Jerome K. Jerome - "Clocks"

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J. Somoes Lopes Netto - "Lendas do Sul"

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Books: Public Opinion

W >> Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion




3

That can be done by having the representative inside carry on
discussion in the presence of some one, chairman or mediator, who
forces the discussion to deal with the analyses supplied by experts.
This is the essential organization of any representative body dealing
with distant matters. The partisan voices should be there, but the
partisans should find themselves confronted with men, not personally
involved, who control enough facts and have the dialectical skill to
sort out what is real perception from what is stereotype, pattern and
elaboration. It is the Socratic dialogue, with all of Socrates's
energy for breaking through words to meanings, and something more than
that, because the dialectic in modern life must be done by men who
have explored the environment as well as the human mind.

There is, for example, a grave dispute in the steel industry. Each
side issues a manifesto full of the highest ideals. The only public
opinion that is worth respect at this stage is the opinion which
insists that a conference be organized. For the side which says its
cause is too just to be contaminated by conference there can be little
sympathy, since there is no such cause anywhere among mortal men.
Perhaps those who object to conference do not say quite that. Perhaps
they say that the other side is too wicked; they cannot shake hands
with traitors. All that public opinion can do then is to organize a
hearing by public officials to hear the proof of wickedness. It cannot
take the partisans' word for it. But suppose a conference is agreed
to, and suppose there is a neutral chairman who has at his beck and
call the consulting experts of the corporation, the union, and, let us
say, the Department of Labor.

Judge Gary states with perfect sincerity that his men are well paid
and not overworked, and then proceeds to sketch the history of Russia
from the time of Peter the Great to the murder of the Czar. Mr. Foster
rises, states with equal sincerity that the men are exploited, and
then proceeds to outline the history of human emancipation from Jesus
of Nazareth to Abraham Lincoln. At this point the chairman calls upon
the intelligence men for wage tables in order to substitute for the
words "well paid" and "exploited" a table showing what the different
classes _are_ paid. Does Judge Gary think they are all well paid?
He does. Does Mr. Foster think they are all exploited? No, he thinks
that groups C, M, and X are exploited. What does he mean by exploited?
He means they are not paid a living wage. They are, says Judge Gary.
What can a man buy on that wage, asks the chairman. Nothing, says Mr.
Foster. Everything he needs, says Judge Gary. The chairman consults
the budgets and price statistics of the government. [Footnote: See an
article on "The Cost of Living and Wage Cuts," in the _New
Republic_, July 27, 1921, by Dr. Leo Wolman, for a brilliant
discussion of the naive use of such figures and "pseudo-principles."
The warning is of particular importance because it comes from an
economist and statistician who has himself done so much to improve the
technic of industrial disputes.] He rules that X can meet an average
budget, but that C and M cannot. Judge Gary serves notice that he does
not regard the official statistics as sound. The budgets are too high,
and prices have come down. Mr. Foster also serves notice of exception.
The budget is too low, prices have gone up. The chairman rules that
this point is not within the jurisdiction of the conference, that the
official figures stand, and that Judge Gary's experts and Mr. Foster's
should carry their appeals to the standing committee of the federated
intelligence bureaus.

Nevertheless, says Judge Gary, we shall be ruined if we change these
wage scales. What do you mean by ruined, asks the chairman, produce
your books. I can't, they are private, says Judge Gary. What is
private does not interest us, says the chairman, and, therefore,
issues a statement to the public announcing that the wages of workers
in groups C and M are so-and-so much below the official minimum living
wage, and that Judge Gary declines to increase them for reasons that
he refuses to state. After a procedure of that sort, a public opinion
in the eulogistic sense of the term [Footnote: As used by Mr. Lowell
in his _Public Opinion and Popular Government_.] can exist.

The value of expert mediation is not that it sets up opinion to coerce
the partisans, but that it disintegrates partisanship. Judge Gary and
Mr. Foster may remain as little convinced as when they started, though
even they would have to talk in a different strain. But almost
everyone else who was not personally entangled would save himself from
being entangled. For the entangling stereotypes and slogans to which
his reflexes are so ready to respond are by this kind of dialectic
untangled.

