Darkwater: Voices from Within the VeilDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
General
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
The paradox which faces the civilized world today is that democratic
control is everywhere limited in its control of human interests. Mankind
is engaged in planting, forestry, and mining, preparing food and
shelter, making clothes and machines, transporting goods and folk,
disseminating news, distributing products, doing public and private
personal service, teaching, advancing science, and creating art.
In this intricate whirl of activities, the theory of government has been
hitherto to lay down only very general rules of conduct, marking the
limits of extreme anti-social acts, like fraud, theft, and murder.
The theory was that within these bounds was Freedom--the Liberty to
think and do and move as one wished. The real realm of freedom was found
in experience to be much narrower than this in one direction and much
broader in another. In matters of Truth and Faith and Beauty, the
Ancient Law was inexcusably strait and modern law unforgivably stupid.
It is here that the future and mighty fight for Freedom must and will be
made. Here in the heavens and on the mountaintops, the air of Freedom is
wide, almost limitless, for here, in the highest stretches, individual
freedom harms no man, and, therefore, no man has the right to limit it.
On the other hand, in the valleys of the hard, unyielding laws of matter
and the social necessities of time production, and human intercourse,
the limits on our freedom are stern and unbending if we would exist and
thrive. This does not say that everything here is governed by
incontrovertible "natural" law which needs no human decision as to raw
materials, machinery, prices, wages, news-dissemination, education of
children, etc.; but it does mean that decisions here must be limited by
brute facts and based on science and human wants.
Today the scientific and ethical boundaries of our industrial activities
are not in the hands of scientists, teachers, and thinkers; nor is the
intervening opportunity for decision left in the control of the public
whose welfare such decisions guide. On the contrary, the control of
industry is largely in the hands of a powerful few, who decide for their
own good and regardless of the good of others. The making of the rules
of Industry, then, is not in the hands of All, but in the hands of the
Few. The Few who govern industry envisage, not the wants of mankind, but
their own wants. They work quietly, often secretly, opposing Law, on the
one hand, as interfering with the "freedom of industry"; opposing, on
the other hand, free discussion and open determination of the rules of
work and wealth and wages, on the ground that harsh natural law brooks
no interference by Democracy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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