|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 51
After all, what the corrupt alderman demands from his followers and
largely depends upon is a sense of loyalty, a standing-by the man who is
good to you, who understands you, and who gets you out of trouble. All
the social life of the voter from the time he was a little boy and
played "craps" with his "own push," and not with some other "push," has
been founded on this sense of loyalty and of standing in with his
friends. Now that he is a man, he likes the sense of being inside a
political organization, of being trusted with political gossip, of
belonging to a set of fellows who understand things, and whose interests
are being cared for by a strong friend in the city council itself. All
this is perfectly legitimate, and all in the line of the development of
a strong civic loyalty, if it were merely socialized and enlarged. Such
a voter has already proceeded in the forward direction in so far as he
has lost the sense of isolation, and has abandoned the conviction that
city government does not touch his individual affairs. Even Mill claims
that the social feelings of man, his desire to be at unity with his
fellow-creatures, are the natural basis for morality, and he defines a
man of high moral culture as one who thinks of himself, not as an
isolated individual, but as a part in a social organism.
Upon this foundation it ought not to be difficult to build a structure
of civic virtue. It is only necessary to make it clear to the voter that
his individual needs are common needs, that is, public needs, and that
they can only be legitimately supplied for him when they are supplied
for all. If we believe that the individual struggle for life may widen
into a struggle for the lives of all, surely the demand of an individual
for decency and comfort, for a chance to work and obtain the fulness of
life may be widened until it gradually embraces all the members of the
community, and rises into a sense of the common weal.
In order, however, to give him a sense of conviction that his individual
needs must be merged into the needs of the many, and are only important
as they are thus merged, the appeal cannot be made along the line of
self-interest. The demand should be universalized; in this process it
would also become clarified, and the basis of our political organization
become perforce social and ethical.
Would it be dangerous to conclude that the corrupt politician himself,
because he is democratic in method, is on a more ethical line of social
development than the reformer, who believes that the people must be made
over by "good citizens" and governed by "experts"? The former at least
are engaged in that great moral effort of getting the mass to express
itself, and of adding this mass energy and wisdom to the community as a
whole.
The wide divergence of experience makes it difficult for the good
citizen to understand this point of view, and many things conspire to
make it hard for him to act upon it. He is more or less a victim to that
curious feeling so often possessed by the good man, that the righteous
do not need to be agreeable, that their goodness alone is sufficient,
and that they can leave the arts and wiles of securing popular favor to
the self-seeking. This results in a certain repellent manner, commonly
regarded as the apparel of righteousness, and is further responsible for
the fatal mistake of making the surroundings of "good influences"
singularly unattractive; a mistake which really deserves a reprimand
quite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making the
surroundings of "evil influences" so beguiling. Both are akin to that
state of mind which narrows the entrance into a wider morality to the
eye of a needle, and accounts for the fact that new moral movements have
ever and again been inaugurated by those who have found themselves in
revolt against the conventionalized good.
The success of the reforming politician who insists upon mere purity of
administration and upon the control and suppression of the unruly
elements in the community, may be the easy result of a narrowing and
selfish process. For the painful condition of endeavoring to minister
to genuine social needs, through the political machinery, and at the
same time to remodel that machinery so that it shall be adequate to its
new task, is to encounter the inevitable discomfort of a transition into
a new type of democratic relation. The perplexing experiences of the
actual administration, however, have a genuine value of their own. The
economist who treats the individual cases as mere data, and the social
reformer who labors to make such cases impossible, solely because of the
appeal to his reason, may have to share these perplexities before they
feel themselves within the grasp of a principle of growth, working
outward from within; before they can gain the exhilaration and uplift
which comes when the individual sympathy and intelligence is caught into
the forward intuitive movement of the mass. This general movement is not
without its intellectual aspects, but it has to be transferred from the
region of perception to that of emotion before it is really
apprehended. The mass of men seldom move together without an emotional
incentive. The man who chooses to stand aside, avoids much of the
perplexity, but at the same time he loses contact with a great source of
vitality.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|