Читать книгу The Unfinished Programme of Democracy - Richard Roberts - Страница 7

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We should, however, be deluding ourselves if we suppose that radical economic change will of itself bring about the kind of world that we want. The miscarriage which has followed political revolution in the past may no less disastrously follow economic revolution. Economic change is of itself powerless to secure us from the appearance of new types of privilege; and there is not a little danger that the present tendencies of some advanced thought may lead to bureaucratic government. Between a proletarian bureaucracy and an industrial plutocracy there is little to choose; and the tyranny of the expert may become as galling as that of a despot. “In the socialistic presentment,” says Professor Hobhouse, “the expert sometimes looks strangely like the powers that be—in education for instance, a clergyman under a new title, in business that very captain of industry who at the outset was the socialist’s chief enemy. Be that as it may, as the expert comes to the front and efficiency becomes the watchword of administration, all that was human in socialism vanishes out of it. Its tenderness for the losers in the race, its protests against class-tyranny, its revolt against commercial materialism, all the sources of inspiration under which socialist leaders have faced poverty and prison, are gone like a dream and instead of them we have a conception of society as a perfect piece of machinery, pulled by wires radiating from a single centre, and all men are either experts or puppets. Humanity, Liberty, Justice are expunged from the banner and the single word efficiency replaces them.” This is, indeed, a sufficiently dismal prospect, for which it is hardly worth while to change our present state. It should be said, however, that this particular peril is greatly minimised by the current emphasis upon democratic control in industry. The danger remains real notwithstanding. Nor is it the only danger inherent in a purely economic change. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any economic change has elements of permanence, while it is only economic.

The word efficiency betrays the mind of the age which gave it its current connotation. It was a machine-governed mind; and mechanistic conceptions of life and progress are from the nature of the case unfriendly to the democratic spirit. The appearance of the “efficiency engineer” showed the low estate into which man had fallen—man made once a little lower than the angels but now treated as a little lower than the machine. The business of efficiency engineering was the closer subordination of the man to the machine by methods alleged to be scientific. Nothing could show more plainly than this does the absence of that broad humanism which is the very breath of democracy; and even the generous intention of the socialist ideal was vitiated by the mechanistic character of socialist doctrine. Statecraft itself became an affair of efficiency-engineering on a large scale; and the logic of the mechanistic habit of thought reached its fine flower in the merciless regimentation of the German people and the enthronement of the “Great God Gun.” From this pernicious heresy, we may hopefully expect that reflection on our war-experience may deliver us. Already there are manifest signs of a reaction to a healthier and kindlier conception of life and its meaning. The excessive and artificial centralisation of power in the State is being challenged by a demand for the revival of regional culture and such a redistribution of the functions of government as a recognition of the “region” would require.^[4] The business of “unscrambling” the egg, will indeed be long and difficult; but it is clear that any advance in the essential humanities is bound up with a release of life from the artificial integrations forced upon it by the machine civilisation. Mr. Delisle Burns has shown us that the essential note of Greek life was its sociability;^[5] and this is indeed a pole to which normal human nature ever swings true. But in the Greek city, sociability was vitiated and ultimately destroyed by the tragic schism of a slave-system; while in modern civilisation it has been poisoned by the dominion of the machine. The swamping of the “region” by the state has enfeebled the natural social bonds of a less sophisticated age; and somehow or other democracy must thread its way back to a simpler and more spontaneous sociability. For the artificial synthesis of “the individual and the state,” we must restore the natural order of “myself and my neighbours.”

4. Upon this subject, see The Coming Polity, by Geddes and Branford. (Williams and Norgate.)

5. In his Greek Ideals.

But we have travelled so far from the simple amenities of the “region” and our minds have become so sophisticated in artificial and mechanical modernity that our recovery must begin in something akin to a spiritual renewal, in a new perception of essential human values. Economic change will not deliver us from the mechanistic obsession; and we shall only be saved from the inherent dangers of economic change under present conditions by a fresh recognition of the central principle of democracy. That every soul has equal worth carries with it the corollary that personality must be conceived as an end in itself and not merely as a means. It is our quarrel with the Junker classes wherever we find them, that they deliberately relegate large masses of their fellowmen into a sub-human category. Democracy is the direct denial of this posture. It affirms on the contrary that every man has a prescriptive right to stand on his feet unashamed, and to have full opportunity to become the whole man he may be. It ascribes to him certain liberties and a certain inalienable status among his fellows; and the employer who regards his men as “hands” denies democracy as directly as does the autocrat who regards his subjects as serfs or cannonfodder. In other words, democracy requires a specific type of personal relationship between men; and perhaps, its troubles are chiefly due to the fact that while it preached liberty and equality with no uncertain sound, it neglected to lay a corresponding emphasis upon fraternity. In truth, democracy is beset more perilously and more persistently by the inward enemy than the foe without—the inner enemy that lurks in men’s souls. For though there be a democrat in every man, there is also a potential aristocrat. The ultimate battle-ground of the democratic ideal is in men’s hearts. After the external enemies of democracy are defeated on land and on sea, democracy will have to go on fighting for its life in our souls. In this as in all things else, “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”

The personal practice of democracy is comparatively simple, as its central doctrine is. The equal worth of souls does not of course imply equal capacity; nor does the fact of unequal natural capacity do away with the truth of equal worth. It simply indicates the kind of world we live in. It is a world in which capacity is the measure not of worth but of obligation; and the law of life is mutual service. In one of the very few political allusions which Jesus made, He stated this point with much plainness. “Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and they that have authority over them are called ‘benefactors’ ” (as it was in the beginning, and has been ever since, when autocrats and their like have conceded to their subjects some fragment of the natural rights of which they have despoiled them and then have posed as “benefactors,” and when imperialists talk of conferring their peculiar Kultur on the “lesser breeds without the law”), “but,” said Jesus, “it shall not be so among you. He that is greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” This is the authentic democratic spirit and the personal practice without which democracy cannot live.

It is not enough to pay lip service to democratic ideals—the sanctity of personality and the obligation of mutual service; or even to accept them in a spirit of pious sentimentalism. That kind of thing is already common enough. To the idealistic temper, we must attach the pragmatic habit, and translate our doctrines into concrete programmes of emancipation and co-operation. The city of God is not to be built with good intentions. Fraternity must be rendered into a polity. Yet even fraternity may perish in formality except it be sustained by a living brotherliness. It is the spirit that quickeneth. Democracy like every living thing must either grow or decay. If it stops at a political form or an economic scheme, then it must decline and die. It is only as its essential spirit captures our consciences and wills and its central principle is consistently and continuously applied that it can survive the perversity of our nature and the vicissitudes of history. It must become a crusade and a holy war.