If this argument means that, instead of thinking of the various phases of social behavior as isolated from one another, we should conceive of them as so interrelated as to form something like a more or less causally connected organic whole, I agree. But if it means something else—and it frequently does—the argument is based upon a logical fallacy. The word "system" is not a causal term; it is purely descriptive. The facts referred to, whatever connections we may discover among them, are not the effects of a mysterious "system" behind the facts of human behavior; the facts themselves, taken together, are the system.
The confusion of causal and descriptive ideas is a habit common to both the intellectualist philosopher and the crowd-minded. It enables people to turn their gaze from the empirical Many to the fictitious One, from the real to the imaginary. The idea of a system behind, over, outside, and something different from the related facts which the term "system" is properly used to describe, whether that system be a world-system, a logical system, or a social system, whether it be capitalism or socialism, "system" so conceived is a favorite crowd-spook. It is the same logical fallacy as if one spoke of the temperature of this May day as the effect of the climate, when all know that the term climate is simply (to paraphrase James) the term by which we characterize the temperature, weather, etc., which we experience on this and other days. We have already seen to what use the crowd-mind puts all such generalizations.
A popular revolutionary philosophy of history pictures the procession of the ages as made up of a pageant of spook-social systems, each distinct from the others and coming in its appointed time. But social systems do not follow in a row, like elephants in a circus parade—each huge beast with its trunk coiled about the end of his predecessors tail. The greater part of this "evolutionary and revolutionary" pageantry is simply dream-stuff. Those who try to march into Utopia in such an imaginary parade are not even trying to reconstruct society; they are sociological somnambulists.
The crowd-mind clings to such pageantry because, as we saw in another connection, the crowd desires to believe that evolution guarantees its own future supremacy. It then becomes unnecessary to solve concrete problems. One need only possess an official program of the order of the parade. In other words, the crowd must persuade itself that only one solution of the social problem is possible, and that one inevitable—its own.
Such thinking wholly misconceives the nature of the social problem. Like all the practical dilemmas of life, this problem, assuming it to be in any sense a single problem, is real just because more than one solution is possible. The task here is like that of choosing a career. Whole series of partially foreseen possibilities are contingent upon certain definite choices. Aside from our choosing, many sorts of futures may be equally possible. Our intervention at this or that definite point is an act by which we will one series of possibilities rather than another into reality. But the act of intervention is never performed once for all. Each intervention leads only to new dilemmas, among which we must again choose and intervene. It is mainly in order to escape from the necessity of facing this terrifying series of unforeseeable dilemmas that the crowd-man walketh in a vain show.
In pointing out the futility of present-day revolutionary crowd-thinking, I am only striving to direct, in however small a degree, our thought and energies into channels which lead toward desired results. It is not by trombones that we are to redeem society, nor is the old order going to tumble down like the walls of Jericho, and a complete new start be given. Civilization cannot be wiped out and begun all over again. It constitutes the environment within which our reconstructive thinking must, by tedious effort, make certain definite modifications. Each such modification is a problem in itself, to be dealt with, not by belief in miracle, but by what Dewey calls "creative intelligence." Each such modification must be achieved by taking all the known facts, which are relevant, into account. As such it is a new adaptation, and the result of a series of such adaptations may be as great and radical a social transformation as one may have the courage to set as the goal of a definite policy of social effort. But there is a world of difference between social thinking of this kind, where faith is a working hypothesis, and that which ignores the concrete problems that must be solved to reach the desired goal, and, after the manner of crowds, dreams of entering fairyland, or of pulling a new world en bloc down out of the blue, by the magic of substituting new tyrannies for old.
Revolutionary crowd-thinking is not "creative intelligence." It is hocus-pocus, a sort of social magic formula like the "mutabor" in the Arabian Nights; it is an Aladdins-lamp philosophy. And here we may sum up this part of our argument. The idea of the revolution is to the crowd a symbol, the function of which is compensation for the burdens of the struggle for existence, for the feeling of social inferiority, and for desires suppressed by civilization. It is an imaginary escape from hard reality, a new-world system in which the ego seeks refuge, a defense mechanism under the compulsive influence of which crowds behave like somnambulistic individuals. It is the apotheosis of the under crowd itself and the transcendental expression and justification of its will to rule. It is made up of just those broad generalizations which are of use in keeping that crowd together. It gives the new crowd unction in its fight with the old, since it was precisely these same dream-thoughts which the old crowd wrote on its banners in the day when it, too, was blowing trumpets outside the walls of Jericho.