Public Opinion | Page 9

hours of women, a cabinet meeting to decide on the
recognition of a government, a party convention choosing a candidate
and writing a platform, twenty-seven million voters casting their ballots,
an Irishman in Cork thinking about an Irishman in Belfast, a Third
International planning to reconstruct the whole of human society, a
board of directors confronted with a set of their employees' demands, a
boy choosing a career, a merchant estimating supply and demand for
the coming season, a speculator predicting the course of the market, a
banker deciding whether to put credit behind a new enterprise, the
advertiser, the reader of advertisments.... Think of the different sorts of
Americans thinking about their notions of "The British Empire" or
"France" or "Russia" or "Mexico." It is not so different from Mr.
Chesterton's four men at the pea green lamp post.
6
And so before we involve ourselves in the jungle of obscurities about
the innate differences of men, we shall do well to fix our attention upon

the extraordinary differences in what men know of the world. [Footnote:
Cf. Wallas, Our Social Heritage, pp. 77 et seq.] I do not doubt that
there are important biological differences. Since man is an animal it
would be strange if there were not. But as rational beings it is worse
than shallow to generalize at all about comparative behavior until there
is a measurable similarity between the environments to which behavior
is a response.
The pragmatic value of this idea is that it introduces a much needed
refinement into the ancient controversy about nature and nurture, innate
quality and environment. For the pseudo-environment is a hybrid
compounded of "human nature" and "conditions." To my mind it shows
the uselessness of pontificating about what man is and always will be
from what we observe man to be doing, or about what are the necessary
conditions of society. For we do not know how men would behave in
response to the facts of the Great Society. All that we really know is
how they behave in response to what can fairly be called a most
inadequate picture of the Great Society. No conclusion about man or
the Great Society can honestly be made on evidence like that.
This, then, will be the clue to our inquiry. We shall assume that what
each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on
pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that the
world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our
planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal
youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If someone digs up
yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he
had found gold. The way in which the world is imagined determines at
any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what
they will achieve. It determines their effort, their feelings, their hopes,
not their accomplishments and results. The very men who most loudly
proclaim their "materialism" and their contempt for "ideologues," the
Marxian communists, place their entire hope on what? On the
formation by propaganda of a class-conscious group. But what is
propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond,
to substitute one social pattern for another? What is class consciousness
but a way of realizing the world? National consciousness but another
way? And Professor Giddings' consciousness of kind, but a process of
believing that we recognize among the multitude certain ones marked

as our kind?
Try to explain social life as the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of
pain. You will soon be saying that the hedonist begs the question, for
even supposing that man does pursue these ends, the crucial problem of
why he thinks one course rather than another likely to produce pleasure,
is untouched. Does the guidance of man's conscience explain? How
then does he happen to have the particular conscience which he has?
The theory of economic self-interest? But how do men come to
conceive their interest in one way rather than another? The desire for
security, or prestige, or domination, or what is vaguely called
self-realization? How do men conceive their security, what do they
consider prestige, how do they figure out the means of domination, or
what is the notion of self which they wish to realize? Pleasure, pain,
conscience, acquisition, protection, enhancement, mastery, are
undoubtedly names for some of the ways people act. There may be
instinctive dispositions which work toward such ends. But no statement
of the end, or any description of the tendencies to seek it, can explain
the behavior which results. The very fact that