4

On many subjects of great public importance, and in varying degree
among different people for more personal matters, the threads of
memory and emotion are in a snarl. The same word will connote any
number of different ideas: emotions are displaced from the images to
which they belong to names which resemble the names of these images.
In the uncriticized parts of the mind there is a vast amount of
association by mere clang, contact, and succession. There are stray
emotional attachments, there are words that were names and are masks.
In dreams, reveries, and panic, we uncover some of the disorder,
enough to see how the naive mind is composed, and how it behaves when
not disciplined by wakeful effort and external resistance. We see that
there is no more natural order than in a dusty old attic. There is
often the same incongruity between fact, idea, and emotion as there
might be in an opera house, if all the wardrobes were dumped in a heap
and all the scores mixed up, so that Madame Butterfly in a Valkyr's
dress waited lyrically for the return of Faust. "At Christmas-tide"
says an editorial, "old memories soften the heart. Holy teachings are
remembered afresh as thoughts run back to childhood. The world does
not seem so bad when seen through the mist of half-happy, half-sad
recollections of loved ones now with God. No heart is untouched by the
mysterious influence.... The country is honeycombed with red
propaganda--but there is a good supply of ropes, muscles and
lampposts... while this world moves the spirit of liberty will burn in
the breast of man."

The man who found these phrases in his mind needs help. He needs a
Socrates who will separate the words, cross-examine him until he has
defined them, and made words the names of ideas. Made them mean a
particular object and nothing else. For these tense syllables have got
themselves connected in his mind by primitive association, and are
bundled together by his memories of Christmas, his indignation as a
conservative, and his thrills as the heir to a revolutionary
tradition. Sometimes the snarl is too huge and ancient for quick
unravelling. Sometimes, as in modern psychotherapy, there are layers
upon layers of memory reaching back to infancy, which have to be
separated and named.

The effect of naming, the effect, that is, of saying that the labor
groups C and M, but not X, are underpaid, instead of saying that Labor
is Exploited, is incisive. Perceptions recover their identity, and the
emotion they arouse is specific, since it is no longer reinforced by
large and accidental connections with everything from Christmas to
Moscow. The disentangled idea with a name of its own, and an emotion
that has been scrutinized, is ever so much more open to correction by
new data in the problem. It had been imbedded in the whole
personality, had affiliations of some sort with the whole ego: a
challenge would reverberate through the whole soul. After it has been
thoroughly criticized, the idea is no longer _me_ but _that_.
It is objectified, it is at arm's length. Its fate is not bound up with my
fate, but with the fate of the outer world upon which I am acting.

5

Re-education of this kind will help to bring our public opinions into
grip with the environment. That is the way the enormous censoring,
stereotyping, and dramatizing apparatus can be liquidated. Where there
is no difficulty in knowing what the relevant environment is, the
critic, the teacher, the physician, can unravel the mind. But where
the environment is as obscure to the analyst as to his pupil, no
analytic technic is sufficient. Intelligence work is required. In
political and industrial problems the critic as such can do something,
but unless he can count upon receiving from expert reporters a valid
picture of the environment, his dialectic cannot go far.

Therefore, though here, as in most other matters, "education" is the
supreme remedy, the value of this education will depend upon the
evolution of knowledge. And our knowledge of human institutions is
still extraordinarily meager and impressionistic. The gathering of
social knowledge is, on the whole, still haphazard; not, as it will
have to become, the normal accompaniment of action. And yet the
collection of information will not be made, one may be sure, for the
sake of its ultimate use. It will be made because modern decision
requires it to be made. But as it is being made, there will accumulate
a body of data which political science can turn into generalization,
and build up for the schools into a conceptual picture of the world.
When that picture takes form, civic education can become a preparation
for dealing with an unseen environment.

