Liberty and democracy, and other essays, in war time

Preface

► A LL human thinking is temporary and r\ experimental, Hke the life of which it is a part. But in time of war, and of such a war as this that now wracks the world, the temporal perils of thought swell to new measures. Our emotions are intense; familiar things take on discolouratlons, while strange orders of fact breed strangely new perceptions, making easy the inroads of fantasy and suspicion; and even the mind consciously in search of a truth that is eternal finds itself hypnotically in bond to the garish actualities of the present. Nevertheless, there are no times when hard thinking is more the need." Such intelligence as we have is meant (if meant for anything) to be of service under stress; and that citizen and that student who fails to respond with his clearest effort betrays at once his country and the best part of human nature, — namely, its quest of rational guidance.

The essays which form the present volume represent but one man's endeavour to discover the light of reason in a period of tremendous stress. They were written, from time to time, under the impulse of events, and for contemporary reading. They cannot, therefore, pretend to either system or consecution, and they undoubtedly contain repe-

PREFACE

titions, not only as between the several essays, but of matters that have been frequently and better expressed elsewhere. Yet with all this, the author believes that the urgency of thought is such that every citizen who prizes his citizenship should publicly and repeatedly express the best that is in him; and he hopes that in the collection here offered there will be found something that may be of real, even if temporary, value in clarifying the problems of principle which beset society.

Problems of principle, — for if there Is one conviction that underlies this book, and may perhaps give it unity of thought as well as of intent, it is that the wisdom of political conduct is proportionate to the clarity with which political principles are defined and the constancy with which they are held in view. To those who find no value in general principles the effort here expended will appear vain; but for those who hold with the author that general principles must be the first rules of all telling practice, no such effort can seem entirely useless. True, there is here no constructive, no reconstructive programme. But the hour calls for diagnosis: we have understood neither our constitution, as a state, nor our maladies, as a society; and not until we achieve these understandings, through analysis of symptoms, can we hope to provide an effective cure. That the physician must have health in his mind when he studies disease was a rule of Greek medicine; and it is in the

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PREFACE

spirit of this rule that the diagnoses here suggested are made.

But while a programme of reconstruction is yet to make, it may be worth a word here to define the line which the author's thinking repeatedly brings him to believe such reconstruction must follow. This is the educational, — not in any narrow scholastic way, but broadly, touching the whole life of the citizen and the whole endeavour of the state. Democracy can only flourish where the citizens are both intelligent and alert, intelligent as to the purposes of their society and alert as to the means of attaining these: unceasing vigilance is the preserver of freedom, but this must be accompanied by a no less unceasing consideration of the ends of human life if the liberty is to be worth preserving. "He who would duly enquire about the best form of the state ought first to determine which is the most eligible life." Aristotle's aphorism is the core of political wisdom; and its applied meaning can only be that the citizen who is a true warden of his rights must be an athlete of the mind, forever trained and in training. The problem of due training is the problem of political self-preservation.

The several essays are here reprinted (in a few cases with slight modifications) from their original publication in The International Journal of Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, The North American Review, The New Republic, The

PREFACE

Dial, The Hibbert Journal, and, in the case of the assembled "Letters to the Public," from the columns of The Nebraska State Journal. In view of the current character and impulse of most of the articles, the author has deemed it advisable to give for each the date of its composition.

February i, iqi8.

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Contents

I. Liberty and Democracy ... i

II. The Fear of Machines ... 28

III. Rousseau and Political Humani-

II

The United States of America came into national existence as the result of a war for independence. It was not an accident of territory or race or language or religion that converted the thirteen Colonies of the Crown into a federal state; it was a political ideal. This fact, more than any other, has appealed to the imagination of Americans, and has moulded in them their conception of the meaning of their own polity. " We hold these truths to be self-evident," reads our Declaration, *'that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It is on the strength of these postulates that the Declaration goes on to affirm that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states."

It is obvious that the conception that gives inotive to this language is the conception of liberty. Equality and the pursuit of happiness are incidents in the definition of liberty : equality is a vague conception of the social boundaries of liberty; the pursuit of happiness is an equally vague estimate of the meaning of liberty for individuals; but the central and moving idea of the Declaration is that of liberty itself. Liberty it is that, in the conception of the fathers of our country, constitutes the fountain and tide of all political rights; and liberty it is that, in our own day, has^ seemed to Americans the very genius of their national institutions.

