III Dissolutions

HERE is a reductio ad absurdum of our social ’isms; and here is the history of many a social rebel. From dissatisfaction to socialism, from socialism to anarchism, from anarchism to Stirnerism, from Stirnerism and the cult of the ego to Nietzsche and the right to exploit;—so has many a man made the merry-go-round of thought and come back wearily at last to the terra firma of the thing that is. We sail into the sea of social controversy without chart or compass or rudder; and though we encounter much wind, we never make the port of our desire. We need maps, and instruments, and knowledge; we need to make inquiries, to face our doubts, to define our purposes; we shall have to examine more ruthlessly our preconceptions and hidden premises, to force into the light the wishes that secretly father our illegitimate thoughts. We must ask ourselves questions that will reach down to the tenderest roots of our philosophies.

You are a feminist, let us say. Very well. Have you ever considered the sociological consequences of that very real disintegration of the “home” which an advancing feminism implies? Granted that this disintegration has been begun by the industrial revolution. Do you want it to go on more rapidly? Do you want women to become more like men? Do you think that the “new woman” will care to have children? It is surely better for the present comfort of our society that there should be a considerable fall in the birth rate; but will that expose the people of Europe and America to absorption by the races of the East? You argue that the case for feminism is as simple as the case for democracy; but is the case for democracy simple? Is democracy competent? Is it bringing us where we want to go? Or is it a sort of collective determination to drift with the tide,—a sort of magnified laissez-faire? And as to “rights” and “justice,” how do you answer Nietzsche’s contention that the more highly organized species, sex, or class, must by its very nature use, command, and exploit the less highly organized species, sex, or class?

You are a Socialist; and you yearn for a Utopia of friends and equals; but will you, to make men equal, be compelled to chain the strength of the strong with many laws and omnipresent force?—will you sacrifice the superiority of the chosen few to the mediocrity of the many? Will you, to control the exploiter, be obliged to control all men, even in detail?—will your socialism really bring the slavery and servile state that Spencer and Chesterton and Belloc fear? Is further centralization of government desirable? Have you considered sufficiently the old difficulty about the stimulus to endeavor in a society that should restrict private property to a minimum and prohibit inheritance? Have you arranged to protect your coöperative commonwealth by limiting immigration—from Europe and from heaven?¹ Are you not, in general, exaggerating the force of the aggregative as against the segregative tendencies in human nature? And do you think that a change of laws can make the weak elude the exploiting arm of the strong? Will not the strongest men always make whatever laws are made, and rule wherever men are ruled? Can any government stand that is not the expression of the strongest forces in the community? And if the strongest force be organized labor, are you sure that organized labor will not exploit and tyrannize? Will the better organized and skilled workers be “just” to the unskilled and imperfectly organized workers? And what do you mean by “justice”?

And as to the eugenist, surely it is unnecessary to expose his unpreparedness to meet the questions which his programme raises. Questions, for example, as to what “units” of character to breed for, if there are such “units”; whether definite breeding for certain results would forfeit adaptive plasticity; whether compulsory sterilization is warranted by our knowledge of heredity; whether serious disease is not often associated with genius; whether the native mental endowments of rich and poor are appreciably different, and whether the “comparative infertility of the upper classes” is really making for the deterioration of the race; whether progress depends on racial changes so much as on changes in social institutions and traditions. And so on.

