MODERN LIBRARY: 100 BEST NOVELS

Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels is a list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century as determined by the Modern Library. In the spring of 1998 the Modern Library polled its editorial board to find the best 100 novels of the 20th century. The board consisted of Daniel J. Boorstin, A. S. Byatt, Christopher Cerf, Shelby Foote, Vartan Gregorian, Edmund Morris, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Styron and Gore Vidal.
The top 100 list was selected that committee that included writers Gore Vidal, whose books did not make the cut, and William Styron, whose novel “Sophie’s Choice” placed fifth from the bottom. Ulysses by James Joyce topped the list, followed by The Great Gatsby and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The most recent novel in the list is Ironweed (1983) by William Kennedy, and the oldest are Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser and Lord Jim (1900) by Joseph Conrad.
The list purports to contain only English-language novels (in fact, ‘Darkness at Noon’ is a translation from the German).
A separate list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century was created the same year. A list of reader choices was published separately by Modern Library in 1999.

 

THE BOARD’S LIST:

• ULYSSES by James Joyce
• THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
• LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
• BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
• THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
• CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
• DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
• SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
• THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
• UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
• THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
• 1984 by George Orwell
• I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
• TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
• AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
• THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
• SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
• INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
• NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
• HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
• APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara
• U.S.A.(trilogy) by John Dos Passos
• WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
• A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
• THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
• THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
• TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
• THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
• ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
• THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
• SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
• A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
• AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
• ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
• THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
• HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
• GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
• THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
• LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
• DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
• A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
• POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
• THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
• THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
• NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
• THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
• WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
• TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
• THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
• PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
• PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
• LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
• ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
• THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
• PARADE’S END by Ford Madox Ford
• THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
• ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
• THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
• DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
• FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
• THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
• THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
• A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
• OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
• HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
• MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
• THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
• THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
• A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
• A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
• THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
• A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
• SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
• THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
• FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
• KIM by Rudyard Kipling
• A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
• BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
• THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
• ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
• A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
• THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
• LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
• RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
• THE OLD WIVES’ TALE by Arnold Bennett
• THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
• LOVING by Henry Green
• MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
• TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
• IRONWEED by William Kennedy
• THE MAGUS by John Fowles
• WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
• UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
• SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron
• THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
• THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
• THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
• THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

THE READER’S CHOICE:

• ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
• THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
• BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
• THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
• TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
• 1984 by George Orwell
• ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
• WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
• MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
• FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard
• ULYSSES by James Joyce
• CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
• THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• DUNE by Frank Herbert
• THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS by Robert Heinlein
• STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert Heinlein
• A TOWN LIKE ALICE by Nevil Shute
• BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
• THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
• ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
• GRAVITY’S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon
• THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
• SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
• GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell
• LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
• SHANE by Jack Schaefer
• TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM by Nevil Shute
• A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving
• THE STAND by Stephen King
• THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN by John Fowles
• BELOVED by Toni Morrison
• THE WORM OUROBOROS by E.R. Eddison
• THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
• LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
• MOONHEART by Charles de Lint
• ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner
• OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
• WISE BLOOD by Flannery O’Connor
• UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
• FIFTH BUSINESS by Robertson Davies
• SOMEPLACE TO BE FLYING by Charles de Lint
• ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
• HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
• YARROW by Charles de Lint
• AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS by H.P. Lovecraft
• ONE LONELY NIGHT by Mickey Spillane
• MEMORY AND DREAM by Charles de Lint
• TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
• THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
• TRADER by Charles de Lint
• THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams
• THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
• THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood
• BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy
• A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
• ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute
• A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
• GREENMANTLE by Charles de Lint
• ENDER’S GAME by Orson Scott Card
• THE LITTLE COUNTRY by Charles de Lint
• THE RECOGNITIONS by William Gaddis
• STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Heinlein
• THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
• THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving
• SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by Ray Bradbury
• THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson
• AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
• TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
• INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
• THE WOOD WIFE by Terri Windling
• THE MAGUS by John Fowles
• THE DOOR INTO SUMMER by Robert Heinlein
• ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE by Robert Pirsig
• I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
• THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
• AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS by Flann O’Brien
• FARENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury
• ARROWSMITH by Sinclair Lewis
• WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams
• NAKED LUNCH by William S. Burroughs
• THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER by Tom Clancy
• GUILTY PLEASURES by Laurell K. Hamilton
• THE PUPPET MASTERS by Robert Heinlein
• IT by Stephen King
• V. by Thomas Pynchon
• DOUBLE STAR by Robert Heinlein
• CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY by Robert Heinlein
• BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
• LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
• ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST by Ken Kesey
• A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
• THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
• SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION by Ken Kesey
• MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather
• MULENGRO by Charles de Lint
• SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy
• MYTHAGO WOOD by Robert Holdstock
• ILLUSIONS by Richard Bach
• THE CUNNING MAN by Robertson Davies
• THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie

Criticism of the list includes that it did not include enough novels by women, and not enough novels from “Anglophone” countries (besides the US and the UK). In addition some say it was a “sales gimmick” as most of the titles in the list are also sold by Modern Library.
(Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USAIt didn’t take long for the Modern Library’s list of the best 100 novels of this century to meet heavy criticism from the masses:
Released on Monday, the library picked James Joyce’s “Ulysses” as the literary topper, with “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” rounding out the top five. Aside from the usual brickbatting that accompanies any list that tries to encapsulate a century, the Modern Library’s rankings has rankled both women and people of color. Only eight female authors were represented in the top 100, and minority authors were noticeably scarce, despite a considerable presence in literature over the past 100 years.
“I don’t know if this is the last great gasp of the white patriarchal male literary establishment, or if we are just going to try and bury all the wonderful writers out there,” says Linda Bubin, co-owner of Women and Children First, a Chicago bookstore that specializes in feminist and children’s books.
Bubin, while angered by the list, was not surprised. “We (women) tend to think we’ve arrived someplace, so it’s good to remind people that the whole establishment is incredibly sexist,” says Bubin. “And this is one more piece of evidence of that.”
By CNN Interactive Writer
Jamie Allen
May 6, 1999, while Christopher Cerf, a member of the Modern Library panel that voted in the list, told reporters Monday that the list was created to spark debate and to get people reading, he also acknowledged his regret over some books left off the list, including works by Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison. The Modern Library’s panel, a division of Random House, included Cerf, Daniel J. Boorstin, A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, Vartan Gregorian, Edmund Morris, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Styron and Gore Vidal — seven men and one woman.

A reader’s poll on the Modern Library’s Web site puts Ayn Rand at No. 1 and 3, with “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” respectively.
On CNN Interactive’s message board, posts overflowed with questions regarding the list’s apparent lack of diversity. The absence of Morrison and Rand was mentioned often. “I am surprised that the committee chose to omit African, Indian, South American, and Australian writers, many of whom write in English.”
— Micky Black
from the CNN Interactive message boards

“I scrolled down the list and noticed that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second mention on the list, ‘Tender is the Night,’ was ranked above the second female novelist mentioned,” noted Kim Berndt in her message board post. “No doubt, F. Scott Fitzgerald is an incredible writer. But are you going to tell me that only one woman’s novel (Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” — ranked No. 15) was better than ‘Tender is the Night?'”
“I am surprised that the committee chose to omit African, Indian, South American, and Australian writers, many of whom write in English,” posted Micky Black. “Also, what about Arab writers? How about more women writers such as Doris Lessing and Isak Dinesen?”
While much of the faultfinding focused on the lack of women or minorities, some readers found other problems with the picks. Many noted that “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee was excluded altogether from the list of 100.
“This list must be a practical joke, either from the Saturday Night Live crew or perhaps Monty Python,” posted Howard Paul Burgess. “‘Ulysses’ as the greatest novel of the century? Sure. And ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space’ was the best movie of the century, too. ‘Ulysses’ is the biggest pile of gobbledygook ever perpetrated on the reading public. I defy anyone to make sense of anything in that (admittedly, sometimes poetic) flow of words, words, words.”
Other readers were reminded of the recent list of the top 100 movies this century, as compiled by the American Film Institute.
“This list is far more subjective than even the AFI’s 100 greatest movies, or that insipid Time article about the century’s greatest entertainers,” Jimmy John posted. “You simply can’t narrow down a century of books into one little list of 100. It’s impossible.”
Impossible, no. The Modern Library has done it. To compile a list that finds no critics may be the impossible task.
“Ulysses as the greatest novel of the century? Sure. And Plan Nine from Outer Space was the best movie of the century, too.”
— Howard Paul Burgess
from the CNN Interactive message boards

Exactly a third of the titles on the list of “best” novels, including 6 of the top 10, have been removed or threatened with removal from bookstores, libraries and schools at some point. The Grapes of Wrath, number 10 on the list, has been one of the most vilified works since its publication in 1939. Burned at the St. Louis (Mo.) Public Library immediately after publication, it also was banned from the Buffalo (N.Y.) Public Library because of “vulgar words.” It was challenged in the Greenville (S.C.) schools because it used the names of God and Jesus “in a vain and profane manner” and was banned in Kern County (Calif.) where the story was set. It continues to be one of the most challenged books in schools and libraries.
Other banned books in the Modern Library’s “Top Ten” include The Great Gatsby and Brave New World. Today, it’s hard to imagine a library or a school curriculum without these works. Fortunately, few books are permanently banned from library and bookstore shelves in the United States. Why? Because librarians, booksellers, educators, parents and others actively defend our right to read.
The fact that 33 books on the Modern Library’s “best” list have been either banned or challenged is not surprising. School and public libraries regularly receive requests to remove materials from their shelves and reading lists. In fact, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports of such challenges each year, with many more going unreported. Last year ALA tracked nearly 500 challenges on such acclaimed works as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia.
These challenges are not just complaints. They are requests to have materials removed from library shelves and curricula, most frequently in our nation’s schools.
The controversy over the Modern Library’s list reminds us that great literature is very much in the mind of the beholder. What is intellectually stimulating to one may be irrelevant or even offensive to another. That doesn’t mean that differing viewpoints should not be heard or that parental guidance should not be exercised. Rather, it means we must respect the rights of others to choose for themselves and their families what they find appealing and appropriate.
(Source: Ann K. Symons, President, American Library Association, 1998–1999)

