PG73755.B00714
Thus in America there is growing recognition of the fact that social policies are not policies invented for the good of the people, but policies created by the people. The regulation theory was based on the same fallacy as the let-alone theory, namely, that government is something external to the structural life of the people. Government cannot leave us alone, it cannot regulate us, it can only express us. The scope of politics should be our whole social life. Our present idea of an omnipresent, ever-active, articulate citizenship building up its own life within the frame of politics is the most fruitful idea of modern times.

PG73755.B00715
Moreover, social legislation is an indication of the growth of democracy, the increase of individualism, because it is legislation for the individual. We have had legislation to protect home industries, we have encouraged agriculture, we have helped the railroads by concessions and land grants, but we have not until recently had legislation for the individual. Social legislation means legislation for the individual man: health laws, shorter hours of work, workmen’s compensation, old age pensions, minimum wage, prevention of industrial accidents, prohibition of child labor, etc. Over and over again our social legislation is pointed to as a reaction against individualism. On the contrary it shows an increase of genuine individualism. The _individual_ has never been so appreciated as in the awakening _social_ world of to-day.

PG73755.B00716
This is not a contradiction of what is said in chapter XV, that law according to its most progressive exponents is to serve not individuals, but the community; that modern law thinks of men not as separate individuals, but in their relation to one another. Modern law synthesizes the idea of individual and community through its view of the social individual as the community-unit. Law used to be for the particularist individual; now it serves the community, but the community-unit is the social individual.

PG73755.B00717
In our most recent books we see the expression “the new individualism.” The meaning of this phrase, although never used by him, is clearly implied in the writings of Mr. Roscoe Pound. He says “As a social institution the interests with which law is concerned are social interests, but the chiefest of these social interests is one in the full human life of the individual.” Here is expressed the essential meaning of the new individualism—that it is a synthesis of individual and society. That the social individual, the community-unit, is becoming “the individual” for law is the most promising sign for the future of political method. When Mr. Pound says that the line between public law and private law in jurisprudence is nothing more than a convenient mode of expression, he shows us the old controversy in regard to the state and the individual simply fading away.

PG73755.B00718
Social legislation, direct government, concentration of administrative responsibility, are then indications of the growth of democracy? Yes, but only indications. They can mean an actual increase of democracy only if they are accompanied by the development of those methods which shall make every man and his daily needs the basis and the substance of politics.

PG73755.B00719
-----

PG73755.B00720
Footnote 74:

PG73755.B00721
With the executive and legislative limited in their powers, the decisions of the courts gradually came, especially as they developed constructive powers, to be a body of law which guided the American people.

PG73755.B00722
Footnote 75:

PG73755.B00723
For ways of doing this see Part III.

PG73755.B00724
Footnote 76:

PG73755.B00725
We used to think frequent elections democratic. Now we know that they mean simply an increase of party influence and a decrease of official responsibility.

PG73755.B00726
Footnote 77:

PG73755.B00727
See ch. XXX, “Political Pluralism and Functionalism.”

PG73755.B00728
Footnote 78:

PG73755.B00729
_Laissez-faire_ was popular when there were great numbers of individual producers. When the large-scale business system made wage-earners of these, there was the beginning of the break-down of _laissez-faire_.

PG73755.B00730
Footnote 79:

PG73755.B00731
Besides the more obvious one of “universal suffrage.”

PG73755.B00732
------------------------------------------------------------------------

PG73755.B00733
PART III

PG73755.B00734
GROUP ORGANIZATION DEMOCRACY’S METHOD

PG73755.B00735
1. THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP

PG73755.B00736
2. THE OCCUPATIONAL GROUP

PG73755.B00737
------------------------------------------------------------------------

PG73755.B00738
THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP

PG73755.B00739
------------------------------------------------------------------------

PG73755.B00740
XXII

PG73755.B00741
NEIGHBORHOOD NEEDS THE BASIS OF POLITICS

PG73755.B00742
--------------

PG73755.B00743
POLITICS are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or method, or is this the guiding moment?

