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Title: The motives of men
Author: George A. Coe
Release date: November 20, 2025 [eBook #77278]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOTIVES OF MEN ***
THE MOTIVES OF MEN
BY
GEORGE A. COE
AUTHOR OF “WHAT AILS OUR YOUTH,” “A SOCIAL THEORY OF
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION,” ETC.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Copyright, 1928, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published October, 1928
Reprinted March, 1929
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
Now that the long labor of writing this book is done, what does it all
amount to? Only the reader can answer this question; but perhaps the
reader’s labor can be facilitated by knowing what moved the author to
write. This, then, as nearly as I can tell the story, is the way it all
happened.
Imagine yourself to be the following kind of polyglot being: Your daily
occupation is teaching the principles of education with particular
reference to the formation of moral and religious character; you have
taken some part in developing the psychology of religion, and you teach
a class in this subject also; you are likewise keenly interested in the
movements of the religious and social life of our time.
On each of these three sides of you there emerges one and the same
problem--the dynamics of mind, specifically the human mind. As teacher
of education you must consider what motives are in operation in both
adult life and child life, how selection among them is made, and how
some can be caused to grow, and others not to grow. As student of
the psychology of religion you must inquire what it is that allures
men into their enormous involvement in religious practices and
institutions. As churchman and as citizen of the world you pause before
the waning influence of churches upon civilization, and before the
waxing influence of industrialism; and you cannot ignore either the
large-scale ignoble conduct that we are witnessing or the cynical
explanations of it that are rife.
Thus the task of identifying the good and the evil at the springs
of conduct forces itself upon you. Scientific psychology meets your
curiosity only half way, or less than half way. Until recently it has
been too little interested in mental dynamics; it has felt a compulsion
to generalize the human and sub-human, the mental and the biological,
the biological and the physical, with no corresponding concentration
upon the specific performances of the human mind; it has been, that is
to say, _self-forgetting_; and, even now that the dynamic problem is
coming to the fore, the question what we human beings specifically are,
dynamically considered, has only begun to be asked.
But, surrounding the uncertainties of technical psychology, there
is a world of certainties, or at least assumptions, on the part of
“practical” men. The nature of “human nature” has become everybody’s
concern. From our sex-tangles up through our industrial and economic
tangles to our international tangles, some notion of human motives is
a controlling factor in thought and policy. Literature is, of course,
saturated with assumptions concerning the springs of action. With great
frequency in recent years exposition of such assumptions has been the
theme of fiction and of drama. The schools and the churches, on their
part, make one or another view of our motives the base-line of all
their planning.
A general survey of this partly technical but mostly untechnical mass
of opinions appears to be worth undertaking. It is doubly needed just
now because there is extensive and growing dissent from assumptions
concerning the inherent nobility of our nature that were taken for
granted not so long ago. We have entered upon a period of spiritual
depression. The opinion may be ventured, moreover, that some view of
human motives is going to be the turning point of every perilous issue
in modern life and civilization.
This is the area that I have surveyed. I have done it with any critical
apparatus that I could lay my hands upon, not scrupling to place side
by side considerations drawn from psychology, biology, current history,
education, and common experience.
Throughout my treatment of this theme I have freely applied valuational
terms such as “good,” “bad,” “high,” and “low” to facts of conduct and
to motives, and I have treated various experiences as desirable or
undesirable. This involves an assumption, of course. For it is possible
to entertain a view of motivation that forbids us to think that
anything is better than anything else.
I bring to life; I bring to death.
I know no more.
It has seemed unnecessary to confront this view with a theory of
valuation; rather, I have taken for granted--as even the exponents of
a-morality do when their theory has to be defended--that better and
worse have objective meaning. Further, I have assumed the validity of
the general trend of valuations that has already put the common good
above egoistic satisfactions, and that would add to physiological
welfare a growing experience of knowledge, beauty, and fellowship.
An invitation to give the Nathaniel Taylor lectures at the Divinity
School of Yale University in the spring of 1926 jogged me into the
present effort to systematize problems and considerations that long
had made my roof their habitation. The interest that was shown in
the problem of the lectures--for which, as well as the jogging just
mentioned I am deeply indebted--instead of making me ready to print,
drove me to further study. As a consequence, though the general
organization of the discussion still follows the course of the four
lectures, additional problems have been attacked, the material has been
multiplied, and further solutions have been offered.
George A. Coe.
_In the Sunshine,
Glendora, California,
May, 1928._
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface v
INTRODUCTION
I On Having a Good Supply of Wants 3
PART I
DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO
HIMSELF CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN
II Our Belief in Man Yesterday and Today 7
III What the War Did to Our Belief in Man 12
IV Has the Theory of Evolution Degraded Us in Our Own Eyes? 21
V The Irrationality of Man as a Literary Motif 27
VI Has Psychology Undermined Our Self-Respect? 36
VII According to Industrialism, “What Is Man?” 47
VIII The Dilemma of Christianity 56
PART II
THIS DISILLUSIONMENT IS ITSELF ILLUSORY
IX The Precise Nature of the Issue 69
X “Human Nature Being What It Is” 73
XI Some Notes on the Psychology of Motivation 80
XII Childhood as a Revealer of Human Capacities 95
XIII Capacities Revealed by New Types of Education 104
XIV Smallness in Great Men and Greatness in Small Men 112
XV The Mixed Motives of Business 120
XVI Motives of the Workingman 129
XVII Economic Production as a Mode of Self-Realization 135
XVIII The Motive That Is in All and Through All 143
PART III
YET OUR CAPACITIES ARE IN BONDAGE
XIX The Cynic Interjects a Question 151
XX Our “Lower” Nature Does Not Explain Our Bondage 156
XXI How Reason Itself Binds Us to the Irrational 164
XXII The Deep Depravity of Our Respectable Faults 170
XXIII Even Our Passions Are Precedent-Ridden 178
XXIV Free Men Fear Their Freedom. Why? 185
XXV The Motives of Youth Compared with Those of Age 196
PART IV
HOW CAN THEY BE RELEASED?
XXVI The Inescapable Task 209
XXVII The Function of Minorities 216
XXVIII Release Through Cooperative Thinking 230
XXIX My Intractable Self 242
XXX The Realm of Free Spirits 252
Index 261
INTRODUCTION
I
ON HAVING A GOOD SUPPLY OF WANTS
Man wants but little here below,
Nor wants that little long.
So runs an old hymn. If it were true, we should be in a bad fix.
A savage, indeed, wants little; this is what makes him a savage. You
cannot pry him loose from his savagery except by the lever of increased
desires, whether for a rifle, or for a piece of calico, or for a house
with windows.
Whatever keeps us going in any direction, together with whatever makes
us select a new direction from time to time--in other words, our
motivation--is what we are. Meagre wants, meagre manhood; enlarging
wants, enlarging manhood. The man of heroic mold makes outreaching
demands upon life, unabashed by the difficulty of supplying them.
Even the Stoics who, superficially considered, practised renunciation
of wants, in reality withdrew from smaller wants into larger ones.
They did not forego but cultivated the cravings of intellect; in human
relations magnanimity was their standard, with dignified friendship as
an experience fit for a philosopher. It was this expansiveness of their
motives that made possible their serenity of spirit.
A generation that has a large supply of narrow-range wants, together
with plenty of corresponding narrow-range goods, easily becomes
self-deceived. Because it gets what it wants, it believes that it is
efficient. It fancies that if one only enlarges one’s barns and fills
them full one will live more largely, whereas, to live in the human
way is to manipulate our wants, and to live largely is to expand,
diversify, and re-create them.
The excuse for saying so obvious a thing is that, in spite of its
obviousness, people do not believe it. If they did, the state of
education and of religion, both of which have specifically to do with
the ends of living, would be different from what it is. Churches and
schools are peddling the wares that they already possess instead of
stimulating a demand for better goods than we have in stock.
Dr. Faustus, in his meditative search for the foundation of existence,
rejects the Johannine dictum, “In the beginning was the Word” (or
universal Reason), substituting for it, “In the beginning was the Act.”
He might well have said, “In the beginning was the Want.”
What then, are the motives of men? In particular, what are we capable
of wanting, and what are we capable of doing with our wants? After
moving some little distance from the wants of savages, must we pause
and merely repeat our wantings henceforth? Or, indeed, are our desires
in any significant way different from those of our savage ancestors?
If we are able to manage our desires to any degree, what is the main
problem of management, and how is it to be solved?
PART I
DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO HIMSELF
CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN
II
OUR BELIEF IN MAN YESTERDAY AND TODAY
A lumber-jack resolved that he would build himself a home, and settle
down. Selecting a piece of timberland, he proceeded to clear it. Day
after day, week after week, his great muscles worked with axe and saw,
and with chain and reins until the trees were felled and burned, and
the time for grubbing and planting had come. Then he looked at his
cleared land, and behold, the ground was so rocky that it was not worth
cultivating. For he was a specialist in subduing mighty forests, not in
nurturing food-plants.
The western world, having found a key to the knowledge that is
power--the key of scientific method--has been engaged for a few
generations in unprecedented exploits in the mastery of nature. Her
resources have been discovered and seized; processes of control have
been devised; tools have been invented; hitherto intractable areas of
the universe have been subdued; and power and possessions beyond all
the dreams of our fathers are in our hands.[1]
The result is, of course, a changed position of man in the physical
universe; but it is not merely this. Man’s position in relation to man
has changed likewise. For we have been at work upon mankind as well
as upon wood and iron. The occupations of men, and their possessions
also, have silently wrought within the mind, the servant fashioning
his master as well as the master the servant. Our inlooks as well as
our outlooks have undergone a metamorphosis. Here, in men’s attitudes
toward one another, and in what they think of themselves, we come upon
the most significant product of modern science, invention, and industry.
The chief output of mines is miners and mine operators; the
chief product of factories is operatives, managers, and absentee
shareholders; the goods mainly dealt in by department stores are
salespeople and customers; the outstanding contribution of finance in
the modern world does not appear in the profit-and-loss account of
any bank, for it is the banker himself and his clients. If we would
estimate the efficiencies of the industrial age, we must study the men,
women and children all about us, and among other things we must take
account of what they think of one another.
Some of the things that are happening to us can readily be discerned.
This high-strung humanity of ours is awake on some sides of its mind
if not on others; it is highly organized, industrially focalized,
scientifically managed, psychologically analyzed; it is rich in things,
but it is distracted and ethically upset. At the moment when enormous
power to work our will is added to us, we become partly unsure as
to what we want, but mostly a sense of disillusionment pervades our
powers. Disillusionment, that is, with respect to the genuine worth of
all our motives and all our straining and striving and organizing.
The signs of this depression are unmistakable. In the last quarter of
the nineteenth century our youth were nurtured upon Tennyson’s smooth
confidence that “Nothing walks with aimless feet”; upon Browning’s
morning song, “All’s well with the world”; upon Emerson’s apothegm that
when two neighbors converse across a fence, “Jove nods to Jove over
the head of each.” A divinity within man seemed to be attested by his
conquest of nature, by his place in the system of evolution, by the
progress of knowledge, by the developmental character of religions,
and by the growth of philanthropy. Under the widely-heralded doctrine
of divine immanence all creation was meaningful, and the human mind,
in particular, was taken to be the point at which the otherwise
hidden meanings of the universe blossomed forth. Even in the strain
of economic life there was a certain lushness of belief in human
capacity. Corresponding to the feeling that our natural resources were
exhaustless, there was a prevalent assumption that success was within
the reach of anyone who chose to be industrious and enterprising.
An enormous increase of immigration was welcomed. Having purged
ourselves of slavery, we believed that the United States had reached
its political maturity, and that it was destined to be the political
light of the whole world. The capacity of men to govern themselves was
taken for granted. Thus, in America, at least, human kind felt itself
to be young, growing, destined to high achievement; and these were
taken to be simply human qualities that manifest themselves wherever
environmental conditions are favorable.
At none of these points does the old confidence in man remain
unimpaired. We are not so sure that progress is inherently provided
for in the nature of man; we are far more sure of something old,
crude, and of pine-stump quality in our make-up. Tacitly, if not
overtly, men assume that irrational desires are the dominant forces
within us, and that conflict has precedence in human motives. There is
a growing skepticism of the worth of the common man. It is becoming
almost popular to sneer at democracy. We rely--increasingly, it
appears--upon force and cunning, or upon the automatic working of
social mechanisms, instead of trusting to open eyes and to reason. We
are afraid to use our freedom, or to let others enjoy the liberties
that we have guaranteed in our laws and constitutions. We are putting
up walls of many kinds to protect ourselves from our fellows. A partly
blatant, partly furtive nationalism has displaced the bland and
expansive political consciousness of the last generation, and both at
home and abroad our policies are governed by an ungenerous caution.
In all our history were we ever moved by fears as much as now? Were
forward-looking proposals ever so regularly confronted with “Human
nature being what it is, you cannot do it”?
A child with lots of playthings, but fidgeting, and dissatisfied with
himself--here is a motif for a cartoonist who would depict the present
condition of the western world.
How is this clouding of our sky to be accounted for, and what does
it signify concerning the immediate tasks of our civilization? Is
this depreciation of man simply a phase of the depression that always
follows a great war? Is it a by-product of modern science, which
reveals on the one hand the baffling immensity of nature, and on the
other hand our blood-relationship with the lowest orders of living
things? Is it a consequence of scientific psychology in general; or
of behaviorism in particular; or, perchance, of psychoanalysis? Has
it been “put over” on the populace by dramatists and fiction-mongers
who find it remunerative to exaggerate the selfish and sensual aspects
of life in the name of realism? Even if all these have combined to
push us in the same direction, are they sufficient to account for
what has happened? To what degree are they symptoms, and to what
degree causes? May not the everyday conduct of all of us have had some
influence in determining what we think of one another? If so, how does
it happen that we have so behaved ourselves as to lower our estimate
of human motives in general? What have we done to produce the present
disillusionment?
III
WHAT THE WAR DID TO OUR BELIEF IN MAN
If the term “war” includes, as well it may, what goes on in the minds
of men when nations cross swords, then the hardest battles, the
greatest victories, and the greatest defeats of the Great War occurred,
not upon the soil of France, but within our sense of the meaning and
value of life. Looked at in this most profound and tragic way, the War
is still going on. For in our own souls kindly and trustful sentiments
are engaged in mortal combat with a powerful urge towards distrust
and contempt, if not hate; and--what is of the utmost consequence--in
_this_ battle national boundaries disappear altogether. We are to win
or to lose for mankind as a whole; our respect for ourselves, with all
that this implies, will go up or down with our respect for those that,
nationalistically considered, have been or yet may be our enemies.
The psychological history of the War proves this. During the years
that immediately preceded the outbreak of hostilities something like
a mild, cosmopolitan humanitarianism prevailed in the mass of the
people, even though it did not prevail and never had done so in the
offices of state where, as a regular part of the day’s work, wars are
forecast and prepared for. Surprise at the thunderous onset of the
storm was followed immediately by desire to fix upon somebody the
blame for it. This natural impulse was abetted directly and of policy
by the various governments involved in order to enlist moral sentiment,
or what the people felt to be moral sentiment, against the enemy. The
truth concerning the causes of the War was not the concern of any of
the warring states; rather, regimenting, militarizing the consciences
of the people so that they would fight more bitterly and obey their
commanders more unquestioningly, was the all-dominating policy.
Next came the exposition and interpretation of battlefield experience.
Again it was in the nature of the situation that the people should
spontaneously abhor the enemy--was he not killing and maiming our
boys? Under these conditions two things were certain to happen:
Combatants on both sides were bound to grow ruthless, and on both
sides the ruthlessness of the enemy was bound to be exaggerated even
without intent to deceive, while the ruthlessness of our own soldiers
(whichever side we were on) was not described to us; it was a technical
military detail.
Then was added deception of our own people as an apparently necessary
military measure. To work up the whole people into one consuming fury,
yet a fury utterly obedient to military command, seemed to be the
dictate of mere efficiency. Hence tales of atrocities, in which fact,
honest error, and deliberate lies were inextricably mixed, were fed to
the populace by marvellously organized departments of propaganda. It
happened that psychologists had just then worked out various problems
of effective advertising, salesmanship, and personnel management, so
that an instrument of enormous potentiality was available. Its power
was at a maximum now, because the authorities of the state were able
to close all competing channels of public information.
The first result of this psychic campaign was the arousal of much
of the desired fury. It involved and evolved great simplicity of
conviction: The enemy state is totally bad; then, the enemy people are
totally bad, one and all; then, the racial stock is totally bad, so
that even the children of the enemy are unfit to live; conversely, we,
taken in our governmental capacity, are above criticism; yes, we belong
to an innately superior stock, and our allies are about as good as we
are.
Let us keep our eyes upon our main question, and not be diverted into
the other lines of thought that are here near the surface. Our sole
present concern is to see what effect the total War experience had
upon our respect for human nature. At the culmination of the mental
hostilities extreme contempt for a part of mankind was married to
extreme approval of another part.
Here was, of course, unstable equilibrium; there was bound to be some
sort of tip-over, perhaps a succession of tip-overs. Effort followed
to prevent a radical reversal of this type of judgment, it is true,
by hunting for innate superiorities and inferiorities of race. It is
a safe guess that the future historian of science will smile at the
nursing bottles that were offered to our self-esteem directly following
the War! Such feeding was peculiarly inept in the United States. Here,
where many races both mingle and intermarry, the notion of racial
virtues and racial defects could not bolster up our national pride or
our contempt for any other people.
Even if this race-discrimination that calls itself scientific were
well established and agreed upon by experts, it could not protect
our self-respect against calamities that came to it directly from the
War. For the nature of governmental propaganda was found out. Citizens
learned that they had been deliberately, systematically, and grossly
deceived by their own virtue-professing governments. This of itself
would have been sufficient to take away both the glamour of our assumed
superiority and the hideousness of the enemy’s depravity. But this
revelation of the real nature of the modern state was only one of
several experiences that focussed at the same point. Dissatisfaction
with the terms of the peace and with the post-bellum tactics of our
allies; the realization that more wars are now in the making, and that
even one more war may wreck civilization; the financial costs and the
financial entanglements entailed by our martial exploit; revelations
concerning the profits of patriotism; finally, analyses of the
intelligence tests that were given to our soldiers--all these worked
directly against the high-flown self-esteem that buoyed us up during
the clash of arms.
But the bursting of the bubble has not produced the humility of the
penitent or of the learner. Instead of being stimulated to a reasonable
re-assessment of our national needs, we are irritated, we fall
a-scrambling among ourselves, our life as a people lacks meaning to us
ourselves--unless, indeed, this meaning be economic imperialism, of
which more later.
Thus it is that, in the by and large, our estimate of the motives
of men, our own motives included, has shifted by reason of our
war-experience in the direction of what we believed the enemy to be
while we were fighting him in the field. It is true that our estimate
of him has been modified, for the most part grudgingly, yet “In the War
you see what human nature really is” comes painfully close to being
the net average judgment of the whole psychic tragedy. It is not only
the cynic who says this; it is not only an occasional psychologist who
thinks that man is by nature a fighting animal; the statesman, the
financier, the industrialist, and the “man in the street” are more on
guard against man as such.
But this is not the whole story; the “inside of the cup” still requires
examination. What if the War itself sprang from causes that were
already undermining man’s confidence in man? What if the silliness of
our views of man in 1918 were merely a pustule through which a systemic
social disease poured itself? Certainly the current “There you see
what human nature really is” is less a discovery than a confirmation
of an antecedent opinion; it is an “I told you so.” It is patent to
all who think about such matters that the Great War was no meteorite,
dropping upon us from outside our system of everyday life, but a
direct and entirely to-be-expected growth within this system. Society
did not suddenly change its habits, or suddenly get sick. Conflict
was already here under other names--the language was industrial,
commercial, economic, but the hand was the hand of Jacob. We shall have
occasion, a little later in our inquiry, to ask somewhat in detail what
motives industrialism has been bringing to the fore, and what part,
accordingly, industrialism has had in bringing about the present sense
of disillusionment. Certainly the roots of the modern war-system derive
their chief sustenance from economic desires; and just as certainly we
were judging men before the War by these desires and by the conduct
that they produced.
This mind-set, already present when hostilities started, helps explain
several items in the psychic history of the War. Take, for example,
the grotesque psychic compound, patriotism plus profiteering. How
was it possible, it has been said, for citizens to profess intense
patriotism and utter devotion to winning the War at the very moment
when they extorted high payment for their support of it? Did they want
the War merely for the sake of the profits it brought them? No, for
they gave their sons with alacrity. The human-nature puzzle that we
have to work out is that of a sincere patriotism that could be at the
same time (as far as the profiteer’s consciousness is concerned) an
eager, self-regarding, profit-making business enterprise. The solution
of the puzzle, apart from the general principle of mixed motives, is
to be found in the habitual meaning that life already had acquired.
Of course one must make profits from every move; why not? The irony
of the situation--unperturbed and sincere devotion to a way of life
that produces wars that sacrifice one’s own offspring in battle--is
obvious to anyone who stands outside industrialism as an observer and
critic of it. To some extent, the people have begun to see it; the
emotional color of the term “war profiteer” is evidence; but we shall
not appreciate the whole truth until we realize that in and through the
accepted ways of industrialism a degraded view of “what we are here
for” had come to be taken for granted.
It is partly because men did not assume nobility in man, and were
therefore unready to look for it or notice it, and therefore did not
tell others of it when it did break forth, that we heard so little
concerning the finest conduct of the soldiers of all the belligerent
powers, friend and foe alike. Think of the sportsmanlike treatment of
enemies while the fighting was still going on; the magnanimity that
was taken for granted in individual relations between warriors; the
countless deeds of mercy both within the area of hostilities and round
about, both during and after the conflict; the half dumb, and wholly
blind, belief of many a soldier that he was doing his utmost for an
ideal cause; and do not forget the sincere response of the mass of the
American people to the idealism of the “Fourteen Points.” Weigh all
this, and then add to it the fact that war-makers cannot get their
own people to fight without first deceitfully frightening them or
artificially working up hatred by means of propaganda.
Here, as in the case of the war-profiteer, we behold moral confusion,
but on the whole a downward trend in our regard for our own qualities.
Our returning soldiers, voicing the slogan “Treat ’em rough!” and
applying it alike to former enemies and to citizens who made moral
distinctions with respect to former enemies, gave us a hint of the
extent to which belief in force as the arbiter of human relations was
spreading. Taken simply and without qualification, this belief means,
among other things, that men are bound to fight, and that when they
fight they will be ruthless butchers on the field and smug profiteers
at home. This is not quite true, but why do we constantly drift towards
a belief that it is? Why do we not counteract it by bringing into the
foreground the generosity that men actually exhibit, and even the fact
that lower and higher motives are struggling within them? A war does
not suddenly create such beliefs. They were here before 1914; they
helped make the world-catastrophe possible, but they have now been
accelerated by their own work.
We now have the clue to certain incidents and phases of the
peace-making. It was a peace-making only in the relatively superficial
sense of pausing in the use of explosives. It was not reconciliation;
it was external, not psychic; and it was external because all the
peacemakers assumed that the conventionally accepted motives are
fundamental in human nature and are to be dominant “world without end.”
Underneath all the instability of the peace and all the insincerity of
such measures as the mandates is a low conception of what we are, what
we want, and what we are capable of becoming--a conception that was not
created by the War.
Why is it that the universal horror of this War does not lead to
repentance for war-making? Repentance, that is, for the habitual
indulgence of motives and methods of daily living that make armies
and navies, secretaries of war (actually normal in times of peace),
international animosities, and finally war itself a characteristic
phase of nationalism? Why don’t we turn over a new leaf? Made-to-order
psychology which attributes the climax of fighting to a fighting
instinct, ignoring the actual antecedents of every actual war, does
not get us far toward an explanation, even if it has within itself a
fragment of truth. We must go back to our everyday living if we are
to explain our reluctance to repent for war-making, and we must see
our everyday living in terms primarily of our wants and our notions
about them. Practically nobody wants war; we are not exactly tigers
and vultures; but something prevents us from having robust confidence
in our ability to avoid the fatal steps. Fortunately, we are not
consistently depreciative of ourselves. Even at Versailles, much more
in the League of Nations (with all its handicaps and timidities), still
more, possibly, in the World Court, an inextinguishable hope, a living
shoot of real confidence in human nature, is perceptible. What shall
come of it will depend, in some measure, upon stopping to consider what
we want, and then thinking straight.
IV
HAS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION DEGRADED US IN OUR OWN EYES?
What keeps alive the notion that the theory of evolution derogates from
the dignity of man? One would suppose, offhand, that nothing but our
own conduct could either disgrace or dignify us except to minds that
judge by perverted standards. In a period of history in which society
has begun to shake off artificial class-distinctions, and to permit
men to rise or fall by virtue of their own individual force or lack of
force, how can we revert to an exaggerated pride or shame of ancestry?
A third of a century ago a college student, for the first time coming
to close quarters with the biological view of man, asked, “Professor,
what becomes of our respect for man if he is a blood-relative of the
beasts?” I replied, mindful of the fact that this student and his
family were new Americans, “Does the worth of an individual depend
upon what his grandfather was, or rather upon what he himself is?” The
student, with a laugh, promptly took the position of all believers in
democracy--“A man’s a man for a’ that!”
Even Ezekiel of old, with few democratic traditions, but deeply
reflecting upon the ways of God, rejected the doctrine that worth
or desert depends upon membership in any ancestral or other group.
The people expressed their traditional view in the aphorism, “The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are on edge,”
but the prophet declared that God judges “everyone according to his
ways.” One would expect those who are not only heirs of the democratic
tradition but also lovers of the Bible to take the same point of
view. Yet it is chiefly persons versed in the Bible who complain that
belief in evolution must degrade us in our own eyes. Perhaps “versed
in the Bible” is not the best designation, for the persons in question
are those who are most inclined to a literal interpretation of the
biblical story of creation, which declares that man was made “out of
the dust of the ground.” How, one wonders, does this text affect the
Fundamentalist’s notion of human dignity?
Evidently there is something in the background of the objector’s
mind that is not specified in his argument. What is this unmentioned
premise? Is the complaint that the dignity of man is affronted by the
theory of evolution a case of “rationalization,” that is, the invention
of a reason that for some cause is more convenient than the facts--an
invention that may not be realized to be thus artificial?
The objection does not rest upon any alleged letting-down of conduct
that can be traced to a belief in evolution. It may very well
have happened that, by the roundabout way of a different sort of
rationalization, consciousness of our evolutionary origin has promoted
loose living. For example, those whose philosophy of life already was,
“Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” might have
said, “We are animals anyway; let us live as such.” This would have
been self-sophistication, of course, for no evolution-theory ever said
that we are not, _qua_ human, different from other animals; moreover,
the “Let us” was not derived or derivable from the theory. At most,
we have here a rationalizing excuse by which to maintain one’s “face”
to oneself or to others. But anti-evolutionists fail to give specific
evidence that even in this indirect and sophistical way the theory has
produced a letting down.
It is possible that the mistaken identification of evolution with a
single theory of its process, struggle for existence and survival of
the fittest, has aided and abetted selfishness and ruthlessness in
competitive business and competitive nationalism. But this kind of
competition does not wait for scientific justification, and when it
alleges evolution as an excuse, it indulges in self-sophistication just
as do the sybarites who have been mentioned. For “existence” does not
mean the same thing for man and his animal ancestors, and therefore
“fittest” does not. In pre-human species there is no precedent for the
alternatives between which the business man and the statesman have to
choose. Rationalization again!
It is scarcely necessary to inquire whether academic ethical theory
has been seduced by the evolutionary aspect of life. Little more is
needed than to recall a name and a circumstance or two. The name is
that of Huxley, rigorous evolutionist, who with all the emphasis that
he could command insisted that the tooth-and-claw principle does not
apply to the human species. An important circumstance is the blossoming
of humanitarian service during this period, with its inevitable
reverberation in ethical thinking. The ethical life is now almost
universally understood to be the life of mutual helpfulness. This view
is strongly backed up by sociology, theoretical and practical, with
its continual reminder of the solidarity of men, and by the parallel
development of social psychology, which finds that personal existence
as such is a mutual affair.
All the more reason, then, for asking why anybody supposes that
our respect for ourselves depends at all upon our holding or not
holding the evolution theory. If, in order to answer this question,
I must flail some old straw, the excuse is that the search for the
sources of our twentieth-century depreciation of man is worthy of
some thoroughness. Well, then, it is clear that there is no logical
thoroughfare between our disillusionment and the theory of descent.
As far as the logic of the theological anxiety is concerned, Huxley’s
retort to Wilberforce in the famous sitting of the British Association
is final. If we were logical, it would be far more derogatory to our
_amour propre_ to be related to a human scoundrel, or even, as Huxley
so crushingly said, to an evasive, only half-honest debater, than to
reckon ape-like creatures in our ancestry.
As a matter of fact, we do retain our regard for ourselves in the full
light of our blood-relationship with men of all sorts of evil traits,
even brutish ones. Fox, tiger, serpent, viper, shark, blood-sucker,
vulture--all these epithets--some of them actually biblical--have long
been applied to members of our species. Within the consanguinity of the
most convinced Fundamentalist there are thieves, murderers, ravishers,
maniacs, and idiots. One whose self-respect remains intact in the
presence of this truth is simply self-deceived if he imagines that
his sense of human dignity would be affronted by admitting that the
anthropoids are his distant cousins. No, each of us readily asserts his
superiority to his relatives, so readily that the theory of evolution
simply cannot have had the effect supposed. At the most, advantage has
been taken of it to emphasize or reinforce notions that have their
source elsewhere. In the case of the Fundamentalists, antagonism to the
concept of evolution upon this ground is a cloak that is employed, more
or less unconsciously, to cover some other reason for the opposition.
The more one looks into the course of religious thought, and of
popular thought in general, since Darwin, the more certain becomes
this conclusion. Biologists and biological psychologists, as far as I
am aware, never claimed to add a single item to the already recognized
list of beast-like qualities in men, and theologians never attacked
evolution upon any such ground. Rather, what the new view of us added
was an explanation of “how we got that way,” and the explanation--mark
this--constituted a partial excuse (not justification, but excuse)
for much of our bad conduct. It actually lifted from us a part of the
condemnation that was inherent in the theological view of special
creation.
It is a fact, moreover, that--whether logically or not--from the
evolutionary view of the past men gathered confidence in their own
capacity for progress. Today we are actually embarrassed by the
too-easy identification of evolution with progress. Men’s self-esteem
was too much enhanced and soothed.
What is not less interesting from the theological point of view is
that the previously current views of the nature and work of God
were ennobled. Whether logically or not, men thought that they saw
more meanings, or saw them more clearly, in the system of nature.
“Star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,” to use Emerson’s phrase, were not
just “there”; they were getting ready to be the home of living things;
and the lower forms of life were regarded as pointers-forward to
higher forms. Again to borrow from the Concord “prophet of the soul,”
And the poor worm shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.
A recent declaration by a number of eminent men, some of them on the
highest round of the scientific ladder, that the evolutionary view of
nature ennobles the thought of God is historically true at least; the
event has occurred. In short, the atmospheric change was not toward
the depression of a sultry day but toward the invigoration of a fresh,
appetite-creating breeze.
The sophistic that turned this into an alleged depletion of our moral
vim is not far to seek. The reason why certain persons did not rejoice
at the excuses that evolution provides for much of our faultiness is
that they did not want us to be excused, but condemned. They wanted
this, not because they were vicious, but because they held a theology
that required them to think so. And because this authoritative theology
had settled upon one way as the only one whereby man could be released
from the sins that beset him, it could not rejoice to discover that
there are other openers of prison doors.
If many of the dogmatically faithful did not think their way into
quite all this detail, they realized at least that to accept at the
hands of evolution an ennobled view of man or of God would involve
admitting inadequacy and lack of true authority in the dogmatic
system. The dogmas never were complimentary to human nature, but--O
droll self-delusion--when science offered us a real compliment, dogma
insisted that it was an insult to our exalted dignity!
V
THE IRRATIONALITY OF MAN AS A LITERARY MOTIF
“What a noble work is man!” is a characteristic sentiment of classical
English literature. “What a work is man!” is the burden of the most
distinctive literature of our day. The difference between the two
exclamations is the difference between sunshine with clouds and clouds
without sunshine.
Our literature always has had rogues and villains galore, hypocrites
and egotists, folly in good people and goodness in bad people. Human
life and human nature have been pictured as spotted and mixed-up,
and strife and confusion have not always been cleared up in the
dénouement. But this was a mixture, a confusion, and a strife, of
genuine opposites. That there are truly noble motives was not doubted;
it was, indeed, the entanglements of nobility in a world that contains
also stupidity, selfishness, sensuality, and cruelty that furnished
the main dramatic situations, whether between individuals or within an
individual’s own soul.
The same objective material receives in our day a fundamentally
different treatment. That we have fewer “happy endings” is not the main
point, and it is not necessarily significant. What is significant is a
shift of the main basis of dramatic contrasts and oppositions, and the
insertion of a new set of tensions, together with the assumption, or
the mood, that lies back of the change.
Whereas, our classical tradition opposed moral ugliness or weakness to
moral beauty or strength, the new mode is not certain that there are
any such dividing lines in our experience. It finds in life, rather,
a mêlée of impulses in which there intermingles more or less policing
that imagines itself to be of superior quality but is actually part
and parcel of the mêlée. In the instincts a literary bonanza has been
discovered. Pit them against one another; tangle them up; make them
intense and ruthless to the point of savagery or beastliness, or
make them crafty and adroitly unscrupulous; ignore the presence in
the world of religious aspiration, or, better still, expose it as a
self-deceived servitor of the powers that it would rule--in short, play
irrationality against irrationality, some of it deceiving itself by its
own camouflage, and you will be up to date.
If this literature cannot paint with epic strokes because its theme,
man, lacks heroic proportions, it does create a complicated and
many-patterned chiaroscuro that, I am ready to believe, is a real
contribution to literary technic. But whatever virtues or vices of
technical art one may find here (which is not my concern), the inlooks
are disillusioning. Even if the lines do not say so, you will find
it between the lines. It permeates the assumptions of the characters
or, if it does not, it suffuses the plot, governing the choice of
characters, situations, incidents, developments; it is testified to
by atmosphere, perspective, and very effectively by silences. If, as
sometimes happens in current plots as well as in classic tragedy, Fate
is the chief actor, it is not sublimely grand or even mysterious,
giving the spectator a feeling that even the irremediable ills of life
are a tribute to the greatness and dignity of existence, but a mean
Fate (rather, fate), a mere mechanical determinism in the sphere of
desire. The spectator goes away unawed, unadmiring, untrustful toward
his species. Life is a mole that burrows under the garden of our
ideals, nipping off at the roots one plant after another. Or, life is a
firecracker; a glittering splutter, then an explosion or a fizzle, then
fragments of smoking refuse--nothing but combustion.
It is far from the purpose of this characterization to indulge in any
general literary criticism, or completely to assess the movement now
in question. The only reason for alluding to it is that here, in a
clearly influential portion of current writing, the disillusionment now
under consideration is a ruling presence. The spirit of it is displayed
in fiction, drama, poetry, and biography. It is bent upon stripping
off the disguises of men, puncturing their pride, and revealing them
as creatures of elemental, a-moral, not-to-be-denied impulses. Now
and then an impression of power is conveyed by the sheer intensity or
explosiveness of an instinctive desire, but anon human wants appear
narrow, mean, vulgar, or sordid. “Spoon River” and “Main Street!”
Authors psychologizing, just as diplomats do, with hard cynicism.
And this cynicism is not intended as caricature, with its precious
privilege of telling the truth by exaggeration, nor satire, isolating
foibles in order to put them into the pillory; the literature in
question intends to present the actuality of human life as against the
conventionalized dreaming of the Victorian period.
Two or three examples may be adduced for the sake of concreteness. A
reviewer gives the following exposition of the philosophy of life that
actuates Mr. Dreiser’s novels: “To him it seemed ... that novelists,
... enamoured of moral delicacy and psychological subtleties, ... had
forgotten the simple motives by which the vast majority of mankind are
moved; so with a single shrug he sloughed off once and for all the
implications of the theory that man is primarily a moral animal, and he
did this much as the behaviorists in psychology sloughed off the soul.
He adopted, instead, what he called ‘a theory of animal conduct.’” The
leading character in Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” the reviewer goes
on to say, “is not unaware of the moral precepts which his parents have
inculcated, nor is he unmoved by the thought of another’s pain. But
these things are pale shadows in comparison with needs and lusts which
are nourished, not by ideas and habits, but by blood. They may go forth
to battle but they never win; they may haunt the mind like overtones or
like ghosts but they never direct a crucial action.... At no point in
all the vast and closely woven story does any motive based upon moral,
social, or religious abstractions count” (Joseph Wood Krutch in the
_Nation_, Feb. 10, 1926, p. 152).
The same writer of analytic reviews calls Eugene O’Neill’s “The Great
God Brown” a “passionate attempt to expound the mystery of the artist’s
maladjustment and of that perpetual tendency of his to slide into the
mud while aspiring toward the stars. Its hero, ... unhappy himself,
... has been the cause of unhappiness in others, and when he dies he
knows no more than that he has lived.... He has not seen the face of
either God or Devil clearly enough to know which was which, and it
is with curses that he has uttered the sincerest of his prayers....
The thirteen scenes ... are thirteen dancing stars still molten and
fluid like the chaos from which they sprung. They are moments in the
life of a man described in a brilliantly poetic sentence as one who
‘had looked into his own dark and was afraid’; and they are thus,
it is difficult not to believe, fragmentary confessions from that
dramatist who has peered more intently than any of his countrymen at
the fantastic shadows cast by reality upon the walls of the dark cavern
which is the self” (Same number of the _Nation_, pp. 164 f.).
A less tempestuous form of disillusionment appears in the
(would-be-bestowed) Pulitzer Prize novel, Sinclair Lewis’s
“Arrowsmith.” The main action takes place upon the plane, not of
brawling passions, but of the supposably rational life. Most persons
of intelligence assume that, however mixed or fragile the values of
other undertakings may be, scientific research is a truly noble and
profoundly worthwhile type of human conduct. Very well, says the author
of “Arrowsmith,” let us look at the thing in actual operation in our
present world. Are you carried away by the researcher’s dispassionate
objectivity and his passionate devotion to truth? In fact, this
dispassionate passion is in a constantly losing fight with enemies both
within and without the researcher.
For, first, since research must be cooperative and organized,
institutionalism seizes the opportunity to lay the long fingers of
its dead hand upon every condition and plan. Next, vulgar utility,
because it purveys the physical sustenance of science, craftily opens
and closes the doors through which the researcher has to walk. Then,
the mixed motives of the individuals with whom the researcher must
be associated--the desire for recognition in the scientific world,
the desire for quick results, or for official position--insinuate
themselves like sand in the cogwheels of a fine mechanism.
