The Worst Fundamentalism
THE Scopes trial in Tennessee provided the biggest and best newspaper story since the war. It kept the headlines for weeks and provoked an immense amount of discussion all over the country. Especially among scholars and scientists this episode aroused a fine display of indignation. It was looked upon as a throwback to mediævalism, an attempt to stultify the convictions of men by due process of law. One would think, from the reaction in academic circles, that religious belief is the only field in which great bodies of our fellow citizens decline to be guided by science or by history.
Of course religion is not the only field in which fundamentalism challenges science. It is not the most important field. There is more fundamentalism in the political than in the religious thought of the American people to-day, and it works greater injury both to the cause of national progress and to the interests of the social order.
Even the most casual observer of our political psychology must have noticed that there are literally millions of Americans who decline to accept things on faith in the realm of religion, but who do not have the slightest compunction about swallowing the catchwords, phrases, formulas, and slogans that go to make up a creed in politics. They scoff at the miracles of Holy Writ, but are continually looking for the miraculous in government, or what would be miraculous if it ever happened — the conduct of a government according to business principles, for example. Most intelligent people regard as preposterous the idea that man was created from the dust of the earth; but they appear to see nothing ridiculous in the proposition that all men are created free and equal. They call that proposition a self-evident truth, when by all the teachings of science and history it is neither true nor self-evident. The modernist in religion wonders how anybody, in spite of astronomers and geologists, can believe that this world was created in six days of twenty-four hours each; but he himself finds no difficulty in believing that the Constitution of the United States was struck off as a finished job in four months. We do not call that belief fundamentalism; we call it patriotism. Of course our national Constitution and our whole frame of government are the product of evolution, just as man himself is; but how few people, even among the well-educated, have learned to think of the body politic in dynamic terms! No, we merely look upon the American democracy as something that rests upon inalienable rights and universal principles, a paragon of excellence which the rest of the world ought to copy but does not. Hence our laws insist that the Constitution be studied in our schools and colleges with due regard for the sanctity of the text and with no taint of higher criticism, but rather in all its textual literalness — that is to say, in the same uncritical spirit that characterizes the fundamentalist approach to the first chapter of Genesis.
I
Let me try to put together, in skeleton form, the political creed of the average American citizen, the dogmas which he accepts as fundamental truths notwithstanding their repugnance to the dictates of reason and to the teachings of experience. ‘Government must rest on the consent of the governed.’ ‘Democracy is government by the whole people.’ ‘The cure for the ills of a democracy is more democracy.’ (What a strange article of faith that slogan embodies! Were I to say that the remedy for the evils of misgovernment is more misgovernment I should be saying something just as rational, but I should be giving you a poor opinion of my intelligence.) ‘Ours must be a government of laws, not of men.’ ‘The executive and legislative branches of the government should be kept separate’; or, as it is sometimes expressed, ‘Checks and balances are essential safeguards of popular liberty.’ ‘No taxation without representation.’ ‘Self-determination and municipal home rule.’ ‘Avoid entangling alliances,’ ‘State rights.’ ‘The office should seek the man, not the man the office.’ (The office does seek the man sometimes, but not often — about as often as a burglar goes seeking a policeman.) ‘The rule of public opinion.’ ‘Political parties are groups of voters who think alike and have a common programme.’ And last, but by no means least, ‘The equality of all citizens before the law.’
These phrases and slogans, I believe, are accepted as gospel by the great majority of our people. They are taken on faith by men and women who insist on rationality in religion. Yet it can readily be demonstrated that no one of these principles is true without large qualifications, while some of them embody only a half truth or no truth at all. They have come down to us from earlier days, enshrined in the literature of patriotism, and so often reiterated from generation to generation that they have become a sort of biological inheritance. They are firmly stamped on the national imagination, and it is to one or another of these creedal tenets that the average citizen relates his reactions on most questions of public policy.
In some cases the results have been detrimental to progress in politics and even to sanity in our processes of government. Take the dogma of human equality, for example. It is a very pleasing idea, this proposition that all men and women are created free and equal, and especially alluring to those who by all the tests of reality are inferior. During the past hundred and fifty years this egalitarian principle has colored our whole political philosophy. It has profoundly influenced our constitutions, laws, and judicial administration. Yet a moment’s reflection will convince anyone that it is absolutely at variance with everything else in the range of human knowledge. Every biologist knows that men are not created equal in body; every educator knows that they are not created equal in mind. And anyone who observes the course of our politics is readily made aware of the fact that all men are not equal in their influence upon government — never were so and never can be. These things are as plain as any facts of biology or history can be, yet the man who would venture to advocate a system of government based upon the demonstrable inequality of men would promptly find his teachings stigmatized as un-American, undemocratic, and a menace to our institutions. He would be investigated by the school board at the demand of the American Legion.
