3.22. DEMOCRACY AND ARISTOCRACY.
And now having dealt with the general form of a man's duty and with his
duty to himself, let me come to his attitude to his individual
fellow-men.
The broad principles determining that attitude are involved in things
already written in this book. The belief in a collective being gathering
experience and developing will, to which every life is subordinated,
renders the cruder conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select life
going on amidst a majority of trivial and contemptible persons who "do
not exist," untenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to believe at all
in a comprehensive purpose in things is to abandon that attitude and all
the habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in universal
significance does not altogether preclude a belief in an aristocratic
method of progress, in the idea of the subordination of a number of
individuals to others who can utilize their lives and help and
contributory achievements in the general purpose. To a certain extent,
indeed, this last conception is almost inevitable. We must needs so
think of ourselves in relation to plants and animals, and I see no
reason why we should not think so of our relations to other men. There
are clearly great differences in the capacity and range of experience of
man and man and in their power of using and rendering their experiences
for the racial synthesis. Vigorous persons do look naturally for help
and service to persons of less initiative, and we are all more or less
capable of admiration and hero-worship and pleased to help and give
ourselves to those we feel to be finer or better or completer or more
forceful and leaderly than ourselves. This is natural and inevitable
aristocracy.
For that reason it is not to be organized. We organize things that are
not inevitable, but this is clearly a complex matter of accident and
personalities for which there can be no general rule. All organized
aristocracy is manifestly begotten by that fallacy of classification my
Metaphysical book set itself to expose. Its effect is, and has been in
all cases, to mask natural aristocracy, to draw the lines by wholesale
and wrong, to bolster up weak and ineffectual persons in false positions
and to fetter or hamper strong and vigorous people. The false aristocrat
is a figure of pride and claims, a consumer followed by dupes. He is
proudly secretive, pretending to aims beyond the common understanding.
The true aristocrat is known rather than knows; he makes and serves. He
exacts no deference. He is urgent to makes others share what he knows
and wants and achieves. He does not think of others as his but as the
End's.
There is a base democracy just as there is a base aristocracy, the
swaggering, aggressive disposition of the vulgar soul that admits
neither of superiors nor leaders. Its true name is insubordination. It
resents rules and refinements, delicacies, differences and organization.
It dreams that its leaders are its delegates. It takes refuge from all
superiority, all special knowledge, in a phantom ideal, the People, the
sublime and wonderful People. "You can fool some of the people all the
time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the
people all the time," expresses I think quite the quintessence of this
mystical faith, this faith in which men take refuge from the demand for
order, discipline and conscious light. In England it has never been of
any great account, but in America the vulgar individualist's
self-protective exaltation of an idealized Common Man has worked and is
working infinite mischief.
In politics the crude democratic faith leads directly to the submission
of every question, however subtle and special its issues may be, to a
popular vote. The community is regarded as a consultative committee of
profoundly wise, alert and well-informed Common Men. Since the common
man is, as Gustave le Bon has pointed out, a gregarious animal,
collectively rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow, the
practical outcome of political democracy in all large communities under
modern conditions is to put power into the hands of rich newspaper
proprietors, advertising producers and the energetic wealthy generally
who are best able to flood the collective mind freely with the
suggestions on which it acts.
But democracy has acquired a better meaning than its first crude
intentions--there never was a theory started yet in the human mind that
did not beget a finer offspring than itself--and the secondary meaning
brings it at last into entire accordance with the subtler conception of
aristocracy. The test of this quintessential democracy is neither a
passionate insistence upon voting and the majority rule, nor an arrogant
bearing towards those who are one's betters in this aspect or that, but
fellowship. The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet and are one
in feeling themselves parts of one synthesis under one purpose and one
scheme. Both realize that self-concealment is the last evil, both make
frankness and veracity the basis of their intercourse. The general
rightness of living for you and others and for others and you is to
understand them to the best of your ability and to make them all, to the
utmost limits of your capacity of expression and their understanding and
sympathy, participators in your act and thought.
