THE NEW STATE
by Mary Parker Follett

Chapter XXXIV
The Moral State and Creative Citizenship

WE see now that the state as the appearance of the federal
principle must be more than a coordinating agency.  It must appear
as the great moral leader.  Its supreme function is moral ordering. 
What is morality?  The fulfillment of relation by man to man, since
it is impossible to conceive an isolated man: the father and mother
appear in our mind and with the three the whole infinite series.
The state is the ordering of this infinite series into their right
relations that the greatest possible welfare of the total may be
worked out.  This ordering of relations is morality in its essence
and completeness.  The state must gather up into itself all the
moral power of its day, and more than this, as our relations are
widening constantly it must be the explorer which discovers the
kind of ordering, the kind of grouping, which best expresses its
intent. 

  But "things are rotten in Denmark." The world is at present a
moral bankrupt, for nations are immoral and men worship their
nations. We have for centuries been thinking out the morals of
individuals. The morality of the state must now have equal
consideration. We spring to that duty to-day. We have the ten
commandments for the individual; we want the ten commandments for
the state. 

  How is the state to gain moral and spiritual authority? 

  Only through its citizens in their growing understanding of the
widening promise of relation. The neighborhood group feeds the
imagination because we have daily to consider the wants of all in
order to make a synthesis of those wants; we have to recognize the
rights of others and adapt ourselves to them. Men must recognize
and unify difference and then the moral law appears in all its
majesty in concrete form. This is the universal striving. This is
the trend of all nature -- the harmonious unifying of all. The call
of the moral law is constantly to recognize this. Our neighborhood
group gives us preeminently the opportunity for moral training, the
associated groups continue it, the goal, the infinite goal, the
emergence of the all-inclusive state which is the visible
appearance of the total relativity of man in all right connections
and articulations.

  The state accumulates moral power only through the spiritual
activity of its citizens. There is no state except through me. 
James' deep-seated antagonism to the idealists is because of their
assertion that the absolute is, always has been and always will be.
The contribution of pragmatism is that we must work out the
absolute. You are drugging yourselves, cries James, the absolute is
real as far as you make it real, as far as you bring forth in
tangible, concrete form all its potentialities. In the same way we
have no state until we make one. This is the teaching of the new
psychology. We have not to "postulate" all sorts of things as the
philosophers do ("organic actuality of the moral order" etc.), we
have to _live_ it; if we can make a moral whole then we shall know
whether or not there is one.  We cannot become the state
imaginatively, but only actually through our group relations.
Stamped with the image of All-State-potentiality we must be forever
making the state.  We are pragmatists in politics as the new school
of philosophy is in religion: just as they say that we are one with
God not by prayer and communion alone, but by doing the God-deed
every moment, so we are one with the state by actualizing the
latent state at every instant of our lives. As God appears only
through us, so is the state made visible through the political man.
We must gird up our loins, we must light our lamp and set forth, we
must _do_ it.

  The federal state can be the moral state only through its being
built anew from hour to hour by the activity of all its members. We
have had within our memory three ideas of the individual's relation
to society: the individual as deserving "rights" _from_ society,
next with a duty _to_ society, and now the idea of the individual
as an activity _of_ society. Our relation to society is so close
that there is no room for either rights or duties. This means a new
ethics and a new politics. Citizenship is not a right nor a
privilege nor a duty, but an activity to be exercised every moment
of the time. Democracy does not exist unless each man is doing his
part fully every minute, unless every one is taking his share in
building the state-to-be. This is the trumpet call to men to-day.
A creative citizenship must be made the force of American political
life, a trained, responsible citizenship always in control creating
always its own life. In most of the writing on American politics we
find the demand for a "creative statesmanship" as the most pressing
need of America to-day. It is indeed true that with so much
crystallized conservatism and chaotic radicalism we need leadership
and a constructive leadership, but the doctrine of true democracy
is that every man is and must be a creative citizen.

  We are now awaking to this need.  In the past the American
conception of government has been a machine-made not a man-made
thing. We have wanted a perfect machine which could be set going
like an international exhibition by pressing the button, but who is
going to press the button?  We have talked about the public without
thinking that we were the public, of public opinion as something
quite distinct from any opinion of our own. It is partly because
men have not wanted the trouble of governing themselves that they
have put all their faith in "good" officials and "good" charters.
"I hate this school, I wish it would burn up," wrote a boy home,
"there's too much old self-government about it, you can't have any
fun." Many of us have not wanted that kind of government.