In the practice of American government this doctrine of human equality has done a lot of harm. By its implications it has afforded good soil for the growth of the spoils system and the practice of rotation in office, two of the most noxious weeds in the garden of American politics. If all citizens are equally competent to govern their fellow men, why should we endeavor to choose among them on the basis of their special qualifications ? If all citizens are endowed with the same political capacity, why let any one stay in office very long? Our reluctance to make use of experts in any branch of public administration is in large measure a byproduct of this national obsession. The most formidable obstacle in the path of civil-service reform is not the avarice of the politician. It is the deep-seated popular conviction that any ablebodied citizen, whatever his competence or lack of it, has an equal and indefeasible right to a place on the public pay roll. Civil-service reform is deemed by many thousands of people in this country to be undemocratic because it throws public employment open to competition, and there is nothing like an open competition to demonstrate the essential inequality of men.
Of course we have been careful not to carry the doctrine of equality too far. We do not project it into the field of taxation, for example. Oh, no, not at all! Men may be equal in their capacity to govern, but not for one moment do we hold them equal in their capacity to bear the burdens of government. When it comes to the framing of our tax laws, we adopt the exact antithesis of the leveling principle. We go on the tacit assumption that men are vastly unequal in their ability to earn and in their ability to pay. In other words, we exalt the common man so far as his share in the control of government is concerned, but when it comes to liquidating the cost of this control — well, at that point the common man seems to lose all interest in the philosophy of Jefferson and Rousseau. He is willing to concede the superiority of the few when sacrifice is involved, and asserts the natural rights of the many only when power and patronage are concerned. I am not arguing, of course, that all men should be equally taxed. I am merely pointing out that this postulate of human equality goes quickly into the discard when it conflicts with the practical necessities of government. A principle always gives way when its application conflicts with the plain interests of the governing class.
II
Government must rest on the consent of the governed. This rule, of course, does not apply to aliens, Negroes, Filipinos, or inhabitants of the District of Columbia. The consent of the governed is a synonym for the will of the majority, and the will of the majority is expressed by a plurality of those who take the trouble to vote. There is a considerable spread between the two, as the figures disclose. For example, the census of 1920 showed approximately fifty million American citizens of voting age. Of this total, only about twenty-six million voters actually went to the polls in the presidential election of the same year. The successful candidate for the presidency was said to have ‘swept the country,’yet he received the votes of only thirty per cent of the people who were legally qualified to exercise the suffrage. Fifteen per cent of our total population gave the ‘consent of the governed’ for all the rest! This, moreover, was an unusually good showing, in a presidential election where momentous issues were at stake. Taking our state and municipal elections, and averaging them for the country as a whole, the figures show that the will of the people is regularly expressed by less than twenty per cent of our adult citizenship, or about ten per cent of the population. What we have in fact, therefore, is not a government by the whole people, or by a majority of the people, or even by a majority of the registered voters, but government by a mere plurality of the politically active.
So widely, then, is our doctrine of popular sovereignty at variance with the facts. Nor does the situation seem to be growing better. The proportion of t he polled vote to the registered vote is smaller in this country to-day than it was fifty years ago. It all goes to prove what a strangely perverse creature the citizen is. Refuse him the right to vote, and he would take up arms to wrest it from his rulers. But give this right to him freely, and he tucks it away in moth halls. He insists upon government by the whole people as a matter of principle, but as a matter of practice it does not concern him much.
III
We are asked to believe that public opinion rules the United States. It is the ultimate sovereign, the supreme law of the land. This is proposition number three in our fundamentalist decalogue. Government by public opinion is a phrase that slips easily from the tongue and has been so oft repeated that most people believe it to be true. Yet public opinion, when you try to define it, proves to be a very elusive thing. What passes for public opinion, in perhaps the majority of cases, is simply the outcome of propaganda and counter-propaganda working upon the traditions, prejudices, aversions, or inertia of the people. I use the term ‘propaganda’ in no disparaging sense. Call it ‘a campaign of education’ if you prefer that, expression — as most propagandist organizations do. The difference is all in your point of view. The first inclination of most men and women, at any rate, is to connect every new problem with something already silhouetted in their own imaginations, some principle that has already found lodgment there. Very few of us approach any new public question with open minds; or rather, we do it with minds that are open at the bottom only, not open at the top. Arguments and appeals to reason go in — and fall right out again. The stereotype remains unaltered.