HAPPINESS

The circumstances of our lives and the dispositions of our characters mainly determine the measure of happiness we enjoy, and mere argument about the causes of happiness and unhappiness can do little to affect them. Man comes into the world with mental and moral characteristics which he can only very imperfectly influence, and a large proportion of the external circumstances of his life lie wholly or mainly beyond his control.
The illusion of free will is only due to the conflict of our motives. The will is nothing more than the last and strongest desire; or it is like a piece of iron surrounded by magnets and necessarily drawn by the most powerful; or (as has been ingeniously imagined) like a weathercock, conscious of its own motion, but not conscious of the winds that are moving it. The law of compulsory causation applies to the world of mind as truly as to the world of matter.
Heredity and Circumstance make us what we are. Our actions are the inevitable result of the mental and moral constitutions with which we came into the world, operated on by external influences. The conflict between the will and the desires, the reality of self-restraint and the power of Will to modify character, are among the most familiar facts of moral life. In the words of Burke, ‘It is the prerogative of man to be in a great degree a creature of his own making.’ There are men whose whole lives are spent in willing one thing and desiring the opposite, and all morality depends upon the supposition that we have at least some freedom of choice between good and evil. ‘I ought,’ as Kant says, necessarily implies ‘I can.’ The feeling of moral responsibility is an essential part of healthy and developed human nature, and it inevitably presupposes free will.
Men continually forget that Happiness is a condition of Mind and not a disposition of circumstances, and one of the most common of errors is that of confusing happiness with the means of happiness, sacrificing the first for the attainment of the second. It is the error of the miser, who begins by seeking money for the enjoyment it procures and ends by making the mere acquisition of money his sole object, pursuing it to the sacrifice of all rational ends and pleasures.
These are but a few obvious instances of the manner in which the body acts upon happiness. They do not mean that the will is powerless in the face of bodily conditions, but that in the management of character it has certain very definite predispositions to encounter. In reasonings on life, even more than on other things, a good reasoner will consider not only the force of the opposing arguments, but also the bias to which his own mind is subject. To raise the level of national health is one of the surest ways of raising the level of national happiness, and in estimating the value of different pleasures many which, considered in themselves, might appear to rank low upon the scale, will rank high, if in addition to the immediate and transient enjoyment they procure, they contribute to form a strong and healthy body.
With its great recuperative powers Youth can do with apparent impunity many things which in later life bring a speedy Nemesis; but on the other hand Youth is pre-eminently the period when habits and tastes are formed, and the yoke which is then lightly, willingly, wantonly assumed will in after years acquire a crushing weight.
Smoking in manhood, when practised in moderation, is a very innocent and probably beneficent practice, but it is well known how deleterious it is to young boys, and how many of them have taken to it through no other motive than a desire to appear older than they are—that surest of all signs that we are very young. How often have the far more pernicious habits of drinking, or gambling, or frequenting corrupt society been acquired through a similar motive, or through the mere desire to enjoy the charm of a forbidden pleasure or to stand well with some dissipated companions! How large a proportion of lifelong female debility is due to an early habit of tight lacing, springing only from the silliest vanity! How many lives have been sacrificed through the careless recklessness which refused to take the trouble of changing wet clothes! How many have been shattered and shortened by excess in things which in moderation are harmless, useful, or praiseworthy,—by the broken blood-vessel, due to excess in some healthy athletic exercise or game; by the ruined brain overstrained in order to win some paltry prize! It is melancholy to observe how many lives have been broken down, ruined or corrupted in attempts to realise some supreme and unattainable desire; through the impulse of overmastering passion, of powerful and perhaps irresistible temptation. It is still sadder to observe how large a proportion of the failures of life may be ultimately traced to the most insignificant causes and might have been avoided without any serious effort either of intellect or will.
It is true that the gain to human happiness is not quite as great as might at first sight be imagined. Death is least sad when it comes in infancy or in extreme old age, and the increased average of life is largely due to the great diminution in infant mortality, which is in truth a very doubtful blessing. If extreme old age is a thing to be desired, it is perhaps chiefly because it usually implies a constitution which gives many earlier years of robust and healthy life. But with all deductions the triumphs of sanitary reform as well as of medical science are perhaps the brightest page in the history of our century. Some of the measures which have proved most useful can only be effected at some sacrifice of individual freedom and by widespread coercive sanitary regulations, and are thus more akin to despotism than to free government. How different would have been the condition of the world, and how far greater would have been the popularity of strong monarchy if at the time when such a form of government generally prevailed rulers had had the intelligence to put before them the improvement of the health and the prolongation of the lives of their subjects as the main object of their policy rather than military glory or the acquisition of territory or mere ostentatious and selfish display!
One of the first and most clearly recognised rules to be observed is that happiness is most likely to be attained when it is not the direct object of pursuit. In early youth we are accustomed to divide life broadly into work and play, regarding the first as duty or necessity and the second as pleasure. One of the great differences between childhood and manhood is that we come to like our work more than our play. It becomes to us, if not the chief pleasure, at least the chief interest of our lives, and even when it is not this, an essential condition of our happiness. Few lives produce so little happiness as those that are aimless and unoccupied. Apart from all considerations of right and wrong, one of the first conditions of a happy life is that it should be a full and busy one, directed to the attainment of aims outside ourselves.
If a life of luxurious idleness and selfish ease in some measure saves men from the first danger, it seldom fails to bring with it the second. No change of scene, no multiplicity of selfish pleasures will in the long run enable them to escape it. It needs but a few years of life experience to realise the profound truth of this passage. An ideal life would be furnished with abundant work of a kind that is congenial both to our intellects and our characters and that brings with it much interest and little anxiety. Few of us can command this. Most men’s work is largely determined for them by circumstances, though in the guidance of life there are many alternatives and much room for skilful pilotage. But the first great rule is that we must do something—that life must have a purpose and an aim—that work should be not merely occasional and spasmodic, but steady and continuous. Pleasure is a jewel which will only retain its lustre when it is in a setting of work, and a vacant life is one of the worst of pains, though the islands of leisure that stud a crowded, well-occupied life may be among the things to which we look back with the greatest delight.
Another great truth is conveyed in the saying of Aristotle that a wise man will make it his aim rather to avoid suffering than to attain pleasure. Men can in reality do very little to mitigate the force of the great bereavements and the other graver calamities of life. All our systems of philosophy and reasoning are vain when confronted with them. Innate temperament which we cannot greatly change determines whether we sink crushed beneath the blow or possess the buoyancy that can restore health to our natures. The conscious and deliberate pursuit of pleasure is attended by many deceptions and illusions, and rarely leads to lasting happiness. But we can do very much by prudence, self-restraint and intelligent regulation so to manage life as to avoid a large proportion of its calamities and at the same time, by preserving the affections pure and undimmed, by diversifying interests and forming active habits, to combat its tedium and despondency.
Another truth is that both the greatest pleasures and the keenest pains of life lie much more in those humbler spheres which are accessible to all than on the rare pinnacles to which only the most gifted or the most fortunate can attain. It would probably be found upon examination that most men who have devoted their lives successfully to great labours and ambitions, and who have received the most splendid gifts from Fortune, have nevertheless found their chief pleasure in things unconnected with their main pursuits and generally within the reach of common men. Domestic pleasures, pleasures of scenery, pleasures of reading, pleasures of travel or of sport have been the highest enjoyment of men of great ambition, intellect, wealth and position.
It is one of the paradoxes of human nature that the things that are most struggled for and the things that are most envied are not those which give either the most intense or the most unmixed joy. Ambition is the luxury of the happy. It is sometimes, but more rarely, the consolation and distraction of the wretched; but most of those who have trodden its paths, if they deal honestly with themselves, will acknowledge that the gravest disappointments of public life dwindle into insignificance compared with the poignancy of suffering endured at the deathbed of a wife or of a child, and that within the small circle of a family life they have found more real happiness than the applause of nations could ever give.
Another consideration in the cultivation of happiness is the importance of acquiring the habit of realising our blessings while they last. It is one of the saddest facts of human nature that we commonly only learn their value by their loss. This is very evidently the case with health. By the laws of our being we are almost unconscious of the action of our bodily organs as long as they are working well. It is only when they are deranged, obstructed or impaired that our attention becomes concentrated upon them. In consequence of this a state of perfect health is rarely fully appreciated until it is lost and during a short period after it has been regained.
And what is true of health is true of other things. It is only when some calamity breaks the calm tenor of our ways and deprives us of some gift of fortune we have long enjoyed that we feel how great was the value of what we have lost. There are times in the lives of most of us when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed. Sometimes, indeed, our perception of this contrast brings with it a lasting and salutary result. In the medicine of Nature a chronic and abiding disquietude or morbidness of temperament is often cured by some keen though more transient sorrow which violently changes the current of our thoughts and imaginations.
Every human mind contains great masses of inert, passive, undisputed knowledge which exercise no real influence on thought or character till something occurs which touches our imagination and quickens this knowledge into activity. Very few things contribute so much to the happiness of life as a constant realisation of the blessings we enjoy. The difference between a naturally contented and a naturally discontented nature is one of the marked differences of innate temperament, but we can do much to cultivate that habit of dwelling on the benefits of our lot which converts acquiescence into a more positive enjoyment.
A discontent with existing circumstances is the chief source of a desire to improve them, and this desire is the mainspring of progress. In this theory of life, happiness is sought, not in content, but in improved circumstances, in the development of new capacities of enjoyment, in the pleasure which active existence naturally gives. To maintain in their due proportion in our nature the spirit of content and the desire to improve, to combine a realised appreciation of the blessings we enjoy with a healthy and well-regulated ambition, is no easy thing, but it is the problem which all who aspire to a perfect life should set before themselves. In medio tutissimus ibis is eminently true of the cultivation of character, and some of its best elements become pernicious in their extremes. Thus prudent forethought, which is one of the first conditions of a successful life, may easily degenerate into that most miserable state of mind in which men are perpetually anticipating and dwelling upon the uncertain dangers and evils of an uncertain future. How much indeed of the happiness and misery of men may be included under those two words, realisation and anticipation!
Such a proverb as ‘Honesty is the best policy’ represents no doubt a great truth, though it has been well said that no man is really honest who is only honest through this motive, and though it is very evident that it is by no means an universal truth but depends largely upon changing and precarious conditions of laws, police, public opinion, and individual circumstances. But in the higher realms of morals the coincidence of happiness and virtue is far more doubtful. It is certainly not true that the highest nature is necessarily or even naturally the happiest. The conscience of Mankind has ever recognised self-sacrifice as the supreme element of virtue, and self-sacrifice is never real when it is only the exchange of a less happiness for a greater one.
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Map of Life, by William Edward Hartpole Lecky)

POLITICAL IDEALS

Political and social institutions are to be judged by the good or harm that they do to individuals. Do they encourage creativeness rather than possessiveness? Do they embody or promote a spirit of reverence between human beings? Do they preserve self-respect?
In all these ways the institutions under which we live are very far indeed from what they ought to be. Institutions, and especially economic systems, have a profound influence in molding the characters of men and women. They may encourage adventure and hope, or timidity and the pursuit of safety. They may open men’s minds to great possibilities, or close them against everything but the risk of obscure misfortune. They may make a man’s happiness depend upon what he adds to the general possessions of the world, or upon what he can secure for himself of the private goods in which others cannot share. Modern capitalism forces the wrong decision of these alternatives upon all who are not heroic or exceptionally fortunate.
At present our institutions rest upon two things: property and power. Both of these are very unjustly distributed; both, in the actual world, are of great importance to the happiness of the individual. Both are possessive goods; yet without them many of the goods in which all might share are hard to acquire as things are now. Without property, as things are, a man has no freedom, and no security for the necessities of a tolerable life; without power, he has no opportunity for initiative. If men are to have free play for their creative impulses, they must be liberated from sordid cares by a certain measure of security, and they must have a sufficient share of power to be able to exercise initiative as regards the course and conditions of their lives.
Few men can succeed in being creative rather than possessive in a world which is wholly built on competition, where the great majority would fall into utter destitution if they became careless as to the acquisition of material goods, where honor and power and respect are given to wealth rather than to wisdom, where the law embodies and consecrates the injustice of those who have toward those who have not. In such an environment even those whom nature has endowed with great creative gifts become infected with the poison of competition. Men combine in groups to attain more strength in the scramble for material goods, and loyalty to the group spreads a halo of quasi-idealism round the central impulse of greed. Trade-unions and the Labor party are no more exempt from this vice than other parties and other sections of society; though they are largely inspired by the hope of a radically better world. They are too often led astray by the immediate object of securing for themselves a large share of material goods. That this desire is in accordance with justice, it is impossible to deny; but something larger and more constructive is needed as a political ideal, if the victors of tomorrow are not to become the oppressors of the day after. The inspiration and outcome of a reforming movement ought to be freedom and a generous spirit, not niggling restrictions and regulations.
The present economic system concentrates initiative in the hands of a small number of very rich men. Those who are not capitalists have, almost always, very little choice as to their activities when once they have selected a trade or profession; they are not part of the power that moves the mechanism, but only a passive portion of the machinery. Despite political democracy, there is still an extraordinary degree of difference in the power of self-direction belonging to a capitalist and to a man who has to earn his living. Economic affairs touch men’s lives, at most times, much more intimately than political questions. At present the man who has no capital usually has to sell himself to some large organization, such as a railway company, for example. He has no voice in its management, and no liberty in politics except what his trade-union can secure for him. If he happens to desire a form of liberty which is not thought important by his trade-union, he is powerless; he must submit or starve.
Exactly the same thing happens to professional men. Probably a majority of journalists are engaged in writing for newspapers whose politics they disagree with; only a man of wealth can own a large newspaper, and only an accident can enable the point of view or the interests of those who are not wealthy to find expression in a newspaper. A large part of the best brains of the country are in the civil service, where the condition of their employment is silence about the evils which cannot be concealed from them. A Nonconformist minister loses his livelihood if his views displease his congregation; a member of Parliament loses his seat if he is not sufficiently supple or sufficiently stupid to follow or share all the turns and twists of public opinion. In every walk of life, independence of mind is punished by failure, more and more as economic organizations grow larger and more rigid. Is it surprising that men become increasingly docile, increasingly ready to submit to dictation and to forego the right of thinking for themselves? Yet along such lines civilization can only sink into a Byzantine immobility.
Fear of destitution is not a motive out of which a free creative life can grow, yet it is the chief motive which inspires the daily work of most wage-earners. The hope of possessing more wealth and power than any man ought to have, which is the corresponding motive of the rich, is quite as bad in its effects; it compels men to close their minds against justice, and to prevent themselves from thinking honestly on social questions while in the depths of their hearts they uneasily feel that their pleasures are bought by the miseries of others. The injustices of destitution and wealth alike ought to be rendered impossible. Then a great fear would be removed from the lives of the many, and hope would have to take on a better form in the lives of the few.
The most dangerous aspect of the tyranny of the employer is the power which it gives him of interfering with men’s activities outside their working hours. A man may be dismissed because the employer dislikes his religion or his politics, or chooses to think his private life immoral. He may be dismissed because he tries to produce a spirit of independence among his fellow employees. He may fail completely to find employment merely on the ground that he is better educated than most and therefore more dangerous. Such cases actually occur at present. This evil would not be remedied, but rather intensified, under state socialism, because, where the State is the only employer, there is no refuge from its prejudices such as may now accidentally arise through the differing opinions of different men. The State would be able to enforce any system of beliefs it happened to like, and it is almost certain that it would do so. Freedom of thought would be penalized, and all independence of spirit would die out.
Unfortunately, in this case laziness is reinforced by love of power, which leads energetic officials to create the systems which lazy officials like to administer. The energetic official inevitably dislikes anything that he does not control. His official sanction must be obtained before anything can be done. Whatever he finds in existence he wishes to alter in some way, so as to have the satisfaction of feeling his power and making it felt. If he is conscientious, he will think out some perfectly uniform and rigid scheme which he believes to be the best possible, and he will then impose this scheme ruthlessly, whatever promising growths he may have to lop down for the sake of symmetry. The result inevitably has something of the deadly dullness of a new rectangular town, as compared with the beauty and richness of an ancient city which has lived and grown with the separate lives and individualities of many generations. What has grown is always more living than what has been decreed; but the energetic official will always prefer the tidiness of what he has decreed to the apparent disorder of spontaneous growth.
The mere possession of power tends to produce a love of power, which is a very dangerous motive, because the only sure proof of power consists in preventing others from doing what they wish to do. The essential theory of democracy is the diffusion of power among the whole people, so that the evils produced by one man’s possession of great power shall be obviated. But the diffusion of power through democracy is only effective when the voters take an interest in the question involved. When the question does not interest them, they do not attempt to control the administration, and all actual power passes into the hands of officials.
For this reason, the true ends of democracy are not achieved by state socialism or by any system which places great power in the hands of men subject to no popular control except that which is more or less indirectly exercised through parliament.
Any fresh survey of men’s political actions shows that, in those who have enough energy to be politically effective, love of power is a stronger motive than economic self-interest. Love of power actuates the great millionaires, who have far more money than they can spend, but continue to amass wealth merely in order to control more and more of the world’s finance. Love of power is obviously the ruling motive of many politicians.
The problem of the distribution of power is a more difficult one than the problem of the distribution of wealth. The machinery of representative government has concentrated on ultimate power as the only important matter, and has ignored immediate executive power. Almost nothing has been done to democratize administration. Government officials, in virtue of their income, security, and social position, are likely to be on the side of the rich, who have been their daily associates ever since the time of school and college. And whether or not they are on the side of the rich, they are not likely, for the reasons we have been considering, to be genuinely in favor of progress. What applies to government officials applies also to members of Parliament, with the sole difference that they have had to recommend themselves to a constituency. This, however, only adds hypocrisy to the other qualities of a ruling caste.
It is a painful fact that the ordinary voter is quite blind to insincerity. The man who does not care about any definite political measures can generally be won by corruption or flattery, open or concealed; the man who is set on securing reforms will generally prefer an ambitious windbag to a man who desires the public good without possessing a ready tongue. And the ambitious windbag, as soon as he has become a power by the enthusiasm he has aroused, will sell his influence to the governing clique, sometimes openly, sometimes by the more subtle method of intentionally failing at a crisis. This is part of the normal working of democracy as embodied in representative institutions. Yet a cure must be found if democracy is not to remain a farce.
One of the sources of evil in modern large democracies is the fact that most of the electorate have no direct or vital interest in most of the questions that arise. The tyranny of the majority is a very real danger. It is a mistake to suppose that the majority is necessarily right. On every new question the majority is always wrong at first. It will be found by those who consider past history that, whenever any new fundamental issue arises, the majority are in the wrong, because they are guided by prejudice and habit. Progress comes through the gradual effect of a minority in converting opinion and altering custom. At one time—not so very long ago—it was considered monstrous wickedness to maintain that old women ought not to be burnt as witches. If those who held this opinion had been forcibly suppressed, we should still be steeped in medieval superstition. For such reasons, it is of the utmost importance that the majority should refrain from imposing its will as regards matters in which uniformity is not absolutely necessary.
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Political Ideals by Bertrand Russell)

