the one against the many
In an epoch dominated by the aspirations of new states for national development, it is instructive to recall that the UnitedStates itself began as an underdeveloped country.
Every country, of course, has its distinctive development problems and must solve them according to its own traditions, capacities, and values. The Americanexperience was unique in a number of ways. The country was blessed by notable advantages—above all, by the fact that population and resources was obviously not the only factor in American development. Had that been so, the Indians, for whom the ratio was even more favorable, would have developed the country long before the first settlers arrived from over the seas. What mattered equally was the spirit in which these settlers approached the economic and social challenges offered by the environment. Several elements seemed fundamental to the philosophy which facilitated the rapid social and economic development of the American continent.
One factor was the deep faith in education. The belief that investment in people is the most essential way for a society to devote its resources existed from the earliest days of the American colonies. It arose originally from a philosophical rather than an economic commitment—from a faith in the dignity of man and from the resulting belief that it is the responsibility of society to offer man the opportunity to develop his highest potentialities. But, at the same time, it also helped produce the conditions essential to successful modernization.
Modern industrial society must be above all a literate society. Economic historians attribute two-third of the growth in American output over the centuries of Americandevelopment to increases on productivity. And increases in productivity, of course, come directly from the size of national investment in education and in research. J. K. Galbraith had rightly observed that “a dollar or a rupee invested in the intellectual improvement of human beings will regularly bring a greater increase in national income than a dollar or a rupee devoted to railways, dams, machine tools, or other tangible capital goods.”T hese words accurately report the American national experience.
Another factor in the process of American development has been the commitment to self-government and representative institutions. We have found no better way than democracy to fulfill man’s talents and release his energies. A related factor had been the conviction of the importance of personal freedom and personal initiative—the feeling that the individual is the source of creativity. Another has been the understanding of the role of cooperative activity, public as well as voluntary.
But fundamental to all of these, and perhaps the single most important explanation of the comparative speed of American development, had been the national rejection of dogmatic preconceptions about the nature of the social and economic order. America has had the good fortune not to be an ideological society.
By ideology I mean a body of systematic and rigid dogma by which people seek to understand the world—and to preserve or transform in. the conflict between ideology and empiricism has, of course, been old in human history. In the record of this conflict, ideology has attracted some of the strongest intelligences mankind has produced—those whom Sir Isaiah Berlin, termed the “hedgehogs”, who knows one big thing, as against the “foxes”, who know many small things.
Nor can one suggest that Americans have been consistently immune to the ideological temptation—to the temptation, that is, to define national goals in an ordered, comprehensive, and permanent way. After all, the American mind was conditioned by one of the noblest and most formidable structures of analysis ever devised, Calvinist theology, and any intellect so
shaped was bound to have certain vulnerability to secular ideology ever after. There have been hedgehogs throughout American history who have attempted to endow America with an all-inclusive creed, to translate Americanism into a set of binding propositions, and to construe the national tradition in terms of one or another ultimate law.
Yet most of the time Americans have foxily mistrusted abstract rationalism and rigid a priori doctrine. Our national faith has been not in propositions but in processes. In its finest hours, the Unite States has, so to speak, risen above ideology. It has not permitted dogma to falsify reality, imprison experience, or narrow the spectrum of choice. This skepticism about ideology has been a primary source of the social inventiveness which has marked so much of development. The most vital American social thought has been empirical, practical, pragmatic. America, in consequence, has been at its most characteristic a nation of innovation and experiment. Pragmatism is no more wholly devoid of abstractions than ideology is wholly devoid of experience. The dividing line comes when abstractions and experience collide and one must give way to the other. At this point the pragmatist rejects abstractions and, the ideologist rejects experience. The early history of the republic illustrates the difference. The American Revolution was a pragmatic effort conducted in terms of certain general values. The colonists fought for independence in terms of British ideals of civil freedom and representative government; they rebelled against British rule essentially for British reasons. The ideals of American independence found expression in the classical documents which accompanied the birth of the nation: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
But it is important here to insist on the distinction between ideals and ideology. Ideals refer to the long-run goals of a nation and the spirit in which these goals are pursued. Ideology is something different, more systematic, more detailed, more comprehensive, more dogmatic. The case of one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, emphasizes the distinction. Jefferson was an expounder both of ideals and of ideology. As an expounder of ideals, he remains a vivid and fertile figure—alive, not only for Americans but, Ibelieve, for all those interested in human dignity and human liberty. As an ideologist, however, Jefferson is today remote—a figure not of present concern but of historical curiosity. As an ideologist, he believe, for example, that agriculture was the only basis of a good society; that the small freehold system was the only foundation for freedom; that the honest and virtuous cultivator was the only reliable citizen for a democratic state; that an economy based on agriculture was self-regulating and, therefore, required a minimum of government; that that government was best which governed least; and that the great enemies of a free state were, on the one hand, urbanization, industry, banking, a landless working class, and on the other hand, a strong national government with power to give direction to national development. This was Jefferson’s ideology, and had the United States responded to it, we would be today a feeble and impotent nation. By responding to Jefferson’s ideals rather than to his ideology, the United States has become a strong modern state.
