, this at least is certain. The men who make the decisions at these central points are remote from the men they govern and the facts with which they deal. Even if they conscientiously regard themselves as agents or trustees, it is a pure fiction to say that they are carrying out the will of the people. They may govern the people wisely. They are not governing with the active consultation of the people. They can at best lay down policy wholesale in response to electorates which judge and act upon only a detail of the result. For the governors see a kind of whole which obscures the infinite varieties of particular interests; their vices are abstraction and generalization which appear in politics as legalism and bureaucracy. The governed, on the contrary, see vivid aspects of a whole which they can rarely imagine, and their prevailing vice is to mistake a local prejudice for a universal truth.

The widening distance between the centers where decisions are taken and the places where the main work of the world is done has undermined the discipline of public opinion upon which all the earlier theorists relied.[36] A century ago the model of popular government was the self-sufficing township in which the voters’ opinions were formed and corrected by talk with their neighbors. They might entertain queer opinions about witches and spirits and foreign peoples and other worlds. But about the village itself the facts were not radically in dispute, and nothing was likely to happen that the elders could not with a little ingenuity bring under a well-known precedent of their common law.

But under absentee government these checks upon opinion are lacking. The consequences are often so remote and long delayed that error is not promptly disclosed. The conditioning factors are distant; they do not count vividly in our judgments. The reality is inaccessible; the bounds of subjective opinion are wide. In the interdependent world, desire, rather than custom or objective law, tends to become the criterion of men’s conduct. They formulate their demands at large for “security” at the expense of every one else’s safety, for “morality” at the expense of other men’s tastes and comfort, for the fulfillment of a national destiny that consists in taking what you want when you want it. The lengthening of the interval between conduct and experience, between cause and effect, has nurtured a cult of self-expression in which each thinker thinks about his own thoughts and has subtle feelings about his feelings. That he does not in consequence deeply affect the course of affairs is not surprising.

2

The centralizing tendencies of the Great Society have not been accepted without protest, and the case against them has been stated again and again.[37] Without local institutions, said de Tocqueville, a nation may give itself a free government, but it does not possess the spirit of liberty. To concentrate power at one point is to facilitate the seizure of power. “What are you going to do?” Arthur Young asked some provincials at the time of the French Revolution. “We do not know,” they replied; “we must see what Paris is going to do.” Local interests handled from a distant central point are roughly handled by busy and inattentive men. And in the meantime the local training and the local winnowing of political talent are neglected. The overburdened central authority expands into a vast hierarchy of bureaucrats and clerks manipulating immense stacks of paper, always dealing with symbols on paper, rarely with things or with people. The genius of centralization reached its climax in the famous boast of a French minister of education, who said: It is three o’clock; all the pupils in the third grade throughout France are now composing a Latin verse.

There is no need to labor the point. The more centralization the less can the people concerned be consulted and give conscious assent. The more extensive the rule laid down the less account it can take of fact and special circumstance. The more it conflicts with local experience, the more distant its source and wholesale its character, the less easily enforceable it is. General rules will tend to violate particular needs. Distantly imposed rules usually lack the sanction of consent. Being less suited to the needs of men, and more external to their minds, they rest on force rather than on custom and on reason.

A centralized society dominated by the fiction that the governors are the spokesmen of a common will tends not only to degrade initiative in the individual but to reduce to insignificance the play of public opinion. For when the action of a whole people is concentrated, the public is so vast that even the crude objective judgments it might make on specific issues cease to be practicable. The tests indicated in preceding chapters by which a public might judge the workability of a rule or the soundness of a new proposal have little value when the public runs into millions and the issues are hopelessly entangled with each other. It is idle under such circumstances to talk about democracy, or about the refinement of public opinion. With such monstrous complications the public can do little more than at intervals to align itself heavily for or against the régime in power, and for the rest to bear with its works, obeying meekly or evading, as seems most convenient. For, in practice, the organic theory of society means a concentration of power; that is, the way the notion of one purpose is actually embodied in affairs. And this in turn means that men must either accept frustration of their own purposes or contrive somehow to frustrate that declared purpose of that central power which pretends it is the purpose of all.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] _Faust_, Part II, Act v, scene 3.

[32] Dibblee, _The Laws of Supply and Demand_, cited by B. M. Anderson, Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 259.

[33] B. M. Anderson, Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 251.

[34] _Ibid._

[35] _Cf._ Werner Lombart, _The Quintessence of Capitalism_, Chapter VII.

[36] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XVI and XVII.

[37] In a convenient form by J. Charles Brun, _Le Régionalisme_, pp. 13 _et seq._ _Cf._ also Walter Thompson, _Federal Centralization_,