The conceptions of human life that our reforming groups have had have been pretty thin and unsatisfying. Any adequate conception of a new social order would, it seems to me, include the scenery, the actors, and the play. It is a mark of our immaturity that we never seem able to get beyond the scene shifting. Our social theorists, in so far as they consider the actors at all, are inclined to treat them as mechanical puppets. As for the play itself—the universal drama of courtship and trial and adventure and contest and achievement, in which every human being is potentially the hero or heroine—the play itself has hardly entered into their consciousness. Their values have not been human values: they have been such values as have been authenticated by commerce and industry, values such as efficiency, fair wages, and whatnot. These, at any rate, have been the immediate objects of effort, and if human values hung vaguely in the background, they were to be realized in a distant and unascertainable future. So one often feels that no matter how base and deteriorated the modern community is, it nevertheless retains in its totality a greater measure of human values than many of the groups that have attacked its inadequacy have to offer.
All this comes out pretty plainly in the attitude of the labor groups towards the current situation. Whether they are organized for political action or for industrial warfare, their aims are curiously similar. In the very act of contending against the present order, they have accepted the ends for which that order stands and have been content to demand simply that they be universalized. This perhaps accounts for the essential uncreativeness of the labor movement. By a revolution they do not mean a transvaluation of values: they mean a dilution and spreading out of established practices and institutions. There may indeed be plenty of excuse for this attitude in any particular situation—a group of unorganized and semi-destitute workers such as those in many American steel plants—but the worst of it is that this attitude characterizes the more advanced and economically secure groups, and creeps into such ultimate programs as one can deduce from attempts to create workers’ educational institutions—as if a change in ownership or the balance of power would alter the face of Coketown so that its fires would no longer burn and its cinders no longer smut.
I have emphasized what is the weakness, as it seems to me, of the labor movement; not because I am necessarily out of sympathy with any particular measure that might be proposed, but because it illustrates upon an enormous scale the point which I desire to make. The prohibition movement, or the charity organization movement—towards both of which I feel, on the contrary, a cordial antipathy—would serve just as well for illustration; for they all have this common distinction: they lack any explicit, consciously projected humane ends which would make any particular measure that they might offer justified.
IV
Let me now anticipate the answer which this criticism will probably meet. To some people it will seem that the current movements for reform are inevitably secular; that they have no business to concern themselves with the ultimate faith of men; that they inevitably deal with a limited here and now, a dollar more of wages, a drop less of liquor, a touch more of uniformity, and so forth. In short, our partial utopias need not concern themselves with any of the questions that have to do with the life of the spirit.
The simple answer to this crude philosophy is—so much the worse for them. The breach between the institutions that deal with the material life and those that deal with the ideal life results either in a complete dissociation, by which each set of institutions becomes paralytic and imbecile; or, as so often happens, in a capitulation of the spiritual power to the temporal, and its complete engrossment in temporal ends. I am aware that these phrases, “spiritual” and “temporal,” have a certain old-fashioned smell; but they precisely express my meaning: it is plain that every community contains the corresponding institutions—one group being devoted to values and the other to means. When our reforms are not touched by a sense of values, the result is that purely temporal ends are taken as ultimate, and we have such notions as efficiency or organization regarded as the very touchstone of social improvement. This is scarcely an improvement over the old order of things, with which we are now so dismally familiar—the state in which our values were not fertilized by any intercourse with the concrete and actual world about us, and so remained remote and sterile. In short, unless our reformers concern themselves with the ultimate values of men, with what constitutes a good life, they are bound to pander to such immediate faiths and superstitions as the National State, Efficiency, or the White Man’s Burden.
V
There is a final criticism of the partial utopias: our one-sided reforms have had this fatal defect—they are one-sided. This partisanship was expressed by their relation to the facts upon which their programs were based, and in their attitude towards the people who were to be affected by them.
The mood of partisanship has been that of a lawyer who is getting up an argument and is looking for such facts as will bolster up his case. That mood is inimical
