The "freedom of speech" which is everywhere demanded in the name of democracy is not at all freedom in the expression of individual opinion. It is only the demand for advertising space on the part of various crowds for the publication of their shibboleths and propaganda. Each crowd, while demanding this freedom for itself, seeks to deny it to other crowds, and all unite in denying it to the non-crowd man wherever possible. The Puritans "right to worship according to the dictates of a mans own conscience" did not apply to Quakers, Deists, or Catholics. When Republicans were "black abolitionists" they would have regarded any attempt to suppress The Liberator, as edited by William Lloyd Garrison, as an assault upon the constitutional liberties of the whole nation. But they are not now particularly interested in preserving the constitutional liberties of the nation as represented in the right of circulation of The Liberator, edited by Max Eastman. In Jeffersons time, when Democrats were accused of "Jacobinism," they invoked the "spirit of 1776" in opposition to the alien and sedition laws under which their partisan propaganda suffered limitation. To-day, when they are striving to outdo the Republicans in "Americanization propaganda," they actually stand sponsor for an espionage law which would have made Jefferson or Andrew Jackson froth at the mouth. Socialists are convinced that liberty is dead because Berger and Debs are convicted of uttering opinions out of harmony with temporarily dominant crowd-ideas of patriotism. But when Theodore Dreiser was put under the ban for the crime of writing one of the few good novels produced in America, I do not recall that Socialists held any meetings of protest in Madison Square Garden. I have myself struggled in vain for three hours or more on a street corner in Green Point trying to tell liberty-loving Socialists the truth about the Gary schools. When the politicians in our legislative assemblies were tricked into passing the obviously unliberal Eighteenth Amendment, I was much interested in learning how the bulk of the Socialists in the Cooper Union audiences felt about it. As I had expected, they regarded it as an unpardonable infringement of personal freedom, as a typical piece of American Puritan hypocrisy and pharisaism. But they were, on the whole, in favor of it because they thought it would be an aid to Bolshevist propaganda, since it would make the working class still more discontented! Such is liberty in a crowd-governed democracy.... It is nothing but the liberty of crowds to be crowds.
The fourth liberty in democratic society to-day is freedom from moral and intellectual responsibility. This is accomplished by the magic of substituting the machinery of the law for self-government, bureaucratic meddlesomeness for conscience, crowd-tyranny for personal decency. Professor Faguet has called democracy the "cult of incompetence" and the "dread of responsibility." He is not far wrong, but these epithets apply not so much to democracy as such as to democracy under the heel of the crowd. The original aim of democracy, so far as its philosophical thinkers conceived of it, was to set genius free from the trammels of tradition, realize a maximum of self-government, and make living something of an adventure. But crowds do not so understand democracy. Every crowd looks upon democracy simply as a scheme whereby it may have its own way. We have seen that the crowd-mind as such is a device for "kidding" ourselves, for representing the easiest path to the enhancement of our self-feeling as something highly moral, for making our personal right appear like universal righteousness, for dressing up our will to lord it over others, as if it were devotion to impersonal principle. As we have seen, the crowd therefore insists upon universal conformity; goodness means only making everyone alike. By taking refuge in the abstract and ready-made system of crowd-ideas, the unconscious will to power is made to appear what it is not; the burden of responsibility is transferred to the group with its fiction of absolute truth. Le Bon noted the fact of the irresponsibility of crowds, but thought that such irresponsibility was due to the fact that the crowd, being an anonymous gathering, the individual could lose his identity in the multitude. The psychology of the unconscious has provided us with what I think is a better explanation, but the fact of irresponsibility remains and is evident in all the influence of crowd-thinking upon democratic institutions. The crowd-ideal of society is one in which every individual is protected not only against exploitation, but against temptation—protected therefore against himself. The whole tendency of democracy in our times is toward just such inanity. Without the least critical analysis of accepted moral dilemmas, we are all to be made moral in spite of ourselves, regardless of our worth, without effort on our part, moral in the same way that machines are moral, by reducing the will to mere automatic action, leaving no place for choice and uncertainty, having everyone wound up and oiled and regulated to run at the same speed. Each crowd therefore strives to make its own moral ideas the law of the land. Law becomes thus a sort of anthology of various existing crowd-hobbies. In the end moral responsibility is passed over to legislatures, commissions, detectives, inspectors, and bureaucrats. Anything that "gets by" the public censor, however rotten, we may wallow in with a perfect feeling of respectability. The right and necessity of choosing our way is superseded by a system of statutory taboos, which as often as not represent the survival values of the meanest little people in the community—the kind who cannot look upon a nude picture without a struggle with their perverted eroticism, or entertain a significant idea without losing their faith.
