Culture and Laissez-Faire
I
IT was big business in seventeenth-century France that coined the slogan laissez faire. It was big business in nineteenth-century England that translated the protest against governmental interference into a very profitable policy. And it was big business in twentieth-century America that finally demonstrated the policy’s inadequacy. To whatever strange ports we are wafted on the warm breezes of the ‘New Deal,’ we shall not see the lotus land of laissez-faire again. That is probably the major historical fact of our generation.
The notion of letting everyone go his own way, in the comfortable faith that the way he found it profitable to go would coincide ‘naturally’ with the way he ought, in the general interest, to be going, covered always a mixture of truth and error. For the greater part of a century the former probably outweighed the latter. Modern circumstances, especially in the international field, have reversed the balance. We are now less mindful of the energy and inventiveness that laissez-faire let loose in the economic sphere than of the stagnation it imposed on those same faculties in other directions. It provided governments that had forgotten how to govern with the assurance that government was really unnecessary. It allowed interests that had no intention of submitting to control to argue that control was socially undesirable. It enabled a President of the United States, as recently as November 1932, to extol ‘the fluidity of the human particles,’ as if the architecture of the sand pile were the highest form of engineering he could compass. But since the angle of natural repose fell far short of our reasonable aspirations, other structural principles are nowunder discussion. Social planning has become the leading indoor sport of parlor Pinks; the ‘New Deal’ continues to attract a bevy of would-be Culbertsons to Washington. What Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and even Hitler have said in criticism of laissezfaire is receiving careful consideration in the few remaining democracies; and the opposing systems now under construction by the dictators are being closely scrutinized in private even by those who deride them in public.
But the criticism of the dictators does not stop at laissez-faire as a political or an economic maxim. It applies also to laissez-faire in the sphere of culture. The opposing systems give even less liberty to the writer, the artist, the teacher, the preacher, the broadcaster, the motionpicture producer, than they do to the business man or the factory manager. Not by accident, but by intention; not as a temporary expedient of revolutionary necessity, but as part of a permanent and considered policy.
This aspect of the matter has so far received little serious attention. We all have heard of, and deplored, the restraints on freedom of thought and expression, on intellectual and artistic independence, that prevail in Italy, Germany, and Russia; and we are gaining not a little from the privilege of playing host to many distinguished exiles from those countries. But that a modern nation should deny the principle, as well as the practice, of liberty in matters of culture seems hardly conceivable to us, save as an act of revolutionary fanaticism. It is in fact much more than this — as the dictators have repeatedly announced; and there is possibly a challenge to our traditions in the cultural sphere no less serious than that to our economic and political pretensions.
II
There is nothing historically new in the use of authority to bring about like-mindedness. On the contrary, it is the principle of liberty that is new — so new, in fact, as to be still on trial. Never have the agnostic, the heretic, the free lance, had so broad a license as during the past three generations of Western democracy. We are, when we stop to think of it, proud of this fact; though our pride may perhaps be tempered by the reflect ion that this freedom was partly accidental. It was the by-product of a philosophy which devoted much less attention than formerly to the life of mind, of spirit; which assumed, in practice, that so long as the pursuit of wealth went on energetically and unhampered, what people thought and how they felt were matters of very minor importance. Witness the fact that the one line of thought in which freedom of expression is still uncertain is that which attacks the dominant forms of economic activity. The atheist is a good deal more secure than the communist, because the deity is a minor issue as compared with private property.
We find it difficult, therefore, to understand governments which attach great importance to homogeneity of thought and ideal. We usually dismiss them with the remark that they are frightened of opposition; to which our intellectuals add that they are manifestly overcompensating for a collective inferiority complex. While there is truth in each of these opinions, it is rather less than half truth; and two half truths do not make a whole truth.
The whole truth goes much deeper. Nations which find themselves in desperate circumstances are called on for an effort of collective will which is possible only under the inspiration of a common faith and a common ideal. The repressive phase of the endeavor is its least significant aspect; what is really remarkable about it is the positive phase, the concentration of psychic energy on the national task. Visitors to Italy, Germany, Russia, whatever their opinions, are impressed with the amount of ozone, so to speak, in the mental atmosphere. These peoples are not cowed; they are resurgent — to use a favorite term of the Nazis. ‘It is a feeling — it is an emotion,’ said a German business man to an English reporter. ‘It is the most wonderful sense of comradeship. And then again it is a reinstatement of self-respect. It is to be again a great nation. Ah, I feel free!’