As a working model of the social system becomes available to the
teacher, he can use it to make the pupil acutely aware of how his mind
works on unfamiliar facts. Until he has such a model, the teacher
cannot hope to prepare men fully for the world they will find. What he
can do is to prepare them to deal with that world with a great deal
more sophistication about their own minds. He can, by the use of the
case method, teach the pupil the habit of examining the sources of his
information. He can teach him, for example, to look in his newspaper
for the place where the dispatch was filed, for the name of the
correspondent, the name of the press service, the authority given for
the statement, the circumstances under which the statement was
secured. He can teach the pupil to ask himself whether the reporter
saw what he describes, and to remember how that reporter described
other events in the past. He can teach him the character of
censorship, of the idea of privacy, and furnish him with knowledge of
past propaganda. He can, by the proper use of history, make him aware
of the stereotype, and can educate a habit of introspection about the
imagery evoked by printed words. He can, by courses in comparative
history and anthropology, produce a life-long realization of the way
codes impose a special pattern upon the imagination. He can teach men
to catch themselves making allegories, dramatizing relations, and
personifying abstractions. He can show the pupil how he identifies
himself with these allegories, how he becomes interested, and how he
selects the attitude, heroic, romantic, economic which he adopts while
holding a particular opinion. The study of error is not only in the
highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating
introduction to the study of truth. As our minds become more deeply
aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method
that is not otherwise there. We see vividly, as normally we should
not, the enormous mischief and casual cruelty of our prejudices. And
the destruction of a prejudice, though painful at first, because of
its connection with our self-respect, gives an immense relief and a
fine pride when it is successfully done. There is a radical
enlargement of the range of attention. As the current categories
dissolve, a hard, simple version of the world breaks up. The scene
turns vivid and full. There follows an emotional incentive to hearty
appreciation of scientific method, which otherwise it is not easy to
arouse, and is impossible to sustain. Prejudices are so much easier
and more interesting. For if you teach the principles of science as if
they had always been accepted, their chief virtue as a discipline,
which is objectivity, will make them dull. But teach them at first as
victories over the superstitions of the mind, and the exhilaration of
the chase and of the conquest may carry the pupil over that hard
transition from his own self-bound experience to the phase where his
curiosity has matured, and his reason has acquired passion.




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE APPEAL TO REASON

1

I HAVE written, and then thrown away, several endings to this book.
Over all of them there hung that fatality of last chapters, in which
every idea seems to find its place, and all the mysteries, that the
writer has not forgotten, are unravelled. In politics the hero does
not live happily ever after, or end his life perfectly. There is no
concluding chapter, because the hero in politics has more future
before him than there is recorded history behind him. The last chapter
is merely a place where the writer imagines that the polite reader has
begun to look furtively at his watch.

2

When Plato came to the point where it was fitting that he should sum
up, his assurance turned into stage-fright as he thought how absurd it
would sound to say what was in him about the place of reason in
politics. Those sentences in book five of the Republic were hard even
for Plato to speak; they are so sheer and so stark that men can
neither forget them nor live by them. So he makes Socrates say to
Glaucon that he will be broken and drowned in laughter for telling
"what is the least change which will enable a state to pass into the
truer form," [Footnote: _Republic_, Bk. V, 473. Jowett transl.]
because the thought he "would fain have uttered if it had not seemed
too extravagant" was that "until philosophers are kings, or the kings
and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and
political greatness and wisdom meet in one... cities will never cease
from ill,--no, nor the human race..."

Hardly had he said these awful words, when he realized they were a
counsel of perfection, and felt embarrassed at the unapproachable
grandeur of his idea. So he hastens to add that, of course, "the true
pilot" will be called "a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing."
[Footnote: 2 Bk. VI, 488-489.] But this wistful admission, though it
protects him against whatever was the Greek equivalent for the charge
that he lacked a sense of humor, furnished a humiliating tailpiece to
a solemn thought. He becomes defiant and warns Adeimantus that he must
"attribute the uselessness" of philosophers "to the fault of those who
will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly
beg the sailors to be commanded by him--that is not the order of
nature." And with this haughty gesture, he hurriedly picked up the
tools of reason, and disappeared into the Academy, leaving the world
to Machiavelli.