Fortunately, Jefferson himself preferred his ideals to his ideology. In case of conflict he chose what helped people rather than what conformed to principle. Indeed, the whole ideological enterprise contradicted Jefferson’s temper, which was basically flexible and experimental. The true Jefferson is not the ideological Jefferson but the Jefferson who said that one generation could not commit the next to its view of public policy or human destiny.
What is wrong with faith in ideology? The trouble is this. An ideology is not a picture of actuality; it is a model derived from actuality, a model designed to isolate certain salient features of
actuality which the model builder, the ideologist, regards as of crucial importance. An ideology, in other words, is an abstraction from reality. There is nothing wrong with abstraction or models per se. In fact, we could not conduct discourse without them. There is nothing wrong with them—so long, that is, as people remember they are only models. The ideological fallacy is to forger that ideology is an abstraction from reality and to regard it as reality itself.
The besetting sin of the ideologist, in short, is to confuse his own tidy models with the vast, turbulent, unpredictable, and untidy reality which is the stuff of human experience. And this confusion has at least two bad results—it commits those who believe in ideology to a fatalistic view of history, and it misleads them about concrete choices of public policy.
Consider for a moment the ideologist’s view of history. The ideologist contends that the mysteries of history can be understood in terms of a clear-cut, absolute, social creed which explains the past and forecasts the future. Ideology thus presupposes a closed universe whose history is determined, whose principles are fixed, whose values and objectives are deducible from a central body of social dogma and often whose central dogma is confided to the custody of an infallible priesthood.In the old philosophic debates between the one and the many, the ideologist stands with the one. It is his belief that the world as a whole can be understood from a single viewpoint that everything in the abundant and streaming life of man is reduci ble to a single abstract system of interpretation.
The American tradition has found this view of human history repugnant and false. This tradition sees the world as many, not as one. These empirical instincts, the preference for fact over logic, for deed over dogma, have found their most brilliant expression in the writings of William James and in the approach to philosophical problems which James called “radical empiricism”. Against the belief in the all-encompassing power of a single explanation, against the commitment to the absolutism of ideology, against the notion that all answers to political and social problems can be found in the back of some sacred book, against the deterministic interpretation of history, against the closed universe, James stood for what he called the unfinished universe—a universe marked by growth, variety, ambiguity, mystery, and contingency—a universe where free men may find partial truths, but where no mortal man will ever get an absolute grip on Absolute Truth, a universe where social progress depends not on capitulation to a single, all-consuming body of doctrine, but on the uncoerced intercourse of unconstrained minds.
Thus ideology and pragmatism differ radically in their views of history. They differ just as radically in their approach to issues of public policy. The ideologist, by mistaking models for reality, always misleads as to the possibilities and consequences of public decision. The history of the twentieth century is a record of the manifold ways in which humanity has been betrayed by ideology.
Let us take an example from contemporary history. It is evident now, for example, that the choice between private and public means, that choice which has obsessed so much recent political and economic discussion in underdeveloped countries, is not a matter of religious principle. It is not a moralissue to be decided on absolutist grounds, either by those on the right who regard the use of public means as wicked and sinful, or by those on the left who regard the use of private means wicked and sinful. It is simply a practical question as to which means can best achieve the desired end. It is a problem to be answered not by theology but by experience and experiment. Indeed, I would suggest that we might well banish some overloaded words from intellectual discourse. They belong to the vocabulary of demagoguery, not to the vocabulary of analysis.
So, with the invention of the mixed society, pragmatism has triumphed over absolutism. As a
consequence, the world is coming to understand that the mixed economy offered the instrumentalities through which one can unite social control with individual freedom. But ideology is a drug; no matter how much it is exposed by experience, the craving for it still persists. That craving will, no doubt, always persists, so long as there is human hunger for an all-embracing, all-explanatory system, so long indeed as political philosophy is shaped by the compulsion to return to the womb.
The oldest philosophical problem, we have noted, is the relationship between the one and the one and the many. Surely the basic conflict of our times is precisely the conflict between those who would reduce the world to one and those who see the world as many—between those who believe that the world is evolving in a single direction, along a single predestined line, toward a single predestined conclusion, and those who think that humanity in the future, as in the past, will continue to evolve in divers directions, toward diverse conclusions, according to the diverse traditions, values, and purposes of divers peoples. It is a choice, in short, between dogmatism and pragmatism, between the theological society and the experimental society.
Ideologists are afraid of the free flow of ideas, even of deviant ideas within their own ideology. They are convinced they have a monopoly on the Truth. Therefore they always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics. Their objective remains that of making the world over in the image of their dogmatic ideology. The goal is a monolithic world, organized on the principle of infallibility—but the only certainty in an absolute system is the certainty of absolute abuse.
The goal of free men is quite different. Free men know many truths, but the doubt whether any mortal man knows the Truth. Their religious and their intellectual heritage join in leading them to suspect fellow men who lay claim to infallibility. They believe that there is no greater delusion than for man to mistake himself for God. They accept the limitations of the human intellect and the infirmity of the human spirit. The distinctive human triumph, in their judgment, lies in the capacity to understand the frailty of human striving but to strive nonetheless.