The Behavior of Crowds Part 9

A recent writer, after showing that the Russian revolution has failed to put the Marxian principles into actual operation, says of Lenin and his a.s.sociates:

They have caught a formula of glittering words; they have learned the verbal cadences which move the ma.s.ses to ecstasy; they have learned to paint a vision of heaven that shall outflare in the minds of their followers the shabby realities of a Bolshevik earth. They are master phraseocrats, and in Russia they have reared an empire on phraseocracy.

The alarmists who shriek of Russia would do well to turn their thoughts from Russia's socialistic menace. The peril of Russia is not to our industries, but to our states. The menace of the Bolsheviki is not an economic one, it is a political menace. It is the menace of fanatic armies, drunken with phrases and sweeping forward under Lenin like a Muscovite scourge. It is the menace of intoxicated proletarians, goaded by invented visions to seek to conquer the world.

In Nicolai Lenin the Socialist, we have naught to fear. In Nicolai Lenin the political chief of Russia's millions, we may well find a menace, for his figure looms over the world. His Bolshevik abracadabra has seduced the workers of every race. His stealthy propaganda has shattered the morale of every army in the world. His dreams are winging to Napoleonic flights, and well he may dream of destiny; for in an age when we bow to phrases, it is Lenin who is the master phraseocrat of the world.

Pa.s.sing over the question of Lenin's personal ambitions, and whether our own crowd-stupidity, panic, and wrong-headed Allied diplomacy may not have been contributing causes of the menace of Bolshevism, it can hardly be denied that Bolshevism, like all other revolutionary crowd-movements, is swayed by a painted vision of heaven which outflares the miseries of earth. _Every revolutionary crowd of every description is a pilgrimage set out to regain our lost Paradise._

Now it is this dream of paradise, or ideal society, which deserves a.n.a.lytical study. Why does it always appear the minute a crowd is sufficiently powerful to dream of world-power? It will readily be conceded that this dream has some function in creating certain really desirable social values. But such values cannot be the psychogenesis of the dream. If the dream were ever realized, I think William James was correct in saying that we should find it to be but a "sheep's heaven and lubberland of joy," and that life in it would be so "mawkish and dishwatery" that we should gladly return to this world of struggle and challenge, or anywhere else, if only to escape the deadly inanity.

We have already noted the fact that this dream has the function of justifying the crowd in its revolt and will to rule. But this is by no means all. The social idealism has well been called a dream, for that is just what it is, the daydream of the ages. It is like belief in fairies, or the Cinderella myth. It is the Jack-and-the-beanstalk philosophy. The dream has exactly the same function as the Absolute, and the ideal world-systems of the paranoiac; _it is an imaginary refuge from the real_. Like all other dreams, it is the realization of a wish. I have long been impressed with the static character of this dream; not only is it much the same in all ages, but it is always regarded as the great culmination beyond which the imagination cannot stretch. Even those who hold the evolutionary view of reality and know well that life is continuous change, and that progress cannot be fixed in any pa.s.sing moment, however sweet, are generally unable to imagine progress going on after the establishment of the ideal society and leaving it behind.

Revolutionary propaganda habitually stops, like the nineteenth-century love story, with a general statement, "and so they lived happily ever after." It is really the end, not the beginning or middle of the story.

It is the divine event toward which the whole creation moves, and having reached it, _stops_. Evolution having been wound up to run to just this end, time and change and effort may now be discontinued. There is nothing further to do. In other words, the ideal is lifted clear out of time and all historical connections. As in other dreams, the empirically known sequence of events is ignored. Whole centuries of progress and struggle and piecemeal experience are telescoped into one imaginary symbolic moment. The moment now stands for the whole process, or rather it is _subst.i.tuted_ for the process. We have taken refuge from the real into the ideal. The "Kingdom of Heaven," "Paradise," "The Return to Man in the State of Nature," "Back to Primitive New Testament Christianity,"

"The Age of Reason," "Utopia," the "Revolution," the "Co-operative Commonwealth," all mean psychologically the same thing. And that thing is not at all a scientific social program, but a symbol of an easier and better world where desires are realized by magic, and everyone's check drawn upon the bank of existence is cashed. _Social idealism of revolutionary crowds is a mechanism of compensation and escape for suppressed desires._

Is there any easier way of denying the true nature and significance of our objective world than by persuading ourselves that that world is even now doomed, and is bound suddenly to be transformed into the land of our heart's desire? Is it not to be expected that people would soon learn how to give those desires greater unction, and to encourage one another in holding to the fictions by which those desires could find their compensation and escape, by resorting to precisely the crowd-devices which we have been discussing?