PG73755.B00744
We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of politics as entirely outside our daily life manipulated by those set apart for the purpose. The methods by which the party platform is constructed are not those which put into it the real issues before the public; the tendency is to put in what will elect candidates or to cover up the real issues by generalities. But just so long as we separate politics and our daily life, just so long shall we have all our present evils. Politics can no longer be an extra-activity of the American people, they must be a means of satisfying our actual wants.

PG73755.B00745
We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the work we do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we live, the water we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for bringing up our children, that in fact the whole area of our daily life should constitute politics. There is no line where the life of the home ends and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private life and my public life. A man I know tells me that he “wouldn’t touch politics with a ten-foot pole,” but how can he help touching politics? He may not like the party game, but politics shape the life he leads from hour to hour. When this is once understood no question in history will seem more astonishing than the one so often reiterated in these days, “Should woman be given a place in politics?” Woman _is_ in politics; no power under the sun can put her out.

PG73755.B00746
Politics then must satisfy the needs of the people. What are the needs of the people? Nobody knows. We know the supposed needs of certain classes, of certain “interests”; these can never be woven into the needs of the people. Further back we must go, down into the actual life from which all these needs spring, down into the daily, hourly living with all its innumerable cross currents, with all its longings and heart-burnings, with its envies and jealousies perhaps, with its unsatisfied desires, its embryonic aspirations, and its power, manifest or latent, for endeavor and accomplishment. The needs of the people are not now articulate: they loom out of the darkness, vague, big, portentously big, but dumb because of the separation of men. To open up this hinterland of our life the cross currents now burrowing under ground must come to the surface and be openly acknowledged.

PG73755.B00747
We work, we spend most of our waking hours working for some one of whose life we know nothing, who knows nothing of us; we pay rent to a landlord whom we never see or see only once a month, and yet our home is our most precious possession; we have a doctor who is with us in the crucial moments of birth and death, but whom we ordinarily do not meet; we buy our food, our clothes, our fuel, of automatons for the selling of food, clothes and fuel. We know all these people in their occupational capacity, not as men like ourselves with hearts like ours, desires like ours, hopes like ours. And this isolation from those who minister to our lives, to whose lives we minister, does not bring us any nearer to our neighbors in their isolation. For every two or three of us think ourselves a little better than every other two or three, and this becomes a dead wall of separation, of misunderstanding, of antagonism. How can we do away with this artificial separation which is the dry-rot of our life? First we must realize that each has something to give. Every man comes to us with a golden gift in his heart. Do we dare, therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by myself on my little self-made pedestal, I narrow myself down to my own personal equation of error. If I go to all my neighbors, my own life increases in multiple measure. The aim of each of us should be to live in the lives of all. Those fringes which connect my life with the life of every other human being in the world are the inlets by which the central forces flow into me. I am a worse lawyer, a worse teacher, a worse doctor if I do not know these wider contacts. Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with every other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in isolation.

PG73755.B00748
But it must be a significant union, never a mere coming together. How we waste immeasurable force in much of our social life in a mere tossing of the ball, on the merest externality and travesty of a common life which we do not penetrate for the secret at its heart. The quest of life and the meaning of life is reality. We may flit on the surface as gnats in the sunlight, but in each of us, however overlaid, is the hunger and thirst for realness, for substance. We must plunge down to find our treasure. The core of a worthy associated life is the call of reality to reality, the calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the depths forever more and more. To go to meet our fellows is to go out and let the winds of Heaven blow upon us—we throw ourselves open to every breath and current which spring from this meeting of life’s vital forces.

PG73755.B00749
Some of us are looking for the remedy for our fatal isolation in a worthy and purposeful neighborhood life. Our proposal is that people should organize themselves into neighborhood groups to express their daily life, to bring to the surface the needs, desires and aspirations of that life, that these needs should become the substance of politics, and that these neighborhood groups should become the recognized political unit.