Public opinion does not exude spontaneously from the cogitalions of the multitude. It does not embody the rational conclusions of what psychologists call ‘the group mind.’ In large measure it is a manufactured product, prepared for the purpose of selling it to the people and marketed to them in the accustomed way. We are prone to forget that you can sell an idea to the people in the same way that you sell them any other commodity, from a Liberty Bond to a breakfast food, and our politicians are the brokers who put through the sale. The arena of political discussion is a great stock exchange in which principles and policies are bought and sold. There are bulls and bears on the floor, crying their specialties up or down, urging the public to put their confidence in World Court common or endeavoring to pull down the market value of Volstead preferred. Our political brokers even deal in futures, and have marketed to the country a large block of that somewhat speculative stock known as ‘America’s entry into the League of Nations,’ when, if, and as issued.
We speak of the referendum as an expression of the public will. But this is merely one of the pleasant selfdeceptions which a democracy likes to cherish. For a referendum is at best nothing more than a call for the yeas and nays, with no opportunity for anyone to voice a qualified opinion. It assumes that every voter is ready to say yes or no to any question that may be placed before him, whether it relate to the extension of a street-railway franchise, the independence of the Philippines, or the pay of the police force. The unthinking voter may be able to do this, but the thoughtful man or woman, when confronted with an issue of public policy, is rarely able to express his true opinion by the simple expedient of marking a cross on a slip of paper; and this is particularly true when the question carries various implications, as referendum questions so often do. In such cases the referendum merely gives the voter a choice between two alternatives, neither of which he may desire, and to that extent it becomes an agency for eliminating the greater of two evils by forcing the people to choose the less. Small wonder it is that under such conditions the voice of the people turns out to be a babel of discordance like unto that which was heard on the plain of Shinar when men sought to build a city whose tower should spike the sky. Vox populi, vox Dei, it is said. For myself, if I thought that the voice of the people was the voice of God I should be sorely tempted to become an atheist.
No, the justification of elections, referenda, and majority rule is not the wisdom of the multitude, much less its omniscience, but the pressing necessity of devising some crude makeshift whereby decisions can be reached which the people will accept. In other words, democracy is a form of government that goes through the gestures of obeisance to popular sovereignty. A presidential election is merely our modern and highly refined substitute for the ancient revolution, a mobilization of opposing forces, a battle of the ins against the outs, with leaders and strategy and campaign chests and all the other paraphernalia of civil war, but without bodily violence to the warriors. This refinement of the struggle for political control, this transition from bullets to ballots, is perhaps the greatest contribution of modern times to the progress of civilization.
Public opinion does not follow the dictates of human reason, for if it did it would have some degree of stability, which it has not. It obeys what we may call, for lack of a better name, the ‘law of the pendulum,’ swinging from one extreme to another, with almost mathematical regularity. The public temper moves from conservatism to radicalism and back again with a precision that can be almost accurately predicted in advance. At one moment it craves strong and assertive leadership; but give the public what it craves and the people resent being led and demand a return to normalcy. Look over the list of American presidents during the past forty years and note the unfailing regularity with which strong men have been followed by weak, and weak presidents by strong. It is not reason that controls this swing of the pendulum, but emotionalism, the desire for change, the disinclination to be content with anything that is.
‘ Who rules England ?' asked a Stuart satirist. ‘The King rules England, of course.’ ‘But who rules the King?’ ’The Duke.’ ‘Who rules the Duke?’ ’The Devil.’ And so it is public opinion that rules in a democracy, and propaganda makes public opinion, and the politicians make the propaganda.
IV
We come to the fourth commandment: ‘Ours must be a government of laws, not of men.’ Free people must be subject only to laws of their own making, and never to the discretionary power of officials, whether elective or appointive, for official discretion is the essence of tyranny. So, indeed, it was written by the Fathers in the Federalist.