Humanitarianism, with its well-meaning desire promptly to relieve
distress, throws its arms around the neck of plain truth-seeking and
drags it under the waves of popular clamor or applause. Even within
the mind of the researcher, there is no real peace nor unity. Anger
and impatience, plain sex-instinct, and even domestic virtues entangle
his interests and divert him from the straight line of loyalty to his
scientific aspirations. At times uncertainty seizes him as to whether
the near-by values of efficiency as the world measures it be not
greater, in fact, than the far values of fundamental truth.
Thus is pictured the life of reason at its intellectual climax. This
is the focus of the story, but not the whole of it. Around the central
character cluster varied types of life-history, but every type is
either self-contradictory, or consistently shallow, or inadequate
because of its unwise goodness. Not less than in the rabble of
instincts in O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but only in a different
manner, and on a more refined level, man is the victim of himself. The
idea is pursued with both continuity and subtlety. With continuity
because it pervades the minor as well as the major characters and
incidents of the plot; with subtlety because over-simplification of
motives is skilfully avoided. The finer qualities are presented as fine
and sincere even though the life within which they occur be smitten
with ultimate futility. There is, indeed, biting cynicism for virtues
that are cold and calculating, but not for warm, impulsive goodness.
But nobody arrives at any destination. As reason fails to
guide the researcher to his desired haven, so also instinctive
wholesomeness fails of its goal. The one deeply lovable person
in the entire story would have demonstrated, if anyone could do
it under the presuppositions of the author, that life can achieve
a worth-while destiny otherwise than through knowledge. Leora is
natural, spontaneous, affectionate; she makes adjustments by simple
directness of feeling without artifice or ambition; though she has
no discernible philosophy of life, she is dependable; on the whole,
she seems to be contented. But her simplicity is that of narrowness,
not of comprehension; she achieves adaptation but not mastery of her
situations, and in the end her lack of any real understanding of the
scientific habits and standards of her husband overwhelms them both in
a needless tragedy.
Everywhere is frustration by inherent, unchangeable defects; yet no
tears, no pathos (for there is no “might have been”); the irrational
is both foreground and background. A surd in every experience would
not necessarily mean defeat if there were any self-sustaining meanings
also. But if our supposed meanings turn out to be surds!
There shines in the earlier parts of the story the steady brilliance
of one ideal, that of unswerving devotion to pure science--wanting
to know the exact truth at all costs. This ideal is incarnated in a
sturdy-willed, growly old priest of the laboratory from whom young
men of science catch the holy flame. They, one and all, allow it to
flicker and smolder; some of them let it go out; but for a long time
the old priest’s light burns steadily on. The reader half believes
that here, for just once, rationality is to vindicate itself. At last
there comes to the veteran researcher an opportunity to guard research,
and to extend it, by administering a research institution that
possesses abundant funds. Unknowing that his motives are mixed and
contradictory, he accepts the fatal advancement, becomes compromised,
and is lost. As a symbol of his descent the novelist makes him sink
into senile dementia. “Vanity of vanities!... All is vanity.”
How much has this literary exploitation of the irrational in man had
to do with the disillusionment that has been spreading among us? Have
we here chiefly a cause, or chiefly an effect? If a cause, is it a
major or a minor one? In any case we have a symptom or diagnostic fact.
Disillusionment has gone far enough to be represented in a considerable
body of literature that cannot be ignored. Whatever much-read novels
and much-witnessed plays reveal concerning a people or an age is here
revealed; whatever they do to people is being done here and now.
The suggestibleness of human beings is too great to leave them
unaffected by such presentations of the supposed realities of life;
this literature certainly is furthering disillusionment. But as a
secondary cause. The primary cause is something actual that sets these
literary workers going and then provides the popular applause. The
applauders have had some sort of experience that makes the picture seem
to have some verisimilitude. Thus we are forced back to the question,
What makes this literature plausible? What has gotten into our common
life that tends to make us think meanly of ourselves, and that causes
us, particularly, to take our wants as a continuous and never to be
resolved squabble among our desires?
Whatever it is, undoubtedly it is the same thing that we came upon in
the “I told you so” of the war psychology. In all probability it is so
commonplace that ordinarily it is not noticed, or if it is noticed, is
taken as a to-be-expected expression of the nature of things. When a
world-catastrophe shakes us, we begin to wake up to the assumptions
that we have so easily fallen into, and when they appear in a new
literature, we say that it is revealing--as it is. But of just what?
The professed derivation of this interpretation of life from psychology
suggests that we look in this direction for further light upon our
problem.
VI
HAS PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINED OUR SELF-RESPECT
The Sphinx attends a meeting of the Psychological Sodality.
The Chairman of the Meeting:
Brothers--er, er, Brothers and Sisters: We have the pleasure, I may say
even the honor, of having as our guest this evening a most venerable
member, if not of our inmost circle (which is not yet venerable
itself, having the age of only a generation), yet a member of the
long and honorable succession of inquirers into what is, perhaps, the
most difficult problem that has engaged the scientific intellect--the
problem of the nature of man. I say “perhaps” the most difficult
problem, for we who have observed the reactions of the white rat are
aware how, under the rub of exact research, man disappears, like
vanishing cream, in the pores of “the organism.” I am reminded of this
with peculiar force upon the present occasion because our distinguished
guest, like our laboratories, combines the human and the sub-human in a
single synthesis. Renowned for her cautious judgment, she is yet more
illustrious for her skill in the formulation of problems. Let me assure
her that the members of this Sodality will have open ears for her
questions, and that we shall be glad to focus upon them the combined
and unified results of our respective lines of research. Fellow
Members, I present The Sphinx!
The Sphinx:
Your Chairman does me too great honor when he says that I combine the
upper and the lower part of me in a single synthesis. The fact is that
the two parts of me never have lived together in harmony. The trouble
is with my head. It’s forever saying, “I’m human, but what is it to be
human?” and this keeps the whole of me in turmoil. I’ve been asking
this question for thousands of years, and asking it is as far as ever
I get. Tough luck; but not as bad as trying to answer questions that
you don’t know how to ask. Believe me, asking the right question is
the greatest discovery anybody ever makes; it’s the high-trapeze act
of the whole scientific circus. It makes me tired--I’ve been too tired
to stir for as much as five thousand years--to hear philosophers, and
preachers, and guides of youth “explain” the mystery of human existence
by prating of ghosts, and souls, and faculties that always are just
around the corner and never where you can get your eyes upon them
(Applause). It all comes about from asking the wrong question. In this
instance, it’s the mud-pie question: What’s it made of? This question
plays the very deuce. By the way, all of you guys are done with mud
pies, I suppose? I haven’t seen the last number of your Annals.
A Practicing Psychologist:
May I introduce myself to our distinguished speaker by explaining
that I am a certified practicing psychologist? From the point of view
of my profession the question that has been put to us is readily
answered: We are done with mud pies. We are not at all concerned to
know whether man is made out of the dust of the ground or out of the
breath of divinity. Our job is simply to enable men to control, manage,
and manipulate themselves and one another so as to get what they want
with the greatest certainty and the least expense. And we have had no
mean success in this job. If a child is backward in school, we find
out why, and we tell the teacher what to do. We have evolved technics
for advertising that increase sales, whip up competition, and compel
combination. We can tell you how to manage salespeople or factory
operatives so that both they and their foremen will be happier, the
output will increase, and dividends will grow. It was a technic that
we devised that enabled our officials at Washington to do the people’s
thinking for them during the War while the people supposed all the time
that they were doing their own thinking. Psychology is what psychology
does.
The Sphinx:
You’re just the pin in a haymow that I’ve been looking for ever since
Bacchus went on his first spree! Nothing else has puzzled me half as
much as this phase of my old question, namely: What do human beings
want? Since the management of minds is your specialty, practice on me;
tell me how I can manage my head or the minds of men so as to find out
what would really satisfy a human being.
Practicing Psychologist:
I did not say that the practicing psychologist knows the whole anatomy
of man’s desires. For the most part he takes the word of his clients
as to what they want, and then goes ahead. I simply do not ask what
other demands of human nature may possibly exist. At the same time I
must admit that, in order to find the economical way to handle the
human factor in any situation, I must always take account of a complex
of instincts. The farther I go in my work, too, the more complicated
the instincts appear to be. For example, we are discovering that the
workman wants out of his work a great many things besides wages, even
things that wages won’t buy. As yet, however, we are not sure that
the capitalist (except a queer one now and then) desires anything but
profits. The acquisitive instinct seems completely to explain the
conduct of business.
A Biological Psychologist:
What has just been said illustrates the need of an inclusive point of
view from which to approach the problem of the instincts. Biology,
in its concept of adjustment, presents us with such a point of view.
All living beings exhibit a push towards the maintenance and the
reproduction of themselves. Thus, there are two great trunk-roots of
behavior, the demand for self-maintenance (at base the requirement of
food), and the demand for reproduction. Where reproduction is sexual,
we may say that food and sex, broadly considered, contain the clue to
all behavior. It is necessary, of course, to perceive that each of
these trunk-roots divides into branches and subdivides into rootlets.
Thus, food-getting includes accumulation for future use, and so it
founds what is sometimes called the acquisitive instinct. Rivalry,
jealousy, and pugnacity belong to the same trunk-root. On the other
hand, the reproductive drive differentiates into complex activities of
courtship, the care of offspring, the family organization, and all the
social institutions that have sprung from it.
The Sphinx:
You puzzle me. I haven’t been hungry or amorous since the pyramids were
built, and I know I never wanted offspring. The only thing I’ve really
wanted for these thousands of years is to know what man is--that is,
what he really wants. At this minute I’m all excited about a particular
aspect of this general question of mine: Does man himself, or only this
queer head of mine, want to know what he wants? And if so, of which of
the two trunk-roots of instinct is this a rootlet?
An Analytical Psychologist:
The question just asked by our venerable friend reinforces a
consideration that I have many times presented in our Sodality.
Psychology cannot be satisfied to work within the very broad categories
of biology; she must find her categories within the specific material
with which she deals, and she must pursue her analyses to the end--that
is, until the simple elements are laid bare. Pursuing this truly
scientific procedure, she finds that mind is a general term for
aggregates of sense-elements on the one hand and elementary drives on
the other. These drives, inherited, of course, and having biological
significance, are more numerous than we once supposed. Each of the
so-called trunk-roots is in reality a cluster of roots, and there are
others not contained in either cluster. The sex-instinct knows nothing
of offspring; does not look forward to progeny nor provide care for the
young--often quite the opposite. These things are managed by another
set of instincts. Moreover, food-getting is not the only sort of
instinctive getting. Curiosity, the prime root of science, is obviously
instinctive. Therefore we may affirm that the trouble with The Sphinx’s
head is the unrest of an unsatisfied instinct.
A Single-Track Behaviorist:
This makes me as tired as it must make The Sphinx. Instincts, forsooth!
An instinct is nothing but a name for a class of responses; it does
not do anything nor explain anything. You can have as many or as few
instincts as you like by choosing your method of classifying behavior.
In fact, the whole notion that desires, instinctive or other, explain
the occurrence of anything is simply a leftover from the belief in
flitting ghosts who did things in the dark but never where you could
see just what was happening. Bring the facts into the light, and what
do you see (for I know nothing but what I see and touch)? You behold
in our behavior nothing whatever but a few reflex movements modified
in numerous ways by the conditions, purely physical, under which they
occur. Behavior, which is change of place, has to be explained from
within its own genus, which is, change of place. This is the last
mountain height of psychology; climb up here, and you shall see that
there are no desires, no wants. Men don’t want anything; a want is
nothing but a bit of vocal or sub-vocal behavior.
The Sphinx:
Professor, you are a man after my own heart. You make things so simple.
From what you say I get a hunch that maybe I have been foolish to be so
inquisitive. For thousands of years I have believed that I was asking
my big question about man because I wanted an answer. You make it clear
that I didn’t ask because I desired an answer, or anything else, but
only because I liked to ask questions. Come to think of it--it’s plain
as a wart on a nose--I couldn’t ask a question _because_ of anything.
In fact, it was not questions, but movements of my lips, that occurred.
I’ve just been kidding myself, and I don’t need to worry any more about
what goes on in this head of mine. I really don’t want an answer, and I
don’t want to ask questions. Still, I should like to know what the rest
of you fellows think about this.
A Gestalt-Psychologist:
The latest experiments upon both men and lower animals fail to justify
any of the theories that man’s mind or his behavior is a composite of
elements. The behavior of men, of chimpanzees, and even of domestic
hens displays types of organization that cannot be explained as
conditioned reflexes, or instinctive pushes, or associations of
sense-elements. The organization is there when the response first
occurs, not merely afterwards, and new organizations appear within new
responses. The unit for psychology is the configuration, which is not
a simple element. We are not composites of any kind of elements; we do
not merely repeat and recombine old reactions; our behavior, through
and through, looks forward to the organized world in which we live.
I find the question of The Sphinx, therefore, not only rational, but
inevitable. The supreme problem of psychology is: Whither? What are
these already organized wholes that we recognize as mind? How and in
what direction do they grow, and what are they going towards? Applied
to man, the question is, What does this species really want?
A Self-Psychologist:
The circle is returning into itself! Psychology took its start--it
always does so--from the experience of being a conscious self. This
is the prime datum; it is the concrete actuality, from which all
your alleged “elements,” sensory, affective, or instinctive, are
derived by abstraction. Mind, as the Gestalt-Psychologist says, is
a self-organizing object. Its activity, wherever you find it, is
purposive striving. I should say that what ails the Sphinx’s head is
simply the painful effort to become a complete self.
The Sphinx:
Thank you! You have saved my self-respect, and ...
A Psychoanalyst:
Pardon me, not too fast! Don’t respect yourself until you find out
whether you are respectable, and above all, don’t rationalize. I am
sure that you will welcome this interruption when I tell you that I am
dealing daily with the dynamics of human conduct in its most intimate
phases, so intimate that people cannot even recognize them as their
own without my help. I walk among the mud-geysers and the volcanoes
that show what’s really inside. What men think they want--in fact,
most of what you psychologists think they want--isn’t what they really
want, for the most part, but a lot of deceptive substitutes for what
men really want and have failed to get. Dig down into the Unconscious,
and you shall find libido, the simple spring that turns all the wheels
of the machine. It is sex-desire broadly considered, though some
would say desire to exalt the ego, or desire just to live (of which
sex-desire is, of course, the chief constituent). Because these desires
are repressed by social conventions, they seek outlets in strange and
deceptive ways, and thus what we call our character becomes chiefly
a mass of self-deluded virtues and self-deluded faults. Now, this
restless longing of The Sphinx, which she thinks is a genuine desire to
know what man is, conceals ...
Several Voices:
Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman, I ...
The Chairman:
Brethren, every member of this Sodality knows exactly what every other
member is about to say. Would it not be well, instead of listening to
ourselves, to hear the comments of our honored guest?
The Sphinx:
I won’t admit, no I won’t, that this discussion has given me a
headache. I want you to think me more hard-headed than that, and
moreover I might unwittingly reveal something in my insides that would
shock the Psychoanalyst. All I can say, in view of your hospitality, is
this: When you find out what you want, I hope you’ll one and all get
what you want, provided you care to have that kind of want. As for me,
the next steamer back to Egypt, where I shall brood over these things,
perhaps, for a few more thousand years.[2]
* * * * *
To the question whether modern psychology has undermined our
self-respect a partial reply would be, as we now see, Which modern
psychology? One psychology is pitted against another whenever the
nature of our motives is in question. Here science has problems rather
than solutions, points of view rather than a point of view.
Only a small proportion of the populace, moreover, reads scientific
psychology. Not by any logical use of established conclusions of
research, then, has the present disillusionment reached its wide
extent. We are dealing with a mood or sentiment and a habit into
which men have slipped, not with insight that they have achieved by
intellectual labor.[3]
Undoubtedly psychological rumors that have trickled into town have
had an influence. Everybody who has an articulate desire to be modern
is thinking about human nature in terms that he supposes to be those
of the psychologist. In particular, three propositions have attained
some vogue: That men are moved by the same instincts as the lower
species; that instinctive conduct is mechanically determined; and that
the reasons conventionally given for conduct are mostly sophistical
“rationalizations” (that is, merely supposed reasons for that which
in reality is determined by emotion rather than thought). These ideas
give support to the current mood, but they cannot have had much to do
with creating it. As here used, they are themselves “rationalizations.”
The basis of the mood is some form of common or at least wide-spread
experience. No great ground-swell of popular sentiment ever originated
from anything else.
Indeed, can we reasonably assume that the wind blows in only one
direction--from psychology to popular opinion, but not from the popular
mood into the psychology laboratory? Surely psychologists are human,
which is to say that we need a psychology of their psychologizing. Here
is an item of it: (1) The area that one chooses for investigation; (2)
The questions that one asks; (3) The facts that one notices or fails
to notice; (4) The values that are noticed in the work of another; and
(5) The apparent size of the sphere within which one acts--all these
are influenced by some interest then and there present. Now, interest
can be awakened in all sorts of ways. The spirit of the times can shunt
research onto this track or that, and it can make this datum or that
prominent in the mind of the researcher.
It is easy, in fact, to trace to their origin several of the dominant
interests of psychology. Thus it struggled for scientific standing at a
period when “science” connoted, most clearly of all, physical science;
at a time when the biological concept of evolution filled the sky; at
a time when it was necessary, in order to be let alone, to seem not
to meddle with theological interests; and, above all, at a time when
industrialism was rushing swiftly towards its present climax. We shall
do no despite to science nor to any of its devotees if we say that
there is a subtle connection between the dominance of machinery in our
civilization, the prominence of a machine-like view of motivation in
the many works on psychology, and the predilection of the popular mood
for just this idea of human nature.
VII
ACCORDING TO INDUSTRIALISM, WHAT IS MAN?
An ancient poet celebrated the greatness of man in the following
glowing words:
O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who
hast set thy glory above the heavens....
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars, which thou hast ordained,
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that
thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the gods, and hast
crowned him with glory and honor.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou
hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.
“Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.”
Simple-minded poet, son of herdsman, hunter, or fisherman, you think
man is great because he domesticates sheep and oxen, and is successful
in his hunting and fishing--so great that even the maker of the heavens
regards him as important! What would you say if you could witness
the conquests of nature that have followed upon modern science and
invention? You might ride in a car that is propelled, heated, and
lighted by a river a hundred miles away; you might speak in your
natural voice at Jerusalem and be heard in Egypt; with a turn of a
hand you could start moving a mass that a thousand of your Palestinian
oxen could not budge.
How is it that this enormous increase in our dominion over nature
adds so little to our appreciation of man? Nay, that it makes us less
appreciative than this rustic?
The answer will be found in some phase of the process of securing this
dominion, or in some use made of it. Outside of industrialism, in fact,
the obvious trend of history is towards a higher and higher estimate
of human nature. The growth of civil and political liberty; the spread
of popular education; emancipation from many superstitious fears; the
increase of humanitarianism--what a truly glorious period in human
evolution do these witness. And yet, in spite of them all, a depressed
view of ourselves hangs heavy in the atmosphere. We have canvassed all
the more obvious partial causes of it, only to be pointed in every
instance towards our everyday occupations as the more important source.
What is industrialism doing to us, then? Under this term may be
included for convenience the entire system by which, in the period of
steam and electric power--still a short one--goods are produced and
distributed, and commerce and finance are carried on. This system,
originating in the West but now spreading to the Orient, reorganizes
human relationships in a manner that is almost revolutionary. It
shifts populations from place to place; it dissolves old connections,
and creates new ones, separating men who were together, and bringing
together those who were strangers; it produces a large-scale
consciousness of one another--ultimately, it seems, an almost feverish
consciousness--but without ever making the reorganization of human
relations any part of its main business. That is, the all-absorbing
industrial system is not organized and run with reference to its main
output, a changed humanity; we are not in business, as has been said,
for our health; and this inversion of values, at first not clearly
foreseen, or intended as a philosophy of life (but only practised), is
now becoming a clearly conscious and, in the Western world, a generally
accepted interpretation of our own worth. We are taking our occupations
seriously.
It is hard for us who are most close to the facts to see them in
perspective. We are rarely conscious of the human movement in the
large because the whole immediate human environment moves with us.
But Oriental observers like Tagore and Gandhi perceive that Western
civilization is developing towards a world-tragedy--pigmy purposes
wielding the power of giants. It may be that we shall be jarred into
something wiser by the jolts that are occurring within the machine
itself. For the human factor is increasingly the problem-setting item
in the industrial system. All the other sources of difficulty--the
weather, the changes of the seasons, the supply of raw materials, the
chemistry of industrial processes, the control of elemental forces--all
these taken together occasion less anxious thought than the question,
What can we rely upon in the sphere of human conduct? The puzzle of
organization is personnel; the nightmare of the employer is labor; the
riddle of labor is organized capital and its instrument, the manager
and the boss; at the spear-point of practically every enterprise
appears the opposing spearhead of sharper and sharper competition.
Experience of friction is leading to modifications of mechanical
processes and some improvements in human relations. But meantime,
there goes on, by virtue of the inner logic of the system as a whole,
an increasing depression of spirit, an increasing skepticism of the
worth of human motives in their totality.
Let not our question be confused with others. We are not asking whether
the industrial system breeds injustice; not even what sorts of men
it produces by this or that particular method of “handling” men. Our
sole interest at this point is in the notions concerning the motives
of men that spring up, or receive emphasis and currency, by virtue of
the general characteristics of the system. Some wariness is advisable
here, for the field is not entirely homogeneous, and (as we shall see
more fully in a later section) motives are mixed and more or less
misunderstood. That industrialism is producing, and, until it becomes
greatly modified, must produce, a depressed view of man, however, is a
safe proposition. For no one will question that there is in it a kind
of gravitation towards the following specific judgments:
(_a_) That in the organization and the use of capital the dominant
motive, almost invariably taken for granted, is not the glory of God
(however this be understood), nor the improvement of human life (one’s
own or others’), nor supplying the wants of men, but accumulation of
profits and of power for the enjoyment of the possessor, or of the
possessor and his family.
(_b_) That among the employed classes the dominant attitude with
respect to the relations between employer and employe is to get the
most possible for the least return; and that a corresponding attitude
on the part of employers is taken as a matter of course.
(_c_) That, since conflict is of the essence of
industrialism--competition of capitalist with capitalist, of laborer
with laborer, and chronic strains between capital and labor--an
essentially pugnacious self-interest is fundamental to human nature;
consequently, that the natural, to-be-expected policy of all concerned
is to obtain compulsory power over others.
(_d_) That insincerity permeates the whole--insincerity in that, though
every one is for himself, everybody endeavors to make it appear that
what he wants is for the good of the others. Thus, men actually ascribe
virtue to themselves because their occupation supplies some human want,
though these same men confess that their motive is profits, and that
they ignore wants that it is less profitable to supply. “The public
good” is known to be a continual excuse for economic partizanship
in laws, administration, and politics generally. Under the guise of
patriotism, self-interest pursues world-policies that make for economic
imperialism, unfairness to weaker peoples, and war. Each struggling
class, laborers and employers alike, conceals from the public the
narrower, more partizan phases of its activities. It is not necessary
to suppose that all this is entirely conscious, or that all men are
equally paralysed in their moral nature by this poison. Let us give the
benefit of the doubt wherever we can. But indubitably our industrial
system creates a belief that our life is thus honeycombed with
insincerity.
These, let it be repeated, are not a portrait, but only certain
selected features; they do not fully describe any situation; they do
not constitute an accusation of depravity. But no one who impartially
surveys the human relationships that most characterize industrialism
can deny that the impressions that have been described are being made
by it, and are being believed with increasing generality.
If we ask how this factor in the present disillusionment compares with
the others--the Great War, the belief in evolution, the literature of
irrationality, general psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis--we
shall conclude that it is more influential than all of them put
together. The reason is not merely that the War covered only a few
short years, whereas experience with the industrial system is more than
a century old; and not merely that science and literature reach only
a portion of the population; there is a still deeper reason for the
profound influence of industrialism upon our conception of ourselves.
Wherever our voluntary activities, our efforts and struggles, are
chiefly expended, there we get our deepest impressions as to the
nature of reality. Men who through life spend from eight to ten of
their freshest hours each day in the economic struggle tend to become
conformed in their personal attitudes to the facts and forces with
which and against which they work. They surely become conformed unless
they take part in efforts to change the system. We do not understand
even the pleasures of the people until we inspect their labor; the same
is true of family life, and--more than we suspect--of religion.
Not only is industrialism the chief of several sources of our
disillusionment; it is the background source that either produces or
gives popular plausibility to the others. It produced the War; it
aggravates all the general problems of the family and of sex-life;
it intensifies everything that makes us distrust one another and
everything that makes us content to be selfish. Industrial efficiency
practically identifies itself with a mechanization of life that leaves
the least possible scope for the exercise of thought, and choice, and
personality. When release from work comes, the imprisoned vitality of
the worker gushes into a kind of freedom that gives one an impression
that the real basis of life is simply instinct. If, as some suppose, a
flood of sexuality has descended upon us, the reason will be found, not
chiefly in psychoanalysis, but in such conditions of modern life as the
industrial city. Granted industrialism, ramifying into the home, the
people’s recreations, politics and law; industrialism, growing more and
more efficient according to its self-secreted standard of efficiency,
what should one expect but disillusionment as to the worth of human
motives? “Gentlemen,” said a college president to some students who
were bibulously inclined, “there is one thing in this world that you
can rely upon--the morning head!”
If one cares to listen for a coda to the harsh symphony of
industrialism, one can discern it in many sorts of effort to reassure
oneself of one’s goodness. Promoters of one of our enormous wastes,
competitive advertising, will tell you that strict truth-telling is one
of the standards of their profession; and one can see them measuring
the moral worth of the profession by this one minor consideration.
When big business is under fire because of its exploitation of both
employe and consumer, we are told that business is growing more moral
because competitors treat one another more honorably. We need not
scent hypocrisy in the welfare work of great factories, but why should
kindness to dependents be offered as an offset to objections to this
very sort of dependence? Rotarians are helping their communities in
various ways from unquestionably good motives; I should be sorry if
any word of mine discounted their interest, say, in boys; but why
should business men think that such extra-business activities reflect
any credit upon the system or have any claim to soften the criticisms
that are directed against it? What we perceive here is men who are
better, and want to be counted as better, than the system that has
caught them and victimized them.
But these “rationalizations,” if such they be, are less portentous
than the infiltration of the principles of industrialism into the
ethics that is generally recognized as obligatory. The major emphases
in current practical ethics are the emphases that will not hurt the
system. They center chiefly about two poles, property and contracts. It
is well recognized that the American system of law is organized chiefly
around property as the basic right, and at least one eminent public man
has declared that unless we can somehow amend this foundation-principle
it will get us into no end of trouble. Now, this assumption as to basic
legal obligation has passed insensibly into an assumption as to moral
obligation and moral character, with ironic results in our current
moral judgments. Compare, for example, the intense reprobation of an
embezzler with the entire respectability of a manufacturer who grows
wealthy out of factory labor by children. He has not stolen property
from children! Compare, again, our attitude toward dishonesty in making
and fulfilling a contract with our attitude toward employers who have
resisted with might and main every measure, whether proposed by a
labor union or in a legislature, to safeguard the health of factory
operatives. They are men of their word! Ask the next hundred men you
meet what are the ethical obligations of business, or of employers, or
of employees, or of buyers and sellers; you will not hear from five
of them, probably not from one, a word about obligations other than
the formal ones of honesty, respect for property, and fulfilment of
contracts. The main issues--what property is for, what the main aim of
production is, what constitutes success, the fundamental immorality of
treating persons as mere means rather than ends--will not be mentioned.
You may possibly receive from some church member a Scripture verse,
“Love your neighbor as yourself”; but what do you think he will mean by
it? Will he mean governing the main aims and processes of the economic
life by this principle? Do you really think he will?
VIII
THE DILEMMA OF CHRISTIANITY
The relation of the dominant religion of the West--the garden-plot of
industrialism--to these depressed views of the motives of men is as
odd as it is complicated. The tradition of official Christianity has
run to the effect that the heart of man is desperately wicked; that it
is selfish, sensual, and self-deceived; and that it is incapable of
improving itself until an infusion of divine power has made possible,
first repentance, then a new life.
Like the melancholy tolling of a bell, our War experience, our popular
psychologies, our popular literature, and our everyday economic
occupations repeat after religion that, under the surface, we are a
madhouse of clamant impulses, and that we have no power to become
anything else. How, we may ask, does theology like this confirmation of
itself?
Not too well! And for interesting reasons. Within the memory of men now
living the evangelical churches were strenuously combating the notion
that man is naturally good; today, when popular thought is inclined to
classify human nature with that of the beasts, the same churches are
exerting themselves to assert the natural nobility and dignity of the
human race, and its unique significance in the order of nature. Just
what has brought about this change of front? And how deep down does it
go?
Secondary reasons for this change need not here be enumerated, as,
for example, the modification of theological thought from within by
its own re-examination of its historical bases. For a great about-face
of popular religious consciousness never takes place at the command
of historical scholarship but only at the command of a pervasive
experience. In this instance, the pervasive experience that dominates
religious thought lies precisely in the area that we already have had
under consideration.
The doctrine that man’s nature is evil had as its counterpart and
counterweight (partly relieving it of its gruesomeness) the dogma that
divine grace, acting through the Scriptures and the church, is able
(and some said, is ever ready,) to take away the evil desires and fill
their place with good. Now, it would be intolerable to the churches
to think so ill of man’s original nature unless the actuality of
regeneration also could be believed in. But--here is the rub--living
belief in regeneration could not be maintained upon biblical grounds or
upon authority alone; it had to be made manifest in the common life to
common men.
In order to retain the doctrine of depravity under such modern
conditions as freedom of thought, popular education, and greatly
widened acquaintance with humanity, a three-fold demonstration would
have been necessary:
_First_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a great and
evident contrast between the daily lives of those who experienced
and those who did not experience the asserted special infusion of
divine power. If the doctrine was true, some experience here and
now, not merely in the hereafter, had to separate men into sheep
and goats.
_Second_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a regenerate
church as an organ of world-regeneration. Not necessarily an
infallible church; not necessarily an organization perfect in its
constitution and free from foibles in its administration, but at
least one clearly discriminable from all other social institutions
by the intensity, the continuity, and the independence of a
superior motive.
_Third_, it would have been necessary to demonstrate the reversal
of human nature’s evil traits socially as well as individually,
and outside the church as well as inside it. In particular, the
“new creature” would have had to appear within the structure of the
industrial order. Not that any sudden or complete conversion of the
industrial order is here implied, but at least some recognizable
beginning, some certain evidence that the process of industrial
regeneration is starting. Feeding those who are left hungry by the
economic machine, or binding up the wounds of those who have been
hurt by it, or soothing the asperities of the industrial warfare,
is not enough; the required demonstration had to reach and modify
the central motives that give to the system its specific character.
Unless objective evidence could be adduced that the kingdom of
property, profits, wealth, and wages can be transformed into a
Kingdom of God--not, of course, by charitable distribution of a
surplus, but by shifting the main direction--then nothing could
keep alive the doctrine of regeneration.
In not one of these directions have the churches made a convincing
showing to the world at large or even to themselves. It is true that
evangelism has turned many an individual permanently from evil ways--a
fact that is today strangely understressed by the churches, and not
sufficiently followed up in work with individuals. But evangelism at
its best has always left us in a condition of strain, with evangelism’s
own chosen problem not really solved. For the converted man turns out
to be, like his unregenerate neighbor, a mixture of yeses and noes;
and, with dismaying frequency--dismaying, that is, for the doctrine of
depravity-removed-by-regeneration--the fruits of the Spirit have been
abundant in the supposably unregenerate and scanty in the supposably
regenerate. The point is not that conversion, if it is to back up the
doctrine, must make a man perfect at a clip, but that it must make him
sufficiently different to enable observers to identify him as actually
different, in point of dominant motives, from men who have been trained
otherwise than by the church.
In the current sense of evangelism, of conversion, of regeneration,
or--most generally--of being a Christian, there is no generally
recognized implication of incongruity with the accepted motivation
of industrialism. I do not say that being a Christian even in the
conventional sense does not somewhat moderate the selfishness of this
motivation; sometimes a Christian industrialist is made superbly
inconsistent by his religion. The point is that Christians, like
anybody else, are expected to live out their workaday lives within
industrialism upon its own terms. And industrialism is playing
spiritual havoc!
A regenerate church, accordingly, is non-existent. This means, not that
unregenerate individuals slip into membership; not that a united church
is still merely hoped for; not that there is no insurance against
corruption in any ecclesiastical body, local or general. It means,
rather, that no church is definitely committed institutionally to the
extirpation of the causes that degrade man in his own eyes. What is the
motivation of the churches as such? What is the official motivation
of the select number of their members to whom is committed the
spiritual oversight of the flock? What does the word “ecclesiasticism”
mean? When is a church successful, or healthily growing? In terms of
motives operating from within the churches upon the causes of our
disillusionment, what is the real meaning of church statistics? Compare
what the churches do to able ministers who preach the Rotarian type
of idealism with what they do to equally able or more able ministers
who preach unequivocally that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. Ask
leaders of industry who hold that its principles are inviolable whether
the churches are allies of the system or makers of trouble for it. The
answer that you will receive is that, though individual ministers are
breeders of discontent, the churches as a whole are an asset to the
system. No; there is no regenerate church.
We now have the groundwork for an explanation of the decay of belief in
depravity even among those who have regarded themselves as faithful to
the traditions of the elders. The doctrine, taken by itself, unrelieved
by a counterbalancing doctrine of regeneration through the intervention
of a merciful God, is too dreadful, too accusing of the Creator, to
be endured. Therefore, when the doctrine of regeneration fails to be
convincing in practice, the conviction grows that men are not so bad,
after all. Natural amiability becomes more impressive, more suggestive
of the hand of God in the creation of man, and natural unamiability
actually gets overlooked or slurred over! The preaching of repentance
loses its bite, too. An odd swing of the pendulum, this. For, whereas
the thunders of the law broke forth against the natural depravity of
man, which he couldn’t help, the bad conduct of naturally good men is
not found particularly exciting!
Is it possible, then, that the churches are becoming a fellowship of
natural amiability, and that, failing to regenerate the industrial
system, they are being assimilated to it? This would involve
topsy-turvydom with respect to ecclesiastical views of the motives of
men, it is true. For it would mean, on the one hand, accommodation
to industrialism’s assumptions regarding our innate selfishness and
the conflicts by which it enforces itself, but, on the other hand,
the giving up, or shoving into the background, of the one Christian
doctrine, depravity, with which these assumptions at all harmonize. The
practical outcome of this confused drifting would be either a sharing
by the churches in the current disillusionment, or an evasion of it by
fellowship in thinking about more pleasant things, and a fellowship in
doing good things that do not bring the issue to the fore.
The anti-Christian movement in China bases itself to a considerable
extent upon the proposition that the Christian churches of the Occident
are in alliance, conscious or unconscious, with the industrialism
that exploits weaker peoples and disrupts the world. What truth is
there in this judgment? If we of the churches are acquiescing in the
interpretation of human motives that is the spiritual essence of the
present industrial order, then we cannot wholly escape the accusation,
no matter how generally amiable and innocent-minded our piety is.
And there is only one way to prove that we are not acquiescing, and
that is to attack. We must attack either by making a demonstration of
regeneration (industrialism’s low estimate of motives being accepted),
or by exposing the falsity of this low estimate, in either case
calling for repentance and for a reversal of the main direction of our
organized conduct.
A significant body of historical study is bringing to light an amazing
array of evidence that Christianity has, in fact, adopted the ethical
fundamentals of the industrial consciousness. The anti-spiritual
presuppositions of an acquisitive system have actually been baptized
into the name of Christ, and taught as virtues. Even Catholicism,
in spite of its reverence for tradition, shies at--more than shies,
objurgates--social aspirations that reflect an early Christian
attitude towards property and towards the organization of society.
Moreover, the dominant Catholic conception of loyalty to the State
obligates the laity to follow industrialism, whenever it so commands,
onto the field of carnage. Rome has the grit to teach her children
when to disobey the powers of this world, but she has not had the
spiritual clarity to see that the kind of docility and contentedness
that she inculcates plays into the hands of Mammon, the chief enemy
of the Christ. Protestants often marvel at the adaptability that this
ancient, stiffly authoritarian church has shown in its adjustments to
the modern secular State and to popular government. What makes this
adaptability possible is the restricted limits of the sphere within
which Catholicism actually exercises authority. This sphere is not
coextensive with the forces that make or mar personality, bestowing
dignity or throwing contempt upon it. According to the decree of the
Vatican Council, the Pope may speak with infallible authority upon any
and all questions of both faith and morals; but he does not speak upon
all of them. If he did speak, in specific and understandable terms,
of the meaning of Jesus’ teachings as applied to present spiritual
conditions, the position of Catholicism in industrial society would be
far less comfortable than it now is.
The historical studies just referred to maintain that Protestantism,
particularly Puritanism, has to a significant extent assimilated its
conception of both the sphere and the method of the spiritual life to
the economic process. That is, instead of insisting that this process
be brought up to the standards implied in the teachings of Jesus,
Protestantism has _first_, acquiesced in the doctrine that the economic
order somehow secretes from within itself its own rules, standards of
value, and grounds of self-justification; _second_, assumed that what
the economic system counts as virtues really are virtues, and that here
the spiritual life gets its discipline, and character its solidity;
_finally_, persuaded itself that the function of the anti-Mammon
teachings of Jesus is to prevent excesses such as sacrificing integrity
to cupidity, taking undue advantage of the weak, pride of wealth,
forgetting the poor, and losing the sense of dependence upon God. Nay,
prosperity in the sense of mere accumulation (not in the sense of wants
of personality actually met) becomes a sign of God’s kindness or even
approval.
Hence austere industriousness (without regard to one’s place in the
economic scale) has been valued above play; above the enjoyment of
nature, literature, or the fine arts; above even the joys of human
fellowship. The habit of saving so as to accumulate a surplus has been
almost identified with strength of character. A serious life has been
evidenced by intense devotion to business, and winning a competence
by working the system hard has been one of the surest guarantees of
general respect even within the religious circle. As to the relation of
God to the system, consider the tone and contents of Thanksgiving Day
proclamations and of prayers and sermons upon this festival day. For
what do people give thanks? And does it not appear that God himself is
contented with the system?
In short, here are clear tendencies towards making Christianity into
a bourgeois religion--the sanctification of the struggles of the
middle class within a _given_ industrial order. Such a religion has
difficulty in understanding either the discontent of the laborer,
or the necessarily disintegrating effect of private wealth upon
personality (yes, the necessarily disintegrating effect, as Jesus
unqualifiedly declared), or the spiritual significance of freedom in
thinking and in the development of ethical principles.