The Messianists of Bible times expected the great transformation and world cataclysm to come by means of a divine miracle. Those who are affected by the wave of premillennialism which is now running through certain evangelical Christian communions are experiencing a revival of this faith with much of its primitive terminology.

Evolutionary social revolutionists expect the great day to come as the culmination of a process of economic evolution. This is what is meant by "evolutionary and revolutionary socialism." The wish-fancy is here rationalized as a doctrine of evolution by revolution. Thus the difference between the social revolutionist and the Second Adventist is much smaller than either of them suspects. As Freud would doubtless say, the difference extends only to the "secondary elaboration of the manifest dream formation"--the latent dream thought is the same in both cases. The Adventist expresses the wish in the terminology of a prescientific age, while the social revolutionist makes use of modern scientific jargon. Each alike finds escape from reality in the contemplation of a new-world system. The faith of each is a scheme of redemption--that is, of "compensation." Each contemplates the sudden, cataclysmic destruction of the "present evil world," and its replacement by a new order in which the meek shall inherit the earth. To both alike the great event is destined, in the fullness of time, to come as a thief in the night. In the one case it is to come as the fulfillment of prophecy; in the other the promise is underwritten and guaranteed by impersonal forces of "economic evolution."

This determinism is in the one case what Bergson calls "radical finalism," and in the other "radical mechanism." But whether the universe exists but to reel off a divine plan conceived before all worlds, or be but the mechanical swinging of the shuttle of cause and effect, what difference is there if the point arrived at is the same? In both cases this point was fixed before the beginning of time, and the meaning of the universe is just that and nothing else, since that is what it all comes to in the end.

Whether the hand which turns the crank of the world-machine be called that of G.o.d or merely "Evolution," it is only a verbal difference; it is in both cases "a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness." And the righteousness? Why, it is just the righteousness of our own crowd--in other words, the crowd's bill of rights painted in the sky by our own wish-fancy, and dancing over our heads like an aurora borealis.

It is the history of all crowds that this dazzling pillar of fire in the Arctic night is hailed as the "rosy-fingered dawn" of the Day of the Lord.

Or, to change the figure somewhat, the faithful crowd has but to follow its fiery cloud to the promised land which flows with milk and honey; then march for an appointed time about the walls of the wicked bourgeois Jericho, playing its propaganda tune until the walls fall down by magic and the world is ours. _No revolution is possible without a miracle and a bra.s.s band._

I have no desire to discourage those who have gone to work at the real tasks of social reconstruction--certainly no wish to make this study an apology for the existing social order. In the face of the ugly facts which on every hand stand as indictments of what is called "capitalism,"

it is doubtful if anyone could defend the present system without recourse to a certain amount of cynicism or cant. The widespread social unrest which has enlisted in its service so much of the intellectual spirit of this generation surely could never have come about without provocation more real than the work of a mere handful of "mischief-making agitators." The challenge to modern society is not wholly of crowd origin.

But it is one thing to face seriously the manifold problems of reconstruction of our social relations, and it is quite another thing to persuade oneself that all these entangled problems have but one imaginary neck which is waiting to be cut with a single stroke of the sword of revolution in the hands of "the people." Hundreds of times I have heard radicals, while discussing certain evils of present society, say, "All these things are but symptoms, effects; to get rid of them you must remove the cause." That cause is always, in substance, the present economic system.

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 fict.i.tious 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 predecessor's 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, a.s.suming 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 const.i.tutes 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 subst.i.tuting 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 _Aladdin's-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.

