A Preface to Politics

W >> Walter Lippmann >> A Preface to Politics

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

Now whoever has followed political theory will have derived perhaps two
convictions as a reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard their
systems as true and binding, and none of these systems are. No matter
which one you examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a Platonist or a
Benthamite in politics to-day. You cannot go to any of the great
philosophers even for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be fairly
complete, and relevant to American life. I returned to the sophomore
mood: "Each of these thinkers has contributed something, has had some
wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk the philosophers can't all be
right or all wrong."

But like so many theoretical riddles, this one rested on a very simple
piece of ignorance. The trouble was that without realizing it I too had
been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too was looking for
something that could not be found. That happened in this case to be
nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the
old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once
and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would
contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms,
foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of
action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was
on the point of damning the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to Marx.

This is what one may call the naivete of the intellect. Its hope is that
some man living at one place on the globe in a particular epoch will,
through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize his experience for
all time and all space. It says in effect that there is never anything
essentially new under the sun, that any moment of experience sufficiently
understood would be seen to contain all history and all destiny--that the
intellect reasoning on one piece of experience could know what all the
rest of experience was like. Looked at more closely this philosophy means
that novelty is an illusion of ignorance, that life is an endless
repetition, that when you know one revolution of it, you know all the
rest. In a very real sense the world has no history and no future, the
race has no career. At any moment everything is given: our reason could
know that moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life would be like
the commuter's who travels back and forth on the same line every day.
There would be no inventions and no discoveries, for in the instant that
reason had found the key of experience everything would be unfolded. The
present would not be the womb of the future: nothing would be embryonic,
nothing would _grow_. Experience would cease to be an adventure in order
to become the monotonous fulfilment of a perfect prophecy.

This omniscience of the human intellect is one of the commonest
assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have,
it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the
child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic
egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole
systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity;
the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists,
materialists and determinists who believed in all sincerity that
"Science" was capable of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If
you want to see this faith in all its naivete go into those quaint
rationalist circles where Herbert Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of
life," with only a few inessential details omitted.

Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has ever realized such hopes.
Mankind has certainly come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's
observation that one of its favorite games is called "Cheat the
Prophet."... "The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all
that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next
generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and
bury them nicely. They then go and do something else." Now this weakness
is not, as Mr. Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the clever
men. But it is a weakness, and many people have speculated about it. Why
in the face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the rocks of the
unexpected do men continue to believe that the intellect can transcend
the vicissitudes of experience?

For they certainly do believe it, and generally the more parochial their
outlook, the more cosmic their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for
the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try to believe that, however
finite we may be, our intellect is something apart from the cycle of our
life, capable by an Olympian detachment from human interests of a divine
thoroughness. Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins
by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame,
perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things
in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it
has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun
which can illuminate the world."

This is what most of us do in our search for a philosophy of politics. We
forget that the big systems of theory are much more like village
lamp-posts than they are like the sun, that they were made to light up a
particular path, obviate certain dangers, and aid a peculiar mode of
life. The understanding of the place of theory in life is a comparatively
new one. We are just beginning to see how creeds are made. And the
insight is enormously fertile. Thus Mr. Alfred Zimmern in his fine study
of "The Greek Commonwealth" says of Plato and Aristotle that no
interpretation can be satisfactory which does not take into account the
impression left upon their minds by the social development which made the
age of these philosophers a period of Athenian decline. Mr. Zimmern's
approach is common enough in modern scholarship, but the full
significance of it for the creeds we ourselves are making is still
something of a novelty. When we are asked to think of the "Republic" as
the reaction of decadent Greece upon the conservative temperament of
Plato, the function of theory is given a new illumination. Political
philosophy at once appears as a human invention in a particular
crisis--an instrument to fit a need. The pretension to finality falls
away.

This is a great emancipation. Instead of clinging to the naive belief
that Plato was legislating for all mankind, you can discuss his plans as
a temporary superstructure made for an historical purpose. You are free
then to appreciate the more enduring portions of his work, to understand
Santayana when he says of the Platonists, "their theories are so
extravagant, yet their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined
and beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies conscience
and utters our inmost hopes." This insight into the values of human life,
partial though it be, is what constitutes the abiding monument of Plato's
genius. His constructions, his formal creeds, his law-making and social
arrangements are local and temporary--for us they can have only an
antiquarian interest.