THE SAVAGE

WALTER BAGEHOT
From jalopnik.com

We always knew how much a man’s past modified a man’s future; that we all knew how much, a man is apt to be like his ancestors; that the existence of national character is the greatest commonplace in the world. Even while the cerebral hemispheres are entire, and in full possession of their powers, the brain gives rise to actions which are as completely reflex as those of the spinal cord. When the eyelids wink at a flash of light, or a threatened blow, a reflex action takes place, in which the afferent nerves are the optic, the efferent, the facial. When a bad smell causes a grimace, there is a reflex action through the same motor nerve, while the olfactory nerves constitute the afferent channels. In these cases, therefore, reflex action must be effected through the brain, all the nerves involved being cerebral. When the whole body starts at a loud noise, the afferent auditory nerve gives rise to an impulse which passes to the medulla oblongata, and thence affects the great majority of the motor nerves of the body. It may be said that these are mere mechanical actions, and have nothing to do with the acts which we associate with intelligence. The reflex actions proper to the spinal cord itself are NATURAL, and are involved in the structure of the cord and the properties of its constituents. By the help of the brain we may acquire an affinity of ARTIFICIAL reflex actions. That is to say, an action may require all our attention and all our volition for its first, or second, or third performance, but by frequent repetition it becomes, in a manner, part our organisation, and is performed without volition, or even consciousness.
As everyone knows, it takes a soldier a very long time to learn his drill – to put himself, for instance, into the attitude of ‘attention’ at the instant the word of command is heard. But, after a time, the sound of the word gives rise to the act, whether the soldier be thinking of it or not. There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out ‘Attention!’ whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been gone through, and its effects had become embodied in the man’s nervous structure. The body of the accomplished man has thus become by training different from what it once was, and different from that of the rude man; it is charged with stored virtue and acquired faculty which come away from it unconsciously.
It is the action of the will that causes the unconscious habit; it is the continual effort of the beginning that creates the hoarded energy of the end; it is the silent toil of the first generation that becomes the transmitted aptitude of the next. Here physical causes do not create the moral, but moral create the physical.
An inherited drill, science says, makes modern nations what they are; their born structure bears the trace of the laws of their fathers; but the ancient nations came into no such inheritance; they were the descendants of people who did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of every impulse and blown by every passion.
In later ages many races have gained much discipline quickly, though painfully; a loose set of scattered clans has been often and often forced to substantial settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans did half the work for above half Europe. But where could the first ages find Romans or a conqueror? Men conquer by the power of government, and it was exactly government which then was not. The first ascent of civilisation was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.
In early times the quantity of government is much more important than its quality. What you want is a comprehensive rule binding men together, making them do much the same things, telling them what to expect of each other, fashioning them alike, and keeping them so. What this rule is does not matter so much. A good rule is better than a bad one, but any rule is better than none; while, for reasons which a jurist will appreciate, none can be very good. But to gain that rule, what may be called the impressive elements of a polity are incomparably more important than its useful elements. How to get the obedience of men is the hard problem; what you do with that obedience is less critical.
The object of such organisations is to create what may be called a cake of custom. All the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object; that gradually created the ‘hereditary drill’ which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too. That this regime forbids free thought is not an evil; or rather, though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it is necessary for making the mould of civilisation, and hardening the soft fibre of early man.
In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peuliarities the strongest tend to be the best. Secondly, within every particular nation the type or types of character then and there most attractive tend to prevail; and, the most attractive, though with exceptions, is what we call the best character. Thirdly, neither of these competitions is in most historic conditions intensified by extrinsic forces, but in some conditions, such as those now prevailing in the most influential part of the world, both are so intensified.
Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigour, the savage virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But what makes one tribe, one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe, to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilisation begins, because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage. Probably if we had historic records of the ante-historic ages, if some superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages before they could set them down for themselves, we should know that this first step in civilisation was the hardest step. But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next step. All the absolutely incoherent men – all the ‘Cyclopes’ – have been cleared away long before there was an authentic account of them. And the least coherent only remain in the ‘protected’ parts of the world, as we may call them.
Ordinary civilisation begins near the Mediterranean Sea; the best, doubtless, of the ante-historic civilisations were not far off. From this centre the conquering SWARM, for such it is, has grown and grown; has widened its subject territories steadily, though not equably, age by age. But geography long defied it. An Atlantic Ocean, a Pacific Ocean, an Australian Ocean, an unapproachable interior Africa, an inaccessible and undesirable hill India, were beyond its range. In such remote places there was no real competition, and on them inferior, half-combined men continued to exist. But in the regions of rivalry, the regions where the better man pressed upon the worse man, such half-made associations could not last. They died out and history did not begin till after they were gone. The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.
Macaulay justly said that many an army has prospered under a bad commander, but no army has ever prospered under a ‘debating society;’ that many-headed monster is then fatal. Despotism grows in the first societies, just as democracy grows in more modern societies; it is the government answering the primary need, and congenial to the whole spirit of the time. But despotism is unfavourable to the principle of variability, as all history shows. It tends to keep men in the customary stage of civilisation; its very fitness for that age unfits it for the next. It prevents men from passing into the first age of progress, the very slow and very gradually improving age. Some ‘standing system’ of semi-free discussion is as necessary to break the thick crust of custom and begin progress as it is in later ages to carry on progress when begun; probably it is even more necessary. And in the most progressive races we find it.
What breaks the human race up into fragments so unlike one another, and yet each in its interior so monotonous? The question is most puzzling, though the fact is so familiar. Perhaps these same considerations throw some light, too, on the further and still more interesting question why some few nations progress, and why the greater part do not. Of course at first all such distinctions of nation and nation were explained by original diversity of race. They are dissimilar, it was said, because they were created dissimilar. But in most cases this easy supposition will not do its work. You cannot (consistently with plain facts) imagine enough original races to make it tenable. Some half-dozen or more great families of men may or may not have been descended from separate first stocks, but sub-varieties have certainly not so descended.
We may argue, rightly or wrongly, that all Aryan nations are of a single or peculiar origin, just as it was long believed that all Greek-speaking nations were of one such stock. But you will not be listened to if you say that there were one Adam and Eve for Sparta, and another Adam and Eve for Athens. All Greeks are evidently of one origin, but within the limits of the Greek family, as of all other families, there is some contrast-making force which causes city to be unlike city, and tribe unlike tribe.
The grave part of mankind are quite as liable to these imitated beliefs as the frivolous part. The belief of the money-market, which is mainly composed of grave people, is as imitative as any belief. You will find one day everyone enterprising, enthusiastic, vigorous, eager to buy, and eager to order: in a week or so you will find almost the whole society depressed, anxious, and wanting to sell. If you examine the reasons for the activity, or for the inactivity, or for the change, you will hardly be able to trace them at all, and as far as you can trace them, they are of little force. In fact, these opinions were not formed by reason, but by mimicry. Something happened that looked a little good, on which eager sanguine men talked loudly, and common people caught their tone. A little while afterwards, and when people were tired of talking this, something also happened looking a little bad, on which the dismal, anxious people began, and all the rest followed their words. And in both cases an avowed dissentient is set down as ‘crotchety.’ ‘If you want,’ said Swift, ‘to gain the reputation of a sensible man, you should be of the opinion of the person with whom for the time being you are conversing.’ There is much quiet intellectual persecution among ‘reasonable’ men; a cautious person hesitates before he tells them anything new, for if he gets a name for such things he will be called ‘flighty,’ and in times of decision he will not be attended to. In this way the infection of imitation catches men in their mostinward and intellectual part – their creed. But it also invades men – by the most bodily part of the mind – so to speak – the link between soul and body – the manner. No one needs to have this explained; we all know how a kind of subtle influence makes us imitate or try to imitate the manner of those around us.
The process of nation-making is one of which we have obvious examples in the most recent times, and which is going on now. The most simple example is the foundation of the first State of America,say New England, which has such a marked and such a deep national character. A great number of persons agreeing in fundamental disposition, agreeing in religion, agreeing in politics, form a separate settlement; they exaggerate their own disposition, teach their own creed, set up their favourite government; they discourage all other dispositions, persecute other beliefs, forbid other forms or habits of government. Of course a nation so made will have a separate stamp and mark. The original settlers began of one type; they sedulously imitated it; and (though other causes have intervened and disturbed it) the necessary operation of the principles of inheritance has transmitted many original traits still unaltered, and has left an entire New England character – in no respect unaffected by its first character.
In early states of civilisation there is a great mortality of infant life, and this is a kind of selection initself – the child most fit to be a good Spartan is most likely to survive a Spartan childhood. The habits of the tribe are enforced on the child; if he is able to catch and copy them he lives; if he cannot he dies. The imitation which assimilates early nations continues through life, but it begins with suitable forms and acts on picked specimens. There is a kind of parental selection operating in the same way and probably tending to keep alive the same individuals. Those children which gratified their fathers and mothers most would be most tenderly treated by them, and have the best chance to live, and as a rough rule their favourites would be the children of most ‘promise,’ that is to say, those who seemed most likely to be a credit to the tribe according to the leading tribal manners and the existing tribal tastes. The most gratifying child would be the best looked after, and the most gratifying would be the best specimen of the standard then and there raised up.
The modern pre-historic men, those of whom we have collected so many remains, and to whom are due the ancient, strange customs of historical nations (the fossil customs, we might call them, for very often they are stuck by themselves in real civilisation, and have no more part in it than the fossils in the surrounding strata), pre-historic men in this sense were ‘savages without the fixed habits of savages;’ that is, that, like savages, they had strong passions and weak reason; that, like savages, they preferred short spasms of greedy pleasure to mild and equable enjoyment; that, like savages, they could not postpone the present to the future; that, like savages, their ingrained sense of morality was, to say the best of it, rudimentary and defective. But that,unlike present savages, they had not complex customs and singular customs, odd and seemingly inexplicable rules guiding all human life.
The man some few thousand years before history began, and not at all, at least not necessarily, the primitive man was identical with a modern savage, in another respect there is equal or greater reason to suppose that he was most unlike a modern savage. A modern savage is anything but the simple being which philosophers of the eighteenth century imagined him to be; on the contrary, his life is twisted into a thousand curious habits; his reason is darkened by a thousand strange prejudices; his feeling sare frightened by a thousand cruel superstitions. The whole mind of a modern savage is, so to say, tattooed over with monstrous images; there is not a smooth place anywhere about it. But there is no reason to suppose the minds of pre-historic men to be so cut and marked; on the contrary, the creation of these habits, these superstitions, these prejudices, must have taken ages. In his nature, it may be said, pre-historic man was the same as a modern savage; it is only in his acquisition that he was different.
It is plain that the first pre-historic men had the flint tools which the lowest savages use, and we can trace a regular improvement in the finish and in the efficiency of their simple instruments corresponding to that which we see at this day in the upward transition from the lowest savages to the highest. Now it is not conceivable that a race of beings with valuable instincts supporting their existence and supplying their wants would need these simple tools. They are exactly those needed by very poor people who have no instincts, and those were used by such, for savages are the poorest of the poor. It would be very strange if these same utensils, no more no less, were used by beings whose discerning instincts made them in comparison altogether rich. Such a being would know how to manage without such things. Pre-historic man was substantially a savage like present savages, in morals, intellectual attainments, and in religion; but that he differed in this from our present savages, that he had not had time to ingrain his nature so deeply with bad habits, and to impress bad beliefs so unalterably on his mind as they have. They have had ages to fix the stain on them selves, but primitive man was younger and had no such time.
In general, too, the conquerors would be better than the conquered (most merits in early society are more or less military merits), but they would not be very much better, for the lowest steps in the ladder of civilisation are very steep, and the effort to mount them is slow and tedious. And this is probably the better if they are to produce a good and quick effect in civilising those they have conquered. The experience of the English in India shows, if it shows anything, that a highly civilised race may fail in producing a rapidly excellent effect on a less civilised race, because it is too good and too different. The two are not en rapport together; the merits of the one are not the merits prized by the other; the manner-language of the one is not the manner-language of the other.The higher being is not and cannot be a model for the lower; he could not mould himself on it if he would, and would not if he could. Consequently, the two races have long lived together, ‘near and yet far off,’ daily seeing one another and daily interchanging superficial thoughts, but in the depths of their mind separated by a whole era of civilisation, and so affecting one another only a little in comparison with what might have been hoped. But in early societies there were no such great differences, and the rather superior conqueror must have easily improved the rather inferior conquered. It is in the interior of these customary groups that national characters are formed. By proscribing non conformist members for generations, and cherishing and rewarding conformist members, non conformists become fewer and fewer, and conformists more and more. Most men mostly imitate what they see, and catch the tone of what they hear, and so a settled type, a persistent character, is formed. Nor is the process wholly mental. No ‘unconscious selection’ has been at work at the breed of man. If neither that nor conscious selection has been at work, how did there come to be these breeds,and such there are in the greatest numbers, though we call them nations? In societies tyrannically customary, uncongenial minds become first cowed, then melancholy, then out of health, and at last die.

From spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk

Adapted from PHYSICS AND POLITICS OR THOUGHTS ON THE APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF ‘NATURAL SELECTION’ AND ‘INHERITANCE’ TO POLITICAL SOCIETY BY WALTER BAGEHOT, 2003-2008 Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.

THE MAP OF LIFE

One of the worst moral evils that grow up in democratic countries is the excessive tendency to time-serving and popularity hunting, and the danger is all the greater because in a certain sense both of these things are a necessity and even a duty. Their moral quality depends mainly on their motive. The question to be asked is whether a politician is acting from personal or merely party objects or from honourable public ones.
Every statesman must form in his own mind a conception whether a prevailing tendency is favourable or opposed to the real interests of the country. It will depend upon this judgment whether he will endeavour to accelerate or retard it; whether he will yield slowly or readily to its pressure, and there are cases in which, at all hazards of popularity and influence, he should inexorably oppose it.
In the long run, under free governments, political systems and measures must be adjusted to the wishes of the various sections of the people, and this adjustment is the great work of statesmanship. In judging a proposed measure a statesman must continually ask himself whether the country is ripe for it—whether its introduction, however desirable it might be, would not be premature, as public opinion is not yet prepared for it?—whether, even though it be a bad measure, it is not on the whole better to vote for it, as the nation manifestly desires it?
In aristocratic governments such as existed in England during the eighteenth century, temptations to corruption were especially strong. To build up a vast system of parliamentary influence by rotten boroughs, and, by systematically bestowing honours on those who could control them, to win the support of great corporations and professions by furthering their interests and abstaining from all efforts to reform them, was a chief part of the statecraft of the time. Class privileges in many forms were created, extended and maintained, and in some countries—though much less in England than on the Continent—the burden of taxation was most inequitably distributed, falling mainly on the poor.
In democratic governments the temptations are of a different kind. Popularity is there the chief source of power, and the supreme tribunal consists of numbers counted by the head. The well-being of the great mass of the people is the true end of politics, but it does not necessarily follow that the opinion of the least instructed majority is the best guide to obtaining it. Party leaders measure legislation mainly by its immediate popularity, and its consequent success in adding to his voting strength. In some countries this tendency shows itself in lavish expenditure on public works which provide employment for great masses of workmen and give a great immediate popularity in a constituency, leaving to posterity a heavy burden of accumulated debt. Much of the financial embarrassment of Europe is due to this source, and in most countries extravagance in government expenditure is more popular than economy. Sometimes it shows itself in a legislation which regards only proximate or immediate effects, and wholly neglects those which are distant and obscure.
A far-sighted policy sacrificing the present to a distant future becomes more difficult; measures involving new principles, but meeting present embarrassments or securing immediate popularity, are started with little consideration for the precedents they are establishing and for the more extensive changes that may follow in their train. The conditions of labour are altered for the benefit of the existing workmen, perhaps at the cost of diverting capital from some great form of industry, making it impossible to resist foreign competition, and thus in the long run restricting employment and seriously injuring the very class who were to have been benefited.
When one party has introduced a measure of this kind the other is under the strongest temptation to outbid it, and under the stress of competition and through the fear of being distanced in the race of popularity both parties often end by going much further than either had originally intended. When the rights of the few are opposed to the interests of the many there is a constant tendency to prefer the latter. It may be that the few are those who have built up an industry; who have borne all the risk and cost, who have by far the largest interest in its success. The mere fact that they are the few determines the bias of the legislators. There is a constant disposition to tamper with even clearly defined and guaranteed rights if by doing so some large class of voters can be conciliated.
Parliamentary life has many merits, but it has a manifest tendency to encourage short views. The immediate party interest becomes so absorbing that men find it difficult to look greatly beyond it. The desire of a skilful debater to use the topics that will most influence the audience before him, or the desire of a party leader to pursue the course most likely to be successful in an immediately impending contest, will often override all other considerations, and the whole tendency of parliamentary life is to concentrate attention on landmarks which are not very distant, thinking little of what is beyond.
There are other temptations of a different kind with which party leaders have to deal. One of the most serious is the tendency to force questions for which there is no genuine desire, in order to restore the unity or the zeal of a divided or dispirited party. As all politicians know, the desire for an attractive programme and a popular election cry is one of the strongest in politics, and, as they also know well, there is such a thing as manufactured public opinion and artificially stimulated agitation. Questions are raised and pushed, not because they are for the advantage of the country, but simply for the purposes of party. The leaders have often little or no power of resistance. The pressure of their followers, or of a section of their followers, becomes irresistible; ill-considered hopes are held out; rash pledges are extorted, and the party as a whole is committed. Much premature and mischievous legislation may be traced to such causes.
Another very difficult question is the manner in which governments should deal with the acts of public servants which are intended for the public service, but which in some of their parts are morally indefensible. Very few of the great acquisitions of nations have been made by means that were absolutely blameless, and in a great empire which has to deal with uncivilised or semi-civilised populations acts of violence are certain to be not infrequent. Neither in our judgments of history nor in our judgments of contemporaries is it possible to apply the full stringency of private morals to the cases of men acting in posts of great responsibility and danger amid the storms of revolution, or panic, or civil war. With the vast interests confided to their care, and the terrible dangers that surround them, measures must often be taken which cannot be wholly or at least legally justified. On the other hand, men in such circumstances are only too ready to accept the principle of Macchiavelli and of Napoleon, and to treat politics as if they had absolutely no connection with morals.
The primary duty of every statesman is to his own country. His task is to secure for many millions of the human race the highest possible amount of peace and prosperity, and a selfishness is at least not a narrow one which, while abstaining from injuring others, restricts itself to promoting the happiness of a vast section of the human race. Sacrifices and dangers which a good man would think it his clear duty to accept if they fell on himself alone wear another aspect if he is acting as trustee for a great nation and for the interests of generations who are yet unborn. Nothing is more calamitous than the divorce of politics from morals, but in practical politics public and private morals will never absolutely correspond. The public opinion of the nation will inevitably inspire and control its statesmen. It creates in all countries an ethical code which with greater or less perfection marks out for them the path of duty, and though a great statesman may do something to raise its level, he can never wholly escape its influence. In different nations it is higher or lower—in truthfulness and sincerity of diplomacy the variations are very great—but it will never be the exact code on which men act in private life. It is certainly widely different from the Sermon on the Mount.
In domestic as in foreign politics the maintenance of a high moral standard in statesmanship is impossible unless the public opinion of the country is in harmony with it. Moral declension in a nation is very swiftly followed by a corresponding decadence among its public men, and it will indeed be generally found that the standard of public men is apt to be somewhat lower than that of the better section of the public outside. They are exposed to very special temptations.
The constant habit of regarding questions with a view to party advantage, to proximate issues, to immediate popularity, which is inseparable from parliamentary government, can hardly fail to give some ply to the most honest intellect. Most questions have to be treated more or less in the way of compromise; and alliances and coalitions not very conducive to a severe standard of political morals are frequent.
Every parliament contains its notorious agitators, intriguers and self-seekers, men who have been connected with acts which may or may not have been brought within the reach of the criminal law, but have at least been sufficient to stamp their character in the eyes of honest men. Such men cannot be neglected in party combinations. Political leaders must co-operate with them in the daily intercourse and business of parliamentary life—must sometimes ask them favours—must treat them with deference and respect. Men who on some subjects and at some times have acted with glaring profligacy, on others act with judgment, moderation and even patriotism, and become useful supporters or formidable opponents. Combinations are in this way formed which are in no degree wrong, but which tend to dull the edge of moral perception and imperceptibly to lower the standard of moral judgment. In the swift changes of the party kaleidoscope the bygone is soon forgotten. The enemy of yesterday is the ally of to-day; the services of the present soon obscure the misdeeds of the past; and men insensibly grow very tolerant not only of diversities of opinion, but also of gross aberrations of conduct. The constant watchfulness of external opinion is very necessary to keep up a high standard of political morality.
Public opinion, it is true, is by no means impeccable. The tendency to believe that crimes cease to be crimes when they have a political object, and that a popular vote can absolve the worst crimes, is only too common; there are few political misdeeds which wealth, rank, genius or success will not induce large sections our society to pardon, and nations even in their best moments will not judge acts which are greatly for their own advantage with the severity of judgment that they would apply to similar acts of other nations. But when all this is admitted, it still remains true that there is a large body of public opinion which carries into all politics a sound moral sense and which places a just and righteous policy higher than any mere party interest. It is on the power and pressure of this opinion that the high character of our government must ultimately depend.
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Map of Life, by William Edward Hartpole)