VIII

THE FRUITS OF REVOLUTION--NEW CROWD-TYRANNIES FOR OLD

So much for the psychology of the revolutionary propaganda. Now let us look at what happens in the moment of revolutionary outbreak. We have dwelt at some length on the fact that a revolution occurs when a new crowd succeeds in displacing an old one in position of social control.

At first there is a general feeling of release and of freedom. There is a brief period of ecstasy, of good will, a strange, almost mystical magnanimity. A flood of oratory is released in praise of the "new day of the people." Everyone is a "comrade." Everyone is important. There is an inclination to trust everyone. This Easter-morning state of mind generally lasts for some days--until people are driven by the pinch of hunger to stop talking and take up again the routine tasks of daily living. We have all read how the "citizens" of the French Revolution danced in the streets for sheer joy in their new-won liberty. Those who were in Petrograd during the days which immediately followed the downfall of the Tsar bear witness to a like almost mystical sense of the general goodness of human kind and of joy in human fellows.h.i.+p.

With the return to the commonplace tasks of daily life, some effort, and indeed further rationalization, is needed to keep up the feeling that the new and wonderful age has really come to stay. Conflicts of interest and special grievances are viewed as involving the vital principles of the Revolution. People become impatient and censorious. There is a searching of hearts. People watch their neighbors, especially their rivals, to make sure that nothing in their behavior shall confirm the misgivings which are vaguely felt in their own minds. The rejoicing and comrades.h.i.+p which before were spontaneous are now demanded. Intolerance toward the vanquished crowd reappears with increased intensity, not a little augmented by the knowledge that the old enemies are now at "the people's" mercy.

There is a demand for revenge for old abuses. The displaced crowd likely as not, foreseeing the doom which awaits its members, seeks escape by attempting a counter-revolution. A propaganda of sympathy is carried on among members of this same cla.s.s who remain in the dominant crowd in communities not affected by the revolution. There is secret plotting and suspicion of treason on every hand. People resort to extravagant expressions of their revolutionary principles, not only to keep up their own faith in them, but to show their loyalty to the great cause. The most fanatical and uncompromising members of the group gain prominence because of their excessive devotion. By the very logic of crowd-thinking, leaders.h.i.+p pa.s.ses to men who are less and less competent to deal with facts and more and more extreme in their zeal. Hence the usual decline from the Mirabeaus to the Dantons and Cariers, and from these to the Marats and Robespierres, from the Milukoffs to the Kerenskys and from the Kerenskys to the Trotzkys. With each excess the crowd must erect some still new defense against the inevitable disclosure of the fact that the people are not behaving at all as if they were living in the kingdom of heaven. With each farther deviation from the plain meaning of facts, the revolution must resort to more severe measures to sustain itself, until finally an unsurmountable barrier is reached, such as the arrival on the scene of a Napoleon. Then the majority are forced to abandon the vain hope of really attaining Utopia, and content themselves with fictions to the effect that what they have really _is_ Utopia--or with such other mechanisms as will serve to excuse and minimize the significance of existing facts and put off the complete realization of the ideal until some future stage of progress. It is needless to add that those who have most profited by the revolutionary change are also most ready to take the lead in persuading their neighbors to be content with these rational compromises.

Meanwhile, however, the revolutionary leaders have set up a dictators.h.i.+p of their own, which, while necessary to "save the revolution," is itself a practical negation of the revolutionary dream of a free world. This dictators.h.i.+p, finally pa.s.sing into the hands of the more competent element of the revolutionary crowd, justifies itself to the many; professing and requiring of all a verbal a.s.sent to the revolutionary creed of which its very existence is a fundamental repudiation. This group becomes in time the nucleus about which society finally settles down again in comparative peace and equilibrium.

