V + 

There is a final criticism of the partial utopias: our one-sided reforms have had this fatal defect⁠—they are one-sided. This partisanship was expressed by their relation to the facts upon which their programs were based, and in their attitude towards the people who were to be affected by them. + 

The mood of partisanship has been that of a lawyer who is getting up an argument and is looking for such facts as will bolster up his case. That mood is inimical to free and intelligent thought: its object is rhetorical triumph. Now it happens that in all the matters which intimately concern a community, a person’s attitude towards the facts not merely seems more important than the facts themselves, but seems so deucedly important that the facts are ignored. The attitude of a group of Southern whites who will lynch a negro on the report that he has raped a white woman before they investigate the truth of the assertion is a bestial exaggeration of a very natural human tendency. Men are built for action rather than thought; or rather, since thought, on the psychologist’s interpretation, is inhibited action, the business of inhibition naturally comes a little hard to us; and when we arc in a place where we have the rough choice of pushing through the obstacle, under a strong impulse of resentment (instinct of pugnacity) or may quietly withdraw from the obstacle, survey it, and frame a plan of action to circumvent it, our fundamental impulse is to follow the first mode. + 

It is easy to see, for example, how the hideous human suffering which accompanied the growth of the capitalist organization⁠—and still exists!⁠—caused the socialists to concentrate attention upon the subjects of ownership and profits, and long blinded them to the specific problems of organization, distribution, and control within the industries that might be affected by the program of socialization. This concentration upon the particular aspect of a problem, like the concentration upon a particular aspect of the solution, has the weakness of ignoring the total situation, and it too crudely simplifies the difficulties. In their haste to arrive at solutions and remedies⁠—for the life of man is short and the needs of the moment are pressing⁠—the partisans neglect to make a complete tally of the facts; and they are too ready to let “common knowledge” take the place of a thorough investigation of the data. + 

This weakness arises out of an almost instinctive tendency towards partisanship; and it is one of the reasons that partisanship continues. If nothing else prevents groups from getting together, their failure to agree about the facts, and their lack of a method for getting at the facts and focusing them, is responsible. If an examination of the facts did nothing else, it might show at least the impossibility of drawing any conclusion from them, and it might warn the partisan to step warily. Thus the testimony that was offered for and against Prohibition carne from fairly high authorities on both sides; and if there had been anything like right reason in the strategically stronger camp, it would have convinced those who were interested in the welfare of the community that nothing could be wisely done while the very basis for judgment⁠—scientific knowledge as to the place of alcoholic stimuli in the life of the human organism⁠—had not been established. + 

It is of course conceivable that men will quarrel and split when they are fully apprised of the facts: we may well remember the story of the British ambassador who confessed to his French colleague that the reason he did not get on very well with the Americans was that both countries unfortunately spoke the same language; but it is inconceivable that they should ever reach an intelligent agreement before they are in common possession of the facts. By ignoring the necessity for substantiating his claims and assertions the partisan frequently not merely fails to see his whole problem in all its implications, but also prevents anyone else from seeing it. Even when the partisan is not intentionally blind, he lacks the discipline which is essential to an open-eyed judgment of the case. What that discipline may be I shall attempt to discuss in the next chapter. + 

The second weakness of partisanship is that it breaks the community into vertical divisions, and promotes fictitious antagonisms and kinships which run against the horizontal affiliations and loyalties of a man’s life. This tendency was nicely illustrated in a play by Mr. St. John Ervine, called Mixed Marriage, which dealt with the love affair of a young girl and a young man who were separated by the religions that had been handed down by their parents. In Mr. Ervine’s wretched little Ulster community, these religions served as an excuse to keep people from being friendly and decent to their neighbors. Now it is obvious that mating, and making friends with those who have common interests and sentiments, and mixing freely within the whole community, are highly important horizontal interests; they tend to unite people in a common bond which is fundamental for the reason that these interests and activities are essentially human. The antagonism between two Christian sects, on the other hand, undermines the good life as a whole, because it insists that there is no other good than a religious good⁠—a good embodied in a pope, or in the practice of scoffing at a pope⁠—while it is obvious to anyone who has possession of his senses that kissing a pretty girl is good, and having a friendly pipe with one’s neighbor is good, and that institutions which prevent one from doing these things at appropriate times are perverted and antisocial. It is true that people who emphasize religious interests take “high ground,” as the saying is, and that those who value the friendly pipe seem by implication to take low ground: but what the partisans fail to see is that there is a good human case for low ground, and that, for the great majority of people it may prove to be not merely the only practicable ground, but in its own right a good and sufficient one. + 