This is not intended to be a statement of the whole situation in
Protestantism, but of a drift within it. If a debit and credit judgment
were in order, one would have to study carefully the upspringing
within both Protestantism and Catholicism (and Judaism, too) of a
social movement that to some extent opposes this drift. But our
concern here is simply to discover the relation between Christianity
and the disillusionment with respect to himself that is creeping upon
twentieth-century man. This is what we find: Both Catholicism and
Protestantism are entangled with industrialism, both its practice
and its philosophy--entangled, that is to say, with the force that
has most to do with lowering us in our own eyes. Christianity in the
western world is therefore in a dilemma of the most vital kind. If it
affirms the greatness and nobility of the human person (whether innate
or achievable by a special infusion of divine grace), it must demand
fundamental reconstruction of the industrial order because in theory
this order denies and in practice it thwarts every such affirmation. On
the other hand, if Christianity continues to compromise as it is now
doing, it cannot maintain even such spiritual values as it now hugs to
its breast. Its faith in God will decline--it is now declining--with
its inability to see or produce the Christlike in the common man
engaged in the common occupations of the day. Its continuity with Jesus
will grow thinner and thinner because of growing inability to speak
or understand the plainest of his language. The Protestant churches
will more and more become clubs for the enjoyment of conventional and
uncreative idealisms, and the Catholic church will protect itself from
the advancing spiritual disintegration of Western society by immuring
the sacramental life more and more in places of worship and in the
esthetic appeal of symbolism. In both Protestantism and Catholicism,
mystical experiences will have the character of a flight from life
instead of being “the practice of the presence of God” not only in our
kitchens but also in our factories, our department stores, and our
offices of finance. Such a mystical flight has begun, in fact, not
guessing its actual route, innocent of the possibility that it may even
be another instrument whereby Mammon conceals the fact that it is--just
Mammon.
PART II
THIS DISILLUSIONMENT IS ITSELF ILLUSORY
IX
THE PRECISE NATURE OF THE ISSUE
The disillusionment that creeps over twentieth-century man concerns,
not the ability of the universe to supply what he desires, but his own
capacity for really desiring anything greatly significant. Are our
springs of action, then, all necessarily narrow, selfish, or sensual,
and do we merely delude ourselves when we fancy that our souls have
wings?
It is conceivable that we have wings, but that the surrounding
atmosphere is not of sufficient density to sustain us in flight. In
this case an old form of pessimism would be justifiable. We should be
able to respect ourselves, but we should complain against the nature
that brought us forth and now envelops us. The situation would have all
the elements of the deepest tragedy--two irreconcilables meeting, and
producing unrelievable woe thereby.
The general trend of our day is not towards pessimism of this kind.
Modern man assumes, on the whole, that the world is large enough for
our nature, and that his job is to get out of it what’s there. No
slackening of enterprise confronts us, little world-weariness; rather
unprecedented eagerness to explore, master, and appropriate. Nature
does not scare and oppress us as she used to do, and she is immensely
more responsive to our desires since the sciences taught us how to
predict. Accordingly, not disappointed bitterness, not renunciation nor
resignation, but exploitation is the characteristic attitude. “The
world is my oyster.”
What directly affects our idealism, then, is not any general lack of
exuberance in nature, but the conviction that there is a special lack
at one point. What we want is there, it is believed, but our wants,
our springs of action, are scant. It is assumed that we cannot want
the common welfare as much as we want profits; that we cannot desire
world-fellowship as much as we desire the perquisites of our present
war-making system of economy; that sex-appetite never can be made to
play a harmonious part in a symphony of life; and that aspiration for
communion with the divine is a refined and self-deceived form of the
very forces that religion fancies that it is bringing under control.
Our question concerns the truth of this view. Is it borne out by the
facts? If it is not borne out by the facts, then another question will
confront us. To conclude that we are capable of high motives is not
to affirm that we live up to our capacities. He who is most ardently
respectful towards human nature will not deny that we live below them.
How, then, does this come about?
An old answer is that we are fundamentally at variance with ourselves.
On one side of our nature, it was said, we are divine or at least have
a spark of divinity, but on another side we are of the earth, earthy.
Others affirm that to be conscious is to desire, and that desire, in
and of itself, is a state of division and inherently painful, and that
relief can be had only through the extinction of consciousness. Upon
this supposed disunity with self another sort of pessimism has been
built. However high some of our motivation may be, and whatever the
rest of the universe is like, it is said, we are doomed to defeat
through self-frustration.
Even if we found deep grounds for self-respect, therefore, the spirit
of disillusionment with reference to ourselves might not be wholly
exorcized. In the present Part evidence will be given that neither
the generalizations of science nor the run of everyday experience
can justify the mood that has overflowed us. But this will have the
effect of plunging us into an even more difficult problem--that of
understanding the contrarieties within our nature. This will be the
theme of Part III, and in Part IV the question will become, how to
manage these contrarieties.
As far as the case permits, this line of inquiry postpones the problems
usually called metaphysical. But they will hover near our every step,
and the conclusions that we reach will necessarily have a metaphysical
squint. If we can respect ourselves after looking one another squarely
in the face, then score one for the universe that brought us forth! It
is not altogether shabby. This we could maintain even if what is found
worthy of respect should be in unresolvable conflict with some negative
principle either within or without. For then the world-system would
bring forth tragedy, which is the opposite of littleness and meanness.
Tragedy is possible only in a world that contains inherent greatness.
Even if some ultimate defeat awaits us, who knows what dignity man
might attain by some superior method of meeting his fate?
But if, as I hope to show in the concluding division, there are ways in
which we can utilize even the contrarieties of our nature--if we can
win victories even through our defeats--then this, too, will suggest
something concerning our world-system. An experience like this is an
experience of freedom--an _experience_ of freedom, not proof except
in the sense that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Such
experience would, however, become a datum for any metaphysics that
fully takes in man. But all this belongs in the final section of the
book.
X
“HUMAN NATURE BEING WHAT IT IS”
Two lines of thought are discernible in the minds of those who
judge that human motivation is and must remain of low quality,
namely, generalizations from direct observation of the life about
us, and inferences from the truth that we are a part of nature and
a manifestation of her unchanging laws. Both these grounds must be
considered. I shall show, in the present section, what is implied as to
motivation in our being enmeshed in the totality of animate nature; in
the following section attention will be given to the bearing of current
psychology upon our problem, and afterwards, I shall endeavor to pluck
some of the fruits of direct observation.
For more than half a century, now, naturalistic views of man have had
their center in the theory of evolution. We have come to know ourselves
as blood relatives of the species that we call lower, and “blood
relative” has come to mean not only bodily but also mental kinship.
This, of itself, would scarcely argue anything as to the level of our
capacities as compared with the level of the beasts, for various levels
of conduct and apparently of capacity exist within our own species.
It is not the fact of kinship, but the fact of law and continuity
within this kinship that seems to furnish a basis for moderating our
self-respect. Law is interpreted as if we were fatalistically assigned
our place, and continuity is interpreted in the sense of sameness with
that from which we have sprung. Hence the notion that, “human nature
being what it is” by virtue of our place in the evolutionary order,
our motives are only complex forms of the impulses that we find in the
lower animals.
Yet the story of development is a story of variation, of variation
piled upon variation, and of sudden mutations. The continuity that
pervades the whole is continuity of process, not the perpetuation of
sameness. The connectedness of nature’s forms is like the connectedness
of a merchant’s goods--all were acquired by purchase, all will be
disposed of by sale; all appear in the same inventory and upon the same
ledger; they have all this in common, and there is this continuity from
one piece of merchandise to another. But this says nothing as to the
range of differences. It was said of one of the great London “stores”
some years ago that it would accept orders for any kind of commodity
known to man.
By means of natural law we can pass from any event in nature to any
other event, just as by the merchant’s books he can pass--say--from
a necktie to a delivery truck. But, just as unprecedented kinds of
goods may be bought and sold without interrupting the system, so
unprecedented natural events may occur, and unprecedented forms of life
may appear, without any breach of continuity. Evolution is, indeed, not
repetition of the same, but the bringing forth of that which is not the
same. Expectancy is the atmosphere appropriate to it. Not that progress
is implicit in evolution as such, but rather plasticity, roominess,
and versatility. The fact that usually the development of new organs
and new species takes place through the gradual accumulation of slight
changes does not alter the logic of the situation; gradualness of
change does not mean sameness. Even if it did, the fact of mutations
would still confront us.
As we have bodily organs that once were non-existent anywhere in our
world-system, so we perform functions that are special to us. Instances
will be given in a moment; but before going on to them, it is worth
remarking that the argument from kinship to sameness works just as well
backward as forward. If it be maintained that the blood relationship
between an Abraham Lincoln and a coyote implies that the impulsions
of the two are the same, it then becomes just as legitimate--and
illegitimate--to interpret the coyote by Lincoln as the reverse.
Let us now examine a case or two of our immersion within the totality
of animate nature. The statement has been made that the whole of human
conduct turns upon two fundamental drives, the appetite for food and
the appetite for sex. The reasoning by which this broad generalization
is supported starts with the assumption that survival is the
all-inclusive objective of organic impulses. Survival means, however,
according to circumstances, either continuance of an individual life,
or maintenance of a species. Nutrition, it is said, is the basic
condition of individual survival; reproduction, that of species
survival. Hence the conclusion is drawn that human life is ruled by
just two drives, each proliferating into many details, the drive for
food and the drive for sex-intercourse.
The theory has the attractiveness of simplicity, at least apparent
simplicity; but it is the simplicity of abstractions substituted
for the complexity of concrete facts. First of all, “survival,”
“individual,” and “species” are our after-thoughts, products of our
reflection and systematization. They are not a description of the
facts of animal conduct or of human conduct. We can perceive that a
given act is related to survival, but this by no means proves that
survival was in any sense an objective of the act.
In the second place, the two-drive theory is not fundamental in its own
sense of the term “fundamental drive.” For, since sexual reproduction
is known to have been preceded by a-sexual, and since a-sexual
reproduction roots in cell-division as a phase of nutrition, the
conclusion, upon the assumed basis, should be that there is only one
basic drive, the nutritional!
In the third place, the theory confuses instead of clarifying human
conduct in the sphere of sex and reproduction. Desire for sex-relations
is not by any means the same as desire for offspring or for the
maintenance of our species. Our race had been on the scene a long time
before anybody suspected the causal relation between the sex function
and the birth of babies. Desire for children does not root in sex
appetite; it arises only after being with children. Desire for the
maintenance of our species arises, of course, only through reflection,
and its object is apprehended only through imagination. As a matter of
unadorned fact, does not the sex-impulsion in human beings struggle to
free itself from all necessary association with reproduction?
A fourth consideration concerns the other supposedly basic and
inclusive drive, the nutritional. If we take the impulse to eat in its
primary and simple sense, then we must see that a plentiful supply of
food at any moment produces quiescence of food-getting activities;
a full belly is, so to say, the _summum bonum_ of this branch of
motivation. But the theory goes on to classify with food-getting a
whole lot of other activities of getting, storing, guarding, and
competing--almost the whole economic system, indeed. In subsequent
chapters (15 and 16) we shall see how complicated, in fact, is the
motivation of our system of production and distribution. At the present
moment it is sufficient to point out how strained is the theory that
all our individualistic getting is at bottom food-getting, and that all
individualistic getting is directed towards the prolongation of the
individual’s existence.
Thus far our considerations are negative; but there are positive
ones also. For it can be shown that within these two general areas
unprecedented inclinations, or likes and dislikes, have repeatedly
arrived. Sex-inclinations are the most easily-read instance. Since
sexual reproduction was preceded by a-sexual, the sex-appetite in its
totality had a beginning; it entered into a system in which it had
been non-existent; it was an utterly new attraction. Moreover, it has
undergone modifications and reversals. In some species promiscuity
is attractive; in others sex-inclination spontaneously selects one
permanent mate--among the pigeons, for example. In the case of man, so
many differentiations, and such profound ones, have taken place that
we are put to it to make our terminology consistent. Shall we classify
the satisfaction that personal beauty in the opposite sex gives us as
sexual, esthetic, or both? Certainly there was a stage in evolution
at which appreciation of beauty had nothing whatever to do with sex.
And what shall we say of mental graces--of wit, humor, originality,
sincerity, good taste? These attract men toward women and women toward
men; somehow these primarily non-sexual mental graces become a sex
bond. It is clear, then, that this drive is no single, unchanging
thing; it is the scene and area of spontaneous, new, unprecedented
inclinations; its first, raw stages, which chiefly attract biological
interest, taken by themselves, misrepresent the truth as much as they
represent it. Would it be old-fashioned, or rather merely “getting
up to date,” to add that fellowship between two personal spirits,
recognizing and prizing and cultivating themselves as such, and
therefore placing the primary sex-relation upon a basis of mutual
respect and reverence--that such fellowship must be recognized and
appreciated if one is to understand the sex drive as a human desire and
motive?
A similar creativeness in the realm of drives has appeared somewhere
in the world in relation to every type of human desire. The interests
of men do not move in any straight line; they dart and quiver;
explore, discover, make new habitations, and then migrate from the
homes that they have builded for themselves. There was a time, for
example, when our ancestors had no taste, no drive, for artistic
creation. But at last there arose--we need not stop to say by what
stages--a satisfaction that was not entirely dependent upon utility
or consumption. Objects began to be made for the pleasure that the
mere sight of them gave. Here is the evolution of a new species of
motivation. We might almost say “species” in the biological sense,
for art-interests breed freely among themselves but tend to become
infertile when they are crossed with other interests.
The existence of the sciences, of which the doctrine of evolution is a
conspicuous part, may itself be taken as an example of the emergence
of a new motive. For here bursts forth a self-sustaining impulsion to
intellectual activity that is free from fear, free from authority,
and free from utilitarian considerations. Here intelligence not only
rises above the clod, not only disengages its interests from all the
conditions of biological survival, but also reverses itself. For
science is a mighty damming back of the historical momentum of mind,
and the creation of new channels for its flow. Indeed, the emergence of
individual and social self-criticism, whether in the scientific or the
ethical sphere, would of itself be sufficient to prove that we belong
to an order in which superior motivation can evolve out of inferior.
Said a youthful and inexperienced fish to an old and experienced one
in the long, long ago before there were any land animals, “What fun
it is to leap into the air! I wonder what it would be like to live on
the land and only occasionally take a bath in water, just as we live
in the water and only occasionally take a bath in air.” “Nonsense!”
replied the old and experienced fish. “Nobody could enjoy living in
the air. How would one breathe? Your gills would dry up, and you would
suffocate. The idea is contrary to nature and perfectly preposterous!”
XI
SOME NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTIVATION
Various phases of current psychology and would-be psychology--methods,
points of view, particular facts--have given an apparent color of
scientific justification, as we have seen, to the popular estimate of
our motivation. We have done them full justice as part causes of the
tendency to disillusionment, but we have not yet asked how far they
logically justify it. This is the question that we now have to consider.
The attribution to psychology of magisterial authority in the realm
of the interests of life is a bit of popular superstition. Probably
something of the thrill evoked by the thought of unseen ghostly
forces is in it; certainly it contains an over-wrought estimate of
the psychologist, as though he had something of the medicine-man in
him. Psychologists themselves know better, of course. Anyone who has
observed the development of the science since, say, James published
his two massive and fascinating volumes knows that cross-currents and
choppy seas and changeable winds prevail in this quarter. The enormous
expenditure of labor and of resources is, indeed, justified by the
results, partly because a substantial body of detailed facts has been
ascertained, and partly because basic issues as to subject-matter,
method, and interpretation have been brought to the fore. But these
issues have not been settled to the satisfaction of psychologists
themselves, who are divided into several apparently irreconcilable
groups. And it is these basic issues that are chiefly important when we
seek light upon our life-policies.
The problem of human motivation, for example--the ascertainment of
both our actual motives and our capacities for motives--is not a
matter of simple detail, like color-blindness or the curve of learning
in typewriting. Rather, it seems as though we can scarcely touch the
edges of motivation without plunging at once into the difficulties
that are systemic to the science as a whole. First and foremost is
the difficulty involved in the atomistic conception of analysis, a
conception taken over from the physical sciences before they had
reached their present insight into the all-embracing sweep of dynamic
problems. It was taken for granted that to analyse mental life is to
look for simple mental elements that correspond to material corpuscles
characterized by what Whitehead calls “simple location.” Then it was
assumed--simply assumed--that mind is an aggregate of simple elements
and that mental dynamic (very little attended to until recently)
corresponds to this supposed aggregate of quasi-independent elements.
That is, the main tradition of scientific psychology runs to the
effect that our whole behavior is actuated by particular relations of
a mechanical sort between elements (psychical or psycho-physical) that
are as remote from experience as atoms.
This amounted, practically, to making a concept of method--a type of
analysis--guarantee a particular metaphysics. The incontinence of
the thing has been repeatedly pointed out from the early days of the
present psychological movement. First, all the logical objections to
English associationism applied here. Next, eminent psychologists of the
new type--Ladd, Münsterberg and (in a sense) James--warned us that
simple sensations or other mental elements are not existing things,
but only mental constructs of the psychologists, a kind of technical
language, like equations or statistical curves. Finally, the physical
prototypes from which the psychological assumption took its start, such
as corpuscular indivisible atoms, have now been resolved by physics
into systems of a dynamic sort. Whitehead maintains that the whole
physical conception of elements and aggregates must now be replaced
by that of organism--the parts are not before the whole, and the real
wholes or organisms are dynamic, not corpuscular.
Meantime, there have been specific happenings in psychology that bear
upon our quest. The chief recognition of the dynamic problem came
through the theory of instincts. At first there appeared a tendency
to attribute every main division of conduct to an instinct. Thus, the
fact of reproduction was referred to an instinct of reproduction;
moral conduct to a moral instinct; religion to a religious instinct;
esthetic interests to an esthetic instinct, etc. This was, of course,
a crude popular starting point, and the particulars had to be refined,
but psychology did little more with mental dynamics for a long time
than just reorganize or refine some old list of instincts. The
number increased and the generality decreased. Instead of a social
instinct, we have, it is held, a whole group of instincts that care
for particular phases of our associated life--a gregarious instinct,
a motherly or parental instinct, an instinct for dominance, and for
submission, for example. But there never was any approximation to an
accepted list, nor does there appear to be any sure way to determine
the matter.
The instincts, whatever they are, have been taken, as a rule, as so
many drives or impulsions not only rooted in our nature but also
destined to express themselves willy-nilly; and the totality of
instincts has been accepted as constituting the total drive of a man.
But, over and above the fact that the list of instincts is unstable,
this theory of the human drive encounters numerous obstacles.
In the _first_ place, some of the instincts apply only within
situations that may or may not arise. Fear-reactions, under some
circumstances, have the marks usually attributed to instinct, but
it does not follow that we have any drive towards fear. Similarly,
pugnacity appears when experience takes a certain form, as restraint
or attack from another, but pugnacity in the sense of not being at
peace with oneself unless one can fight somebody else appears to be
non-existent.
In the _second_ place, habit plays an enormous rôle in the entire
matter. That is, the outfit of instincts, if there is such an outfit,
does not determine the configuration of the drives in any individual.
Here is the general truth that underlies the possibly doubtful theory
of sublimation. Apparently instincts can atrophy; certainly what are
called instincts can be either active or quiescent.
_Third_, “satisfiers and annoyers,” as Thorndike calls them, are
not identical with instincts in every case. There are conditions in
which it is annoying not to act, and other conditions in which it is
annoying to act. Further, as he likewise maintains, there are “original
tendencies of the original tendencies,” as to repeat, to form habits,
to organize; and, finally, there is the fact of self-criticism, with
its impelling or restraining influence exercised from the standpoint
of the whole rather than of any specific instinct. More of this later.
_Fourth_, further study of our drives increases the certainty of
their enormous plasticity. Woodworth has maintained that any mental
mechanism can become a drive, that is, that we can develop a positive
interest in and tendency to repeat anything that we ever do--we
can “take an interest” in anything. Watson, too, from his point of
view, and with his own conception of the method, holds that a man
can acquire practically any qualities. “Condition” the few original
reflexes in appropriate manner, and you will make of an individual a
religious devotee, a monster of vice, or what you will. Finally, the
whole notion that we possess an equipment of just such and so many
instincts is threatened, not only from the Watsonian angle but also
from several others. Instincts, various writers point out, appear to be
classificatory devices and nothing more.
For our present purpose it is not essential to forecast the ultimate
outcome of researches that bear upon these points. It is sufficient to
recognize the great range of human motivation, the great plasticity
of it (that is, the indefinitely many possibilities of character for
the same individual), and the organic character of it (that is, the
capacity for action from the standpoint of a desired whole). Anyone who
is interested in the future development of thought upon this matter
will do well to watch the discussions of the concept of “organism”
(Whitehead’s term) in the physical sciences and of “configuration” (an
English translation of the German, _Gestalt_, as used by Koffka) or an
equivalent in psychology.
The physics of today already has transcended the notion that bodies
are aggregates of elements--transcended it, not upon speculative or
metaphysical grounds alone, but also upon the basis of experiment
and mathematical analysis. Throughout nature, so Whitehead says, any
concrete actuality is a dynamic whole, a complex event, not a corpuscle
or an aggregate of corpuscles. These are merely abstractions, useful
in their way, but matter is not even the residence of energy. Further,
these dynamic wholes act spontaneously, and they even transform
themselves from within themselves--they do not wait to be acted upon
like billiard balls; rather, initiative is everywhere present.
If this conception of physical nature should become the accepted view,
it would remove at a stroke the methodological foundation of much
psychology that regards itself as particularly entitled to be called
scientific. In particular, the whole of psychology would become dynamic
psychology, and motivation would be recognized as _in limine_ both
organizing and self-transforming action. It is a safe guess that, in
this case, _the self_ would be accorded a far less grudging place than
it has had in the psychology of the last generation. Professor Calkins
has recently pointed out, in fact, that several contemporary movements
of psychology are converging in this general direction.
It is an interesting coincidence that the concept of organism should
emerge in physics and the concept of configuration in psychology almost
simultaneously. As far as I am aware, there has been no connection
or interdependence between them. It is even more interesting that
both concepts should spring directly from experimentation. Much more
experimental research must be made before we shall definitely know
just what truth there is in the _Gestalt_-psychology, and just how the
concept of “configuration” applies, if it applies at all, at different
levels of conduct. Prediction is precarious, and it is uncalled
for; but again it lies upon the surface that here is a movement,
experimental in method, that is destined, if it goes on, to instate the
self as an actual determiner and organizer of behavior at the levels
usually called social and ethical. And the self will not only not be
conceived as an aggregate (even of forces); it will not be construed
primarily by its antecedents of whatever sort. Adjustment, that is,
will not be conceived as accommodation of a given organism to a given
environment merely, but as also re-creation of both organism and
environment. An entirely reasonable attitude might then be expressed as
follows: “This is the sort of self, and this is the sort of society,
that we want to be; let us, then, create educational, physiological,
and economic conditions favorable thereto.”
The position of psychoanalysis in the total movement of psychology is
somewhat ambiguous, or at least not well worked out. On the one hand,
we have here a genuine attempt at a dynamic psychology. The object
under contemplation is not the brain; it is scarcely psycho-physical;
it is predominantly, almost exclusively, mental, and the mental is
conceived of not as a perceiving, knowledge-getting function, but as
overwhelmingly desire--designing, scheme-forming, outward-pressing
desire. Further, the individual is treated predominantly as an
individual rather than as an aggregate. The disorders of personality
are the main interest, and the treatment of these disorders is directed
toward a reorganization of the personality so that it shall function as
a unit. On the other hand, the raw material of human nature appears
to be much like a congeries of instincts, or a collection of wild
animals each of which is ready to spring into action upon the slightest
occasion. The endeavor to discover some central desire that uses these
instincts for its own purposes is, indeed, a movement towards an
organic view of the individual; but even the central desire, in the
absence of help from the psychoanalyst, seems to have a substantially
wild, instinctive quality.
“The Unconscious,” or desire before psychoanalysis has enabled it
to understand itself, may be either a literal description of mental
dynamics, or a symbol that psychiatrists find useful in their practice,
a symbol that abstracts from the psychical actuality much as atoms and
ethers do from physical actuality. That psychoanalytic treatments have
some success does not prove the truth of the practitioner’s mental
pictures. The Ptolemaic astronomy correctly predicted eclipses; the
Mesmeric fluid, animal magnetism, the king’s touch, spirits of deceased
Indian chiefs--all have been effective for purposes of mental healing.
Recently a psychoanalyst, MacCurdy, has pointed out that the patient’s
emotional reorganization and recovery may take place around a secondary
or minor complex instead of the one that is the primary cause of the
disturbance; the essential thing is to secure the proper attitude and
procedure for reconstruction. The cure, then, does not prove that any
theory of the contents or the processes of “the Unconscious” is correct.
There remains as evidence of the wild-animal-den view the fact that
the patient himself accepts it as true in his own case. “Yes,” he
says, “I see that I have desired to commit incest with my mother, or
to murder my father. I didn’t realize it until now.” In other words,
a psychoanalytic theory has been transferred to him in the course of
the analysis. There is no evidence that he has become a psychologist,
or that his ability at introspection has achieved a trustworthy stage.
When witchcraft was believed, confessions were made, apparently sincere
confessions, that one had “signed the Devil’s book,” or that one had
done other monstrous deeds. Under questioning in court witnesses have
recalled things that they never witnessed. A still closer parallel with
psychoanalysis is the success of many a revivalist in convincing people
of their utter moral worthlessness and helplessness, that they are
creatures of the devil, moved solely by evil desires. In both cases the
person who brings the relief is the one through whom the certainty of
one’s inner baseness first arises.
The upshot of the evidence, then, is about as follows: Psychoanalysis
has extended in important ways our knowledge of the ramifications of
the sex impulses and of the impulse to egoistic dominance; it has
increased our knowledge of the motivation of much that mistakenly,
through “rationalization,” offers itself as reasonable conduct; it has
put us upon our guard against a considerable range of self-deceptions;
but it has not proved the actual existence of the diabolism that is
pictured in “the Unconscious.” And let it be remembered that, in front
of the patient whose mind is supposed to be a den of wild beasts,
sits the psychoanalyst himself, a self-controlled, benevolent, and
high-minded man. Over against the theoretical Unconscious let us place
the certainly actual honor of the psychiatrist in his handling of his
patient--scrupulous honor in a situation that brings to the fore the
most enticing emotions and impulses.
A word should be said concerning the bearing of intelligence-tests upon
our knowledge of the motives of men. There is a popular tendency, which
is not altogether absent from academic circles, to jump at conclusions
concerning motivation from the results of experiments upon something
else. The adjectives “superior” and “inferior,” applied primarily to
levels of intelligence, come almost insensibly to be a designation
of levels of manhood or of decency in general. Now, the most that
can be said as yet concerning the interrelations between the various
desirable and undesirable factors of personal make-up is that, on the
whole, the more desirable tend to bunch together, and the undesirable
likewise tend to go in bunches. It cannot be said, however, that there
is only one worthwhile type, and that the core of this type is superior
intelligence. We do not yet know just what this “intelligence” that we
have been measuring is, nor what it guarantees at its various levels.
It is certain that achievement depends upon other qualities also, so
that failure may attend a high IQ, and success may be won by steady
and persistent employment of an intelligence distinctly lower. Wisdom
and goodness and efficiency have other foundations in addition to
some as yet undetermined degree of intelligence. Further, it appears
that within the general concept, “intelligence,” we are required to
distinguish between types. There is, for example, in addition to
the abstract or conceptual type that is most cultivated in schools,
a mechanical type of intelligence, very likely there is a social
intelligence, and there may be others. We do not yet know, except in
the vaguest way, how these varieties of intelligence are dynamically
related to the requirements of wise living, either individual or social.
Yet bold conclusions have been drawn on this very point. Without
waiting for any research upon the possible connections between
different intelligence-levels, on the one hand, and different sorts of
drives on the other not a few persons have somehow assured themselves
that superiority of intelligence tends and must tend to create a ruling
class and that this ruling class will automatically run affairs in its
own interest, making other classes means thereto. There is scarcely a
shadow of evidence for this view. History seems to show that superior
intelligence has aspired to all kinds of power and all kinds of
excellence. Further, it is notorious that the resort to force, and even
to less external means of putting halter and bridle upon one’s fellows,
is a second-class resource for those who lack strength to meet their
fellows upon the basis of intelligent trust, good-will, and mutual
sharing. Was it because William Penn lacked high intelligence that
he treated the Indians in such an unconventional manner? The almost
certain fact of a high average of intelligence among monarchs and high
officials generally does not account for the specific principles upon
which they administer government. For these principles run through the
entire scale from Nero to Confucius, and from Louis XIV to Washington
and Lincoln. If we were in position to measure the intelligence of
rulers and heads of states through a considerable period of political
history we might find--we probably should find--that the higher
intelligence leans, on the whole, towards universal good according to
the understanding of it that each period of culture makes possible;
that it correlates with sensitiveness towards people, and in this
sense makes for appreciation of others’ points of view and therefore
for a common human measure of the good. Truly efficient love of one
another may yet turn out to be the supremely satisfying accomplishment
of the highest intelligence.
In the entire museum of misconstructions of intelligence-test
results nothing, perhaps, is more grotesque than the inference, or
assumption, that high intelligence will of course accept and profit
by the motivation of industrialism in its present form. The average
IQ of the financially successful is somewhat higher than that of the
economically under-dog portion of the populace. In other words, the
_degree_ of success is due _in some measure_ to this factor. In some
measure only, for there is no evidence that all the more intelligent
succeed and all the others fail; and the degree only, for in a general
way intelligence connotes success in the pursuit of any end that it
consents to serve, and moreover we know of particular circumstances
that induce men to pursue wealth and the power that it brings. We know
that the environmental influences of our time shunt men’s ambitions
in particular directions. We are trained from infancy by an economic
order that takes for granted the service of self rather than of others.
Some persons who possess high native intelligence go in for the ends
that this training promotes, and of course such persons have more than
average success in getting what they want. Meantime, other possessors
of the gift go in for other things--research, original production in
literature and the fine arts, humanitarian service, the championship
of unpopular causes, the development of a cooperative society, the
promotion of religion.
Moreover, we have no comparative measures of the intelligence of
different types of successful men of affairs. What should we find if
we compared these three sorts: Men who rely upon compulsion; men who
rely upon indirection or intrigue; and men who rely upon frankness,
conciliation, and moderation? We do not know which of these would
exhibit the highest intelligence; but it is allowable to guess!
The relation between the insight of the literary artist and that of
the psychologist is sufficiently close to require a comment, finally,
upon the evidential value of the literature of disillusion that was
mentioned in Chapter V. Is it not the business of the imaginative
writer, one may ask, to see life as it is; to be more sensitive than
the common run of men to the devices and desires of the heart, and thus
to reveal us to ourselves? Look in the mirror of current literature,
then, and see what a rank thing your nature is! An appropriate
part-reply to this would be: Why this mirror more than scores of
others that literature, past and present, has held up to nature? What
guarantee is there that this reflecting surface has fewer distorting
curves than others that render a different image? Why accept at its
own value, without analysis, the cynical “realism” of one group,
or the “barbaric naturalism” of another? Their borrowings from the
psychologists are mixed and partly dubious or worse, and the marks of
the seer are scarcely discernible.
That some value as a revealer of ourselves to ourselves may reside in
even a distorted image must be granted. The literature in question
is uncovering naïve insincerities and evasions that infest our life,
and it is almost compelling us to see that there are forces within
and around us that require a rational control that never yet has been
provided. Nevertheless, in this total phenomenon we are witnessing one
of the literary fashions that have succeeded one another for thousands
of years. These pictures have truth in them, but it is truth selected
and isolated in accordance with a mood, a drift, a spirit of the times,
and then imaginatively reorganized in the interest of composition or
picture-making. The literature of tomorrow will turn to other phases of
experience, other types of motivation, and it will leave a different
taste in the mouth of readers and theater-goers.
It turns out, then, that the psychology of motivation, and the
quasi-psychology of it, have drifted here and there into disillusioning
allegations, but without definitely proving them. On the one hand we
have the hang-over of an unworkable theory of instincts; a decadent
atomistic point of view and method; behavioristic metaphysics based
upon nothing more substantial than a preference as to what one shall
attend to; hasty inferences from the results of intelligence-testing;
the rough-and-ready symbols of practicing psychiatrists, and literary
exploitation of the whole. On the other hand, we find failure of every
theory that assimilates human motivation in its totality to either the
movements of matter or the impulses of the lower animals, and instead,
growth of contrary views within general science and specifically within
psychology; in particular, a definite reaffirmation that the individual
mind acts as a true integer, a genuine one-in-many.
This does not solve our whole problem; we still have much to learn
about ourselves. But it furnishes at least a “not proved” to set
against our temptation too easily to believe the loud voices of
disillusionment. It furnishes, likewise, a visa for those who would
travel outside of technical psychology in order to see more of
humanity. We should not be surprised if we find organization of drives
by some sort of ruling drive; the consequent shifting of satisfactions
and dissatisfactions, approvals and disapprovals; the possible approval
or disapproval of the ruling drive, with consequent redirection of the
central tendency. All this implies, likewise, readiness to question
the extent and significance of the term “drive.” Perhaps we are moved
only in part by a _vis a tergo_; possibly man is a forward-reacher, an
initiator, a creator. And perhaps this disillusionment that threatens
or seems to threaten paralysis of our wants may turn out to be the
vague, confused beginning of a new want, the darkness upon the face of
the deep whence a new world is to appear.
Note. The authors and works referred to in this Chapter are as
follows:
Calkins, M. W. “Converging Lines in Contemporary Psychology,” Brit.
Jour. Psy. (Gen’l Section), Jan., 1926, pp. 171-179.
Koffka, K. Growth of the Mind. New York, 1925.
MacCurdy, J. T. Problems in Dynamic Psychology, New York, 1922.
Thorndike, E. L. The Original Nature of Man. New York, 1913.
Watson, J. B. Behaviorism. New York: People’s Institute Pub. Co.
Whitehead, A. N. Science and the Modern World. New York, 1925.
Woodworth, R. S. Dynamic Psychology. New York, 1918.
XII
CHILDHOOD AS A REVEALER OF HUMAN CAPACITIES
The attitude of disillusionment puts the mind into a prison upon whose
walls hang pictures of life at which the prisoner continually gazes.
Make the round of your cell, O prisoner, and tell me what stages of
life you find represented. There are no children in any of the pictures!
The apparent evidence that humanity is doomed to low types of
motivation is drawn from a fraction of experience at particular stages
of life. None is derived from childhood, scarcely any from adolescence;
nearly all of it comes from the fully adult period which, being most
conventionalized and least plastic, is least able to reveal to us our
unrealized possibilities.
If we desire to witness our elemental propensities, or nearly all of
them, in unrestrained swing, let us observe children. Not yet encrusted
with custom, not yet halter-broken to the emotional restraints of their
elders, they “let go” readily. What is inside shows outwardly. At least
this is relatively true as compared with us who have endured the bit so
long that we take it to be a part of our nature. And a great variety,
indeed, there is inside a child; in an hour you shall witness a range
of motivation that you might not discover in a grown-up in a score of
years. Here is nature in the raw, or nearly so. What impression, then,
does childhood make upon us when we become intimate with it?
A mixed impression: Amusement at the simple, literal, and unashamed
reproduction of our own foibles; something like astonishment at the
(usually) easy transitions between desirable and undesirable conduct; a
sort of fascination by the utter naturalness of generosity, alongside
the equal naturalness of pinching self-regard; and (if we are analytic)
a bit of self-searching when we realize the deep dependence of both
upon conditioning circumstances as well as upon original tendencies.
All this, but never disrespect--at least never after one has taken
the trouble to trace the processes of children’s minds. A really
understanding intimacy with the young appears invariably to produce
respect for them.
The drama of disillusionment is never played upon this stage.
Cynicism, depression, revolt, and either surly, regretful, or ghoulish
acquiescence in mean ways of living, all are shoved aside, forgotten,
made impossible when we sympathetically enter into the experiences
and attitudes of dawning life. Spirits bruised by adult experience
find healing in play with children; calloused minds recover their
sensitiveness by merely watching them. If a small child is perceived to
be in immediate peril, the most hardened adult will suddenly exhibit a
glint of nobility.
All this constitutes evidence with respect to the validity of the
reasoning that is offered by the current disillusionment. Evidence, not
merely incitement to change of mood; though such a change may itself
be evidential in some conditions. Depression of spirit can disappear
under the influence of children, or under the influence of alcohol. But
the difference is twofold: Alcohol dulls the edge of judgment, and it
introduces us to no fresh facts, whereas acquaintance with children
does not impair the judgment, and it does introduce us to pertinent
facts. The fact that when original nature displays its rudiments with
frankness and unrestraint we do not find confirmation for a certain
view of life, but on the whole find ourselves drifting in the opposite
direction, is distinctly evidential.
There is no need to be afraid that we shall yield too much to naïve
impressions--at least no one who has lived through the child-study
movement is likely to remain naïve. For a whole generation analytical
study has consciously and of set purpose put aside the gush of parental
impulse and the sentimentality of certain kindergarten traditions
in a determination to be objective and to hitch up child-life with
the scientific study of nature generally. Now, not only has the
child-study movement not slurred over the unlovely traits of the young;
it has actually picked out and emphasized every shred of evidence
of irrationality, social insensitiveness, selfishness, cruelty, and
whatever else might seem to reflect the drives of pre-human species.
At the outset of the child-study movement, genetic psychology
enthusiastically believed that the human individual rather closely
recapitulates the developmental stages of lower species, and that
childhood is a genuine savagery. This was an unsentimental theory; at
least it made of children creatures of instincts to which nobility
could not be attributed. If science ever had an opportunity to lay the
foundations of a pessimistic view of man, it was now; for its eyes
were straining to see animality and irrationality wherever they could
be found. Higher, more social and rational drives, it was held, appear
spontaneously at adolescence, and they are consolidated in maturity.
We now know that this was an exaggeration of the spontaneous values
of adolescence. Suppose this exaggeration had been discovered at the
time; the conditions then would have been ripe for explaining human
motivation at its best as merely a set of complicated and sophisticated
forms of drives that are both low and blind.
Thus, modern child-study has leaned over backward in its endeavor
not to be complimentary in its interpretations of the young of the
species. If an anthropoid ape should acquire ability to read English,
he would not discover any race-prejudice against apes in the American
publications that represented this point of view! But the point of
view did not maintain itself. It rested upon three supports each
of which proved to be weak. _First_, the embryological facts that
formed the substructure turned out to be too few and too scattered
to establish recapitulation even in pre-natal life. _Second_, the
view of instinct that was employed was speculative, almost animistic.
_Third_, observation of children was skewed by the theory under which
it proceeded--the theory that children recapitulate savagery and
barbarism. Disproportionate attention was given to conduct that is
disagreeable to elders; socially neglected or mistrained youngsters
were incautiously taken to be “the child”; everything obstreperous was
a shining nugget. The movement actually reached the point of awakening
apprehension as to the normality or sincerity of untroublesome children.