In some such way as this the sophomoric riddle is answered: no thinker
can lay down a course of action for all mankind--programs if they are
useful at all are useful for some particular historical period. But if
the thinker sees at all deeply into the life of his own time, his
theoretical system will rest upon observation of human nature. That
remains as a residue of wisdom long after his reasoning and his concrete
program have passed into limbo. For human nature in all its profounder
aspects changes very little in the few generations since our Western
wisdom has come to be recorded. These _apercus_ left over from the great
speculations are the golden threads which successive thinkers weave into
the pattern of their thought. Wisdom remains; theory passes.

If that is true of Plato with his ample vision how much truer is it of
the theories of the littler men--politicians, courtiers and propagandists
who make up the academy of politics. Machiavelli will, of course, be
remembered at once as a man, whose speculations were fitted to an
historical crisis. His advice to the Prince was real advice, not a
sermon. A boss was telling a governor how to extend his power. The wealth
of Machiavelli's learning and the splendid penetration of his mind are
used to interpret experience for a particular purpose. I have always
thought that Machiavelli derives his bad name from a too transparent
honesty. Less direct minds would have found high-sounding ethical
sanctions in which to conceal the real intent. That was the nauseating
method of nineteenth century economists when they tried to identify the
brutal practices of capitalism with the beneficence of nature and the
Will of God. Not so Machiavelli. He could write without a blush that "a
prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which
men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to
act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion." The
apologists of business also justified a rupture with human decencies.
They too fitted their theory to particular purposes, but they had not the
courage to avow it even to themselves.

The rare value of Machiavelli is just this lack of self-deception. You
may think his morals devilish, but you cannot accuse him of quoting
scripture. I certainly do not admire the end he serves: the extension of
an autocrat's power is a frivolous perversion of government. His ideal
happens, however, to be the aim of most foreign offices, politicians and
"princes of finance." Machiavelli's morals are not one bit worse than the
practices of the men who rule the world to-day. An American Senate tore
up the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, and with the approval of the President
acted "contrary to fidelity" and friendship too; Austria violated the
Treaty of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Machiavelli's ethics
are commonplace enough. His head is clearer than the average. He let the
cat out of the bag and showed in the boldest terms how theory becomes an
instrument of practice. You may take him as a symbol of the political
theorist. You may say that all the thinkers of influence have been
writing advice to the Prince. Machiavelli recognized Lorenzo the
Magnificent; Marx, the proletariat of Europe.

At first this sounds like standing the world on its head, denying reason
and morality, and exalting practice over righteousness. That is neither
here nor there. I am simply trying to point out an illuminating fact
whose essential truth can hardly be disputed. The important social
philosophies are consciously or otherwise the servants of men's purposes.
Good or bad, that it seems to me is the way we work. We find reasons for
what we want to do. The big men from Machiavelli through Rousseau to Karl
Marx brought history, logic, science and philosophy to prop up and
strengthen their deepest desires. The followers, the epigones, may accept
the reasons of Rousseau and Marx and deduce rules of action from them.
But the original genius sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons
afterward. This amounts to saying that man when he is most creative is
not a rational, but a wilful animal.

The political thinker who to-day exercises the greatest influence on the
Western World is, I suppose, Karl Marx. The socialist movement calls him
its prophet, and, while many socialists say he is superseded, no one
disputes his historical importance. Now Marx embalmed his thinking in the
language of the Hegelian school. He founded it on a general philosophy of
society which is known as the materialistic conception of history.
Moreover, Marx put forth the claim that he had made socialism
"scientific"--had shown that it was woven into the texture of natural
phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia crowds three heavy volumes, so
elaborate and difficult that socialists rarely read them. I have known
one socialist who lived leisurely on his country estate and claimed to
have "looked" at every page of Marx. Most socialists, including the
leaders, study selected passages and let it go at that. This is a wise
economy based on a good instinct. For all the parade of learning and
dialectic is an after-thought--an accident from the fact that the
prophetic genius of Marx appeared in Germany under the incubus of Hegel.
Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he wrote three volumes to
justify it. Did not the Communist Manifesto appear many years before "Das
Kapital"?