The effect of all this upon the intellectual progress and the freedom of art in democratic society is obvious, and is just what, to one who understands the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, might be expected. No wonder de Tocqueville said he found less freedom of opinion in America than elsewhere. Explain it as you will, the fact is here staring us in the face. Genius in our democracy is not free. It must beg the permission of little crowd-men for its right to exist. It must stand, hat in hand, at the window of the commissioner of licenses and may gain a permit for only so much of its inspiration as happens to be of use-value to the uninspired. It must play the conformist, pretend to be hydra-headed rather than unique, useful rather than genuine, a servant of the "least of these" rather than their natural master. It must advertise, but it may not prophesy. It may flatter and patronize the stupid, but it may not stand up taller than they. In short, democracy everywhere puts out the eyes of its Samson, cuts off his golden-rayed locks, and makes him grind corn to fill the bellies of the Philistines.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century until now it has been chiefly the business man, the political charlatan, the organizer of trade, the rediscoverer of popular prejudices who have been preferred in our free modern societies. Keats died of a broken heart; Shelley and Wagner were exiled; Beethoven and Schubert were left to starve; Darwin was condemned to hell fire; Huxley was denied his professorship; Schopenhauer was ostracized by the élite; Nietzsche ate his heart out in solitude; Walt Whitman had to be fed by a few English admirers, while his poems were prohibited as obscene in free America; Emerson was for the greater part of his life persona non grata at his own college; Ingersoll was denied the political career which his genius merited; Poe lived and died in poverty; Theodore Parker was consigned to perdition; Percival Lowell and Simon Newcomb lived and died almost unrecognized by the American public. Nearly every artist and writer and public teacher is made to understand from the beginning that he will be popular in just the degree that he strangles his genius and becomes a vulgar, commonplace, insincere clown.
On the other hand steel manufacturers and railroad kings, whose business record will often scarcely stand the light, are rewarded with fabulous millions and everyone grovels before them. When one turns from the "commercialism," which everywhere seems to be the dominant and most sincere interest in democratic society, when one seeks for spiritual values to counterbalance this weight of materialism, one finds in the prevailing spirit little more than a cult of naïve sentimentality.
It can hardly be denied that if Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cassanova, Goethe, Dostoievsky, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Rousseau, St. Augustine, Milton, Nietzsche, Swinburne, Rossetti, or even Flaubert, were alive and writing his masterpiece in America to-day, he would be instantly silenced by some sort of society for the prevention of vice, and held up to the public scorn and ridicule as a destroyer of our innocence and a corrupter of public morals. The guardians of our characters are ceaselessly expurgating the classics lest we come to harm reading them. I often think that the only reason why the Bible is permitted to pass through our mails is because hardly anyone ever reads it.
It is this same habit of crowd-thinking which accounts to a great extent for the dearth of intellectual curiosity in this country. From what we have seen to be the nature of the crowd-mind, it is to be expected that in a democracy in which crowds play an important part the condition described by de Tocqueville will generally prevail. There is much truth in his statement that it seems at first as if the minds of all the Americans "were formed upon the same model." Spiritual variation will be encouraged only in respect to matters in which one crowd differs from another. The conformist spirit will prevail in all. Intellectual leadership will inevitably pass to the "tight-minded." There will be violent conflicts of ideas, but they will be crowd ideas.
The opinions about which people differ are for the most part ready-made. They are concerned with the choice of social mechanisms, but hardly with valuations. With nearly all alike, there is a notion that mankind may be redeemed by the magic of externally manipulating the social environment. There is a wearisome monotony of professions of optimism, idealism, humanitarianism, with little knowledge of what these terms mean.
I am thinking of all those young people who, in the decade and a half which preceded the war, represented the finished product of our colleges and universities. What a stretch of imagination is needed before one may call these young people educated! How little of intellectual interest they have brought back from school to their respective communities! How little cerebral activity they have stirred up! Habits of study, of independent thinking, have seldom been acquired. The "educated" have possibly gained a little in social grace; they have in some cases learned things which are of advantage to them in the struggle for position. Out of the confused mass of unassimilated information which they dimly remember as the education which they "got," a sum of knowledge doubtless remains which is greater in extent than that possessed by the average man, but, though greater in extent, this knowledge is seldom different in kind. There is the same superficiality, the same susceptibility to crowd-thinking on every subject. The mental habits of American democracy are probably best reflected to-day by the "best-seller" novel, the Saturday Evening Post, the Chautauqua, the Victrola, the moving picture.