The decadence of this mode of approach, and the rise of more objective
methods, have brought us insight that is of the utmost importance
to anyone who desires to understand the motivation of adults. First
of all, psychical continuity rather than discontinuity between
childhood and maturity has been proved to exist; in the second place,
the remarkable plasticity or modifiability of childhood, taken in
connection with this continuity, has given us clues hitherto lacking
concerning the real origin of many adult traits.
Small children can respond to nearly if not quite every sort of
stimulus that adults feel. We cannot longer regard even sex as a
completely delayed drive, for traces of sex-stimulation are found in
infancy, and definite sex interest follows very early. Any social
impulse, good or bad, that adults exhibit can be found in early
childhood also under appropriate conditions of stimulation. Moreover,
in respect to the employment of intelligence there is no necessary
break between childhood and maturity, for rational processes mingle
with impulse and emotion from infancy. In fact, old-fashioned parental
authority met scarcely any obstacle greater than the capacity of
children to have a reason and to stick to it. We now know that
scientific attitudes and types of observation and inference no more
need to be postponed than does good pronunciation, which is taking the
place of the old-fashioned “baby-talk.” It is worth noting, by the way,
that “baby-talk,” wherever it exists, has been learned largely from
adults!
This psychical continuity between childhood and maturity vacates the
notion that adulthood is a ready-made set of drives or characteristics
into which we are ushered by natural laws of growth. We are what we
are, not because nature acts after the manner of destiny or fate, but
because some selective process has been at work in each individual
case. Each of us has the capacity to be very different from what he
is. It is true, of course, that there are inborn and ineradicable
differences between individuals, differences in degree of energy, in
degree of intellectual capacity, in degree of sensitiveness towards a
given sort of stimulus, and therefore differences in emotional type.
But these are entirely generic; they do not shut up an individual
to just this or that occupation, social bond, way of thinking, or
policy and habit of weighing values. If we desire to account for the
particular qualities of an individual, we must look into his whole
experience from infancy onward.
This point of view is now no longer a merely general probability.
Psychiatrists and experts in child-guidance are daily tracing to
particular experiences what seem at first sight to be native and
ineradicable personal traits. Moreover, many a bound personality is
being released by the interjection of new experiences and the formation
of corresponding new habits. This is true of both children and adults,
and it is particularly noteworthy that the release of adults often
depends upon undoing a knot that was tied in childhood.
If the plasticity of childhood and the psychical continuity between
maturity and immaturity are, in one aspect, portentous, they are
likewise heartening. For the fine qualities that children are capable
of--their spontaneity, their capacity for reversing themselves, their
generosity and affection, their sense of humor, their unabashed candor,
their frequently startling objectivity--we of adult years also are
capable of. Childhood is not a shut-off room which we are permitted
to visit now and then in order to forget the disagreeable apartment
in which we are compelled to live; childhood is a part of what we
still are! Plasticity, we are learning, though it may decline with the
hardening of the arteries, has no dead line. Experiment has disproved
the view, held as late as William James, that after adolescence we are
practically incapable of learning qualitatively new habits. We can both
increase already used powers by further use of them, and also bring
into action neglected powers.
Anyone who can enter sympathetically into the life of another has
capacity for developing in himself the qualities of this other. The
fact that our cynicism, our distrust of others, and our doubt of
ourselves shrink when we make ourselves companions of the young is a
direct evidence of what our nature contains, in however undeveloped
form. And who does not grow mellow--who does not experience a measure
of regeneration (becoming “as a little child”)--upon witnessing in
children such admirable graces as candor, responsiveness to affection,
generosity, the habit of laughter--all spontaneous, unreserved,
uncalculating? It is because there is something of the child within me
that I am capable of entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
At first sight, psychoanalytic studies may seem to work against the
view both that childhood is so plastic and that it is so beautiful.
Certainly these studies are sobering. After making due deduction
for speculation that expresses itself as statement of fact, and for
an almost mythological symbolism that spreads a fog of fatalistic
mysticism over simple and controllable facts, there is still excellent
reason for growing sober. But the reason is the one already given for
regarding as portentous our new knowledge of the possibilities that
reside in early mind-sets. These possibilities are both portentous
and heartening, we have said, and there is nothing in the ascertained
facts of psychoanalysis that goes against this statement. Sex-tangles
can start in infancy, and they can persist into maturity, thwarting
life at almost any point. Attitudes of dependence upon a parent may
be so overwrought, or they may be continued so long, that again the
mature person never quite comes to himself. But these are not fated
tragedies; they are errors that can be prevented. Psychoanalysts are
clear upon this point. There remains, then, no difficulty unless it
be the shock that some persons experience upon hearing that small
children are capable of sex response and that their sex attraction
may be towards a parent. If such persons will only take notice that
psychoanalysts employ the term “sex” in an exceedingly broad manner,
sometimes making it as inclusive as the term “affection”; and if they
will further reflect that there is nothing unclean in sex as such, so
that a psychically sexless child would be no more “innocent” than one
psychically sexed, the psychoanalytic view, even if it be wholly true,
will be seen not to rob childhood of any spiritual beauty.
The remark was made, a little way back, that fellowship with children
produces respect for their native qualities. Some evidence of the
correctness or incorrectness of this statement ought to be discoverable
in the attitudes of teachers and in the practices of schools. The
teacher becomes acquainted with many children of different types;
is less liable than a parent to be swayed by emotions that deflect
the judgment; is in a situation that calls for professional study
and attitudes in the matter. The trained teachers, then, and the
schools that make the largest study of the problems of education
may be expected to accumulate experience and views that have some
significance. Now, it is safe to say that today no school that is
modern or even intelligently managed is conducted upon the assumption
that children at any age are merely instinctive creatures. Moreover,
in the schools in which experimentation is most free and pervasive,
you will find an abounding belief in children, and no spirit of
disillusionment with respect to adults. You will find criticism of
adult society, great dissatisfaction with it, to be sure; but on what
ground? On the ground that the traditional, conventional treatment of
the young represses, retards, covers up, and thus defeats the splendid
capacities that are within us.
It is noteworthy that the schools and schoolmen who make this charge do
thereby place themselves under obligation to make a concrete showing
of what can be done by better education. What happens when schooling
is guided by this glowing faith in man? Does the faith grow brighter
and brighter, or does it check itself by its own failure to work? It
is my opinion that the actualities of human nature are receiving more
illumination at the present moment in the experimental schools than
anywhere else. Let us take a glance or two, then, in this direction.
XIII
CAPACITIES REVEALED BY NEW TYPES OF EDUCATION
The same two decades that showered us with mental tests witnessed also
the upspringing of many schools that are variously designated by such
terms as “modern,” “experimental,” and “creative activity.” Creative
activity, as a description of what pupils do when they are at school,
is an arresting notion. It obviously assumes with respect to pupils’
capacities something different from popular thought about them, and
different, too, from the traditions of the schoolmaster. The school
policy that it connotes includes provision for an unprecedented degree
of both negative freedom (absence of compulsion) and positive freedom
(abundance of materials with which to work and natural situations to
be met by the pupils’ own initiative). Observation of pupils placed in
conditions thus favorable for the showing out of what is in them may be
expected to throw light upon the motives and the capacities of human
beings.
The testing movement has had the effect of stressing “nature” rather
than “nurture” as the great determinant of conduct--over-stressing
it, indeed. But the creative type of school-experience yields data
that help towards a balanced understanding of the factors. In general,
this experience tends to make both nature and nurture stand out; the
old bipolarity of heredity-environment, nature-nurture, remains, but
both poles are illuminated. This type of school makes obvious the
differences in native gifts, but it shows likewise that conditions
created by adults have prevented us from knowing what gifts are there.
Whenever a given sort of conduct is oft-repeated, our first, incautious
impulse is to guess that the conduct in question is produced by some
specific quality or bent of one’s original nature. The absence, or even
the great infrequency of anything, is taken, similarly, as evidence
that there is a vacant place in one’s nature. Thus a bad mental habit,
a fallacious mode of judging, gets control of us. “It’s his nature,”
we say, not stopping to consider whether the whole of his capacity
or only a fraction of it has been displayed. What the experimental
schools are doing is to bring into action capacities that commonly are
under-exercised and therefore not recognized as existing.
These schools are proving that there is more in human nature than
we had dreamed of in our philosophy. The method of the proof is, in
principle, simple: Make conditions favorable for the maximum voluntary
exercise of any and all worth-while capacities that may possibly be
there. When this is done, behold, pupils “take an interest in” many
things that have been regarded as beyond their range. We are finding
out that teaching of the traditional sorts has habitually aimed under
the heads rather than over the heads of pupils. An intellectual
springiness that teachers and parents failed to discover or produce
by the methods of prescription, spontaneously appears under the new
conditions. Conduct now occurs that is better by far than old-type
schools ever thought of requiring or even recommending.
All this throws light upon the motives of men. In brief, this is
the trend of the facts: _First_, a surprising degree of rationality
has appeared. That is, children and youth are showing remarkable
capacity for the apprehension of problems, the weighing of facts, the
holding of judgment in suspense, caution in generalizing, readiness
to revise one’s own findings, and ability to resist suggestion and
external authority. _Second_, equally surprising social capacities
come to the surface. Pupils show not merely ability to run the
machinery of a self-government scheme devised by teachers, but also
readiness to feel situations and needs, to originate solutions, to
carry responsibilities, to organize and cooperate, to appreciate both
justice and generosity, and to make self-corrections. _Third_, to
the originality that is involved in all this there is added amazing
creativeness in literature, drawing, and painting.
If this were a discussion of educational method, we should now inquire,
of course, into the specific procedures of the schools and the teachers
that have these effects upon pupils. But the technic of teaching
is not our present concern. What is directly to our purpose is the
demonstration that schools and teachers of the older, customary sort
did not bring out the whole nature of their pupils. Indeed, the schools
of yesterday concealed, retarded, distorted, smothered some of the most
valuable gifts, thereby unwittingly contributing to the forces that
have produced the present sense of disillusionment with respect to
human nature.
It is worthy of particular note that the “creative activity” schools
are discovering capacities other than those usually classed as
intellectual. It is much that the young take an interest in abstract
and bookish knowledge; it is more that they take the attitudes and
employ the processes of science with reference to natural events; but
beyond this, and of greatest significance, is capacity to adjust human
relations in thoughtful, high-minded, and sometimes original ways. Only
a few years ago an incident like the following would have astonished
any teacher, but today it seems only “natural.” A group of children,
engaged in play-activities that involved construction-work, discovering
that merely impulsive conduct interfered with their purposes, called
a meeting, devised a government, and actually administered it
effectively. Not the least instructive feature of this incident is that
these children, when their own information did not suffice, voluntarily
sought help from a teacher.
Such fresh and keen practicality in attacking the problems of social
living in the school is often extended into the problems of the larger
community also. Instances are multiplying in which community service
of great value has been done by the young upon their own initiative
(with the constant help of teachers, of course). Not only have children
shown eager willingness to relieve immediate distress; they have
penetrated to the causes of one or more common infectious diseases,
and have mastered some of the methods of prevention; they have worked
intelligently and devotedly at the problem of parks and playgrounds;
they have cooperated with police departments and fire departments. And
in and through the whole there are glints of creativeness. Genuine
creativeness, not merely naïveté that happens now and then to make a
happy hit.
The creativeness of the young adds to our knowledge of ourselves a
touch more thrilling than that of romance, and it suggests fascinating
outlooks for the future. The ruts that exist almost everywhere in our
conduct have heretofore constituted the staple evidence concerning the
nature of man. More than once already we have noticed how prone men
are to take habitual performance as a measure of possible performance.
Conventionality, it seems, always claims that it is more than
conventionality; it makes itself out to be a forthright utterance of
original, unchangeable human nature, or even a requirement of ethical
obligation and the will of God. What a happy reversal of all this might
occur if schools generally should cultivate in their pupils the ability
to get out of ruts as well as to get into them. It is conceivable
that society might ultimately include in its regular expectations a
genuinely original, self-transcending, non-conformity and re-creation.
The most astounding piece of educational literature that has appeared
in many a day is Mearns’s _Creative Youth_ (New York, 1925). It is an
account of the teaching of literature to pupils of high-school age
through the unified experience of appreciation and creation. Yes,
creation of literature, not ‘exercises in composition.’ The evidence
is here in a collection of real poems thus produced. The inventiveness
displayed in them is almost unbelievable; the insight into life shown
by several of the young poets is a mystery that calls for solution;
but the poems are undeniably poems, undeniably original, some of them
worthy (literary critics being judges) to stand alongside the best that
the recognized poets of our day have produced.
What is the explanation of this wonder? Mr. Mearns answers that he
merely made conditions favorable for full self-expression. There was
free appreciation, favorable or unfavorable, of the literature of past
and present, no one’s honest judgment being rebuked or authoritatively
overridden. There was a cooperative spirit that enabled the pupils
to profit from the judgments that they passed upon one another’s
productions--criticism did not quench the flame. There was help from
the teacher in the way of information about literary technic, and in
the way of encouragement to self-respect and self-confidence as well
as self-judgment. Individuality, rather than conformity of any kind,
received constant applause. This class had its setting in a school
that favors just these things. All this Mr. Mearns makes evident,
but he insists that these conditions and methods merely clear the
way for a creative urge that is present, he is sure, in children
and youth generally. He finds that small children make attempts at
original creation, but hide the product away, and fail to develop the
self-confidence and the practice that alone can bring their original
powers to fruitage. The point of all this is the naturalness of free
creation of beauty. Man is by nature a creator of beauty!
Parallel with Mearns’s book may be placed, as further and possibly
equal evidence of creative capacity in the young, the April-May-June,
1926 issue of _Progressive Education_ (Washington, D. C.). It contains
many reproductions, mostly in colors, of original pictures made
by children. In these child-productions there is vastly more than
imitation. One’s breath is taken away again and again, indeed, by the
seizure and vivid presentation of what is characteristic in a scene
or in a person; or, one is thrilled by the child-artist’s subtle
realization of just where lies the beauty of the object represented.
As a consequence we have here something beyond mere representation,
something more significant than technic learned from a teacher. We
find here insight (the product of originality in observation), and
self-expression that, being neither conventional nor merely generic but
individual, is truly creative.[4]
These poems and pictures are, of course, not the average productions
of their young authors, and the young authors themselves probably
have native talent considerably above the average. We must not make
haste to infer that children in general might reach this precise
level of performance. Nevertheless, we must not dismiss these unusual
productions by merely muttering “IQ.” They are not to be thought of
as the work of children who are freaks, or (in the biological sense)
sports. This is school work, produced in the ordinary routine of the
day. Schools always have had in them pupils whose intelligence-quotient
was high, but somehow the schools of yesterday had no such product to
show.
It is clear, then, that generation after generation can come and
go without discovering its own children. Without discovering, not
only what its ablest are capable of, but the others also. For it
is altogether probable--the newer sorts of school are accumulating
evidence all the time--that conditions that raise the performance of
gifted children raise the performance, also, of the rank and file.
This ray of light, shining out of a few new-type schools, illuminates
to some extent the whole problem of adult society, both its capacities
and the way to bring them to fruition. There is no reason in the
nature of things or in the nature of man why the creativeness that is
fostered in schools should not be fostered also in the larger society.
We need only make general the conditions that teachers are creating
in schools. This would involve the reversal of a habit that custom
transmits from age to age--a habit that I shall make bold to call the
psychical inbreeding of adults. By this I mean that it is traditional
for adults to segregate themselves as a supposedly self-sufficient
portion of society and to draw their standards, their expectations,
and their stimuli from among themselves. Through this inbreeding it
comes to pass that each generation of grown-ups becomes the spiritual
successor of the preceding generation of grown-ups, whereas it should
be the spiritual successor and heir of its own childhood.
Perhaps the younger portion of society will yet release us from our
disillusionment.
XIV
SMALLNESS IN GREAT MEN AND GREATNESS IN SMALL MEN
If your peace of mind depends upon your being able to bestow unmixed
admiration upon the great men and the great deeds of our national or
racial past, think twice before you read the present dominant types of
history, biography, and character-delineation. For they are subjecting
halos to spectrum-analysis! The result is that we are compelled, time
after time, to qualify the approvals that are traditional with us, and
to tone down our reverence. How “human,” after all, were these men and
these deeds that we had supposed to be so far removed from mere us. How
naïve or even gullible were many of our old attachments. We are tempted
to become cynical and to feel ourselves disillusioned.
But it is possible, where feelings are so actively involved, to jump
from the frying pan into the fire, exchanging an illusion of nothing
but greatness in our heroes for an illusion of nothing but meanness.
What the critical methods are showing is that motives are mixed in both
the greatly good and the greatly bad, as well as in us who are neither
the one nor the other. And the obverse of the discovery of smallness
in great men is the clearer and clearer demonstration of greatness
in small men. That is, the more objective and merciless our analysis
of men is, the more do particular qualities stand out in their own
light, and the more sharp become the contrasts. The lesson of the new
biography is not, “All men are alike,” but “Look for the particulars.”
Until a few years ago, when researches began to be made into the
psychology of “transfer of training,” we lacked means for understanding
the coexistence of opposite qualities in the same personality.
Worldly-wise observers knew that motives are mixed, but how they came
to be mixed, how ethical contradictories can endure the presence of
each other, and why the good influence of home, school, and church have
such equivocal results--all this was a matter of guess-work.
Some of this guess-work, taking the form of theology, accounted for
our contradictory selves by the theory that God and the devil, or
the Divine Spirit and human depravity, are at war in each of us. But
this did not explain the complacency with which a man can be good
and bad, great and small, at the same time. The easy way for thought
was to place each man in some broad category and then either ignore
conduct that did not fall into it, or else find excuses or sophistical
explanations. A man was either a Christian or a non-Christian _as
a whole_, it was assumed. If he was a Christian, his un-Christlike
conduct was assigned to a dim region of thought and then often
conveniently forgotten; if he was a non-Christian, his Christlike
conduct was the part assigned to this limbo and then forgotten.
Corresponding to this theology there was a naturalistic interpretation
of man that ran to the effect that human nature is essentially low, or
at least selfish and tricky, and that our virtues are either refined
and far-seeing selfishness, or else a mere cloak of respectability. The
dim region of thought in this instance, as in the theological judgment
upon non-Christians, was that in which moral purity, strength, or
greatness seemed spontaneously to spring from within the man.
Into this thought-situation came experimental psychology, taking to
pieces these complex mental facts instead of interpreting them by
broad concepts that are more or less speculative. Why, it asked, are
the spelling papers of a given school pupil scrupulously neat, but
his arithmetic-papers slovenly? The same pupil is actually both neat
and not neat! How is it that a child humanely reared so that in his
maturity he is sensitive to the pleasures and pains of his kin, his
neighbors, and even the lower animals, exhibits also insensitiveness to
the weal and woe of his competitors or his employes? The same man is
kindly, yet cruel! How can one who has been trained to strict honesty
of thought by mathematical study be evasive and untrustworthy? Nay, how
is it that one can sincerely believe obviously contradictory doctrines,
as that God is infinitely benevolent as well as infinitely wise and
powerful, and yet sends into eternal torment persons whom He himself
has created and sustained in existence up to the moment of their doom?
The upshot of research into this problem is--some technicalities
omitted--the proof that training or experience can have a wider or
narrower “spread” according to the components or the method of it.
Training to neatness can be narrowly directed to spelling papers, or
it can be so handled that some effect upon arithmetic papers also will
appear. There is no general trait of neatness; there are, rather,
neatnesses, though these may be brought into the unity of a common
ideal and habit. Similarly, there is no general quality of kindliness
or cruelty that presides over all one’s human relations. The man whom
we index as humane can be hard as flint; the one whom we have set down
as unfeeling can perform acts of delicate or heroic kindness. So with
honesty. Pupils who habitually cheat in one subject resist temptation
to cheat in other subjects or in games. What wonder, then, that sincere
belief in obvious contradictories occurs? As there is no general trait
of honesty, so there is no “faculty” of reason that spreads itself
equally through all our intellectual activities. But more or less
generalization does occur in both thought and conduct, and whether it
shall be more or whether it shall be less is partly in our keeping. We
can train ourselves to participate in broad issues and ideals, we can
form a habit of noticing the elements in new situations so that we see
what principle applies, and we can discipline ourselves into paying the
price of an organized personality.
We have no reason, then, to suppose that a man who is great in one
respect will be great or good in all respects, nor, conversely, to
suppose that a man who is small in several ways will be small in all
his ways. There is as yet no really all ’round education or all ’round
experience; we do not yet know how much can be done by schools or homes
to provide such education or experience.
This little excursion into the borders of psychology should enable us
to render fair judgment upon current types of disillusioning biography.
To the extent that a biographer burrows into weaknesses under the
assumption that the worst in a man is the real clue to him--to this
extent the supposedly enlightened writer reproduces the wholesale
naturalism that endeavored to offset the equally wholesale theology.
Such biography is pre-psychological. On the other hand, why should we
object to the publication of any well-authenticated fact concerning any
public character? We have every reason to expect that minute scrutiny
will reveal some sort of smallness in any great man. What we should
beware of is the obscuring of what is admirable by the dust that goes
into the air when these smallnesses are dug out.
That hero-worship has had a setback is not a matter for regret, but
rather for congratulation. For not only was it careless of historical
truth, but it separated from us those who are of us, making us feel
unduly inferior to good men, and (as the psychoanalyst would say with
some show of reason) making a false compensation for our own defects by
adulation of men who were supposed not to have them.
There are other reasons, too, for rejoicing at the growth of realistic
methods in the appraisals of men. For it is not merely historical
distance that creates illusion, but social distance also, and likewise
interests that are served by making distances appear where they do
not exist. Let me speak without reserve. The achievement of success
in any commonly accepted sense of “success” ordinarily produces
self-gratulation of an expansive sort. That is, one attributes to
oneself admirable qualities other than those that produced the success.
Jack Horner said “What a big boy am I!” Moreover, the successful man’s
neighbors, too, admire the whole man instead of merely the particular
acts and qualities that bring him into notice. Thus it is that
practically any successful man is overestimated by both himself and his
contemporaries.
In the same way, distinctions of birth, wealth, and official position
automatically inflate themselves. Even in societies that count
themselves democratic there is an astonishing amount of kow-towing to
station. Yesterday Mr. X was nothing but a politician, a leader of a
party or of a section of a party. His own maneuvers and those of his
friends having secured for him nomination for a high office, he began
now to be more remote from the common. Rumors that a great and wise
man had been discovered blew over the land with every breeze. But even
this campaign puffiness was a slight thing in comparison with the size
that the man seemed to take on after he was seated in a chair of state.
There was now not only deference to his office, but also breathless
watching for his every next word or move, as though he were the arbiter
of destiny; and this--let it be noted--was not chiefly fear of his
power; it was belief in his true greatness, wisdom, and goodness.
Though no act of outstanding ability or courage could be credited to
him; though he had neither eloquence, nor wit, nor marked idiosyncrasy;
though he lacked even the picturesqueness of the adventurer; yet
was he, for the time being, taken to be one of the great characters
of history. Two factors, of course, worked together to create this
impression: On the one hand, politico-economic propaganda, which found
it more useful to exalt a leader than to argue a policy; and on the
other hand, on the part of the populace, inherited assumptions that
there is a great distance between the ruler and the ruled, and that the
greatness of one’s country somehow passes over to the leaders of its
affairs.
What is needed here is realistic, analytic thinking upon authentic
data as to the specific acts of a leader. Such thinking upon such
data is bound to deflate some reputations. When we look for the
particulars, thrones and bishoprics and large places in the sun lose
their awesomeness. To the reasonably cautious mind, common acclaim is
unimpressive; one has discovered the social assumptions and influences
that too often are back of it.
Nevertheless, if we are not to fall into a disillusionment that
is speculative or subjective; if we are not to make sweeping
generalizations from picked facts, this critical mood must not
forthwith reduce the greatly good personages of history or of the
present to the mean and the commonplace. They will henceforth have less
mythological and legendary set-apartness; they will be more like plain
us (a mixture of qualities), but we shall not have a flat landscape.
Yonder researcher in science or history may be not a whit wiser in a
thousand respects than his next-door neighbor; even in his laboratory
and his library lower and higher motives may jostle each other, but
in sheer fairness and objectivity we must perceive that a high end
that he labels “truth” lures him on, restrains contrary motives, and
rewards him from within itself. The artist who believes in his art
against the odds of conventionalized criticism; the medical man who, as
practitioner or as researcher, never swerves from the main purpose of
the utmost increase of health; the social worker who really “believes
in people”--in the human as such--when social prejudices make this
belief costly; the religious prophet who at the expense of persecution
or crucifixion calls upon us to lift up our eyes from our pettiness to
the coming Kingdom of God--these are true specimens of what the human
can be and sometimes is in point of motivation.
Between the more creative, or the more favorably placed, of these
persons and the common run of men there is no gap or partition in
the matter of motives. When we achieve a deep acquaintance with men,
though we realize as never before the extent of their foibles, we
come upon a residuum that evokes our respect. But deep acquaintance
means something far more intimate and therefore insightful than
our classifying devices. Of course, no one who exercises coercion
understands those whom he coerces, and whoever exploits men is blinded
by his point of view. A mere observer, moreover, an outsider standing
aloof, may perceive more clearly than others do a part of what is
going on in his fellows, yet his very aloofness, because it places
inhibitions upon those whom he inspects, defeats his quest. Hence
it is that the generalizations of the “hard-boiled” are never quite
convincing to persons who live in friendly, cooperative relations
with one another. The greater authorities upon what the common man is
capable of wanting are those enlightened souls whose un-self-seeking
unreserve and participation in the neighbor’s hopes and fears, and ups
and downs, thaw out the ordinary barriers between man and man. Now,
almost universally those who have had the widest experience in dealing
with men on this basis of intimacy have the firmest faith in humanity.
I do not mean sentimentalists who indulge humanitarian emotions at a
distance, nor yet lovers who may--or may not--deceive themselves by
over-idealization, but persons like some social workers whom anyone
could name who unite a cool head with a warm heart. They, if anybody,
should be disillusioned, for they, more often than the rest of us,
witness frailty and frustration close at hand, yet they are most
unshakenly respectful of the common man.
XV
THE MIXED MOTIVES OF BUSINESS
It is necessary to distinguish between the qualities of the industrial
system and the qualities of the men who run it. It is true that they
have created it, that they endeavor to express themselves in it, and
that they interpret themselves by their own creation; but it does
not follow that they have succeeded particularly well in expressing
themselves, or that their interpretation of themselves is adequate.
There was a time when our ancestors expressed themselves in idols, the
work of their own hands and imaginations, and interpreted themselves
thereby, even offering human sacrifice as a normal part of the system.
But we know that the wants of these worshippers outran the prayers
that, for the time being, they were able to frame. The man was better
than his religion.
May it not be that industrial man is better than industrialism? And
if so, is it not conceivable that the mechanism of business that
now tyrannizes over us as ancient religions tyrannized over their
worshippers may yet go through transformations as profound as those
that separate the Druid from the believer in ethical monotheism?
The gravitation of the _system_, we have seen, is towards a depressing
view of human nature, and unquestionably the system is to some extent
forming men in its own image. But even as they yield to economic
custom, they make excuses for yielding, and they hunt up excuses for
the system that coerces them just as the idols of old coerced our
ancestors. Such a system is as imperfect an index of the nature of man
as would be a motor car running away down a hill because the brakes
have been allowed to get out of order. In such a car human nature is
both represented and misrepresented.
If, under such terms as “love of money,” “desire for gain,” “profit
motive,” or “economic motive,” we think to explain the “go” of
business, we shall be caught in an abstraction or over-simplification.
It is as if one were to say that the reason why any man buys an
automobile is that he desires to ride rather than walk. This is not
misleading, but it is abstract and inadequate. The experience of
riding, it is true, may beget a desire simply to ride and ride, and
similarly the experience of making money may become a source of direct
satisfaction; but any concrete situation is almost certain to be far
less simple than this. The motives of business--later we shall see
whether the same is true of the worker--are decidedly mixed. Let us see.
The vast majority of those who employ capital for the making of profits
mingle their own daily labor in an intimate way with their capital.
A truck-driver who owns his own truck; a small grocer who lives at
the back of his grocery; a fisherman who owns his own nets and a
“one-lunger” motorboat--what is the economic motive in their case? It
is scarcely distinguishable from the motives of a skilled workman who
makes no profits, but receives wages only. Enough for the family to
eat; a comfortable home; opportunities for the children; recognition
by one’s fellows as amounting to something; a chance at amusements
and recreations (to own a radio-set and a motor-car, of course),
and--very important--security against sickness and old age--these are
the meanings of prosperity for such small capitalists, at least the
fundamental and primary meanings.
One of these meanings, as desire for security, may become dominant; or
secondary meanings may arise, as wanting to outdistance a particular
competitor; and the individual may so identify himself with the
mechanism of his occupation that his establishment becomes practically
an end in itself. So complicated, and so modifiable, is the economic
drive in its more simple and human aspects.
At the higher points in the scale of possessions and of power we see
the same fundamental motives at work, but in changed proportions and
with different proliferations. Some drives decrease or disappear simply
because there is now a regular and abundant supply for the wants
involved. When wealth comes, one no longer bothers much about mere
necessities; instead, one reaches out for luxuries, for variety, or
for intangible goods such as “standing” in “society” or in financial
circles.
The desire for security, rather paradoxically, appears to grow rather
than become quiescent when insecurity of the primary type recedes.
The reason is that the possessor tends to identify himself and his
family with his “pile,” so that whenever the “pile” increases, not
only is there more to protect against shrinkage, but there is also
a bigger-seeming self to feel the loss. It is said that perhaps
no other single motive plays as large a part in the minds of the
financially already-strong as longing to get safely above the buffets
of circumstance--to be utterly secure. But how much must one accumulate
if one is to be superior to the vicissitudes of fortune? In the words
of Harry Lauder, “When is a man fu’? Eh? Eh?” I protect what I have by
adding a financial outpost; then this requires protection. Thus the
motive of security transforms itself into the policy of increasing
possessions without limit.
Oddly enough, one of the motives of religion also is desire to be safe
in a changing and largely unpredictable world.
I have been young, and now am I old;
Yet have I never seen the righteous man forsaken,
Nor his children begging bread.
The Lord is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear
Even though the earth be removed
And the mountains be cast into the sea.
Be not anxious ... for your Heavenly Father understands that
ye have need of these things.
All things are yours.
From facts like these some persons have drawn the conclusion that
unquenchable thirst for possessions is in reality “thirst for the
Infinite” mistaking its own nature.
Another factor or phase of the motivation of business is thirst for
power. But this, in turn, is not a single or uniform thing; it is
complex and variable. What is it to experience power and to rejoice
in it? It is to be able to express oneself; to have the experience of
being a cause; to exercise some specific talent; to be noticed of men,
or followed by them; to construct or create something, or to cause
something to grow, and to have it to contemplate and to show to others
(whether as farmer, breeder, artizan, author, artist, builder of a
business or of a fortune); to feel stimulated instead of depressed in
the face of obstacles; to feel that what one is doing is a game, a
“sporting proposition”; to be fascinated by the everlasting “beyond”;
to be thrilled by such an onward pull as a mountain climber feels who
cannot be satisfied with any attained peak as long as a higher one
is visible. Economic power may mean any of these; it may mean, too,
possessing the means to do some desired thing outside the business, as
patronizing art or learning, or carrying out a pet philanthropy.
When the economic motive takes the form of thirst for power, how like
some of the motives of religion it becomes!
They that trust in the Lord shall renew their strength.
They shall mount up with wings as eagles;
They shall run and not be weary:
They shall walk and not faint.
I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.
On the other hand, the power-motive can include, often does include,
desire for mastery over the personality of others, and pugnacity or
even destructive fury when they resist or stand in the way. Desire
for selfhood and for mastering and creatively reconstructing the
conditions of life, taken socially (_our_ selves, _our_ world), is the
heart of ethical living; but, taken egoistically, it nurtures conceit,
self-will, ruthlessness, and the illusion that achieved strength
can satisfy by inbreeding with itself without creating beauty, or
discovering truth, or promoting fellowship.
The motivation of the economic order is related, likewise, to our
consciousness of the shortness of life. I am fleeting, but my property
will be here after I have disappeared; can I not put the stamp of
myself upon it? A college president repeatedly remarked to a man of
wealth, “Mr. M, if I were in your place, I should build myself a
monument.” This, and nothing more, time and again, until the man of
wealth remarked one day, “Doctor, I have decided to build myself a
monument, namely a building upon your campus.” To identify myself with
something that will speak in my name when I am gone, something that
will act upon men so that I still count with them--this, in some cases
at least, is a constituent of the desire for gain. It may take the
form of ambition merely to build up a great estate that shall bear my
name; to perpetuate this estate in its integrity as long as the law
permits; not only to endow my children and grandchildren with wealth,
but also to prevent them from dissipating it; by my beneficence to be
really good for something in the long future; to cause my name to be
gratefully spoken of by future generations, forever, if possible.
Again, how like religion, with its interest in survival after death!
All things are yours, whether ... life or death.
Make to yourself friends of unrighteous Mammon (said Jesus
derisively) so that they may receive you into everlasting
habitations!
Clearly, then, we shall only partly understand the driving power of
the economic system if we fail to perceive that, like science, art,
and religion, it contains aspirations to be free, to be recognized
by others, to fulfil the impulses of family affection, to enthrone
personality above circumstance, to be a creator, and to baffle the grim
Reaper.
The industrial revolution wrought havoc within this garden of motives.
Factory production separates the experience of producing from the
experience of consuming, thereby concealing something of the meaning
of both. Moreover, in place of face-to-face dealings between men,
which keep the human factor in the foreground, we now have mass or
group relations between persons who never meet one another, and
these relations are mediated on the side of capital by laws, rules,
standards, and officials that represent a somewhat-less-than-human
interest. The dominant assumption is one that can be expressed in a
balance-sheet, which is merely a summary of the non-human aspects of a
business--a summary, that is to say, of that to which no _meanings_ are
as yet assigned. Was there ever anything more abstract than a balance
sheet? The business man, his family and friends, his employes, his
country, his church, the whole human race might be blest or injured to
any extent by his business, but the balance-sheet would not yield the
slightest hint of the fact. Yet the balance-sheet--this abstraction--is
taken as the main guide of business conduct!
The moral tragedy of industrialism lies not in the fact that we are so
bent upon mastering the material resources of the world, but in the
abstraction of this mastery from the motives that started it going
and that give it its only meaning. But we have not quite smothered
ourselves with the works of our hands; the man within the business
man, fortunately, is commonly inconsistent with business philosophy.
Prosperity is not the measure of his satisfactions and desires. Though
surrounded by plenty, he is restless; though efficient, he has not yet
expressed himself. Something greater than industrialism is struggling
to be born.
The evidence of this inner struggle can be seen in Rotary clubs and
similar organizations, with their effort to promote friendliness among
competitors, their interest in some forms of public welfare, and their
emphasis upon “service” as the test of good business management.
This talk about “service” does not yet mean, of course, that Jesus’
principle has been adopted and selfish ends abandoned; it certainly
means that I make the largest profits by consulting my customer’s
interests as well as my own; but even so, it contains a glimmering
recognition that our real interests are mutual interests. Through this
recognition some warmth and enlargement are coming to the business
consciousness.
But there is another side to this consciousness--a side that likewise
speaks of satisfactions not yet found. When men become nervously
concerned for orthodoxy, assuming that an issue is already closed
and that they have the key to it, we may be sure that there is a
lurking skepticism within. Orthodoxy is organized distrust not only
of unbelievers but also of believers, oneself included. And business
orthodoxy grows apace!
Another sign that defence mechanisms are forming in the business mind
is flight into generalizations and abstractions. I have spoken already
of the element of insincerity in the perennial claim that public
benefits flow from any and every scheme out of which I secure private
gain. But this is more than mere tactics; it is more than an economic
theory now outworn; it is also a flight into generalizations and
abstractions. It has become so much a habit that it has secreted from
itself a sense of sincerity. The business of coal-mining is ceasing to
be to the owners the particular facts of this mine and these miners;
it is something larger, more general and public. I do not think we
can otherwise explain the tolerance of mine-owners towards the facts
revealed to a Senate committee that recently investigated the human
conditions at mines in Western Pennsylvania. It is true that the
stock-and-bond method of capitalizing an enterprise makes it difficult
for the absentee owners, whether of a mine, a factory, or a power
plant, to know what is going on. But it is not merely the absentees who
escape the force of facts; managers who are close to the works do it
too. In short, there is more or less shrinking on the part of business
men from the literal actualities of business and industry; the motives
thereof are not at peace among themselves, and the manhood of these
men has not yet found the way of adequate self-expression. What the
business man “really wants” he has still largely to find out.
XVI
MOTIVES OF THE WORKINGMAN
If you want to know the inside of the worker’s mind, do not ask him
any generalized questions about it, for, like the capitalist, the
employe has his attention fixed upon the mechanisms of industry and
upon the particular things that, at the moment, he thinks will better
his condition. A generalized answer from him may throw no more light
upon his complex springs of action than “love of money” throws upon
the conduct of captains of industry. Do not ask his employer, either,
what the worker really desires, for the employer will apply to others
some over-simple explanation that parallels the one that he applies to
himself.
Our best sources of general information are men and women who have
lived and labored side by side with the workers in an endeavor to
understand and help them--persons like Carleton Parker, Helen Marot,
and Whiting Williams.[5] The return from such studies is not simple.
You cannot compress the soul of the workingman or of anybody else into
a simple formula, nor can you explain him by naming the social or
economic class to which he belongs. The pigeonholing of men, by the
way, is one of the major immoralities!
What the workingman wants, first of all, is work; he wants to be sure
of a job. This means, for him, his foothold upon this earth. He wants
to know where the next meal is coming from, and the more thoughtful
individual determines that sickness and old age must not find the
cupboard empty if he can prevent it. How like his employer, who
likewise is struggling to rise above the vicissitudes of existence!
The workingman wants a job that gives him standing among his fellows.
High pay can give him such standing; or an occupation that requires
skill, or judgment, or daring; or even connection with a renowned or
admired enterprise. Thus again, employer and employe meet in a common
desire for social recognition.
The worker is bent upon amusements and recreations. They occupy his
mind even at his labor, especially where high subdivision of labor
permits the hands to be employed almost mechanically. Moreover, with
the increasing mechanization of industrial processes, which implies
ever decreasing spontaneity and self-expression, and ever-deepening
dulness in the routine, thought turns with ever greater insistence to
amusements that promise contrasting experiences of freedom, variety,
strong stimulation or excitement, and social contacts. Not so unlike
the experience of the employer, for he too, as his business becomes
mechanized, builds up for himself a second world in which real living
is contrasted with work.
Family interests affect the worker about as they affect other persons,
but with this important difference in the application: Whereas the
capitalist seeks to make the future secure for his children by endowing
them with property, the workingman endeavors, largely through the
education of his children, to get them out of his economic status into
a higher one, such as that of a “white-collar job” for the son and
clerical work or school-teaching for the daughter.