Liberty is gone, yet there is a curious atmosphere of liberation. Why? Because the dictators have discovered how to put the tremendous forces of collective emotion behind the collective destiny. That — that alone — is the secret of their power. The means they have employed are not new, nor esoteric, nor even very emotional in themselves. Hitler is almost cynically frank about the technique of the achievement. It rests, in every case, on the power of the myth. The myth is the current which fuses mass emotion and mass ideology into unity of purpose.
Well, we too had our myths during the war, when it was important for us all to act together. The only difference is that our myths were by comparison very inferior ones. We invented the ‘Hun’ (subsequently we invented the ‘Red’) very much as Hitler has invented the ‘Jew’; but he was not quite so useful a devil, because, for a practical, usable myth, he was really a little too mythical. Then, as the positive pole of our magnetic field, we invented the ‘war to end war’; which again was not as effective as it might have been, since many of us in our hearts did not, and do not, want to end war. Finally, we decided to ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ without ever being able to convince ourselves either that democracy could be made safe for the world or that the world would be much better if it were. We put the same kind of tactics behind our myth making (including the repressions) that the dictators have put behind theirs; but our myths were not adequate to the occasion, which was altogether too big for them.
And our myths had the further defect of lacking their proper ritual or symbolism. The only symbols we could rake up were our poor little national flags, which suggest division rather than unity, and our thin little national tunes, which we played till we were sick of the sound of them. If only we could have founded a League of Nations at the same time as we established unity of command, and given that a flag, a tune, and a ritual — then we might have achieved something, with all our effort, better than six million dead and the ruin of Europe.
Myths are curious things. They become true by being believed in. The grain of fact that is in all of them has little to do with their final form or function; but, being planted in a certain psychological soil, it produces truths of remarkable efficacy. That soil is the subconscious yearning for a centre of common aspiration; and the resulting truth is of the same order as that which the lover knows of his beloved. It is true for the believer, in that new evidence is continually forthcoming, and that it leads to results which harmonize admirably with the rest of his experience. Of course they do, since all his experience is colored by the need which the myth objectifies. But inasmuch as it focuses and energizes action, leading to results which would otherwise be impossible, it is there for us all to reckon with. Hitler’s ‘pure Aryanism,’ Mussolini’s Cæsarism, Stalin’s Marxism — the more they are believed in, the truer they become, proving their truth by results which accord with the hopes and expectations of their believers. To truth of such importance the claims of freedom and rationality appear justly subordinate.
III
The trouble with this sort of truth, as with every sort of pragmatic affirmation, is its local and limited quality. When it comes into conflict with other people’s truth, there is nothing left to appeal to — save force. That is why a purely pragmatic policy of nation building is essentially a warlike policy. But in the short run a policy which uses the power of the myth in preference to the appeal to reason, and silences doubt by emotion rather than by argument, offers tremendous advantages. It opens a short cut — short though bloody — to national unity. By harnessing collective emotion, via the myth, to collective effort, it attains a collective strength seldom reached by democratic societies. And it furnishes a sense of the absolute value of the corporate life that democracies, to judge by their disintegrative tendencies, lack. We who reject such a policy must realize what we are up against.
But we do reject it. Take a key issue. A few years ago there was a sharp skirmish between the American Legion and the intellectuals about the writing of school history textbooks. The Legion considered that many of the books in use showed a deplorable lack of respect for some of the famous figures in the American past, and indicated pretty plainly its opinion that the teaching of history should inculcate a belief in the unique excellence of the American nation. The intellectuals expressed themselves as horrified with the bias displayed in certain texts dear to local school committees, and endorsed such books as those of Dr. Beard which resolutely prefer truth to nationalism. So far as one could judge, the public was with the intellectuals — certainly the teachers were.
