to be extended to all
associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second
point. The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever
one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out from full
interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the
protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress
through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from
one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they
had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the
interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned
and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity
and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals
within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as
synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have
identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs.
On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others,
for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion
reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding mental
life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical
environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the
field where we are apt to ignore it--the sphere of social contacts.
Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the
operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between
peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the
alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between
them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another,
and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial
tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers;
to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible
connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the
intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of
space.

2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point
to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more
varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon
the recogn