Читать книгу The Unfinished Programme of Democracy - Richard Roberts - Страница 11

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A good deal of confusion has been introduced into this subject by a tendency to regard society itself as an end. In much modern thought upon the matter, the individual is conceived as attaining his own end through his due contribution to the life of the group. The extreme development of this view is to be found in the German doctrine of the state, a doctrine which prevails in more or less perfection wherever the Hegelian philosophy has struck its roots.^[8] On this view, the individual has neither function nor end which is not to be expressed in terms of his own personal subordination to the state. He is a cog in the wheel, and no more. The modern dogma of progress has reinforced this view to some extent; as has also the obsession of size, which is one of the by-products of our extended knowledge of the physical universe and which has had the effect of minimising the significance of the single life. But whatever the causes to which this view is attributable, its influence on sociological thought is beyond question. It has been assumed, with varying explicitness, that the supra-personal end which the individual is to serve is to be identified with the social group to which he belongs. It is his appointed purpose to minister to the happiness of the group or to increase its efficiency as a military or economic unit.

8. The devout Hegelian who dislikes the Prussian doctrine of the state is nowadays at some pains to explain that Hegel’s view of the state does not cohere quite congruously with the rest of his philosophy.

(a) It may be urged against this view that the antithesis which it implies between the individual and the group is fallacious. For the group is composed of individuals and it cannot have a conscious end except in the minds of the individuals who compose it. There is a degree of truth in speaking of the “personality” of a group so long as the analogy is not pressed too far. A group may have a common thought and may unite in a collective act; but to say that a group has a definite “personality” of its own is to carry the process of abstraction too far. A group attains to consciousness only in the several minds of its members. Moreover social ends must take shape in individual lives. That the individual should serve a social end is true; it is equally true that the social aim must be achieved in the character and experience of individuals. For if they are not realised in persons, where shall they be realised? If our ultimate social aims do not become effective in the single life, they remain mere abstractions, existing only in a speculative thought and never reaching the point of actuality. But it serves us as little to insist on the converse of this view and to assert that the end of society is the individual. The truth would rather appear to be that the individual is to reach his own end in and through a society which it is his first business to create. Personal self-realisation and social integration will proceed pari passu. The individual and the group will find themselves in each other; the great soul and the great society will arrive together. But from the nature of the case, we must seek the clue to the character of right social aims through a study of personality, and of what is involved in its self-realisation.

(b) A further objection to this view is that it subordinates personality to aims that are limited and sectional. In practice it may make good Germans, but almost certainly it cannot make good men. While it is better for a man to serve the narrowest social group than to serve his self-regard, yet the exclusiveness of the social group as it is identified with the state or the nation is hostile to that increasing social integration which is implied in a self-consistent sociology. The current conceptions of the state and the nation must undergo some revision if they are to be made congruous with a fruitful social polity. The nation represents a stage in the social education of the race, in that discipline whereby the caveman grows into a citizenship of the world; and in no sense can the nation be ethically regarded as constituting an adequate end for the individual, except as the nation in its turn is consciously seeking its own end in the service of the whole.

It is true that men have in the past generally regarded the glory and the power of their particular group as an end which has the right to command their absolute devotion, and have believed that to suffer death in such a cause is the highest conceivable self-realisation. This does indeed represent a much higher ethical plane than that on which a man fights only for his own hand or the tiny circle of his blood kindred. But the fact that this loyalty to his group has had the power to evoke the highest possible sacrifice, does not prove that the glory and the power of the group provides a full and valid end for him as a man. In his character as German or Englishman, it may appear to provide him with an end to which he may properly submit himself without reserve; but it is questionable whether he can do so without some sacrifice of his possibilities and obligations as a man. The propaganda of Germanism produced very efficient and docile Germans; but the records of the war leave us little room to doubt that the process has had a mischievous effect upon their manhood. From the standpoint of an expanding society polity, education should produce individuals who are human before they are national. There is no system of national education which achieves this result; but the ultimate logic of the prevailing educational tradition as we see it in the German conduct of the war should provoke serious misgivings and minister to a change of heart in those persons who direct the policies of public education.

(c) It is worth observing in this connection that even in Germany the Germanic propaganda had to trick itself out in a pseudo-universal jargon. It had to say large-sounding things about a Kultur-mission to the world in order to validate itself in the eyes of the German people. The claim implied in the Kultur-mission as it was commonly expounded is so preposterous as to be self-refuting to a normal mind; but this systematic diffusion of the idea proves that man has reached a point where the power and wealth of a particular group is no longer able by itself to evoke an effectual response in the individuals who compose the group. The fact is that civilised mankind is slowly learning to think in universal terms. Its social grasp is already faintly embracing the whole world.

This circumstance tends to simplify the sociologist’s task very materially. While the application of the polity which he evolves will require to take account of the peculiar traditions and institutions of different groups, he will be free to work out his polity in terms which are independent of the present exclusive and conflicting aims of the groups which compose the world of man. He will state the ultimate problems of society in Germany in the same terms as he will state those in America; for he will necessarily be dealing with the one factor which is common to both. There cannot be a distinctive social science in Germany and another in America, differing from one another in essentials and both at the same time being true. There will be endless variety in the methods by which social principles are applied by different groups; for we cannot write off the past of a people and the institutions in which its history is embodied. Yet there can be no true sociology in England or in Germany unless its postulates are equally valid in America. In other words these postulates must be drawn from a disinterested study of personality. They will not concern themselves with the welfare of a particular group, in whatever terms that welfare may be defined. But they will be concerned with the good of the world of groups because they are derived from the one fact which is common to and underlies them all, and which, despite conflicting aims still binds human groups together in a permanent unity, namely, personality.