Nearly everyone in America can read, for the "schoolhouse is the bulwark of democratic freedom." However, with the decrease in illiteracy there has gone a corresponding lowering of literary and intellectual standards, a growing timidity in telling the truth, and a passion for the sensationally commonplace. If it be true that before people may be politically free they must be free to function mentally, one wonders how much of an aid to liberty the public schools in this country have been, or if, with their colossal impersonal systems and stereotyped methods of instruction, they have not rather on the whole succeeded chiefly in making learning uninteresting, dulling curiosity and killing habits of independent thinking. There is probably no public institution where the spirit of the crowd reigns to the extent that it does in the public school. The aim seems to be to mold the child to type, make him the good, plodding citizen, teaching him only so much as some one thinks it is to the publics interest that he should know. I am sure that everyone who is familiar with the actions of the school authorities in New York City during the two years, 1918 and 1919, will be impelled to look elsewhere for much of that liberty which is supposed to go with democracy.
Some years ago I conducted a little investigation into the mental habits of the average high-school graduate. An examination was made of twenty or more young people who had been out of school one year. This is doubtless too limited a number to give the findings great general significance, but I give the results in brief for what they are worth. These students had been in school for eleven years. I thought that they ought at least to have a minimum of general cultural information and to be able to express some sort of opinion about the commonplaces of our spiritual heritage. The questions asked were such as follow: What is the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States? What is a dicotyledon? Does the name Darwin mean anything to you? Have you ever heard of William James? What is the significance of the battle of Tours? Who was Thomas Jefferson? There were twenty questions in all. The average grade, even with the most liberal marking, was 44.6. The general average was raised by one pupil who made a grade of 69. But then we should not be too severe upon the public-school graduate. One of the brightest college graduates I know left a large Eastern institution believing that Karl Marx was a philologist. Another, a graduate from a Western college, thought that Venus de Milo was an Italian count who had been born without any arms. I know a prominent physician, whose scientific training is such that he has been a lecturer in a medical college, who believes that Heaven is located just a few miles up in the sky, beyond the Milky Way. These are doubtless exceptional cases, but how many persons with university degrees are there who have really caught the spirit of the humanistic culture, or have ever stopped to think why the humanities are taught in our colleges? How many are capable of discriminating criticism of works of music, or painting, literature, or philosophy? My own experience convinces me, and I am sure that other public teachers who have had a like experience will bear witness to the same lamentable fact, that such little genuine intellectual interest as there is in this country is chiefly confined to immigrant Jews, our American youth being, on the whole, innocent of it. The significance of this fact is obvious, as is its cause. Due to the conformist spirit of the dominant crowd, native-born Americans are losing their intellectual leadership.
We must not ignore the fact that there is among the educated here a small and, let us hope, growing group of youthful "intellectuals." But in the first place the proportion of these to the whole mass is tragically small. In the second place intellectual liberalism has been content for the most part to tag along behind the labor movement, as if the chief meaning of the intellectual awakening were economic. It is no disparagement of labor to say that the intellect in this country of crowds has also other work to do, and that, until it strikes out for itself, neither the labor movement nor anything else will rise above commonplace crowd dilemmas. Too much of our so-called intellectualism is merely the substitution of ready-made proletarian crowd-ideas for the traditional crowd-ideas which pass for thinking among the middle classes.
All the facts which have been pointed out above are the inevitable consequences of government by crowds. There can be no real liberty with crowds because there can be no personal independence. The psychic mechanisms of the crowd are hostile to conscious personality. The independent thinker cannot be controlled by catchwords. In our day intellectual freedom is not smothered in actual martyr fires, but it is too often strangled in the cradle. The existence of new values, a thing which will inevitably happen where the human spirit is left free in its creative impulses, is disturbing to the crowd-mind. Education must therefore be made "safe for democracy"; it must be guarded carefully lest the youth become an original personal fact, a new spiritual creation. I realize the element of truth in the statement often made, that there is already too much spiritual originality in the youths of this generation. I am not contending that certain phases of egoism should not be checked by education. A solid intellectual basis must be created which will make social living possible. The trouble is, however, that this task is done too well. It is the merely useful man, not the unusual man, whom the crowd loves. Skill is encouraged, for, whether it be skill in serving or in demanding service, skill in itself does not upset existing crowd-values. Reflection is "wicked" for it leads to doubt, and doubt is non-gregarious behavior. Education ceases to be the path of spiritual freedom; it becomes a device for harnessing the spirit of youth in the treadmill of the survival-values of the crowd. It is also the revenge of the old against the young, a way of making them less troublesome. It teaches the rules for success in a crowd-governed world while taking advantage of the natural credulity of childhood to draw the curtain with such terrifying mummery about the figure of wisdom that the average mind, never having the daring or curiosity to lift it, will remain to its dying day a dullard and a mental slave without suspecting the fact. Every "dangerous" thought is denatured and expurgated. The student is skillfully insulated from any mental shock that might galvanize him into original intellectual life. The classic languages are taught for purposes of "discipline." After six or seven years study of Greek literature in the accepted manner one may be able to repeat most of the rules of Goodwins Greek Grammar, and pride himself upon being a cultivated person, knowing in the end less of the language than a bootblack from modern Athens knows of it, or than a waiter from Bologna knows of English after one years residence in Greenwich Village. And the all-important thing is that never once has the student been given a glimpse of the beautiful free pagan life which all this literature is about.