PG73755.B00750
Let us consider some of the advantages of the neighborhood group. First, it makes possible the association of neighbors, which means fuller acquaintance and a more real understanding. The task of creation from elektrons up is putting self in relation. Is man the only one who refuses this task? I do not know my next-door neighbor! One of the most unfortunate circumstances of our large towns is that we expect concerted action from people who are strangers to one another. So mere acquaintance is the first essential. This will lead inevitably to friendly feeling. The story is told of some American official who begged not to be introduced to a political enemy, for he said he could not hate any one with whom he became acquainted. We certainly do feel more kindly to the people we actually see. It is what has been called “the pungent sense of effective reality.” Neighborhood organization will substitute confidence for suspicion—a great gain.

PG73755.B00751
Moreover, neighborhood organization gives opportunity for constant and regular intercourse. We are indeed far more interested in humanity than ever before. Look at what we are studying: social psychology, social economics, social medicine and hygiene, social ethics etc. But people must socialize their lives by practice, not by study. Until we begin to acquire the habit of a social life no theory of a social life will do us any good. It is a mistake to think that such abstractions as unity, brotherhood etc. are as self-evident to our wills as to our intellect. I learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship, but by living my life with my friends and learning by experience the obligations friendship demands. Just so must I learn my relation to society by coming into contact with a wide range of experiences, of people, by cultivating and deepening my sympathy and whole understanding of life.

PG73755.B00752
When we have come together and got acquainted with one another, then we shall have an opportunity for learning the rules of the game—the game of association which is the game of life. Certain organizations have sprung up since 1914 with the avowed object of fighting war with love. If only we knew how to love! I am ready to say to you this minute, “I love my neighbors.” But all that I mean by it is that I have a vague feeling of kindliness towards them. I have no idea how to do the actual deed. I shall offend against the law of love within an hour. The love of our fellow-men to be effective must be the love evolved from some actual group relation. We talk of fellowship; we, puny separatists bristling with a thousand unharmonized traits, with our assertive particularist consciousness, think that all we have to do is to _decide_ on fellowship as a delightful idea. But fellowship will be the slowest thing on earth to create. An eager longing for it may help, but it can come into being as a genuine part of our life only through a deep understanding of what it really means.

PG73755.B00753
Yet association is the impulse at the core of our being. The whole social process is that of association, individual with individual, group with group. Progress from one point of view is a continuously widening of the area of association. Our modern civilization has simply overlaid and falsified this primary instinct of life. But this is rapidly changing. The most striking characteristic of the present day is that people are doing more things together: they are coming together as never before in labor organizations, in coöperative societies, in consumers’ leagues, in associations of employers and employed, in municipal movements, for national purposes, etc. etc. We have the Men’s City Club, the Women’s City Club; professional societies are multiplying over night. The explanation sometimes given for this present tendency towards union is that we are beginning to see the material advantages of coöperation, but the root of the thing is far from utilitarian advantage. Our happiness, our sense of living at all, is directly dependent on our joining with others. We are lost, exiled, imprisoned until we feel the joy of union.

PG73755.B00754
I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us with a fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common life, is going to be the substitute for what men now get in war. Some psychologists tell us that fighting is one of the fundamental instincts, and that if we do not have war we shall have all the dangers of thwarted instinct. But the lure of war is neither the instinct of hate nor the love of fighting; it is the joining of one with another in a common purpose. “And the heart of a people beat with one desire.” Many men have gone joyfully to war because it gave them fellowship. I said to some one that I thought the reason war was still popular in spite of all its horrors was because of our lack of imagination, we simply could not realize war. “No,” said the man I spoke to, “I know war, I know its horrors, and the reason that in spite of it all men like war is because there we are doing something all together. That is its exhilaration and why we can’t give it up. We come home and each leads his separate life and it seems tame and uninteresting merely on that account, the deadly separateness of our ordinary life.”

