In particular the democratic movement of modern times has been chiefly unconscious.As De Tocqueville says of its course in France, "...it has always advanced without guidance.The heads of the state have made no preparation for it, and it has advanced without their consent or without their knowledge.The most powerful, the most intelligent and the most moral classes of the nation have never attempted...to guide it."
Will has been alive only in details, in the smaller courses of life, in what each man was doing for himself and his neighbors, while the larger structure and movement have been subconscious, and for that reason erratic and wasteful.For it is just as true of large wholes as of individuals that if they blunder on without knowing what they are doing much of their energy is lost.No doubt it is better to go ahead even blindly than to stand still, and remarkable things have been achieved in this way, but they are little to what might be done if we could work out our highest human nature intelligently, with assurance and prevision, and on a large scale.A society which did this would have the same sort of superiority to present society as man to his sub-human progenitors.
The very idea of Progress, of orderly improvement on a great scale, is well known to be of recent origin, or at least recent diffusion, the prevalent view in the past having been that the actual state of things was, in its general character, unalterable.
Even at the present day social phenomena of a large sort are for the most part not willed at all, but are the unforeseen result of diverse and partial endeavors.It is seldom that any large plan of social action is intelligently drawn up and followed out.Each interest works along in a somewhat blind and selfish manner, grasping, fighting and groping.
As regards general ends most of the energy is wasted; and yet a sort of advance takes place, more like the surging of a throng than the orderly movement of troops.Who can pretend that the American people, for instance, are guided by any clear and rational plan in their economic, political and religious development ? They have glimpses and impulses, but hardly a will, except on a few matters of near and urgent interest.
In the same way the wrongs that afflict society are seldom willed by any one or any group, but are by-products of acts of will having other objects; they are done, as some one has said, rather with the elbows than the fists.There is surprisingly little ill-intent, and the more one looks into life the less he finds of that vivid chiaroscuro of conscious goodness and badness his childish teaching has led him to expect.
Take, for instance, a conspicuous evil like the sweating system in the garment trades of New York or London.Here are people, largely women and children, forced to work twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day, in the midst of dirt, bad air and contagion, suffering the destruction of home life and decent nurture; and all for a wage hardly sufficient to buy the bare necessities of life.But if oce looks for sin dark enough to cast such a shadow he will scarcely find it."Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents." The "sweater" or immediate employer, to whom he first turns, is commonly himself a workman, not much raised above the rest and making but little profit on his transactions.Beyond him is the large dealer, usually a well-intentioned man, quite willing that things should be better if they can be made so without too much trouble or pecuniary loss to himself.He is only doing what others do and what, in his view, the conditions of trade require.And so on; the closer one gets to the facts the more evident it is that nowhere is the indubitable wickedness our feelings have pictured.It is quite the same with political corruption and the venal alliance between wealth and party management.The men who control wealthy interests are probably no worse intentioned than the rest of us; they only do what they think they arc forced to do in order to hold their own; and so with the politician: he finds that others are selling their power, and easily comes to think of it as a matter of course.In truth the consciously, flagrantly wicked man is, and perhaps always has been, a fiction, for the most part, of denunciation.The psychologist will hardly find him, but will feel that most sorts of badness are easily enough comprehensible, and will perhaps agree with the view ascribed to Goethe, that he never heard of a crime which he might not himself have committed.
Naturally the more mechanical the system is the less of will and of live human nature there is in its acts.So in Russia, says Tolstoy, "Some make the laws, others execute them; some train men by discipline to autocratic obedience; and these last, in their turn, become the instruments of coercion, and slay their kind without knowing why or to what end." In our reading and thinking democracy there is at least the feeling that the working of the whole ought to be the fulfilment of some humane purpose, and a continual protest that this is not more the case.
I cannot hold out a prospect of the early appearance of an adequate public will; it is a matter of gradual improvement, but it seems clear that there is a trend this way, based, mechanically, on recent advances in communication, and, as regards training, on the multiform disciplines in voluntary cooperation which modern life affords.
EndnotesDemocracy in America, vol.i, Introduction.Of course the Greeks had the philosophical conception of general flux, but I do not know that they applied it to society with such distinctness as to give anything worth calling an idea of progress.My Religion, 45.