A Preface to Politics

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The third requirement of a valuable contribution, says the Chicago
Commission, is the constitutional sanction. This idol carries its own
criticism with it. The worship of the constitution amounts, of course, to
saying that men exist for the sake of the constitution. The person who
holds fast to that idea is forever incapable of understanding either men
or constitutions. It is a prime way of making laws ridiculous; if you
want to cultivate _lese-majeste_ in Germany get the Kaiser to proclaim
his divine origin; if you want to promote disrespect of the courts,
announce their infallibility.

But in this case, the Commission is not representative of the dominant
thought of our times. The vital part of the population has pretty well
emerged from any dumb acquiescence in constitutions. Theodore Roosevelt,
who reflects so much of America, has very definitely cast down this idol.
Now since he stands generally some twenty years behind the pioneer and
about six months ahead of the majority, we may rest assured that this
much-needed iconoclasm is in process of achievement.

Closely related to the constitution and just as decadent to-day are the
Sanctity of Private Property, Vested Rights, Competition the Life of
Trade, Prosperity (at any cost). Each one of these ideas was born of an
original need, served its historical function and survived beyond its
allotted time. Nowadays you still come across some of these ancient
notions, especially in courts, where they do no little damage in
perverting justice, but they are ghost-like and disreputable, gibbering
and largely helpless. He who is watching the ascendant ideas of American
life can afford to feel that the early maxims of capitalism are doomed.

But the habit of mind which would turn an instrument of life into an
immutable law of its existence--that habit is always with us. We may
outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or Private Property only to
establish some new totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate
tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by no means confined to
the arts. Politics, religion, science are subject to it,--in politics we
call it conservative, in religion orthodox, in science we describe it as
academic. Its manifestations are multiform but they have a common source.
An original creative impulse of the mind expresses itself in a certain
formula; posterity mistakes the formula for the impulse. A genius will
use his medium in a particular way because it serves his need; this way
becomes a fixed rule which the classicalist serves. It has been pointed
out that because the first steam trains were run on roads built for carts
and coaches, the railway gauge almost everywhere in the world became
fixed at four feet eight and one-half inches.

You might say that genius works inductively and finds a method; the
conservative works deductively from the method and defeats whatever
genius he may have. A friend of mine had written a very brilliant article
on a play which had puzzled New York. Some time later I was discussing
the article with another friend of a decidedly classicalist bent. "What
is it?" he protested, "it isn't criticism for it's half rhapsody; it
isn't rhapsody because it is analytical.... What is it? That's what I
want to know." "But isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad
it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew what it was...." And so the
argument ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the article under certain
categories he had come to accept, appreciation was impossible for him. I
have many arguments with my classicalist friend. This time it was about
George Moore's "Ave." I was trying to express my delight. "It isn't a
novel, or an essay, or a real confession--it's nothing," said he. His
well-ordered mind was compelled to throw out of doors any work for which
he had no carefully prepared pocket. I thought of Aristotle, who denied
the existence of a mule because it was neither a horse nor an ass.

Dramatic critics follow Aristotle in more ways than one. A play is
produced which fascinates an audience for weeks. It is published and read
all over the world. Then you are treated to endless discussions by the
critics trying to prove that "it is not a play." So-and-so-and-so
constitute a play, they affirm,--this thing doesn't meet the
requirements, so away with it. They forget that nobody would have had the
slightest idea what a play was if plays hadn't been written; that the
rules deduced from the plays that have already been written are no
eternal law for the plays that will be.

Classicalism and invention are irreconcilable enemies. Let it be
understood that I am not decrying the great nourishment which a living
tradition offers. The criticism I am making is of those who try to feed
upon the husks alone. Without the slightest paradox one may say that the
classicalist is most foreign to the classics. He does not put himself
within the creative impulses of the past: he is blinded by their
manifestations. It is perhaps no accident that two of the greatest
classical scholars in England--Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern--are
political radicals. The man whom I call here the classicalist cannot
possibly be creative, for the essence of his creed is that there must be
nothing new under the sun.

The United States, you imagine, would of all nations be the freest from
classicalism. Settled as a great adventure and dedicated to an experiment
in republicanism, the tradition of the country is of extending
boundaries, obstacles overcome, and pioneering exploits in which a
wilderness was subdued to human uses. The very air of America would seem
to be a guarantee against formalism. You would think that self-government
finds its surest footing here--that real autonomy of the spirit which
makes human uses the goal of effort, denies all inhuman ideals, seeks out
what men want, and proceeds to create it. With such a history how could a
nation fail to see in its constitution anything but a tool of life, like
the axe, the spade or the plough?