Widespread, too, is “land-hunger,” particularly among agricultural
workers, though not exclusively among them by any means. To have “a
place that one can call one’s own”; to put thought and muscle upon a
garden or a house, feeling that the results will not at once slip away
out of one’s hands and sight; to express one’s very own taste without
let or hindrance; to have one’s personality identified in the community
with something stable, like real estate--here is one focus of the
ambition of many and many a worker.
Closely related to this attachment for the land is an impulse--alas,
how often thwarted--to express one’s individuality in and through
one’s work. You can witness the joy of creation in a child who for
the first time makes a whistle that really whistles; in a housewife
who achieves a new flavor in her pickles or luxuriant blossoms upon
her window-plants; in a blacksmith when he fits and tempers a piece
of iron just right; in anybody who performs the whole process of
creation from raw material to finished product. Even in factories
which, by subdivision of tasks, make this impossible, there appears now
and then a partial compensation in that workmen identify themselves
imaginatively with the establishment or its products. Notice the pride
in the machine that one superintends, or in a piano or a locomotive
that one has helped build.
The worker wants a large wage, but it is not true that this is his
sole or all-dominant concern. Time and again opportunity for larger
wages is rejected in favor of opportunity for self-expression, or
pride of workmanship, or social recognition. Nor is the desire for
maximum wages an altogether simple motive. Increase of income may mean
saving or insurance; it may mean education for the children; or more
family excursions into open spaces; or a radio set in the home, or what
not? The other day a gentleman remarked, “I have been amazed at the
intelligence of my chauffeur who, as far as schools are concerned, is
an uneducated man. The secret of it is that he has procured a radio set
wherewith he listens to lectures and sermons. Every Sunday, he says, he
hears a sermon by an eminent clergyman.”
It is folly to look upon the labor movement as simply organized
grabbing. It may become this, of course, precisely as a corporation
may become a depersonalized snatching-tool for capital. But the demand
for reasonable hours of labor, for decent working conditions, for a
living wage, for collective bargaining, and recently for a share in
the management of industries represents a wide and deep motivation.
Everything that “my family” means to a man, or social recognition, or
security, or desire for individual selfhood is included in the movement.
Yet it is not possible to take a roseate view of the pressure of
industrialism upon the spirit of either employe or employers and
financiers. A man who was subsisting upon the borderline between worker
and employer had opportunity for gain by a shady transaction. It
consisted in taking surreptitious advantage of a municipality in such
a way that permanent gain would accrue to a corporation with which he
was “in cahoots.” He laughed at scruples, saying, “I’m going to get
mine while the getting is good. They’re all doing it.” Of course it
isn’t true that all are doing it, but will anyone deny that the system
in which both worker and capitalist have become enmeshed exercises
upon both of them a gravitational pull away from the wholesome motives
that have been named in this and the preceding sections, and towards a
narrow-minded policy of _getting_ simply as such?
Industrialism in its present form unquestionably pushes into the
background the motives of concrete well-living, and brings into the
foreground a desire for “efficiency” or “results” as measured by
a mechanical or abstract standard. Both employer and employe feel
impelled to get the most possible out of each other, for the system as
such (and its leaders insist that its “as-suchness” is both natural
and reasonable) has no inherent reference to a possible mutuality in
well-living for all concerned. Well-living is not the job of business
or of industry, least of all mutual well-living; instead, conflict of
interests is assumed to be basic and permanent.
In this assumed conflict of interests, possession is the objective.
Hence the employer, since he already has possessions, which mean power,
has an advantage which the worker sees no way to offset except by
arbitrary action or inaction. Hence effort to “get by” with the least
exertion; mechanized listlessness; loss of heart (“I’m not going to
strain myself in order to increase his profits”); the warlike strategy
of the union; resentment when defeated in this game of “get”; and,
when conflict reaches a climax, resort to force. And, in and through
all, the Tempter whispering that class-interest is a finality in our
organized life, and that force is the final arbiter of everything.
This on the side of labor; and, on the side of capital, parallel
abstraction from the more vital enjoyments, parallel drying and
hardening of the mental tissue, and final resort to cunning and
force. There is scarcely a mean motive, apart from brutal lust, that
does not now come into play upon both sides. And yet, the same men,
both employers and employes, are partly actuated in their economic
activities by motives that culminate in religion!
XVII
ECONOMIC PRODUCTION AS A MODE OF SELF-REALIZATION
Within the evolution of economic production one can read a story of
the gradual molding of the human clay by human hands. Yes, _the_ story
of it, for the range of the interests that enter into the day’s work
is without limit, and the same interests, modified by the day’s work,
radiate outward into all phases of culture.
Hunting makes a hunter; fishing makes a fisherman; when man achieved
the domestication of animals, he achieved likewise some taming of
himself. When seeds began to be planted, and fixed dwellings to be
built, then seed-thoughts were sown in the mind, and he who erected
a roof “built better than he knew,” for an advance took place in the
structure of domestic society. In our own country we have seen the
frontier produce the frontiersman, and industrialism a vastly different
type of personality. Slave labor in the south created one sort of
capitalist, free labor in the north another sort. The economic process
and its economic product--whether weapon, tool, commodity of any
sort--makes the man as truly as the man makes the product. The story of
the day’s work is the story of man, discovering himself, changing and
diversifying himself, sometimes maiming his mind as well as his members
with tools, weapons, and machines of his own devising, but again
recovering himself and going forward.
In this sense an economic interpretation of history is possible; but it
means, not that the whole of culture is controlled by “desire for gain”
or any other narrow (and indeed abstract) spring of action, but that
what we do with natural resources influences all sides of human nature
and capacity. The new history, employing the polarizing lenses of
psychology, reveals everywhere and at all periods unbroken continuity
between, on the one hand, men’s daily occupation of transforming raw
materials, of getting and spending, of buying and selling, of employing
and being employed, and, on the other hand, the substance of the
social life and of the political order, literature and the fine arts,
religion, science, and philosophy.
The economic order, that is to say, is not a thing _per se_. If church
worship, or the goings-on at an amusement park make a strong appeal
because they are different from the daily grind, even here we see
the continuity. It is the man, the personal self, that has gone into
the grind and that has come out of it seeking something specifically
different. The personal self, though it has remarkable capacity
for inconsistency and forgetfulness, contains no really watertight
compartments. A point of view, or an attitude, that has become habitual
in any sphere of life can control us in subtle as well as overt ways.
For example, the laymen who most strenuously insist that ministers
should attend to “spiritual” affairs, letting business alone, represent
in their own persons, and that vividly, the impossibility of a real
separation of religious experience from economic experience.
Production and distribution of economic goods at its best--nay, why
should we not say at its normal point--is, then, a working together
with God in the creation, not so much of plants and fruits and
domestic animals and structures of wood, stone, and steel, as man
himself. The economic order is a chief sphere, if not the chief one,
for the realization of personal selves.
This is the only coherent meaning that we can give to it. Therefore,
whenever we find it turning out undeveloped, depressed, or distorted
personalities, they must not be taken as by-products or incidents;
they are the main concern, and therefore the system is here sick and
self-defeating. To say that we are engaged in making goods and not
men is in any case simply not so. We actually do make men of one
sort or another in all our sowing and reaping, mining and smelting,
manufacture, commerce, and finance. For better or for worse this is so;
there is no escaping it.
But our modern world deludes itself on this point by endeavoring to
maintain and cultivate a spiritual life _alongside_ the economic.
By “spiritual” life I mean the only thing that it can signify to us
moderns, namely, regard for personal selves, all selves within our
purview. This concept of the spiritual includes a scale of attitudes
long enough to reach all the way from comforting a frightened child
to worshipping God. We are self-deceived in that we have turned
over the making of selves to schools, homes, and churches as their
specialty, for the making of selves takes place just as truly and not
less effectively in and through the economic order. We have rather
lazily assumed, too, that the superior personal relations experienced
or talked about in home, school, and church will somehow--rarely does
anyone even attempt to say just how--pass over into the field, the
factory, the market, and the financial institution.
Undoubtedly considerable seepage into economic relations does occur.
For, even where the system is most mechanized, it is not quite
shameless, and the sporadic cases of concern for human values are
neither few nor insignificant in quality. Nevertheless, on the whole,
we undertake to base our economic conduct upon economic principles
that are supposed (though mistakenly) to be self-sustaining or even
self-evident, and our ethical and religious life upon a contrasting
set of principles, supposed (though mistakenly) to be likewise
self-sustaining. The result in multitudes of instances is a dual life;
always it is confusion, blurring, and relative inefficiency in the
human concerns that most count.
In fact, the seepage from our spiritual life into the economic is large
or fully offset by a reverse penetration of depersonalized economic
principles and practices into the very citadels of spirituality.
Consider, for example, the prerogatives assumed by and commonly granted
to “the man who pays the bill.” Does the entirely unspiritual fact
of carrying the purse give one a preferred position with respect to
spiritual relations within the family? Yes or no? Does economic power,
or does it not, either intentionally or by mere drift, determine what
shall be soft-pedaled in schools, colleges, and theological seminaries?
No one takes the trouble to deny that laymen of means have influence in
the churches altogether out of proportion both to their number and to
their religious intelligence, and no one questions that this influence
colors the teachings called religious.
The spiritual does not succeed in maintaining itself alongside the
economic. In the nature of the case, it cannot do so; the economic
experience is bound, for good or for ill, to be the area in which some
of the chief character-forming forces are generated.
The present partition of ourselves into secular and religious,
industrial and cultural, practical and idealistic is deceptive and
ruinous. It results in half-conscious gropings, tangled purposes,
self-defeating self-assertions, fallacious self-justifications, and
diluted standards of spirituality. In consequence of it the economic
order lacks definite meaning. It should mean production for use and
for the enlargement of life all along the line, but instead it is not
unambiguously directed towards any human good whatsoever. It feeds the
hungry (some of them), but it also exploits their hunger. It indirectly
supports education, science, art, philanthropies, and religion; but at
the same time it promotes senseless luxury, conspicuous spending, a
commercialized amusement fever, political corruption, and the kind of
national economy that makes for war. If it has sharpened the wits of
many, and opened to them wider vistas, it has likewise made multitudes
of minds hard, materialistic, mechanical. It has produced class
consciousness and class conflict so general and so acute that sober
observers are wondering whether the system is not bound to destroy
itself by its internal friction.
We shall not recover from this sickness by developing more spiritual
life alongside an industrialism that treats persons as means rather
than as ends, but only by spiritualizing the industrial system itself.
The obvious necessity, the only way to spiritualize industrialism, is
to develop through the entire range of its personnel the joy of being
a producer, as distinguished from the satisfaction of receiving wages
or making profits. When motives focus upon wages and profits, which are
extraneous both to the thing produced and to the persons who use the
product, the realization of one’s self in one’s work is squeezed out,
and the realization of other selves as benefited by us is squelched.
Moreover, when the motives for production become thus uncreative, the
goods produced convey to the consumer little or no ethical meaning; he
procures and uses them as mere things, ignoring the human life that has
gone into them, and therefore realizing no spiritual relationship by
means of them.
If men are to be religious in any deep sense _within_ the economic
experience, the raw materials and the finished products that pass from
hand to hand, and the machinery for manufacture and distribution, must
acquire something of a sacramental character, becoming outward and
visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. To make a button, or to
buy and sell one is, in reality, to participate in a great complex of
personal relationships, whether high or low; right here we determine,
in part, the level of our common life.
On the other hand, when the massive walls, arches, and towers of a
magnificent house of worship arise upon some lofty point in a great
center of population, what spiritual significance can one see therein?
You answer that multitudes will worship God inside this structure.
But what of the structure itself as an _economic fact_? Human life,
the life of persons to whom Jesus attributed value beyond measure,
went into the quarrying of these stones, the smelting of this metal,
the mixing of this mortar, the financing of a multitude of major and
minor operations. What happened to this life of persons through its
participation in the making of a sanctuary? Did men find God, and one
another as sons of God, here? What is the spiritual significance,
moreover, of the contribution that I make for the erection of this
towering monument to our faith? How did this money come into my
keeping? That is, what human relationships, what makings or marrings
of personality, what wages of bitterness or hardenings of heart have
gone thus indirectly into the edifice that is meant to signify divine
fatherhood and human brotherhood?
Is our religious thinking so feeble that we actually expect to solve
the problem of worship by saying and singing within the sanctuary
sentiments that are contradicted by the very walls and roof that
shelter the congregation? On the other hand, is our economic thinking
to be so abstract as to go on assuming that the aspirations of the
heart of man are for the inside of the sanctuary, and not equally
for quarry, mine, mill, and banking house? The unstable state of
both organized religion and the industrial and economic structure at
the present time suggests that we are in the grip of an inevitable
issue. It is not over-rash to surmise that we are going to have a
spiritualized industrial and economic order, or else a pseudo-spiritual
and actually degraded religion. Degraded, that is, by increasing
subservience to an unspiritual system of dealing with the material
resources of nature.
That there is any inescapable drag in the direction of such a fatal
system does not appear from any broadly objective scrutiny of the
motives of either capitalist or worker. On both sides mixed motives
are the rule, and the two mixtures largely coincide. On either side
one or another motive gains or loses influence by the shifting of
conditions that are within our power. It is as if the ancient word had
been spoken to our generation: “I have laid before you life and death;
choose life.”
After three years’ experience as a worker in mines and factories,
Whiting Williams declares that the mainspring of the worker--we have
seen that this is true also of the employer--is the wish for worth,
the wish to be a person, to realize that he counts and that others
recognize the fact; and, Williams adds, “through our work, if anywhere
in all the universe, we may hope to become a person, meaningful and
valuable--aye, indispensable--to others.”[6]
XVIII
THE MOTIVE THAT IS IN ALL AND THROUGH ALL
The lines of our inquiry converge upon the following conception of the
motives of men: Rooted in the conditions of individual and racial life
are various “drives” that are related to nutrition, sex, avoidance
of discomfort and danger, activity and repose, and the presence or
conduct of other members of the species. But these are not elementary
units that in their aggregate constitute human motivation. For, in and
through them, using them, giving meaning to them, and creating new
meanings through them, is the affirmation of a personal self, and the
coordinate and equally inevitable affirmation of other selves. And this
affirmation of selves does not consist in sucking at the breast of
Nature, but in reconstructing the gifts of Nature, and in constructing
and reconstructing ourselves and society to suit ourselves as our
experiences, desires, and insights evolve.
There is an old distinction, which is both useful and necessary though
it frequently is ignored, between two senses of the term “motive.” This
term sometimes signifies psychic pressure in one direction or another
without forethought or consideration of results--what one may call a
_vis a tergo_ or “push from behind.” In this sense, thirst for water,
or sex-hunger, or spontaneous liking or disliking counts as a motive.
On the other hand, an end-in-view, something that awakens desire when
we think about it, a “pull from in front,” likewise goes under the name
of motive.
The difference between a psychic push and a psychic pull is not
merely that between immediate and postponed fulfillment of action
or of satisfaction, nor yet this plus the difference between simple
and complicated drives. There is a further and even more important
distinction to be made. Consider, for example, the following series of
cases:
1--The reaction of a carnivore upon smelling raw flesh.
2--The conduct of an acquaintance of mine who, when sugar grew
scarce during the War, seized an opportunity to buy a barrel of it
for the use of his family.
3--In a canyon not far from where these words are being written, a
county is building a great and costly dam in order to control the
flood waters of the surrounding mountain slopes. Control of these
waters means safety for life and property, irrigation for orange
groves, and a supply of water for domestic use.
4--An acquaintance of mine worked hard and spent little in order
that a son, still a small boy, might have a college education.
Meantime the state in which they lived taxed itself heavily on
behalf of a system of education that reaches from the kindergarten
to the university.
An intimate history of the conduct of the individuals concerned in each
of these cases would reveal primitive urges, as those for food, for
escape from peril, for care of offspring; but in all instances except
the first it would reveal also something more than just a summation of
such rudimentary drives. Even in case 2 they are redirected, canalized,
weighed against one another, dovetailed together, related to the
whole significance of the family for its members. In cases 3 and 4
it is still more obvious that work has been done _upon_ the primitive
drives, not merely by them, for there is organization of selves and
organization of society that are not at all predictable from any
scrutiny of raw drives; indeed, here power over conduct flows out of
valuations that, a little way back in our history, could not have been
felt or understood. We have reached a point where we are able to say
what sort of selves we want to be; we have begun to have preferences
concerning types of society; already, through law, education, religion,
and eugenics we are upon the edge of deliberate control of the
evolution of our species.
Thus far, for the sake of convenience in dealing with a complicated
matter, I have spoken of primitive or raw drives or pushes, for
the most part, as though they were so many separate and distinct
actualities. In fact, however, hunger, sex-attraction, and all the
rest are generalizations. In the human species at least each actual
instance of hunger is less simple than mere hunger; each instance of
sex-attraction requires, if we are to describe it completely, something
more than an isolated instinct. With man, an instinctive satisfaction
is not the terminus of a railroad but an intermediate station through
which as well as to which he moves. The whole truth is that, though the
raw material of our personal selves is given to or thrust upon us, just
as sap is given to or thrust upon a tree, nevertheless it is from the
beginning human material; within it from the beginning personal selves
are in process of forming themselves, and society is in process of
forming itself. This motive is in all and through all the dynamics of
human conduct.
You can stop mere hunger by filling the stomach, but by no stuffing
process can you appease the life-urge that is human. Much of
the devastating irony that Plato’s Socrates directs against the
Sophists is based upon this truth. Gautama saw the merely negative
aspect of it, but he did not perceive, as Jesus did, that creative
self-activity--ethical love, for example--contains a satisfaction of
its own--a satisfaction, too, that is by no means to be equated with
other satisfactions, since it bestows value upon them or withholds it
from them. Self-discipline is a fact; so is voluntary acceptance of
work, and even of pain and loss and obloquy. If men revile you, and
persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, still you are
blessed or happy if this experience comes because you are loyal to
“the ever-coming Kingdom of God.” It is partly by this transvaluation
of values, this conversion of our native drives, that men now and then
transmute both their environment and themselves into forms that yield
unprecedented beauty, and truth, and fellowship. In human experience,
I repeat, the motive of being a personal self among personal selves is
in all and through all. It may be weak or retarded, or it may become
distorted, yet even in conditions most unpropitious we find the spark
not quite extinguished.
A few years ago, a one-act play, a curtain-raiser, entitled “A Morality
Play for the Leisured Class,”[7] was given at the Neighborhood
Playhouse in New York City. There were two characters, a modern man
who had just been killed in an automobile smash-up, and an experienced
inhabitant of the other world. The deceased, gradually coming to
himself, and wondering where he is, calls out in the misty twilight
that surrounds him,
“Is anybody there?”
The mist clears away, revealing a shining Presence with wings. The
Presence asks,
“Can I do anything for you, Sir?”
The deceased wants to know what’s to be had here.
“Anything you like,” is the reply. “Anticipating your desires, I have
already taken thirty years from your age.”
“Perpetual youth, eh?” exclaims the newcomer. “It looks as if I’d come
to the good place, after all. But what about the golden crown?”
“You can have one if you like,” comes the answer, and presto! a starry
golden crown encircles the stranger’s brow.
“Exactly according to the specifications,” says he. “And now, what else
have you got here?”
“Anything you like,” replies the angel.
“I can have everything I desire? Absolutely everything?” asks the soul
excitedly.
“Subject only to certain restrictions imposed by the nature of the
place,” is the reply. “There is neither pain, nor suffering, nor
struggle here. Anything else that you desire I will procure for you.”
There follows a succession of requests and realizations: The best of
things to eat and drink; luxurious living quarters; “period” furniture
and decorations; masterpieces of painting and statuary; the society
of beauteous women (Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and others). But each
of these exalted experiences proves to be insufficient and finally
cloying, and the experimenter demands a change. “This everlasting
perfection palls,” he says. “The sights are too uniformly beautiful,
the ladies too uniformly clever, charming, and obliging.... I know what
I want! I want some work.” But he discovers that, since work implies
wanting something that one cannot have by merely wanting it, whereas
here one gets a thing by merely asking for it, the satisfaction of work
is out of the question.
He and his obliging attendant ransack their minds to think of something
that might possibly relieve the tedium. The attendant, at his wits’ end
and discouraged, turns to go, saying, “I don’t know what to propose,
Sir. But if anything occurs to you,” ...
“Hold on!” cries the seeker; “I’ve got it! I want some pain; that’s it.”
“I’m sorry, Sir,” comes the polite answer, “but no one is allowed to
have any pain in this place. You’ll get used to the restriction after
you’ve been here a few thousand years. They all feel as you do at
first, but they all get accustomed, after a while, to this mode of
existence.”
“But,” ejaculates the neophyte, “I can’t stand this damned everlasting
bliss! I’d rather be in hell.”
The Presence, stepping back and looking at him in astonishment, asks,
“And wherever do you think you _are_, Sir?”
PART III
YET OUR CAPACITIES ARE IN BONDAGE
XIX
THE CYNIC INTERJECTS A QUESTION
Some cynic, my mind’s eye tells me, is smiling over the picture of
human nature that emerges out of the preceding sections.
“You think you have shown that the feeling of disillusionment that
is spreading among us is a mood and a fashion rather than a rational
conviction; that the psychological evidence of our essential lowness
is weak; that our motivation is not a composite of instincts; that
in the evolutionary order, of which we are a part, desires as well
as structures evolve, so that the unprecedented in motives occurs
and is to be expected; that mind is marvellously plastic, and in
unconventional childhood is beautiful; that, under favorable school
conditions, creativeness bubbles up out of the commonplace; that after
the hot crucible of historical criticism has brought to the surface all
the dross of both great men and small, it reveals also precious gold;
that even within our selfish economic order high and fine strains of
desire can be seen, as if a god were struggling to create a superior
species through our mastery of natural resources. You find that, in
and through the complex that we call our motives there runs a demand
of personal-selves-in-the-making, a demand for mutual self-realization
in an order of reason, beauty, and good-will, in the creation of which
they are participants.
“All very soothing,” continues the cynic, “provided that you keep your
eyes straight ahead. But if you look to the right or the left of this
reasoning, this is what you see: In form, the argument defends the
dignity of life, but it does so only by picking out facts that shine
by contrast with our everyday conduct. Practically everything that has
been said includes or implies a protest against the ordinary run of
human motives, valuations, and habits. Thus, the passage from childhood
to adulthood is admitted to be a hardening process; it is admitted
that the capacities for creation occasionally displayed by the young
are generally thwarted, and that the very citadels of the spirit--the
home, the church, the school--are infected with the unspirituality of
our current economic standards and practices. It is made to appear,
further, that the economic order, which might and should have a main
part in the creation of man in cooperation with God, actually is an
enormous mechanism that subordinates men--capitalists and workers
alike--to a part, and the lower part, of their own motives, and these
largely misunderstood.
“You have proved that human nature contains factors that the current
disillusionment ignores or misrepresents, but you have shown also that
the actual exercise of men’s wills thwarts and imprisons the superior
motives that you are so concerned about.”
Thus the cynic; and he is right as to the facts provided that he
does not exaggerate the extent of this thwarting and imprisoning of
ourselves by ourselves. It does not necessarily follow, however, that
basic cynicism towards life can be justified, however useful as a
stimulus to inquiry the cynical comment may be. Men are inconsistent
with themselves; they do obstruct their own steps, and they trip over
themselves. What, then? Shall we acquiesce in our blunders? Shall
we end our forward steps in pity or scorn of ourselves? Or, shall we
endeavor to understand what has happened, hoping that we may find a way
to master the obstructive self that is within ourself? It should be
interesting, at least, to inquire into the nature of this checking and
thwarting of man by himself, for, in spite of the obviousness and the
disagreeableness of the fact, it is relatively neglected by the very
institutions that assume as their function the making of men.
It is true that religionists, moralists, and educationists for many
generations have talked about an inner conflict of forces. It is
represented now as competition between instincts; then as a struggle
of reason with impulse; again, as a strain between egoistic and social
motives. Though there is obvious truth in these conceptions, they
do not touch several questions that must be answered before we can
secure firm control of our situation. These questions are: Why is our
performance so much below our capacity all along the line? Where and
how does the leakage of power occur? How have we become inured to our
own inconsistencies of conduct and of motive? What is the technic for
recognizing real alternatives for what they are? What is the method for
keeping a continuously open road for our wiser selves?
As far as I can see, neither our churches nor our schools are handling
with aggressive vigor these overwhelmingly pertinent questions. Exalted
capacities are, indeed, ascribed to man, and lofty ideals of conduct
are unceasingly mentioned, recommended, sung about, and prayed about;
but who offers a technic for getting these capacities to do their
proper work? and who really believes in the practicability of what he
says?
This is a severe judgment, but it is a deliberate one, and if it is
true it is not unfair, as it certainly is not unfriendly. My own
life has been continuously identified with churches and educational
institutions, and I would not have it otherwise; but I do not see how
anyone who has intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with them can
deny that they are suffering from a profound dualism that they know
not how to heal. Of the general sincerity of their idealistic views
of man there need be no doubt; that both church and school exercise
a wholesome influence upon conduct in various respects is gladly
conceded; it is their lack of plan and method for the organization of
life, individual and collective, that is now in question. Now, this
lack is about the worst possible; for it not only permits mint, anise,
and cummin to get out of perspective; it not only foreshortens each
institution’s picture of itself; it also encourages the positive evil
of an illusory self-organization in the form of fair words and fair
sentiments instead of adequate purposes.
Assent to ideals, and emotional identification of oneself with America,
the church of all ages, or the will of God can be a species of
self-love and self-sophistication. Sunday after Sunday the churchgoer
says “Yes” in his heart to the prayer of confession; “Yes” to the
Godward aspirations of Scripture, hymn, and supplication; “Yes” to the
admonitions of the preacher and to every reference to love for man and
consecration to the Kingdom of God; and, departing from the sanctuary,
he has a comfortable self-feeling because he is a “Yes” man. He is on
this side, is he not? In school and college another set of sentimental
assents is evoked. Sportsmanship, patriotism, good citizenship,
admiration for the honesty, honor, and unselfish devotion shown by our
heroes--towards all these a “Yes,” a sincere glow, and “This is what we
are.”
A large part of the economic power of the Western world is in the hands
of men who worship the God of the prophets and of Jesus; yet we know
that business and industry will proceed during the week upon principles
other than those of love to God and man. The leaders of our civic
life, and most of the followers, have come out of our own schools for
generations, but neither our political parties, nor our officers of
state, nor our accepted state policies clearly reflect the idealism
of these schools. It is not hypocrisy that creates this gulf; rather,
confused helplessness in the presence of mixed motives. There is even
some awareness of this helplessness, but this awareness usually leads
to little more than speeding up the “Yes, yes” experience.
What boots it, then, to have shown that the current disillusionment
with respect to ourselves is illusory, if we don’t know how to give the
control of our lives into the keeping of the better elements that are
in us? In fact, our discussion thus far has done little more than clear
the ground for a tussle with our main problem, which concerns, not the
existence of high motives, but the bondage in which we find them. What
we must ascertain, if possible, is the nature of this bondage and how
we can release ourselves from it.
And first, the nature of our bondage. Let us frankly face the
disagreeable facts, not being outdone by the cynic himself in the
ferreting out of irrationalities. Only so can we hope to find the
remedy for our condition.
XX
OUR “LOWER NATURE” DOES NOT EXPLAIN OUR BONDAGE
If we could refer human folly all in a lump to our “lower nature” it
would be convenient in several ways. For one thing, like those who
refer their every slip to the solicitations of Satan, we should be
relieved from the laborious and often disagreeable task of tracing
out the particular threads of influence that make our conduct bad. On
the other hand, every accusation against our “lower nature” really
flatters whatever we happen to regard as our “higher nature.” The
Indian mystic says “Neti, neti” of the lower, finite, and merely
apparent reality, while he identifies his true self with the infinite.
Plato believes that, in his own person as philosopher, Reason, ever
pure and uncontaminated, though it be associated with the passions,
is manifested as a self-certifying and self-sufficient good. A
parallel self-gratulation was provided by Christian theology through
its doctrine that the Christian has a regenerated nature which
participates in some measure in the infallibility of God. Similarly,
our evolutionary relation to “the ape and tiger” is often used as a
foil for displaying our true dignity.
But this attribution of our irrational conduct to our “lower nature”
is altogether too convenient. It is like a child’s classification of
human beings into “good people” and “bad people.” As “bad people” are
partly good, so our “lower nature” is not altogether low; and, as “good
people” are not perfectly satisfactory, so--at least possibly--our
“higher nature” is not altogether high. In short, this whole theory of
our bondage requires re-examination.
In countries that are familiar with the Christian tradition, the
classical instance of the supposed clash of two natures is that of
Paul, who testified to a veritable warfare in his members. The good
that he would do, he did not, and the evil that he would not, that he
did. The more he struggled to keep “the law” the deeper became his
sense of guilt and helplessness. How shall we understand and evaluate
this experience? Not by manipulating merely abstract ideas such as
perfect righteousness (details unspecified and unspecifiable), nor the
holiness of God (specifications again impossible), nor sin (in the
sense of a generalized sinfulness); we could not judge Paul’s motives
and desires without inspecting them in their relation to particular
concrete situations, and this the record does not enable us to do.
If, as seems not improbable, his chief entanglement was sexual, then
the basic desire, as thinking Christians now agree, was not bad. As a
sex-creature he was not bad _simpliciter_ but only _secundum quid_.
Moreover, it is not possible to affirm that his condemnation of himself
was altogether balanced; he may have had a morbid conscience.
Whenever we are able to untangle the threads of impulse and to take
into account the circumstances of each, invariably the reference of our
defective conduct to our “lower nature” turns out to be mistaken--if
for no other reason, because it over-simplifies the facts. Always what
we find is a mix-up, and usually confusion. Witness, for example, the
gamut of motives involved, as we have seen, in the War and in our
economic and industrial system. Therefore, whoever would understand our
bondage must examine into the nature of this confusion; he must hunt
for the specific conditions that give a bad turn to motives that are
capable, under other circumstances, of building up instead of tearing
down. The conclusion towards which these facts push us is that that
which checks, thwarts, and imprisons our capacities is not a set of
particular drives but neglect of some relation or relations within
experience, or some twist in our methods of organizing ourselves.
If this inquiry tends to vacate the whole notion of a “lower nature”
that acts as a drag upon us, it tumbles us into a problem with respect
to the existence of a “higher nature.” Are any of our drives good
_simpliciter_, or, is the clue to goodness as well as badness to be
looked for in habits of organization rather than in particular and
ineradicable impulses? It is, in fact, easy to show that even within
our better conduct the same sorts of floundering occur as in our worst
behavior, so that the same problem of the organization of a self and of
selves is everywhere present. We have, as gifts of our nature, neither
radically bad drives against which we should arm ourselves, nor yet
radically good drives to which we can fly for effective protection. No
_vis a tergo_ will either ruin us or save us. The thing upon which the
issues of life depend is what I have called the motive that is in all
and through all, the desire to be a self in a world of selves.
The real nature of our bondage can be illustrated by a chain of
examples that reaches all the way from our handling of physiological
good and evil to our prayers. All along the line we shall find that
the good and the evil, the failures and the successes, depend upon
the organization of life as personal, and specifically upon the degree
in which, consciously and deliberately, we face situations, with
their alternative values, as wholes. We shall see that we are missing
on an enormous scale good things of life that are not beyond our
reach--things unquestionably good, unquestionably within our reach,
unquestionably more important than the things towards which we do
stretch ourselves. And all this is true of our more idealistic as well
as of our less idealistic interests. Now for the examples:
Let us begin with health and bodily vigor. We put up with physical
limitations that are entirely unnecessary--limitations that hygiene
and medical science can remove. It would be economical in the
financial sense to remove them, because our productive power would
thereby increase along with the joy of living. Why do we persist in
this conduct? We have everything to lose and nothing to gain by it.
We may phrase the answer in many ways, as inattention, distraction
by immediate stimuli, not connecting effects with causes, doing
as everybody else does; but all real explanations come down to
this, that we do not put enough of ourselves--our comprehending,
difference-perceiving, organizing selves--into the matter.
We permit thousands of distressing accidents to occur every year.
We permit them, for we could prevent them; we have sufficient
experience of the dangers, we have sufficient scientific knowledge,
and we have sufficient financial means. We could save thousands of
lives without even feeling a financial pinch, and most of the lives
saved would add to the financial resources of the country. But we
do not stop to think; that is, we do not put our whole selves into
our conduct.
We submit to a multitude of unnecessary discomforts--dirt, smoke,
noise, confusion, delays, undue fatigue, uncomfortable clothing,
senseless customs. Our intelligence concerning the conditions of
agreeable living, and our budgetary capacity for it, far outrun our
plans and policies.
We endure unsightly spots in cities and towns, and the despoiling
of natural beauty in the country. The persons who reap financial
advantage from our esthetic impoverishment do so, not by their own
inherent power, but by our acquiescence. Our trouble is lack of
head-work.
We read inferior stuff, not because it is more enjoyable than
literature, but because we wont take the trouble to enjoy
ourselves. Thus, because we are “not all there,” we let slip
opportunities for exciting adventures in imagination, thought, and
knowledge.
Our opinions are largely manufactured for us and imposed upon us,
or else we merely drift into them and afterwards, perhaps, search
for reasons in support of them. We permit ourselves to be treated
as herds--some writers even using this term with respect to us--not
because we are necessarily bovine but because we are unnecessarily
absent-minded. That is, the human in us acts fragmentarily instead
of integrally.
We are capable of having better government and better social
relations generally than we have. We could afford them without risk
of impoverishment and often to the benefit of our pocketbooks.
Our good precedents, our weakly professed convictions, our known
capacity for fruitful experimentation, all outrun our political and
social practice. Often we are pig-headed, not because there is a
porcine drive in our original nature, but because we get the habit
of over-fondness for our half-thoughts.
We are capable of providing far better schooling for our children
than we do provide. Even parental affection, which comes so near to
being unqualifiedly good, is a main support for mistaken education.
Moreover, education is a field in which most persons who have
not paused to investigate believe, nevertheless, that they are
competent to pass judgments. Thus, precisely where we think we are
using our heads, we fail to use them enough.
If there were such a thing as a “higher nature,” it should clearly
manifest itself in morals and religion. In the sphere of moral
conduct we should be able to discern particular drives that are
worthy of invariable and unqualified approval. Ethical philosophy
long endeavored to discover such pure springs of action, but
without success. It is true, likewise important, that some broadly
general types of policy, such as neighborliness, truthfulness,
and industry, are usually safe guides. Yet, when my improvident
neighbor asks me for a loan, or when an oppressor would use my
truthfulness as an instrument with which to reach an innocent
victim, or when I endeavor to apportion my time between work and
play, then not one of these policies suffices as a basis for
decision. “Love beauty” is good advice, but there are times when we
have to decide whether to rest our eyes upon the curves of beauty
or upon the harsh lines of actuality. “Pursue truth”; certainly,
but just when is the moment for action upon the basis of present
light, perhaps twilight? “Do as you would be done by”; of course,
but how, under some circumstances, would I be done by? That is to
say, in all such cases, the background-problem is, What sort of “I”
do I want my self and others to be?
Is it not true that good men are forever getting in the way of
the good? Consider any half dozen social changes that history has
proved to be wholesome, and then count over the men who opposed
them at the time they were made. You will perceive that the
mental clumsiness of bad men has an exact parallel in the moral
awkwardness of good men.
The case is not different with religion. Considered from the
standpoint of the drives that have made men pious, piety is by
no means an unmixed blessing. For history shows that any desire
whatever can receive the baptism of religious sanctity, with all
the reinforcement that results therefrom. On the one hand, it is
true, we see religion calling men to a life of righteousness;
on the other hand, there is no meanness nor narrowness that has
not somewhere at some time been a part of religion. For this
reason, religion is the most dangerous thing in the world. It can
promote either candor or prejudice, either self-will or sweet
reasonableness, either ruthlessness or the gentleness of a St.
Francis of Assisi. And no single religion can exempt itself from
the danger. In this country at the present moment--to take a single
case for illustration--there is a species of sincere Christianity
that seizes intellectual freedom by the throat in order to choke
it; that fans flames of hate; that commits deeds of lawless
violence. So impossible is it to find in religion the especial seat
of a higher nature! On the other hand, at various points in the
history of different faiths, religion has turned critically upon
itself, and by reorganizing itself upon unprecedented lines, it has
proved that, though we cannot rely upon a higher nature made up of
drives that everlastingly repeat themselves, nevertheless we have a
capacity for never-ending criticism and reconstruction of ourselves.
These facts put the bondage of our capacities into correct perspective.
We need not deny that untamed and partly tamed impulses tug at the bit,
kick, sometimes run away with us; but they are not our jailers. They
make difficulty for us, they wound and scar us, but they have within
themselves no coherence, whereas types of coherence within a self make
all the difference between freedom and bondage. If anyone insists
that human nature is depraved, he should place the seat of depravity
in the rational man, or the supposed higher nature that is expressed
in religion, morals, customs, government, social organization, and
deliberate purposes generally.
If we conceive the matter in the terms of evolution, then the problem
of our bondage centers in the latest-evolved, not the most ancient,
phases of human nature; not in raw impulses taken one by one, but in
the elaboration of conduct by thought and purpose; not in what is
wildest in us, but in what is most civilized and taken for granted.
Must we say, then, that within reason itself there is an irrational
lag? If this should prove to be the case, the wisest thing to do would
be to make allowance for it and by deliberate policy to counteract
it, just as the astronomical observer calculates and counteracts his
personal equation.
XXI
HOW REASON ITSELF BINDS US TO THE IRRATIONAL
Every progressive thinker is troubled by the following fact: In
order to live rationally, we must organize and institutionalize our
behavior, which implies giving a sort of mechanical or automatic power
to yesterday’s thoughts. But as soon as any institution begins to be
efficient, it resists rational inquiry with respect to itself. This is
true of all institutions without exception. They resist--here is the
heart of our difficulty--because they are not haphazard combinations
but institutions, which is to say that they are a deposit of reason.
Thus our necessary rational procedures imprison reason as naturally “as
the sparks fly upward.”
For “institution” we can substitute any term for a job that is
deliberately done, or for any devotion that is a day old, and the
proposition that reason imprisons reason still holds. Whenever thought
makes a nest for itself where it can incubate, it turns out to have
mated with unreason, and it produces a mongrel offspring.
How the principle works can be seen in the relatively simple
institution of the family. For example, a parent who, in the course
of family government, makes a decision with respect to the children,
immediately adopts this decision as a precedent that is binding upon
himself also, he won’t budge from it; if it is questioned he finds
reasons in support of it; or, if he is pushed into a corner, he
reasserts it upon the ground of the inherent rationality of parental
authority. That is, by a process of thought he identifies himself with
what he has been, and he equates reason with one of its incidental
products. Many a parent-child fellowship has been wrecked in this way.