But the history of human conduct shows nothing more certainly than that an idea may be both moving and powerful without being either clear or consistent. The history of American political idealism is but an added illustration of this. From the beginning we have been greatly stirred by the symbols of liberty, but we have given little thought to its essence. Certain elements, to be sure, stand out with eminence, yet none of them go to the marrow of the conception, even as it affects our practice. On the one hand, liberty has come to mean for us an exaggerated individualism, — the pursuit of happiness carried to the extreme of do-as-you-please and mindyour-own-business. The Jeff ersonian aphorism, "that government is best which governs least," is the typical expression of this notion in political philosophy. On the other hand, liberty has been assumed to imply a social equality of citizen with citizen which all human organization is strenuous to deny. What we call our democracy is the current expression of this notion, socially represented by our willingness to 'mix', as we say. Its noblest verbal embodiment is the great determination of Lincoln "that we here highly resolve that government of the people, for the people, and by the people shall not perish from the earth."

The ambiguity of our thinking is reflected in our turbid history. I know of no more spectacular example of the blindness with which an idea can sere men's minds to fact than in our own political career has issued from the assertion that ' all men are born free and equal.' This, which seemed self-evident truth to our fathers, seems self-evident falsehood to us. Yet a great war, the War of the Rebellion, was fought in the terrific effort to

LIBERTY A^D DEMOCRACY

steep this lie into the blood of Nature. North and South alike, in that war, fought in the name of liberty; yet neither understood the thing. The liberty for which the North contended was the social liberty represented by a fictitious human equality; the liberty for which the South fought was the freedom to realize equally fictitious individual rights.

In less spectacular, though perhaps not less momentous ways, the same see-saw is apparent in our economic and social life. From the 'squatter sovereign' to the 'plutocrat', from the boy bully to the flamboyant lechers of affinity unions, we are loud in our proclamations of individual independence. On the other hand, no people more hoarsely vociferates vox populi, vox Dei, or more piously cants that the public sentiment is the wisdom of God. None of these fancies could endure, I am certain, were it not for the conviction, less conscious than determined, that somehow the essence of liberty is interbound with them. We cannot forget that we are a nation founded in the faith of freedom, and it is to that faith that we will be true to the cost of every sanity.

No one, I think, can comprehend American history without some feeling for the force with which the symbol of liberty appeals to the American mind; but it would be a rash man who should assert that in America, liberty, in any intelligible and definable form, has ever been realized. Indeed, the observer of our history might well sympathize with the aphorism of a shrewd student of the history of Florence: "The Florentines had in a very marked degree the sentiment of liberty but the sentiment is often in inverse proportion to the possibility." And for our own democracy, surely the thinking man will share something of the bitter contempt which Plato felt for the democracy of Athens, — "a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike."

Democracies have their own special forms of tyranny, not the least rancorous of which is the tyranny of a public sentiment called to support a liberty which the public does not comprehend. In the recently published report of the Committee on Academic Freedom to the American Association of University Professors occurs the following significant judgment: "Public opinion is at once the chief safeguard of a democracy, and the chief menace to the real liberty of the individual. It almost seems as if the danger of despotism cannot be wholly averted under any form of government. In a political autocracy there is no effective public opinion, and all are subject to the tyranny of the ruler; in a democracy there is political freedom, but there is likely to be a tyranny of public opinion."

If educated Americans so diagnose their own state, it is not surprising that foreigners coming from states governed by totally different conceptions should be profoundly and disagreeably impressed by our servitude to the vox populi, — by that justice of democratic states which is, says Aristotle, governed by a numerical, not by a qualitative principle. In a current pamphlet, Nordamerika und Deutschla7id, the famous historian, Eduard Meyer, says: "The cultivated German, from the moment when he lands on the quay of New York until he leaves it again, feels himself under an unwonted sense of oppression, the yoke of 'public opinion,' which is exercised not only by the press, but also through all the forms of social life. His behaviour, his utterances are all controlled and dragged into publicity; he has no freedom of movement nor of opinion; it is surely the greatest problem of 'the land of contrasts' that the Americans regard themselves as a free people." It is in no spirit of self-depreciation, but with real solicitude, that we should study such criticisms as these, asking ourselves whether indeed our vaunted freedom may not be the illusory thing which to Meyer it appears to be.

Ill

It is the common opinion of men, says Aristotle, that the basis of the democratic state is liberty, and that liberty can only be enjoyed in democracies.