The West has in a measure carried its freedom over into politics and
social life generally. Formalism sets in as you move east and south into
the older and more settled communities. There the pioneering impulse has
passed out of life into stupid history books, and the inevitable
classicalism, the fear of adventure, the superstition before social
invention, have reasserted themselves. If I may turn for a moment from
description to prophecy, it is to say that this equilibrium will not hold
for very long. There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms
which it needs to-day--reforms which will free its economic life from the
credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the
marketing of its products--will follow the way of all agricultural
communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer
does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain
unnatural irritants which may be summed up as absentee ownership. The
West is suffering from foreignly owned railroads, power-resources, and an
alien credit control. But once it recaptures these essentials of its
economic life, once the "progressive" movement is victorious, I venture
to predict that the agricultural West will become the heart of American
complacency. The East, on the other hand, with its industrial problem
must go to far more revolutionary measures for a solution. And the East
is fertilized continually by European traditions: that stream of
immigration brings with it a thousand unforeseeable possibilities. The
great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the
wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. To-day perhaps,
it is still predominantly a question for the East. But it means that
America is turning from the contrast between her courage and nature's
obstacles to a comparison of her civilization with Europe's. Immigration
more than anything else is drawing us into world problems. Many people
profess to see horrible dangers in the foreign invasion. Certainly no man
is sure of its conclusion. It may swamp us, it may, if we seize the
opportunity, mean the impregnation of our national life with a new
brilliancy.

I have said that the West is still moved by the tapering impulse of the
pioneer, and I have ventured to predict that this would soon dwindle into
an agricultural toryism. That prediction may very easily be upset.
Far-reaching mechanical inventions already threaten to transform farming
into an industry. I refer to those applications of power to agriculture
which will inevitably divorce the farmer from the ownership of his tools.
An industrial revolution analogous to that in manufacture during the
nineteenth century is distinctly probable, and capitalistic agriculture
may soon cease to be a contradiction in terms. Like all inventions it
will disturb deeply the classicalist tendency, and this disturbance may
generate a new impulse to replace the decadent one of the pioneer.

Without some new dynamic force America, for all her tradition, is not
immune to a hardening formalism. The psychological descent into
classicalism is always a strong possibility. That is why we, the children
of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly
with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In
many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the
people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid
sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different
civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism:
universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial
success; we have no tradition of intellectual revolt. The American
college student has the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court
judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical
habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the
"sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a
boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is
regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism
which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new
ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment with him.

It seems at times as if our capacity for appreciating originality were
absorbed in the trivial eccentricities of fads and fashions. The obvious
novelties of machinery and locomotion, phonographs and yellow journalism
slake the American thirst for creation pretty thoroughly. In serious
matters we follow the Vice Commission's fourth essential of a valuable
contribution--_that which will square with the public conscience of the
American people_.

I do not care to dilate upon the exploded pretensions of Mr. and Mrs.
Grundy. They are a fairly disreputable couple by this time because we are
beginning to know how much morbidity they represent. The Vice Commission,
for example, bowed to what might be called the "instinctive conscience"
of America when it balked at tracing vice to its source in the
over-respected institutions of American life and the over-respected
natures of American men and women. It bowed to the prevailing conscience
when it proposed taboos instead of radical changes. It bowed to a
traditional conscience when it confused the sins of sex with the
possibilities of sex; and it paid tribute to a verbal conscience, to a
lip morality, when, with extreme irrelevance to its beloved police, it
proclaimed "absolute annihilation" the ultimate ideal. In brief, the
commission failed to see that the working conscience of America is to-day
bound up with the very evil it is supposed to eradicate by a relentless
warfare.

It was to be expected. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal
verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means
a radical change in conscience. In order to do away with vice America
must live and think and feel differently. This is an old story. Because
of it all innovators have been at war with the public conscience of their
time. Yet there is nothing strange or particularly disheartening about
this commonplace observation: to expect anything else is to hope that a
nation will lift itself by its own bootstraps. Yet there is danger the
moment leaders of the people make a virtue of homage to the unregenerate,
public conscience.