And the anarchist, whom one loves if only for the fervor of his hope and the beauty of his dream,—the anarchist falters miserably in the face of interrogation. If all laws were to be suspended to-morrow, all coercion of citizen by state, how long would it be before new laws would arise? Would the aforementioned strong cease to be strong and the weak cease to be weak? Would people be willing to forego private property? Are not belief and disbelief in private property determined less by logic and “justice” than by one’s own success or failure in the acquisition of private property? Do only the weak and uncontrolled advocate absolute lack of restraint? Do most men want liberty so much that they will tolerate chaos and a devil-take-the-hind-most individualism for the sake of it? Can it be, after all, that freedom is a negative thing,—that what men want is, for some, achievement, for others, peace,—and that for these they will give even freedom? What if a great number of people dread liberty, and are not at all so sensitive to restraint and commandment as the anarchist? Perhaps only children and geniuses can be truly anarchistic? Perhaps freedom itself is a problem and not a solution? Does the mechanization, through law and custom, of certain elements in our social behavior, like the mechanization, through habit and instinct, of certain elements in individual behavior, result in greater freedom for the higher powers and functions? Again, to have freedom for all, all must be equal; but does not development make for differentiation and inequality? Consider the America of three hundred years ago; a nation of adventurous settlers, hardly any of them better off than any other,—all of a class, all on a level; and see what inequalities and castes a few generations have produced! Is there a necessary antithesis between liberty and order, freedom and control?—or are order and control the first condition of freedom? Does not law serve many splendid purposes,—could it not serve more? Is the state necessary so long as there are long-eared and long-fingered gentry?

As for your revolutions, who profits by them? The people who have suffered, or the people who have thought? Is a revolution, so far as the poor are concerned, merely the dethronement of one set of rulers or exploiters so that another set may have a turn? Do not most revolutions, like that which wished to storm heaven by a tower, end in a confusion of tongues? And after each outbreak do not the workers readapt themselves to their new slavery with that ease and torpid patience which are the despair of every leader, until they are awakened by another quarrel among their masters?

One could fling about such questions almost endlessly, till every ’ism should disappear under interrogation points. Every such ’ism, clearly, is but a half-truth, an arrested development, suffering from malinformation. One is reminded of the experiment in which a psychologist gave a ring-puzzle to a monkey, and—in another room—a like puzzle to a university professor: the monkey fell upon the puzzle at once with teeth and feet and every manner of hasty and haphazard reaction,—until at last the puzzle, dropped upon the floor, came apart by chance; the professor sat silent and motionless before the puzzle, working out in thought the issue of many suggested solutions, and finally, after forty minutes, touched it to undo it at a stroke. Our ’isms are simian reactions to the social puzzle. We jump at conclusions, we are impinged upon extremes, we bound from opposite to opposite, we move with blinders to a passion-colored goal. Some of us are idealists, and see only the beautiful desire; some of us are realists, and see only the dun and dreary fact; hardly any of us can look fact in the face and see through it to that which it might be. We “bandy half-truths” for a decade and then relapse into the peaceful insignificance of conformity.²

It dawns on students of social problems, as it dawned long since on philosophers, that the beginning of their wisdom is a confession of their ignorance. We know now that the thing we need, and for lack of which we blunder valiantly into futility, is not good intentions but informed intelligence. All problems are problems of education; all the more so in a democracy. Not because education can change the original nature of man, but because intelligent coöperation can control the stimuli which determine the injuriousness or beneficence of original dispositions. Impulse is not the enemy of intelligence; it is its raw material. We desire knowledge—and particularly knowledge of ourselves—so that we may know what external conditions evoke destructive, and what conditions evoke constructive, responses. We do not, for example, expect intelligence to eradicate pugnacity; we do not want it to do so; but we want to eradicate the environmental conditions which turn this impulse to wholesale suicide. Men should fight; it is the essence of their value that they are willing to fight; the problem of intelligence is to discuss and to create means for the diversion of pugnacity to socially helpful ends. Character is per se neither good nor bad, but becomes one or the other according to the nature of the stimuli presented. What we call moral reform, then, waits on information and consequent remoulding of the factors determining the direction of our original dispositions. We become “better” men and women only so far as we become more intelligent. Just as psychoanalysis can, in some measure, reconstruct the personal life, so social analysis can reconstruct social life and turn into productive channels the innocent but too often destructive forces of original nature.³

Our problem, then, to repeat once more our central theme, is to facilitate the growth and spread of intelligence. With this definition of the issue we come closer to our thesis,—that the social problem must be approached through philosophy, and philosophy through the social problem.