Public Opinion Part 17

Factory is, of course, a very loose word, and Mr. Cole asks us to take it as meaning mines, shipyards, docks, stations, and every place which is "a natural center of production." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p.

41] But a factory in this sense is quite a different thing from an industry. The factory, as Mr. Cole conceives it, is a work place where men are really in personal contact, an environment small enough to be known directly to all the workers. "This democracy if it is to be real, must come home to, and be exercisable directly by, every individual member of the Guild." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 40.]

This is important, because Mr. Cole, like Jefferson, is seeking a natural unit of government. The only natural unit is a perfectly familiar environment. Now a large plant, a railway system, a great coal field, is not a natural unit in this sense. Unless it is a very small factory indeed, what Mr. Cole is really thinking about is the shop. That is where men can be supposed to have "the habit and tradition of working together." The rest of the plant, the rest of the industry, is an inferred environment.

4

Anybody can see, and almost everybody will admit, that self-government in the purely internal affairs of the shop is government of affairs that "can be taken in at a single view." [Footnote: Aristotle, _Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. IV.] But dispute would arise as to what const.i.tute the internal affairs of a shop. Obviously the biggest interests, like wages, standards of production, the purchase of supplies, the marketing of the product, the larger planning of work, are by no means purely internal. The shop democracy has freedom, subject to enormous limiting conditions from the outside. It can deal to a certain extent with the arrangement of work laid out for the shop, it can deal with the temper and temperament of individuals, it can administer petty industrial justice, and act as a court of first instance in somewhat larger individual disputes. Above all it can act as a unit in dealing with other shops, and perhaps with the plant as a whole. But isolation is impossible. The unit of industrial democracy is thoroughly entangled in foreign affairs. And it is the management of these external relations that const.i.tutes the test of the guild socialist theory.

They have to be managed by representative government arranged in a federal order from the shop to the plant, the plant to the industry, the industry to the nation, with intervening regional grouping of representatives. But all this structure derives from the shop, and all its peculiar virtues are ascribed to this source. The representatives who choose the representatives who choose the representatives who finally "coordinate" and "regulate" the shops are elected, Mr. Cole a.s.serts, by a true democracy. Because they come originally from a self-governing unit, the whole federal organism will be inspired by the spirit and the reality of self-government. Representatives will aim to carry out the workers' "actual will as understood by themselves,"

[Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 42.] that is, as understood by the individual in the shops.

A government run literally on this principle would, if history is any guide, be either a perpetual logroll, or a chaos of warring shops. For while the worker in the shop can have a real opinion about matters entirely within the shop, his "will" about the relation of that shop to the plant, the industry, and the nation is subject to all the limitations of access, stereotype, and self-interest that surround any other self-centered opinion. His experience in the shop at best brings only aspects of the whole to his attention. His opinion of what is right within the shop he can reach by direct knowledge of the essential facts. His opinion of what is right in the great complicated environment out of sight is more likely to be wrong than right if it is a generalization from the experience of the individual shop. As a matter of experience, the representatives of a guild society would find, just as the higher trade union officials find today, that on a great number of questions which they have to decide there is no "actual will as understood" by the shops.

5

The guildsmen insist, however, that such criticism is blind because it ignores a great political discovery. You may be quite right, they would say, in thinking that the representatives of the shops would have to make up their own minds on many questions about which the shops have no opinion. But you are simply entangled in an ancient fallacy: you are looking for somebody to represent a group of people.

He cannot be found. The only representative possible is one who acts for "some particular function," [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 23-24.]

and therefore each person must help choose as many representatives "as there are distinct essential groups of functions to be performed."

a.s.sume then that the representatives speak, not for the men in the shops, but for certain functions in which the men are interested. They are, mind you, disloyal if they do not carry out the will of the group about the function, as understood by the group. [Footnote: _Cf._ Part V, "The Making of a Common Will."] These functional representatives meet. Their business is to coordinate and regulate. By what standard does each judge the proposals of the other, a.s.suming, as we must, that there is conflict of opinion between the shops, since if there were not, there would be no need to coordinate and regulate?

Now the peculiar virtue of functional democracy is supposed to be that men vote candidly according to their own interests, which it is a.s.sumed they know by daily experience. They can do that within the self-contained group. But in its external relations the group as a whole, or its representative, is dealing with matters that transcend immediate experience. The shop does not arrive spontaneously at a view of the whole situation. Therefore, the public opinions of a shop about its rights and duties in the industry and in society, are matters of education or propaganda, not the automatic product of shop-consciousness.

