Part 20 (2/2)
That is a virtue, but it becomes a very thin virtue when it is merely a corrective for the unwholesome position of social science. For the scholar is condemned to guess as shrewdly as he can why in a situation not clearly understood something or other may have happened. But the expert who is employed as the mediator among representatives, and as the mirror and measure of administration, has a very different control of the facts. Instead of being the man who generalizes from the facts dropped to him by the men of action, he becomes the man who prepares the facts for the men of action. This is a profound change in his strategic position. He no longer stands outside, chewing the cud provided by busy men of affairs, but he takes his place in front of decision instead of behind it. To-day the sequence is that the man of affairs finds his facts, and decides on the basis of them; then, some time later, the social scientist deduces excellent reasons why he did or did not decide wisely. This ex post facto relations.h.i.+p is academic in the bad sense of that fine word. The real sequence should be one where the disinterested expert first finds and formulates the facts for the man of action, and later makes what wisdom he can out of comparison between the decision, which he understands, and the facts, which he organized.
4
For the physical sciences this change in strategic position began slowly, and then accelerated rapidly. There was a time when the inventor and the engineer were romantic half-starved outsiders, treated as cranks. The business man and the artisan knew all the mysteries of their craft. Then the mysteries grew more mysterious, and at last industry began to depend upon physical laws and chemical combinations that no eye could see, and only a trained mind could conceive. The scientist moved from his n.o.ble garret in the Latin Quarter into office buildings and laboratories. For he alone could construct a working image of the reality on which industry rested.
From the new relations.h.i.+p he took as much as he gave, perhaps more: pure science developed faster than applied, though it drew its economic support, a great deal of its inspiration, and even more of its relevancy, from constant contact with practical decision. But physical science still labored under the enormous limitation that the men who made decisions had only their commonsense to guide them. They administered without scientific aid a world complicated by scientists.
Again they had to deal with facts they could not apprehend, and as once they had to call in engineers, they now have to call in statisticians, accountants, experts of all sorts.
These practical students are the true pioneers of a new social science. They are ”in mesh with the driving wheels” [Footnote: Cf. The Address of the President of the American Philosophical a.s.sociation, Mr. Ralph Barton Perry, Dec. 28, 1920. Published in the Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting.] and from this practical engagement of science and action, both will benefit radically: action by the clarification of its beliefs; beliefs by a continuing test in action.
We are in the earliest beginnings. But if it is conceded that all large forms of human a.s.sociation must, because of sheer practical difficulty, contain men who will come to see the need for an expert reporting of their particular environment, then the imagination has a premise on which to work. In the exchange of technic and result among expert staffs, one can see, I think, the beginning of experimental method in social science. When each school district and budget, and health department, and factory, and tariff schedule, is the material of knowledge for every other, the number of comparable experiences begins to approach the dimensions of genuine experiment. In forty-eight states, and 2400 cities, and 277,000 school houses, 270,000 manufacturing establishments, 27,000 mines and quarries, there is a wealth of experience, if only it were recorded and available. And there is, too, opportunity for trial and error at such slight risk that any reasonable hypothesis might be given a fair test without shaking the foundations of society.
The wedge has been driven, not only by some directors of industry and some statesmen who had to have help, but by the bureaus of munic.i.p.al research, [Footnote: The number of these organizations in the United States is very great. Some are alive, some half dead. They are in rapid flux. Lists of them supplied to me by Dr. L. D. Upson of the Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, Miss Rebecca B. Rankin of the Munic.i.p.al Reference Library of New York City, Mr. Edward A.
Fitzpatrick, Secretary of the State Board of Education (Wisconsin), Mr. Savel Zimand of the Bureau of Industrial Research (New York City), run into the hundreds.] the legislative reference libraries, the specialized lobbies of corporations and trade unions and public causes, and by voluntary organizations like the League of Women Voters, the Consumers' League, the Manufacturers' a.s.sociations: by hundreds of trade a.s.sociations, and citizens' unions; by publications like the _Searchlight on Congress_ and the _Survey_; and by foundations like the General Education Board. Not all by any means are disinterested. That is not the point. All of them do begin to demonstrate the need for interposing some form of expertness between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled.
CHAPTER XXVI
INTELLIGENCE WORK
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THE practice of democracy has been ahead of its theory. For the theory holds that the adult electors taken together make decisions out of a will that is in them. But just as there grew up governing hierarchies which were invisible in theory, so there has been a large amount of constructive adaptation, also unaccounted for in the image of democracy. Ways have been found to represent many interests and functions that are normally out of sight.