Thus, in the first great encounter between reason and politics, the
strategy of reason was to retire in anger. But meanwhile, as Plato
tells us, the ship is at sea. There have been many ships on the sea,
since Plato wrote, and to-day, whether we are wise or foolish in our
belief, we could no longer call a man a true pilot, simply because he
knows how to "pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars
and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art." [Footnote: Bk. VI,
488-489.] He can dismiss nothing which is necessary to make that ship
sail prosperously. Because there are mutineers aboard, he cannot say:
so much the worse for us all... it is not in the order of nature that
I should handle a mutiny... it is not in the order of philosophy that
I should consider mutiny... I know how to navigate... I do not know
how to navigate a ship full of sailors... and if they do not see that
I am the man to steer, I cannot help it. We shall all go on the rocks,
they to be punished for their sins; I, with the assurance that I knew
better....

3

Whenever we make an appeal to reason in politics, the difficulty in
this parable recurs. For there is an inherent difficulty about using
the method of reason to deal with an unreasoning world. Even if you
assume with Plato that the true pilot knows what is best for the ship,
you have to recall that he is not so easy to recognize, and that this
uncertainty leaves a large part of the crew unconvinced. By definition
the crew does not know what he knows, and the pilot, fascinated by the
stars and winds, does not know how to make the crew realize the
importance of what he knows. There is no time during mutiny at sea to
make each sailor an expert judge of experts. There is no time for the
pilot to consult his crew and find out whether he is really as wise as
he thinks he is. For education is a matter of years, the emergency a
matter of hours. It would be altogether academic, then, to tell the
pilot that the true remedy is, for example, an education that will
endow sailors with a better sense of evidence. You can tell that only
to shipmasters on dry land. In the crisis, the only advice is to use a
gun, or make a speech, utter a stirring slogan, offer a compromise,
employ any quick means available to quell the mutiny, the sense of
evidence being what it is. It is only on shore where men plan for many
voyages, that they can afford to, and must for their own salvation,
deal with those causes that take a long time to remove. They will be
dealing in years and generations, not in emergencies alone. And
nothing will put a greater strain upon their wisdom than the necessity
of distinguishing false crises from real ones. For when there is panic
in the air, with one crisis tripping over the heels of another, actual
dangers mixed with imaginary scares, there is no chance at all for the
constructive use of reason, and any order soon seems preferable to any
disorder.

It is only on the premise of a certain stability over a long run of
time that men can hope to follow the method of reason. This is not
because mankind is inept, or because the appeal to reason is
visionary, but because the evolution of reason on political subjects
is only in its beginnings. Our rational ideas in politics are still
large, thin generalities, much too abstract and unrefined for
practical guidance, except where the aggregates are large enough to
cancel out individual peculiarity and exhibit large uniformities.
Reason in politics is especially immature in predicting the behavior
of individual men, because in human conduct the smallest initial
variation often works out into the most elaborate differences. That,
perhaps, is why when we try to insist solely upon an appeal to reason
in dealing with sudden situations, we are broken and drowned in
laughter.