  The idea of the state as a collection of units has fatally misled
us in regard to our duty as citizens. A man often thinks of his
share in the collective responsibility for Boston as a 1/500,000
part of the whole responsibility. This is too small a part to
interest him, and therefore he often disregards such an
infinitesimal duty altogether. Of course we tell him about little
drops of water, little grains of sand etc., but hitherto such
eloquence has produced little effect. This is because it is untrue.
We must somehow make it clear that the part of every man in a great
city is not analogous to the grain of sand in the desert, it is not
a 1/500,000 part of the whole duty. It a part so bound up with
every other part that no fraction of a whole can represent it. It
is like the key of a piano, the value of which is not in its being
1/56 of all the notes, but in its infinite relations to all the
other notes. If that note is lacking every other note loses its
value.

  Another twist in our ideas which has tended to reduce our sense
of personal responsibility has been that we have often thought of
democracy as a happy method by which all our particular limitations
are lost sight of in the general strength. Matthew Arnold said,
"Democracy is a force in which the concert of a great number of men
makes up for the weakness of each man taken by himself." But there
is no mysterious value in people conceived of all together. A lot
of ignorant or a lot of bad people do not acquire wisdom and virtue
the moment we conceive them collectively.  There is no alchemy by
which the poornesses and weaknesses of the individual get
transmuted in the group; there is no trick by which we can lose
them in the whole. The truth is that all that the individual has or
is enhances society, all that the individual lacks, detracts from
society. The state will become a splendid thing when each one of us
becomes a splendid individual. Democracy does not mean being lost
in the mass, it means the contribution of every power I possess to
social uses. The individual is not lost in the whole, he makes the
whole.

  A striking exception to the attitude of the average American in
the matter of his personal responsibility was Mr. John Jay
Chapman's visit to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, to do penance for
"that blot on American history" -- the burning a Negro to death in
the public square of Coatesville -- because he felt that "it was
not the wickedness of Coatesville but the wickedness of all
America."

  But there are signs to-day of a new spirit among us. We have
begun to be restless under our present political forms: we are
demanding that the machine give way to the man, we want a world of
men governed by the will of men. What signs have we that we are now
ready for a creative citizenship?

  Every one is claiming to-day a share in the larger life of
society. Each of us wants to pour forth in community use the life
that we feel welling up within us: Citizens' associations, civic
clubs and forums are springing up every day in every part of the
country. Men are seeking through direct government a closer share
in law-making.  The woman suffrage movement, the labor movement,
are parts of this vital and irresistible current. They have not
come from surface springs, their sources are deep in the life
forces of our age. There is a more fundamental cause of our present
unrest than the superficial ones given for the woman movement, or
the selfish ones given for our labor troubles: it is not the
"demand for justice" from women nor the "economic greed" of labor,
but the desire for one's place, for each to give his share, for
each to control his own life -- this is the underlying thought
which is so profoundly moving both men and women today.

  But a greater awakening has come since April, 1917. It has taken
the ploughshare of fire to reveal our true selves: this war is
running the furrows deep in the hearts of men and turning up
desires of which they were unconscious themselves in their days of
ease. Men are flocking to Washington at the sacrifice of business
and personal interests willing to pour out their all for the great
stake of democracy; the moment came when the possession of
self-government was imperiled and all leapt forward ready to lay
down their lives to preserve it.   This war has revealed the deeper
self with its deeper wishes to every man and he sees that he prizes
beyond life the power to govern himself. Now is the moment to use
all this rush of patriotism and devotion and love of liberty and
willingness to serve, and not let it sink back again into its
hidden and subterranean depths. Let us develop the kind of
institutions which will call forth and utilize these powers and
energies for peace as for war, for the works of peace are glorious
if men can but see the goal. Let us make a fitting abiding place
for men's innate grandeur. Let us build high the walls of democracy
and enlarge its courts for our daily dwelling.

  Then must men understand that in peace as in war ours is to be a
life of endeavor, of work, of conscious effort towards conscious
ends. The ordinary man is not to do his work and then play a little
in order to refresh himself, with the understanding that the world
of industry and the government of his country are to be run by
experts. They are to be run by him and he is to prepare himself to
tackle his job.  The leisure-time problem is not how the workman
can have more time for play, it is how he can have more time for
association, to take his share in the integrated thought and will
and responsibility which is to make the new world. The "good
citizen" is not he who obeys the laws, but he who has an active
sense of being an integral part of the state. This is the essence
and the basis of effective good citizenship. We are not part of a
nation because we are living within its boundaries, because we feel
in sympathy with it and have accepted its ideas, because we have
become naturalized. We are part of a nation only in so far as we
are helping to make that nation.

  For this we must provide methods by which every man is enabled to
take his part. We are no longer to put business and political
affairs in the hands of one set of men and then appoint another set
as watch-dogs over them, with the people at best a sort of chorus
in the background, at the worst practically non-existent. But we
are so to democratize our industrial and our political methods that
all will have a share in policy and in responsibility. Exhortation
to good citizenship is useless. We get good citizenship by creating
those forms within which good citizenship can operate, by making it
possible to acquire the habit of good citizenship by the practice
of good citizenship.