Now in Russia, Germany, and Italy school histories are all being rewritten from the point of view of the dominant national myth; and there is very little protest. Russian children now imbibe a history which shows the wickedness of capitalism, the folly of religion, and the adequacy of historical materialism as a clue to everything. Italian children learn the continuity of modern Italy with imperial Rome, and regard Mussolini as the natural successor to the Cæsars. German children, freed from the ‘corrupting influence’ of liberalism, are being taught the racial theory of history, with devotion to the state and the army as the prime objective, and a strong dash of irredentism to give it all a kick.
Could a majority of voters in any state or city of the Union be found to endorse such a policy? I doubt it. The American tradition, exceptions notwithstanding, is that matters of culture are not to be made subject to political expediency. We believe, taking us by and large, that our democracy is strong enough to stand for truth and freedom and still achieve a sufficient unity of will and idea. But, in believing that, we are setting ourselves a much more difficult challenge than we realize.
The United States, not less than Germany and Italy, is entering upon a drastic reconstruction of its collective life in which issues of the most fundamental character will be raised. What has happened so far is a mere scouting expedition. The process may take a couple of decades, or it may be catastrophic; in either case, the relations of the various sections and the various economic groups to one another will be profoundly altered, and the centre of gravity will undergo a noticeable shift. If the transition is not marked by civil disorder on an unprecedented scale, we shall be extraordinarily lucky. The drift toward violence has been very marked in recent years, and if we are compelled to adopt either Fascism or revolutionary communism, both of which have to maintain themselves by force, the outcome will be much more sanguinary than in Europe.
That prospect can be averted only by a surpassing readiness of all interests to put the commonweal ahead of their particular doctrines and advantages; and the challenge is coming, very speedily, in quite specific and material forms. We have to ask ourselves whether the practice of laissezfaire in cultural matters is giving us a collective morale high enough to stand the strain of the coming crisis. And we have to recognize that at present there are powerful groups within the community whose devotion to the common good is not strong enough to call forth voluntarily the sacrifices that are going to be demanded from them. External war may present a psychologically tempting distraction from the internal strain; and a pretext for it may not be undiscoverable, since within the next few years the United States will be compelled to assume a definite attitude, one way or another, toward its international responsibilities. Can we, consistently with the principle of liberty in education and culture, attain such an intelligent harmony of will and idea as will preserve us from becoming enemies of one another and a menace to our neighbors? That is the ultimate challenge to laissez-faire.
IV
If we fail, the penalty will be very heavy. It will involve, among other things, the disappearance of the form of government and the kind of liberty to which we have grown accustomed. But, if we are to succeed, one prerequisite is evident: we must foster intelligence and the power of the reason as energetically as the dictatorships foster emotion and the power of the myth.
And at once an ominous fact strikes one. Of all the popular objects of attack in time of depression, public education seems to be the most popular and the most defenseless. Business men who would admit that the social stability of the United States depends on the intelligence of the average citizen are everywhere acting as if education were the least essential of all the public services. Citizens’ committees, taxpayers’ leagues, municipal research bureaus, and chambers of commerce up and down the country have been heading the attack on the public schools, using as their chief weapon their private influence on the bankers, who have now, in many cases, the last word in municipal policy; and they have the support of the most widely circulating propaganda sheet in the country — the Saturday Evening Post. Salaries have been cut (where they are still paid) to levels below their 1914 purchasing power; staffs have been depleted to a degree which makes a class of less than forty children a rare phenomenon; and the teacher has been made to feel as if he were receiving an unmerited privilege from the community in being allowed to teach at all.
Well might a Chicago teacher exclaim, in January 1933, ‘How are we teachers to teach civics under present circumstances? Are we to admit that popular government has collapsed, as well as private industry? We are given to understand as teachers that we are further to be offered up as a sacrifice to the financial powers. The schools are easy to attack, though we have found it desperately hard to keep them open through eight long payless months. Do the people, the common people, really want their schools?’
There are, — or were, — no doubt, certain economies that could be made in the educational system without impairing its efficiency; but it takes experts, not bankers or politicians, to make them. And, on the other hand, the average level of public-school salaries, even before the depression, was too low to attract a sufficient supply of the right kind of talent, especially among men. In a dictatorship, this would not so much matter. When we hear of the wholesale mutilation of the educational system in Germany, of the virtual extinction of the progressive school movement, of the reckless sacrifice of intellectual ability to political fanaticism, we deplore it, but we recognize it as all of a piece with the type of society Germany is creating. A dictatorship, whether of one man or one party, does not need to rely upon the free intelligence of its citizenry. But a democracy does. Whether we realize it or not, the maintenance of the highest possible level of public education is an integral part of the American theory of government; and it is both better and safer that occasional waste or extravagance should be condoned than that efficiency should be in any measure impaired — especially in time of crisis.