Nothing is more instructive than a socialist "experience" meeting at
which everyone tries to tell how he came to be converted. These
gatherings are notoriously untruthful--in fact, there is a genial
pleasure in not telling the truth about one's salad days in the socialist
movement. The prevalent lie is to explain how the new convert, standing
upon a mountain of facts, began to trace out the highways that led from
hell to heaven. Everybody knows that no such process was actually lived
through, and almost without exception the real story can be discerned: a
man was dissatisfied, he wanted a new condition of life, he embraced a
theory that would justify his hopes and his discontent. For once you
touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs
are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. In the
language of philosophers, socialism as a living force is a product of the
will--a will to beauty, order, neighborliness, not infrequently a will to
health. Men desire first, then they reason; fascinated by the future,
they invent a "scientific socialism" to get there.

Many people don't like to admit this. Or if they admit it, they do so
with a sigh. Their minds construct a utopia--one in which all judgments
are based on logical inference from syllogisms built on the law of
mathematical probabilities. If you quote David Hume at them, and say that
reason itself is an irrational impulse they think you are indulging in a
silly paradox. I shall not pursue this point very far, but I believe it
could be shown without too much difficulty that the rationalists are
fascinated by a certain kind of thinking--logical and orderly
thinking--and that it is their will to impose that method upon other men.

For fear that somebody may regard this as a play on words drawn from some
ultra-modern "anti-intellectualist" source, let me quote Santayana. This
is what the author of that masterly series "The Life of Reason" wrote in
one of his earlier books: "The ideal of rationality is itself as
arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as
any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which
the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In
spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands rationality,
what really demands rationality, what makes it a good and indispensable
thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own nature, but our need
of it both in safe and economical action and in the pleasures of
comprehension." Because rationality itself is a wilful exercise one hears
Hymns to Reason and sees it personified as an extremely dignified
goddess. For all the light and shadow of sentiment and passion play even
about the syllogism.

The attempts of theorists to explain man's successes as rational acts and
his failures as lapses of reason have always ended in a dismal and misty
unreality. No genuine politician ever treats his constituents as
reasoning animals. This is as true of the high politics of Isaiah as it
is of the ward boss. Only the pathetic amateur deludes himself into
thinking that, if he presents the major and minor premise, the voter will
automatically draw the conclusion on election day. The successful
politician--good or bad--deals with the dynamics--with the will, the
hopes, the needs and the visions of men.

It isn't sentimentality which says that where there is no vision the
people perisheth. Every time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory
on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at
a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red
flag of the socialists; every song from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
to the "International"; every metrical conclusion to a great
speech--whether we stand at Armageddon, refuse to press upon the brow of
labor another crown of thorns, or call upon the workers of the world to
unite--every one of these slogans is an incitement of the will--an effort
to energize politics. They are attempts to harness blind impulses to
particular purposes. They are tributes to the sound practical sense of a
vision in politics. No cause can succeed without them: so long as you
rely on the efficacy of "scientific" demonstration and logical proof you
can hold your conventions in anybody's back parlor and have room to
spare.

I remember an observation that Lincoln Steffens made in a speech about
Mayor Tom Johnson. "Tom failed," said Mr. Steffens, "because he was too
practical." Coming from a man who had seen as much of actual politics as
Mr. Steffens, it puzzled me a great deal. I taxed him with it later and
he explained somewhat as follows: "Tom Johnson had a vision of Cleveland
which he called The City on the Hill. He pictured the town emancipated
from its ugliness and its cruelty--a beautiful city for free men and
women. He used to talk of that vision to the 'cabinet' of political
lieutenants which met every Sunday night at his house. He had all his
appointees working for the City on the Hill. But when he went out
campaigning before the people he talked only of three-cent fares and the
tax outrages. Tom Johnson didn't show the people the City on the Hill. He
didn't take them into his confidence. They never really saw what it was
all about. And they went back on Tom Johnson."

That is one of Mr. Steffens's most acute observations. What makes it
doubly interesting is that Tom Johnson confirmed it a few months before
he died. His friends were telling him that his defeat was temporary, that
the work he had begun was unchecked. It was plain that in the midst of
his suffering, with death close by, he found great comfort in that
assurance. But his mind was so realistic, his integrity so great that he
could not blink the fact that there had been a defeat. Steffens was
pointing out the explanation: "you did not show the people what you saw,
you gave them the details, you fought their battles, you started to
build, but you left them in darkness as to the final goal."

I wish I could recall the exact words in which Tom Johnson replied. For
in them the greatest of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical
weakness of opportunist politics.

