Conclusion: Experience as Evocation

THINKER after thinker is trying to find some way to get rid of conflict. Moralists hope that this will be done by changing human nature. The political scientists who have taken fact-finding for their slogan tell us that facts are the solvent for controversy. Economists are seeking a way by which the struggle between capital and labor may cease. Many writers on international relations would rid us of the conflict between nations. Some of the biologists tell us that we could abolish conflict and live together in peace and harmony like the well-known instances of the animal colonies; they seem to ignore the fact that most of us, even those peacefully inclined, do not wish to live like the ants and the beavers.

But on the other hand there are biologists who give us the tooth-and-claw theory. There are sociologists who say that conflict is built into the structure of the world, that the world is cemented with blood and sweat. It seems to me that there is occasionally a little confusion of thought on one point both among those who wish to abolish conflict and those who regard it as beneficent and wish to retain it. What people often mean by getting rid of conflict is getting rid of diversity, and it is of the utmost importance that these should not be considered the same. We may wish to abolish conflict but we cannot get rid of diversity. We must face life as it is and understand that diversity is its most essential feature. I know a man whose fear of difference is so great that he looks alarmed if the most friendly argument appears at his dinner table; he always changes the subject immediately. But fear of difference is dread of life itself. It is possible to conceive conflict as not necessarily a wasteful outbreak of incompatibilities, but a normal process by which socially valuable differences register themselves for the enrichment of all concerned. One of the greatest values of controversy is its revealing nature. The real issues at stake come into the open and have the possibility of being reconciled. A fresh conflict between employers and employees is often not so much an upsetting of equilibrium, really, as an opportunity for stabilizing. Our unfortunate ethical connotations are a handicap to clear thinking. The conflict of chemistry we do not think reprehensible. If we could look at social conflict as neither good nor bad, but simply a fact, we should make great strides in our thinking. On every level the movement of life is through the release of energy. Psychology has shown us release and what it calls integration as one process. Social conflict is constructive when it follows this normal process, when the release of energy is by one and the same movement carrying itself to a higher level.

What I have tried to show in this book is that the social process may be conceived either as the opposing and battle of desires with the victory of one over the other, or as the confronting and integrating of desires. The former means non-freedom for both sides, the defeated bound to the victor, the victor bound to the false situation thus created - both bound. The latter means a freeing for both sides and increased total power or increased capacity in the world. The core of the development, expansion, growth, progress of humanity is the confronting and gripping of opposites. Integration is both the keel and the rudder of life: it supports all life's structure and guides every activity. This thought must be ever before us in social research. For we believe in the inexhaustible resources of life, in the fresh powers constantly springing up. The test of the vitality of any experience is its power to unite into a living, generating activity its self-yielding differences. We seek a richly diversified experience where every difference strengthens and reinforces the other. Through the interpenetrating of spirit and spirit, differences are conserved, accentuated and reconciled in the greater life which is the issue. Each remains forever himself that thereby the larger activity may be enriched and in its refluence, reinforce him. The activity of co-creating is the core of democracy, the essence of citizenship, the condition of world-citizenship.

We seek reality in experience. Let us reject the realm of the compensatory; it is fair, but a prison. Experience may be hard but we claim its gifts because they are real, even though our feet bleed on its stones. We seek progressive advancement through the transformation of daily experience. Into what, conceptual pictures? No, daily experience must be translated not into conceptual pictures but into spiritual conviction. Experience can both guide and guard us. Foolish indeed are those who do not bring oil to its burning.

In conclusion, the essence of experience, the law of relation, is reciprocal freeing: here is "the rock and the substance of the human spirit." This is the truth of stimulus and response: evocation. We are all rooted in that great unknown in which are the infinite latents of humanity. And these latents are evoked, called forth into visibility, summoned, by the action and reaction of one on the other. All human intercourse should be the evocation by each from the other of new forms undreamed of before, and all intercourse that is not evocation should be eschewed. Release, evocation - evocation by release, release by evocation - this is the fundamental law of the universe. The test of the validity of any social process is whether this is taking place - between one and another, between capital and labor, between nation and nation. It must be the test for industrial arbitrators, jurists and statesmen alike. To free the energies of the human spirit is the high potentiality of all human association.

No reform will be successful which tries to circumvent life instead of facing it. I believe in no happy (or unhappy) land where expert or leader can overcome diversity. I believe in no shadow country where vicarious experience can take the place of our own experience. I see no golden age in the past or in the future, but I believe in the possibilities of human effort, of disciplined effort, in truth in its Anglo-Saxon meaning (tryw) of faithfulness, and in the essence of relation from the amoeba and its food to man and man, as the release of energy, the evocation or the calling forth of new powers one from the other.

This is the stuff of experience. This is the challenge of experience.