Therefore, if federal aid is called for, it should be at least as freely forthcoming as it has been to insolvent railroads and corrupt banking institutions. Further, from the point of view of economic policy, the case for federal aid to education is at least as strong as the case for general ’public works.’ Of all possible public works, education is the most deserving; and if the government really desires to get more purchasing power into circulation, the needs of the teachers — which are also largely those of the children — are entitled to immediate consideration.
There is undoubtedly a problem here about which even professional opinion is divided. If the use of federal funds is to be invoked to relieve the present appalling emergency in the educational system, will there not arise a real danger of regimentation from above in respect of the educational programme? It is this prospect which has given pause to many in control of educational institutions whose needs are desperate. On the other hand, a survey of the composition of the school committees in the vast majority of the smaller towns suggests that some measure of centralization in control might be desirable for the improvement in personnel and policy that it could bring. In view of the inadequate state of organization and representation among teachers themselves, there can be no easy solution; but it seems to the present writer that the need for rescue work is so urgent as to warrant taking a certain risk in regard to local autonomy. The local communities owe it to the nation to live up to the responsibility that is entrusted to them. If they fail — for whatever reason — to do so, the nation cannot afford to regard the situation with indifference.
V
When we turn from the education of the child to that of the adult, we encounter another paradox. It has been officially stated that the present German government does not favor the extension of education among the people, especially among women. The Volkshochschulen, and other institutions for adults of more or less liberal character, have been closed, and even the book trade now exists largely on Nazi sufferance. The independent theatre, with its tremendous educational value, is a thing of the past. ‘We demand,’ says Article 23 of the official Nazi programme, ‘laws against tendencies in art and literature which have a bad influence on our life as a people, and the closing of institutions which conflict with this demand.’ The demand is being fulfilled even in advance of the laws. Modernist art is taboo, exhibitions have been forcibly closed, art organizations compelled to adopt the Nazi creed or dissolve. The entire motion-picture industry — ‘purged’ of its finest talent — is now reorganized ‘ under the protection of the national government ’ and entering on a new production programme according to the ideas of Dr. Goebbels. The propagandist control of broadcasting has forced itself into international prominence.
In short, there is no longer any sphere in which the opportunity for free cultural development is open to citizens of the ‘third Reich.’
Well, that is one way of striving for an effective consensus of opinion. To us it seems an appalling way, and not worth the price, even if it succeeds; we stand committed to an opposite course. But we cannot be said to be pursuing our own course as if we really believed in it, although success is just as important to us as it is to the Germans. The culture of the adult citizen is a matter which the United States has never yet taken seriously.
Adult education, for example, outside of some two or three progressive states, has received not one quarter the attention given it in other democracies; and the use of the radio has been left exclusively, save for some 4 per cent of total facilities, to the control of commercial interests. Out of ninety-five educational broadcasting stations licensed since February 1927, forty-four were surviving at the beginning of 1932, and several of these have since succumbed to the difficulties of their position. For all practical purposes, educational or cultural use of the radio depends entirely on the generosity of the commercial broadcasters. Partly on their own account, partly at the instigation of private social agencies, the principal broadcasters have given more of their facilities to disinterested uses than was expected a few years ago, and they are entitled to ample recognition of the fact. But, even if they were perfect Galahads, they are in business primarily to make money; their personnel, their organization, and their policy are all subject to this consideration.
An adequate social use of broadcasting in America is very far off indeed. Yet the cultural possibilities of this medium are so great — as the British have demonstrated — that no nation may neglect them with impunity; and an exclusively commercial control involves not only neglect of these possibilities, but certain kinds of positive damage to society.