Science is taught that the student, if he has ability, may learn how to make a geological survey of oil lands, construct and operate a cement factory, make poison gas, remove infected tonsils, or grow a culture of bacteria; but should he cease to hold popular beliefs about the origin of life or the immortality of the soul it is well for him to keep the tragic fact to himself. Those who teach history, economics, and political science in such a way as to stimulate independence of thinking on the part of the students are likely to be dismissed from their faculties by the practical business men who constitute the boards of trustees of our institutions of higher learning; the purpose of these sciences is to make our youth more patriotic. Finally, the average instructor receives less pay than a policeman, or a headwaiter, and the unconscious reason for this is all of a piece with the psychology of the crowd-mind. The ignorant mans resentment toward superiority, or "highbrowism," is thereby vindicated. Moreover, the integrity of the complex of ruling crowd-ideas is less endangered. There is less likelihood of its being undermined in the process of education when vigorous, independent spirits are diverted from intellectual pursuits by richer prizes offered in other fields, and the task of instruction therefore left largely to the underfed and timid who are destined by temperament to trot between the shafts.
In this discussion of the government of crowds I have ignored consideration of the mechanisms of political and social organizations which usually characterize the treatment of this subject. It is not that I wish to divert attention from the necessity of more practical and just social arrangements and political forms of organizations. These we must achieve. But the facts which ultimately make for our freedom or slavery are of the mind. The statement that we cannot be politically or economically a free people until we attain mental freedom is a platitude, but it is one which needs special emphasis in this day when all attention is directed to the external form of organization.
No tyranny was ever for long maintained by force. All tyrannies begin and end in the tyranny of ideas uncritically accepted. It is of just such ideas that the conscious thinking of the crowd consists, and it is ultimately from the crowd as a psychological mechanism that tyranny as such proceeds. Democracy in America fails of freedom, not because of our political constitution, though that would doubtless be modified by a people who were more free at heart; it fails because freedom of opinion, intellectual alertness, critical thinking about fundamentals, is not encouraged. There is, moreover, little promise of greater freedom in the various revolutionary crowds who to-day want freedom only to add to the number of crowds which pester us. And for this we have, whether we are radicals or reactionaries or simply indifferent, no one to blame but ourselves and our own crowd-thinking.
X
EDUCATION AS A POSSIBLE CURE FOR CROWD-THINKING
We have seen that Democracy in and of itself is no more sure a guarantee of liberty than other forms of government. This does not necessarily mean that we have been forced by our psychological study into an argument against the idea of democracy as such. In fact, it cannot be denied that this form of human association may have decided advantages, both practical and spiritual, if we set about in the right way to realize them. It does not follow that, because the franchise is exercised by all, democracy must necessarily be an orgy of mob rule. If, under our modern political arrangements, it has been shown that the crowd presumes to regulate acts and thought processes hitherto considered purely personal matters, it is also true that the dominance of any particular crowd has, in the long run, been rendered less absolute and secure by the more openly expressed hostility of rival crowds. But crowd-behavior has been known in all historic periods. Democracy cannot be said to have caused it. It may be a mere accident of history that the present development of crowd-mindedness has come along with that of democratic institutions. Democracy has indeed given new kinds of crowds their hope of dominance. It has therefore been made into a cult for the self-justification of various modern crowds.
The formula for realizing a more free and humane common life will not be found in any of the proffered cure-alls and propagandas which to-day deafen our ears with their din. Neither are we now in such possession of the best obtainable social order that one would wish to preserve the status quo against all change, which would mean, in other words, the survival of the present ruling crowds. Many existing facts belie the platitudes which these crowds speak in their defense, just as they lay bare the hidden meaning of the magic remedies which are proposed by counter-crowds. There is no single formula for social redemption, and the man who has come to himself will refuse to invest his faith in any such thing—which does not mean, however, that he will refuse to consider favorably the practical possibilities of any proposed plan for improving social conditions.
The first and greatest effort must be to free democracy from crowd-mindedness, by liberating our own thinking. The way out of this complex of crowd compulsions is the solitary part of self-analysis and intellectual courage. It is the way of Socrates, and Protagoras, of Peter Abelard, and Erasmus, and Montaigne, of Cervantes and Samuel Butler, of Goethe, and Emerson, of Whitman and William James.