There is a type of radical who has an idea that he can insinuate advanced
ideas into legislation without being caught. His plan of action is to
keep his real program well concealed and to dole out sections of it to
the public from time to time. John A. Hobson in "The Crisis of
Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can
recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men
have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the
manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by
sophistical notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens calls
these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction
of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of
monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of
existing Municipal or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the
sole springs of action." Well may Mr. Hobson inquire, _"Now, what
provision is made for generating the motor power of progress in
Collectivism?"_

No amount of architect's plans, bricks and mortar will build a house.
Someone must have the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic
state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the good sense of its program. It
must find popular feeling, organize it, and make that the motive power of
government. If you study the success of Roosevelt the point is
re-enforced. He is a man of will in whom millions of people have felt the
embodiment of their own will. For a time Roosevelt was a man of destiny
in the truest sense. He wanted what a nation wanted: his own power
radiated power; he embodied a vision; Tom, Dick and Harry moved with his
movement.

No use to deplore the fact. You cannot stop a living body with nothing at
all. I think we may picture society as a compound of forces that are
always changing. Put a vision in front of one of these currents and you
can magnetize it in that direction. For visions alone organize popular
passions. Try to ignore them or box them up, and they will burst forth
destructively. When Haywood dramatizes the class struggle he uses class
resentment for a social purpose. You may not like his purpose, but unless
you can gather proletarian power into some better vision, you have no
grounds for resenting Haywood. I fancy that the demonstration of King
Canute settled once and for all the stupid attempt to ignore a moving
force.

A dynamic conception of society always frightens a great number of
people. It gives politics a restless and intractable quality. Pure reason
is so gentlemanly, but will and the visions of a people--these are
adventurous and incalculable forces. Most politicians living for the day
prefer to ignore them. If only society will stand fairly still while
their career is in the making they are content to avoid the actualities.
But a politician with some imaginative interest in genuine affairs need
not be seduced into the learned folly of pretending that reality is
something else than it is. If he is to influence life he must deal with
it. A deep respect is due the Schopenhauerian philosopher who looks upon
the world, finds that its essence is evil, and turns towards insensitive
calm. But no respect is due to anyone who sets out to reform the world by
ignoring its quality. Whoever is bent upon shaping politics to better
human uses must accept freely as his starting point the impulses that
agitate human beings. If observation shows that reason is an instrument
of will, then only confusion can result from pretending that it isn't.

I have called this misplaced "rationality" a piece of learned folly,
because it shows itself most dangerously among those thinkers about
politics who are divorced from action. In the Universities political
movements are generally regarded as essentially static, cut and dried
solids to be judged by their logical consistency. It is as if the stream
of life had to be frozen before it could be studied. The socialist
movement was given a certain amount of attention when I was an
undergraduate. The discussion turned principally on two points: were
rent, interest and dividends _earned_? Was collective ownership of
capital a feasible scheme? And when the professor, who was a good
dialectician, had proved that interest was a payment for service
("saving") and that public ownership was not practicable, it was assumed
that socialism was disposed of. The passions, the needs, the hopes that
generate this world-wide phenomenon were, I believe, pocketed and ignored
under the pat saying: "Of course, socialism is not an economic policy,
it's a religion." That was the end of the matter for the students of
politics. It was then a matter for the divinity schools. If the same
scholastic method is in force there, all that would be needed to crush
socialism is to show its dogmatic inconsistencies.

The theorist is incompetent when he deals with socialism just because he
assumes that men are determined by logic and that a false conclusion will
stop a moving, creative force. Occasionally he recognizes the wilful
character of politics: then he shakes his head, climbs into an ivory
tower and deplores the moonshine, the religious manias and the passions
of the mob. Real life is beyond his control and influence because real
life is largely agitated by impulses and habits, unconscious needs,
faith, hope and desire. With all his learning he is ineffective because,
instead of trying to use the energies of men, he deplores them.

Suppose we recognize that creeds are instruments of the will, how would
it alter the character of our thinking? Take an ancient quarrel like that
over determinism. Whatever your philosophy, when you come to the test of
actual facts you find, I think, all grades of freedom and determinism.
For certain purposes you believe in free will, for others you do not.
Thus, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, no determinist is prevented from saying
"if you please" to the housemaid. In love, in your career, you have no
doubt that "if" is a reality. But when you are engaged in scientific
investigation, you try to reduce the spontaneous in life to a minimum.
Mr. Arnold Bennett puts forth a rather curious hybrid when he advises us
to treat ourselves as free agents and everyone else as an automaton. On
the other hand Prof. Muensterberg has always insisted that in social
relations we must always treat everyone as a purposeful, integrated
character.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16