POLITICAL ANIMAL

“When we survey our lives and endeavours, we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires is bound up with the existence of other human beings. We notice that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have produced, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society. The individual, if left alone from birth, would remain primitive and beastlike in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive.” – Albert Einstein, 1934.
Geoff Haselhurst, a philosopher of science, in June, 2007 has written, although people like to use the term democracy to describe our own government the truth is that they are not really democratic. The political system is actually a complex mix of ruler (president / prime minister), oligarchy (ministers / senators, academic policy advisers, government bureaucrats and large corporations), and the masses (democracy). There is clearly an interplay of all three groups that ultimately determines policy.
So the ruler has limited powers and is influenced by an oligarchy of advisers who jointly try to manipulate the masses with political spin – but they also have to get votes so they do poll the masses and this affects their policies.
The central problem is that truth and reality are not significant factors in the current system. The solution is not to try and change the system, but to change the knowledge foundations within the existing system such that truth and reality become the central factors in determining government policy.
It is also clear that truth and reality are critical foundations for humans to think and act wisely. Disagreement comes from our (mis)conceptions of truth and reality. How can humans live together? The world has grown smaller and more humans are forced to live together. The problem is larger, more acute and more complicated than it was when ancient philosophers first looked at it. How in particular can a top-dog and an under-dog be made to live together?
By nature man is a political animal. Hence man have a desire for life together, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help. Nevertheless, common interest too is a factor in bringing them together, in so far as it contributes to the good life of each. The good life is indeed their chief end, both communally and individually; but they form and continue to maintain a political association for the sake of life itself. Perhaps we may say that there is an element of good even in mere living, provided that life is not excessively beset with troubles. Certainly most men, in their desire to keep alive, are prepared to face a great deal of suffering, as if finding in life itself a certain well-being and a natural sweetness.
For the real difference between humans and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state.
It is clear that those constitutions which aim at the common good are right, as being in accord with absolute justice; while those which aim only at the good of the rulers are wrong.
Thus it is thought that justice is equality; and so it is, but not for all persons, only for those that are equal. Inequality also is thought to be just; and so it is, but not for all, only for the unequal. We make bad mistakes if we neglect this ‘for whom’ when we are deciding what is just. The reason is that we are making judgements about ourselves, and people are generally bad judges where their own interests are involved. So we must lay it down that the association which is a state exists not for the purpose of living together but for the sake of noble actions.
Then, when a large number of men of similar virtue became available, people no longer tolerated one-man rule but looked for something communal, and set up a constitution. But the good men did not remain good: they began to make money out of that which was the common property of all. And to some such development we may plausibly ascribe the origin of oligarchies, since men made wealth a thing of honour. The next change was to tyrannies, and from tyrannies to democracy. For the struggle to get rich at all costs tended to reduce numbers, and so increased the power of the multitude, who rose up and formed democracies. And now that there has been a further increase in the size of states, one might say that it is hard to avoid having a democratic constitution. Desire is like a wild beast, and anger perverts rulers and the very best of men. Hence law is intelligence without appetition.
Democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few.
(Karene Howie at spaceandmotion.com)
“A big part of our problem is that politicians are elected for only a few years at a time. In that time, they have to provide benefits that can be seen quickly, like construction jobs, new factories and shopping malls. Since social and environmental problems take years to be revealed and just as long to be averted, different politicians will be around to take the credit or the blame when they become critical. So people elected into office find themselves naturally concentrating on short-term fixes, like helping a pulp-and-paper company open a new mill. They know they will be long gone by the time the effects of deforestation or dioxin contamination from that mill are felt by the public.”
(David Suzuki on Naked Ape to Superspecies)
“Any government is in itself an evil in so far as it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny. However, except for a small number of anarchists, every one of us is convinced that civilized society cannot exist without a government. In a healthy nation there is a kind of dynamic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny. It is obvious that the danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over all the channels of education and information as well as over the economic existence of every single citizen.” – Albert Einstein, 1947.
“Our purpose in founding our state was not to promote the happiness of a single class, but, so far as possible, of the whole community. Our idea was that we were most likely to justice in such a community, and so be able to decide the question we are trying to answer. We are therefore at the moment trying to construct what we think is a happy community by securing the happiness not of a select minority, but of a whole.” – Plato.
“If you get, in public affairs, men who are so morally impoverished that they have nothing they can contribute themselves, but who hope to snatch some compensation for their own inadequacy from a political career, there can never be good government. They start fighting for power, and the consequent internal and domestic conflicts ruin both them and society. True indeed.
Is there any other life except that of true philosophy which looks down on political power? None that I know of.
And yet the only men to get power should be men who do not love it, otherwise we shall have rivals’ quarrels. That is certain.
Who else, then, are we to compel to undertake the responsibilities of ruling, if it is not to be those who know most about good government and who yet value other things more highly than politics and its rewards? There is no one else” – Plato.
(Karene Howie at spaceandmotion)

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT OR PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT

Jean-Jacques Rousseau painted portrait
Current Loc Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin
Originally uploaded to en by User:Sir Paul
From WIKIPEDIA

