CHAPTER VII SIGNS OF PROMISE
Superficially it may seem that the present is an inappropriate time to suggest that either women or men go deliberately out of their way to undertake a process of self-education in the meaning of freedom. The dominant spirit among us is not only not hospitable to the idea of freedom; it is openly inimical to the idea. The United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world. It is in the midst of the most interesting experiment ever seen in the simplification of human life. It is undertaking to prove that human beings can live a generally satisfactory life without the exercise of the reflective intellect, without ideas, without ideals, and in a proper use of the word without emotions, so long as they may see the prospect of a moderate well-being, and so long as they are kept powerfully under the spell of a great number of mechanical devices for the enhancement of comfort, convenience and pleasure. This experiment is so universal and so preoccupying that while it is going on there would seem to be no chance to get any consideration for so unrelated a matter as freedom. Hence the only current notion of freedom is freedom to live and behave as the majority live and behave and to desire what the majority desire; and notions which diverge from this have not been under stronger suspicion and disapproval since the eighteenth century than they are in this country today. Not that any one, probably, fears any degree of liberty for himself, but every one has a nervous horror of too much liberty for others. Most people no doubt feel that they themselves would know exactly what to do with freedom and therefore might be safely trusted with any measure of it; it is the possible social effect of other people’s liberty that they dread. No idea, probably, is more distrusted and feared among us at the present time than that of freedom for someone else.
The dominant spirit at present—the spirit which gives tone to our society—is diametrically opposed to the spirit of freedom. It is a spirit of coercion and intolerance. Politically this spirit finds expression in a pronounced reaction from the “progressivism” which had gained so much support before the war; in an enormous strengthening of “the cohesive power of public plunder,” with a consequent reversion to the regimentation of strict party-government; in outrages committed by government, with popular approval—or at least indifference—upon the persons and property of people suspected of economic unorthodoxy; and in a cynical disregard by both government and populace of those guarantees of individual liberty which were wrested from government by more liberty-loving generations than our own. It is evident also in the development of extra-governmental organizations committed to a programme of violence actuated by religious bigotry, race-hatred, or inflamed chauvinism, such as the Hackenkreutzers and Fascists abroad—for the spirit of intolerance is not confined to the United States—and the Ku Klux Klan in this country; movements which, although they imply no menace to the exploiting classes themselves, do constitute a menace, at present imperfectly perceived, to the established organization through which those classes exercise exploitation, and an extremely threatening danger to the lives and liberties of millions among the governed.
Economically the spirit of coercion is in evidence in the struggles for advantage between capital and labour, each trying to force the other to its own terms; in attempts by employers to break up defensive organization among their workers; and in such laws as the Criminal Syndicalism Acts, most of which give criminal character to membership in an organization professing radical economic doctrine. Socially it is reflected in such laws as the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, and in puerile and evil-minded attempts at censorship of individual conduct, of public amusement, and of literature and art. In religion it is manifest in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, in the current controversy between Fundamentalism and Modernism in the Protestant churches, and in the attempt sponsored by bigoted and influential church-organizations to stop by edict the progress of biological and anthropological science, because it threatens the tenure of established superstitions. It is likewise evident in the concern of those organizations with such social behaviour of individuals as must rationally be held indifferent, and their efforts to get their particular code of conduct enforced through sumptuary law.
The recrudescence of this spirit is the immediate result of war, which always brings it about. War embodies in its crudest form the doctrine of government by violence; and when war is dominant, therefore, the ideals of justice and liberty, which are directly opposed to it, become so unpopular that those who continue to profess them are liable to persecution by government and by their war-mad compatriots. Governments, which never grant their citizens more freedom of opinion and action than is absolutely necessary in order to get themselves tolerated, take advantage of this war-spirit to revoke, in practice if not in law, those guarantees of individual rights which it suits their purpose to dispense with. When the popular orgy of patriotic bloodthirst and intolerance is over, and the populace begins to get back to sanity, it finds government more securely fixed upon its back than ever, and prepared to ride it without that easy rein and that sparing of the spur which fear compels. Thus it is that the Governments of the Western world, since the war, have been carrying on their imperialist activities abroad and persecuting dissenters at home, with an excess of cynicism which would have been effectively reprehended by public opinion before the war.
