Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

There really are people who need Upton Sinclair. It may be a hard fact to face perhaps, but when one faces it one is glad there is one. Some of the millionaires need Sinclair. There are others whose attention would be attracted better in more subtle ways.

The class-war socialist, though I may be at this moment in the very act of trying to make him impossible, to put him out of date, has been and is, in his own place and his own time, I gratefully acknowledge, of incalculable value.

Any man who can, by saying violent and noisy things, make rich, tired, mechanical-minded people, and poor, tired mechanical-minded people wake up enough to feel hateful has performed a public service. The hatefulness is the beginning of their being covetous for other things than the things they have. If a man has a habit of hunger he gets better and better hungers as a matter of course; bread and milk, ribbons, geraniums, millinery, bathtubs, Bibles, copartnership associations. And in the meantime the one precious thing to be looked out for in a man, and to be held sacred, is his hunger.

The one important religious value in the world is hunger and to all the men to-day who are contributing to the process of moving on hungers; whether the hungers happen to be our hungers or not or our stages of hunger or not, we say Godspeed.

There are times when the sudden sense one comes to have that the world is a struggle, a great prayer toward the sun, a tumult and groping of desire, the sense that every kind and type of desire has its time and its place in it and every kind and type of man, gives a whole new meaning to life. This sense of a now possible toleration which we come to have, some of us, opens up to us always when it comes a new world of courage about people. It makes all these dear, clumsy people about us suddenly mean something. It makes them all suddenly belong somewhere. They become, as by a kind of miracle, bathed in a new light, wrong-headed, intolerable though they be, one still sees them flowing out into the great endless stream of becoming—all these dots of the vast desire, all these queer, funny, struggling little sons of God!

It has been overlooked that social reform primarily is not a matter of legislation or of industrial or political systems, or of machinery, but a matter, of psychology, of insight into human nature and of expert reading and interpretation of the minds of men. What are they thinking about? What do they think they want?

The trades unions and employers' associations, extreme socialists and extreme Tories have so far been very bad psychologists. If the Single Tax people were as good at being intuitionalists or idea-salesmen as they are at being philosophers in ideas they would long before this have turned everything their way. They would have begun with people's hungers and worked out from them. They would have listened to people to find out what their hungers were. The people who will stop being theoretical and logical about each other and who will look hard into each other's eyes will be the people whose ideas will first come to pass. Everything we try to do or say or bring to pass in England or America is going to begin after this, not in talking, but in listening. If social reformers and industrial leaders had been good listeners, the social deadlock—England with its House of Lords and railroads both on strike and America with its great industries quarrelling—would have been arranged for and got out of the way over twenty years ago.

We have overlooked the first step of industrial reform, the rather extreme step of listening. The most hard-headed and conclusive man to settle any given industrial difficulty is the man who has the gift of divining what is going on in other people's minds, a gift for being human, a gift for treating everybody who disagrees with him as if they might possibly be human too, though they are very poor, even though they are very rich. Practical psychology has come to be not only the only solution but also the only method of our modern industrial questions. Being so human that one can guess what any possible human being would think is the one hard-headed and practical way to meet the modern labour problem.

The first symptom of being human in a man is his range and power of shrewd, happy toleration, or courage for people who know as little now as he knew once.

A man's sense of toleration is based primarily upon the range and power of his knowledge of himself, upon his power of remembering and anticipating himself, upon his laughing with God at himself, upon his habit in darkness, weariness or despair, or in silent victory and joy, of falling on his knees.