But no government ever has been or ever can be a government of laws alone. Laws are inanimate things. They have no motion of their own. Like clocks, they go from the motion that men give them. They must be interpreted, applied, and enforced by human agencies. Hence every government must be to a large extent a government of men, no matter what our delusions to the contrary may be. And the more complicated our civilization becomes, the more essential it is to widen the range of administrative discretion and to have a government of men. This broadening has been going on at a rapid rate in all branches of American government during the past few decades, and the end is not yet. We have, in fact, departed far from the old order.
Our tenacious belief in a government of laws has had one obvious result. It has resulted in an outpouring of laws the like of which the world has never seen elsewhere. There are various estimates of the total number of laws and ordinances now operative in the United States, but these estimates are mere guesswork, because nobody has ever attempted to count them all. We do know, however, that there are now on the statute books of the nation and the states no fewer than twenty thousand laws relating to the railroads alone. Thomas Jefferson once asserted that a government was best when it governed least. What would he say, were he to rise from his grave and survey a government which practises the principle of noninterference to the tune of twenty thousand statutes affecting a single branch of our transportation system ?
Our Federal and state laws are increasing at the rate of about ten thousand a year. It takes no fewer than one hundred and twenty-five printed volumes to hold our regular output of statutes, not to speak of almost as many more to contain the decisions of the courts interpreting these statutes. Think of the New York policeman who carries in his pockets a list of the sixteen thousand ordinances and regulations which he is expected to enforce. Your answer is that he does not enforce five per cent of them, and you are right, He is merely the sauntering symbol of our helplessness in dealing with the problems which life in a great urban community brings with it.
Our zeal for the making of laws has been matched by our lack of success in enforcing them. That is not surprising, for the average citizen has only a limited amount of time and thought for public affairs. If he bestows it on the task of getting laws made, he has none left for the much more difficult job of seeing that they are enforced. Our people keep a far closer watch on legislatures and city councils than on police courts and district attorneys’ offices and parole boards. The consequence is that a large part of the energy expended in lawmaking goes for nought. Much has been written upon the ways of securing a better enforcement of the laws of the land. But the first essential step in that direction, as I see it, must be a reorientation in the mind of the ordinary citizen. He must be brought to realize that when a law is passed the job is only half done, or less than half done. He must be induced to think in terms of a government of men. Until he does this, all other remedies for laxity in law enforcement will carry him but a little way,
V
Let me invite attention to another aspect of our political life and to some widespread misconceptions relating to it — namely, the party system. Nowhere does the fundamentalist character of our political creed disclose itself more plainly than here. A political party is commonly defined as a large group of men and women who profess allegiance to common principles and who think alike on public questions. We are asked to believe, in fact, that voters choose a political party as the outcome of their own thought and reflection. In reality this is very seldom the case. Far more often the voter’s allegiance to a political party is the result of his ancestry, or his occupation, or his personal associations, or something else that is largely irrelevant to his own rational processes. Most men and women inherit their party affiliations. They are creatures of the Mendelian law. They are Republicans or Democrats because their fathers and grandfathers were, although they do not like to be told this truth. If one takes the country as a whole, it is within bounds to say that at least sixty per cent of the active electorate is strictly ’regular’ in its party allegiance. Irrespective of issues or personalities, the partisan loyalty of these groups is almost absolutely dependable. Some of these voters — yes, thousands of them — would support Beelzebub for governor, with the right tag pinned on him. It is not that these men and women ‘think alike’; many of them do not think at all.
When you consider the realities and not merely the philosophy of our party system, you will find that unity of thought and allegiance to common principles is about the last thing that a party organization possesses. Glance for a moment at our two major organizations of to-day. The Democratic Party is made up of two outstanding elements: namely, the solid South and a large, widely scattered following in the North and West, particularly in the industrial cities. These two elements have virtually nothing in common. The Southern Democracy is largely nativeborn, Protestant, conservative, agricultural, and bone-dry. The Northern wing of the party is, by contrast, very largely of foreign birth or descent, diverse in religion, predominantly industrial in occupation, more radical in its point of view, and wringing wet on one of the main issues of the day. What a travesty on truth to say that here is an organization whose members profess common principles and think alike on public questions! To make any such assertion is to use the terms in a strictly Pickwickian sense. The affair in Madison Square Garden two years ago showed us what men who ‘think alike’ can do when they come together.
