IV

THE METHOD OF PROGRESS

Progress as an ideal is quite modern in its origin.  For although the ancients were progressing, they did it unconsciously, blindly, stumbling on it by chance, forced to it, as we have seen, by the struggle for existence.  True of the ancient civilizations of Europe and Western Asia and Africa, this is emphatically true of the Orient.  Here, so far from seeking to progress, the avowed aim has been not to progress; the set purpose has been to do as the fathers did; to follow their example even in customs and rites whose meaning has been lost in the obscurity of the past.  This blind adherence was the boast of those who called themselves religious.  They strove to fulfill their duties to their ancestors.

Under such conditions how was progress possible?  And how has it come to pass that, ruled by this ideal until less than fifty years ago, Japan is now facing quite the other way?  The passion of the nation to-day is to make the greatest possible progress in every direction.  Here is an anomaly, a paradox; progress made in spite of its rejection; and, recently, a total volte-face.  How shall we explain this paradox?

In our chapter on the Principles of National Evolution,[E] we see that the first step in progress was made through the development of enlarging communities by means of extending boundaries and hardening customs.  We see that, on reaching this stage, the great problem was so to break the “cake of custom” as to give liberty to individuals whereby to secure the needful variations.  We do not consider how this was to be accomplished.  We merely show that, if further progress was to be made, it could only be through the development of the individualistic principle to which we give the more exact name communo-individualism.  This problem as to how the “cake of custom” is successfully broken must now engage our attention.

Mr. Bagehot contends that this process consisted, as a matter of history, in the establishment of government by discussion.  Matters of principle came to be talked over; the desirability of this or that measure was submitted to the people for their approval or disapproval.  This method served to stimulate definite and practical thought on a wide scale; it substituted the thinking of the many for the thinking of the few; it stimulated independent thinking and consequently independent action.  This is, however, but another way of saying that it stimulated variation.  A government whose action was determined after wide discussion would be peculiarly fitted to take advantage of all useful variations of ideas and practice.  Experience shows, he continues, that the difficulty of developing a “cake of custom” is far more easily surmounted than that of developing government by discussion; i.e., that it is far less difficult to develop communalism than communo-individualism.  The family of arrested civilizations, of which China and India and Japan, until recent times, are examples, were caught in the net of what had once been the source of their progress.  The tyranny of their laws and customs was such that all individual variations were nipped in the bud.  They failed to progress because they failed to develop variations.  And they failed in this because they did not have government by discussion.