Moreover, no one question can be adequately discussed without an understanding of many more. Remedies for abuses are seldom direct because every abuse is bound up with our whole political and economic system. And if discussion induces thinking by the preparation necessary, it certainly stimulates thinking by the opposition we meet.
But the great advantage of discussion is that thereby we overcome misunderstanding and conquer prejudice. An Englishman who visited America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper this advice, “Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like him,” and was much struck with the difference between the American and the English way of looking at the matter. The Englishman, he said, does not get acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him! I sometimes feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our opponents for fear we might sympathize with them.
Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring out difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion is that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives form to truth.
The whole conception of discussion is now changing. Discussion is to be the sharpest, most effective political tool of the future. The value of the town-meeting is not in the fact that everyone goes, but in what everyone does when he gets there. And discussion will overcome much indifference, much complacency. We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them. I always feel intimate with my enemies. It is not opposition but indifference which separates men.
Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors is that men discuss questions there before they come to a political issue, when there is not the heat of the actual fight and the desire to win.
Through regular meetings then, and a genuine discussion, we help to forge the neighborhood bond. But this is not enough. A true community life should be developed. If the multiplicity and complexity of interrelations of interests and wants and hopes are to be brought to the surface to form the substance of politics, people must come more and more to live their lives together. We are ignorant: we should form classes and learn together. The farmer in Virginia goes to the School Centre to learn how to test his seed corn. We need social intercourse: we should meet to exchange experiences and to have a “good time” together. We need opportunity for bringing old and young together, parents and children, for boys and girls to meet in a natural, healthy way. We need true recreation, not the passive looking at the motion pictures, not the deadening watching of other people’s acting; we want the real recreation of active participation. The leisure time of men and women is being increased by legislation, by vocational efficiency, by machinery, and by scientific management. One of the most pressing needs of today is the constructive use of leisure. This need can be largely satisfied in the Neighborhood Centre. Festivals, pageants, the celebration of holidays can all be used as recreation, as a means of self-expression, and of building up the neighborhood bond.
Here too the family realizes that its life is embedded in a larger life, and the richer that larger life the more the family gains. The family learns its duty to other families, and it finds that its external relations change all its inner life, as the International League will change fundamentally the internal history of every nation. I knew two sisters who were ashamed of their mother until they could say to their friends, “Mother goes to the lectures every Saturday night at the School Centre.” I know men and wives who never went out together until they found an extended home in a School Centre. I know a father, an intelligent policeman, who never had any real friendship with his four daughters until he planned dances for them at the School Centre so that they should not go to the public dance-halls.
Families often need some means of coming to a common understanding; they are not always capable by themselves of making the necessary adjustment of points of view brought from so many sources as the different family outgoings produce. For example, food conservation taught in various ways in the Neighborhood Centre—by cooking classes for women, by lectures for both men and women showing the relation of food to the whole present world problem, by having regular afternoons for meeting with agents from the Health Department, by comparison between neighbors of the results of the new feeding—food conservation, that is, taught as a community problem, is more effective than taught merely to classes of mothers. For if the mother makes dishes the father and children refuse to eat, the cooking classes she has attended will have no community value. To give community value to all our apparently isolated activities is one of the primary objects of neighborhood organization.
The Neighborhood Centre, therefore, instead of separating families, as sometimes feared, is uniting them. To live their