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Swiss-born French philosopher, social and political theorist, musician, botanist, and one of the most eloquent writers of the Age of Enlightenment, was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712, and was raised by an aunt and uncle following the death of his mother a few days after his birth. He was apprenticed at the age of 13 to an engraver, but after three years he ran away and became secretary and companion to Madame Louise de Warens, a wealthy and charitable woman who had a profound influence on Rousseau’s life and writings. In 1742 Rousseau moved to Paris, where he earned his living as a music teacher, music copyist, and political secretary. He became a close friend of the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who commissioned him to write articles on music for the French Encyclopédie.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau contributed to many branches of social philosophy. The Social Contract is a classic defense of the democratic form of government. Rousseau trusted the “general will” of a democratic people, as expressed by a vote of the majority, to make all important decisions. This trust in the majority contrasts greatly with the ideas of philosophers who championed minority and individual rights.
Here are excerpts from THE SOCIAL CONTRACT OR PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT by Jean Jacques Rousseau 1762, Translated by G. D. H. Cole:
“Under THE FIRST SOCIETIES he wrote , MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
THE most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.
Under THE RIGHT OF THE STRONGEST, Rousseau wrote, The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will — at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty? As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word “right” adds nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing.
Obey the powers that be. If this means yield to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: All power comes from God, we admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are forbidden to call in the doctor? A brigand surprises us at the edge of a wood: must we not merely surrender our purse on compulsion; but, even if we could withhold it, are we in conscience bound to give it up? For certainly the pistol he holds is also a power. Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.
Next, Rousseau talked about SLAVERY. If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why could not a whole people do the same and make itself subject to a king? A man who becomes the slave of another does not give himself; he sells himself, at the least for his subsistence: but for what does a people sell itself? A king is so far from furnishing his subjects with their subsistence that he gets his own only from them; and, according to Rabelais, kings do not live on nothing. Do subjects then give their persons on condition that the king takes their goods also? We fail to see what they have left to preserve. To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that he who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness creates no right.
The right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: “I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep t as long as I like.”
He also said that SOVEREIGNTY IS INDIVISIBLE. Political theorists, unable to divide Sovereignty in principle, divide it according to its object: into force and will; into legislative power and executive power; into rights of taxation, justice and war; into internal administration and power of foreign treaty. Sometimes they confuse all these sections, and sometimes they distinguish them; they turn the Sovereign into a fantastic being composed of several connected pieces: it is as if they were making man of several bodies, one with eyes, one with arms, another with feet, and each with nothing besides. We are told that the jugglers of Japan dismember a child before the eyes of the spectators; then they throw all the members into the air one after another, and the child falls down alive and whole. The conjuring tricks of political theorists are very like that; they first dismember the Body politic by an illusion worthy of a fair, and then join it together again we know not how.
And then he asked WHETHER THE GENERAL WILL IS FALLIBLE. It follows from what has gone before that the general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.
There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences.
The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves. Why is it that the general will is always in the right, and that all continually will the happiness of each one, unless it is because there is not a man who does not think of “each” as meaning him, and consider himself in voting for all? This proves that equality of rights and the idea of justice which such equality creates originate in the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly in the very nature of man. It proves that the general will, to be really such, must be general in its object as well as its essence; that it must both come from all and apply to all; and that it loses its natural rectitude when it is directed to some particular and determinate object, because in such a case we are judging of something foreign to us, and have no true principle of equity to guide us.
Indeed, as soon as a question of particular fact or right arises on a point not previously regulated by a general convention, the matter becomes contentious. It is a case in which the individuals concerned are one party, and the public the other, but in which I can see neither the law that ought to be followed nor the judge who ought to give the decision. In such a case, it would be absurd to propose to refer the question to an express decision of the general will, which can be only the conclusion reached by one of the parties and in consequence will be, for the other party, merely an external and particular will, inclined on this occasion to injustice and subject to error.
We also have THE RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH, Rousseau then explained. The right of pardoning or exempting the guilty from a penalty imposed by the law and pronounced by the judge belongs only to the authority which is superior to both judge and law, i.e., the Sovereign; each its right in this matter is far from clear, and the cases for exercising it are extremely rare. In a well-governed State, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a State is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity. Under the Roman Republic, neither the Senate nor the Consuls ever attempted to pardon; even the people never did so, though it sometimes revoked its own decision. Frequent pardons mean that crime will soon need them no longer, and no one can help seeing whither that leads. Let us leave these questions to the just man who has never offended, and would himself stand in no need of pardon.
Next, Rousseau wrote about THE PEOPLE. As, before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and sounds the site to see if it will bear the weight, the wise legislator does not begin by laying down laws good in themselves, but by investigating the fitness of the people, for which they are destined, to receive them. Plato refused to legislate for the Arcadians and the Cyrenæans, because he knew that both peoples were rich and could not put up with equality; and good laws and bad men were found together in Crete, because Minos had inflicted discipline on a people already burdened with vice.
A thousand nations have achieved earthly greatness, that could never have endured good laws; even such as could have endured them could have done so only for a very brief period of their long history. Most peoples, like most men, are docile only in youth; as they grow old they become incorrigible. When once customs have become established and prejudices inveterate, it is dangerous and useless to attempt their reformation; the people, like the foolish and cowardly patients who rave at sight of the doctor, can no longer bear that any one should lay hands on its faults to remedy them.
There are indeed times in the history of States when, just as some kinds of illness turn men’s heads and make them forget the past, periods of violence and revolutions do to peoples what these crises do to individuals: horror of the past takes the place of forgetfulness, and the State, set on fire by civil wars, is born again, so to speak, from its ashes, and takes on anew, fresh from the jaws of death, the vigor of youth. Such were Sparta at the time of Lycurgus, Rome after the Tarquins, and, in modern times, Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of the tyrants.
Youth is not infancy. There is for nations, as for men, a period of youth, or, shall we say, maturity, before which they should not be made subject to laws; but the maturity of a people is not always easily recognizable, and, if it is anticipated, the work is spoilt. One people is amenable to discipline from the beginning; another, not after ten centuries. Russia will never be really civilized, because it was civilized too soon. Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing. He did some good things, but most of what he did was out of place. He saw that his people was barbarous, but did not see that it was not ripe for civilization: he wanted to civilize it when it needed only hardening. His first wish was to make Germans or Englishmen, when he ought to have been making Russians; and he prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might have been by persuading them that they were what they are not. In this fashion too a French teacher turns out his pupil to be an infant prodigy, and for the rest of his life to be nothing whatsoever. The empire of Russia will aspire to conquer Europe, and will itself be conquered. The Tartars, its subjects or neighbors, will become its masters.
In defining CIVIL LIBERTY , Jean Jacques Rousseau said, by equality, we should understand, not that the degrees of power and riches are to be absolutely identical for everybody; but that power shall never be great enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself which implies, on the part of the great, moderation in goods and position, and, on the side of the common sort, moderation in avarice and covetousness.
What makes a good government, Rousseau again asked. He answered, THE question “What absolutely is the best government?” is unanswerable as well as indeterminate; or rather, there are as many good answers as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative situations of all nations. But if it is asked by what sign we may know that a given people is well or ill governed, that is another matter, and the question, being one of fact, admits of an answer. It is not, however, answered, because everyone wants to answer it in his own way. Subjects extol public tranquility, citizens individual liberty; the one class prefers security of possessions, the other that of person; the one regards as the best government that which is most severe, the other maintains that the mildest is the best; the one wants crimes punished, the other wants them prevented; the one wants the State to be feared by its neighbors, the other prefers that it should be ignored; the one is content if money circulates, the other demands that the people shall have bread. Even if an agreement were come to on these and similar points, should we have got any further? As moral qualities do not admit of exact measurement, agreement about the mark does not mean agreement about the valuation.
Next Rousseau talked about THE DEATH OF THE BODY POLITIC. The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction. But both may have a constitution that is more or less robust and suited to preserve them a longer or a shorter time. The constitution of man is the work of nature; that of the State the work of art. It is not in men’s power to prolong their own lives; but it is for them to prolong as much as possible the life of the State, by giving it the best possible constitution. The best constituted State will have an end; but it will end later than any other, unless some unforeseen accident brings about its untimely destruction.
The life-principle of the body politic lies in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the heart of the State; the executive power is its brain, which causes the movement of all the parts. The brain may become paralyzed and the individual still live. A man may remain an imbecile and live; but as soon as the heart ceases to perform its functions, the animal is dead. The State subsists by means not of the laws, but of the legislative power. Yesterday’s law is not binding to-day; but silence is taken for tacit consent, and the Sovereign is held to confirm incessantly the laws it does not abrogate as it might. All that it has once declared itself to will it wills always, unless it revokes its declaration.
Why then is so much respect paid to old laws? For this very reason. We must believe that nothing but the excellence of old acts of will can have preserved them so long: if the Sovereign had not recognized them as throughout salutary, it would have revoked them a thousand times. This is why, so far from growing weak, the laws continually gain new strength in any well constituted State; the precedent of antiquity makes them daily more venerable: while wherever the laws grow weak as they become old, this proves that there is no longer a legislative power, and that the State is dead.
HOW THE SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY MAINTAINS ITSELF, Rousseau asked. He answered, Sovereign, having no force other than the legislative power, acts only by means of the laws; and the laws being solely the authentic acts of the general will, the Sovereign cannot act save when the people is assembled. The people in assembly, we shall be told, is a mere chimera. It is so to-day, but two thousand years ago it was not so. Has man’s nature changed?
The bounds of possibility, in moral matters, are less narrow than we imagine: it is our weaknesses, our vices and our prejudices that confine them. Base souls have no belief in great men; vile slaves smile in mockery at the name of liberty. Let us judge of what can be done by what has been done. We shall say nothing of the Republics of ancient Greece; but the Roman Republic was, to our mind, a great State, and the town of Rome a great town. The last census showed that there were in Rome four hundred thousand citizens capable of bearing arms, and the last computation of the population of the Empire showed over four million citizens, excluding subjects, foreigners, women, children and slaves. What difficulties might not be supposed to stand in the way of the frequent assemblage of the vast population of this capital and its neighborhood. Yet few weeks passed without the Roman people being in assembly, and even being so several times. It exercised not only the rights of Sovereignty, but also a part of those of government. It dealt with certain matters, and judged certain cases, and this whole people was found in the public meeting-place hardly less often as magistrates than as citizen we went back to the earliest history of nations, we should find that most ancient governments, even those of monarchical form, such as the Macedonian and the Frankish, had similar councils. In any case, the one incontestable fact that was given is an answer to all difficulties; it is good logic to reason from the actual to the possible.
Rousseau believed that THE INSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT IS NOT A CONTRACT. It has been held that this act of establishment was a contract between the people and the rulers it sets over itself, — a contract in which conditions were laid down between the two parties binding the one to command and the other to obey. It will be admitted, he is sure, that this is an odd kind of contract to enter into. But let us see if this view can be upheld. First, the supreme authority can no more be modified than it can be alienated; to limit it is to destroy it. It is absurd and contradictory for the Sovereign to set a superior over itself; to bind itself to obey a master would be to return to absolute liberty.
There is only one contract in the State, and that is the act of association, which in itself excludes the existence of a second. It is impossible to conceive of any public contract that would not be a violation of the first.
Under THE INSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT Rousseau asked, Under what general idea then should the act by which government is instituted be conceived as falling? He began by stating that the act is complex, as being composed of two others — the establishment of the law and its execution. By the former, the Sovereign decrees that there shall be a governing body established in this or that form; this act is clearly a law. By the latter, the people nominates the rulers who are to be entrusted with the government that has been established. This nomination, being a particular act, is clearly not a second law, but merely a consequence of the first and a function of government.
WHAT was just said makes it clear that the institution of government is not a contract, but a law; that the depositories of the executive power are not the people’s masters, but its officers; that it can set them up and pull them down when it likes; that for them there is no question of contract, but of obedience and that in taking charge of the functions the State imposes on them they are doing no more than fulfilling their duty as citizens, without having the remotest right to argue about the conditions. When therefore the people sets up an hereditary government, whether it be monarchical and confined to one family, or aristocratic and confined to a class, what it enters into is not an undertaking; the administration is given a provisional form, until the people chooses to order it otherwise is true that such changes are always dangerous, and that the established government should never be touched except when it comes to be incompatible with the public good; but the circumspection this involves is a maxim of policy and not a rule of right, and the State is no more bound to leave civil authority in the hands of its rulers than military authority in the hands of its generals.
Does it follow that the general will is exterminated or corrupted? Not at all: it is always constant, unalterable and pure; but it is subordinated to other wills which encroach upon its sphere. Each man, in detaching his interest from the common interest, sees clearly that he cannot entirely separate them; but his share in the public mishaps seems to him negligible beside the exclusive good he aims at making his own. Apart from this particular good, he wills the general good in his own interest, as strongly as any one else. Even in selling his vote for money, he does not extinguish in himself the general will, but only eludes it. The fault he commits is that of changing the state of the question, and answering something different from what he is asked. Instead of saying, by his vote, “It is to the advantage of the State,” he says, “It is of advantage to this or that man or party that this or that view should prevail.” Thus the law of public order in assemblies is not so much to maintain in them the general will as to secure that the question be always put to it, and the answer always given by it.
We could here set down many reflections on the simple right of voting in every act of Sovereignty — a right which no one can take from the citizens — and also on the right of stating views, making proposals, dividing and discussing, which the government is always most careful to leave solely to its members, but this important subject would need a treatise to itself, and it is impossible to say everything in a single work.
On VOTING Rousseau further explained, There is but one law which, from its nature, needs unanimous consent. This is the social compact; for civil association is the most voluntary of all acts. Every man being born free and his own master, no one, under any pretext whatsoever, can make any man subject without his consent. To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man. If then there are opponents when the social compact is made, their opposition does not invalidate the contract, but merely prevents them from being included in it. They are foreigners among citizens. When the State is instituted, residence constitutes consent; to dwell within its territory is to submit to the Sovereign. Apart from this primitive contract, the vote of the majority always binds all the rest. This follows from the contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How are the opponents at once free and subject to laws they have not agreed to?
Rousseau said The question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens and free. When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion that is contrary to our own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that we were mistaken, and that what we thought to be the general will was not so. If our particular opinion had carried the day we should have achieved the opposite of what was our will; and it is in that case that we should not have been free. This presupposes, indeed, that all the qualities of the general will still reside in the majority: when they cease to do so, whatever side a man may take, liberty is no longer possible.
ELECTIONS by lot, Rousseau said, would have few disadvantages in a real democracy, in which, as equality would everywhere exist in morals and talents as well as in principles and fortunes, it would become almost a matter of indifference who was chosen. But it was already said that a real democracy is only an ideal.
When choice and lot are combined, positions that require special talents, such as military posts, should be filled by the former; the latter does for cases, such as judicial offices, in which good sense, justice, and integrity are enough, because in a State that is well constituted, these qualities are common to all the citizens. As for the method of taking the vote, it was among the ancient Romans as simple as their morals, although not so simple as at Sparta. Each man declared his vote aloud, and a clerk duly wrote it down; the majority in each tribe determined the vote of the tribe, the majority of the tribes that of the people, and so with curiæ and centuries. This custom was good as long as honesty was triumphant among the citizens, and each man was ashamed to vote publicly in favor of an unjust proposal or an unworthy subject; but, when the people grew corrupt and votes were bought, it was fitting that voting should be secret in order that purchasers might be restrained by mistrust, and rogues be given the means of not being traitors.
We should not wish to govern a people that has been corrupted by the laws that a good people requires. There is no better proof of this rule than the long life of the Republic of Venice, of which the shadow still exists, solely because its laws are suitable only for men who are wicked.
The citizens were provided, therefore, with tablets by means of which each man could vote without any one knowing how he voted: new methods were also introduced for collecting the tablets, for counting voices, for comparing numbers, etc.; but all these precautions did not prevent the good faith of the officers charged with these functions from being often suspect. Finally, to prevent intrigues and trafficking in votes, edicts were issued; but their very number proves how useless they were.
Concluding, Rousseau said that he has laid down the true principles of political right, and tried to give the State a basis of its own to rest on, he ought next to strengthen it by its external relations, which would include the law of nations, commerce, the right of war and conquest, public right, leagues, negotiations, treaties, etc. But all this forms a new subject that is far too vast for his narrow scope. He ought throughout to have kept to a more limited sphere.”

THE ULTIMATE VINDICATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC FAITH

As a student between 1877 and 1881, Jane Addams (6 Sept. 1860-21 May 1935), was among the first generation of college-educated women in the United States. She was an exemplary student and a charismatic campus leader, serving as class president all four years, editor of the school magazine, president of the literary society, and valedictorian. Ultimately, Addams was the first student to receive a bachelor’s degree from Rockford, an event that marked the school’s transition to collegiate status.

 