Now for Catholic and Protestant in Mr. St. John Ervine’s play one may substitute Democrat and Republican, White Guard and Red Guard, Socialist and Financier, Prohibitionist and anti-Prohibitionist and the results will be just as deplorably the same. There are any number of interests in a well-wrought life which lie altogether beyond these categories, and it is the chief misdemeanor of partisanism, as opposed to utopianism, that it tends to slight these general interests, and either bring them into the service of the “ism” or urge that they be neglected in devotion to the “cause.” The first method has been used by the apostles of nationalism. The National State, recognizing that art and culture and science could not be altogether engrossed in the strategy of political warfare, promptly put these goods in the pigeon hole labelled national resources. The partisans of the State talked about American science as opposed to German science, of Italian art as opposed to French art; and thus emphasized the things which men in America had with other Americans in order to mark off more clearly the things they had apart from men of similar interests in other countries. The same thing happened in the Russian communist state, with its attempt to set aside the common cultural heritage of mankind at large and define a purely proletarian culture. The results in every case are, I believe, incurably mischievous; and those who would promote the good life must cease this infantile practice of asserting vainly that “my father knows more than your father,” “my mother is more beautiful than your mother”⁠—and so on. + 

For the most part the second method has been indefatigably used. In the political state the partisans make a great show of the gulf which separates the political party in power from that which is outside, and every other interest in life is supposed to be secondary to this abysmal cleavage. In relatively crude communities, like the United States and Ireland, these differences seem to be taken by the great mass of people at their face value; whereas in England, which at least has the virtues of disillusion, it is the great tradition of Parliament that all the animosities of the floor are ignored in the bar of the House of Commons, while all the congenialities and convivialities that bind men together are emphasized. Lest I be accused of prejudice where none exists, let me add that in the most substantial reconstruction movement that Ireland possesses⁠—I refer to agricultural cooperation as promoted by Sir Horace Plunkett and Æ⁠—the horizontal interests which bind men together as farmers and members of a local community are successfully emphasized to the exclusion of irrelevant vertical differences, at least in matters touching the organization and conduct of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society; and that, as far as I can see, this single organization has done more to promote the good life in Ireland than any other institution, with the possible exception of the equally nonpartisan literary association which grew up in Dublin under the leadership of Æ, William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the rest of that fine and glorious crew. + 

Obviously, it is not altogether for nothing that men have joined together in vertical organizations which are as broad as a continent, let us say, or the European world. There is a sense in which the Christians of Jerusalem have more in common with the Christians of Rome than they have with the Jews and Mohammedans of their local region. In the same way, I find myself more deeply drawn to certain friends of mine in Bombay and London than I am towards my next door neighbor, with whom the only recognizable bond is our common animus against a rapacious landlord. So long as the vertical affiliation with people of the same views in politics or religion or philosophy is a spiritual affiliation a great deal of good may come out of it. When, however, the things that draw people together as members of a vertical group are used as a means of inflicting similar opinions or practices upon the local community, without respect to its regional qualities, the results are little less than disastrous. The rain falls on the just and the unjust; more than that, the food that we grow, the houses that we build, the roads that we lay down, the thoughts that we think, belong to us as members of the human species who have inherited the earth and the fullness thereof; and it is absurd to let differences in our idola prevent us from participating equally in this common heritage. + 

At long last, the things that unite human beings as human beings, the social inheritance that enables them to realize their stature as human beings, are more important than any particular element that the partisan may lay hold of. Whether our partisanism consists in being first and foremost an American or first and foremost a Theosophist, it tends to limit the world with which we may have commerce and so impoverishes the personality. The person who insists upon being a hundred percent American has by that very emphasis become something less than half a man. By fastening attention upon a segment of the world, the partisan creates a segment of a personality. It is these segments or sects that any movement which aims at a general good in the community must contend against. So long as work for the common welfare meets with irrelevant partisanisms, so long will we lack the means of creating whole men and women; and so long will the main concerns of civilization be sidetracked. + 