We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion governs the world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our legislatures are supposed to enact the will of the people, our courts are supposed to declare the will of the people, our executive to voice the will of the people, a will surrounding men like a nimbus apparently from their births on. But there is no will of the people.[[85]] We talk glibly about it but the truth is that it is such a very modern thing that it does not yet exist. There is, it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all the problems which surround us. Is this public opinion? The urge of the crowd often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated. Is this public opinion? Certain interests find a voice; one party or another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public opinion? Public opinion is that common understanding which is the driving force of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole.
We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common will, but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices for getting at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that we have a will to express; but our great need at present is not to get a chance to express our wonderful ideas, but to get some wonderful ideas to express. A more complete representation is the aim of much of our political reform, but our first requirement is surely to have something to represent. It isn’t that we need one kind of government more than another, as the image-breakers tell us, it isn’t that we need honest intentions, as the preachers tell us, our essential and vital need is a people creating a will of its own. In all the sentimental talk of democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put it into operation.
The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I have no money in my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve. The average American citizen says to himself, “It doesn’t matter very much what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core.” It is our Great Illusion. There has been much apotheosizing of the so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can’t put a wreath round “the popular will” and call it democracy. The popular will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will—the true will of the people.
Who are the people? Every individual? The majority? A theoretical average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of the “people.” We are told that we must elevate the “people.” There are no “people.” We have to create a people. The people are not an imaginary average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level that is left the people. The people are the integration of every development, of every genius, with everything else that our complex and interacting life brings about. But the method of such integration can never be through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi is vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the crowd or counting the votes in the ballot-box.
The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our political thought: that the social process is the spread of similarities by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is shared, simply because it is shared, is called public opinion. But if this opinion is shared because it has spread among large numbers by “unconscious imitation,” then it is not a genuine public opinion; to be that, the process by which it has been evolved must be that of intermingling and interpermeating. Public opinion has been defined as the opinions of all the men on the “tops of busses,” or the opinion made by “banks, stock-exchanges and all the wire-pullers of the world,” or the opinion “imposed on the public by a succession of thinkers.” All this is, no doubt, true of much of our so-called public opinion at present, for public opinion to-day is largely crowd opinion. But there is less of this than formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which there shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about by crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily; there is no real progress here.
Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated and artificially stimulated by those who can command sufficient money to engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great rank and file of men and women to-day, and which must be brought clearly to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful future for our political life under the present scheme of party domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is a tilting at wind-mills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of creative citizenship. We need to-day: (1) an active citizenship, (2) a responsible citizenship, (3) a creative citizenship—a citizenship building its own world, creating its own political and social structure, constructing its own life forever.
Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a constructive life. The organization of neighborhood groups will give us this machinery.
Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine public opinion.
First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate, personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent the life of our people. Then when we see clearly that the affairs of city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or indifferent in regard to politics. We all are interested in our own affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we feel that they have nothing to do with us.
Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of government through the increased social legislation of all our states during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social programs into party platforms means that a powerful influence is at work to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency, closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could contribute little to their solution. The social legislation of the last few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen’s compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis, mothers’ pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment agencies etc.