I The Democratization of Aristocracy

AND now we stop for objections.

“This plan is a hare-brained scheme for a new priesthood and a new aristocracy. It would put a group of college professors and graduates into a position where they could do almost as they please. You think you avoid this by telling the gentlemen that they must limit themselves to the statement of fact; but if you knew the arts of journalism you would not make so naïve a distinction between airing opinions and stating facts. When a man buys up a newspaper what he wants to do is not so much to control the editorials as to ‘edit’ the news,—that is, to select the facts which shall get into print. It’s wonderful what lies you can spread without telling lies. For example, if you want to hurt a public man, you quote all his foolish speeches and ignore his wise ones; you put his mistakes into head-lines and hide his achievements in a corner. I will guarantee to prove anything I like, or anything I don’t like, just by stating facts. So with your Society for Social Research; it would become a great political, rather than an educational, organization; it would almost unconsciously select its information to suit its hobbies. Why, the thing is psychologically impossible. If you want something to be true you will be half blind and half deaf to anything that obstructs your desire; that is the way we’re made. And even if nature did not attend to this, money would: as soon as your society exercised real power on public opinion it would be bought up, in a gentle, sleight-o’hand way, by some economic group; a few of the more influential members of the Society would be ‘approached,’ some ‘present’ would be made, and justice would have another force to contend with. No; your Society won’t do.”

Well, let us see. Here you have a body of 5000 men; rather a goodly number for even an American millionaire to purchase. They wish to investigate, say, the problem of birth-control; what do they do? They vote, without nominations, for six of their number to manage the investigation; the six men receiving the highest vote investigate and write out a report. Now if any report were published which misstated facts, or omitted important items, the fault would at once diminish the repute and influence of the Society. Let merely the suspicion get about that these reports are unfair, and the Society would begin to decay. That is, the power of the Society would grow with its fairness and fall with its unfairness,—a very happy arrangement. The fear of this fall in influence would be the best incentive to impartial reports. Every committee would feel that the future of the Society depended on the fairness of its own report; and every man on every committee would hesitate before making himself responsible for the disrepute of the Society; he would feel himself on trial before his fellow-members, and would halt himself in the natural slide into partiality.

Not that he would always succeed; men are men. But it is reasonable to expect that men working under these conditions would be considerably more impartial than the average newspaper. Again, who is as impartial as the scientist? One cannot do much in science without a stern control of the personal equation; to describe protozoa, for example, as one would like them to be, is no very clever way of attaining repute in protozoölogy. This is not so true in the social as in the physical sciences, though even in this new field scientific fairness and accuracy are rapidly increasing. One can get more reliable and impartial reports of an industrial situation,—e.g., of the Colorado troubles,—from the scientific investigators than from either side to the controversy. The very deficiencies of the student type—incapacity for decisions or for effective methods in action—involve a compensatory grasp of understanding and impartiality of attitude. Our best guarantee against dishonesty is not virtue but intelligence, and our Society is supposed to be a sort of distilled intelligence.

That the scheme savors of aristocracy is not to its discredit. We need aristocracy, in the sense of better methods for giving weight to superior brains; we need a touch of Plato in our democracy. After all, the essence of the plan, as we have said, is the democratization of Plato and Nietzsche and Carlyle; the intelligent man gets more political power, but only through the mechanism of democracy. His greater power comes not by his greater freedom to do what he pleases despite the majority, but by improved facilities for enlightening and converting the majority. Democracy, ideally, means only that the aristocracy is periodically elected and renewed; and this is a plan whereby the aristocrats—the really best—shall be more clearly seen to be so. Furthermore, the plan avoids the great defect of Plato’s scheme,—that philosophers are not fitted for executive and administrative work, that those skilled to see are very seldom also able to do. Here the philosopher, the man who gets at the truth, rules, but only indirectly, and without the burdens of office and execution. And indeed it is not the philosopher who rules, but truth. The liberator is made king.