Jane Addams
Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division

Image from the United States Library

At the peak of her popularity in the years between 1909 and 1915, Addams became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (later the National Conference of Social Work), a vice president of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association and pro-suffrage columnist for the Ladies’ Home Journal, a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the author of six books, including her bestselling autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910).
Before World War I, Addams had been the most famous and most respected American woman of her day. In 1906 the British labor leader John Burns called her “the only saint America has produced.” In 1912 the Philadelphia North American called her “probably the most widely beloved of her sex in all the world.” In 1913 the Twilight Club of New York asked three thousand “representative Americans” to name America’s most socially useful Americans and Addams was listed first on over half of the ballots. That same year, the Independent asked its readers, “who among our contemporaries are of the most value to the community?” In that poll Addams came in second to Thomas Edison. As a result of her pacifism during the war, however, Addams’s public image was transformed from saint to villain, and during the reactionary 1920s, many conservatives in the United States regarded her as a dangerous radical with suspicious ties to subversives.
During the last fifteen years of her life the criticisms of Addams darkened but did not defeat her political activism. She continued to lead Hull-House but spent increasing amounts of time and energy on international peace efforts. In her capacity as president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom she traveled often to Europe and Asia, meeting with a wide variety of diplomats and civic leaders and reiterating her Victorian belief in women’s special mission to preserve peace. Recognition of these efforts came with a gradual thaw in the U.S. political climate, and by the late 1920s Addams had regained her stature as a beloved public figure. The culmination of this restoration came with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Addams in 1931. As the first U.S. woman to win the prize, Addams was applauded for her “expression of an essentially American democracy of spirit.”
Age and ill health prevented Addams from playing an active role in the New Deal, but she did serve on the Chicago advisory committee of the housing division of the Public Works Administration and was one of the vice presidents of the American Association of Social Security. She was dismayed by the depression’s widespread poverty but welcomed the opportunity it provided to expand public responsibility for the common welfare.
Addams died of cancer in Chicago, ten days after a banquet in Washington celebrating the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and its founder. Thousands attended her funeral in the courtyard of Hull-House and agreed with Walter Lippmann’s editorial eulogy declaring her career “the ultimate vindication of the democratic faith.”
In DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS, Addams has written , “we realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement.
There are many people in every community who have not felt the “social compunction,” who do not share the effort toward a higher social morality, who are even unable to sympathetically interpret it. Some of these have been shielded from the inevitable and salutary failures which the trial of new powers involve, because they are content to attain standards of virtue demanded by an easy public opinion, and others of them have exhausted their moral energy in attaining to the current standard of individual and family righteousness.
There is no doubt that, in the effort to sustain the moral energy necessary to work out a more satisfactory social relation, the individual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately go into the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he considers the higher claim.
If we could only be judged or judge other people by purity of motive, life would be much simplified, but that would be to abandon the contention made in the first chapter, that the processes of life are as important as its aims. We can all recall acquaintances of whose integrity of purpose we can have no doubt, but who cause much confusion as they proceed to the accomplishment of that purpose, who indeed are often insensible to their own mistakes and harsh in their judgments of other people because they are so confident of their own inner integrity.
There is no doubt that the great difficulty we experience in reducing to action our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that we have not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even to fuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement. We have all been at times entertained by the futile efforts of half a dozen highly individualized people gathered together as a committee. Their aimless attempts to find a common method of action have recalled the wavering motion of a baby’s arm before he has learned to coördinate his muscles.
If, as is many times stated, we are passing from an age of individualism to one of association, there is no doubt that for decisive and effective action the individual still has the best of it. He will secure efficient results while committees are still deliberating upon the best method of making a beginning. And yet, if the need of the times demand associated effort, it may easily be true that the action which appears ineffective, and yet is carried out upon the more highly developed line of associated effort, may represent a finer social quality and have a greater social value than the more effective individual action. It is possible that an individual may be successful, largely because he conserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put any of his energy into the training which will give him the ability to act with others. The individual acts promptly, and we are dazzled by his success while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in industrial relations, as existing between the owner of a large factory and his employees.
Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer than industrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrial control to domestic and social arrangements. They felt the lack of democracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in these matters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence. The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directing the social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find out their desires, and without any organization through which to give them social expression. The president of the company was, moreover, so confident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test the righteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of the men. He doubtless built the town from a sincere desire to give his employees the best surroundings. As it developed, he gradually took toward it the artist attitude toward his own creation, which has no thought for the creation itself but is absorbed in the idea it stands for, and he ceased to measure the usefulness of the town by the standard of the men’s needs. This process slowly darkened his glints of memory, which might have connected his experience with that of his men. It is possible to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor until the power of attaining a simple human relationship with the beneficiaries, that of frank equality with them, is gone, and there is left no mutual interest in a common cause. To perform too many good deeds may be to lose the power of recognizing good in others; to be too absorbed in carrying out a personal plan of improvement may be to fail to catch the great moral lesson which our times offer.
We have assumed that much of our ethical maladjustment in social affairs arises from the fact that we are acting upon a code of ethics adapted to individual relationships, but not to the larger social relationships to which it is bunglingly applied. In addition, however, to the consequent strain and difficulty, there is often an honest lack of perception as to what the situation demands.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our political life as it manifests itself in certain quarters of every great city. It is most difficult to hold to our political democracy and to make it in any sense a social expression and not a mere governmental contrivance, unless we take pains to keep on common ground in our human experiences. Otherwise there is in various parts of the community an inevitable difference of ethical standards which becomes responsible for much misunderstanding.
It is difficult both to interpret sympathetically the motives and ideals of those who have acquired rules of conduct in experience widely different from our own, and also to take enough care in guarding the gains already made, and in valuing highly enough the imperfect good so painfully acquired and, at the best, so mixed with evil. This wide difference in daily experience exhibits itself in two distinct attitudes toward politics. The well-to-do men of the community think of politics as something off by itself; they may conscientiously recognize political duty as part of good citizenship, but political effort is not the expression of their moral or social life. As a result of this detachment, “reform movements,” started by business men and the better element, are almost wholly occupied in the correction of political machinery and with a concern for the better method of administration, rather than with the ultimate purpose of securing the welfare of the people. They fix their attention so exclusively on methods that they fail to consider the final aims of city government. This accounts for the growing tendency to put more and more responsibility upon executive officers and appointed commissions at the expense of curtailing the power of the direct representatives of the voters. Reform movements tend to become negative and to lose their educational value for the mass of the people. The reformers take the rôle of the opposition. They give themselves largely to criticisms of the present state of affairs, to writing and talking of what the future must be and of certain results which should be obtained. In trying to better matters, however, they have in mind only political achievements which they detach in a curious way from the rest of life, and they speak and write of the purification of politics as of a thing set apart from daily life.
On the other hand, the real leaders of the people are part of the entire life of the community which they control, and so far as they are representative at all, are giving a social expression to democracy. They are often politically corrupt, but in spite of this they are proceeding upon a sounder theory. Although they would be totally unable to give it abstract expression, they are really acting upon a formulation made by a shrewd English observer; namely, that, “after the enfranchisement of the masses, social ideals enter into political programmes, and they enter not as something which at best can be indirectly promoted by government, but as something which it is the chief business of government to advance directly.”
Men living near to the masses of voters, and knowing them intimately, recognize this and act upon it; they minister directly to life and to social needs. They realize that the people as a whole are clamoring for social results, and they hold their power because they respond to that demand. They are corrupt and often do their work badly; but they at least avoid the mistake of a certain type of business men who are frightened by democracy, and have lost their faith in the people. The two standards are similar to those seen at a popular exhibition of pictures where the cultivated people care most for the technique of a given painting, the moving mass for a subject that shall be domestic and human.
In certain stages of moral evolution, a man is incapable of action unless the results will benefit himself or some one of his acquaintances, and it is a long step in moral progress to set the good of the many before the interest of the few, and to be concerned for the welfare of a community without hope of an individual return. How far the selfish politician befools his constituents into believing that their interests are identical with his own; how far he presumes upon their inability to distinguish between the individual and social virtues, an inability which he himself shares with them; and how far he dazzles them by the sense of his greatness, and a conviction that they participate therein, it is difficult to determine.
Morality certainly develops far earlier in the form of moral fact than in the form of moral ideas, and it is obvious that ideas only operate upon the popular mind through will and character, and must be dramatized before they reach the mass of men.
Ethics as well as political opinions may be discussed and disseminated among the sophisticated by lectures and printed pages, but to the common people they can only come through example—through a personality which seizes the popular imagination. The advantage of an unsophisticated neighborhood is, that the inhabitants do not keep their ideas as treasures—they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they have. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In a neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the political morality of his constituents.
Nothing is more certain than that the quality which a heterogeneous population, living in one of the less sophisticated wards, most admires is the quality of simple goodness; that the man who attracts them is the one whom they believe to be a good man. We all know that children long “to be good” with an intensity which they give to no other ambition. We can all remember that the earliest strivings of our childhood were in this direction, and that we venerated grown people because they had attained perfection.
Primitive people are still in this stage. They want to be good, and deep down in their hearts they admire nothing so much as the good man. Abstract virtues are too difficult for their untrained minds to apprehend, and many of them are still simple enough to believe that power and wealth come only to good people.
The successful candidate, then, must be a good man according to the morality of his constituents. He must not attempt to hold up too high a standard, nor must he attempt to reform or change their standards. His safety lies in doing on a large scale the good deeds which his constituents are able to do only on a small scale. If he believes what they believe and does what they are all cherishing a secret ambition to do, he will dazzle them by his success and win their confidence. There is a certain wisdom in this course. There is a common sense in the mass of men which cannot be neglected with impunity, just as there is sure to be an eccentricity in the differing and reforming individual which it is perhaps well to challenge.
Look at the constant kindness of the poor to each other, and that they unfailingly respond to the need and distresses of their poorer neighbors even when in danger of bankruptcy themselves. The kindness which a poor man shows his distressed neighbor is doubtless heightened by the consciousness that he himself may be in distress next week; he therefore stands by his friend when he gets too drunk to take care of himself, when he loses his wife or child, when he is evicted for non-payment of rent, when he is arrested for a petty crime. It seems to such a man entirely fitting that his alderman should do the same thing on a larger scale—that he should help a constituent out of trouble, merely because he is in trouble, irrespective of the justice involved.
We are constantly underestimating the amount of sentiment among simple people. The songs which are most popular among them are those of a reminiscent old age, in which the ripened soul calmly recounts and regrets the sins of his youth, songs in which the wayward daughter is forgiven by her loving parents, in which the lovers are magnanimous and faithful through all vicissitudes. The tendency is to condone and forgive, and not hold too rigidly to a standard. In the theatres it is the magnanimous man, the kindly reckless villain who is always applauded. So shrewd an observer as Samuel Johnson once remarked that it was surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society contained.
According to the same law, the positive evils of corrupt government are bound to fall heaviest upon the poorest and least capable. When the water is foul, the prosperous buy water bottled at distant springs; the poor have no alternative but the typhoid fever which comes from using the city’s supply. When the garbage contracts are not enforced, the well-to-do pay for private service; the poor suffer the discomfort and illness which are inevitable from a foul atmosphere. The prosperous business man has a certain choice as to whether he will treat with the “boss” politician or preserve his independence on a smaller income; but to a day laborer it is a choice between obeying the commands of a political “boss” or practical starvation. Again, a more intelligent man may philosophize a little upon the present state of corruption, and reflect that it is but a phase of our commercialism, from which we are bound to emerge; at any rate, he may give himself the solace of literature and ideals in other directions, but the more ignorant man who lives only in the narrow present has no such resource; slowly the conviction enters his mind that politics is a matter of favors and positions, that self-government means pleasing the “boss” and standing in with the “gang.” This slowly acquired knowledge he hands on to his family. During the month of February his boy may come home from school with rather incoherent tales about leaders, and the father may for the moment be fired to tell of Garibaldi, but such talk is only periodic, and the long year round the fortunes of the entire family, down to the opportunity to earn food and shelter, depend upon the “boss.”
What the corrupt alderman demands from his followers and largely depends upon is a sense of loyalty, a standing-by the man who is good to you, who understands you, and who gets you out of trouble. All the social life of the voter from the time he was a little boy and played “craps” with his “own push,” and not with some other “push,” has been founded on this sense of loyalty and of standing in with his friends. Now that he is a man, he likes the sense of being inside a political organization, of being trusted with political gossip, of belonging to a set of fellows who understand things, and whose interests are being cared for by a strong friend in the city council itself. All this is perfectly legitimate, and all in the line of the development of a strong civic loyalty, if it were merely socialized and enlarged. Such a voter has already proceeded in the forward direction in so far as he has lost the sense of isolation, and has abandoned the conviction that city government does not touch his individual affairs. Even Mill claims that the social feelings of man, his desire to be at unity with his fellow-creatures, are the natural basis for morality, and he defines a man of high moral culture as one who thinks of himself, not as an isolated individual, but as a part in a social organism.
Would it be dangerous to conclude that the corrupt politician himself, because he is democratic in method, is on a more ethical line of social development than the reformer, who believes that the people must be made over by “good citizens” and governed by “experts”? The former at least are engaged in that great moral effort of getting the mass to express itself, and of adding this mass energy and wisdom to the community as a whole.
The wide divergence of experience makes it difficult for the good citizen to understand this point of view, and many things conspire to make it hard for him to act upon it. He is more or less a victim to that curious feeling so often possessed by the good man, that the righteous do not need to be agreeable, that their goodness alone is sufficient, and that they can leave the arts and wiles of securing popular favor to the self-seeking. This results in a certain repellent manner, commonly regarded as the apparel of righteousness, and is further responsible for the fatal mistake of making the surroundings of “good influences” singularly unattractive; a mistake which really deserves a reprimand quite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making the surroundings of “evil influences” so beguiling. Both are akin to that state of mind which narrows the entrance into a wider morality to the eye of a needle, and accounts for the fact that new moral movements have ever and again been inaugurated by those who have found themselves in revolt against the conventionalized good.”
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Democracy and Social Ethics, by Jane Addams)

A wall-mounted quote by Jane Addams
The American Adventure
The World Showcase pavilion
Walt Disney World’s Epcot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Centennial Dinner honoring Jane Addams
Photo by Wallace Kirkland//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