This judgment — true, doubtless, of the average Hellene of Aristotle's day — can

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hardly be regarded as universal to-day. Certainly the expression just quoted from Eduard Meyer implies that in America essential liberty is absent. We know well that the Imperial German states of to-day are not democracies, and yet that they consider themselves free, — free in a truer sense than that in which we are free. In an inquiry into the nature of liberty it behooves us to ask for the precise meaning which the Germans attach to liberty, especially when that meaning is so obviously contradistinguished from the meaning of liberty as understood by democrats, ancient and modern.

In the pamphlet above cited Meyer says that the German and the Anglo-Saxon have diametrically opposite conceptions of freedom and of the state. Now it is from the difference in the conception of the state that the diflPerent conceptions of freedom follow. If, therefore, we would understand the German conception of freedom, we must get it through an understanding of the German conception of the state.

This is no simple idea. The oft-quoted phrase of Treitschke, "der Staat ist Macht, " is only one of its interpretations, and by no means a clear one; for while Treitschke, no doubt, has political power chiefly in his eye, his is but one focalization out of many possible focalizations of a much more comprehensive philosophical idea.

I refer to Hegel's notion that the state is one II living mind, — not figuratively, but literally, one living mind, the necessary and rational expression of nationality. It would be altogether false to Hegel's genius to identify this mind which is the state with the 'collective mind' of the French sociologists, much less with the 'public sentiment' and 'popular sovereignty' of American phrase. The mind which Hegel has in view is a definitely organized and logically articulate expression of reason, having a metaphysical unity of its own, as real, if not as comprehensive, as is the unity of the universe. The state is the rational expression of the nation, whose individual citizens it should rule as our human reason should rule our lesser faculties. From another point of view — the cosmic view — the state is an expression of the universal mind of the Absolute; it is a unity within the greater unity of the universe, comprising within itself the lesser units which are its citizens. All of these — universe, state, citizen — are essentially spiritual entities; but as the broader unities are the more spiritual, the state is a more spiritual thing than is the man whose civic being enters into it, and who is, therefore, in every sense a less worthy object than is the state.

In such a system as this, where the reason of every citizen is subordinate to the reason of the state, where is liberty to be found? Hegel's answer, and the answer of Germany, which has been drawn from Hegel, is simple.

Liberty is never private; liberty is always public and collective. "The universal is bound up with the full freedom of the particular," is Hegel's phrase, the only meaning of which must be that there is no freedom for the will of the individual save in its concord with the will of the state. Indeed, the essential quality of individuality, as we democrats conceive it, disappears altogether: the great man, the man of genius and apparent individuality is, in Hegel's view, but "the mouthpiece and executor of his age," — the more or less conscious voice and instrument of the national mind.

This, in my opinion, is the essential and by all odds the most respectable form of the Germanic philosophy of the state. It is echoed, in varying intonation, by many succeeding writers. The Nietzschean and Treitschkean and Bernhardian effusions but represent the decline of this conception from that of a state mind whose rule is the rule of reason, to that of a state mind whose rule is the rule of appetite and force. The thing is more decently expressed by better thinkers. Hugo Muensterberg puts it: "In the German view the state is not for the individuals, but the individuals for the state. The ideal state unit which has existence only in the belief of the individuals is felt as higher and more important than those chance personalities which enter into it." And again: "The Anglo- Saxon system is controlled by the belief in the individual as such, and the Teutonic ideals are bound by the belief in the overindividual soul." In the same vein and with the same intention Professor Meyer tells us that the German state is "a living thing, set on high above all individuals."

It is obvious that the German conception of the state thus sketched is in reality as diametrically opposed to the conception of the state held by Americans, and with them by Frenchmen and Englishmen, as Professors Meyer and Muensterberg say it is. It is obvious, too, that the German notion of liberty, flowing from the German notion of the state, is to the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon no liberty at all. We cannot say of a man who can exercise his will and reason only when they are in accord with a more authoritative will and reason, that he is a free man; we cannot regard that citizen whose highest activity is as mouthpiece or tool of the state, as a free citizen.