Just so, when the idea of sex-equality appeared upon the horizon, many
a person prepared to defend the family against dissolution! Many a
potential conjugal fellowship has been blasted because of unreadiness
to re-think the old assumption of sex-servitude. One is unready to
re-think it, not because of any imperious natural drive of the male
to sex-mastery, not because the female naturally prefers submission,
but because one has bound one’s mind by a partial use and habit of
intelligence; a has-been-so has been taken as inherently natural and
reasonable.
The same sort of retardation of thought by itself appears, likewise,
in our larger and more complicated institutions. For example, in the
economic order at the present moment, in spite of its creakiness,
there is enough that is humanly valuable to supply a basis for
the reconstruction that is so sorely needed. Why, then, do we not
delightedly hasten to build a fairer structure upon our present
goodness? The usual reply that selfishness stands in the way, is a
lazy explanation. “Innate selfishness” is perhaps the trickiest of all
our merely plausible general ideas, for it applies to almost anything
that we dislike in ourselves or anybody else, yet tells us nothing
specific. The sticking-point in economic thinking is the point where
particular drives or alternatives are adjusted to one another. This
point, unfortunately often, is characterized by economic precedents
taken as dictates of reason or nature. Self-imitation, that is to say,
has generated an economic orthodoxy which is the true “original sin”
of the system. And it is the sacredness of the orthodoxy that makes
the gooseflesh rise upon us when we contemplate the possibility of
reversing our ways. We have sufficient stamina to stand losses or to
get along with less wealth, but the uncertainties of a reconstructive
policy make us quail. Thus we trust yesterday’s thought more than we
trust any fresh thinking.
Orthodoxy, which is the acceptance of yesterday’s agreed-upon
conclusions as an assumption that must govern today’s thought, is
not a sporadic or merely incidental occurrence; it insinuates itself
everywhere; there are as many varieties of it as there are kinds of
human association.
Political orthodoxies are, of course, rather obvious. The remark is
commonplace that parties retain their coherence after the reason for
their existence has faded away, and that, at last, lacking genuine
meaning, they stand upon trumped-up platforms which often are a blind
erected by hunters of office or by those whom they serve. The main
support of bad politics is found in men who are not bad but only
conventionally good. The difficulty with them is that they treat a
petrified idea as if it were a living thought--they are politically
orthodox.
Our laws, likewise, are streaked with anachronisms that at their best
are clumsy and obstructive, but at their worst are instruments--well
known as such!--whereby social obligation is evaded and injustice
committed. The intellectual clarity of laws and courts is accompanied
by an emotional haze, amounting at times to ethical obscurantism, that
is taken as the light of a sanctuary, but is in reality the shrinking
into itself of a mind that is unready for fresh thinking even in its
own field.
Forms of government and constitutions, too--living thoughts at the
beginning--become mechanized thoughts after a time, and then they are
a precarious asset. Precarious because, though they are properly only
instruments to assist us in our adjustments to the conditions of life,
they become the objects to which adjustment is made. The notion of
sovereignty, for example--that ark of the covenant within the holy of
holies of political principles--has become a mechanized thought and an
obstacle to the establishment of any rule of reason in the world as a
whole.
The professions and the other occupations, likewise, always run into
the danger of introversion as soon as they begin to think about
themselves. Each wants to fix its functions so that they will “stay
put.” Traditions of many sorts now become, essentially, dogmas;
divisions and subdivisions of function are established, and each
functionary becomes a breathing precedent. Machinery unending is
interjected between the needs of client or customer or employer and
the satisfaction of these needs. Some business men, it is said, have
undertaken to create a tribunal of their own that shall settle their
legal difficulties without resort to the law. What a comment is this
upon the legal profession! There is a considerable area of human need
that calls for both spiritual and medical help, yet physicians and
ministers can hardly get together upon the most obvious cases because
professional precedents have not paved the road thereto. Just so, the
dentist goes his way, and the physician his, to the detriment of the
patient, all because one is dentist and the other physician.
The orthodoxies of religion, whether conservative or liberal, are
natural enough, for they reflect a sense of the greater issues of life
and a sense of the importance of any truth about them that we may be
able to reach. Yet the endeavor of piety to think itself and to put
itself into the form of propositions has become a bane to piety. For
accepting pious declarations both deludes us into classifying ourselves
as pious, and excuses us from looking straight into the eye of
actuality, whether contemporary or ancient. Limiting the freedom of the
mind is perhaps not the worst thing about orthodoxy, though it is bad
enough. Rather, ecclesiastical custodianship of particular religions or
particular types within a religion, tends to displace thought-activity
from the greater issues of life to the minor ones. The great issues
having been settled, as is supposed, ministers, church boards, and
denominational leaders betake themselves to making the church, which
already has the truth, get the men, get the means, build machinery, and
make it go.
How do we account for the ecclesiastical situation that is revealed by
the church announcements in the daily papers of any large city? I shall
not stop to characterize either the sermon topics or the publicity
methods that are here disclosed, for this has been done many times,
and the facts speak too loudly for themselves. Many explanations have
been offered, but the background reason usually remains unnoticed. It
is that the church already _has_ religion. It has it, and therefore
peddles it; it peddles it, and therefore all the devices of the
advertiser, the hawker, and the auctioneer become appropriate; and
because they are appropriate, the church that is most up-to-date in
using them esteems itself the most enterprising. The ministerial and
ecclesiastical jazz and piffle are direct results of having minds that
are at rest upon the main issues. Reliance upon yesterday’s thought
produces the vacant, noisy mind of today. Orthodoxy did it!
Every orthodoxy, whether it emphasizes a formula of thought, or loyalty
to an institution, or the propriety of an habitual process--every
orthodoxy, whether economic, political, social, professional,
educational, scientific, or religious (and we have them all)--every
one, though created by reason, is a drag upon reason.
Yet orthodoxy is only an organized or social expression of a necessary
and inescapable factor in the exercise of intelligence. It is because
we remember, form judgments, make inferences, and then use the products
of this process as data both for immediate decisions where action is
necessary and for new judgments--it is for this reason that we are
humans at all and not brutes. Our fairest structures are built upon
past thinking as well as through present thinking. There is no other
way. Irrationalism or pure romanticism may be useful now and then as
a protest or as a spur, but this is never the horse that carries the
load. Here, then, is our paradoxical situation: We must guide thinking
by thinking; we must trust reason; but reason itself, in this process,
binds us to the irrational. What would be a reasonable policy in this
situation?
XXII
THE DEEP DEPRAVITY OF OUR RESPECTABLE FAULTS
Men check their own growth by self-imitation. Now, inasmuch as
each self exists in and through reciprocity with other selves,
self-imitation becomes a criss-cross of copyings. This mutual imitation
of one another is “respectability.”
Every healthy-minded person desires, of course, to have the approval
of his fellows, and to be worthy of their approval. And this is no
insignificant thing, for sharing, or universalizing, is of the essence
of reason. But reason makes its characteristic slip; when individuals
reciprocally approve one another, they forthwith generalize the basis
of their judgment, whatever this basis is, and the generalization
becomes a social fence with an inside and an outside. Our judgment may
soundly represent a situation and a value, yet for this very reason we
may fancy that we have reached the summit of a social mountain when we
have merely come to a turn in the trail.
The momentum of a gyroscope can be given, in fact, to practically any
way of accommodating ourselves to one another. The assent that “was”
then becomes an assent that “ought to be.” Reciprocal approvals are
now funded and they become a vested interest of the stockholders. The
stockholders, in the fashion of our latest corporations, do not even
vote their stock--they merely draw dividends.
Two results follow: First, the ethical perspective that is required by
free and growing minds is lost. The trivialities of respectability,
when we look at them from the outside (as in the satirical novel and
drama), are amazing. I am reminded of an incident in a college. A
member of a sorority, being asked why one of the students who had been
“rushed” had not been initiated, replied, “Well, at our ‘rushing party’
we had squab on toast, and she ate the toast, evidently not knowing any
better. So we didn’t elect her. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere,
you know.”
The reverse side to respectability’s over-sensitiveness to trifles
is frequent insensibility to master-values, as the work of creative
thinkers, artists, saviors of mankind. Such work does not bestow
respectability.
And not only is perspective lost; there supervenes a kind of blindness.
Respectability means sanctioning conduct that is unfitted to new
conditions that have now arrived, and condemning conduct that is. It
means not seeing, or slurring over, or hushing up facts that could
not stand the light of critical analysis. There is a self-excusing
that produces a self-blinding that is worse for the world than
straightforward badness. Respectability connotes the constricted mind,
the involved and indirect mind, the self-deceived mind.
These are the reasons why dramatists can so easily make unconventional
badness seem superior to conventional goodness. The recipe is
simple: Place upon one side of the stage a typical conformist whose
respectability is as easily read as a wayside billboard; a man who is
orthodox in business, in politics, and in religion, and in excellent
standing among his associates; whose virtues are stereotyped and
stamped with the appreciation of his set, and whose faults are ignored,
or camouflaged, or possibly praised in the restricted circle in which
he moves. Over against him place a person without social standing,
a creature of strong and unconcealed natural impulses who is free
from scruples, over-caution, and self-deception; one who is just his
natural, uncalculating self. This turns the trick, and the audience
applauds. Why does it applaud? Few of its members could tell you, and
the psychoanalyst has only a fraction of the truth when he explains
that our repressed instincts have release and go on a picnic through
subtle self-identification with the character upon the stage. There is
also gladness in having the way cleared for re-thinking, the acceptance
of an invitation to judge basically, a feeling of liberation, not into
unbridled instinct, but into a fresh effort at rational objectivity.
A woman who had been reared in a “protected” and conventional way,
never guessing that she might think for herself, experienced in mature
life an intellectual awakening that took the direction of extreme
revolt against all orthodoxies, moral axioms included. She declared
that she did not feel a need for God; was happier without any belief
in him; and that she had rejected the whole notion of moral laws.
“But,” she added, “I believe in being decent!” She had not reverted to
irrational impulse; she was endeavoring to let reason retrieve errors
that arose through reason.
That membership in a circle of the respectable sometimes assists in
hiding evil so gross that respectability itself would be shocked by
it need not be urged, for it is merely incidental. The more important
faults are the commonplace ones--the ones that are common because they
spring directly from the process that founds respectable society. Here
they are:
1--Respectability is the standardization of compromises by using them
as precedents. Compromising is, of course, not the same as discovering
either truth or righteousness; it is at best a detour over a temporary
and perishable bridge. Its service lies in keeping us peaceable or
cooperative in spite of disagreements; its goal is not to repeat itself
endlessly, but to fade into a no-compromise because we have come out
into clear light. When we make compromise the standard procedure, then
we sanctify our defects and bestow upon them capacity for unlimited
progeny.
2--Respectability measures conduct in terms of the average performance,
the average praise and blame, or the average acquiescent silence, of
a limited society, instead of directly evaluating the consequences
of an act for all the persons concerned. Conventional standards are
not useless, of course, but they lack full ethical objectivity, and
for this reason they can conceal as well as reveal. I can be “honest”
in a transaction that is cruel; I can obey all the ten commandments
and yet lack the one essential thing. Because the standards of
respectability are not derived from the consequences of conduct to all
persons concerned, but only some, it comes about that, without losing
self-respect or forfeiting caste, respectable men as a fact do share in
acts that result in nearly every form of inhumanity.
3--Respectability, fixing an artificial horizon-line for social
fellowship, prevents us from knowing either ourselves or human nature
in the large. We cannot know ourselves or others by merely noting
how we respond to one another in a club or clique. Many a hitherto
conventional individual has found liberation and enlargement by
fishing with an illiterate guide, riding with a cow-puncher, attending
a meeting of radicals, doing social work in the slums, or getting
acquainted with criminals or harlots. Between Jesus and such persons
there was no barrier of respectability, as, on the opposite side, he
had no prejudice towards persons of wealth, power, or culture. When
church membership connotes respectability, let the church beware!
Its Master did not belong to the respectable classes. The deep
danger here is retardation of spiritual growth followed by fixation,
self-complacency, and the use of one’s power against the influences
that make for a broader, more humane life.
4--Coordinate with this encysting of our ethical capacities is the
habit, almost universal in respectable circles, of shunting the
blame for the evils of the world to other classes of society. Even
in America, where we have made so large a beginning of trust in the
common man, it has been customary to assume that the main danger to
the republic inheres in the “lower classes,” which term denotes now
the uneducated, now the unpropertied, now the hand-workers, now the
immigrants, now the discontented.
The fact is that every major peril that we have encountered has had
its seat “above” the “lower classes.” Sectionalism, slavery, political
partizanship, corrupt politics, a depraved civil service, dominance
of government by the money power--these do not spring from the less
privileged classes, however much these classes may have been used by
leaders. If, as common opinion has it, civil government reaches its
lowest level in our cities, the reason is found, not in the character
of the masses of city dwellers, but in the forces that organize them,
use them, and exploit them for profit or for the advancement of a
political party and the financial interests back of it.
There are just two ways in which those designated as the “lower
classes” might become the means of our undoing: Some of “the interests”
which have respectable standing might persuade, deceive, wheedle,
or inflame them into the support of some evil that they could not
originate; or, long-continued injustice and repression might lead to an
explosion. No significant explosion of the classes in question will be
brought about in any other way. In other words, what makes the “lower
classes” dangerous, as far as they are dangerous, is the respectable
classes.
The depravity of our respectable thinking upon social and political
interests shows itself, thus, in the actual (though, of course,
unintended) meanness of blaming others where we ourselves deserve
the blame, and even of attributing to others the evils that we cause
through them when we use them for our own ends.
5--Nothing is more characteristic of respectability than its habit
of finding exalted reasons for justifying conventional conduct,
whatever it is. High ground for our conventional domestic conduct is
found in the unalterable nature of the sexes, or in a trust committed
by society, or in some ancient scripture. Reason for unlimited
profit-getting is found by manufacturing psychology to order (the
pseudo-psychology of the motives for enterprise), and in the old,
comfortable middle-class self-sophistication that asserts that private
selfishness is the best way to serve the common good. In ecclesiastical
matters we have been much pushed in later years to find divinely good
reasons for our customary conformities, such as saying in worship what
we do not mean; keeping straight faces in the presence of small men
arrayed in large historical and institutional dignities; supporting a
denominationalism that we say we deplore, and excusing an evangelism
that obviously needs an explanation. We are put to it to place all
these things within a system of rational thought, but we manage
to do it, though it takes some culture to accomplish the feat. In
education--I speak from the inside--it is positively funny how many
old and creaky things, and how few new things can be justified by mere
guesses.
This respectable habit of finding that we always are in every respect
respectable makes it next to impossible for us to repent for even the
deeper wrongs of conventional social practice. Even the harlots, Jesus
declared, enter the Kingdom of Heaven before those who could give
twenty reasons why harlots cannot get in at all.
All this separatism, evasion, and self-sophistication leads on with
entire naturalness to the habit of reliance upon authority and finally
upon force. Respectability never quite commits the adjudication
of its interests to open ethical thinking. It regards its case as
already closed. In other words, it claims for itself a privileged
position for which the only remaining defence is force in one form
or another--economic force, partizan laws, ostracism, defamation,
blacklisting, the denial of freedom of speech, war. All these are,
in fact, appropriate once the main assumption has been accepted, and
consistency is a virtue, is it not? Hence it is that these acts, some
of which are positively base and not merely muddle-headed, do not
produce self-condemnation among good people. So depraved can our
respectable faults finally become! This is not the hardness, of course,
of minds that see themselves as they are and yet do not blush; it is
still worse than this, for it is the hardness of the paralyzed nerve,
the hardness of the eye that sends no light to the intelligence, the
hardness of a blocked intelligence that closes the heart to its proper
world.
Socrates maintained that to do wrong knowingly is not as bad as to do
it ignorantly.
XXIII
EVEN OUR PASSIONS ARE PRECEDENT-RIDDEN
The problem with which we are wrestling is, How account for the low
average performance of beings as highly endowed as ourselves? The usual
explanation--that we are made up of two natures, a higher and rational
one, and a lower and irrational one--turns out not to explain, for
neither an unmixed lower nature nor an unmixed higher nature can be
anywhere discerned.
A wide vista into the sources of our trouble opened, however, when we
inspected reason, the discriminating and thinking function, not in
abstraction or as an ideal, but in operation as a guide to behavior.
We behold it saving us, indeed, from utter rawness and brutish fixity
by analysis that indefinitely enlarges the range of selection within
experience; but at the same time we discovered that it customarily
stumbles over its own products, checks its own progress, and becomes
an instrument of the very rawness that it should leave behind. This
difficulty we found to be inherent in reason as such because thinking
depends upon memory, and thought-guided conduct upon precedents.
Precedents are necessary to thought-guided action, but they imprison
us, especially through the social process, wholesome and necessary as
this is.
It must not be supposed that we are handicapped by a down-pulling
lower nature plus a lag in our higher nature. What we have found is
a hesitation that spreads through the whole range of functions as
far as they are human at all. This truth is two-edged. It means not
only that our reason is never, in practice, completely pure, but also
that the instinctive or impulsively raw “factors” in behavior never
can be isolated, and therefore never are factors in the strict sense
but only abstracted aspects. They are as abstract as “pure reason.” A
few examples will show that even our passions are precedent-ridden,
and that the control of them has to be effected by manipulating this
thought-factor. Even in the region of ourselves that is commonly called
lower, both the down-drag and the up-push inhere in the rationality
that we regard as our distinguishing mark. If this truth conduces to
modesty, it justifies also hope, for it means that even in our passions
we discriminate occasions and reach after rational selection.
That precedents guide even our passions is not quite the same as
saying that all emotional responses become “conditioned” after the
first instance of them in infancy. Precedents arise through analysis,
discrimination, and comparison, not automatically, and they can be
changed and dethroned by the same process that creates them.
Let us turn, now, to a few illuminating examples. By the “passions” we
are to understand such emotional eagernesses as anger, malice, revenge,
jealousy, greed, lust; and we are to take the most volcanic of them,
anger and lust, as objects of our especial scrutiny. The question is,
Is there a thought-determined selection of the occasions upon which
each shall dominate the individual’s conduct, of the object towards
which action shall be directed, of the form that action shall take, and
of the distance it shall go? Are there fashions here as well as in our
appreciations of art and of religion?
Does anger arise from the same provocations and run the same course
in a club, upon a college campus, among workmen in a factory, between
“society people,” between an employer and his employe, a teacher and
a pupil, close friends, business competitors? Evidently not. If my
friend craftily grabs the good things in sight and leaves me in the
lurch, I am affronted; but not if my business competitor does the same
thing. When a teacher corrects a pupil’s error, all remains serene, but
when a pupil corrects a teacher’s error we cannot be so sure of calm
weather. If one of my society acquaintances spills hot tea upon me, I
am more likely to pity him than to be angry with him; but suppose that
a waiter in a restaurant spills anything on me! What would be an insult
in a club or on the golf links is only bluff geniality among workmen,
or coltishness among college students. One of the most astonishing
instances of the control of primitive feelings by a social precedent,
preliminary practice being entirely lacking, may be seen in hazings and
initiations among collegians.
So sensitive is anger to its setting within a system of ideas.
Moreover, the particular expressions of it, when it does arise, are
almost purely conventional. Whether one shall stiffen up in haughty
silence and stare at the offender; speak a frigid word; utter a hot
epithet; swear; or deliver a fisticuff, or a challenge to a duel
depends upon already accepted notions as to what is appropriate in the
given social setting. The object towards which it is directed, also,
is often thought-selected. If I get “hot” when a dining-car waiter
serves my roast and potato cold I may “roast” either the waiter, the
cook, the steward, or the railroad company. It appears to have been
a custom of ancient potentates to punish messengers who brought bad
news, but we esteem ourselves fortunate if our newsgatherers tell the
truth whether or not it pains us. If some Chinese, out of patience at
our delay in the revocation of the unequal treaties, insult and abuse
or kill some of our nationals, our resentment will flame, according to
our thought-habits, against the Chinese who did the act, against the
Chinese people, or against our own officials who were dilatory about
removing an irritation.
How far anger shall go, once it gets started, is likewise largely
a matter of social tradition. In some circles of society, physical
chastisement for provoking conduct is entirely proper, and it is
administered then and there; in other circles, this so far offends
good form that it scarcely occurs at all. Though knocking a man down
for an insulting word may be applauded, kicking a man when he is down
is the act of a “mucker.” “Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go
down upon your wrath.” That is, though a sudden and temporary burst of
this passion be excusable, the nursing of wrath is not. Yet there are
populations in which the nursing of wrath until revenge can be had is
the mark of a man.
Even lust is guided by thought-out distinctions. With one individual
it acts within wedlock and stops there; with another it acts towards
courtesans, but despises seduction; with still others it permits
seduction of girls of other races or of a different social class,
but not girls of one’s own class and race; and all these differences
between men depend very largely upon the male company one keeps. That
is, lust acts by code. Moreover, every permission that any of these
codes grants is accompanied by prohibitions also; at every level
distinctions are made between better and worse, and customs of regard
for the better actually prevail.
The passions that sway men in masses are similarly obedient to
precedents. You cannot account for lynchings by naming human instincts,
nor by this plus a description of the crimes that lynchers seek to
avenge, nor yet by adding a color-contrast between lynchers and
lynched. Who is to be lynched, by whom, upon what provocation, and by
what method depends upon a set of discriminated ideas already present
when the provocation occurs. An acquaintance of mine tells me that,
being in the vicinity of a town where this summary procedure was
threatened, he took means to ascertain just what was done. In this
instance--it is doubtless an extreme one, but it is none the less
instructive--the populace assembled at a prearranged hour and without
tumult; prayer was offered; the victim was calmly hanged from a bridge,
and his body was riddled with bullets; after which, this business
being attended to, the crowd went about its other business. If most
lynchings are less orderly, they nevertheless are ruled by the same
sort of traditions; see how alike these crimes are, and how unruffled
the surrounding populace can remain.
It should scarcely be necessary to say how conventionalized are the
passions that make nations fight one another. Like the personal-honor
code of the duelist is diplomacy’s schedule of the degrees of
possible offensiveness in the conduct of other nations and their
representatives, with a parallel column for appropriate ways of
resenting each sort of disagreeableness. And the extreme mode of
resentment, war, has a definite place in this code. Nations do not wait
to be hurtled into war by explosions of popular wrath. The matter is
much more in the control of reason than this. War-making is one of
the legally recognized functions of the state, and all the necessary
machinery--from secretaries of war to a supply of gas-masks--is kept
constantly on hand. How odd it is that the people as a rule think of
wars, even modern wars, as calamities that, like a tornado or a tidal
wave, just happen, or as a horror that “bad” nations thrust upon
“good” ones. Wars occur, just as fisticuffs or shootings occur among a
frontier populace, and just as measured words of resentment are spoken
where culture prevails, namely, as an expression of the recognized
system for dealing with situations of certain sorts. There is nothing
inevitable about any of them.
When an individual follows the social code of resentment from a
sense of duty rather than from hot passion, we find the situation
amusing. But when a people that does not desire to fight is governed
by officials that do, then occurs the most remarkable, as it is also
the most tragic, example of the actual relation between passion and
precedent. The populace must now be worked up into a mood that will
impel them to kill and to do it with a clear conscience. And how
is the war-passion, in fact, aroused? By bringing the proposed or
already-declared war under some appropriate precedent or precedents.
Farmers and grocers, say, have not kept up with international events
sufficiently to know what the friction is all about, or which side is
right if either side is, or what probability there is that war will set
things right; but they won’t submit to a foreign invader or oppressor,
they love their country and its traditions, and they hate the
ruthlessness that ravishes women, and starves and mutilates children
and wounded soldiers. So, it is
“Fight for your altars and your fires;
Fight for the green graves of your sires,
God and your native land!”
The whole scheme of war-propaganda consists in inducing people to
classify another country, or a foreign leader, or events under
appropriate headings. So precedent-ridden is the passion that has rent
the world asunder and now threatens to destroy it.
The struggle to control and guide any of our passions, or if need be
to cause them to atrophy from disuse, must be directed chiefly to
current assumptions, types of thought, social standards, and customary
classifications. This is one reason why the world cannot be saved by
rescuing individuals one by one from their evil ways. While we are
rebuilding one individual in this way, social precedents are stamping
themselves upon ten children. It follows that the reconstructive work
of religion and of education must be done chiefly by discrediting
currently accepted precedents and causing a rethinking of the
alternatives.
XXIV
FREE MEN FEAR THEIR FREEDOM. WHY?
Our fathers gave their all that we might be free, but we are abashed
by the bequest that they have left us. We are abashed, not by the
moral grandeur, the holiness, of our inheritance, nor by the height of
the obligations with which it endows us, but by apprehension that the
inside of it may not be as fair as the outside. We decorate ourselves
with the name and the glory of free men; they grace our historic
records and our festal occasions; but in our daily conduct we accept
the functions of free men with reservations. We are “judicious,” as we
call it.
The paradox of liking and disliking freedom at the same time is not
a superficial one; it is deep in our nature; it is an apparently
inevitable seesaw in our motives. There is in our endowment something
so grand that ordinary men accept any privation in preference to
comfortable slavery. So majestic is the mind of man when it is
aroused that no pain that our fellows can inflict counterbalances the
value of uncoerced thinking and speaking. We know that this freedom,
with all the risks and burdens that it entails, is fundamental to
every great thing that humanity has done in the modern period.
Milton’s _Areopagitica_ and the First Amendment of the Constitution
of the United States are flags upon the mountain peaks of history.
Nevertheless, the meaning of every achieved enfranchisement is in
practice toned down by the enfranchised themselves, and in consequence
even our old and taken-for-granted liberties have continually to be
rewon.
The sincerity of this cautiousness is not to be questioned. For we are
apprehensive not only that social classes other than our own, and other
individuals (as, the young) will fail to “make a wise use of freedom,”
but that we ourselves shall fail to do so. We are on guard against our
own enjoyment of powers and prerogatives that nevertheless we highly
esteem. Father and mother, instead of being eager to confer freedom
upon their child as rapidly as possible, make it their policy to shield
him as long as possible from the dangers of freedom; and in accord
with this policy they measure the correctness of their own conduct
in the presence of children by its restraints, not by its resistance
of restraints. Teachers, likewise, from the elementary school to the
college, are as a rule engaged in putting upon young spirits a yoke
made by others instead of assisting pupils to make harnesses of their
own. It is regarded as an achievement of good teaching when pupils are
kept happy and active in the process of being yoked to precedents. And
teachers themselves are an ensample to their flock. If there is anybody
in the world who, under a régime of freedom, should be characterized by
constant unfixing of precedents, it is the teacher, but it is safe to
guess that not one person in a thousand could name an instance of it in
any school.
If we were to judge religion by its great creative periods, we should
perhaps say that the religious leader, even more than the teacher,
should be a dyed-in-the-wool user of freedom. But, obviously, the fear
of a flexible faith is greater, except at crisis-points in religious
history, than the fear that faith may become stereotyped, mechanical,
and dead. In nearly all ecclesiastical folds, if not in all of them,
it is assumed that no clergyman “of good judgment” will use all
the liberty that the constitution and the laws of his denomination
permit. There is an unwritten law of repression within the written
guarantees of liberty. Many years ago a Catholic professor was asked
whether the advice of the Pope upon a certain point in education was
an _ex cathedra_, officially authoritative, pronouncement. “No,” said
the professor, “but we obey it just as if it were.” A passage from
John Wesley concerning the Virgin Birth was submitted to a Methodist
Episcopal bishop with the question whether this--the source not being
named--was a view of the matter fit for a Methodist. The bishop’s reply
was an emphatic negative. Upton Sinclair trapped a ministers’ meeting
by reading a fresh translation of the denunciation of rich men in the
Epistle of James and attributing the words to Emma Goldman. Most of
the ministers thought that such utterances justified putting her into
prison.
If we drew our presumptions from history, we should assume that, in
every area of church life, what is now going on is partly valid and
partly not; and believers in the _status quo_ and disbelievers in it
would discuss each question upon a plane of friendly equality. But
they do not meet as equals; the freedom to repeat our thoughts is, so
to say, greater than the freedom to do fresh thinking. Note how many
liberals strive, as far as honesty permits, to make it appear that they
are not radical nor anything more than progressively orthodox. That is
to say, it is taken for granted that something has the precedence of
real freedom. Churchmen have no such fear of their past as the facts
warrant; their fears always prick up ears towards anything that is in
any significant way novel. Was ever a minister brought to trial for
backwardness of mind, or for obstructing the freedom of others? And
did the acceptance or rejection of any candidate for the ministry ever
hinge upon whether he was sufficiently liberty-loving to guard the
guarantees of freedom in the church constitution? The fears are on the
other side, and there the defenders of the faith patrol their beat.
As for individual ministers who believe in real freedom yet submit to
the informal censorship of church opinion, it is by no means necessary
to suppose that they sell their silence for place or salary, though the
spiritual peril here is immeasureable. Some of them, without doubt, by
their really large and just-permitted variations from the ordinary,
are helping to keep alive the tradition of freedom. On the other hand,
what shall be said of those who, though they believe in freedom in
the abstract, are convinced that, if it is not actually a subordinate
interest of the spirit, at least it can better afford postponement than
other interests? It is fair to say that they lay it away in a napkin.
I should not like to have these remarks add force to the common opinion
that religious institutions are inherently more repressive than
others. This opinion is at least a grave exaggeration. It forgets the
glorious chapters in religious history that record the identification
of faith with the bursting of bonds--ecclesiastical, political, social,
intellectual, ethical. It forgets, too, the character of our secular
institutions. Let us look at a few of them.
Within the tradition of academic freedom, exactly as within
ecclesiastical practice, there exists an unwritten law of abstention.
It restrains professors and administrators alike, though at different
points. Not all professors or all administrators, of course, but the
great mass of them. Self-restriction expresses itself in solicitude
for “the standing of the institution”; in the professor’s choice of
his field for research and publication; in acute tenderness for the
immature judgment of students (most of them either in possession of
the ballot or about to reach their majority); in the censorship of
student publications that criticize the social and educational _status
quo_; in decisions as to what speakers may be heard upon the campus;
in the use of the term “good judgment” or its opposite when variant
professors are attacked; in the selection and promotion of members of
the staff; in the budget; in consciousness of the legislature at state
institutions, and in consciousness of the donor at others; finally, in
the development of the present dominant type of college and university
administration. If we compare state institutions with privately endowed
ones in these matters, we do not discover any great difference. The
same scale, from overt repression, through tacit abstention, to
courageous championship of real freedom, is found filled up by both,
and institutions representing the religious motive have no distinctive
place of their own upon this scale. Fear to use academic freedom is
not a mark of either religious or secular institutions; it is merely
academic! In short, real freedom for the mind is as much a problem
in our day as in that of Galileo. It is the subject-matter that has
changed.
Not that hypocrisy is in the academic saddle. No; our trouble is the
confusion that arises from sincerely believing in freedom but also
sincerely fearing it. This is why technicalities of procedure play so
large a rôle; this is the reason why so much depends upon judicious
silence. It is because we are not quite at one with ourselves in our
own souls that what might be the lusty exercise of our powers of
variation becomes merely the absence of certain external restraints.
Fear puts us on the defensive; whereupon, quietly reducing the points
of possible attack appears to be a dictate of practical wisdom.
The handling of freedom in our legal system is not a whit more daring
than in our ecclesiastical and educational institutions. It is not
customary to construe particular laws in the spirit of an expanding
liberty; nor do courts, as a rule, endeavor to get at the core of
justice, ethically considered. The technical theory of their function
is that they are umpires between litigants, responsible merely for
seeing that contests are conducted according to prescribed rules.
In fact, and of course, courts are and must be more than this; they
cannot be merely automatic appliers of laws and precedents. We do not
impugn the integrity of judges if we say that they cannot help being
influenced in their decisions by their understanding of the world in
which they live, and also by their own appreciation of values in life,
in society, in law and government. It was no statutory obligation, but
his chosen use of the discretion allowed him that gave its noteworthy
character to Judge Thayer’s conduct of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. In
the celebrated contest over a sweat-shop law in the State of New York,
it was a belated outlook upon industrial changes that dictated the
first decision of the Court of Appeals, and a changed outlook that
brought about the reversal of it. Appointments to the supreme bench
of the United States are not made upon the basis of ability, probity,
and experience alone; the appointing power has regard also to social
attitudes. The subsequent votes of appointees cannot be accounted for
without recognizing the influence of these attitudes.
All this has been pointed out again and again. The purpose of saying
it once more is to raise the question why courts do not more often
give the weight of their discretion to the expansive use of freedom?
Why do not judges openly and frankly avow the principles that control
them when they perform discretionary acts? Why minimize the fact that
discretion is used and that thereby something new under the sun might
be brought to birth? Consider the often-cited treatment of “freedom of
contract.” Since coercion takes new forms in our changing society, it
was inevitable that real freedom of contract should move its old line
fences. But how timid the legal and judicial mind has been toward the
plain fact, and how reluctant to draw the necessary inference. Timidity
counsels, “Make no new precedents.” The short of it is that here is the
same fear of freedom that we found in parents, clergymen, teachers,
professors, and college administrators.
Even the specific guarantees of freedom that we have incorporated
into our organic law do not get themselves enforced with the
simple directness that should mark real faith in them. Liberty of
speech, of press, of assemblage, and of domiciliary privacy, as
liberty was understood and intended by the framers of our scheme of
self-government, is boldly invaded in several of our states by the
police, the executive arm, and the legislatures. And the courts comply,
as they surely would not do if the mental climate were to change. Now,
it is especially interesting to note that the police never stop a
meeting of jingoes and fire-eaters even though they advocate illegal
violence; that no legislature has attempted to put a check upon
those who would subvert the constitution by suppression of freedom;
that those who actually have interfered with the constitutional
liberties of others go unpunished; and that a Department of Justice
that keeps a wary eye upon pacifists is untroubled when beliefs and
policies like the following are blazoned: That force is the ultimate
arbiter in human affairs; that our government must act accordingly;
that we should enforce our economic self-interest against our weaker
neighbors regardless of their liberties; that there is an inevitable
clash between our self-interest and that of other great powers
(sometimes named), and that we must fight these powers, not relying
upon conciliation, arbitration, or anything else that signifies that
humanity is capable of growing towards rationality in its conduct.
The paradox of all this deepens towards the ridiculous or the
tragic when one discovers that these men who despitefully use the
constitutional guarantees are fervid worshippers of the Constitution,
and firm believers that the founders, who based their policy upon
trust in human nature, made the greatest political discovery of all
ages, a discovery that is destined to bless the whole world! Here is
intellectual hara-kiri. Asked to explain it, those who practice it
tell us sincerely that they believe in freedom as an everyday method
of getting along; it is only when we get into a pinch, when vital
interests are at stake, or when freedom is abused, that suppression is
required. What deep distrust is this! The freedom that cost our fathers
so dearly precisely because it applied to the major and contested
concerns of society now becomes a convenience in handling small affairs
but is of no use in emergencies.
In all these mixings-up of faith and unfaith in our supposably achieved
liberties one can discern a foundation-issue in our philosophy of life.
The whole universe of our experience--the solid earth, the sea, the
sky, the past and present of society, the achievements of science,
the devices and desires of the heart, the inspiring faiths--all this
confronts us with the question, What do you really want, and how much
will you dare on behalf of it? Our answer involves our assessment
of our own selfhood. Usually the alternatives for our enterprise
are, on the one hand, increasing or stabilizing some conventional
and comfortable function, or, on the other hand, reaching after an
unconventional blessing that costs the pain of self-reconstruction. We
cannot have brotherhood, democracy, industrial justice, world-peace,
_or freedom_ at a lower cost than this. Shall we, then, experiment,
explore, adventure in the area of selfhood as we are doing at the
present moment in the sky? Can the mind, as well as the body, support
itself in a less dense medium than that in which it has moved in the
past?
The scientific movement has made us daring in the realm of ponderables
but not with respect to ourselves. Pure science seeks only one
value, that of knowing the connections of things; its one interest
in personality is that scientific method should be employed; its one
interest in freedom is this. In our academic institutions a spiritually
delicate sensitivity at this point may be joined with indifference to
freedom in the other essays of man. A kind of daring different from
that of the laboratory or even of polar exploration is required if we
are to cast off the moorings of an old selfhood and voyage forth in
search of new spiritual continents.
Further, the scientific spirit can be and often is inattentive to the
life-values or dis-values that are promoted by the application of its
discoveries. The uncriticized purposes of the present, accordingly,
have unobstructedly capitalized on their own static behalf our
enormously increased power over nature. Indeed, these purposes,
because they use new and shining machinery, have actually acquired
something of the éclat of the sciences. A current writer, according
to an announcement that has appeared since this chapter was begun,
declares that science has actually been accepted as a sort of messiah,
deliverer, or solver of life’s final problems--a rôle for which it is
totally unqualified.[8] The obverse of this attitude toward science is
inertia toward the values that science as such does not feel.
The weight of precedent is, indeed, on the side of force, not of
cooperative thinking, as the arbiter of human relations; it is on
the side of class privilege, not of democracy; of repression, not of
liberty. But always the light shines in this darkness, though the
darkness comprehend it not. For nobody wants sheer force, nobody
approves all that class-selfishness implies, everybody believes (after
a fashion) in liberty even though with contradictory restrictions.
The picture is that of a world of personal selves in evolution. If,
in any species that belongs to an evolutionary order, thought mixes
with desire; if self-guidance arrives at all, these paradoxical
inconsistencies are bound to occur. The present satisfaction, once
thought about, is certain to resist any and every not-yet-experienced
good. There always will be trepidation when the half-gods go.
But, wherever thought and desire do mix, there occurs the process
of emancipation from authority; freedom is the very soul of moral
evolution. We see why it is feared; but need it be? Is it not possible
to devise a technic for freedom whereby we shall be somewhat less
inconsistent, somewhat less distrustful of one another, somewhat more
wisely venturesome in the realm of selfhood?
XXV
THE MOTIVES OF YOUTH COMPARED WITH THOSE OF AGE
The problem of freedom and restraint, of impulse and reason, of the
real nature of human motive forces, comes far to the fore today in
world-wide perplexity over the present restlessness of youth. Our
young people won’t “stay put.” Many of them refuse to postpone life’s
satisfactions--“they want theirs now.” A few are asking the critical
questions, wherein life’s greater satisfactions consist, and whether
our present ways of life lead toward them. On all hands there is a
loosening of the bonds that tie the present to the past; the face of
youth is towards the future, whether the next evening or the next
century. Here, accordingly, is an unparalleled opportunity to “see the
wheels go ’round” in human conduct. Here is life only a step removed
from naïveté; and here is a display, side by side, of inexperienced
youth and experienced age.
Perhaps it would not be misleading to say inexperienced youth with
“the lid off,” and experienced age with “the lid on.” What, then, are
the main differences between them in point of motivation? The usual
answer is simplicity itself--that is, the answer usually given by
experienced age. These youngsters are carried away, we are told, by
“the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life”--to
use an ancient phrase for pleasure-seeking instincts; whereas--so the
assumption runs--we oldsters are guided by a rationality that governs
our instincts and keeps them in their place. Most persons of maturity
are sure that, in the by and large, experience brings wisdom, that the
rules and precedents that the mature observe are dictates of practiced
reason, and therefore that youths who do not follow substantially in
our footsteps act irrationally, and thereby subject themselves to the
penalties of rashness.