In La Follette's Magazine (Feb. 17, 1912) there is a leading article
called "The Great Issue." You can read there that "the composite judgment
is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the
judgment of any one individual mind. The people have been betrayed by
their representatives again and again. The real danger to democracy lies
not in the ignorance or want of patriotism of the people, but in the
corrupting influence of powerful business organizations upon the
representatives of the people...."

I have only one quarrel with that philosophy--its negativity. With the
belief that government is futile and mischievous unless supported by the
mass of the people; with the undeniable fact that business has corrupted
public officials--I have no complaint. What I object to is the emphasis
which shifts the blame for our troubles from the shoulders of the people
to those of the "corrupting interests." For this seems to me nothing but
the resuscitation of the devil: when things go wrong it is somebody
else's fault. We are peculiarly open to this kind of vanity in America.
If some wise law is passed we say it is the will of the people showing
its power of self-government. But if that will is so weak and timid that
a great evil like child labor persists to our shame we turn the
responsibility over to the devil personified as a "special interest." It
is an old habit of the race which seems to have begun with the serpent in
the Garden of Eden.

The word demagogue has been frightfully maltreated in late years, but
surely here is its real meaning--to flatter the people by telling them
that their failures are somebody else's fault. For if a nation declares
it has reached its majority by instituting self-government, then it
cannot shirk responsibility.

These "special interests"--big business, a corrupt press, crooked
politics--grew up within the country, were promoted by American citizens,
admired by millions of them, and acquiesced in by almost all of them.
Whoever thinks that business corruption is the work of a few inhumanly
cunning individuals with monstrous morals is self-righteous without
excuse. Capitalists did not violate the public conscience of America;
they expressed it. That conscience was inadequate and unintelligent. We
are being pinched by the acts it nourished. A great outcry has arisen and
a number of perfectly conventional men like Lorimer suffer an undeserved
humiliation. We say it is a "moral awakening." That is another dodge by
which we pretend that we were always wise and just, though a trifle
sleepy. In reality we are witnessing a change of conscience, initiated by
cranks and fanatics, sustained for a long time by minorities, which has
at last infected the mass of the people.

The danger I spoke of arises just here: the desire to infect at once the
whole mass crowds out the courage of the innovator. No man can do his
best work if he bows at every step to the public conscience of his age.
The real service to democracy is the fullest, freest expression of
talent. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must
whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not
the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.

Hostile critics of democracy have long pointed out that mediocrity
becomes the rule. They have not been without facts for their support. And
I do not see why we who believe in democracy should not recognize this
danger and trace it to its source. Certainly it is not answered with a
sneer. I have worked in the editorial office of a popular magazine, a
magazine that is known widely as a champion of popular rights. By
personal experience, by intimate conversations, and by looking about, I
think I am pretty well aware of what the influence of business upon
journalism amounts to. I have seen the inside working of business
pressure; articles of my own have been suppressed after they were in
type; friends of mine have told me stories of expurgation, of the
"morganization" of their editorial policy. And in the face of that I
should like to record it as my sincere conviction that no financial power
is one-tenth so corrupting, so insidious, so hostile to originality and
frank statement as the fear of the public which reads the magazine. For
one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are
rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the
farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer
girl. Anybody can take a fling at poor old Mr. Rockefeller, but the great
mass of average citizens (to which none of us belongs) must be left in
undisturbed possession of its prejudices. In that subservience, and not
in the meddling of Mr. Morgan, is the reason why American journalism is
so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.

The people should be supreme, yes, its will should be the law of the
land. But it is a caricature of democracy to make it also the law of
individual initiative. One thing it is to say that all proposals must
ultimately win the acceptance of the majority; it is quite another to
propose nothing which is not immediately acceptable. It is as true of the
nation as of the body that one leg cannot go forward very far unless the
whole body follows. That is a different thing from trying to move both
legs forward at the same time. The one is democracy; the other
is--demolatry.

It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol. It would be
an endless task to hunt down all the masks, the will-o'-the-wisps and the
shadows which divert us from our real purpose. Each man carries within
himself the cause of his own mirages. Whenever we accept an idea as
authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the
plough, and not the fruit. And from this habit there is no permanent
escape. Only effort can keep the mind centered truly. Whenever criticism
slackens, whenever we sink into acquiescence, the mind swerves aside and
clings with the gratitude of the weary to some fixed idea. It is so much
easier to follow a rule of thumb, and obey the constitution, than to find
out what we really want and to do it.