The chief reason why this policy of force continues to command a large measure of popular support is because fear of bolshevism has taken the place of that fear of the enemy which unifies public opinion behind Governments in war-time. Economic interests immediately consolidated against the influence of the Russian Revolution precisely as they did against that of the French Revolution, and in the same way. Governments have done all in their power to inculcate fear of this influence upon their peoples; and in this they command the assistance of practically the whole institutional organization of their respective countries. There is other and far better reason for this propaganda than the mere need of a new bogey with which to cow the timorous and keep the disaffected under control. The idea of freedom which bolshevist Russia has launched is a distinct menace to political government and its beneficiaries, the owning classes. If the expropriated and exploited masses in other countries once get it through their heads that their primary interest is not political but economic, the days of political government will be numbered. The propaganda against bolshevism is therefore inspired by two motives: the wish to frighten peoples into approving suppression of those suspected of political and economic heresy, and the wish to divert attention from the idea behind the Russian Revolution through the moral effect of real or supposititious misbehaviour by the Revolutionary Government. It is a curious twist of human psychology that makes supposed outrages committed by a foreign Government five thousand miles away appear to justify actual and equal outrages by one’s own Government in one’s own country; and a proletarian dictatorship five thousand miles away appear to justify a dictatorship of the exploiting classes at home. The Soviet Government’s alleged mistreatment of political dissenters is easily made effective in ranging popular opinion in this country behind governmental persecution and deportation of communists and anarchists. Reports of Red terror in Russia reconcile public opinion—or at least that portion of it which is articulate—to the reign of a White terror here. It would appear that the desirability of dictatorship and terrorism is not in question, but their colour. Civilized persons, perhaps, would find little to choose between Red terror and White terror, or a Red dictatorship and a White; they would probably elect to dispense with terrorism and dictatorship altogether; but civilized persons have nothing to do with framing the policies of government, and almost nothing to do with the formation of majority-opinion.
Superficially, then, an invitation to contemplate freedom seems untimely. The cause of freedom is neither popular nor fashionable; therefore it may seem unduly optimistic to expect that there will soon be an interest in it deep enough or general enough to move many people to inquire seriously into its meaning or its desirability. Such a study would imply a critical reappraisal of institutions to which fear of change impels the majority to cling with a tenacity out of proportion to the benefits to be derived from their preservation. In this country this fear of change is especially strong because, as I have remarked before, the exactions of monopoly have not yet advanced to the point of choking industry. Moreover, opportunities to enjoy monopoly are not as extensively pre-empted here as they are elsewhere; and therefore the chances of the individual to share in the loot of industry are much better. This fact tends to keep a great many people loyal to an economic and political order which offers them a chance, however remote, to live by the earnings of other people, and to make them inhospitable to an idea of freedom which threatens that chance. There is another factor, too, which must be taken into account, as explaining the hostility of our proletariat towards an experiment in proletarian government which might be expected to gain their tolerance if not their sympathetic interest: that factor is the tendency of human beings to prefer an immediate temporary well-being to an ultimate permanent well-being conditioned on the acceptance of immediate hardship or uncertainty. “Après nous le déluge” is a sentiment by no means peculiar to dissolute and irresponsible monarchs. Humankind has always shown a perfect willingness to let posterity pay its bills and atone for its misdeeds. Labour at present is comparatively well off in this country; and it is significant that just those sections of it that are most advantageously situated are strongest in their opposition to the bolshevist experiment, namely: the unions in the American Federation of Labour. One can not unreservedly condemn their attitude; there is much to be said for it. In a society organized as ours is, the mere loss of a job is, as I have remarked elsewhere, terrible enough to keep one’s thoughts from wandering on burning ground. The labourer stands to lose through any radical economic readjustment quite as much as the monopolist, that is, his all. If his all be sufficient to keep him from want, he will naturally regard with apprehension any proposal to take it away for the moment, even for the sake of his own possible future advantage. The poor man, especially if he have a family, is likely to feel that a present sufficiency is worth much more than a future surplus. It is only when people have literally nothing to lose but their chains that they can face without fear the prospect of revolutionary change. If the existing economic order remains in force, that time will come in this country as it came in pre-revolutionary France, and something over a century later in pre-revolutionary Russia; and when it does, there will be plenty of active interest in freedom, and of underground movements to bring it about by revolutionary methods. But at present the “dissidence of Dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion,” the Anti-Saloon League, the one-hundred-per-centers, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Republican party, are in unapproachable ascendancy.
This does not greatly matter. Force and proscription are in the long run invariably ineffectual against an idea. The idea released by the American and French revolutions—the idea of the right of individual self-expression in politics—prevailed over the combined forces of European feudalism; and the idea released by the Russian Revolution will prevail over the combined forces of European and American imperialism. For ideas can be fought neither with armies nor with persecutions; nor can attention be for ever diverted from them. The only thing that has effective force against an idea is a better one. Whether or not the Soviet Government succeeds in getting beyond dictatorship to the establishment of economic justice in Russia is not really important. If it should fail, its failure will not halt the progress of the idea that human freedom is fundamentally a matter of economics. Not even that acceptance in principle and denial in practice which is the chief characteristic of Liberal policy, can permanently defeat it. Sooner or later it will penetrate into human consciousness; it will become part of that consciousness; and it will prevail. Whether or not it will prevail during this era of the world’s history is another question, whose answer will depend upon the readiness of mankind to assimilate and be actuated by it. If it is not assimilated in time to prevent the ruin of European civilization, then its ultimate victory will take place in a future era, when European civilization has followed the way of other civilizations to oblivion.