Just here I know that certain conservatives will heartily agree with me. "That is it," they will say; "begin with the individual." Yes, but which individual shall we begin with? Most of those who speak thus mean, begin with some other individual. Evangelize the heathen, uplift the poor, Americanize the Bolshevists, do something to some one which will make him like ourselves; in other words, bring him into our crowd. The individual with whom I would begin is myself. Somehow or other if I am to have individuality at all it will be by virtue of being an individual, a single, "separate person." And that is a dangerous and at present a more or less lonely thing to do. But the problem is really one of practical psychology. We must come out of the crowd-self, just as, before the neurotic may be normal, he must get over his neurosis. To do that he must trace his malady back to its source in the unconscious, and learn the meaning of his conscious behavior as it is related to his unconscious desires. Then he must do a difficult thing—he must accept the fact of himself at its real worth.
It is much the same with our crowd-mindedness. If psychoanalysis has therapeutic value by the mere fact of revealing to the neurotic the hidden meaning of his neurosis, then it would seem that an analysis of crowd-behavior such as we have tried to make should be of some help in breaking the hold of the crowd upon our spirits, and thus freeing democracy to some extent from quackery.
To see behind the shibboleths and dogmas of crowd-thinking the "cussedness"—that is, the primitive side—of human nature at work is a great moral gain. At least the "cussedness" cannot deceive us any more. We have won our greatest victory over it when we drag it out into the light. We can at least wrestle with it consciously, and maybe, by directing it to desirable ends, it will cease to be so "cussed," and become a useful servant. No such good can come to us so long as this side of our nature is allowed its way only on condition that it paint its face and we encourage it to talk piously of things which it really does not mean. Disillusionment may be painful both to the neurotic and to the crowd-man, but the gain is worth the shock to our pride. The ego, when better understood, becomes at once more highly personalized because more conscious of itself, and more truly social because better adjusted to the demands of others. It is this socialized and conscious selfhood which is both the aim and the hope of true democracy.
Such analysis may possibly give us the gift to see ourselves as others do not see us, as we have not wished them to see us, and finally enable us to see ourselves and others and to be seen by them as we really are.
We shall be free when we cease pampering ourselves, stop lying to ourselves and to one another, and give up the crowd-mummery in which we indulge because it happens to flatter our hidden weaknesses! In the end we shall only begin to solve the social problem when we can cease together taking refuge from reality in systems made up of general ideas that we should be using as tools in meeting the tasks from which as crowd-men and neurotics people run away; when we discontinue making use of commonly accepted principles and ideals as defense formations for shameful things in which we can indulge ourselves with a clear conscience only by all doing them together.
There must be an increase in the number of unambitious men, men who can rise above vulgar dilemmas and are deaf to crowd propaganda, men capable of philosophical tolerance, critical doubt and inquiry, genuine companionship, and voluntary co-operation in the achievement of common ends, free spirits who can smile in the face of the mob, who know the mob and are not to be taken in by it.
All this sounds much like the old gospel of conviction of sin and repentance; perhaps it is just that. We must think differently, change our minds. Again and again people have tried the wide way and the broad gate, the crowd-road to human happiness, only to find that it led to destruction in a cul-de-sac. Now let us try the other road, "the strait and narrow path." The crowd-path leads neither to self-mastery nor social blessedness. People in crowds are not thinking together; they are not thinking at all, save as a paranoiac thinks. They are not working together; they are only sticking together. We have leaned on one another till we have all run and fused into a common mass. The democratic crowd to-day, with its sweet optimism, its warm "brotherly love," is a sticky, gooey mass which one can hardly touch and come back to himself clean. By dissolving everything in "one great union" people who cannot climb alone expect to ooze into the co-operative commonwealth or kingdom of heaven. I am sick of this oozing democracy. There must be something crystalline and insoluble left in democratic America. Somewhere there must be people with sharp edges that cut when they are pressed too hard, people who are still solid, who have impenetrable depths in them and hard facets which reflect the sunlight. They are the hope of democracy, these infusible ones.
To change the figure, may their tribe increase. And this is the business of every educator who is not content to be a faker. What we need is not only more education, but a different kind of education. There is more hope in an illiterate community where people hate lying than in a high-school educated nation which reads nothing but trash and is fed up on advertising, newspapers, popular fiction, and propaganda.
In the foregoing chapter, reference was made to our traditional educational systems. The subject is so closely related to the mental habits of democracy that it would be difficult to overemphasize its importance for our study. Traditional educational methods have more often given encouragement to crowd-thinking than to independence of judgment. Thinking has been divorced from doing. Knowledge, instead of being regarded as the foresight of ends to be reached and the conscious direction of activity toward such ends, has been more commonly regarded as the copying of isolated things to be learned. The act of learning has been treated as if it were the passive reception of information imposed from without. The subject to be learned has been sequestered and set apart from experience as a whole, with the result that ideas easily come to be regarded as things in themselves. Systems of thought are built up with little or no sense of their connection with everyday problems. Thus our present-day education prepares in advance both the ready-made logical systems in which the crowd-mind takes refuge from the concretely real and the disposition to accept truth second-hand, upon the authority of another, which in the crowd-man becomes the spirit of conformity.