Whether the guildsmen elect a delegate, or a representative, they do not escape the problem of the orthodox democrat. Either the group as a whole, or the elected spokesman, must stretch his mind beyond the limits of direct experience. He must vote on questions coming up from other shops, and on matters coming from beyond the frontiers of the whole industry. The primary interest of the shop does not even cover the function of a whole industrial vocation. The function of a vocation, a great industry, a district, a nation is a concept, not an experience, and has to be imagined, invented, taught and believed.

And even though you define function as carefully as possible, once you admit that the view of each shop on that function will not necessarily coincide with the view of other shops, you are saying that the representative of one interest is concerned in the proposals made by other interests. You are saying that he must conceive a common interest. And in voting for him you are choosing a man who will not simply represent your view of your function, which is all that you know at first hand, but a man who will represent your views about other people's views of that function. You are voting as indefinitely as the orthodox democrat.

6

The guildsmen in their own minds have solved the question of how to conceive a common interest by playing with the word function. They imagine a society in which all the main work of the world has been a.n.a.lysed into functions, and these functions in turn synthesized harmoniously. [Footnote: _Cf. op. cit._, Ch. XIX.] They suppose essential agreement about the purposes of society as a whole, and essential agreement about the role of every organized group in carrying out those purposes. It was a nice sentiment, therefore, which led them to take the name of their theory from an inst.i.tution that arose in a Catholic feudal society. But they should remember that the scheme of function which the wise men of that age a.s.sumed was not worked out by mortal man. It is unclear how the guildsmen think the scheme is going to be worked out and made acceptable in the modern world. Sometimes they seem to argue that the scheme will develop from trade union organization, at other times that the communes will define the const.i.tutional function of the groups. But it makes a considerable practical difference whether they believe that the groups define their own functions or not.

In either case, Mr. Cole a.s.sumes that society can be carried on by a social contract based on an accepted idea of "distinct essential groups of functions." How does one recognize these distinct essential groups? So far as I can make out, Mr. Cole thinks that a function is what a group of people are interested in. "The essence of functional democracy is that a man should count as many times over as there are functions in which he is interested." [Footnote: _Social Theory,_ p. 102 _et seq._] Now there are at least two meanings to the word interested. You can use it to mean that a man is involved, or that his mind is occupied. John Smith, for example, may have been tremendously interested in the Stillman divorce case. He may have read every word of the news in every lobster edition. On the other hand, young Guy Stillman, whose legitimacy was at stake, probably did not trouble himself at all. John Smith was interested in a suit that did not affect his "interests," and Guy was uninterested in one that would determine the whole course of his life. Mr. Cole, I am afraid, leans towards John Smith. He is answering the "very foolish objection" that to vote by functions is to be voting very often: "If a man is not interested enough to vote, and cannot be aroused to interest enough to make him vote, on, say, a dozen distinct subjects, he waives his right to vote and the result is no less democratic than if he voted blindly and without interest."

Mr. Cole thinks that the uninstructed voter "waives his right to vote." From this it follows that the votes of the instructed reveal their interest, and their interest defines the function. [Footnote: _Cf._ Ch. XVIII of this book. "Since everybody was a.s.sumed to be interested enough in important affairs, only those affairs came to seem important in which everybody was interested."] "Brown, Jones, and Robinson must therefore have, not one vote each, but as many different functional votes as there are different questions calling for a.s.sociative action in which they are interested." [Footnote: _Guild Socialism,_ p. 24. ] I am considerably in doubt whether Mr. Cole thinks that Brown, Jones and Robinson should qualify in any election where they a.s.sert that they are interested, or that somebody else, not named, picks the functions in which they are ent.i.tled to be interested. If I were asked to say what I believe Mr. Cole thinks, it would be that he has smoothed over the difficulty by the enormously strange a.s.sumption that it is the uninstructed voter who waives his right to vote; and has concluded that whether functional voting is arranged by a higher power, or "from below" on the principle that a man may vote when it interests him to vote, only the instructed will be voting anyway, and therefore the inst.i.tution will work.