Has it ever occurred to critics of the Nazi régime that the everlasting sales talk of American broadcasting constitutes a propaganda in favor of money making that is even more insistent, and more nauseating, than propaganda for a given political system? On behalf of the German, the Italian, and the Russian controls, it can at least be said that in forcing the attention of the listener to issues of national concern they compel him to a measure of disinterestedness in his personal outlook, and relegate the question of petty economic gain to a subordinate place in the collective ideology. That is no small advantage; it may turn out, in the matter of public morale, a decisive advantage over a system which devotes its major energies, Sundays and weekdays alike, by both precept and example, to the national sport of dollar chasing. If I am to be compelled to listen to propaganda over the radio, I would rather, on the whole, it were for a national ideal than for the patent-medicine proprietor and others of his tribe.
A second type of social cost is perhaps inevitably incurred by the mechanization of sound, so that the question becomes one of compensating advantage. American broadcasting consists of about 86 per cent music (of a sort). This fact, in conjunction with the mechanization of the motion-picture theatre, is rapidly reducing the American public to a passive, chairsitting mass, incapable of doing anything for itself, and ‘fed up’ with far more inactive recreation than is good for it. The American Society of Composers has produced figures to show that total sales of sheet music have fallen off 75 per cent in the past few years. An outstanding ‘song hit’ stales so quickly through incessant mechanical repetition that its sales now reach only about one fifth of their former volume, while employment of musicians in motion-picture theatres dropped from 19,000 in 1925 to about 3000 in 1932.
Much of this change is, no doubt, inevitable, and some of it, no doubt, represents a gain in the quality of what is actually heard. No one would contend, however, that the reduction to passivity of the general public is in itself a good thing; and we are entitled to ask the industries that bring it about what positive contributions to the national culture they can show to offset the loss of any active concern with the art of music in thousands of humble homes. They will reply, if they are honest, that considerations of national culture are necessarily a very distant second in their calculations to considerations arising from their profit-and-loss accounts.
VI
The truth is that a people whose cultural interests are almost entirely in the hands of the profit seekers is in no position to sneer at a people whose cultural interests are under the domination of a political group. Which is the more likely — that the profit system will place in control people who care little about profits, or that the dictatorships will eventually produce people who care less for politics than they do for culture? Consider the motionpicture industry: Is the Marxism of the Russian film, the ‘pure Germanism’ that is in future to inspire the German film, the melodramatic nationalism encouraged by the Italian directorate, any lower in the scale of values than the crude mass appetites to which, for purely financial reasons, the majority of American films cater? Russians, Germans, Italians, and a good many Americans, do not seem to think so. The question is open.
It may be argued on behalf of the laissez-faire attitude toward matters of culture that at any rate the possibility of change is not arbitrarily blocked, and that change may mean progress. It may; but there is no assurance that it will; and if laissez-faire is to mean in this sphere, as in others, the sole supremacy of private profit seeking, there is every probability that it will not. Freedom is an excellent thing, most excellent of all in matters of culture; but a system in which all cultural advance is conditioned by its ability to show financial profits is not in fact a free system, and special forms of community effort and organization may be a necessary prerequisite to freedom.
What precise forms such effort should take is a matter requiring careful consideration in the immediate future. For the past three or four years citizen organizations have been at work on these problems in respect of adult education, broadcasting, and the motion-picture business; but so far there is nothing that can be called a consensus of opinion. The area of agreement is little more than a general sentiment that matters cannot be left to take care of themselves. That, however, may prove a good starting ground if it can be extended. What is now needed is a wider public recognition of the existence of the cultural problem. Laissez-faire democracy has received a sharp challenge in this sphere as it has in others; and a government which relies, in the last resort, on the intelligence and the morale of the free citizen can no more afford a policy of drift in matters of culture than it can in matters of economics.
It remains to be seen whether, in the difficult times that lie ahead, the government of the United States can secure through voluntary loyalty the same preference of the common good to individual gain that other powers now foster by dictatorial methods. Considerable groups of Americans already affirm that it cannot, that the issue will have to be fought out. To avert that failure of reason and good will, the national government must endeavor to deserve the loyalty of its citizens in a measure exceeding the call of either party or profit. It cannot do this by an exclusive devotion to economic ends, whether of individuals, corporations, or the state itself. An active concern for economic justice is undoubtedly the first step. An active concern for the culture of its citizens is the equally essential second.