This book is addressed to the general reader and discusses the urgent problems of our time from the point of view of the common man.
While the various shades of anti-democrats each have their own story of the world catastrophe – the democrat has yet to produce his own.
This story should tell in simple language how it all started; where responsibility lay for past mistakes; what was unavoidable and should not be a subject for recrimination; and what were avoidable failures, whether they sprang from moral, intellectual or political weakness.
This story should be ruthlessly frank. It should discard the illusions concerning the nature of international peace systems, such as were fostered by hosts of wishful thinkers entrenched in the pacifistic and economistic camps. The all too simple view which assumes war to be merely due to a ramp of international financiers or big armament makers should be discounted. Only then is it possible to propose methods which can be seriously expected to reduce the probability of wars, to restrict the scope of those that occur, and to ensure that if they occur the aggressor be the loser.
This story should be consistent. There was not an independent observer in the 1920s but agreed that Europe had too many sovereign potentates; that there were too many political frontiers; and that the liberum veto of the Lilliputs was at its best a nuisance, at its worst a dangerous breeder of anarchy. It is emerging how many tend to forget this today. The consistent democrat must staunchly oppose reactionary insistence on antiquated boundaries, while rigidly maintaining the right to cultural freedom – a right much too frequently trodden under foot by the self-same governments who insist on inflated territorial acquisitions and hypertrophical sovereignties.
The story should be intelligent. We should recognize progress even where the forces of evil are using it as their vehicle. If Germany's masters have opened the path to a united Europe, to regulated economies and to the displacement of the gold standard, we should not rush back thoughtlessly into the past, only because the doors of the future were thrown open by those who wanted to dominate that future for their own criminal advancement.
The story should be true. We must at last face the facts – all the facts. We must not shirk those facts which seem to contradict our ideals, but take a straight look at them and redraw the outlines of our ideals, where they conformed only loosely to the facts. Do not let us squeamishly hide ourselves behind complacent references to past formulations. These may have admirably fitted other situations, but would betray today the essential faith of their authors, if one attempted to wangle the formulations instead of submitting to the facts and restating the truth in their light.
This story should be complete. Not in the sense of the pedant or the antiquarian, who imagines that he who has all the facts has all the truth. He may have merely collected all the words of a dead language. But complete in the sense that it should envisage the scene of man's collective life in all its breadth and depth, and that it should formulate the task all-round, for democracy is either a form of life or it is nothing. But life is the fullness of all actions and meanings, the pervasive substance which acts and reacts upon all things. So let us range over the whole field of communal existence – the political, cultural, and social, the economic, financial and technological, the military, educational and artistic, the scientific, philosophical and religious. Man's life is not this or that, not the one or the other; society lives by and through each; democracy is kindred to them all.
This story should be practical. Not in the sense of suggesting popular solutions for supposedly burning issues while evading essential ones for fear of being called academic. But in the responsible sense which implies that no one should advocate beliefs to which he does not feel able to live up himself. Demands however high-minded, which by their very nature can not be realised, are not idealistic but meaningless; and he who obstructs in the name of such ideals the achievement of the possible is not an idealist but merely a social nuisance. The idealist is he whose values correspond to the nature of human society, and who is bent on achievement even when there is nothing thrilling about the details he is hammering out. Yet such realism should not be permitted to become an excuse for the complacent acceptance of avoidable ills, for society allows the fulfilment of the best in man, and it is only the unselfish realist who can be trusted to aim at the best.
This story should be the story of the common man. If Jesus exalted the poor, he did not do so because he [thought] the poor better than others, but because the poor man was the common man of the time. A society can consist of working and labouring people alone; but no society can consist of rich people alone. The rich man is not any worse than the working man, but he should put up with the fact that he is not the common man, and it is to the needs of the latter that society should be adapted. A human society is one in which the common man feels at home; the wealthy should be content with his wealth and not expect public esteem merely on account of his wealth. The expert should serve the common man, and not attempt to make him serve the expert. On the fundamental questions of government there can be no specialists. Questions like these can concur the value of human life itself, and there is no expert in the matter of life and death. Whether a community should or should not risk the lives of its members; whether it should turn to one or the other chief task of existence; whether it should accept one or another ultimate rule of conduct is for the common man to decide. All he needs is such information as the government is in duty bound to provide him with. It has been confirmed by statistical proof that the common man is a safer judge of the essentials of a vital issue than the so-called educated person (while on unessential and non-vital issues the latter may be more reliable). The anti-democratic argument of the alleged educational and cultural handicaps of the common man derives from mere prejudice. Education is no safeguard against social superstition as witnessed by the vicious untruths sponsored and spread by the intellectuals of the 1920s who served as the hotbed of fascism. The miasma of cultural degeneration throve in academic circles and it was the common man who was least susceptible to that emotional epidemic.