But there are two kinds of uninstructed voter. There is the man who does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an enlightened person. He is the man who waives his right to vote. But there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he is, or care. He can always be gotten to the polls, if the party machinery is working. His vote is the basis of the machine. And since the communes of the guild society have large powers over taxation, wages, prices, credit, and natural resources, it would be preposterous to a.s.sume that elections will not be fought at least as pa.s.sionately as our own.

The way people exhibit their interest will not then delimit the functions of a functional society. There are two other ways that function might be defined. One would be by the trade unions which fought the battle that brought guild socialism into being. Such a struggle would harden groups of men together in some sort of functional relation, and these groups would then become the vested interests of the guild socialist society. Some of them, like the miners and railroad men, would be very strong, and probably deeply attached to the view of their function which they learned from the battle with capitalism. It is not at all unlikely that certain favorably placed trade unions would under a socialist state become the center of coherence and government. But a guild society would inevitably find them a tough problem to deal with, for direct action would have revealed their strategic power, and some of their leaders at least would not offer up this power readily on the altar of freedom. In order to "coordinate" them, guild society would have to gather together its strength, and fairly soon one would find, I think, that the radicals under guild socialism would be asking for communes strong enough to define the functions of the guilds.

But if you are going to have the government (commune) define functions, the premise of the theory disappears. It had to suppose that a scheme of functions was obvious in order that the concave shops would voluntarily relate themselves to society. If there is no settled scheme of functions in every voter's head, he has no better way under guild socialism than under orthodox democracy of turning a self-centered opinion into a social judgment. And, of course, there can be no such settled scheme, because, even if Mr. Cole and his friends devised a good one, the shop democracies from which all power derives, would judge the scheme in operation by what they learn of it and by what they can imagine. The guilds would see the same scheme differently. And so instead of the scheme being the skeleton that keeps guild society together, the attempt to define what the scheme ought to be, would be under guild socialism as elsewhere, the main business of politics. If we could allow Mr. Cole his scheme of functions we could allow him almost everything. Unfortunately he has inserted in his premise what he wishes a guild society to deduce. [Footnote: I have dealt with Mr. Cole's theory rather than with the experience of Soviet Russia because, while the testimony is fragmentary, all competent observers seem to agree that Russia in 1921 does not ill.u.s.trate a communist state in working order. Russia is in revolution, and what you can learn from Russia is what a revolution is like. You can learn very little about what a communist society would be like. It is, however, immensely significant that, first as practical revolutionists and then as public officials, the Russian communists have relied not upon the spontaneous democracy of the Russian people, but on the discipline, special interest and the n.o.blesse oblige of a specialized cla.s.s-the loyal and indoctrinated members of the Communist party. In the "transition," on which no time limit has been set, I believe, the cure for cla.s.s government and the coercive state is strictly homeopathic.

There is also the question of why I selected Mr. Cole's books rather than the much more closely reasoned "Const.i.tution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain" by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. I admire that book very much; but I have not been able to convince myself that it is not an intellectual tour de force. Mr. Cole seems to me far more authentically in the spirit of the socialist movement, and therefore, a better witness.]

CHAPTER XX

A NEW IMAGE

1

THE lesson is, I think, a fairly clear one. In the absence of inst.i.tutions and education by which the environment is so successfully reported that the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized cla.s.s whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. This cla.s.s is irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common property, in situations that the public at large does not conceive, and it can be held to account only on the accomplished fact.

The democratic theory by failing to admit that self-centered opinions are not sufficient to procure good government, is involved in perpetual conflict between theory and practice. According to the theory, the full dignity of man requires that his will should be, as Mr. Cole says, expressed "in any and every form of social action." It is supposed that the expression of their will is the consuming pa.s.sion of men, for they are a.s.sumed to possess by instinct the art of government. But as a matter of plain experience, self-determination is only one of the many interests of a human personality. The desire to be the master of one's own destiny is a strong desire, but it has to adjust itself to other equally strong desires, such as the desire for a good life, for peace, for relief from burdens. In the original a.s.sumptions of democracy it was held that the expression of each man's will would spontaneously satisfy not only his desire for self-expression, but his desire for a good life, because the instinct to express one's self in a good life was innate.