Even science, taught in this spirit may be destructive of intellectual freedom. Professor Dewey says that while science has done much to modify mens thoughts, still
It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical; it has provided more efficient means for satisfying pre-existent desires rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs....
The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The method of science ingrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure....
That science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude.
The new kind of education, the education which is to liberate the mind, will make much of scientific methods. But let us notice what it is to set a mind free. Mind does not exist in a vacuum, nor in a world of "pure ideas." The free mind is the functioning mind, the mind which is not inhibited in its work by any conflict within itself. Thought is not made free by the mere substitution of naturalistic for theological dogma. It is possible to make a cult of science itself. Crowd-propaganda is often full of pseudoscientific jargon of this sort. Specialization in technical training may produce merely a high-class trained-animal man, of the purely reflex type, who simply performs a prescribed trick which he has learned, whenever an expected motor-cue appears. In the presence of the unexpected such a person may be as helpless as any other animal. It is possible to train circus dogs, horses, and even horned toads, to behave in this same way. Much so-called scientific training in our schools to-day is of this sort. It results not in freedom, but in what Bergson would call the triumph of mechanism over freedom.
Science, to be a means of freedom—that is, science as culture—may not be pursued as pure theorizing apart from practical application. Neither may a calculating utilitarianism gain freedom to us by ignoring, in the application of scientific knowledge to given ends, a consideration of the ends themselves and their value for enriching human experience. It is human interest which gives scientific knowledge any meaning. Science must be taught in the humanist spirit. It may not ignore this quality of human interest which exists in all knowledge. To do so is to cut off our relations with reality. And the result may become a negation of personality similar to that with which the crowd compensates itself for its unconscious ego-mania.
The reference just made to Humanism leads us next to a consideration of the humanities. It has long been the habit of traditional education to oppose to the teaching of science the teaching of the classic languages and the arts, as if there were two irreconcilable principles involved here. Dewey says that
Humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken.... It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject-matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery—that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject-matter which accomplishes this result is humane and any subject-matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.
The point is that it is precisely what a correct knowledge of ancient civilization through a study of the classics does that our traditional educators most dread. William James once said that the good which came from such study was the ability to "know a good man when we see him." The student would thus become more capable of discriminating appreciation. He would grow to be a judge of values. He would acquire sharp likes and dislikes and thus set up his own standards of judgment. He would become an independent-thinker and therefore an enemy of crowds. Scholars of the Renaissance knew this well, and that is why in their revolt against the crowd-mindedness of their day they made use of the litteræ humanores to smash to pieces the whole dogmatic system of the Middle Ages.
With the picture of ancient life before him the student could not help becoming more cosmopolitan in spirit. Here he got a glimpse of a manner of living in which the controlling ideas and fixations of his contemporary crowds were frankly challenged. Here were witnesses to values contrary to those in which his crowd had sought to bring him up in a docile spirit. Inevitably his thinking would wander into what his crowd considered forbidden paths. One cannot begin to know the ancients as they really were without receiving a tremendous intellectual stimulus. After becoming acquainted with the intellectual freedom and courage and love of life which are almost everywhere manifest in the literature of the ancients, something happens to a man. He becomes acquainted with himself as a valuing animal. Few things are better calculated to make free spirits than these very classics, once the student "catches on."
But that is just the trouble; from the Renaissance till now, the crowd-mind, whether interested politically, morally, or religiously; whether Catholic, or Protestant, or merely Rationalist, has done its level best to keep the student from "catching on." Educational tradition, which is for the most part only systematized crowd-thinking, has perverted the classics into instruments for producing spiritual results of the very opposite nature from the message which these literatures contain. Latin and Greek are taught for purposes of discipline. The task of learning them has been made as difficult and as uninteresting as possible, with the idea of forcing the student to do something he dislikes, of whipping his spirit into line and rendering him subservient to intellectual authority. Thus, while keeping up the external appearance of culture, the effect is to make the whole thing so meaningless and unpleasant that the student will never have the interest to try to find out what it is all about.
I have said that the sciences and classics should be approached in the "humanistic" spirit. The humanist method must be extended to the whole subject-matter of education, even to a revaluation of knowing itself. I should not say even, but primarily. It is impossible here to enter into an extended discussion of the humanist theories of knowledge as contrasted with the traditional or "intellectualist" theories. But since we have seen that the conscious thinking of the crowd-mind consists in the main of abstract and dogmatic logical systems, similar to the "rationalizations" of the paranoiac, it is important to note the bearing of humanism upon these logical systems wherever they are found.
A number of years ago, while discussing certain phases of this subject with one of the physicians in charge of a large hospital for the insane, the significance of education for healthy mental life was brought out with great emphasis. It was at the time when psychiatrists were just beginning to make use of analytical psychology in the treatment of mental and nervous disorders.
