We give up self when we are too sluggish for the heroic life. For our self is after all the greatest bother we ever know, and the idea of giving it up is a comfortable thought for sluggish people, a narcotic for the difficulties of life. But it is a cowardly way out. The strong attitude is to face that torment, our self, to take it with all its implications, all its obligations, all its responsibilities, and be ourselves to the fullest degree possible.
I do not mean to imply, however, that unselfishness has become obsolete. With our new social ideal there is going to be a far greater demand on our capacity for sacrifice than ever before, but self-sacrifice now means for us self-fulfilment. We have now a vision of society where service is indeed our daily portion, but our conception of service has entirely changed. The other day it was stated that the old idea of democracy was a society in which every man had the right to pursue his own ends, while the new idea was based on the assumption that every man should serve his fellow-men. But I do not believe that man should “serve his fellow-men”; if we started on that task what awful prigs we should become. Moreover, as we see that the only efficient people are the servers, much of the connotation of humility has gone out of the word service! Moreover, if service is such a very desirable thing, then everyone must have an equal opportunity for service.
We have had a wrong idea of individualism which has made those who had more strength, education, time, money, power, feel that they must do for those who had less. In the individualism we see coming, all our efforts will be bent to making it possible for every man to depend upon himself instead of depending upon others. So noblesse oblige is really egoistic. It is what I owe to myself to do to others. Noblesse oblige has had a splendid use in the world, but it is somewhat worn out now simply because we are rapidly getting away from the selfish point of view. I don’t do things now because my position or my standing or my religion or my anything else demands it, nor because others need it, but because it is a whole-imperative, that is, a social imperative. We cannot transcend self by means of others, but only through the synthesis of self and others. Wholeness is an irresistible force compelling every member. The consciousness of this is the wellspring of our power.
An English writer says that we get leadership from the fact that men are capable of being moved to such service by the feeling of altruism; he attributes public spirit to love, pity, compassion and sensitiveness to suffering. This is no doubt largely true at the present moment, but public spirit will sometime mean, as it does today in many instances, the recognition that it is not merely that my city, my nation needs me, but that I need it as the larger sphere of a larger self-expression.
I remember some years ago a Boston girl just entering social work, fresh from college, with all the ardor and enthusiasm of youth and having been taught the ideals of service to others. She was talking to me about her future and said that she was sorry family circumstances obliged her to work in Boston instead of New York, there was so much more to reform in New York! She seemed really afraid that justice and morality had reached such a point with us that she might not be afforded sufficient scope for her zeal. It was amusing, but think of the irony of it: that girl had been taught such a view of life that her happiness, her outlet, her self-expression, depended actually on there being plenty of misery and wretchedness for her to change; there would be no scope for her in a harmonious, well-ordered world.
The self-and-others theory of society is then wrong. We have seen that the Perfect Society is the complete interrelating of an infinite number of selves knowing themselves as one Self. We see that we are dependent on the whole, while seeing that we are one with it in creating it. We are separate that we may belong, that we may greatly produce. Our separateness, our individual initiative, are the very factors which accomplish our true unity with men. We shall see in the chapter on “Political Pluralism” that “irreducible pluralism” and the self-unifying principle are not contradictory.
XII
The Crowd Fallacy
Many people are ready to accept the truth that association is the law of life. But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory with only a partial understanding of it, many people today are advocating the life of the crowd. The words society, crowd, and group are often used interchangeably for a number of people together. One writer says, “The real things are breathed forth from multitudes … the real forces of today are group forces.” Or we read of “the gregarious or group life,” or “man is social because he is suggestible,” or, “man is social because he likes to be with a crowd.” But we do not find group forces in multitudes: the crowd and the group represent entirely different modes of association. Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on