* * * * *

A great deal of political theory has been devoted to asking: what is the
aim of government? Many readers may have wondered why that question has
not figured in these pages. For the logical method would be to decide
upon the ultimate ideal of statecraft and then elaborate the technique of
its realization. I have not done that because this rational procedure
inverts the natural order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical
tangles and pseudo-problems. They come from an effort to state abstractly
in intellectual terms qualities that can be known only by direct
experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if you begin by announcing
that politics must achieve "justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even
though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly what these words mean
translated into concrete experiences, it is very doubtful whether you can
really convey your meaning to anyone else. "Plaisante justice qu'une
riviere borne. Verite, au deca des Pyrenees, erreur au de la," says
Pascal. If what is good in the world depended on our ability to define it
we should be hopeless indeed.

This is an old difficulty in ethics. Many men have remarked that we
quarrel over the "problem of evil," never over the "problem of good."
That comes from the fact that good is a quality of experience which does
not demand an explanation. When we are thwarted we begin to ask why. It
was the evil in the world that set Leibniz the task of justifying the
ways of God to man. Nor is it an accident that in daily life misfortune
turns men to philosophy. One might generalize and say that as soon as we
begin to explain, it is because we have been made to complain.

No moral judgment can decide the value of life. No ethical theory can
announce any intrinsic good. The whole speculation about morality is an
effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively
feel is good. No formula can express an ultimate experience; no axiom can
ever be a substitute for what really makes life worth living. Plato may
describe the objects which man rejoices over, he may guide them to good
experiences, but each man in his inward life is a last judgment on all
his values.

This amounts to saying that the goal of action is in its final analysis
aesthetic and not moral--a quality of feeling instead of conformity to
rule. Words like justice, harmony, power, democracy are simply empirical
suggestions which may produce the good life. If the practice of them does
not produce it then we are under no obligation to follow them, we should
be idolatrous fools to do so. Every abstraction, every rule of conduct,
every constitution, every law and social arrangement, is an instrument
that has no value in itself. Whatever credit it receives, whatever
reverence we give it, is derived from its utility in ministering to those
concrete experiences which are as obvious and as undefinable as color or
sound. We can celebrate the positively good things, we can live them, we
can create them, but we cannot philosophize about them. To the anaesthetic
intellect we could not convey the meaning of joy. A creature that could
reason but not feel would never know the value of life, for what is
ultimate is in itself inexplicable.

Politics is not concerned with prescribing the ultimate qualities of
life. When it tries to do so by sumptuary legislation, nothing but
mischief is invoked. Its business is to provide opportunities, not to
announce ultimate values; to remove oppressive evil and to invent new
resources for enjoyment. With the enjoyment itself it can have no
concern. That must be lived by each individual. In a sense the politician
can never know his own success, for it is registered in men's inner
lives, and is largely incommunicable. An increasing harvest of rich
personalities is the social reward for a fine statesmanship, but such
personalities are free growths in a cordial environment. They cannot be
cast in moulds or shaped by law. There is no need, therefore, to generate
dialectical disputes about the final goal of politics. No definition can
be just--too precise a one can only deceive us into thinking that our
definition is true. Call ultimate values by any convenient name, it is of
slight importance which you choose. If only men can keep their minds
freed from formalism, idol worship, fixed ideas, and exalted
abstractions, politicians need not worry about the language in which the
end of our striving is expressed. For with the removal of distracting
idols, man's experience becomes the center of thought. And if we think in
terms of men, find out what really bothers them, seek to supply what they
really want, hold only their experience sacred, we shall find our
sanction obvious and unchallenged.

CHAPTER VII

THE MAKING OF CREEDS

My first course in philosophy was nothing less than a summary of the
important systems of thought put forward in Western Europe during the
last twenty-six hundred years. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we
did gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages. For the rest we
touched upon all the historic names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about
nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend approached me with a sour
look on his face. "You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail out of
this business. I agree with each philosopher as we study him. But when we
get to the next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally says the
other one was wrong. They can't all be right. Can they now?" I was too
much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him.

Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was
a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had
jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground
passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of
motives and facts and ideas was incredible. I began to feel the force of
Mr. John Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for social and
industrial reforms continue to ignore principles ... they will have to
pay the price which short-sighted empiricism always pays; with slow,
hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and
backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track toward an
unseen goal." The political theorists laid some claim to lighting up both
the track and the goal, and so I turned to them for help.

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