This view of the matter contains a grain of truth, of course, but
only a grain. A burnt child does dread the fire, but a child with a
stomachache does not dread the unwholesome food that produced it.
“Experience” at the dining-room table often results in wrong dietary
habits that even maturity regards as right. “Experience” as a parent
can fix upon the mind the most futile and injurious conceptions of
parental authority--it has done so in multitudes of cases. “Experience”
as a teacher fastened upon us a kind of school-teaching that we are
now struggling, with enormous effort, to free ourselves from. So, in
statecraft, in churchcraft, in industrial and economic relations, in
social customs, we oldsters are dragging about with us a terrible
weight of unnecessary and injurious habit and precedent. In fact,
experience has brought us, along with some wisdom, a lot of unwisdom
which it has baptized with the sanctity of our years.
Accumulation of experience or of years is not of great inherent
significance; neither is the lack of years. What is important is the
way in which we deal with experiences as they arise. This is the
problem for age and youth alike, and here is the basis for the most
useful approach to the youth-question. It is not enough to say that in
childhood and adolescence instinctive impulses are more varied and
more clamorous; nor have we said enough when we add to this that in our
day there is an unusually wide cleft between the ways of the young and
the ways of the old. The really important comparison is that between
the characteristic technic of the young and of the old in the making
and the unmaking of approved precedents.
When we make this comparison, what do we find? On the side of age we
find man measuring himself by his own past, mechanizing the wisdom
of yesterday so that it cannot grow through today’s experiences,
making his own imperfections into virtues. We behold, consequently,
accumulations of property, of personal and institutional influence, and
even of scientific knowledge bolstering customs and standards after
they have become plainly questionable. If we of the older generation
had the grit to be historically, psychologically, and ethically
realistic towards ourselves, we should see the irony of our position.
We have a timid wisdom, a self-restricting wisdom, a pseudo-wisdom, for
we have no adequate technic for getting out of new experiences what
they could teach us, nor for graduating from precedents whose teaching
is already completed.
When the Disciples asked, “Who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?”
Jesus set a small child in the midst, saying, “Except ye become as
little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
On the other hand--what a paradox! who is more unwilling than an
adolescent to become as a little child? Are modern youths very ready to
learn? This is the test for them, and when they prove that they are in
the attitude of learning, they must next show whether they will take
the trouble to acquire a technic for learning. We say that youth is
forward-reaching; it thinks in terms of the future. But in what sense
is this true? Most commonly in the sense of aspiration to be classified
with adults and to enjoy their prerogatives. It does not usually mean a
stretching towards any unprecedented good. Youth sheds the precedents
of its own childhood only to adopt the precedents of those a little
older than itself! The “flapper” of fourteen gets herself up and
conducts herself as if she were eighteen at least; the boy of sixteen
wants to be “a man of the world” right now; almost any youth of twenty
can be relied upon to conform scrupulously to the customs of some
group, set, or type that, in his estimation, has “arrived.”
Heedlessness of precedents is not characteristic of youth. Youth is
avid for them. If satisfactory ones are not found in the generation
that is just ahead, any pleasant thing that happens twice is seized
upon and stereotyped. Placed in as free an environment as the modern
college campus, young people form rigidly conventional groupings
and adopt rigid campus customs. The average college student cannot
stand alone; he is a very bond-slave to social precedents; and he is
one of the most intolerant critics of those who are more individual
than himself. Even at the points where modern youths flout adult
conventions, other conventions quickly form. The very follies of
youth are conventionalized. Why the hip flask at dancing parties? Why
the present wave in the ancient stream of “petting” and “necking”?
Why is “jazz” for the time being the only music that is interesting?
Why Valentinitis? Doubtless the starting-point of each of them is a
particular situation that involves a stimulus or a deficiency, but
the rapid spread occurs through imitation and mutual suggestion; and
the self-accepted excuse or justification lies, not in the nature and
results of the act or the experience, but in the fact that it is the
conventional or expected thing.
The similarity between the ways of youth and the ways of age is
remarkable. Think of the money and the time that adults have spent in
the last ten years in order to listen to radio trash. Compare the silly
social compulsions of the college campus with the force that compels
everybody to stand whenever “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung or
played. Or compare, in point of mental process, young women’s adulation
of Valentino with mature men’s adulation of Coolidge. Does any fever of
modern youth reach a higher temperature than automobilitis among the
parents?
Moreover, just as it would be unfair to the present generation of
mature men and women to characterize it solely by such flightiness, so
we should do injustice to the young people of today if we judged them
by these shallow performances and conventionalities. For the opening of
eyes and the enlargement of horizons is as marked a fact as the other.
The new freedom assumed by the youth of today, the increase in spending
money, the widened range of activities made possible by machinery, and
the multiplication of attractive objects or experiences that can be had
for a money consideration--all these, taken together, stimulate thought
as well as instinct. They present alternatives, awaken conflicting
motives, make uncertainties vivid; all of which is favorable to
reflection. It is probable that even “jazzy” young people are doing
more thinking upon life’s alternatives than was done by the average
youths of yesterday. Many who appear to be blown hither or thither by
popular folly are really experimenting, watching, putting limits to
their indulgences, endeavoring to be ethically realistic; all of which
should be reassuring to those of us who are able to trust the human
mind when it is awake and at work.
Furthermore, from a minority of youths, very modern youths, there
flash forth upon our distraught world some of the most hopeful signs.
I refer not so much to the impulsive idealism of some, so strongly
contrasting with the frivolity of others, as to the union of critical
thinking with sober idealism that appears in spots all over the world.
Let the conventional self-flattery of maturity take heed to itself,
for “a chiel’s amang ye, takin’ notes” upon our efficiencies and
inefficiencies. The most effective critics of modern life are not
Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, but younger spirits who possess
both a scientific attitude of inquiry and an idealism that is not
tired or sour. In the colleges such youngsters are engaged not only in
“de-bunking” the customs of both faculties and students but also in
thinking out something better.
To the credit of the older generation be it here recorded that
various presidents and faculties are welcoming this critical scrutiny
by much younger heads. Before me, for example, lies an official
college bulletin that consists of a report by a student committee
upon the curriculum, the teaching, and other official affairs of the
institution. Similarly, there is a stirring in the churches. Young
people are holding conventions in which they ask such questions
and propose such measures as have not proceeded from youth at any
time within the memory of men now living, if ever. And again it is
remarkable to see how much of their freshness is welcomed by the older
generation.
There is danger, indeed, that the hospitality of adult minds will
divert these younger minds from their journey of exploration.
Palliatives will be sought for in situations that require a drastic
study of causes. Cooperation in a respectable good will postpone
appraisement of the limitations of it. The lack of experience on the
part of thinking young people, together with their sense of being at
official disadvantage as compared with their elders, makes them too
thankful for half-loaves where whole loaves are needed.
Youth’s rashness, and the perils that it involves, require closer
analysis than they ordinarily receive. The fault of the great majority
is precipitate acceptance of adult standards and ways of life. This is
youth’s most characteristic rashness. Here is a young workingman who
says that the “powers that be” are so strongly intrenched in the state
and in industry that his vote can make no difference; hence, he pursues
a policy of merely wriggling within his immediate environment so as to
get out of it what he can. Here is a high-school senior who declares
outright that the professed standards of adults do not represent the
forces whereby things get done; money and power _are_ the things that
count; the strong _do_ exploit the weak; this _is_ the road to success,
and he intends to walk in it. Here are multitudes of young men and
young women who are so rash as to accept the class-consciousness of
their parents as though it were self-evidently correct. And here are
myriads of members of church young-people’s societies who actually
regard the conventional religion about them as a fulfilment of Jesus’
double law of love. The great and deadly rashness of youth takes the
form of hasty acquiescence in things as they are or seem to be.
Of those who do not acquiesce, by far the larger number will be found
in the following classes: Those who make an idealistic spurt, but grow
tired, or become discouraged because of the inertness or the antagonism
of others; those who talk but do not act; those who act but are too
thankful for “small favors,” too gratified by minor improvements, to do
anything really fundamental; and those who, seeing this lag in things
fundamental, “give it up.” All these become swallowed up, in the end,
by the insatiable respectability of the _status quo_.
Radicalism, whether that of the mere skeptic, or that which discards
the good for the better and the better for the best, is not
characteristic of the young. There is only a small minority of thinking
youths who make any sustained effort to go to the bottom of things. Of
these there are three main types: The attackers, the appliers, and the
investigators.
The attackers turn life inside out in order to show how irrational
or futile the accepted order of things is. The working hypothesis
appears to be that whatever enjoys official power or general acceptance
is either misled or misleading. The results are, of course, one
sided, but they are not useless. Until our institutions provide for
self-criticism, they are bound to be victims of self-deception;
therefore they must be “shown up” again and again. Probably attack
is good, in the end, even for our valid convictions, because they
get tangled with what is temporary and merely specious. It is true,
of course, that these young attackers are, to a considerable extent,
imitators of the mature writers, mentioned in an earlier section, who
exploit our irrationality as a literary gold mine. There is, therefore,
a touch of conventionality and dependence in these would-be emancipated
youngsters. They should be listened to, however, because they are on
track of aspects of truth that are commonly overlooked.
The appliers are those who endeavor to go the whole length with some
approved principle, as, for example, Jesus’ injunction to treat all men
as brothers. This sort of endeavor, in turn, leads to a critique of
life not less drastic than that of the attackers, but more likely to be
patient and considerate towards our weaknesses. Moreover, the appliers
exhibit various attempts to govern their present conduct by exalted
standards for which the society about them is not ready. The service
of such youths is various. It reveals to us the disparity between the
pious phrases of our lips and our daily conduct in church, state, and
occupation. It presents many a living example of fidelity to an ideal.
It spreads the contagion of faith, making better things practicable
because we believe that they are so.
The third, or investigator, type of non-conventional youth goes behind
the appearance of things by intellectual processes that sometimes have
all the coolness of science. He must be “shown”; neither _ipse dixit_
nor general acquiescence satisfies him. What does the curriculum of
this college include and what does it omit, and why? What are the
most effective methods of teaching, and do our professors use them?
What are the real values of our extra-curricular activities? How are
our teachers chosen and promoted, and how much are they paid? Why do
we have religious denominations, creeds, missions, worship? What is
the truth about our international relations? What is the life of the
industrial worker like? How is “hiring and firing” done? I’ll get a
job and find out. What really is happening in Germany or Russia? Why
shouldn’t I go over there to see for myself? This sort of questioning
is growing, and it is bound to spread in colleges and high schools.
It is one of the most solidly hope-giving aspects of the entire youth
situation.
These three types of aggressive non-conformity overlap and blend,
of course. As a rule students of the investigator type are moved by
dissatisfaction with the _status quo_; they investigate in order
to find the road towards some ideal. Not seldom the applier type
discovers the fascination of social statistics and even of history. The
attacker, in turn, will usually be found working for specific reforms.
All three types make freedom their common cause--freedom to think
without fear of consequences; freedom to speak with sincerity upon
great issues; freedom to listen to speakers who represent disagreeable
minority positions; freedom to participate in the determination of the
conditions under which they shall live.
In these youths who really transcend conventions we have a hint of
what might be, what ought to be, the normal place of young people in
society. Yes--let me answer your doubt before you state it--there is
danger that, taking advantage of the questioning mood, the dissenting
mood, or the consciousness of freedom, wayward impulse will make the
worse appear the better reason. There is danger in asking questions,
but God took this risk when he created man; and by far the greater
danger is that we shall not ask questions enough, nor questions that
go deep enough. By far the greatest evil in the youth-life of today
is that so few young men and women find any antidote to the way men
imitate themselves and one another--any antidote, that is to say, to
the pseudo-wisdom of age.
PART IV
HOW CAN THEY BE RELEASED?
XXVI
THE INESCAPABLE TASK
Capacity for high motivation, but doubt of the existence of such
capacity because our performance is low; low performance due, not
chiefly to external obstacles nor to remains of the beast in us, but
to self-imposed bondage to our past and present selves, the instrument
that binds us being that which is high, not low, in us, even our
intelligence and reason--this is what we behold. The same intelligence
that masters external circumstance by looking behind and before, by the
same process subjects us to ourselves. On the other hand, intelligence
chafes at the bondage that it has created, and knows itself as the
agent of emancipation.
Such is our self-imprisoning, self-releasing, deeply paradoxical human
nature. But there is a difference. We imprison ourselves automatically,
but we do not automatically release ourselves. The door closes with a
spring lock; it opens only by directed effort. At least, adherence to
the _status quo_ requires as a rule little reflection, while release
from it into something better requires much. In particular, the
_habit_ of releasing myself from what I am and have been depends upon
continuous alertness joined with self-detachment or objectivity with
respect to myself.
Our greatest lack is a habit of self-release, a habit of being free
and freely cooperative. Such a habit cannot be acquired by repetition
of impulsive revolts or impulsive repentances, nor by jumping at
novelties; it requires self-discipline; it depends upon practising a
technic.
But a technic for freedom in the sphere of life’s values and policies
can scarcely be said to exist. Scientific method is indeed the
technic of free intelligence conceived as a disinterested observer of
events; but something more than on-looking is involved in living. Our
difficulty lies in inadequate procedures in the weighing of values and
the choice of ends. Here, too, scientific method--as we shall presently
see in more detail--is essential to freedom; we are not too enamored
of science nor too ready to use its technic, but not enough so. Yet
scientific method is only one factor in the technic of self-release.
In the absence of the other factors, it becomes, in fact, a servant
of inferior, reactionary, or even destructive ways of life, as we
abundantly see at the present moment.
The inescapable task for our culture--for education, religion, social
organization, and (I surmise) literature and the other arts--is to
develop a technic for freedom in the sense of continuous release from
continuously-forming precedents--release into selves that are neither
precedent-ridden nor yet fidgety or flighty but creative.
This implies much more than readiness to participate in reform
movements. Excitement over the dust and rubbish that have accumulated,
or even willingness to clean Augean stables, does not get at causes; it
deals only with the products of self-poisoning processes, not with the
sources of the poison; it produces little beyond oscillation between
the fulness of a vice and the emptiness of a virtue.
Even the religion that glories in its ascription of infinite value to
persons has failed to develop a technic for releasing personality from
its self-imposed limitations. Indeed, the maintenance of some of these
limitations in the form of beliefs, institutions, and rules of conduct
has been erected into a virtue.
Meantime, religion conducts a largely futile struggle against the
bondage of sin. The churches pray, exhort, instruct, but all this
is effective, for the most part, only with sins that already lack
social standing. Current religion knows not how to deal with the
deep depravity of our respectable faults, and indeed it scarcely
recognizes them as faults. On the other hand, it magnifies petty
virtues and a-dynamic goodness. It offers emotional elevation and a
sense of selfhood through worship, but since God is rarely worshipped
as a creative power here and now at work within the moral order, the
worshipper’s self remains complacent and accommodating, an arrived and
secure soul; it does not become a chrysalis breaking from its shell.
Any adequate religion will call for a different way of paying respect
to the Creator, and a different way of receiving him into our lives.
Worship must come to include within itself a technic for continually
transcending the religious self and the religious organization of
yesterday and of today, a technic for free reconstruction within the
whole realm of our deepest hopes, our highest ideals, our ultimate
convictions, and our profoundest fellowships and loyalties.
Considerable liberty in the sense of toleration of dissent already
exists, it is true, in large areas of Protestantism, but this is not
the same as a technic for freedom. When we merely tolerate dissent, we
the tolerators do not dissolve the special privilege claimed by our
past and present selves; our own souls remain indoors, and we decline
the responsibility for exploration and the changing of our maps.
What of the schools, then? Surely they are emancipators of personality?
Yes and no. Education, as we moderns of the West practise it, contains
the most remarkable ambiguity. For it sincerely intends to develop the
specifically human capacity for intelligent self-control, but with
equal sincerity it intends to keep the teacher (that is, the generation
that is passing away) in control of the pupil (the generation that is
arriving).
We justify this dualism, or at least keep it alive and
respectable-looking, by the violent assumption that we who are about to
die already possess wisdom, already know how to live, already incarnate
pure intelligence to such a degree that the next generation cannot
do better than walk in our footsteps. “Acquire self-control,” we say
to the young, but we mean, “Form a habit of doing what we oldsters
want you to do.” This reminds one of the old skit on the doctrine of
predestination:
You can and you can’t; you will, and you won’t;
You’ll be damned if you do, you’ll be damned if you don’t.
Or, still better, it illustrates Paul’s famous confession: “There is
war in my members.... The good that I would do, I do not, and the
evil that I would not do, that I do.” What we should do is to make
our educational system a systematic warning against walking in our
footsteps.
The whole conception of education as primarily a process of handing on
the intelligence that we possess is an error. For intelligence is not a
deposit that one can possess; it is not composed of particular mental
acts and habits; endeavor to possess it, and you gather to yourself
ashes and smoking embers--the flame has escaped you.
Under the surface of contemporary education these two irreconcilables
are already in conflict. We are beginning to see that the prime
function of schools is to put the young into possession of methods
for inquiry and for testing. And in the light of this function we are
beginning to ask, What is it to teach patriotism, or religious loyalty,
or social-mindedness? The result is conflict that goes deeper than a
contest between two finished views of the state or of the church or
of social organization. It is a contest between two opposed ways of
acquiring and holding views, opposed ways of dealing with standards, of
handling ever-rising new issues, of choosing our loyalties.
The effect of making education an instrument whereby the wisdom of a
departing generation shall control the arriving one never is what the
theory of it calls for. Theoretically, the impartially selected best
in contemporary civilization should be transmitted; actually some sort
of partizanship is propagated. A state school in Canada and one in
the United States, though they be within sight of each other, do not
develop a common rationality in respect to either of the two countries
or in respect to Great Britain. The teaching of what is called
patriotism is the inculcation of partizanship and of the closed mind.
There is nothing in it that enables pupils to discriminate between
different varieties of patriotism, or that prepares them for a possibly
unprecedented type.
Religious education in the church school, likewise, is partizan. It is
directed towards the perpetuation of a specific loyalty, not towards
the capacity and the habit of weighing loyalties. Even if Christians
already have the truth, this does not justify partizan methods in
teaching it; for the truth, one would guess, requires no special
privilege. Indeed, it is worth asking whether partizanship on behalf
of a good thing does not always obscure its goodness. Would it be
un-Christian so to teach the young that they should freshly and freely
weigh Christianity and its alternatives, my denomination and other
denominations, our civilization and other actual or possible ones?
Because we do not thus educate we have churches that have no technic
for correcting their corporate errors, no technic for squarely meeting
new situations, no technic for getting denominations together even when
these denominations know that they ought to do it. Moreover, no just
balance is held between majorities and minorities in the churches, or
between laymen and clergy or clerical officers.
Whether the need for conversion is greater in church education or
in state education might be questioned; in any case the spiritual
sickness of both is the same, and the remedy is the same. Both display
a self-imprisonment of the spirit, though both aspire to freedom;
both take steps towards freedom, but hesitate, fear, and compromise
or become inefficient from both points of view. In this juncture our
inescapable duty is to go forward, not into discrete freedoms doled
out piecemeal, but into freedom as an all-inclusive technic and habit
whereby we shall continuously outgrow ourselves both individually and
collectively.
Some parts of such a technic are now in process of experimental
development. We shall in due time point them out. Other parts we have
still to seek. The assumption under which the seeking must proceed
is that the technic of freedom is not a pattern that we impose upon
conduct, but itself a manifestation of freedom, and therefore something
more like friendship or worship.
XXVII
THE FUNCTION OF MINORITIES
To say “freedom” is to be reminded of the old, old story of the
struggle of apparent weakness against obvious power; the desperate
straits of a truth against which men stop their ears; the plight of
the simply human as against the institutional; the contrast between
injustice in obscure corners and massive but inert virtue in the
market-place.
Freedom connotes minorities. There is no instance of a majority that,
having become secure in its power, spontaneously secretes freedom from
within itself for any considerable time. It appears to be about as
easy for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle as for those who
have power over men to cultivate freedom in the same men. Even under
constitutions that guarantee individual liberty, actual liberty exists,
if at all, through continuous struggle of a dissatisfied few against
the lethargy of a satisfied many. The only exceptions that I can think
of are the few teachers and parents who, imbued with respect for the
personalities of the young, endeavor to educate them through their
freedom instead of by canalizing their minds.
Our reliance must be, then, not upon might and power, but upon the
kind of spiritual strength that can reside in those who are accounted
weak. Let us consider, then, the function of minorities, and the
more effective methods of performing this function. This subject is
strangely neglected, and when not neglected, strangely misunderstood.
It is a truism of history that the privileges that we enjoy simply
because we are men were won for us from reluctant power first of all
through the daring dreams, and then the daring struggle, of a few.
We glory in these early minorities, or minor forces as the world
measures force, yet for the most part our present citizens regard it
as a misfortune to be in a minority, especially if it is small and
its triumph seems far away. Pity or contempt towards those who are
“different” is the conventional thing among us, but when have success
and power, however unjust, been contemptible?
Up to the present time we in America have almost entirely failed to
develop and utilize the capacities of political minorities. The popular
assumption is that the function of a minority party is to win the next
election, and then to rule as the majority party. If the election goes
against us, we think that the next thing to do is to expire or to make
terms with the dominant majority, as Mr. Roosevelt did after a single
defeat of the Progressive Party, and as Democratic leaders have done
for many years when their party has been out of power. The assumed
principle is, Win the election, or else give up, or compromise and
divide the benefits.
But this leaves out of account one of the chief services that a
minority might perform, especially a minority that maintains a
continuous existence through a long period of defeats. This service
is nothing less than helping the majority party to use its power more
wisely than it is capable of using it without outside help. To make the
party in power think twice before acting; to make it aware that all
that is hidden will be brought to light; to make it conscious that
nothing is settled until it is settled right; and to keep alive the
idea that the last and the least of our citizens must be taken into
account--this is a service that the majority cannot perform for itself,
and that neither a short-lived nor compromising minority can perform,
but only a minority whose convictions are deep enough to sustain it
indefinitely.
Whatever party or individual is in power, real grievances exist;
somebody is oppressed, or exploited, or thwarted in his legitimate
claims. It is the function of the minority to listen to his cry and to
become voice for him in the centers of administration and legislation.
It is likewise the function of the minority to keep its thinking
“ahead of the game” and to initiate ideas that require to be mulled
over before action is taken. When a vital idea is apprehended it is
to be talked about, and thought through, and revised, and kept before
people’s minds until it has the effect that is its due.
I have spoken as if the tools of a political minority were weapons,
and as if strife were of the essence of the technic that freedom
requires. But herein I have merely used existing notions of politics
in order to point the way to something better. That strife is not the
process whereby minorities can best perform most of their functions
will be shown in a subsequent section. At the present moment what most
concerns us is to perceive that minorities are a normal part of any
live society, political or other; to ascertain the needs that only
minorities can meet, and in the light of what we thus find to set forth
some items in a rational policy for individual conduct.
First of all, we need to give more attention than is customary to the
effects of power upon those who wield it, and we need to educate
the young with direct reference to these effects. The reason for
continuous universal education with respect to this matter is the
all-pervasiveness of the problem and of the difficulty. We have to deal
not only with power lodged in officers of state, but also in parents,
employers, labor leaders, investors, clergymen and ecclesiastical
officers, and leaders in many civic groups; not only with power lodged
in adults but also the power of the young over one another in play and
social relations; finally, we have to do not merely with the conduct
of leaders, but also with that of members of majorities or of other
dominant groups. Education on this point is needed not only in order to
put those who wield power upon guard against themselves, but also to
make the generality of men reasonably critical towards their leaders,
and towards all dominant parties or groups. In short, the whole
populace should acquire a habit of sensitiveness towards all power and
authority wheresoever it is lodged.
Let us see, now, what the dangers are. They have their center in
the fact that consciousness of possessing power tends to divert the
possessor’s attention from main issues to subordinate ones. The
experience of being a cause, and of being able to bring things to pass,
is enjoyable; therefore it seeks to prolong itself as though it were a
good _per se_, whereas it is really good only when its consequences,
on the whole, are wholesome. Thus the stake that one properly has in
one’s selfhood becomes exaggerated and distorted. This produces in the
victim at one time undue respect for precedents that he himself has
created, at other times undue responsiveness to the seductions of the
moment. The resulting pseudo-virtue of consistency, and the obverse
pseudo-virtue of “adaptability” or “practicality” alike put one’s
present self into the foreground instead of the issues that the self
should be meeting.
Instead of “one’s self” in this description, we may read, upon
occasion, “one’s party,” “one’s church,” “one’s set,” or “one’s
institution”; the truth of the description is unaffected. In short,
consciousness of power tends to beget self-will in individuals and in
groups.
Not only does this self-will tend to dislocate issues _ab initio_; it
also cumulatively surrounds itself with products of its own that wall
it off from surrounding realities. One now uses “vested interests” as
the measure of other interests; one measures one’s efficiency by the
ratio between planned result and actual result, not realizing that
the lack of a better plan, a wider horizon, spells inefficiency; one
consorts with persons of like mind, whether partners or beneficiaries,
erects their joint opinion into an orthodoxy, and becomes callous
towards outsiders and towards unaccustomed ideas; at last the fate
that was implicit in the situation from the beginning fulfils its
measure--incapacity to reconstruct from within, and ignoble terror
before the danger of explosion from without.
It is scarcely needful to dwell upon the less subtle consequences of
possessing power, such as exaggeration of the importance of security
for oneself and one’s possessions; secretiveness; the temptation to
employ illegitimate means and to justify them by the importance of the
ends in view, and the danger, at last, of conscienceless corruption.
Let no one think that this is a description merely of political
parties, cliques, office-holders, and bosses, nor that the economic
sphere is the only one that needs to be considered along with the
political. No; the psychology of the matter applies to the whole
experience of wielding power. Many years ago a woman became, as she
thought, disillusioned concerning a leader who was widely known for
his utterly unselfish devotion to the common weal. “For,” said she,
“I have learned that in his family he is dictatorial to the point
of tyranny, whereas outside his family he teaches and practises the
exact opposite.” It was my privilege to point out that there is here
no psychological inconsistency. “He was born into a social system
that took for granted that a husband and father would be the ‘head of
the family,’ and as such would make decisions for the whole family,
and employ the family means to carry his decisions through. From this
root his domestic habits grew as grows the grass. On the other hand,
outside the family he encountered a contrary set of assumptions, and he
developed a contrasting set of habits. These habits truly reveal his
capacity for sensitive response to persons; if he were to start his
family experience _de novo_ under the assumptions of the new day, with
no consciousness of the old-fashioned power as ‘head of the family,’ he
would form domestic habits that would satisfy you.”
Knowledge of the psychology of power is needed in our religious
organizations. For here additional emotional sanctions gather around
the conduct of clerical leaders, and around institutional acts, past
and present. The religiousness of both leader and led reinforces the
tendencies that have been described, and then partly overlooks, partly
hushes up, partly defends, and partly sanctifies the results.
One great communion, the Roman Catholic, not only concentrates all
power in a hierarchy, but also identifies the authority of the
hierarchy with the authority of an unchanging God. Theoretically
it does not follow that all priestly acts and policies are sound,
for distinction is made between the bishop or the Pope acting
as an individual and the same person wielding divine authority.
Nevertheless in practice this distinction tends to fade out. What the
Pope says “goes” without anybody’s stopping to inquire whether or
not it is _ex cathedra_. If the bishops in the United States adopt a
policy--concerning parochial schools, say--that they have a perfect
right to reject or to reconsider, opposition to it is instantly branded
as disloyalty to the church. A bishop has been known to go as far as to
assert that it is improper to discuss and evaluate episcopal conduct
except in official conclaves. In this situation the moral necessity
of institutional self-criticism is unprovided for. Minorities can
scarcely function at all. Even when oppressive use of power is made by
an occasional ecclesiastic, there is no known way to resist it without
being accused of straight disloyalty to Mother Church; and when a
high official becomes prideful, puffed up, and notorious for pompous
display, no way is at hand for deflating him.
Protestant bodies, though they offer far more opportunity for
reconstruction from within, even providing organs for lay participation
therein, nevertheless do not escape the tendencies that accompany
the exercise of power, nor provide adequate means for resisting
these tendencies. The immunities of officialdom, though they be not
denominated in the bond, are there. “Respect for the cloth” leads
to the coddling of theological students; by means of easy tests it
certifies intellectual weakness along with strength, and then piously
puts up with the resulting qualities of pulpit and pastoral skill.
For how many of the sermons preached last Sunday was there any real
occasion? Where real occasion for a sermon existed, was the needed and
serviceable sermon forthcoming? What is an efficient or successful
minister? The point of this question is not that ministers are human,
fallible, and of varying degrees of ability, but that the immunity
from real tests that their official position gives them misleads both
them and their parishioners. Keeping the church machinery going and
attracting support for it, or even increasing the membership, does
not of itself indicate anything as to what is happening within the
spiritual life. Here, as in politics, industry, and education, the
possession of power generates illusions.
A striking example of this illusory self-involution is the continuance
of denominational competition in rural communities after the facts
and the wickedness of it have been exposed. Denominational officers
responsible for this condition have become so far ankylosed by the
poison of officialdom that they take only the feeblest steps towards
reform, and meantime the laity, though it does not believe in this
competition, contributes the money for keeping it going.
Nothing will effectively counteract these tendencies except a further
development within Protestantism of the functions of minorities. Among
other things, we need a more critical church press and also more
periodicals devoted to religion but entirely independent of official
support. We must ask more questions, and questions with a sharper
point. We must not hesitate to bring about losses of some kinds of
power in order that spiritual powers of better quality may be released.
Genial humor and good-natured satire might well be employed as one
antidote to the sense of personal enlargement that so commonly attends
elevation to office. If we Protestants gasp at the effect upon Catholic
“dignitaries” of the authority that they wield, we should at least
snicker out loud at the effect upon our own bishops.
Active, unabashed, good-natured minorities are needed wherever our
life is organized, and indeed wherever, organized or not, we move in
masses. We owe a debt to anybody who employs unfashionable good taste.
There is room for coteries of persons bent upon reaching out beyond
the conventional to the beautiful and the true. We need minorities
in morals, too; minorities that will openly place the weak points
over against the strong points in current moral standards as well as
practice, and that will also pay the cost of experiments in living upon
a higher plane. We cannot have moral evolution without in some way
abandoning old standards and adopting new ones. If this abandoning and
adopting is desultory, hit-and-miss, and especially if it is compelled
to be secret, evolution becomes unduly slow and costly, or else unduly
fast and costly. The rational procedure is to recognize that there is
a place for minorities that seriously experiment with reconstructions
for the benefit of all. The widespread moral confusion and haste of
the present day is a natural result of the lack of critical minorities
thinking and experimenting in the open during the preceding two or
three generations when the conditions of existence were being rapidly
transformed by economic forces.
From some of the current concepts of education one would infer that in
the school and college world at least minorities must be flourishingly
performing their indispensable functions. One would expect students to
obtain a material part of their training in rationality from belonging
to this or that minority, and from the reciprocal modification of
majorities and minorities by each other. Some experience of this
kind is had, in fact, in self-government schemes of some sorts; yet
it appears that the educational possibilities of majority-minority
situations are rarely worked out either by pupils acting alone or
by pupils acting under the guidance of supervisors. Instead of the
learning of deficiencies and the enlargement of horizon that should
result from the interplay of groups, we find, too often, cock-crowing
by the victorious majority and a sense of futility upon the part of the
defeated minority.
This in the elementary and secondary schools. When we come to the
colleges, we find conditions even worse. The majority-minority
relations are so irrational that anything more ominous for the future
of society can scarcely be found. “Campus customs,” often trivial,
sometimes offensive, are enforced upon every last student with the
ruthlessness of a Czarist régime. If one refuses, say, to wear a green
cap, one is thrown into water or otherwise manhandled; or, if physical
penalties have been abolished, there are psychical penalties not less
compelling. The faculty of a certain college is proud to have rooted
physical violence completely out of the campus; yet on the same campus
there is a law that a freshman must deliver a match to any upper-class
man who demands one, and another law permits any upper-class man to
examine the socks that any freshman is wearing. “What would happen to
a freshman who refused to submit to these laws?” a visitor asked. The
reply was that if he persisted in his disobedience life would be made
so miserable for him that he would leave college. The visitor asked
again, “What would happen if a freshman sent to the college paper a
dignified communication in opposition to these customs?” The editor
answered that the communication would not be printed, but that if it
were printed the writer would suffer the penalty.
The quality of such campus laws must be judged by the effects upon both
those who command and those who obey. The pain, physical or mental,
even though it amount to cruelty, is not the worst of the matter, by
any means. A deeper wound by far is inflicted upon the perpetrators
themselves through the closing of their minds to thought and to the
conditions of rational social existence. Where minorities have no
voice, the mind of the majority decays. Perhaps the clearest sign
of what really happens here is the sheepish submissiveness of the
minority, and the salving of its sores by the thought that next year
one will have the privilege of tormenting somebody else.
“All the general student offices for the next three years have been
allotted. Even the freshmen who are to hold office in their senior
year have been picked out,” said one who knew. “How was it done?”
“Oh, politicians from the fraternities put their heads together and
distributed the plums.” “But how about the elections? Can these
politicians deliver the vote?” “Certainly.”
This may be an extreme case, but certainly “delivering the votes”
is common upon our campuses, and partizanship is taken as normal.
Majority-minority relations are made up of deals, combinations, sharp
practices, squabbles, and occasional corruption of the ballot. The
minutes of a certain chapter of a fraternity actually contain the
record of a motion, duly made and carried, that the chapter combine
with other fraternities therein named to get and divide the college
offices.
When we find such things in Pennsylvania colleges, or Ohio colleges,
or Illinois colleges, we are justified in asking whether academic
experience may not be contributing to the gang politics and the
political corruption proved to have been present in these states.
Though the means for proving a connection are lacking, the likelihood
of it is sufficient to give pause to the wise. At least this can be
asserted, that this sort of college experience contains no corrective
for this sort of political conduct.
One looks in vain for anything in the teaching or the administration
of colleges that promises to go far in the opposite direction.
Professors, who might be expected to be wise in such rudimentary
matters of the education of intelligence, are handicapped by lack of
reasonable minority-majority relations within their faculty. College
administration is in too many respects autocratic; a professor has too
much reason to suppose that minorities are unwelcome and futile. The
contacts of students with such mentors, whether in the classroom or
outside it, will not go far towards curing the ills of the campus.
Nor will the cure come, as far as now appears, from presidents and
deans. The “administrative mind,” admirable as it is for its ability to
fit human and other factors together in a general scheme, is the victim
of its own strength. It thinks of human problems in terms of possible
manipulation by a manager; it seeks quick results, and it is tempted to
value them above fine human relations; it fits men into its own plan
instead of developing in men a capacity to make plans. Prediction
is, of course, precarious, but the present indications are that our
best reliance for reform in this part of higher education is upon the
students themselves. Their power, measured in administrative scales, is
minor, but they are capable of attaining the spirit that overtops all
mechanics of administration. We know this because of what we already
see in individuals and minority groups upon many campuses. Students
are beginning to ask to be educated! And much of the best criticism
of the mass-folly of collegians comes from collegians themselves. The
growth of these minorities in number, in size, in insight, and in
articulateness is to be expected. There is room for hope that some day
minorities upon the campus will perform their true educational function.
The indispensable functions of minorities, then, are these: To bring
into the open any oppression, injustice, untruth, failure or defect
that the powers that be are committing or permitting or failing
to perceive; to apprehend and to define new issues, especially in
situations in which the majority has a strong motive for continuing
the _status quo_; to bring it to pass that ideas shall be thrashed out
before action is taken; to protect the ruling majority from becoming
the victim of its own power; finally, being convinced where truth and
right lie, to stick to the conviction through thick and thin without
compromise unless right reason shows that the conviction is erroneous.
Let any minority that pursues this policy become the majority if it
can; let it secure control if it can by fair and open means, and then
let it beware of its own power, and let it accept help from minorities
that now will arise in their turn.
The most important changes that are to occur tomorrow are in the
keeping of some minority now in existence or soon to arise. The most
creative thought will take its rise from discontent and criticism, not
from fattened respectability. The most significant part of society
in state, in church, in the industrial order, in education, is some
minority. Minorities can be wise or foolish. It is not necessarily
creditable to walk with the few nor discreditable to march with the
many (but only dangerous!). Nevertheless, the most significant part of
any society is some minority in which creative changes are germinating.
Without minorities society, as an order of reason, would perish.
XXVIII
RELEASE THROUGH COOPERATIVE THINKING
That release from the trammels of selfhood is to be found in some sort
of self-identification with other selves is one of the surest insights
men have achieved through millennial ponderings upon the meaning of
life. But the nature and the process of this mingling of personalities
have been variously conceived. Sympathy, particularly with sufferers;
oneness with a congregation of worshippers; obedience, as of soldiers
to a commander; fellowship through common loyalty to a person, a cause,
or an institution; friendship and affection; “letting go” in a crowd,
as in religious frenzies ancient and modern, in drinking bouts, or in
a football game--all these have recommended themselves as modes of
emancipation. All of them do in fact bring a sense of enlargement; we
are here on track of some conceivably universal good. Yet the contrasts
and the clashes between these heterogeneous modes of self-enlargement
warn us to think twice. When we do think twice, we shall ask from what
we need to be released, and into what, and what is the final result of
each of these types of experience.
As a rule, we struggle to be released without first inquiring into the
nature of our bondage, and as a result we hail as salvation almost any
experience that promotes the flow of self-forgetting emotion. Real
release, in any large and permanent sense, must be that which brings to
fruition the motive that is in all and through all our motivation--to
be a rational, self-guiding self in a society of such selves; and the
chains that must be struck off are the specific ones that we ourselves
have forged through partial and defective self-activity in the past.
I shall take for granted, without devoting a section to discussing
the point, that current thought is right, along with considerable
ancient thought, when it values friendship, affection, and generally
sympathetic relations between individuals as, in some degree, the
actual attainment of the life of reason. The same is true of the
experience of beauty, of delight in truth, and of play. All these
are genuinely emancipating experiences. They are a rational good in
themselves, and they fit into the framework of rationality in the
larger relations. It is in these larger relations that our problem is,
in practice, farthest from solution. In the modern world the individual
is obliged to make specific reactions to extensive social masses and
forces; further, many of these reactions must be made by the individual
as a member of some class, organization, or institution. Here is where
the shoe of precedent pinches most; here is where the capacity of the
individual to achieve any large freedom is most in question.
It is perhaps scarcely necessary to argue that dividing the world
of persons into a few who command and a many who obey is neither
practicable nor inherently rational. The impossibility of it and the
irrationality rest back upon the same fact, namely, that both those who
command and those who obey know themselves and one another as persons.
