Chapter VII · DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS (continued 2)

The combining of convention with a due respect for the liberty of the individual involves, it must be admitted, adjustments of the utmost delicacy. Two extremes are about equally undesirable: first, the convention may be so rigid and minute as to leave little scope for the initiative of the individual. This formalistic extreme was reached, if Occidental opinion be correct, in the China of the past, and also in the older French convention that Rousseau attacked. At the opposite pole is the person who is spontaneous after the fashion encouraged by Rousseau and who, in getting rid of conventions, has also got rid of standards and abandoned himself to the mere flux of his impressions. The problem of standards would be simple if all we had to do was to oppose to this anarchical “liberty” a sound set of general principles. But so far as actual conduct is concerned, life resolves itself into a series of particular emergencies, and it is not always easy to bridge the gap between these emergencies or concrete cases and the general principle. It has been held in the Occident, at least from the time of Aristotle, and in the Orient, at least from the time of Confucius, that one should be guided in one’s application of the general principle by the law of measure. The person who thus mediates successfully seems, in the phrase of Pascal, to combine in himself opposite virtues and to occupy all the space between them. As a general principle, for example, courage is excellent, but unless it be tempered in the concrete instance by prudence, it will degenerate into rashness. According to Bossuet, “Good maxims pushed to an extreme are utterly ruinous.” (Les bonnes maximes outrées perdent tout.) But who is to decide what is the moderate and what the extreme application of a good maxim? The casuist or legalist would not only lay down the general principle, but try to deal exhaustively with all the cases that may arise in the application of it, in such wise as to deprive the individual, so far as possible, of his autonomy. The cases are, however, inexhaustible, inasmuch as life is, in Bergson’s phrase, a perpetual gushing forth of novelties. A Jesuitical casebook or the equivalent is after all a clumsy substitute for the living intuition of the individual in determining the right balance to strike between the abiding principle and the novel emergency. While insisting, therefore, on the need of a convention, one should strive to hold this convention flexibly, imaginatively, and, as it were, progressively. Without a convention of some kind it is hard to see how the experience of the past can be brought to bear on the present. The unconventional person is assuming that either he or his age is so unique that all this past experience has become obsolete. This very illusion has, to be sure, been fostered in many by the rapid advance of the physical sciences.

So much experience has accumulated in both the East and the West that it should seem possible for those who are seeking to maintain standards and to fight an anarchical impressionism, to come together, not only as to their general principles, but as to the main cases that arise in the application of them. This convention, if it is to be effective, must, as I have already suggested, be transmitted in the form of habits to the young. This is only another way of saying that the civilization of a community and ultimately the government of which it is capable is closely related to the type of education on which it has agreed. (One should include in education the discipline that children receive in the family). “The best laws,” says Aristotle, “will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution.”⁠[133] Aristotle complains that this great principle was being violated in his time. Is it being observed in ours? It will be interesting in any case to make a specific application of the Aristotelian dictum to our American education in its relation to American government. Assuming that what we wish to preserve is a federal and constitutional democracy, are we training up a class of leaders whose ethos is in intimate accord with this type of government? The older type of American college reflected faithfully enough the convention of its time. The classical element in its curriculum was appropriately subordinated to the religious element, inasmuch as the leadership at which it aimed was to be lodged primarily in the clergy. It would have been possible to interpret more vitally our older educational convention, to give it the broadening it certainly needed and to adapt it to changed conditions. The new education (I am speaking, of course, of the main trend) can scarcely be said to have developed in this fashion from the old. It suggests rather a radical break with our traditional ethos. The old education was, in intention at least, a training for wisdom and character. The new education has been summed up by President Eliot in the phrase: training for service and power. We are all coming together more and more in this idea of service. But, though service is supplying us in a way with a convention, it is not, in either the humanistic or the religious sense, supplying us with standards. In the current sense of the word it tends rather to undermine standards, if it be true, as I have tried to show, that it involves an assumption hard to justify on strictly psychological grounds—the assumption that men can come together expansively and on the level of their ordinary selves. The older education was based on the belief that men need to be disciplined to some ethical centre. The sentimental humanitarian opposes to a definite curriculum which aims at some such humanistic or religious discipline the right of the individual to develop freely his bent or temperamental proclivity. The standard or common measure is compromised by the assertion of this supposed right, and in about the same measure the effort and spirit of emulation that the standard stimulates disappears. The very word curriculum implies a running together. Under the new educational dispensation, students, instead of running together, tend to lounge separately. Interest is transferred from the classroom to the athletic field, where there is a standard of a kind and, with reference to this standard, something that human nature craves—real victory or real defeat. The sentimentalist also plays into the hands of the utilitarian, who likewise sets up a standard with reference to which one may strive and achieve success or failure. Anything that thus has a definite aim tends to prevail over anything that, like a college of liberal arts under the elective system, is comparatively aimless. One cannot admit the argument sometimes heard that, because the older education had a definite end, it was therefore vocational in the same sense as the schools of business administration, for example, that have been developing so portentously of late in our educational centres. The older education aimed to produce leaders and, as it perceived, the basis of leadership is not commercial or industrial efficiency, but wisdom. Those who have been substituting the cult of efficiency for the older liberal training are, of course, profuse in their professions of service either to country or to mankind at large. The question I have been raising throughout this volume, however, is whether anything so purely expansive as service, in the humanitarian sense, can supply an adequate counterpoise to the pursuit of unethical power, whether the proper counterpoise is not to be sought rather in the cultivation of the principle of vital control, first of all in the individual and finally in the State.

