But enormous organization is compatible with demolition of the ties that form local communities and with substitution of impersonal bonds for personal unions, with a flux which is hostile to stability. The character of our cities, of organized business and the nature of the comprehensive associations in which individuality is lost, testify also to this fact. Yet there are contrary signs. “Community” and community activities are becoming words to conjure with. The local is the ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists. It is easy to point to many signs which indicate that unconscious agencies as well as deliberate planning are making for such an enrichment of the experience of local communities as will conduce to render them genuine centers of the attention, interest and devotion for their constituent members.
The unanswered question is how far these tendencies will reëstablish the void left by the disintegration of the family, church and neighborhood. We cannot predict the outcome. But we can assert with confidence that there is nothing intrinsic in the forces which have effected uniform standardization, mobility and remote invisible relationships that is fatally obstructive to the return movement of their consequences into the local homes of mankind. Uniformity and standardization may provide an underlying basis for differentiation and liberation of individual potentialities. They may sink to the plane of unconscious habituations, taken for granted in the mechanical phases of life, and deposit a soil from which personal susceptibilities and endowments may richly and stably flower. Mobility may in the end supply the means by which the spoils of remote and indirect interaction and interdependence flow back into local life, keeping it flexible, preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past, and furnishing it with the elements of a variegated and many-hued experience. Organization may cease to be taken as an end in itself.
Then it will no longer be mechanical and external, hampering the free play of artistic gifts, fettering men and women with chains of conformity, conducing to abdication of all which does not fit into the automatic movement of organization as a self-sufficing thing.
Organization as a means to an end would reënforce individuality and enable it to be securely itself by enduing it with resources beyond its unaided reach.
Whatever the future may have in store, one thing is certain. Unless local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself. But if it be re-established, it will manifest a fullness, variety and freedom of possession and enjoyment of meanings and goods unknown in the contiguous associations of the past. For it will be alive and flexible as well as stable, responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in which it is enmeshed. While local, it will not be isolated. Its larger relationships will provide an exhaustible and flowing fund of meanings upon which to draw, with assurance that its drafts will be honored.
Territorial states and political boundaries will persist; but they will not be barriers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from his fellows; they will not be hard and fast divisions whereby external separation is converted into inner jealousy, fear, suspicion and hostility. Competition will continue, but it will be less rivalry for acquisition of material goods, and more an emulation of local groups to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual and artistic wealth. If the technological age can provide mankind with a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in a humane age. It will take its place as an instrumentality of shared and communicated experience. But without passage through a machine age, mankind’s hold upon what is needful as the precondition of a free, flexible and many-colored life is so precarious and inequitable that competitive scramble for acquisition and frenzied use of the results of acquisition for purposes of excitation and display will be perpetuated.
We have said that consideration of this particular condition of the generation of democratic communities and an articulate democratic public carries us beyond the question of intellectual method into that of practical procedure. But the two questions are not disconnected.
The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a reality. Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech.
Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public. But it and its results are but tools after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take. Logic in its fulfillment recurs to the primitive sense of the word: dialogue. Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought. It, like the acquisition of material wealth, marks a diversion of the wealth created by associated endeavor and exchange to private ends. It is more genteel, and it is called more noble. But there is no difference in kind.
In a word, that expansion and reënforcement of personal understanding and judgment by the cumulative and transmitted intellectual wealth of the community which may render nugatory the indictment of democracy drawn on the basis of the ignorance, bias and levity of the masses, can be fulfilled only in the relations of personal intercourse in the local community. The connections of the ear with vital and out-going thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator. Publication is partial and the public which results is partially informed and formed until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth. There is no limit to the liberal expansion and confirmation of limited personal intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another in the communications of the local community. That and that only gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.
FOOTNOTES [2] Judges make rules of law. On the “will” theory this is an encroachment on the legislative function. Not so, if the judges further define conditions of action.
[3] “A Treatise on Human Nature,” Part II, sec. vii.
[5] Ayers, “Science: The False Messiah,” Chapter IV, The Lure of Machinery.
[6] The one obvious exception concerns the tools of waging war. With respect to them, the state has often shown itself as greedy as it has been reluctant and behindhand with reference to other inventions.
[7] This is a convenient place for making explicit a qualification which has to be understood throughout but which is slighted in the text. The words “government” and “officers” are taken functionally, not in terms of some particular structure which is so familiar to us that it leaps to the eyes when these words are used. Both words in their functional meaning are much wider in application than what is meant when we speak, say, of the government and officers of Great Britain or the United States. In households, for example, there have usually been rule and “heads”; the parents, for most purposes the father, have been officers of the family interest. The “patriarchal family” presents an emphatic intensification, on account of comparative isolation of the household from other social forms, of what exists in lesser degree in almost all families. The same sort of remark applies to the use of the term “states,” in connection with publics. The text is concerned with modern conditions, but the hypothesis propounded is meant to hold good generally. So to the patent objection that the state is a very modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of those _structures_ which go by the name of states, yet all history, or almost all, records the exercise of analogous _functions_. The argument concerns these functions and the mode of their operation, no matter what word be used, though for the sake of brevity the word “state,” like the words “government” and “officer,” has been freely employed.
[8] This last position promptly called forth a protest from the head of the utilitarian school, Jeremy Bentham.
[10] See Walter Lippmann’s “The Phantom Public.” To this as well as to his “Public Opinion,” I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness, not only as to this particular point, but for ideas involved in my entire discussion even when it reaches conclusions diverging from his.
[11] The most adequate discussion of this ideal with which I am acquainted is T. V. Smith’s “The Democratic Way of Life.”
[12] The religious character of nationalism has been forcibly brought out by Carleton Hayes, in his “Essays on Nationalism,” especially Chap.