But if freedom, in our sense, is foreign to German political ideals, may there not be compensation in other qualities which we miss, — if, indeed, our freedom is in itself desirable? Few will deny, I imagine, that there is, in some degree, such compensating virtue. Undoubtedly its expression is that * efficiency' which all nations to-day unite in envying the German. Efficiency in execution is the direct correlative of unity of purpose and simplicity of ends; and unity of purpose and simplicity of ends are exactly what a state of the German type is adapted to secure. The basis of such a state is not liberty (as Aristotle would have it for democratic states) but loyalty, — the great virtue of feudalism. The institution of feudalism was Germany's first gift to European civilization. After the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes which were Rome's destroyers reorganized Western Europe on the basis of feudal law; and the key to that law is the loyalty of vassal to suzerain. A man's security, in the feudal system, lay in being some other man's man, and in being true to that other man; personal dependence, not personal independence, is the structural principle. There is no direct relation of the individual to the law, as in the Roman system, but only of the individual to the higher individual, up to the sovereign, who is himself supported, as is the capstone of an arch, by the hierarchical edifice to which he gives solidity. In Germany, France, and England, and even in Italy, this feudal law became the dominant feature of mediseval states. It was broken in Italy by the Renaissance democracies, in England by the Magna Carta, in France by the Revolution; but it remains to this day the outstanding feature, of the polity of those imperial German states from whose remote founders it first issued. Indeed, I am inclined to think

IS that the nub of what Western Europe calls Prussian militarism is feudalism pure and simple. And Hegel, in his conception of a hierarchical universe, of which the hierarchical state is only a lesser image and division, is, I believe, but speaking in philosophical terms the political meaning of German feudalism.

Clearly, in such a state equality and the liberty which is associated with equality have no place. Its political principle is self-surrender, inequality, and its virtue is loyalty to a superior. There may be a kind of humanitarianism involved in the conception, the faith of the man in his master, but there is an utter destruction of that West European humanitarianism based on equality before the law and the faith of man in man.

This, however, is not a condemnation of philosophical feudalism, if I may so term the German view; it is merely a definition of its difference from our own view. Surely we can never condemn such a polity if it be true, as so stout a Ghibelline as Dante affirmed and so stanch a Ghibelline as Kaiser Wilhelm II vociferates, that the Empire is the visible expression of God's will on earth. Dante's noblest verse is that in which he sums up the spiritual unity of a feudal universe, — E la sua volontate e nostra pace, — and I suppose that it could be only Satanic rebels who would care or dare to oppose the will of a divinely inspired Empire. The one question which remains, if we accept, as many do, the feudal

t6 conception of the cosmopolis, is as to the authenticity of the German inspiration, — or, to put it into more contemporary terms, the righteous superiority of German Kultur.

IV

On this question even men who accept the Hegelian philosophy and acknowledge the supremacy of loyalty over liberty as the civic virtue hold divergent views. But it is hardly a matter worth arguing. For it seems obvious that if you believe that God is the omnipotent suzerain of the universe, the event of Germany's victory or defeat will prove whether the Kaiser is indeed the Lord's most eminent feudatory, — for, \ as again Dante points out, trial by combat is the last determinant of justice in a feudal world: might is, as our German instructors have informed us, the proof of right, and military conquest a divine vindication of superiority.

But my philosophy is opposed to this, and I would argue against the whole view, irrespective of Germany's merits, of her successes or of her defeats. For the real question, as I see it, is not whether German culture is the culture providentially designed for all mankind, nor whether Germany is the providential instrument for its dissemination, but it is whether or not the German conception of the universe, and hence of polity, is true. I cannot believe that it is true.

In the first place I do not believe that the universe is exclusively mental and spiritual; I think that it is in part material, and that this materiality is an essential condition of whatever spirituality it may possess. That is to say, my philosophy is dualistic, or, as I should prefer to say, Platonic. Let us take the issue at its crux, — the conditions of reason. Of all our mental and spiritual powers, reason is the most obviously mental and spiritual; and yet the whole exercise of reason is dependent upon the existence of material, or irrational, factors and situations into which reason introduces its own peculiar kind of order. To put the matter simply, reason acts through judgments. A judgment is always a decision between possible alternates, — the rational and the irrational consequences of a situation. Without judgment, without choice, we could have no reason; and this means that the existence of reason is directly conditioned by the existence of the irrational, — • which is Plato's and my conception of the material. It means further that rational choice is always a free choice, and indeed that the essence of freedom is the power to make a rational choice.^

'I say this in full consciousness of the phrase 'rational necessity,' — a phrase which is wholly unfortunate in so far as it has been made the support of a theory of logical bondage. For rational determinism is in no sense analogous to physical or mechanical determinism: it is, in fact, an opposite quality. Rational necessity is fundamentally only respect for truth; it is a valuation of true judgments or decisions in preference to false judgments and decisions, and it is determination with respect to this valuation. If there were no alternatives involved,

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It is to the great credit of Dante and the mediaevaUsts that they recognized this truth. For them freedom was no matter of libertine impulse; it was the gift of reason. "Free choice is free judgment in matters of will," is Dante's phrase, and this freedom of judgment he regarded as the greatest gift conferred by God upon the human race. The difficulty of the mediaeval view, — a difficulty which was never solved, — is the reconciliation of bona fide choice with thoroughgoing foreordination.

