The Unfinished Programme of DemocracyRoberts, Richard
Philosophy
The Unfinished Programme of Democracy
Roberts, Richard
Democracy; Social history
The weakness of this kind of analysis is that it appears to untwine
threads that cannot be untwined in practice and never are separated in
experience. Human instincts do not operate independently; they blend
into each other continuously and inextricably in countless ways. We have
seen how the reproductive impulse fused with the instinct of workmanship
into an impulse toward creative art. But the debt has been repaid in the
introduction of requirements of beauty into the exercise of workmanship.
In the era of craftsmanship, the two impulses were very intimately
blended, workmanship and creativeness going hand in hand in the erection
of stately minsters, or in the making of harness for the squire’s
horses. It is due to the development of the machine that these two
impulses have been so widely parted in our time, to the immense injury
of both; and it is one of the tasks, perhaps the chief of the tasks,
facing us in the future to restore them to something of their old-time
intimacy. Of this restoration, the great modern prophet is William
Morris, who saw hope neither for the worker nor for the artist except in
a closer association of industry with beauty, and who laid the
foundation of this revived association by his own pioneer work as a
house-decorator. This does not require, as some suppose, the scrapping
of the machine industry, even though that were possible; it only
requires that we understand the true place of the machine industry and
put it there. Similarly, the instinct of sociability coalesced with
those of workmanship and creativeness. The signal instance of this
combination is to be found in the spirit of the mediæval Guilds; but
there are other instances in plenty. Most of the great human
achievements in thought, religion and art, have had a social origin, in
schools of philosophers and prophets, in groups of artists and the like,
and conversely new departures in thought, religion and art have become
the _foci_ of new groups.
Of all this the moral would seem to be that we must treat the _energy_
of personality, its characteristic outgoing, as a single undivided
indivisible stream; yet we must recognise it also as a stream containing
a certain range of ingredients. Therefore, what we shall require of our
ideal society is that it shall generate an atmosphere and an environment
in which the constituent ingredients of personal _energy_ shall find
opportunity of full, co-ordinated and parallel development. It will be a
society in which the instinct of workmanship, creativeness and
sociability will grow side by side and hand in hand toward “the perfect
man, of the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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