IV.
[13] J. S. Mill, Logic, Book VI, ch. 7, sec. I. Italics mine.
INDEX Absolutism, in method, 194–202 Amusements, rivals to political interest, 139 Anarchism, 26 Art, of communication, 182–84 distinctive traits of human, 24; revolt against, 88, 98–100; economic, 105–07; and democracy, 143; rigid and flexible, 148; distinguished from community, 151–53; domination of isolated, 194; territorial and functional, 212–13.
Bentham, J., 54 n.
Biological, and social, 11–12, 152, 195 Business, rival to political interest, 138; political control by, 182.
versus the causal order, 201–02 Child Labor Amendment, 121 Common Interest, nature of, 17, 34–35.
Communication, a public function, 60, 208; social necessity of, 152, 217–19; necessary to knowledge, 176–79; an art, 182–84.
See _Symbols_ Community, 38; and society, 98, 157; conditioning wants, 105–06; and communication, 152–54; importance of local, 211–19.
See _Great Society_ Comparative Method, 47 Conjoint Behavior, see _Association_ Conscience, private, origin of, 49–50 Consequences, importance of for politics, 12–13, 15, 17, 24–25, 27, effect of expansion, 47–57; and rules of law, 56; effect of enduring, 57–62; effect of irreparable, 62–64; relation to state and government, 66–69; to antithesis of individual and social, 193 Control, political, 12, 16; of human nature, 197–99 Corporations, illustration of relation of individual and social, 190 Democracy, political, 77; significance of, 83; historic genesis, 83–87; alleged unity, 83; pure, 94; inchoate, 109; pessimism about, 110; American, 111–15; as a moral idea, 143–44; machinery of political, 143–46; nature of ideal, 147–51; and experts, 203–08; and local community, 212 Descartes, R., 88 De Tocqueville, 20 Direct Action, 31 Dissemination, and social knowledge, 176–77; physical means of, 179; and art, 182–84.
See _Communication_ Dynastic States, 89 Economic Determinism, 118–89, 155–56 Education, and social control, 197–99; and absolutistic method, 200; and political democracy, 206–08 Electoral College, 111 Emerson, R. W., 217 Equality, nature of, 149–50 Experimental Method, in politics, 194–202; defined, 203 Experts, importance of, 123–25, 136–37; and democracy, 203–04 Factions, 119 Facts, and meanings, 3; physical and social, 6–7, 11–12; and theories, 17 Farmers, condition of, 129–30 Gerontocracy, 78 as representative, 76; dynastic, 81–82; economic control of, 107; and opinion, 192–93 Groups, and the state, 4, 26, 71–73; local, 41–42.
History, continuity of, 161; contemporaneous, 179 Hume, D., 56 186–191; and acts, 18, 21; and invention, 58; economic, 91; as fiction, 102, 157–58; defined, 186–88 Individualism, origin of, 22, 87–94; and private property, 61; explanation of, 98–102; influence, 116; economic, 134; and collectivism, 186–193; and method, 195.
See _Psychology_ Instincts, and social theory, 9–12 Intelligence, necessary for social facts, 12, 24, 151–62, 188; and democracy, 208–10; embodied, 200–01.
Interdependence, 155 James, W., quoted, 159–60 Justice, and property, 92 Kings’s Peace, 48 Knowledge, political, 162–67; divided, 175; and communication, 176–79, 218–19 Labor Legislation, 62 Law, not command, 53–54; nature of, 54–57; social and physical, 196–97 Legal Institutions, 16, 47 Liberalism, 134 Liberty, made an end in itself, 86; nature of, 150; of thought, 168–70; and uniformity, 215–16 Locke, J., on natural rights, 87 Macaulay, 102 Majorities and Minorities, 207–08 Materialism, 173–74 Method, problem of, 192–203 Mill, J., theory of democratic government, 93–95 Mill, J. S., 195 Mobility, social effect, 140 Nationalism, 170 News, 179–81 dual capacity, 77, 82; selection of, 78–82 Opinion, 177, 179 Parties, 119–21 Paternalism, 62 Perception, see _Intelligence, Consequences_ Pioneer Conditions, effect on American democracy, 111 Pluralism, political, 73–74 Private, defined, 15.
See _Public_.
Prohibition, 132–33 Propaganda, 181–82 Property, and government, 91–93.
Psychology, of habit, 61, 159–60; of individualism, 88; of private consciousness, 100, 158; social effects of science of, 197–99 Public, and private, 12–17, 47–52; marks of, 39–64; ownership, 61; democratic, 77; education, 112–13; complexity of, 126; as intellectual problem, 152; and publicity, 167–171, 219; and opinion, 177 Railways, and government, 133–34 Reason, and the state, 20; and law, 55–57 Religion, and social institutions, 41, 49, 169–70 Rulers, see _Officers, Government_ Santayana, G., quoted, 211 Science, distinction from knowledge, 163–65, 172; social and physical, 171, 179, 199; and the press, 181–82; applied, 172–76; method, 201 Smith, Adam, 13, 89 Smith, T. V., 147 n “Socialization,” 70 Society, human, 24–25; Spencer, H., 63, 79 Symbols, social import of, 141–42, 152–54, 218 Tariff, 131–32 Tilden, S. J., 208 Toleration, 49–51 Tradition, revolt against, 86 Utilitarianism, 91 Wallas, G., 96 Wants, individualistic theory of, 102; socially conditioned, 103–04 War, and selection of rulers, 79; the World, 127–28 Whitman, Walt, 184 Will, as cause of state, 20, 38; and the command theory of law, 53; and government, 68; general, 153 Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 96–97 Workers, political neglect and emancipation, 99–100.