The emphasis, therefore, has always been on the mechanism for expressing the will. The democratic El Dorado has always been some perfect environment, and some perfect system of voting and representation, where the innate good will and instinctive statesmanship of every man could be translated into action. In limited areas and for brief periods the environment has been so favorable, that is to say so isolated, and so rich in opportunity, that the theory worked well enough to confirm men in thinking that it was sound for all time and everywhere. Then when the isolation ended, and society became complex, and men had to adjust themselves closely to one another, the democrat spent his time trying to devise more perfect units of voting, in the hope that somehow he would, as Mr. Cole says, "get the mechanism right, and adjust it as far as possible to men's social wills." But while the democratic theorist was busy at this, he was far away from the actual interests of human nature. He was absorbed by one interest: self-government. Mankind was interested in all kinds of other things, in order, in its rights, in prosperity, in sights and sounds and in not being bored. In so far as spontaneous democracy does not satisfy their other interests, it seems to most men most of the time to be an empty thing. Because the art of successful self-government is not instinctive, men do not long desire self-government for its own sake. They desire it for the sake of the results. That is why the impulse to self-government is always strongest as a protest against bad conditions.

The democratic fallacy has been its preoccupation with the origin of government rather than with the processes and results. The democrat has always a.s.sumed that if political power could be derived in the right way, it would be beneficent. His whole attention has been on the source of power, since he is hypnotized by the belief that the great thing is to express the will of the people, first because expression is the highest interest of man, and second because the will is instinctively good. But no amount of regulation at the source of a river will completely control its behavior, and while democrats have been absorbed in trying to find a good mechanism for originating social power, that is to say a good mechanism of voting and representation, they neglected almost every other interest of men. For no matter how power originates, the crucial interest is in how power is exercised. What determines the quality of civilization is the use made of power. And that use cannot be controlled at the source.

If you try to control government wholly at the source, you inevitably make all the vital decisions invisible. For since there is no instinct which automatically makes political decisions that produce a good life, the men who actually exercise power not only fail to express the will of the people, because on most questions no will exists, but they exercise power according to opinions which are hidden from the electorate.

If, then, you root out of the democratic philosophy the whole a.s.sumption in all its ramifications that government is instinctive, and that therefore it can be managed by self-centered opinions, what becomes of the democratic faith in the dignity of man? It takes a fresh lease of life by a.s.sociating itself with the whole personality instead of with a meager aspect of it. For the traditional democrat risked the dignity of man on one very precarious a.s.sumption, that he would exhibit that dignity instinctively in wise laws and good government. Voters did not do that, and so the democrat was forever being made to look a little silly by tough-minded men. But if, instead of hanging human dignity on the one a.s.sumption about self-government, you insist that man's dignity requires a standard of living, in which his capacities are properly exercised, the whole problem changes. The criteria which you then apply to government are whether it is producing a certain minimum of health, of decent housing, of material necessities, of education, of freedom, of pleasures, of beauty, not simply whether at the sacrifice of all these things, it vibrates to the self-centered opinions that happen to be floating around in men's minds. In the degree to which these criteria can be made exact and objective, political decision, which is inevitably the concern of comparatively few people, is actually brought into relation with the interests of men.

There is no prospect, in any time which we can conceive, that the whole invisible environment will be so clear to all men that they will spontaneously arrive at sound public opinions on the whole business of government. And even if there were a prospect, it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered, or would take the time to form an opinion on "any and every form of social action"

which affects us. The only prospect which is not visionary is that each of us in his own sphere will act more and more on a realistic picture of the invisible world, and that we shall develop more and more men who are expert in keeping these pictures realistic. Outside the rather narrow range of our own possible attention, social control depends upon devising standards of living and methods of audit by which the acts of public officials and industrial directors are measured. We cannot ourselves inspire or guide all these acts, as the mystical democrat has always imagined. But we can steadily increase our real control over these acts by insisting that all of them shall be plainly recorded, and their results objectively measured. I should say, perhaps, that we can progressively hope to insist. For the working out of such standards and of such audits has only begun.

PART VII

NEWSPAPERS

CHAPTER XXI. THE BUYING PUBLIC " XXII. THE CONSTANT READER " XXIII. THE NATURE OF NEWS " XXIV. NEWS, TRUTH, AND A CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XXI

THE BUYING PUBLIC

1

THE idea that men have to go forth and study the world in order to govern it, has played a very minor part in political thought. It could figure very little, because the machinery for reporting the world in any way useful to government made comparatively little progress from the time of Aristotle to the age in which the premises of democracy were established.

