Not merely does a community need a Buddha, let us say, before it can produce Buddhism; it needs a whole succession of Buddhas if the religion itself is not to fritter away into the hideous ecclesiastical grind it became in Tibet. This principle has a general application. The social critics of the last century confused the mechanical problem of transforming an institution or of creating a new organization with the personal and social problem of spurring people to effect the transformation and see it through. Their tactics were those of a general who would go into battle without training his army; their strategy was that of the demagogue who talks of a million armed men springing up overnight. The personal problem, the problem of education, was as easy as that!
If we are to account for the poverty of our achievements in renovating the community, in contrast with the enormous amount of quite justifiable economic and political agitation, research, and criticism, it is perhaps not altogether fair to put the entire burden of failure upon the partisan’s lopsided utopia. The plans of our reformers have indeed been weak and jerrybuilt in themselves; but that is not all. What has perhaps been even more conspicuously lacking has been people who are accessible to the existing knowledge, people whose minds have been trained to play freely with the facts, people who have learned the fine and exacting art of cooperating with their fellows; people who are as critical of their own mental processes and habits of behavior as they are of the institutions they wish to alter. As Viola Paget says: “The bulk of thinking and feeling intended to help on human improvement has not really been good enough for the purpose. Not good enough in the sense of not sufficiently impersonal and disciplined.”
Between our programs, our utopias, and their fulfillment there has usually dropped a thick veil of personalities; and were the plan itself the collaborate product of the best minds of the race; as Mr. H. G. Wells satirically pictured in Boon, it would still have to take its chances with the wild asses of the devil that human weakness, apathy, greed, lust for power, might release. Walt Whitman said of Carlyle that behind the tally of his work and genius stood the stomach, and gave a sort of casting vote. So one may say of every social movement, that behind the tally of its theoretic background and its concrete programs stand human beings—hale and sick, neurotic and stable, well-intentioned and malicious—and give the casting vote.
Anyone who has read an important book, and then met the author, who has respected an apparently significant social movement, and then met the leaders behind the scenes, will realize how frequent is the difficulty of reconciling theoretic agreement with the inaccessibilities and prejudices and repugnances of particular personalities. No one can join the work of even the most trivial sort of committee—be it a delegation to shake hands with the Congressman or a body designated to revise the rules of a tennis club—without discovering how the work in hand is perpetually being balked and diverted by the play of personalities.
It is not a little significant that popular speech gives the word “personalities” a derogatory meaning. Again and again the success or failure in large collaborations hinges upon human factors that have no bearing on the question at issue. Pope’s satiric words about wretches hanging that jurymen may dine touches the point neatly. Our programs for reconstruction that have not reckoned with the perpetual cussedness of human nature and have no method for exorcising are as shallow as those older theologies which sought to make men live in grace without altering the social order in which they functioned. Perhaps they could learn something from the story of that ancient agitator who cured the blind, the maimed, the sick, and the halt before he bade them enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Emerson well said in his essay on “Man the Reformer” that it was stupid to expect any real or permanent change from any social program which was unable to regenerate or convert—these are religious phases for a common psychological phenomenon—the people who are to engineer it and carry it through.
It would be so easy, this business of making over the world, if it were only a matter of creating machinery. There has probably never been lacking the sort of energy and talent that is needed for this sort of work; and at any rate, during the last three centuries, with the growth of technology, the mechanical services at the command of our engineers and organizers are huge and adequate. Unfortunately, we are still in the same ditch that Carlyle mordantly pointed out in his essay on Characteristics: Given a world of knaves, we are trying by various cunning devices to produce an honesty from their
