The enthusiasts of democracy today are those who have caught sight of a great spiritual unity which is supported by the most vital trend in philosophical thought and by the latest biologists and social psychologists. It is, above all, what we have learnt of the psychical processes of association which makes us believe in democracy. Democracy is everyone building the single life, not my life and others, not the individual and the state, but my life bound up with others, the individual which is the state, the state which is the individual. “When a man’s eye shall be single”—do we quite know yet what that means? Democracy is the fullest possible acceptance of the single life.
Thus democracy, although often considered a centrifugal tendency, is rather a centripetal force. Democracy is not a spreading out: it is not the extension of the suffrage—its merely external aspect—it is a drawing together; it is the imperative call for the lacking parts of self. It is the finding of the one will to which the will of every single man and woman must contribute. We want women to vote not that the suffrage may be extended to women but that women may be included in the suffrage: we want what they may have to add to the whole. Democracy is an infinitely including spirit. We have an instinct for democracy because we have an instinct for wholeness; we get wholeness only through reciprocal relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations. Democracy is really neither extending nor including merely, but creating wholes.
This is the primitive urge of all life. This is the true nature of man. Democracy must find a form of government that is suited to the nature of man and which will express that nature in its manifold relations. Or rather democracy is the self-creating process of life appearing as the true nature of man, and through the activity of man projecting itself into the visible world in fitting form so that its essential oneness will declare itself. Democracy then is not an end, we must be weaving all the time the web of democracy.
The idea of democracy as representing the all-will gives us a new idea of aristocracy. We believe in the few but not as opposed to the many, only as included in all. This makes a tremendous change in political thought. We believe in the influence of the good and the wise, but they must exert their influence within the social process; it must be by action and reaction, it must be by a subtle permeation, it must be through the sporting instinct to take back the ball which one has thrown. The wise can never help us by standing on one side and trying to get their wisdom across to the unwise. The unwise can never help us (what has often been considered the most they could do for the world) by a passive willingness for the wise to impose their wisdom upon them. We need the intermingling of all in the social process. We need our imperfections as well as our perfections. So we offer what we have—our unwisdom, our imperfections—on the altar of the social process, and it is only by this social process that the wonderful transmutation can take place which makes of them the very stuff of which the Perfect Society is to be made. Imperfection meets imperfection, or imperfection meets perfection; it is the process which purifies, not the “influence” of the perfect on the imperfect. This is what faith in democracy means. Moreover, there is the ignorance of the ignorant and the ignorance of the wise; there is the wisdom of the wise and the wisdom of the ignorant. Both kinds of ignorance have to be overcome, one as much as the other; both kinds of wisdom have to prevail, one as much as the other.
In short, there is not a static world for the wise to influence. This truth is the blow to the old aristocracy. But we need the wise within this living, moving whole, this never-ceasing action and interaction, and this truth is the basis of our new conception of aristocracy. Democracy is not opposed to aristocracy—it includes aristocracy.
As biology shows us nature evolving by the power within itself, so social psychology shows us society evolving by the power of its own inner forces, of all its inner forces. There is no passive material within it to be guided by a few. There is no dead material in a true democracy.
When people see the confusion of our present life, its formlessness and planlessness, the servile following of the crowd, the ignorance of the average man, his satisfaction in his ignorance, the insignificance of the collective life, its blindness and its hopelessness, they say they do not believe in democracy. But this is not democracy. The so-called evils of democracy—favoritism, bribery, graft, bossism—are the evils of our lack of democracy, of our party system and of the abuses which that system has brought into our representative government. It is not democracy which is “on trial,” as is so often said, but it is we ourselves who are on trial. We have been constantly trying to see what democracy meant from the point of view of institutions, we have never yet tried to see what it meant from the point of view of men.
If life could be made mechanical, our method would be correct, but as mechanics is creature and life its superabounding creator, such method is wholly wrong. When people say that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy, they usually mean that while we have some “popular” institutions, we have not enough, and that when we get enough “popular” institutions, our inadequacies will be met. But no form is going to fulfil our needs. This is important to remember just now, with