I have said that one’s attitude towards the principle of control will determine one’s definition of liberty, and that the Jeffersonians inclining, as they did, to the new myth of man’s natural goodness, looked askance, not merely at the traditional restraints, but at everything that interfered with a purely expansive freedom. Jefferson himself saw to some extent the implications of his general position for education in particular. He is, for example, one of the authentic precursors of the elective system.⁠[134] The education that the Jeffersonian liberty has tended to supplant set up a standard that limited the supposed right of the individual to self-expression as well as the inbreeding of special aptitudes in the interests of efficiency; it was not, in short, either sentimental or utilitarian. There is a real relation between the older educational standard that thus acted restrictively on the mere temperament of the individual and the older political standard embodied in institutions like the Constitution, Senate, and Supreme Court, that serve as a check on the ordinary or impulsive will of the people. It follows from all I have said that the new education does not meet the Aristotelian requirement: it is not in intimate correspondence with our form of government. If the veto power disappears from our education there is no reason to anticipate that it will long survive in the State. The spirit of the leaders will not be that which should preside over a constitutional democracy.

The best of our elder statesmen, though they opposed a standard to the mere flux of popular impulse and made sure that the standard was appropriately embodied in institutions, did not associate their standard with any theory of the absolute. Herein they showed their sagacity. One cannot separate too carefully the cause of standards from that of the absolute. Standards are a matter of observation and common sense, the absolute is only a metaphysical conceit. In political thinking this conceit has led to various theories of unlimited sovereignty. Judged by their fruits all these theories are, according to John Adams, “equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical.” They can be shown, at all events, to be hard to reconcile with a proper respect for personal liberty.⁠[135] It is a fortunate circumstance that the very word sovereignty does not occur in our Constitution. The men who made this Constitution were for granting a certain limited power here and another limited power somewhere else, and absolute power nowhere. The best scheme of government they conceived to be a system of checks and balances. They did not, however, look on the partial powers they bestowed as being on the same level. They were aware that true liberty requires a hierarchy and a subordination, that there must be something central in a state to which final appeal may be made in case of conflict. The complaint has, indeed, been made that they left certain ambiguities in the articles of union that had finally to be clarified on the battle-field. If they had been more explicit, however, it is not probable that they would have been able to establish a union at all. They were confronted with the difficult task of gaining recognition for the centripetal element in government in the face of the most centrifugal doctrine the world has ever known—the doctrine that encourages men to put their rights before their duties.