This story should be about the unsolved problems of our time. What we need is not so much a clarification of intentions as of the situation we find ourselves in – not of values but of facts. Complacency results in intellectual failure to comprehend the meaning of the events. So we of the democracies alone remained in the dark about the problems, the dangers and the tasks of the age. These unsolved problems cause the catastrophe, shaped the course of events, and still dominate the situation. On a complete understanding of these problems, the common man must base his masterplan if he is to become the conscious ruler of his own world.
The story of the unresolved problems should drive home the following recognitions:
That post war reconstruction is not about “What to do with Germany” but what to do with the unsolved problems of the world. No conceivable treatment of Germany will resolve them.
That these unsolved problems led to World War I and were only partly resolved by the destruction of the feudal empires of the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg, the Romanov and the Sultan-Khalifs; that the between-wars period was entirely dominated by them, including the rise of Hitlerism, British appeasement, the Russian bogey, the collapse of France, the gay twenties, and the wasted thirties in America.
That these unsolved problems centered around the antiquated international system of absolute sovereignties and an automatic gold-standard on the one hand, of a national life based on unregulated economies on the other. Between them they corroded the civilization with unemployment and unrest, deflations and super-wars.
That the Hitlerism crime wave could be successful only because it benefited from these unsolved problems which were bursting the world wide open; in the Hitlerian venture some of the most obstructive features of the old world perished including nuisance sovereignties, the gold standard fetish as well as chaotic markets. But if Hitlerian barbarism was thus “hitch-hiking on the great transformation”, it was only because it could pretend to offer an ultimate solution even though it was that of slavery for all under the heel of the Nordics of the Munich beer garden.
That the survival of democratic methods depends upon the measure of their success in tackling the global tasks of the time. If freedom fails (a) to restrict the scope of wars, (b) to secure a medium of exchange between increasingly large areas of the planet, then the war-waging slave empire will triumph and ensure peace and division of labour within its confines of death.
That the greatest single step towards division of labour and the enlargement of the peace area is represented by essentially autarchic and essentially peaceful empires the co-operation of which is institutionally safeguarded, empires such as the U.S.A., Latin America, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R. and a similarly peaceful federation of a German Central Europe, China, India, and some other regions.
That the will to cooperation between the empires must be positive and institutionalized. It is the new form of the peace interest which the nineteenth century produced, and which we should retain and develop. All but the predatory empires are eligible under the new dispensation. The tame empire is no more a utopia.
That the nineteenth century was peacefully imperialistic since under the gold standard the leading powers insisted on spreading their business pattern to all countries and forced them to accept their institutions, without which trade was then not possible. We should model ourselves on China which is and was based on the tolerance of other people's ways of life.
That self-sufficient empires can regulate their economic life in the way that they please and live at peace with others. The helpless method of free trade must be superseded by direct responsibility of the governments for economic and financial relations with other governments.
That internally we must have regulated markets which remove labour land and money from the scope of anarchy. The inevitable increase in centralization that is involved must be met by the positive will to freedom for all minorities – racial, religious, regional or otherwise – made effective with a single-mindedness modelled on England's achievement.
First – […] that the masses have no political judgement of their own: As against that you have the evidence of the facts, hard statistical facts, of the greatest exactitude, the Gallup polls prove that the masses in this country have been consistently ahead of their leaders. Now mind you that does not prove right, they may have just been ahead of the mistakes made later by their leaders.
But that isn't the point. The point is whether the masses have or have not an opinion of their own, or whether it is made for them. In this respect the evidence is absolutely conclusive.
Second – Listen to people's arguments and political discussions. The issue may be anything: war and peace, free trade versus protection, prohibition versus anti-prohibition, or anything you please. The blues and the buffs will argue anything and everything / deny the other sides contention whatever it be. Listening to the arguments it is difficult not to get convinced that you are listening to a pair of fools, for the argument has obviously nothing whatever to do with the issues involved. They are arguing the rights and wrongs of incidents which propaganda has dumped into the issue, shoals of red herrings are started and each herring is chased to some subterfuge where he is hiding until some fresh herring attracts attention and the game of confusing the issue starts all over again.