CORRELATED ARTS

Poetry, music, and painting are three correlated arts, connected not merely by an accidental classification, but by their intrinsic nature. For they all possess the same essential function, namely, to interpret the uninterpretable, to reveal the undiscoverable, to express the inexpressible.
They all attempt, in different forms and through different languages, to translate the invisible and eternal into sensuous forms, and through sensuous forms to produce in other souls experiences akin to those in the soul of the translator, be he poet, musician, or painter.
But while it is true that these three arts are correlative and co-operative, they do not duplicate one another. Each not only speaks in a language of its own, but expresses in that language a life which the others cannot express. As color and fragrance combine to make the flower, but the color expresses what the fragrance cannot express, and the fragrance expresses what the color cannot express, so in the musical drama, music, poetry, and painting combine, not by duplicating but by supplementing each other.
One may describe in language a symphony; but no description will produce the effect which the symphony produces. One may describe a painting; but no description will produce the effect which the painting will produce. So neither music, nor painting, nor both combined, can produce the same effect on the soul as poetry.
The music and scenery are no more accessories to the words than the words are accessories to the music and scenery. The three combine in a triple language to express and produce one life, and it can be expressed and produced in no other way than by the combination of the three arts in harmonious action. This is the reason why no parlor readings can ever take the place of the theatre, and no concert performance can ever take the place of the opera. This is the reason why all attempts to suppress the theatre and opera are and always will be in vain. There are attempts to suppress the expression and awakening of a life which can neither be expressed nor awakened in any other way; and suppression of life, however successfully it may be accomplished for a time, is never permanently possible.
Man is not a creator, he is only a discoverer. The imagination is not creative, it is only reportorial. Ideals are realities; imagination is seeing. The musician, the artist, the poet, discover life which others have not discovered, and each with his own instrument interprets that life to those less sensitive than himself.
In one sense and in one only can art be called creative: the artist, whether he be painter, musician, or poet, so interprets to other men the experience which has been created in him by his vision of the supersensible and eternal, that he evokes in them a similar experience. He is a creator only as he conveys to others the life which has been created in himself. As the electric wire creates light in the home; as the band creates the movement in the machinery; thus and only thus does the artist create life in those that wait upon him. He is in truth an interpreter and transmitter, not a creator. Nor can he interpret what he has not first received, nor transmit what he has not first experienced. The music, the painting, the poem are merely the instruments which he uses for that purpose. The life must first be in him or the so-called music, painting, poem are but dead simulacra; imitations of art, not real art. This is the reason why no mechanical device, be it never so skillfully contrived, can ever take the place of the living artist. The pianola can never rival the living performer; nor the orchestrion the orchestra; nor the chromo the painting. No mechanical device has yet been invented to produce poetry; even if some shrewd people should invent a printing machine which would pick out rhymes as some printing machines seem to pick out letters, the result would not be a poem. This is the reason too why mere perfection of execution never really satisfies. “She sings like a bird.” Yes! and that is exactly the difficulty with her. We want one who sings like a woman. The popular criticism of the mere musical expert that he has no soul, is profound and true. It is soul we want; for the piano, the organ, the violin, the orchestra, are only instruments for the transmission of soul. This is also the reason why the most flawless conductor is not always the best. He must have a soul capable of reading the soul of the composer; and the orchestra must receive the life of the composer as that is interpreted to them through the life of the conductor, or the performance will be a soulless performance.
Into each of these arts, therefore—music, painting, poetry—enter two elements: the inner and the outer, the truth and the language, the reality and the symbol, the life and the expression.
The painter must have something to express, but he must also have skill to express it; the musician must have music in his soul, but he must also have a power of instrumentation; the poet must feel the truth, or he is no poet, but he must also have power to express what he feels in such forms as will create a similar feeling in his readers, or he is still no poet.
Multitudes of women send to the newspapers poetical effusions which are not poems. The feeling of the writer is excellent, but the expression is bad. The writer has seen, but she cannot tell what she has seen; she has felt, but she cannot express her experience so as to enkindle a like experience in others. These poetical utterances of inarticulate poets are sometimes whimsical but oftener pathetic; sometimes they are like the prattle of little children who exercise their vocal organs before they have anything to say; but oftener they seem like the beseeching eyes of a dumb animal, full of affection and entreaty for which he has no vocal expression. It is just as essential that poetical feeling should have poetical expression in order to constitute poetry as it is that musical feeling should have musical expression in order to constitute music. And, on the other hand, as splashes of color without artistic feeling which they interpret are not art, as musical, sounds without musical feeling which they interpret are not music, so poetical forms without poetical feeling are not poetry. Poetical feeling in unpoetical forms may be poetical prose, but it is still prose. And on the other hand, rhymes, however musical they may be to the ear, are only rhymes, not poetry, unless they express a true poetical life. Poetry is not common thought expressed in an uncommon manner; it is not an artificial phrasing of even the higher emotions. The higher emotions have a phrasing of their own; they fall naturally—whether as the result of instinct or of habit need not here be considered—into fitting forms.
Thus the study of poetry is the study of life, because poetry is the interpretation of life. Poetry is not a mere instrument for promoting enjoyment; it does not merely dazzle the imagination and excite the emotions. Through the emotions and the imagination it both interprets life and ministers to life. When the critic attempts to express that truth, that is, to interpret the interpreter, which he can do only by translating the poetry into prose, and the language of imagination and emotion into that of philosophy, he destroys the poem in the process, much as the botanist destroys the flower in analyzing it, or the musical critic the composition in disentangling its interwoven melodies and explaining the nature of its harmonic structure. The analysis, whether of music, art, or poetry, must be followed by a synthesis, which, in the nature of the case, can be accomplished only by the hearer or reader for himself.
Not to amplify too much, we have confined these considerations to the three arts of music, painting, and poetry; but they are also applicable to sculpture and architecture. All are attempts by men of vision to interpret to the men who are not equally endowed with vision, what the invisible world about us and within us has for the enrichment of our lives. It is true that at times the arts have been sensualized, the emphasis has been put on the form of expression, not on the life expressed.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW Frontispiece
Photogravure from photograph by Hanfstaengl after portrait by Kramer.
PENELOPE AWAITING ULYSSES
The patient grief and endurance of Absence: while the tapestry woven by day stands on the frame to be unravelled by night, as the loyal wife puts off her suitors.
Painting by Rudolph von Deutsch.
ABSENCE
“What shall I do with all the days and hours
That must be counted ere I see thy face?”
From a photograph by the Berlin Photographic Co., after a painting by R. Pötzelberger.
WAIL OF PROMETHEUS BOUND
“Behold me, a god, what I endure from gods!
Behold, with throe on throe,
How, wasted by this woe,
I wrestle down the myriad years of Time!”
From photograph after a painting by G. Graeff.
PIERRE-JEAN DE BÉRANGER
From lithograph after a crayon-drawing by H. Alophe.
THOMAS HOOD
After an engraving from contemporary portrait.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
After a photograph from life by Talfourd, London.
THE COUNTRY CHURCHYARD
“Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”
After an original drawing by Harry Fenn.
LOVE AND DEATH
Death comes in,
Though Love, with outstretched arms and wings outspread,
Would bar the way.”
From photogravure after the painting by George Fredeick Watts.
WALT WHITMAN
After a life-photograph by Rockwood, New York.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
From an engraving after the drawing by George Richmond.
SIR EDWIN ARNOLD
After a life-photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.
(Adapted from The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World’s Best Poetry, Volume 3, by Various)

THE PHILOSOPHER OF FREEDOM

“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided” (Locke)
Locke (1632-1704) was born in Wrington to Puritan parents of modest means. His father was a country lawyer who served in a cavalry company on the Puritan side in the early stages of the English civil war. His father’s commander, Alexander Popham, became the local MP, and it was his patronage which allowed the young John Locke to gain an excellent education. In 1647 Locke went to Westminster School in London. The importance of Westminster school in the intellectual life of the seventeenth century can scarcely be exaggerated. Locke was a King’s Scholar. The King’s Scholars were a small group of special boys who had the privilege of living in the school and who received a stipend for two or three years before standing for election for either Christ Church, Oxford or Trinity College Cambridge. While the “major elections” were probably political, the “minor elections” or “challenges” were among the most genuinely competitive admissions processes in English schools of the period. Locke did not succeed in the challenge until 1650.
From Westminster school he went to Christ Church, Oxford, in the autumn of 1652 at the age of twenty. As Westminster school was the most important English school, so Christ Church was the most important Oxford college. Education at Oxford was medieval. Reform came, but not in Locke’s time there. The three and a half years devoted to getting a B.A. was mainly given to logic and metaphysics and the classical languages. Conversations with tutors, even between undergraduates in the Hall were in Latin.
Locke received his B.A. in February 1656. His career at Oxford, however, continued beyond his undergraduate days. In June of 1658 Locke qualified as a Master of Arts.
While living in London at Exeter House, Locke continued to be involved in philosophical discussions. James Tyrrell, one of Locke’s friends was at a meeting. He recalls the discussion being about the principles of morality and revealed religion. Thus the Oxford scholar and medical researcher came to begin the work which was to occupy him off and on over the next twenty years.
In 1674 after Shaftesbury had left the government, Locke went back to Oxford, where he acquired the degree Bachelor of medicine, and a license to practice medicine.
(By William Uzgalis at plato.stanford.edu)
Thinkers expressed their thoughts in writing and read the thoughts of others, one, foremost among their ranks, was John Locke. Briefly, the core of Locke’s beliefs are to be found in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). It is with this book that there was established the principles of modern Empiricism (the human mind begins as a tabula rasa, and we learn through experience). It is in this book, Human Understanding, that we see Locke attacking the rationalist doctrine of innate ideas. His other work naturally follows: Two Treatises of Government (1690). Locke’s Treatises were written in defense of the Glorious Revolution: that government rests on popular consent and rebellion is permissible when government subverts the ends – the protection of life, liberty, and property – for which it is established.
Locke was an empiricist, viz., all knowledge comes to us through experience. “No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” There is no such thing as innate ideas; there is no such thing as moral precepts; we are born with an empty mind, with a soft tablet (tabula rasa) ready to be writ upon by experimental impressions. Beginning blank, the human mind acquires knowledge through the use of the five senses and a process of reflection. Not only has Locke’s empiricism been a dominant tradition in British philosophy, but it has been a doctrine which with its method, experimental science, has brought on scientific discoveries ever since, scientific discoveries on which our modern world now depends.
Locke’s Second Treatise, by far, is the more influential work. In it, he set forth his theory of natural law and natural right; in it, he shows that there does exist a rational purpose to government and one need not rely on “myth, mysticism, and mystery.” Against anarchy, Locke saw his job as one who must defend government as an institution. Locke’s object was to insist not only that the public welfare was the test of good government and the basis for properly imposing obligations on the citizens of a country; but, also, that the public welfare made government necessary.
In uncivilized times, in times before government, Hobbes asserted there existed continual war with “every man, against every man.” A time of “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” On this point Locke and Hobbes were not in agreement. Locke, consistent with his philosophy, viewed man as naturally moral. The reason man would willingly contract into civil society is not to shake his brutish state, but rather that he may advance his ends (peace and security) in a more efficient manner. To achieve his ends man gives up, in favour of the state, a certain amount of his personal power and freedom.
(By Peter Landry at blupete.com)

Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
Contents ( PDF)
The complete work ( PDF, 1,722kb)
Book I ( PDF, 110kb)
Book II
Book III
Book IV

Locke, Second Treatise of Government:
Complete text ( PDF, 395kb)
chapters 1 through 6 ( PDF, 95kb)
chapters 7 through 13 ( PDF, 100kb)
chapters 14 to end ( PDF, 105kb)
Copyright ©2005-2008 Jonathan Bennett
Early Modern Texts Philosophy Topics
By Modern Day Philosophers

Among Locke’s philsophical works, the best known is his Essay concerning human understanding. In the Essay, Locke concentrates his assessment on the origins and nature of human knowledge,which is one of the fundamental questions asked in epistemology. As he gains lots of influences from his scientists friends such as Robert Boyle, he forms his system of knowledge with empiricist idioms. The first is that he establishes an account that there are two kinds of ideas, i.e. simple and complex ideas. The former such as ‘sweet’, ‘blue’,and ‘cold’ have attributes of sensory experiences to objects, whereas the latter is the compounds of the former. However, both simple and complex ideas are regarded as the mere material basis for knowledge. The extended version of Locke’s assessment of this is his distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke regards primary qualities as in solidity, extension, figure motion or rest and number all of which are intrinsic properties of material objects. The secondary qualities are characterised as colours, sounds and tastes, and they are the powers to produce various sensations in us by the primary qualities. They also depend on partly the perceptual power of an observer. For instance, a bar of chocolate, its primary quality can be portrayed as a solid brick which resembles most of all chocolate shape, and the secondary quality as ‘sweetness’, ‘bitterness’, ‘darkness’,and ‘hardness’ of the chocolate, depending on each individual’s palatal taste or other kinds. These features do not correspond to the feature of the chocolate.They are merely sensory sources of what makes a chocolate chocolate character.The primary quality corresponds to the resemblance of material objects and are ideas of being things in themselves. In a nutshell,the ideas of primary qualities have no power to produce perceptions on us but resemble the grounds of the powers to produce such ideas, (they can depict what is there in things), whereas of secondary qualities have powers to produce perceptions and can provide corresponding attributes to the material objects. Although Locke’s theory of knowledge is often attacked by many philosophers for its equivocality and inconsistency in his Essay, some other philosophers take it that his theory is only misunderstood by them. Locke’s other thought: possibility of innate moral and religious ideas, human knowledge derived from experiences.
(John Locke: general ideas of his thoughts at nobunaga.demon.co.uk)
Locke’s epitaph:
English Translation:
STOP TRAVELLER
Near this place lies JOHN LOCKE. If you are wondering what kind of man he was, he answers that he was contented with his modest lot. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. You will learn this from his writings, which will show you everything about him more truthfully than the suspect praises of an epitaph. His virtues, if indeed he had any, were too slight to be lauded by him or to be an example to you. Let his vices be buried with him. Of virtue you have an example in the gospels, should you desire it; of vice would there were none for you; of mortality surely you have one here and everywhere, and may you learn from it.
That he was born on the 29th of August in the year 1632 and that he died on the 28th of October in the year 1704. This tablet, which itself will soon perish, is a record.
(From From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
More about John Locke:
1. Dates
Born: Wrington, Somersetshire, 29 Aug. 1632
Died: Oates, Essex, 28 Oct. 1704
Dateinfo: Dates Certain
Lifespan: 72
2. Father
Occupation: Lawyer, Government Official
Also John Locke, the father was a lawyer and a clerk to the local Justices of the Peace. It is our impression that the position of clerk was not a governmental one but rather private employment by the JP’s. However, toward the end of his life the father was county clerk for sewers.
It seems clear that he was affluent. He had inherited a good fortune from his own father, although he left his own son less than he had received.
3. Nationality
Birth: English
Career: English
Death: English
4. Education
Schooling: Oxford, M.A., M.D.
Westminister School, 1646-52.
Oxford University, Christ Church, 1652-8. B.A., 1656; M.A., 1658; M.B., 1674. Locke never received the M.D., but the followings are medical degrees as though they were M.D.’s.
5. Career
Personal physician of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury
Politician
Aristocrat
His friendships with prominent government officers and scholars made him one of the most influential men of the 17th century.
(©1995 Al Van Helden at galileo.rice.edu)