PG73755.B00755
When we want a substitute for war, therefore, we need not seek for a substitute for fighting or for hating; we must find some way of making ourselves feel at one with some portion of our fellow-creatures. If the essential characteristic of war is doing things together, let us begin to do things together in peace. Yet not an artificial doing things together, we could so easily fall into that, but an entire reorganization of life so that the doing things together shall be the natural way—the way we shall all want to do things.

PG73755.B00756
But mere association is not enough. We need more than the “collective life,” the mere “getting-together,” so much talked of in these days; our getting together must be made effective, must exercise our minds and wills as well as our emotions, must serve the great ends of a great life. Neighborhood organization gives all an opportunity to learn the technique of association.

PG73755.B00757
A further advantage of neighborhood organization is that as a member of a neighborhood group we get a fuller and more varied life than as a member of any other kind of a group we can find, no matter how big our city or how complex or comprehensive its interests. This statement sounds paradoxical—it will seem to many like saying that the smaller is greater than the larger. Let us examine this statement therefore and see if perhaps in this case the smaller is not greater than the larger. Why is the neighborhood group better for us than the selected group? Why are provincial people more interesting than cosmopolitan, that is, if provincial people have taken advantage of _their_ opportunities? Because cosmopolitan people are all alike—that has been the aim of their existence and they have accomplished it. The man who knows the “best” society of Petrograd, Paris, London and New York, and that only, is a narrow man because the ideals and standards of the “best” society of London, Paris and New York are the same. He knows life across but not down—it is a horizontal civilization instead of a vertical one, with all the lack of depth and height of everything horizontal. This man has always been among the same kind of people, his life has not been enlarged and enriched by the friction of ideas and ideals which comes from the meeting of people of different opportunities and different tastes and different standards. But this is just what we may have in a neighborhood group—different education, different interests, different standards. Think of the doctor, the man who runs the factory, the organist and choir leader, the grocer, the minister, the watch-maker, the school-teacher, all living within a few blocks of one another.

PG73755.B00758
On the other hand consider how different it is when we _choose_ the constituents of our group—then we choose those who are the same as ourselves in some particular. We have the authors’ club, the social workers’ club, the artists’ club, the actors’ society, the business men’s club, the business women’s club, the teachers’ club etc.[80] The satisfaction and contentment that comes with sameness indicates a meagre personality. I go to the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my neighborhood club to meet men. It is just because my next door neighbor has never been to college that he is good for me. The stenographer may come to see that her life is really richer from getting the factory girl’s point of view.

PG73755.B00759
In a neighborhood group you have the stimulus and the bracing effect of many different experiences and ideals. And in this infinite variety which touches you on every side, you have a life which enriches and enlarges and fecundates; this is the true soil of human development—just because you have here a natural and not an artificial group, the members find all that is necessary in order to grow into that whole which is true community living.

PG73755.B00760
Many young men and women think as they come to the teeming cities that there they are to find the fuller life they have longed for, but often the larger our world the narrower we become, for we cannot face the vague largeness, and so we join a clique of people as nearly like ourselves as we can find.

PG73755.B00761
In so far, therefore, as neighborhoods are the result of some selective process, they are not so good for our purpose. The Italian colony or the Syrian colony does not give us the best material for group organization, neither does any occupational segregation like the stockyard district of Chicago. (This is an argument against the industrial colonies which are spreading.) In a more or less mixed neighborhood, people of different nationalities or different classes come together easily and naturally on the ground of many common interests: the school, recreational opportunities, the placing of their children in industry, hygiene, housing etc. Race and class prejudices are broken down by working together for intimate objects.