But I cannot help conceding that this is true. The fallacy of the argument is simply shown: The arguments adduced in discussion and the actual arguments on which people make up their minds are two entirely different sets of arguments. The arguments adduced are numerous and foolish, the arguments which are actually objective are few and to the point.
It is not very different from private life. One makes up one's mind about a matter in business or family life, rightly or wrongly, on one or two rarely three arguments. But once one has made up one's mind and taken up a position in consequence, one is prepared to defend it against any on-comer, and the arguments then used may be simply repartees, to what the other man or woman says, with very little, indeed, mostly with no connection at all with the original, and relevant points of argument.
Let me put it this way. There comes a point in every public discussion – and the more heated and the more confused it is, the more likely is this to happen – when a man comes home tired and disgusted, utterly fed up, and in undressing he delivers himself in a kind of pondered and sententious way of what he, John Doe, personally reckons is at the bottom “of all this bother”. Now, watch: What he is now going to say will usually be rather cynical, at least he intends it to be so. It will have hardly any reference to the heated discussions of the day; and – it will be very simple. John Doe now believes himself to be very clever; he believes himself to be at his best; he will not be bamboozled. That is why he tries to be cynical. And what he now delivers himself of – that's my point – is itself thoroughly reasonable. It is not necessarily true; but it bears reference to the things he believes are really important: and – here's my second contention – he cannot be far wrong.
For a very simple reason: the things he believes are really important are the few things which actually matter: To him I would list them crudely as follows (and contend that he cannot be far wrong about either of them): (a) his income, (b) what he can get for his income (c) the security of his existence job life and otherwise, (d) whether he on the whole feels happy or basically fed up with things. That is all he cares for – and jolly well right he is; and it takes something to say that anybody was a better judge of his long run money wages, his long run real wages, his long run security of job or limb, his long run feel about life and its liveability than John Doe himself.
But – it is interjected – here's the trouble. For he does not judge the matter from the long run view, but from the short run view. [The conventional view assumes that] He will go in for inflation, if that gives him higher income; he will go in for rationing if that gives him cheaper prices; he will stand for free competition or for planning, which ever gives him more security in his job, and every time he will disregard the long term effects of his desires – the ruin of the currency, the increase in cut-throat competition, the growth of bureaucracy, and so on.
Against this I appeal to the facts. For it is precisely on big decisions or ultimate issues that the average man is apt to be sound – that is what the poll shows. And every time he is credited with taking the short view, he actually takes the long view. This was true on the question of aero-craft; on the war issue; on rationing; on taxation, on working hours; on man power; on every other issue.
The explanation is again quite simple: the ultimate issues are simply the long run issues. On definite short run issues, the man is much more apt to be mistaken, but these are the comparatively unimportant issues. They are technical, the can be and perhaps should be dealt with by the expert. But the basic issue is by its very nature outside the competency of the expert, because the only person who really knows the rights and wrongs of these issues is the person whom they must ultimately affect and that is again the common man.
Take capital issues: like war and peace. I maintain that there is no expert on the question of life and death. We all come in to life once and move out once; nobody has more experience or less on this point. Now the question of war and peace is precisely on this: Whether a life is as it is not worth living, and what risks we should reasonably take to change in order to make it liveable.
Nothing is more ridiculous than the call for the expert who is supposedly an authority on whether I should prefer to live or die. And this is precisely the true long run question – and yet who but the common man should be able to pronounce upon it.
But in the same way there is no expert on the value of liberty; no expert on the various sides and shades and aspects of liberty; there is no expert on the value of security in life; or whether adventure or security are both worth more under the given conditions; there is no expert on the types of happiness we are consistently gambling against one another; there is no expert on the question whether I prefer stable money and restricted jobs to less stable money with more certainty of jobs. All the experts series one usually know is that which is entirely unessential to the common man, because experts series No. 2 have long since discovered any fallacy in the arguments of experts series one.
I may now of course be in danger of having proved too much, for if I have my way, then, it seems, the common man would always be right, and it would be entirely inexplicable why there are still differences of opinion, seeing that only one view can be right at a time.