Therefore, if you had asked a pioneer democrat where the information was to come from on which the will of the people was to be based, he would have been puzzled by the question. It would have seemed a little as if you had asked him where his life or his soul came from. The will of the people, he almost always a.s.sumed, exists at all times; the duty of political science was to work out the inventions of the ballot and representative government. If they were properly worked out and applied under the right conditions, such as exist in the self-contained village or the self-contained shop, the mechanism would somehow overcome the brevity of attention which Aristotle had observed, and the narrowness of its range, which the theory of a self-contained community tacitly acknowledged. We have seen how even at this late date the guild socialists are transfixed by the notion that if only you can build on the right unit of voting and representation, an intricate cooperative commonwealth is possible.

Convinced that the wisdom was there if only you could find it, democrats have treated the problem of making public opinions as a problem in civil liberties. [Footnote: The best study is Prof.

Zechariah Chafee's, _Freedom of Speech_.] "Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" [Footnote: Milton, _Areopagitica_, cited at the opening of Mr. Chafee's book. For comment on this cla.s.sic doctrine of liberty as stated by Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Mr. Bertrand Russel, see my _Liberty and the News_, Ch. II.] Supposing that no one has ever seen it put to the worse, are we to believe then that the truth is generated by the encounter, like fire by rubbing two sticks? Behind this cla.s.sic doctrine of liberty, which American democrats embodied in their Bill of Rights, there are, in fact, several different theories of the origin of truth. One is a faith that in the compet.i.tion of opinions, the truest will win because there is a peculiar strength in the truth.

This is probably sound if you allow the compet.i.tion to extend over a sufficiently long time. When men argue in this vein they have in mind the verdict of history, and they think specifically of heretics persecuted when they lived, canonized after they were dead. Milton's question rests also on a belief that the capacity to recognize truth is inherent in all men, and that truth freely put in circulation will win acceptance. It derives no less from the experience, which has shown that men are not likely to discover truth if they cannot speak it, except under the eye of an uncomprehending policeman.

No one can possibly overestimate the practical value of these civil liberties, nor the importance of maintaining them. When they are in jeopardy, the human spirit is in jeopardy, and should there come a time when they have to be curtailed, as during a war, the suppression of thought is a risk to civilization which might prevent its recovery from the effects of war, if the hysterics, who exploit the necessity, were numerous enough to carry over into peace the taboos of war.

Fortunately, the ma.s.s of men is too tolerant long to enjoy the professional inquisitors, as gradually, under the criticism of men not willing to be terrorized, they are revealed as mean-spirited creatures who nine-tenths of the time do not know what they are talking about. [Footnote: _Cf._ for example, the publications of the Lusk Committee in New York, and the public statements and prophecies of Mr.

Mitch.e.l.l Palmer, who was Attorney-General of the United States during the period of President Wilson's illness.]

But in spite of its fundamental importance, civil liberty in this sense does not guarantee public opinion in the modern world. For it always a.s.sumes, either that truth is spontaneous, or that the means of securing truth exist when there is no external interference. But when you are dealing with an invisible environment, the a.s.sumption is false. The truth about distant or complex matters is not self-evident, and the machinery for a.s.sembling information is technical and expensive. Yet political science, and especially democratic political science, has never freed itself from the original a.s.sumption of Aristotle's politics sufficiently to restate the premises, so that political thought might come to grips with the problem of how to make the invisible world visible to the citizens of a modern state.

So deep is the tradition, that until quite recently, for example, political science was taught in our colleges as if newspapers did not exist. I am not referring to schools of journalism, for they are trade schools, intended to prepare men and women for a career. I am referring to political science as expounded to future business men, lawyers, public officials, and citizens at large. In that science a study of the press and the sources of popular information found no place. It is a curious fact. To anyone not immersed in the routine interests of political science, it is almost inexplicable that no American student of government, no American sociologist, has ever written a book on news-gathering. There are occasional references to the press, and statements that it is not, or that it ought to be, "free" and "truthful." But I can find almost nothing else. And this disdain of the professionals finds its counterpart in public opinions.

Universally it is admitted that the press is the chief means of contact with the unseen environment. And practically everywhere it is a.s.sumed that the press should do spontaneously for us what primitive democracy imagined each of us could do spontaneously for himself, that every day and twice a day it will present us with a true picture of all the outer world in which we are interested.