"The trouble with a great many of our patients," said my friend, "is the fact that they have been wrongly educated."
"Do you mean," I said, "that they have not received proper moral instruction?"
"Yes, but by the proper moral instruction I do not mean quite the same thing that most people mean by that. It all depends on the way in which the instruction is given. Many of these patients are the mental slaves of convention. They have been terrified by it; its weight crushes them; when they discover that their own impulses or behavior are in conflict with what they regard as absolute standards, they cannot bear the shock. They do not know how to use morality; they simply condemn themselves; they seek reconciliation by all sorts of crazy ideas which develop into the psychoneurosis. And the only hope there is of cure for them is re-education. The physician, when it is not too late, often to do any good has to become an educator."
The practice of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method is really hardly anything more than re-education. The patient must first be led to face the fact of himself as he really is; then he must be taught to revalue conventional ideas in such a way that he can use these ideas as instruments with which he may adjust himself in the various relations of life. This process of education, in a word, is humanistic. It is pragmatic; the patient is taught that his thinking is a way of functioning; that ideas are instruments, ways of acting. He learns to value these tendencies to act and to find himself through the mastery of his own thinking.
Now we have seen that the neurosis is but one path of escape from this conflict of self with the imperatives and abstract ideas through which social control is exercised. The second way is to deny, unconsciously, the true meaning of these ideas, and this, as we have seen, is crowd-thinking. Here, as in the other case, the education which is needed is that which acquaints the subject with the functional nature of his own thinking, which directs his attention to results, which dissolves the fictions into which the unconscious takes refuge, by showing that systems of ideas have no other reality than what they do and no other meaning than the difference which their being true makes in actual experience somewhere.
We have previously noted the connection between the intellectualist philosophies with their closed systems of ideas, their absolutists, and the conscious thinking of crowds. The crowd finds these systems ready-made and merely backs into them and hides itself like a hermit crab in a deserted seashell. It follows that the humanist, however social he may be, cannot be a crowd-man. He, too, will have his ideals, but they are not made-in-advance goods which all must accept; they are good only as they may be made good in real experience, true only when verified in fact. To such a mind there is no unctuousness, by which ideas may be fastened upon others without their assent. Nothing is regarded as so final and settled that the spirit of inquiry should be discouraged from efforts to modify and improve it.
Generalizations, such as justice, truth, liberty, and all other intellectualist- and crowd-abstractions, become to the humanist not transcendental things in themselves, but descriptions of certain qualities of behavior, actual or possible, existing only where they are experienced and in definite situations. He will not be swept into a howling mob by these big words; he will stop to see what particular things are they which in a given instance are to be called just, what particular hypothesis is it which it is sought to verify and thus add to the established body of truth, whose liberty is demanded and what, to be definite, is it proposed that he shall do with the greater opportunity for action? Let the crowd yell itself hoarse, chanting its abstract nouns made out of adjectives, the humanist will know that these are but words and that the realities which they point to, if they have any meaning at all, are what "they are known as."
This humanist doctrine of the concreteness of the real is important. It is a reaffirmation of the reality of human experience. William James, who called himself a "radical empiricist," made much of this point. Experience may not be ruled out for the sake of an a priori notion of what this world ought to be. As James used to say, we shall never know what this world really is or is to become until the last mans vote is in and counted. Here, of course, is an emphasis upon the significance of unique personality which no crowd will grant. Crowds will admit personality as an abstract principle, but not as an active will having something of its own to say about the ultimate outcome of things.
Another important point in which humanism corrects crowd-thinking is the fact that it regards intellect as an instrument of acting, and not as a mere copyist of realities earthly or supermundane. Dewey says:
If it be true that the self or subject of experience is part and parcel of the course of events, it follows that the self becomes a knower. It becomes a mind in virtue of a distinctive way of partaking in the course of events. The significant distinction is no longer between a knower and the world, it is between different ways of being in and of the movement of things; between a physical way and a purposive way....
As a matter of fact the pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the function of mind is to project new and more complex ends to free experience from routine and caprice. Not the use of thought to accomplish purposes already given either in the mechanism of the body or in that of the existent state of society, but the use of intelligence to liberate and liberalize action, is the pragmatic lesson.... Intelligence as intelligence is inherently forward looking; only by ignoring its primary function does it become a means for an end already given. The latter is servile, even when the end is labeled moral, religious, esthetic. But action directed to ends to which the agent has not previously been attached inevitably carries with it a quickened and enlarged spirit. A pragmatic intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic.