Now I don't argue anything of the kind. I restrict my view to ultimate issues in critical situations, and exclude all the issues which are not basic, i.e. do not decide the fate of the community in some essential respect. Now, quite naturally, views will differ according to the experiences and interests of the various strata, and if they vote accordingly, this merely proves that they have voted according to their interests. But still reasonably, and – that is all I contend.
Now I come to a second fallacy on the masses and on democracy, and it is that democracy is simply a matter of education.
Against that I should like to put up a counter thesis which is that although education is not only a good thing, but one of the things which make individual and community life worth living – it has very little to do with democracy.
The reason again is simple. Democracy is a way of life and as a method of decision it is about the contents of life. Now these are not matters about which there is any set knowledge. One man's knowledge is as good as another's. And it is a simple fact that the way of life of democracy was not developed by so-called educated people nor was it practiced by them nor was it even preferred by them, but it was practiced by communities of simple people like those of the History of the Apostles, the Quaker communities, pioneering villages of the early frontier or the pilgrim father's land on board the Mayflower. None of these communities can boast to have been especially educated. Poor fishermen at the best; small obscure people who had fled from Northern England in Elizabethan times; poor ill educated frontiersmen – there were the inventors of the idea and technique [of democracy]. The notion that education is needed to understand democracy or to practice it, is a misunderstanding which deserves to be cleared up, because it obscures the general human import and the general human validity of the democratic idea.
The truth is that common human experience is at the back of democracy, and where that experience includes tolerance, patience with the views of dissenting minorities, there democracy itself will be tolerant and not enforce more uniformity than necessary to give effect to the decisions of the majority.
The third change in the nature of politics is the passing of the conviction that politics is merely about power and interest, a mere jungle of blind chance and interests, human passions and irrational ambitions. As against that I want to set the growing conviction of the basic rationality of man and of politics.
Chance cannot of course be eliminated from politics. A war that was certain to break out may be averted by the sudden death of the chief actors; an inevitable fall in prices and consequent unemployment may be averted by the chance discovery of large gold fields as actually happened in the middle of the century both in California and Australia. But this only means that some measure of risk is inevitably linked with any political prediction or forecast; that we cannot be safe from the action of chance however prudently we have mapped our course.
But that does not mean at all, that politics is not rational.
Take, again, our private life and existence. Who would argue that our life is not largely under the sway of rational plans, decisions, attitudes, moral purposes and the promptings of duty and affection on the one hand, passion and ill considered emotion on the other. The fact of chance which may deflect the rational course of things in life does not prevent us from thinking about moral life as ruled by reason and the laws of reason. In other words, all we do is to account for chance by facing risk – an entirely usual happening.
The same is the case in politics. Barring chance, human situations leave only simple alternatives, this is the law of private life. But precisely the same is also the law of public life, or politics. Barring chance, political situations leave simple alternatives, and these alternatives are as inevitable as those which govern private life. There are situations which allow of no other solution than fight; other situations allow also the solution of compromise; but in every situation the number of basic alternatives is limited, and therefore the forecast of the future is possible, as long as we restrict ourselves to these alternatives. I agree that this is most unsatisfactory. When it is certain that one of the two partners must win and the other lose one is only able to say that either the one or the other will win. This almost sounds like a bad joke. But if one looks at it more closely, the matter is not quite as bad. Although I may be burning to know which will win, I may yet be interested to know for certain which two events I can expect to happen – alternatively, i.e. either the one or the other.
Something similar happens, after all, in private life. How often the warning of a friend may take on the form: mind, once you put yourself into this situation, there will be only the choice for you to stay or quit; or: to go in for the venture or cut it out; to stand up for your views and take the consequences or back out of these views too late. And so on. Are such views entirely worthless? Surely not: They in effect help us to make up our minds, since they clarify the situations we are in by objectifying the situation we would get into by taking one or another decision. And although they are not able to foretell what will happen, they help us by telling us for certain that one of the two things must happen.
This, I submit is the nature of political forecast. And if we do not expect more from it, we will hardly ever be cheated. I repeat – barring chance, the political situation allows only a very few alternatives, and with the certainty of a geometrical proposition we can foretell that one of them is bound to happen. True, nobody knows for certain which will happen, since that precisely is the matter still under decision. But that is far from saying that the student of politics cannot offer a view which has more chance of being right than he, who has not studied the nature of the alternatives. With one important qualification; that on the really decisive issues, the common man's view is worth as much as his [of the expert]; on less important ones however, he has more chance to be right than the common man.
Democracy is well grounded in the rationality of man.