If what has just been said about the fundamental condition of reason be true, its implications with reference to states are not far to seek. Reason consists in free choice as between real alternatives; the existence of reason, therefore, rests upon the existence of conflicting possibilities. Reason within ^ a state • — no more than reason in human affairs generally — cannot exist except among a citizenship endowed with the power of free choice; an utterly 'efficient' state can be neither rational nor free; the first condition of a reign of reason is a reign of freedom. _

This is the first point in regard to political reason: that it can only exist in states whose citizens are free. But there is a second characteristic of almost equal pertinency to the

the word 'necessity' would itself be meaningless (as essentially it is when applied to mechanical situations, which are without alternative outcomes until restated in ideal terms). Reason, therefore, is fundamentally based upon free choice in a situation presenting real alternatives; or, otherwise put, the essence of true freedom is rational choice, which is rational determinism.

times. This is the essential detachment of reason. Reason is conditioned by a material situation, but it is not itself material. It is essentially a condition of withdrawal from the material and the physical. We ' stop to think, ' as we say; and the whole art of rational living is the cultivation of the power to withdraw from action for the sake of thinking. The main portion of our active life is a social life; but reason is mainly anti-social, individual, in character. It is a notorious fact that men reason least when their activities are most collective; the responsibilities of reason are far more with the closet scholar than with the orator of the forum; even generals are bombproofed when they plan their battles. Men act most efficiently for the accomplishment of determined ends when they act in groups, but they think most eifectively when they think in severalty. The history of civilization, with its Plato, Archimedes, Galileo, Copernicus, and the rest, is loud in this asseveration. The den may have and does have its fallacies, but they are fallacies of logic, not of temperament, as are those of the forum and the rostrum.

The truth is that a state in which the will and desire to act is controlled by collectivist purpose, and not by free choice, is only an organized — and hence an especially dangerous — mob. The mob mind, no matter how complexly organized, is inferior to the individual mind, than which it is infinitely less rational. The excellencies of mind (as history shows) develop in detachment from affairs, in the acquisition of what we call mental perspective, and not in social absorption. Individual detachment no less than individual liberty is requisite to all realization of ideal values.

If reason possesses the characteristics which I have assigned to it, — free judgment and detachment from action, i. e., liberty and individualism, — it follows inevitably that reason must be sought not in coUectivistic states, but in democratical states, where liberty and individualism are prized. It follows, too, that such a metaphysical entity as the "overindividual state" of Professor Muensterberg or the "living being set high above individuals" of Professor Meyer is a rational monstrosity; and I cannot but feel that it is just this monstrosity which drives the non-Teutonic world to its present horror of the German state machine. There is in this machine's hugely brutal operation something at once fascinating and terrible, and, as with all terrible fascinations, something inhuman. To call it superhuman is quite in the Germanic vogue, but to men reared in the humanitarian school there is nothing complimentary in the epithet: the Uebermensch can never be less than unlovely and ogreish.

Prussian militarism is not, in my view, a thing of arms and munitions; it is a point of view. A while back I said that it is a modern expression of mediaeval feudalism. I will now add that it is feudalism despiritualized and imbruted by the superposition of a conception of the state in which true reason and hence true humanity have no part. No one, I trust, will regard this condemnation of a theory of the state as a condemnation of the German people nor even entirely of the German state; for no state, whether autocracy or democracy, is perfect of its type; and this is obviously true of Germany, which contains many elements of democracy, wherein, as I believe, are to be found the sources of the true greatness of the German people. But the essential character of an "overindividual state" and an "overindividual national mind" seems to me, both in its conception and in its present fruits, nothing short of damnable.

V

In this criticism of the anti-democratical state I have tried to lay the foundations for a proper estimate of what should constitute the true democracy, — not such a democracy as we have in our United States of to-day, to the flaws and weaknesses of which no man is more willing to confess than am I, but such a democracy as we would have our state to be, could we reconstruct it according to the true principles of rational liberty.