The New State · Part III · I · Chapter 22 (1/2)

XXII

Neighborhood Needs the Basis of Politics

Politics are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or method, or is this the guiding moment?

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.

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.

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 heartburnings, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 electrons 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 anyone 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.

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.

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.

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 cooperative 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 cooperation, 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.

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 someone 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.”

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.

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.

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 watchmaker, the schoolteacher, all living within a few blocks of one another.

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.

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.

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.

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.