John Marshall deserves special praise for the clearness with which he saw that the final centre of control in the type of government that was being founded, if control was to have an ethical basis and not be another name for force, must be vested in the judiciary, particularly in the Supreme Court. This court, especially in its most important function, that of interpreting the Constitution, must, he perceived, embody more than any other institution the higher or permanent self of the State. With a sound and independent judiciary, above all with a sound and independent supreme bench, liberty and democracy may after all be able to coexist. Many people are aware that personal liberty and the security of private property, which is almost inseparable from it, are closely bound up with the fortunes of the Supreme Court. Their ideas are, however, often vague as to the nature of the menace that overhangs our highest tribunal. We are familiar with the rant of Gompers and his kind against the courts; we also know what to expect from the radical press. We are not surprised, for example, when a socialistic periodical, published at Girard, Kansas, devotes a special issue of five million copies to an assault on the federal judiciary. A menace that is perhaps more serious than this open hostility may be defined as a sort of “boring from within.” This phrase seems to fit the professors in our law schools who are departing from the traditional standards of the law in favor of “social justice.” Social justice, it is well to remind these “forward-looking” professors, means in practice class justice, class justice means class war and class war, if we are to go by all the experience of the past and present, means hell.

The inadequacy of social justice with its tendency to undermine the moral responsibility of the individual and at the same time to obscure the need of standards and leadership may be made clearer if we consider for a moment the problem of government with the utmost degree of realism. Thus considered, government is power. Whether the power is to be ethical or unethical, whether in other words it is subordinated to true justice, must depend finally on the quality of will displayed by the men who administer it. For what counts practically is not justice in the abstract, but the just man. The just man is he whose various capacities (including the intellect) are acting in right relation to one another under the hegemony of the higher will. We are brought back here to the problem of the remnant. Those who strive for the inner proportion that is reflected in the outer world as justice have always been few. The remark of Aristotle that “most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner” remains true, at least in the subtler psychic sense. Though one agree with Aristotle as to the ethical unsoundness of the majority, it does not follow that the ethical State is impossible. Human nature, and this is its most encouraging trait, is sensitive to a right example. It is hard, indeed, to set bounds to the persuasiveness of a right example, provided only it be right enough. The ethical State is possible in which an important minority is ethically energetic and is thus becoming at once just and exemplary. Such a minority will also tend to solve the problem of union. The soul of the unjust man is, according to Aristotle, torn by every manner of faction.⁠[136] The just man, on the contrary, is he who, as the result of his moral choices based on due deliberation, choices in which he is moved primarily by a regard for his own happiness, has quelled the unruly impulses of his lower nature and so attained to some degree of unity with himself. At the same time he will find that he is moving towards a common centre with others who have been carrying through a similar task of self-conquest. A State that is controlled by men who have become just as the result of minding their own business in the Platonic sense will be a just State that will also mind its own business; it will be of service to other States, not by meddling in their affairs on either commercial or “idealistic” grounds, but by setting them a good example. A State of this kind may hope to find a basis of understanding with any other State that is also ethically controlled. The hope of coöperation with a State that has an unethical leadership is chimerical. The value of political thinking is therefore in direct ratio to its adequacy in dealing with the problem of leadership. The unit to which all things must finally be referred is not the State or humanity or any other abstraction, but the man of character. Compared with this ultimate human reality, every other reality is only a shadow in the mist.⁠[137]⁠