PG73755.B00762
Whenever I speak of neighborhood organization to my friends, those who disagree with me at once become violent on the subject. I have never understood why it inflames them more easily than other topics. They immediately take it for granted that I am proposing to shut them up tight in their neighborhoods and seal them hermetically; they assume that I mean to substitute the neighborhood for every other contact. They tell me of the pettiness of neighborhood life, and I have to listen to stories of neighborhood iniquities ranging from small gossip to determined boycotting. Intolerance and narrowness thrive in the neighborhood group they say; in the wider group they do not. But I am not proposing to substitute the neighborhood group for others, yet even so I should like to say a word for the neighborhood.

PG73755.B00763
We may like some selected group better than the company of our neighbors, but such a group is no “broader” necessarily, because it draws from all over the city, than a local one. You can have narrow interests as well as narrow spaces. Neighbors may, it is true, discuss the comings and goings of the family down the street, but I have heard people who are not neighbors discuss equally trivial subjects. But supposing that non-neighborhood groups are less petty in the sense of less personal in their conversation, they are often also less real, and this is an important point. If I dress in my best clothes and go to another part of the city and take all my best class of conversation with me, I don’t know that it does me any good if I am the same person who in my every-day clothes goes in next door and talks slander. What I mean is that the only place in the world where we can change ourselves is on that level where we are real. And what is forgotten by my friends who think neighborhood life trivial is that (according to their own argument) it is the same people who talk gossip in their neighborhoods who are impersonal and noble in another part of the city.

PG73755.B00764
Moreover, if we are happier away from our neighborhood it would be well for us to analyze the cause—there may be a worthy reason, there may not. Is it perhaps that one does not get as much consideration there as one thinks one’s due? Have we perhaps, led by our vanity, been drawn to those groups where we get the most consideration? My neighbors may not think much of me because I paint pictures, knowing that my back yard is dirty, but my artist friends who like my color do not know or care about my back yard. My neighbors may feel no admiring awe of my scientific researches knowing that I am not the first in the house of a neighbor in trouble.

PG73755.B00765
You may reply, “But this is not my case. I am one of the most esteemed people in my neighborhood and one of the lowest in the City Club, but I prefer the latter just because of that: there is room for me to aspire there, but where I am leading what is there for me to grow toward, how can I expand in such an atmosphere?” But I should say that this also might be a case of vanity: possibly these people prefer the City Club because they do not like to think they have found their place in life in what they consider an inferior group; it flatters them more to think that they belong to a superior group even if they occupy the lowest place there. But the final word to be said is I think that this kind of seeking implies always the attitude of getting, almost as bad as the attitude of conferring. It is extremely salutary to take our place in a neighborhood group.

PG73755.B00766
Then, too, that does not always do us most good which we enjoy most, as we are not always progressing most when thrills go up and down our spine. We may have a selected group feeling “good,” but that is not going to make us good. That very homogeneity which we nestle down into and in which we find all the comfort of a down pillow, does not provide the differences in which alone we can grow. We must know the finer enjoyment of recognized diversity.

PG73755.B00767
It must be noted, however, that while it is not proposed that the neighborhood association be substituted for other forms of association—trade-union, church societies, fraternal societies, local improvement leagues, coöperative societies, men’s clubs, women’s clubs etc.—yet the hope is that it shall not be one more association merely, but that it shall be the means of coördinating and translating into community values other local groups. The neighborhood association might become a very mechanical affair if we were all to go there every evening and go nowhere else. It must not with its professed attempt to give a richer life cut off the variety and spontaneity we now have.

PG73755.B00768
But the trouble now is that we have so much unrelated variety, so much unutilized spontaneity. The small merchant of a neighborhood meets with the other small dealers for business purposes, he goes to church on Sundays, he gets his social intercourse at his lodge or club, but where and when does he consider any possible integration of these into channels for community life? At his political rally, to be sure, he meets his neighbors irrespective of business or church or social lines, but there he comes under party domination. A free, full community life lived within the sustaining and nourishing power of the community bond, lived for community ends, is almost unknown now. This will not come by substituting the neighborhood group for other groups, not even by using it as a clearing-house, but by using it as a medium for interpretation and unofficial integration.