Nor is the situation in the Republican Party substantially different. It is merely that here the cleavage is East and West, not North and South. The G. O. P. is also a composite of two great elements that have little in common. The Eastern wing of the Republican Party, resting on New England and Pennsylvania, is heavily — but of course not wholly — industrial, strongly protectionist, and desirous not only of getting back to normalcy but of staying there. But as you move toward the Republican Middle West, Northwest, and Far West, you find the party taking on a bucolic color. Its attitude on public questions tends to centre around the interests of agriculture, and it can be counted upon to insurge whenever the price of wheat goes down. This Western section of the party is more radical, — or more progressive, if you prefer that term, — and its inclination to bolt from the paths of party regularity gives the Republican leaders perpetual concern. So there is no approach to unity of thought in the ranks of either organization.
What, then, of the party creed, the national platform to which members of the party are assumed to give their allegiance? True enough, the ostensible purpose of a party platform is to set forth foundations of belief and to enunciate a programme. But read one of these documents and you will find that this is precisely what a party platform, in its most important planks, is very careful not to do. Take the tariff issue, for example. Here is what the Republican national platform of 1924 said about the tariff: —
We believe in protection as a national policy, with due and equal regard to all sections and to all classes. It is only by adherence to such a policy that the wellbeing of the consumers can be safeguarded, that there can be assured to American agriculture, to American labor, and to American manufacturers, a return to perpetuate American standards of life.
Mark the solicitude for everything and everybody: for the consumer and producer, for the farmer, the industrial worker, and the employer. The Republican Party pledges us a tariff that will be equally beneficent to buyer and seller, to agriculture and to industry, to North, South, East, and West alike. Surely that pledge pays a poor tribute to the economic sagacity of a practical people, for no tariff equally advantageous to all classes and sections ever has been or ever can be framed.
But the Democratic Party did not propose to be outdone by any such compendious appeal, and its national platform of 1924 promptly countered with the following more concise but equally alluring assurance: —
We pledge ourselves to adjust the tariff so that the farmer and all other classes can buy again in a competitive manufacturers’ market.
There is a special appeal to the farmer here, to the discontented Republican farmer in particular, but you will observe that ‘all other classes’ are not forgotten. Indeed, the distinguishing mark of each plank in a party platform is its universality of appeal and its allinclusive promises. The party platform may embody a creed, but it is one that promises salvation to all.
VI
And so I might go on to the last verse in our political Pentateuch. ‘With words we govern men,’ Disraeli once said, and he was well practised in the art of government. Words and phrases have often been more influential than ideas in shaping the course of public administration. Nevertheless we are making progress. We are becoming less deferential to the platitudes than we used to be. A generation ago there was hardly anyone bold enough to question the time-hallowed doctrine of checks and balances in government. It was regarded as the shield and buckler of all true democracy. To-day it is not only assailed from many quarters, but in the field of municipal government it is being widely abandoned. The marvel to me is that any race of men, in their senses, should have chosen this extraordinary principle as one on which to base their government.
Some years ago I took a walking trip through southern Ireland. I noticed a good many goats in the fields, but always in pairs, tied to each other. Wondering why this should be the case, I asked an Irish farmer the reason. He was amazed at my lack of sophistication in animal husbandry.
‘They’re tied to each other so that they won’t wander away,’ he said.
‘But I don’t see the point,’ was my reply. ‘Why can’t two goats wander away as well as one.’
‘They can’t, and they won’t,’ he said, with true Hibernian emphasis, ‘for one goat will never go where the other wants to go, and the result is that they just stay around where they are.’
Then, for the first time, there dawned on me the psychological basis of the principle of checks and balances in government. Just hitch the executive and legislative branches of your government together in such a way that the one can never go anywhere without the other, and you may safely count upon both staying just where they are. This would be all right if the chief end of government were to maintain the status quo; but it is not. The chief end of a government is to promote progress, and no doctrine of checks and balances will ever conduce effectively toward that end.
In brief, then, the time has come to reŏxamine most of these maxims and postulates and aphorisms which are believed to embody true principles of democratic government. For it is only by renewing the foundations of the commonwealth that the permanence of a government can be assured. Ten years ago we talked gallantly of making the world safe for democracy. But the world can never be made safe for any system of government that does not rest on a rational basis, and our first task is to rationalize it in the minds of our own people. What we most need, therefore, is that the oncoming generation shall make war on fundamentalism in politics, just as scholars of the past generation have assailed fundamentalism in religion. That is one of the many herculean tasks that we pass along to the college graduates of to-day.