It follows from what I have said that ethical union, whether in the single man or among different men or on the national or international scale, is attainable so far as it is attainable at all, not by expansive emotion nor by any form of machinery or organization (in the current sense of the word), but only by the pathway of the inner life. Some persons will remain spiritually anarchical in spite of educational opportunity, others will acquire at least the rudiments of ethical discipline, whereas still others, a small minority, if we are to judge by past experience, will show themselves capable of the more difficult stages of self-conquest that will fit them for leadership. Our traditional education with all its defects did something to produce leaders of this ethical type, whereas the utilitarian-sentimental education which has been tending to supplant it is, as I have been trying to show, lacking in the essentials of the inner life and so is not likely to produce either religious or humanistic leaders. Most Americans of the present day will, indeed, feel that they have refuted sufficiently all that I have said, if they simply utter the word “service.” One may suspect, however, that the popularity of the gospel of service is due to the fact that it is flattering to unregenerate human nature. It is pleasant to think that one may dispense with awe and reverence and the inner obeisance of the spirit to standards, provided one be eager to do something for humanity. “The highest worship of God,” as Benjamin Franklin assures us blandly, “is service to man.” If it can be shown experimentally—and a certain amount of evidence on this point has accumulated since the time of Franklin—that service in this sense is not enough to chain up the naked lusts of the human heart, one must conclude that the supreme exemplar of American shrewdness and practicality did not, in the utterance I have just cited, show himself sufficiently shrewd and practical. The gospel of service is at all events going to receive a thorough trial, if nowhere else, then in America. We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian crusaders. The present reign of legalism is the most palpable outcome of this crusading. It is growing only too evident, however, that the drift towards license is being accelerated rather than arrested by the multiplication of laws. If we do not develop a sounder type of vision than that of our “uplifters” and “forward-lookers,” the history of free institutions in this country is likely to be short, and, on the whole, discreditable. Surely the first step is to perceive that the alternative to a constitutional liberty is not a legalistic millennium, but a triumph of anarchy followed by a triumph of force. The time may come, with the growth of a false liberalism, when a predominant element in our population, having grown more and more impatient of the ballot box and representative government, of constitutional limitations and judicial control, will display a growing eagerness for “direct action.” This is the propitious moment for the imperialistic leader. Though the triumph of any type of imperialistic leader is a disaster, especially in a country like our own that has known the blessings of liberty under the law, nevertheless there is a choice even here. Circumstances may arise when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin. Such an emergency is not to be anticipated, however, unless we drift even further than we have thus far from the principles that underlie our unionist tradition. The maintenance of this tradition is indissolubly bound up with the maintenance of standards. The democratic contention that everybody should have a chance is excellent provided it mean that everybody is to have a chance to measure up to high standards. If the democratic extension of opportunity is, on the other hand, made a pretext for lowering standards, democracy is, in so far, incompatible with civilization. One might be more confident of the outcome of the struggle between a true and a false liberalism that has been under way since the founding of the Republic, if the problem of standards was being dealt with more adequately in our education, above all in our higher education. The tendency here, however, is, as I have noted, to discard standards in favor of “ideals”; and ideals, as currently understood, recognize very imperfectly, if at all, that man needs to be disciplined to a law of his own, distinct from the law of physical nature. One might view this idealistic development with more equanimity if one were convinced with Professor John Dewey that the growing child exudes spontaneously a will to service.⁠[138] If we look, however, on this form of spontaneity as a romantic myth, we shall be forced to conclude that we have been permitting Professor Dewey and his kind to have an influence on our education that amounts in the aggregate to a national calamity; that with the progress of ideals of this kind our higher education in particular is, from the point of view of a genuinely liberal training, in danger of becoming a vast whir of machinery in the void; finally, that, in the interest of our experiment in free institutions, we need educational leaders who will have less to say of service and more to say of culture and civilization, and who will so use these words as to show that they have some inkling of their true meaning.