We are most conscious of this in our theory of the courts, when we explain their legislative powers and their vetoes on the theory that there are interests to be guarded which might be forgotten by the elected officials. But the Census Bureau, when it counts, cla.s.sifies, and correlates people, things, and changes, is also speaking for unseen factors in the environment. The Geological Survey makes mineral resources evident, the Department of Agriculture represents in the councils of the nation factors of which each farmer sees only an infinitesimal part. School authorities, the Tariff Commission, the consular service, the Bureau of Internal Revenue give representation to persons, ideas, and objects which would never automatically find themselves represented in this perspective by an election. The Children's Bureau is the spokesman of a whole complex of interests and functions not ordinarily visible to the voter, and, therefore, incapable of becoming spontaneously a part of his public opinions.
Thus the printing of comparative statistics of infant mortality is often followed by a reduction of the death rate of babies. Munic.i.p.al officials and voters did not have, before publication, a place in their picture of the environment for those babies. The statistics made them visible, as visible as if the babies had elected an alderman to air their grievances.
In the State Department the government maintains a Division of Far Eastern Affairs. What is it for? The j.a.panese and the Chinese Governments both maintain amba.s.sadors in Was.h.i.+ngton. Are they not qualified to speak for the Far East? They are its representatives. Yet n.o.body would argue that the American Government could learn all that it needed to know about the Far East by consulting these amba.s.sadors.
Supposing them to be as candid as they know how to be, they are still limited channels of information. Therefore, to supplement them we maintain emba.s.sies in Tokio and Peking, and consular agents at many points. Also, I a.s.sume, some secret agents. These people are supposed to send reports which pa.s.s through the Division of Far Eastern Affairs to the Secretary of State. Now what does the Secretary expect of the Division? I know one who expected it to spend its appropriation. But there are Secretaries to whom special revelation is denied, and they turn to their divisions for help. The last thing they expect to find is a neat argument justifying the American position.
What they demand is that the experts shall bring the Far East to the Secretary's desk, with all the elements in such relation that it is as if he were in contact with the Far East itself. The expert must translate, simplify, generalize, but the inference from the result must apply in the East, not merely on the premises of the report. If the Secretary is worth his salt, the very last thing he will tolerate in his experts is the suspicion that they have a ”policy.” He does not want to know from them whether they like j.a.panese policy in China. He wants to know what different cla.s.ses of Chinese and j.a.panese, English, Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians, think about it, and what they are likely to do because of what they think. He wants all that represented to him as the basis of his decision. The more faithfully the Division represents what is not otherwise represented, either by the j.a.panese or American amba.s.sadors, or the Senators and Congressmen from the Pacific coast, the better Secretary of State he will be. He may decide to take his policy from the Pacific Coast, but he will take his view of j.a.pan from j.a.pan.
2
It is no accident that the best diplomatic service in the world is the one in which the divorce between the a.s.sembling of knowledge and the control of policy is most perfect. During the war in many British Emba.s.sies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left that to the political chiefs. But in an American Emba.s.sy I once heard an amba.s.sador say that he never reported anything to Was.h.i.+ngton which would not cheer up the folks at home. He charmed all those who met him, helped many a stranded war worker, and was superb when he unveiled a monument.
He did not understand that the power of the expert depends upon separating himself from those who make the decisions, upon not caring, in his expert self, what decision is made. The man who, like the amba.s.sador, takes a line, and meddles with the decision, is soon discounted. There he is, just one more on that side of the question.
For when he begins to care too much, he begins to see what he wishes to see, and by that fact ceases to see what he is there to see. He is there to represent the unseen. He represents people who are not voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and people. He has a const.i.tuency of intangibles. And intangibles cannot be used to form a political majority, because voting is in the last a.n.a.lysis a test of strength, a sublimated battle, and the expert represents no strength available in the immediate. But he can exercise force by disturbing the line up of the forces. By making the invisible visible, he confronts the people who exercise material force with a new environment, sets ideas and feelings at work in them, throws them out of position, and so, in the profoundest way, affects the decision.
Men cannot long act in a way that they know is a contradiction of the environment as they conceive it. If they are bent on acting in a certain way they have to reconceive the environment, they have to censor out, to rationalize. But if in their presence, there is an insistent fact which is so obtrusive that they cannot explain it away, one of three courses is open. They can perversely ignore it, though they will cripple themselves in the process, will overact their part and come to grief. They can take it into account but refuse to act.
They pay in internal discomfort and frustration. Or, and I believe this to be the most frequent case, they adjust their whole behavior to the enlarged environment.
The idea that the expert is an ineffectual person because he lets others make the decisions is quite contrary to experience. The more subtle the elements that enter into the decision, the more irresponsible power the expert wields. He is certain, moreover, to exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the administrator. All governing agencies will tend to organize bodies of research and information, which will throw out tentacles and expand, as have the intelligence departments of all the armies in the world.
But the experts will remain human beings. They will enjoy power, and their temptation will be to appoint themselves censors, and so absorb the real function of decision. Unless their function is correctly defined they will tend to pa.s.s on the facts they think appropriate, and to pa.s.s down the decisions they approve. They will tend, in short, to become a bureaucracy.
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