4

For the rate at which reason, as we possess it, can advance itself is
slower than the rate at which action has to be taken. In the present
state of political science there is, therefore, a tendency for one
situation to change into another, before the first is clearly understood,
and so to make much political criticism hindsight and little else. Both in
the discovery of what is unknown, and in the propagation of that which
has been proved, there is a time-differential, which ought to, in a much
greater degree than it ever has, occupy the political philosopher. We
have begun, chiefly under the inspiration of Mr. Graham Wallas, to
examine the effect of an invisible environment upon our opinions.
We do not, as yet, understand, except a little by rule of thumb, the
element of time in politics, though it bears most directly upon the
practicability of any constructive proposal. [Footnote: _Cf_. H. G.
Wells in the opening chapters of _Mankind in the Making._] We
can see, for example, that somehow the relevancy of any plan depends
upon the length of time the operation requires. Because on the length
of time it will depend whether the data which the plan assumes as
given, will in truth remain the same. [Footnote: The better the
current analysis in the intelligence work of any institution, the less
likely, of course, that men will deal with tomorrow's problems in the
light of yesterday's facts.] There is a factor here which realistic
and experienced men do take into account, and it helps to mark
them off somehow from the opportunist, the visionary, the philistine
and the pedant. [Footnote: Not all, but some of the differences
between reactionaries, conservatives, liberals, and radicals are
due, I think, to a different intuitive estimate of the rate of change
in social affairs.] But just how the calculation of time enters into
politics we do not know at present in any systematic way.

Until we understand these matters more clearly, we can at least
remember that there is a problem of the utmost theoretical difficulty
and practical consequence. It will help us to cherish Plato's ideal,
without sharing his hasty conclusion about the perversity of those who
do not listen to reason. It is hard to obey reason in politics,
because you are trying to make two processes march together, which
have as yet a different gait and a different pace. Until reason is
subtle and particular, the immediate struggle of politics will
continue to require an amount of native wit, force, and unprovable
faith, that reason can neither provide nor control, because the facts
of life are too undifferentiated for its powers of understanding. The
methods of social science are so little perfected that in many of the
serious decisions and most of the casual ones, there is as yet no
choice but to gamble with fate as intuition prompts.

But we can make a belief in reason one of those intuitions. We can use
our wit and our force to make footholds for reason. Behind our
pictures of the world, we can try to see the vista of a longer
duration of events, and wherever it is possible to escape from the
urgent present, allow this longer time to control our decisions. And
yet, even when there is this will to let the future count, we find
again and again that we do not know for certain how to act according
to the dictates of reason. The number of human problems on which
reason is prepared to dictate is small.

5

There is, however, a noble counterfeit in that charity which comes
from self-knowledge and an unarguable belief that no one of our
gregarious species is alone in his longing for a friendlier world. So
many of the grimaces men make at each other go with a flutter of their
pulse, that they are not all of them important. And where so much is
uncertain, where so many actions have to be carried out on guesses,
the demand upon the reserves of mere decency is enormous, and it is
necessary to live as if good will would work. We cannot prove in every
instance that it will, nor why hatred, intolerance, suspicion,
bigotry, secrecy, fear, and lying are the seven deadly sins against
public opinion. We can only insist that they have no place in the
appeal to reason, that in the longer run they are a poison; and taking
our stand upon a view of the world which outlasts our own
predicaments, and our own lives, we can cherish a hearty prejudice
against them.

We can do this all the better if we do not allow frightfulness and
fanaticism to impress us so deeply that we throw up our hands
peevishly, and lose interest in the longer run of time because we have
lost faith in the future of man. There is no ground for this despair,
because all the _ifs_ on which, as James said, our destiny hangs,
are as pregnant as they ever were. What we have seen of brutality, we
have seen, and because it was strange, it was not conclusive. It was
only Berlin, Moscow, Versailles in 1914 to 1919, not Armageddon, as we
rhetorically said. The more realistically men have faced out the
brutality and the hysteria, the more they have earned the right to say
that it is not foolish for men to believe, because another great war
took place, that intelligence, courage and effort cannot ever contrive
a good life for all men.

Great as was the horror, it was not universal. There were corrupt, and
there were incorruptible. There was muddle and there were miracles.
There was huge lying. There were men with the will to uncover it. It
is no judgment, but only a mood, when men deny that what some men have
been, more men, and ultimately enough men, might be. You can despair
of what has never been. You can despair of ever having three heads,
though Mr. Shaw has declined to despair even of that. But you cannot
despair of the possibilities that could exist by virtue of any human
quality which a human being has exhibited. And if amidst all the evils
of this decade, you have not seen men and women, known moments that
you would like to multiply, the Lord himself cannot help you.