In general, then, it may be said that a revolution does not and cannot realize the age-long dream of a world set free. Its results may be summed up as follows: a newly dominant crowd, a new statement of old beliefs, new owners of property in the places of the old, new names for old tyrannies. Looking back over the history of the several great tidal waves of revolution which have swept over the civilization which is to-day ours, it would appear that one effect of them has been to intensify the hold which crowd-thinking has upon all of us, also to widen the range of the things which we submit to the crowd-mind for final judgment. In confirmation of this it is to be noted that it is on the whole those nations which have been burnt over by both the Reformation and the eighteenth-century revolution which exhibit the most chauvian brand of nationalism and crowd-patriotism. It is these same nations also which have most highly depersonalized their social relations.h.i.+ps, political structures, and ideals. It is these nations also whose councils are most determined by spasms of crowd-propaganda.

The modern man doubtless has a sense of self in a degree unknown--except by the few--in earlier ages, but along with this there exists in "modern ideas," a complete system of crowd-ideas with which the conscious self comes into conflict at every turn. Just how far the revolutionary crowds of the past have operated to provide the stereotyped forms in which present crowd-thinking is carried on, it is almost impossible to learn.

But that their influence has been great may be seen by anyone who attempts a psychological study of "public opinion."

Aside from the results mentioned, I think the deposit of revolutionary movements in history has been very small. It may be that, in the general shake-up of such a period, a few vigorous spirits are tossed into a place where their genius has an opportunity which it would otherwise have failed to get. But it would seem that on the whole the idea that revolutions help the progress of the race is a hoax. Where advancement has been achieved in freedom, in intelligence, in ethical values, in art or science, in consideration for humanity, in legislation, it has in each instance been achieved by unique individuals, and has spread chiefly by personal influence, never gaining a.s.sent except among those who have power to recreate the new values won in their own experience.

Whenever we take up a new idea as a crowd, we at once turn it into a catchword and a fad. Faddism, instead of being merely a hunger for the new is rather an expression of the crowd-will to uniformity. To be "old-fas.h.i.+oned" and out of date is as truly to be a nonconformist as to be a freak or an originator. Faddism is neither radicalism nor a symptom of progress. It is a mark of the pa.s.sion for uniformity or _the conservatism of the crowd-mind_. It is change; but its change is insignificant.

It is often said that religious liberty is the fruit of the Reformation.

If so it is an indirect result and one which the reformers certainly did not desire. They sought liberty only for their own particular propaganda, a fact which is abundantly proved by Calvin's treatment of Servetus and of the Anabaptists, by Luther's att.i.tude toward the Saxon peasants, by the treatment of Catholics in England, by the whole history of Cromwell's rule, by the persecution of Quakers and all other "heretics" in our American colonies--Pennsylvania, I believe, excepted--down to the date of the American Revolution.

It just happened that Protestantism as _the religion of the bourgeois_ fell into the hands of a group, who, outside their religious-crowd interests were destined to be the greatest practical beneficiaries of the advancement of applied science. Between applied science and science as a cultural discipline--that is, science as a humanistic study--the line is hard to draw. The Humanist spirit of the sciences attained a certain freedom, notwithstanding the fact that the whole Reformation was really a reactionary movement against the Renaissance; in spite, moreover, of the patent fact that the Protestant churches still, officially at least, resist the free spirit of scientific culture.

It is to the free spirits of the Italian Renaissance, also to the Jeffersons and Franklins and Paines, the Lincolns and Ingersolls, the Huxleys and Darwins and Spencers, the men who dared alone to resist the religious crowd-mind and to undermine the abstract ideas in which it had intrenched itself, to whom the modern world owes its religious and intellectual liberty.

The same is true of political liberty. England, which is the most free country in the world to-day, never really experienced the revolutionary crowd-movement of the eighteenth century. Instead, the changes came by a process of gradual reconstruction. And it is with just such an opportunist reconstructive process that England promises now to meet and solve the problems of the threatened social revolution. In contrast with Russia, Socialism in England has much ground for hope of success. The radical movement in England is on the whole wisely led by men who with few exceptions can think realistically and pragmatically, and refuse to be swept off their feet by crowd-abstractions. The British Labor party is the least crowd-minded of any of the socialistic organizations of our day. The Rochdale group has demonstrated that if it is co-operation that people desire as a solution of the economic problem, the way to solve it is to co-operate along definite and practicable lines; the co-operators have given up belief in the miracle of Jericho. The British trade-union movement has demonstrated the fact that organization of this kind succeeds in just the degree that it can rise above crowd-thinking and deal with a suggestion of concrete problems according to a statesmanlike policy of concerted action.