Hence humanism breaks down the conformist spirit of crowds. From the simplest to the most complex, ideas are regarded as primarily motor, or, rather, as guides to our bodily movements among other things in our environment. James says that the stream of life which runs in at our eyes and ears is meant to run out at our lips, our feet, and our fingertips. Bergson says that ideas are like snapshots of a man running. However closely they are taken together, the movement always occurs between them. They cannot, therefore, give us reality, or the movement of life as such, but only cross-sections of it, which serve as guides in directing the conscious activity of life upon matter. According to James again, there are no permanently existing ideas, or impersonal ones; each idea is an individual activity, known only in the thinking, and is always thought for a purpose. As all thinking is purposive, and therefore partial, emphasizing just those aspects of things which are useful for our present problem, it follows that the sum total of partial views cannot give us the whole of reality or anything like a true copy of it. Existence as a whole cannot be reduced to any logical system. The One and the Absolute are therefore meaningless and are only logical fictions, useful, says James, by way of allowing us a sort of temporary irresponsibility, or "moral holiday."
From all this follows the humanist view of Truth. Truth is nothing complete and existing in itself independent of human purpose. The word is a noun made out of an adjective, as I have said. An idea becomes true, says James, when it fits into the totality of our experience; truth is what we say about an idea when it works. It must be made true, by ourselves—that is, verified. Truth is therefore of human origin, frankly, man-made. To Schiller it is the same as the good; it is the attainment of satisfactory relations within experience. Or, to quote the famous humanist creed of Protagoras, as Schiller is so fond of doing, "Man is the measure of all things." The meaning of the world is precisely, for all purposes, its meaning for us. Its worth, both logical and moral, is not something given, but just what we through our activity are able to assign to it.
The humanist is thus thrown upon his own responsibility in the midst of concrete realities of which he as a knowing, willing being is one. His task is to make such modifications within his environment, physical and social, as will make his own activity and that of others with him richer and more satisfactory in the future.
The question arises—it is a question commonly put by crowd-minded people and by intellectual philosophers; Plato asks it of the Protagoreans—how, if the individual man is the measure of all things, is there to be any common measure? How any agreement? May not a thing be good and true for one and not for another? How, then, shall there be any getting together without an outside authority and an absolute standard? The answer, as Schiller and James showed, is obvious; life is a matter of adjustment. We each constitute a part of the others environment. At certain points our desires conflict, our valuations are different, and yet our experience at these points overlaps, as it were. It is to our common advantage to have agreement at these points. Out of our habitual adjustments to one another, a body of mutual understanding and agreement grows up which constitutes the intellectual and moral order of life. But this order, necessary as it is, is still in the making. It is not something given; it is not a copy of something transcendent, impersonal, and final which crowds may write upon their banners and use to gain uniform submission for anything which they may be able to express in terms which are general and abstract. This order of life is purely practical; it exists for us, not we for it, and because we have agreed that certain things shall be right and true, it does not follow that righteousness and truth are fixed and final and must be worshiped as pure ideas in such a way that the mere repetition of these words paralyzes our cerebral hemispheres.
Doubtless one of the greatest aids of the humanist way of thinking in bringing the individual to self-consciousness is the way in which it orients us in the world of present-day events. It inspires one to achieve a working harmony, not a fictitious haven of rest for the mind interested only in its relations to its own ideas. The unity which life demands of us is not that of a perfect rational system. It is rather the unity of a healthy organism all the parts of which can work together.
Cut up as we are into what Emerson called "fragments of men," I think we are particularly susceptible to crowd-thinking because we are so disintegrated. Thought and behavior must always be more or less automatic and compulsory where there is no conscious co-ordination of the several parts of it. It is partly because we are the heirs of such a patchwork of civilization that few people to-day are able to think their lives through. There can be little organic unity in the heterogeneous and unrelated aggregation of half-baked information, warring interests, and irreconcilable systems of valuation which are piled together in the modern mans thinking.
Life may not be reduced to a logical unity, but it is an organic whole for each of us, and we do not reach that organic unity by adding mutually exclusive partial views of it together.
Something happens to one who grasps the meaning of humanism; he becomes self-conscious in a new way. His psychic life becomes a fascinating adventure in a real world. He finds that his choices are real events. He is "set intellectually on fire," as one of our educators has correctly defined education. As Jung would doubtless say, he has "extroverted" himself; his libido, which in the crowd seeks to enhance the ego feeling by means of the mechanism which we have described, now is drawn out and attached to the outer world through the intellectual channel. Selfhood is realized in the satisfactoriness of the results which one is able to achieve in the very fullness of his activity and the richness of his interests.
Such a free spirit needs no crowds to keep up his faith, and he is truly social, for he approaches his social relationships with intelligent discrimination and judgments of worth which are his own. He contributes to the social, not a copy or an imitation, not a childish wish-fancy furtively disguised, but a psychic reality and a new creative energy. It is only in the fellowship of such spirits, whatever political or economic forms their association may take, that we may expect to see the Republic of the Free.