  The neighborhood group gives the best opportunity for the
training and for the practice of citizenship. The leader of a
neighborhood group should be able to help every one discover his
greatest ability, he should see the stimulus to apply, the path of
approach, that the constituents of his neighborhood should not
merely serve, but should serve in exactly that way which will best
fit themselves into the community's needs. The system of war
registration where men and women record what they are best able to
do, might, through the medium of the neighborhood group, be applied
to the whole country. The chief object of neighborhood organization
is not to right wrongs, as is often supposed, but to found more
firmly and build more widely the right.

  Moreover, neighborhood organization gives us a definite objective
for individual responsibility. We cannot understand our duty or
perform our duty unless it is a duty to _something_. It is because
of the erroneous notion that the individual is related to "society"
rather than to a group or groups that we can trace much of our lack
of responsibility. A man trusts vaguely that he is doing his duty
to "society," but such vagueness gets him nowhere.  There is no
"society," and therefore he often does no duty. But let him once
understand that his duty is to his group -- to his neighborhood
group, to his industrial group -- and he will begin to see his duty
as a specific, concrete thing taking definite shape for him.

  But my gospel is not for a moment of citizenship as a mere duty.
We must bring to politics passion and joy. It is not through the
cramping and stultification of desire that life is nobly lived, it
is through seeing life in its fullness. We want to use the whole of
man. You cannot put some of his energies on one side and some on
the other and say some are good and some bad -- all are good and
should be put to good use. Men follow their passions and should do
so, but they must purify their passions, educate them, discipline
and direct them. We turn our impulses to wrong uses, but our
impulses are not wrong. The forces of life should be used, not
stifled. It is not corruption, dishonesty, we have to fight; it is
ignorance, lack of insight, desires not transmuted. We want a state
which will transmute the instincts of men into the energies of the
nation.  You cannot dam the stream entirely, you can only see that
it flows so as to irrigate and fructify. It all comes down to our
fear of men. If we could believe in men, if we could see that
circle which unites human passion and divine achievement as a halo
round the head of each human being, then social and political
reorganization would no longer be a hope but a fact. The old
individualism feared men; the corner-stone of the new individualism
is faith in men. We need a constructive faith and a robust faith,
faith in men, m this world, in this day, in the Here and the Now.

  From the belief of savages in the spirits who ruled their fate to
the "power outside ourselves that makes for righteousness," through
the weak man's reliance on luck and the strong man's reliance on
his isolated individuality, we have had innumerable forms of the
misunderstanding of responsibility. But all this is now changing.
The distinguishing mark of our age is that we are coming to a keen
sense of personal responsibility, that we are taking upon ourselves
the blame for all our evils, the charge for all our progress. We
are beginning to realize that the redemptive power is within the
social bond, that we have creative evolution only through
individual responsibility.

  The old ways of thinking are breaking up. The New Life is before
us. Are we ready? Are we making ourselves ready? A new man is
needed for the New Life -- a man who understands self-discipline,
who understands training, who is willing to purge himself of his
particularist desires, who is conscious of relations as the stuff
of his existence. 

  To sum up this chapter: the moral state is the task of man. This
must be achieved through the creative power of man as brought into
visibility and actuality through his group life. The great cosmic
force in the womb of humanity is latent in the group as its
creative energy; that it may appear the individual must do his duty
every moment. We do not get the whole power of the group unless
every individual is given full value, is giving full value.  It is
the creative spontaneity of each which makes life march on
irresistibly to the purposes of the whole. Our social and political
organization must be such that this group life is possible. We hear
much of "the wasted forces of our nation." The neighborhood
organization movement is a movement to use some of the wasted
forces of this nation -- it is the biggest movement yet conceived
for conservation. Have we more "value" in forests and water-power
in America than in human beings? The new generation cries, "No,
this release of the spiritual energy of human beings is to be the
salvation of the nation, for the life of all these human beings is
the nation." The success of democracy depends (1) upon the degree
of responsibility it is possible to arouse in every man and woman,
(2) on the opportunity they are given to exercise that
responsibility. The new democracy depends upon you and me. It
depends upon you and me because there is no one else in the world
but you and me. If I pledge myself to the new democracy and you
pledge yourself to the new democracy, a new motor force will be
born in the world.

  We need to-day new principles. We can reform and reform but all
this is on the surface. What we have got to do is to change some of
the fundamental ideas of our American life. This is not being
disloyal to our past, it is exactly the opposite. Let us be loyal
to our inheritance and tradition, but let us understand what that
inheritance and tradition truly is. It is not _our_ tradition to
stick to an outworn past, a conventional ideal, a rigid religion.
We are children of men who have not been afraid of new continents
or new ideas. In our blood is the impulse to leap to the highest we
can see, as the wills of our fathers fixed themselves on the
convictions of their hearts. To spring forward and then to follow
the path steadfastly is forever the duty of Americans. We must
_live_ democracy.