To be sure it cannot be denied that the social reconstruction in England is seriously menaced by the tendency to crowd-behavior. At best it reveals hardly more than the superior advantage to the whole community of a slightly less degree of crowd-behavior; but when compared with the Socialist movement in Russia, Germany, and the United States, it would seem that radicalism in England has at least a remote promise of reaching a working solution of the social problem; and that is more than can at present be said for the others.

In the light of what has been said about the psychology of revolution, I think we may hazard an opinion about the vaunted "Dictators.h.i.+p of the Proletariat"--an idea that has provided some new catchwords for the crowd which is fascinated by the soviet revolution in Russia. Granting for the sake of argument that such a dictators.h.i.+p would be desirable from any point of view--I do not see how the mere fact that people work proves their capacity to rule, horses also work--would it be possible? I think not. Even the temporary rule of Lenin in Russia can hardly be called a rule of the working cla.s.s. Bolshevist propaganda will have it that such a dictators.h.i.+p of the working cla.s.s is positively necessary if we are ever to get away from the abuses of present "capitalistic society." Moreover, it is argued that this dictators.h.i.+p of the organized workers could not be undemocratic, for since vested property is to be abolished and everyone forced to work for his living, all will belong to the working cla.s.s, and therefore the dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat is but the dictators.h.i.+p of all.

In the first place, a.s.suming that it is the dictators.h.i.+p of all who survive the revolution, this dictators.h.i.+p of all over each is not liberty for anyone; it may leave not the tiniest corner where one may be permitted to be master of himself. The tyranny of all over each is as different from freedom as is pharisaism from spiritual living.

Again, what is there to show that this imagined dictators.h.i.+p of all is to be shared equally by all, and if not have we not merely set up a new privileged cla.s.s--the very thing which the Socialist Talmud has always declared it is the mission of the workers to destroy forever? While the workers are still a counter-crowd, struggling for power against the present ruling cla.s.s, they are of course held together by a common cause--namely, their opposition to capital. But with labor's triumph, everybody becomes a worker, and there is no one longer to oppose. That which held the various elements of labor together in a common crowd of revolt has now ceased to exist, "cla.s.s consciousness" has therefore no longer any meaning. Labor itself has ceased to exist _as a cla.s.s_ by reason of its very triumph. What then remains to hold its various elements together in a common cause? Nothing at all. The solidarity of the workers vanishes, when the struggle which gave rise to that solidarity ceases. There remains now nothing but the humanitarian principle of the solidarity of the human race. Solidarity has ceased to be an economic fact, and has become purely "ideological."

Since by hypothesis everyone is a worker, the dictators.h.i.+p of the workers is a dictators.h.i.+p based not on labor as such, but upon a universal human quality. It would be quite as truly a dictators.h.i.+p of everyone if based upon any other common human quality--say, the fact that we are all bipeds, that we all have noses, or the fact of the circulation of the blood. As the purely proletarian character of this dictators.h.i.+p becomes meaningless, the crowd-struggle switches from that of labor as a whole against capital, to a series of struggles within the dominant labor group itself.

The experience of Russia has even now shown that if the soviets are to save themselves from nation-wide bankruptcy, specially trained men must be found to take charge of their industrial and political activities.

Long training is necessary for the successful management of large affairs, and becomes all the more indispensable as industry, education, and political affairs are organized on a large scale. Are specially promising youths to be set apart from early childhood to prepare themselves for these positions of authority? Or shall such places be filled by those vigorous few who have the ambition and the strength to acquire the necessary training while at the same time working at their daily tasks? In either case an _intellectual cla.s.s_ must be developed.

Does anyone imagine that this new cla.s.s of rulers will hesitate to make use of every opportunity to make itself a privileged cla.s.s?