Moreover, neighborhood organization gives us a definite objective for individual responsibility. We cannot understand our duty or perform our duty unless it is a duty to something. It is because of the erroneous notion that the individual is related to “society” rather than to a group or groups that we can trace much of our lack of responsibility. A man trusts vaguely that he is doing his duty to “society,” but such vagueness gets him nowhere. There is no “society,” and therefore he often does no duty. But let him once understand that his duty is to his group—to his neighborhood group, to his industrial group—and he will begin to see his duty as a specific, concrete thing taking definite shape for him.
But my gospel is not for a moment of citizenship as a mere duty. We must bring to politics passion and joy. It is not through the cramping and stultification of desire that life is nobly lived, it is through seeing life in its fulness. We want to use the whole of man. You cannot put some of his energies on one side and some on the other and say some are good and some bad—all are good and should be put to good use. Men follow their passions and should do so, but they must purify their passions, educate them, discipline and direct them. We turn our impulses to wrong uses, but our impulses are not wrong. The forces of life should be used, not stifled. It is not corruption, dishonesty, we have to fight; it is ignorance, lack of insight, desires not transmuted. We want a state which will transmute the instincts of men into the energies of the nation. You cannot dam the stream entirely, you can only see that it flows so as to irrigate and fructify. It all comes down to our fear of men. If we could believe in men, if we could see that circle which unites human passion and divine achievement as a halo round the head of each human being, then social and political reorganization would no longer be a hope but a fact. The old individualism feared men; the corner-stone of the new individualism is faith in men. We need a constructive faith and a robust faith, faith in men, in this world, in this day, in the Here and the Now.
From the belief of savages in the spirits who ruled their fate to the “power outside ourselves that makes for righteousness,” through the weak man’s reliance on luck and the strong man’s reliance on his isolated individuality, we have had innumerable forms of the misunderstanding of responsibility. But all this is now changing. The distinguishing mark of our age is that we are coming to a keen sense of personal responsibility, that we are taking upon ourselves the blame for all our evils, the charge for all our progress. We are beginning to realize that the redemptive power is within the social bond, that we have creative evolution only through individual responsibility.
The old ways of thinking are breaking up. The New Life is before us. Are we ready? Are we making ourselves ready? A new man is needed for the New Life—a man who understands self-discipline, who understands training, who is willing to purge himself of his particularist desires, who is conscious of relations as the stuff of his existence.
To sum up this chapter: the moral state is the task of man. This must be achieved through the creative power of man as brought into visibility and actuality through his group life. The great cosmic force in the womb of humanity is latent in the group as its creative energy; that it may appear the individual must do his duty every moment. We do not get the whole power of the group unless every individual is given full value, is giving full value. It is the creative spontaneity of each which makes life march on irresistibly to the purposes of the whole. Our social and political organization must be such that this group life is possible. We hear much of “the wasted forces of our nation.” The neighborhood organization movement is a movement to use some of the wasted forces of this nation—it is the biggest movement yet conceived for conservation. Have we more “value” in forests and water-power in America than in human beings? The new generation cries, “No, this release of the spiritual energy of human beings is to be the salvation of the nation, for the life of all these human beings is the nation.” The success of democracy depends (1) upon the degree of responsibility it is possible to arouse in every man and woman, (2) on the opportunity they are given to exercise that responsibility. The new democracy depends upon you and me. It depends upon you and me because there is no one else in the world but you and me. If I pledge myself to the new democracy and you pledge yourself to the new democracy, a new motor force will be born in the world.
We need to-day new principles. We can reform and reform but all this is on the surface. What we have got to do is to change some of the fundamental ideas of our American life. This is not being disloyal to our past, it is exactly the opposite. Let us be loyal to our inheritance and tradition, but let us understand what that inheritance and tradition truly is. It is not our tradition to stick to an outworn past, a conventional ideal, a rigid religion. We are children of men who have not been afraid of new continents or new ideas. In our blood is the impulse to leap to the highest we can see, as the wills of our fathers fixed themselves on the convictions of their hearts. To spring forward and then to follow the path steadfastly is forever the duty of Americans. We must live democracy.
XXXV
THE WORLD STATE
WE have seen the true state emerging through the working of the federal principle, dual in its nature: (1) created by the law of interpenetration, the unifying of difference, and (2) representing the multiple man in his essential nature. Through the further working of this principle the world-state appears.