This book has been written to no purpose unless I have made plain that the problem of standards and leadership is by no means merely American. The American situation can be understood only with reference to the larger background—the slow yielding in the whole of the Occident of traditional standards, humanistic and religious, to naturalism. I have defined in its main aspects the movement that has supervened upon this emancipation from the past as Baconian, Rousseauistic, and Machiavellian; in other words, as utilitarian, sentimental, and imperialistic. The individualist should, however, make a better use of his liberty; the less traditional he becomes, the more he should strive to get at standards positively and critically. The result of such a striving would, I have tried to show, be a movement that might be best defined as Socratic, Aristotelian, and Christian, that would, in short, put prime emphasis in its different stages on definition, habit, and humility. What has actually been witnessed in the Occident, as a result of the failure to work out critical equivalents of traditional standards, has been a series of violent oscillations between a humanitarian idealism and a Machiavellian realism. Humanitarian idealism is still firmly entrenched in this country, especially in academic circles, where it seems to be held more confidently, one is almost tempted to say more smugly, with each succeeding year. Europeans, on the other hand, have suffered certain essential disillusions. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to believe that the idealists have discovered any effective counterpoise to the push for power. “We are much beholden,” says Bacon, “to Machiavel and others that wrote what men do, and not what they ought to do.” The gap between what men do and what they ought to do is turning out to be even wider under the humanitarian dispensation than under that of mediæval Christianity.

Yet the Machiavellian solution is in itself impossible. If the Occident does not get beyond this type of realism, it will simply reënact all the pagan stupidities and hasten once more to the pagan doom. Moreover, the latter stages of the naturalistic dissolution of civilization with which we are menaced are, thanks to scientific “progress,” likely to be marked by incidents of almost inconceivable horror. The danger of power without wisdom, of a constantly increasing material organization combined with an ever-growing spiritual anarchy, is already so manifest that unless there is a serious search for a remedy we may conclude that the instinct for self-preservation that is supposed to inhere in mankind is a myth. Surely the first step will be to put in his proper subordinate place the man of science with his poison gases⁠[139] and high explosives, and that without a particle of obscurantism. The tendency of physical science to bring the whole of human nature under a single law can be shown to be at the bottom of some of the most dangerous fallacies of the present time—for example, the socialistic dream of “scientific” politics. “Thus the whole of society,” says Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, “its organization, its institutions, its activities, is brought within the sway of natural law, not merely on its descriptive and historical side, but on its experimental side, and administration and legislation become arts pursued in the same way as the chemist works in his laboratory.”⁠[140] The man of science is flattered in the conceit of his own importance by this inordinate exaltation of the “law for thing.” Yet he should, in the interest of science itself, reject the whole point of view as pseudo-scientific; for science needs the support of civilization and the chief force that is now making against civilization is, next perhaps to emotional unrestraint, pseudo-science.

Mr. MacDonald and his kind almost invariably look upon themselves as “idealists.” This should serve to remind us that the terms idealism and realism as now employed, however much they may clash superficially, have at least this much in common: they are both rooted in a naturalistic philosophy. Any one who transcends this philosophy ceases in about the same measure to be either a humanitarian idealist or a Machiavellian realist. He becomes aware of a quality of will that distinguishes man from physical nature and is yet natural in the sense that it is a matter of immediate perception and not of outer authority. I have said that the neglect of this quality of will by both utilitarians and sentimentalists has encouraged a sophistical definition of liberty; that this type of liberty has owed its appeal to its flattery of spiritual indolence, perhaps the most fundamental human trait that is open to direct observation. Any one who has once perceived this trait in himself and others, and followed it out in even a few of its almost innumerable ramifications, will be in no danger of overlooking the old Adam after the fashion of the “idealists.” The insistence on the putting aside of spiritual indolence and the exercise of the higher will is found in every genuinely spiritual doctrine, above all in genuine Christianity. Traditionally the Christian has associated his liberty and his faith in a higher will with grace. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” I myself have been trying to come at this necessary truth, not in terms of grace, but in terms of work, and that on the humanistic rather than on the religious level. I am not so arrogant as to deny the validity of other ways of affirming the higher will, or to dismiss as obsolete the traditional forms through which this will has been interpreted to the imagination. I am attempting a contribution, I cannot remind the reader too often, to a specific problem—to the distinction, namely, between a sound and an unsound individualism. My argument should appeal primarily, so far as it appeals to any one, to those who, as a result of having broken with the traditional forms on grounds insufficiently critical, are in danger of losing the truths of the higher will entirely; who are mere modernists at a time when there is a supreme need of thoroughgoing and complete moderns.

THE END