There is something present all ’round that is stronger than force. A
full measure of obedience never can be exacted from the many, and the
few cannot bring themselves to exact it. It is fascinating to witness
the possessors of power compromising with themselves in the use of
it; it is inspiring to see strength of spirit in those who are shorn
of power. Persons just have to get together upon the sheer basis of
personality.
There is a kind of freedom, as also a kind of get-together, in
herd-action, no doubt. For such action takes down the bars and lets
something inside of us caper. This capering may be lightsome, as in
a New Orleans Mardi Gras or a New York City election-night jamboree;
or it may be strenuous, as in mass support of a football team engaged
in a hard game; or it may be destructive, as in an angry mob. By
emotional release of this sort people can be made to cohere on behalf
of an institution, a party, or a cause. Consequently leaders of many
interests--political, economic, religious--have developed a technic for
causing people to move in herds when, because of emotional release,
they think they are acting freely as individuals.
It is not to be denied that release of this general type, though it
be partial, though it lends itself to self-deception, though it be
dangerous, may be serviceable at times. Leastways, one can scarcely
fail to sympathize when minds long subjected to a narrow and numbing
routine break loose and go on a spiritual picnic! There are times
when frolicsome nonsense brings benefits deeper than the momentary
satisfaction. We must not forget that even our better and wiser selves
perpetually rebreathe the partly exhausted air that issues from our
own lungs. We ever need the open! Further, when alternatives have been
weighed and a decision reached, it may sometimes be the part of wisdom,
though it be dangerous, to put all our energy into an executive act,
postponing further thought for the time being.
But mass-action in which critical thought is not a concurrent item
never is wholly safe. It is least dangerous in play-activities in which
the many actually play, not merely look on; it is most perilous when
a whole population, or a class in society, or a party, acts as a unit
under the inspiration of some high sentiment, religious, patriotic, or
other. For now concentration of mind upon a given end that stirs deep
emotion not merely postpones thought, but controls thought. The mind is
now ready to affirm or deny anything whatever in the interest of its
consuming passion; or, if ‘interest’ rather than ‘passion’ is the type
of control, unlimited ingenuity is employed in digging out evidence
that we are already acting wisely and fairly.
At this point the problem of release of our powers takes this form: How
are the functions of thought to be performed and made effective where
men act in groups, societies, classes, and masses? A special phase of
this problem concerns the method of rational action where conflict
arises or is threatened between two sets of persons.
A phrase that has been coming into use recently, “cooperative thinking”
points the way to a solution, the only possible solution, of this
problem. There are two aspects of it. One is “thinking” in the strict
sense of active inquiry by analytic methods; the other is “cooperation”
as contrasted, on the one hand, with thinking in solitude, and on the
other hand, with the strife-and-victory attitude and habit.
Such thinking is, of course, not an invention, nor a new discovery. It
exists in circles of friends who muse by the fireside without desire
to win victories over one another; it exists in some families and
partnerships, in which the members pool their views and thereby attain
harmony of action; it characterizes the old Quaker type of deliberation
in which there was much silence and listening, but freedom to speak,
with the final word of the chairman (no vote having been taken), “It
seems to be the sense of the meeting that ...”; it can be witnessed
in assemblies in the interest of scientific research, when each
participant in discussion takes the attitude of inquiry.
What has to be done with this already old experience of thinking
together is threefold: To extend the practice from these restricted
groups to other groups and to the larger aggregations of men; to
extend it from the few interests in which it is now recognized to all
interests that call for corporate action; and to dig deeper into the
nature and the conditions of cooperative thinking, particularly in
areas of conflict, and to improve the technic of it.
In view of some items of recent history, some readers may ask, “Do you
mean discussion method, so called? If so, then, ...?” If by discussion
method we are to understand a particular _a, b, c_, procedure,
this is not what I mean, for I am not convinced that cooperative
thinking is restricted to any one, or any other number, of particular
procedures. Even in the few examples to which allusion has been
made there is great variety. On the other hand, there is distinct
advantage in the formulation of specific procedures that have been
successful--formulations that, most of all, enable persons assembling
together for the first time to find their own mind and discern their
problems most promptly.[9]
The leading promoters of discussion method, whatever the particular
technic that they favor, appear to have in mind the same goal, on the
whole, as that which I have defined. If the goal, and the roads that
lead towards it, have not always been clearly seen, I am willing to
think that this is incidental to the newness and the incompleteness
of some phases of our experience in this field. Consequently, if I
now point out some misconceptions and pitfalls, it is not because I
wish to hold back the movement that goes under the name of discussion
method, but because I believe that it represents in important measure a
principle of rationality itself.
First, then, genuinely cooperative thinking must be something more than
a friendly adjustment of conflicting present interests, or pooling
of present desires. Let us gladly grant that arbitration, pooling,
and adjustment by compromise have their place. When opponents--say,
employers and employes--“get their feet under the same table,”
something is likely to be gained, even if conflicting desires are
adjusted without inquiry into the validity of any of them. But in the
end we must distinguish between the two questions, How can I get what I
want with the least friction? and, What wants, of myself and of others,
are reasonable?
An illustration of the principle is easily found in industrial
conflicts. In most contests between capital and labor, each party
occupies a fixed base of assumed self-interest. Now and then, it is
true, a declaration is heard that the interest of the employer and the
interest of the worker are at bottom one; but this is interpreted as
meaning, according to one’s starting point, either that high profits
for the employer carry with them benefits for the worker in the way
of wages, or that high wages for the worker increase the prosperity
of the investor by stabilizing labor and by enabling workers to buy
goods. Meantime, evidence accumulates that something is wrong with the
assumptions that underlie this type of thought. Are not the interests
of capital and the interests of labor, as they are here understood,
fundamentally antagonistic to each other and to the common weal?
Clearly, the great task of thought and of conference between these
two--rather three--interests is to face unflinchingly the true nature
of the ends that each party seeks, and to evaluate them all by weighing
them in the same scales.
A parallel instance is the habit of excluding from conferences between
nations questions of “vital interest,” “national honor,” “purely
domestic concern,” or a specified topic such as the Monroe Doctrine.
What is the implication of such reservations? Is it that we desire
the privilege of acting arbitrarily? Or, is it that we possess a
rationality that others do not possess? Or, finally, is it that we
distrust thought as a guide where our emotions are most intense?
How is cooperative thinking related to debating? Undoubtedly debate,
which proceeds by settled rules, is a splendid step on the road from
squabbling to peace. The rules of order for deliberative assemblies
are a mighty achievement of reason. They make mere force take a back
seat. For they make it possible for the last man to be heard. They
provide for pause, a second thought, amendment and postponement; they
enable minorities actually to modify the thinking of majorities, and
they are one instrument of a genuinely common will--a will proved to
be common by the loyal acquiescence of minorities in final decisions
by vote. Nevertheless, debate is only a half-way house. For it is
a clash between conclusions already held rather than a seeking for
deeper insight. Moreover, because it has the form and uses a method of
conflict, it is not favorable to friendly and candid examination of
motives. It is not a method of self-criticism, nor of help to others in
self-criticism.
Discussion method, even in its present forms, is a clear addition
to the tools of reason. For it does not endeavor to make one’s
initial position prevail. Rather, its attitude is that of seeking
to know rather than seeking to convince or to win. It is a method
of mutual self-modification. It smooths the path towards the larger
truths, which are always the potentially common-to-all rather than
the particular-tome. Its hardest task and its severest test will be
found in the necessity, ultimately, of submitting to mutual scrutiny
our basic assumptions, which represent our deepest-rooted and most
persistent desires.
Cooperative revision of conduct in the realm of basic desires through
analytical thought! Release from our self-bound selves by what one
may dare call the intellectual love of one another! This is the goal
towards which cooperative thought must move. In the end, nothing less
will suffice.
We shall be tempted to content ourselves with a less radical good, a
less radical rationality than this. We shall be tempted not only by
timidity and desire for special privileges, but also by our regard
for what is really good within one another. The evil in life is due
chiefly to misplaced and displaced desires that are not fundamentally
evil but fundamentally good. There is reason, always, for respect,
considerateness, gentleness, therefore. Any attempt to think
cooperatively must rely upon bringing the reasonableness of such
attitudes to clear consciousness. But at once we are tempted, even
out of regard for one another, to soften issues, or to pool interests
rather than weigh our wants, or to equilibrate our present views
instead of deepening our problem and obtaining fresh data.
There is no painless operation that can cure us of our deeper
irrationalities. Discussion, when it is good, does not anesthetize
its participants, nor make them dozy with the sweet food of specious
solutions for problems, but keeps them awake by the prick of
self-criticism. When discussion is at its best it treads the dangerous
edge where intrenched interests and supposedly sacred convictions
practice the philosophy of preparedness.
Sometimes cooperative thinking must manifest its virtues by producing
repentance. For, though a kernel of good impulse can be found in our
conduct, the direction that conduct takes often is destructive. I can
administer spiritual poison to myself through my love of life; when I
pursue my just rights I can become insensitive and cruel; I can become
so absorbed in the mechanisms and immediate motives of my occupation
that I fail of ethical perspective. For me, in such situations, there
is no salvation into rationality without an about-face.
No method of conference will render minorities dispensable. In even
the sincerest discussion we need participants who have the “show me”
spirit. Always there is a residuum of problem or of evidence not yet
mastered; always there is the one-sidedness of men; always there will
be leaders who are in danger of dominating the thought of others;
friendliness may produce an illusory sense of unanimity or of having
solved a problem; and even while discussion is going on conditions in
the world are changing and problems are shifting. Discussion groups in
which minorities fade out should be carefully scrutinized.
The promotion of discussion method has brought to the fore still
another set of interesting and important questions. Are all questions
whatsoever to be treated as open? However we answer this query, are
we to set down as prejudiced every mind that tenaciously holds that
condition _a_ is right, condition _b_ wrong, and change _c_ required?
Does cooperative thinking imply that such an individual is to act as if
he did not see what he is sure that he does see? And does it justify in
others an everlasting “Perhaps so; perhaps not”? Is nothing ever to be
taken as settled? Does willingness to consider the other man’s point of
view estop us from action that may, from his point of view, constitute
antagonism?
The rational answers to these questions appear to be as follows: The
only sense in which we can properly assume that all questions are open
is that everyone should be ready to weigh specific evidence when it is
offered and to go after evidence upon specific proof that it is needed.
The most learned man, and the ethically insightful one, can be at home
in a discussion group upon this condition; he cannot be at home if the
notion of open-mindedness is so applied as to make specific grounds
and sharp distinctions seem unimportant. The open mind is not the
same as the empty mind, as has been said; it is far more likely to be
the full mind. That is, readiness to listen, to weigh, and to revise,
rather than non-committance, is the essential requirement. Truly
cooperative thinking will not make pussy-cats of us all; there still
will be prophets, and they will express convictions that have point.
They will be helped, however, to be circumspect, even though, as seems
to be inevitable, conduct will result that, from some points of view,
constitutes antagonism.
Cooperative thinking thus understood offers a marvellous emancipation
to us who are caught in the web of selfhood. An emancipation both
negative and positive, both from something and into something. It
offers, to begin with, as real a “letting go” as the emotional sprees
that simulate freedom. When I enter wholeheartedly into discussion, as
we are coming to understand this term, I rise out of my inhibitions,
my strains, my defence-attitudes, my feeling that the weal or the woe
of myself, my party, my institution, or society in general is hanging
by a thread that I am holding between my fingers. What a relief! And
what a smoothing out of the wrinkles of the mind ensues when one casts
out pride of being right, and, instead of being embarrassed when one is
found to be in error, rejoices in being set right. This is one phase of
the becoming “as a little child” that Jesus recommended.
But this is a letting go, not into a controlling emotion, but into
a more limber use of intelligence. The change is like that which a
tennis player, or a piano player, experiences when he learns how to
relax his wrist. Questions now bob up where they were not suspected;
one sees hitherto unrealized meanings in the other fellow’s thought;
one’s own notions now appear in a new perspective, and one actually
understands one’s own ideas better than before; the as-yet-unknown
and the as-yet-unfinished come out of the shadows and show themselves
for what they are, and therefore the lure of study increases. New
possibilities now seem worth trying, and expectancy of unprecedented
good is nourished.
Here are conditions that favor invention, originality, and
creativeness. There is, first, release from tensions; then, vivid
consciousness of a problem; next, stimulation by varied data and
alternatives, and finally, criticism of all proposed solutions. No
doubt the climax of creativity will occur as a rule in moments of
solitary reflection, but this free fellowship of mind prepares the
way. It starts the appropriate mood and attitude; it helps define
our discontents; it gets us out of our ruts. Cooperative _thinking_
does not flatten out the individual; rather, it saves him from the
merely type-reactions of both himself and his professional and social
environment.
A little way back we contemplated the pseudo-emancipation of
herd action. Let us close this section by noticing the opposite
pseudo-emancipation of smart minds that are not cooperative. We have
had in recent years not a little free-lance criticism of everything
in our civilization. With much of the “de-bunking” that has resulted,
these pages have shown sympathy. But much of this criticism fails
to attain complete objectivity because the critic takes no means to
correct his own necessarily faulty personal equation. His personality,
his theory of the universe, or his dominant mood so mingles with his
description of actualities that the final effect is the pitting of a
newly conventionalized individual against older conventions. This will
be found in fiction, in essay, and in criticism. These authors feel,
perhaps, that they are exercising great freedom, whereas in fact much
of their capacity for apprehending fact, for critical judgment, and for
reconstruction is bound by their solitariness or their partizanship.
Full emancipation comes only through some form of cooperative thinking.
XXIX
MY INTRACTABLE SELF
The problem of releasing our powers is the problem of both mastering
and submitting to the process of becoming a person. A submission that
is also a mastering! Here is the paradox of rationality in a finite
and growing being. A sort of dialectic is involved: Self-affirmation,
followed by self-denial, and then realization that this denial of self
is in reality a higher and fuller affirmation of selfhood.
I am not conscious, when I say this, of being under the influence
of Hegel, and certainly I do not regard this process as abstractly
logical. It is not the logical inconsistency of our self-assertiveness
that is so troublesome, but the consequences of it in pain, injustice,
sensuality, on the one hand, and on the other hand the numbing of high
motives of which we are by nature capable.
This interplay of apparent opposites appears in the large in the
majority-minority-majority cycle. Power in the majority gives rise from
within itself to power-in-weakness in a minority; this after struggle
grows into the major self-affirmation of the society in question, and
then, in turn, a new minority is required.
A parallel cycle is fulfilled in the individual through the medium of
cooperative thinking. Before the experience of cooperative thinking
he affirms or believes or acts upon the basis of a narrow experience;
cooperative thinking submits his case to a wider, more varied
experience, in which he ceases to take himself as the majority; but
behold, this submission frees and intensifies his own individuality,
whereupon the cycle begins over again.
The point in this cycle at which the chief obstacles to the growth
of persons are encountered is the second step--the denial of one’s
accumulated self. The chief hindrances are emotional. They are fear
of the unknown, and reaching after utter security (which in fact one
never experiences until one ceases to grasp after it); pride (which
does one the dishonor of identifying oneself with one’s possessions or
products); sensitiveness to opposition or contradiction (which easily
becomes either pugnacity, or argumentativeness, or smartness, or the
habit of being on the defensive); and indolent contentment with the
merely good, coupled with only languid approval of the better. In all
these states the self withdraws from actuality, covering its eyes as
if they could not bear the light. Consequently, a prime necessity,
if we are to be released from bondage to self, is the attainment of
objectivity, particularly objectivity towards our own sensitive points.
There are several trails that lead into or at least towards this
fruitful mountain valley. The scientific study of man helps; learning
what others think about us helps; a third trail, which is the least
laborious and painful, is laughter. I mean the laughter, not of scorn
or derision, but of humorous sympathy. Put yourself into some funny
classification, even if it be only partly or remotely true, and lo, you
are playing with yourself instead of making of your little self such
a dreadfully serious matter! Humor in this sense--not the biting-dog
sense--is a method of objectivity or truth-finding. It has a wondrous
capacity to make small things look small, and large things large. “Just
think, mother!” a humorous magazine makes a freshly graduated collegian
say, as he holds up his “sheepskin,” “Now I’m an educated man!”
Genial humor, moreover, is a normal expression of confidence in the
meaningfulness of life. When I laugh good-humoredly at my own foibles
I as much as say, “I wasn’t all there, was I?” When Immanuel Kant,
who was less than five feet tall, stumbled and fell, he rose smiling,
saying that it was no matter, he wasn’t tall enough to fall far! The
meaning of comedy is that we look straight at the incongruities in
ourselves without being abashed or losing our self-respect--_we_ are
free and happy in spite of our blunders, more free and happy because
we do not dodge the fact of our blundering. The stage comedy that we
enjoy most is the one that most completely hits off the characteristic
foibles of humanity in the large, that is of us the spectators. Here we
play with our selfhood, see deeper into it, and renew our confidence
that we can be rational.
Man is like a bear in a cage, says Robert Frost--so different from a
bear freely roaming, so ridiculous, yet ... But see for yourself how
humor without acerbity works.
THE BEAR
By Robert Frost
The bear puts both arms round the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke-cherries lips to kiss goodby,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall.
(She’s making her cross-country in the fall.)
Her great weight creaks the barbed wire in the staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free.
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like a poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope,
Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction giving quite a spread.
Or if he rests from scientific tread,
’Tis only to sit back and sway his head
Through ninety-odd degrees of arc it seems,
Between two metaphysical extremes.
He sits back on his fundamental butt
With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut
(He almost looks religious but he’s not),
And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,
At the other agreeing with another Greek,
Which may be thought but only so to speak.
A baggy figure equally pathetic
When sedentary and when peripatetic.
_The Nation_, April 18, 1928, p. 447.
Humor helps us to be objective in even the most serious and sacred
matters. In the sermons of some of the most spiritually illuminated
and illuminating preachers of our day laughter is continually near the
surface, and often above the surface. The chuckle of the congregation
is not a sign that the mind has been distracted by unspiritual
influences, but that the point has got home. “I wonder,” said a
distinguished theologian, “whether God has a sense of humor?”
The laughter that makes us objective towards our limitations and yet
confident of our powers is not the same as the laughter of Lazarus
in Eugene O’Neill’s play. The point that Lazarus strives and strives
to make convincing is that selfhood is really insignificant and that
lightsome laughter is the appropriate mood for dealing with this
fact. As the drama was staged--magnificently staged--at the Pasadena
Community Playhouse, the laughter that Lazarus evoked in others was not
lightsome. Even his own “followers” did not attain to happy humor, and
the masks that they wore expressed abandon without the salt of thought.
_Thinking laughter_ was reserved for Lazarus alone, but his philosophy
and his laugh never, in fact, blended with each other. In spite of the
fact that he applied hope-bearing terms such as “life” and “God” to the
lifeless and undivine dust into which we are to be resolved, he could
not make laughter really natural and free in the contemplation of such
a destiny; it was, instead, an irruption suggestive of a pathological
condition.
The kind of lightsomeness that releases the bound self is the kind that
expresses belief in the significance of selfhood. Its function is, not
to solve our problems, but to take the stiffness out of the joints
of our mind. The main work has still to be done by rigorous thinking
and--as I have more than once hinted--by vigorous repenting.
In some situations repenting is the only way in which straight thinking
can perform its functions. By repentance I mean the frank, unequivocal
realization and acknowledgment (to oneself at least) that one has been
in the wrong in a sense so deep that the self expressed therein must be
disavowed, together with the positive espousal of a contrary selfhood.
In any such reversal of self there will be emotion, but not necessarily
any standard emotion. Upon this point there is much misunderstanding
and unfinished thinking. The most common view of repentance is that
it is the climax of chagrin, a humiliating experience, or even a
grovelling of spirit that anyone who respects himself would shun if
he could. This notion arose, no doubt, through the grovelling of
“subjects” before a human “sovereign” whom they had offended. Then, the
qualities of a human sovereign having been ascribed to God, religion
made of repentance the abject thing of our tradition.
The ability to repent is one of the noblest attributes of man. The act
is a privilege, not a dour necessity. It is, or can be, free growth
from within, a normal event in rational living on the part of finite
beings; therefore to be expected, provided for in our life-policies,
and lived through in dignity rather than abjectness.
The emotions that can occur in such a crisis cover a whole spectrum
from self-loathing to gladness. The state that we most need to
cultivate is gladness or joy that we are able to break through the
shell of self into a larger world. What a hell our selfhood would be if
one could no longer repent of anything! Repentance is not the winter’s
grave of our self-respect; it is the springtime of it.
It is needless to ask what class in society is impoverishing itself
most by neglecting the grace of repentance. For nearly every class
and institution has built up one or another defence-mechanism whereby
it employs some supposed virtue of its own as a justification for
continuing on its present course. Neither in the State nor in the
church; neither in education nor in business and industry; neither in
the family nor in the larger social groupings, do we find the habit of
facing faults in a manly and rational way; in none of them does one
hear the spring-song of growth through repentance.
Nor is this note audible in the vocalizations of most of our
_intelligentsia_ who occupy themselves so much with the fact of their
own emancipation and the lack of it in their contemporaries. The
function of the critic is both important and permanent, but the goal of
criticism is neither the chagrin that depresses the powers of another,
nor yet inflation of the critic’s self-esteem through applause from the
irresponsible. As in games the best sort of sportsmanship encourages
and helps a competitor to do his best, so the discoverer of our defects
should so reveal us to ourselves that we desire to improve ourselves.
Criticism at its best is a sympathetic entering into the problems of
others; it is not taking “pot shots” at them. When the problem for
another is to achieve repentance, the problem for the critic is to make
repentance seem attractive as well as necessary.
The writer or the speaker who merely utters flings at our
faults suffers in his own person the same sort of closing-up or
self-involution that he produces in those whom he “lambastes” or
denounces. Lacking the sympathy or the humor to enter into the
human-nature situation of another, he forfeits the capacity of
self-criticism also. He becomes opinionated, dogmatic, sometimes
intolerant, and at last careless of fact and unable to repent of his
own follies.
Some of our difficulty, as I have indicated, arises from habits and
traditions generated by experience under arbitrary governments, when
citizens had compelling motive for concealment and for putting the
best foot forward. But in addition we must admit that our nature
spontaneously shrinks from paying the cost of freedom; it longs
for joy, but fears to grasp it. Self-overcoming, therefore, and
self-discipline are indispensable.
Hence the peculiar service of the self-disciplined individuals who
openly reverse themselves with evident happiness. We know how the young
are helped to be self-critical and at the same time self-confident when
a parent or a teacher makes amends for his errors, either intellectual
or administrative. The late Josiah Strong told with utter simplicity
how he, a Christian minister, discovered that his preaching had
misconstrued the Gospel, and how through self-reversal he experienced
a kind of joyful conversion (see My Religion in Everyday Life). Harry
Emerson Fosdick has experienced, we may be sure, a sense of happy
emancipation as he has publicly abandoned positions that he publicly
took during the War. The revivalist, Gypsy Smith, having repeated in
public a story that was damaging and offensive to the then Mayor Hylan,
“took it all back” in public without qualification or self-excuse.
One can safely guess that a few more acts like these on the part of
preachers and evangelists would recommend religion more effectively
than rivers of argument, denunciation, and pleading.
Is it Quixotic to hope for an ultimate reversal of the popular
assumption that of course every individual and organization will be
on the defensive with respect to what he or it is and is doing? May
not this defensive attitude at last be seen to be what it verily is,
weakness rather than strength? May not repentance become the expected
thing, acquiring the dignity and the educational force that belong to
any necessary aspect of our rationality? The growth of cooperative
thinking is one sign that this hope is not entirely without ground.
Even “rights” and “vital interests” will be safer when this day comes
than they are now. Demonstrate that you are unarmed, and others will
lay down their arms; then you can “talk it over.” Where wrong has been
done, an unreserved acknowledgment of it has time and again smitten
the hardness of men’s spirits, and streams of generosity have burst
forth. Often and often what we most need is someone who will take the
initiative in repentance.
The diagnosis of humanity’s sickness that was made in Part III
indicated that the affected part is our intelligence, and that
recovery depends upon sharpening our wits. It should now be evident
that sharpening our wits is different from putting an edge upon a
tool that is no part of ourselves. Our “wits” are not constituted of
any impersonal intelligence, but of intelligence that quivers through
and through with personality and the laws of its growth. Intellect,
as such, cannot whittle itself to a point, as we see in the practical
stupidities of intellectual men; the total attitude of the person
towards himself and towards others is involved.
Shall we say, then, that the problem of release from our self-imposed
bondage finds its solution in the Greek idea of being ourselves, or in
the Christian idea of being saved from ourselves? The answer lies in
the fact that when we become objective towards ourselves we come upon
the requirement of repentance. We do, indeed, need to be ourselves,
but not these selves that we behold in each of us! Here not only does
naturalism in any of its current forms prove to be inadequate as a
theory of motivation, but also all naïve confidence in ourselves
whencesoever it be derived. Self-denial is not a vagary of unhealthy
minds; it is a law of reason; it is fundamental in the motivation of a
man. We save our lives by losing them. The solution of the problem is
far more Christian than it is Greek.
A remark was made some way back that the technic of freedom will be
found to be, not a pattern to be imposed upon conduct, but something
more like friendship or worship. The meaning of this possibly cryptic
utterance will be the subject of the next and concluding chapter.
XXX
THE REALM OF FREE SPIRITS
The spirit of man, when it is most awake, eager, and demanding, pants
for the open spaces and for companionship there. But what sort of open
spaces? Real emancipation is not only release from something but also
release into something. How, then, shall we describe the realm into
which our spirits, when they breathe freedom, struggle to press? What
could really satisfy a man?
The question can be answered only in and through the act of struggling
to be free. _Solvitur ambulando._ Wants become defined through the
interplay of satisfactions and discomforts that awaken thought. I did
not want to stop at Daggett to have the contents of my car examined
by the California State Bureau of Plant Quarantine and Pest Control,
but when my questioning taught me that I might inadvertently import an
insect that would destroy the orange groves amid which I write these
words, I acquired a desire for the examination. But this learning,
mark! was not the plastering upon me of an external compulsion; rather,
events guided me back to myself, making me act from within more fully
than before. It is experience that teaches us what we want, but it
does it by pricking us awake so that we ask questions and compare
satisfaction with satisfaction, desire with desire.
Having been at this business of self-discovery for some time, there
is no reason why we might not analyse the incidents and the processes
of it, and thereby arrive at a general description of the attitudes
that we take in our struggles to emancipate ourselves from ourselves.
Attitudes are, of course, leanings “towards,” and hence pointers-out of
a direction and possibly a goal. What, then, is this “life” concerning
which we say:
’Tis life of which our nerves are scant;
’Tis life, and more of life, we want?
This question can be asked and answered without saying whether this
which we want really exists or is ultimately attainable. I shall not
enter into the metaphysical question whether we are in process of
discovering an ideal world that already exists; or whether we are
participating in the creation of an ideal reality that shares existence
with the unideal; or whether ideals are, in last analysis, chimerical.
My sole question is this: If our likes could be filled to the very
brim, what kind of world should we then find ourselves living in? It is
appropriate to remark, however, that unless we permit our wants to go
exploring, we cannot find out what the resources of the world are. We
learn where food is, and where it is not, because hunger sets us upon a
quest. Nature teaches us when we, the pupils, put questions to her. If,
then, we desire to know whether our world-system is a fit habitation
for persons, we must make the experiment of acting as persons, and then
observe what happens. We must know what we want, and then go after it.
There is a tendency, which grows naturally out of the order in which
the sciences developed--first the physical, then the biological, then
the psychological and sociological--to invert the order of inquiry
that has just been named, asking first what the environment contains
and only afterwards what our desires are. Then, under a general theory
of adaptation, the assumption is made that our desires, in the nature
of the case, must be adapted to the particular environment that most
occupies scientific attention. If we say that we want something
more than _this_ environment provides, we are assured that we have
misinterpreted ourselves, and that what we “really” want is only
that which the already-assumed environment is ready to supply. Love
is “in reality” only “galloping gonads,” as a college student put
it; and idealistic cravings are “in reality” an expression of some
physiological vacuum.
This type of procedure regards itself as strictly objective, whereas
it is infected with subjectivity in that a particular mental habit
prevents consideration of unaccustomed questions. It is sheer
self-imitation that makes us believe that the fundamental apprehension
of our world is to be had by way of the physical sciences. It is a
self-deceived subjectivity that restricts the description of our wants
to sub-human categories instead of letting these wants speak for
themselves.
The universe may make possible what we want, or it may not; the issue
must be determined by observation and experiment under hypotheses
adapted to testing the free flight of desire. This free flight is what
now concerns us, and what we want to know is the direction in which it
goes when it is most free, most completely personal and venturesomely
rational. To change the figure, what is the medium that our wings must
press against in order to fly? The answer is partly implied in the
preceding sections.
_First_, how small or weak must a minority be in order to become
totally insignificant and rationally negligible? I do not see how we
can give any answer to this question that will not assume, rightly
or wrongly, that there is a realm of free spirit that lives by
forces resident within itself, and not by permission of anything
external to itself. Whatever matter may prove to be, and whatever
factor of determinism may reside in the temporal process; however
irrational and self-defeating we may at times become, something that
is self-nourishing appears to be capable of asserting itself in the
weakest minority.
_Second_, how broad must cooperation in thinking be in order that I may
become fully emancipated from myself? Who is to be included, and who is
to be excluded from the fellowship of intelligence? Again, I do not see
what answer can be given that will not assume that inclusive good-will
is an inherent aspect of intelligence. Good-will assumes, likewise, to
be a self-sustaining thing; it cannot be either purchased or compelled;
rather, it creates the fellowship of minds from within mind.
_Third_, is the grace of repentance whereby we break through our shell
into freedom a matter of arbitrary liking or a matter of obligation?
Knowing the blunderous way that we live, and the hurts that our
blunders entail, how can we possibly say that repentance may wait upon
our convenience? How can we possibly maintain the rightful supremacy of
rationality unless we assume that “I ought” is inherently involved in
it? How could we possibly be at home and free in an a-moral universe?
_Fourth_, what reservations are made by the mind that fully emancipates
itself from its self-imposed bondage? Is a taboo placed upon any
subject or material of thought? Is there any area of the universe that
is “posted” so that we may not hunt upon it?
Men used to assume that there are such areas. The name of God was
spoken with a hush; men even forbade themselves to speak it at all.
They became mute and abject in the presence of supposedly fearsome
forces, whether divine or demoniac; yes, some men and institutions
and old thoughts were even walled off so that eyes might not see.
All this was self-imprisonment from which it is necessary to achieve
self-release. We must reach the point where we realize that it is only
a pseudo-sanctity, a piece of mere conventionality, that reserves any
kind of actuality from the peering eyes of anyone who desires to know.
We are guilty of no irreverence when we investigate the pedigrees and
weigh the conduct of all the gods; we must be able with tranquillity
to endure uncertainties while waiting for evidence; and, as for the
sanctity of any temple built by men, what men have built that they can
rebuild or replace.
At this point release from the thralldom of selfhood is equivalent
to making ourselves at home in the universe. The experience takes
different forms with different persons. Freedom to doubt, coming to
some persons like the sun suddenly emerging from a black cloud, makes
them dance and skip; occasionally it reproduces, almost point for
point, the emotional phenomena of religious conversion. That some,
upon realizing their release, should luxuriate in skepticisms is
not strange; they are like children from the city streets let loose
in the country and pulling up wildflowers by the roots. With other
persons the experience of release takes the form of glad consecration
to the rigorous labor and the strict methods whereby alone we can
know the truth. Still others feel the fellowship side of their new
world. Separated from other minds hitherto by prejudice and fear, they
now discover friends on all hands, and they glow with friendliness
themselves. Not a few have said, “Behold, God is here, and I knew it
not.” For they feel that they are dealing with what L. P. Jacks calls
“a living universe.”
Thus, underlying our motivation when we most radically claim freedom is
the implicit assumption that we are living in a universe in which no
mental reservations are really needed by anyone. But we cannot go as
far as this without assuming likewise that no reservations on behalf
of any sort of self-interest are necessary. Here is where the shoe
pinches most, and here is where self-deception most enslaves us. When
we get beneath the surface of our mental reservations--theological,
ethical, economic, social, political--we usually find that they are
servants of some form of self-interest, whether of an individual, or
of an institution, or of a social class. How desperately we cling to
our littleness! But our very desperation is a defence-reaction towards
something dimly appreciated as greater. We are like a very small child
who wanted to get out of bed all by himself, but found himself hanging
to the mattress, afraid to let go because he could not feel the floor
under his toes, and yet not strong enough to pull himself back. The
sickness of our society is in its fear to let go what it regards as
its security, though it does not really secure. We employ argument and
systems of thought to protect us, but we are like some persons accused
of crime who refuse to make a clean breast of their conduct even to the
attorney who defends them. Our salvation must come from a cooperative
thinking that is more than abstract. I have already remarked that
cooperative thinking assumes that the realm of intelligence is the
realm likewise of good-will or active respect for all persons. In the
end, then, our struggle against our bondage is a struggle towards a
cooperative intelligence that is likewise a cooperative choice and
enjoyment of the good, whatever the good is.
I promised to keep as clear of metaphysics as the case permits. I
have not even argued, though I am convinced, that the best clue we
have to the general character of the universe consists in this,
that persons exist, and are, as a matter of fact, in the process of
achieving freedom, and of achieving it cooperatively. The experience of
becoming free, even though it be incomplete, even though it never can
be completed, surely casts a beam of light into the problem of being.
An original, self-sustaining light. For the becoming of freedom is
an experience, a datum, primary and underived. We do not learn it by
inference from some otherwise-known system of things; we do not need
to ask whether a place can be made for it in a view of nature that is
derived from the pre-human world. It is here; it makes its own place,
and our view of nature must be sufficiently large and objective to
include it. This does not deny either the general self-consistency of
nature that we call law, nor yet any specific connection of events that
can be shown to be probable. Any experience whatever, the experience
of becoming free not excepted, occurs under conditions that can
theoretically be formulated in a general proposition. But the event
need not repeat or continue the conditions under which it arises. Out
of a songless egg, someone has said, emerges the song of a lark.
The realization that one is freely a member of such a realm of spirits
as I have described is not only like worship, it is indistinguishable
from worship. For it is just the opposite of spiritual isolation. This
outward movement from self, though it be initiated within us, is not,
in any complete and exclusive sense, initiated by us. It is wrought
through us as much as by us! It chooses us as much as we choose it.
Over and over again the experience repeats itself of being certain,
just where we are most original, that then and there we are organs
of something greater than our particular selves. It is as if each
particular self were enveloped and suffused and already partly actuated
by some self-like principle that is abroad in the universe.
INDEX
Academic freedom, 188 ff.
Accidents, preventable, 159.
Acquisitive instinct, 39.
Adolescence, see “Youth”.
Advertising, 13, 38, 52.
Affection, 231.
“American Tragedy, An”, Dreiser’s, 29.
Amusements, 52, 130, 139.
Analytical method in psychology, 40, 81, 93.
Anger, 179 ff.
“Areopagitica”, Milton’s, 185.
Argumentativeness, 243.
“Arrowsmith”, Sinclair Lewis’s, 31.
Art and artists, 78, 106, 109 f., 118, 125.
Assemblage, freedom of, 191.
Authority, 26, 176, 195.
Averages as standards of judgment, 173.
Ayres, C. E. 194 (note.)
Balance sheet as index of values, 126.
Balderston, J. L., 146 (note).
“Bear, The”, Robert Frost’s, 244.
Beauty, 109, 160, 231.
Behaviorism, 41, 52, 93.
Bible, 22.
Biography, recent, 110 ff.
Biology, Ch. IV, 39.
Bondage of our powers, Part III, Part IV.
Browning, R., 9.
Buddha, The, 146.
Business, motives of, Ch. XV;
see also “Industrialism”.
Calkins, M. W., 85, 94 (note).
Canada, 213.
Capitalism and capitalists, 39, 50, 121;
see also “Industrialism”, “Profits”, and “Labor”.
Catholic Church, see “Roman Catholic Church”.
Character, 44.
Childhood, Chs. XII, XIII.
Child-study movement, 97 f.
China, 61, 181.
Christianity, Ch. VIII, 61 ff., 162, 210 f., 214, 250.
Christians, 113.
Church, v, 57, 59 f., 138, 140, 153, 168, 174, 186 ff., 201 ff., 247;
see also “Protestantism” and “Roman Catholic Church”.
Church school, see “Religious Education”.
Class interest, 133, 139.
Colleges and universities, 138, 186, 188 ff., 193, 201, 224 ff.
Comedy, 244.
Common man, the, 119.
Competition, 23, 49.
Compromise, policy of, 173.
Conditioned reflex, 41 f., 84.
Configuration, see “Gestalt-psychology”.
Conflict between men, 50, 133, 139, 218.
Conflict, inner, 153.
Confucius, 90.
Constitution of the U. S., 185, 191 f.
Continuity in nature, 74.
Contracts, 54, 190.
Conventionality, 108, Ch. XXII.
Conversion, 59.
Coolidge, Calvin, 200.
Cooperative thinking, Ch. XXVIII, 255, 257.
Courts of law, 190.
Creation, special, 5.
Creative activity, 104, 106 ff., 210.
Criticism, function of, 248.
Crowd-action, 182, 232.
Curiosity, 41.
Cynicism, vi, 29, 32, 151 f.
Darwin, Charles, 25.
Debate, 236.
Defence mechanisms, 127, 243, 247, 257.
Democracy, 22.
Democratic Party, 217.
Depravity, 26, 56 f., 60, 70, 113, 163, Ch. XXII.
Desires, see “Wants”.
Determinism, 29.
Dignity of man, 21, 26.
Discomforts, 160.
Discussion method, 234 _et passim_.
Disillusionment, Part I, Part II.
Domiciliary privacy, 191.
Doubt, 256.
Drama, material of, 27 ff.;
see also “Comedy”, and “Tragedy”.
Dreiser, Theodore, 29 f.
Drives and pulls, psychic, 144 ff.
Dynamics of mind, vi, 43, 82, 86, _et passim_.
Dynamic view of physical nature, 82, 85.
Economic imperialism, 51.
Economic interpretation of history, 136.
Economic order, the, 136, 138, 165;
see also “Capitalism”, etc.
Economic production, Ch. XVII.
Education, 4, Ch. XIII, 176, 184, 210, 212 ff., 247;
see also “Schools”, “Colleges and universities”, and “Religious
education”.
Efficiency, 4, 8, 13, 32, 52 f., 127, 133, 201.
Ego, the, 44;
see also “Self, the personal”, etc.
Elliott, Harrison, 234 (note).
Emerson, R. W., 9, 25 f.
Environment, influence of, 104 f., 252;
see also Ch. XIII.
Ethics, problems of, 23, 54, 79, 86, 124, 138, 140, 161, 171, 173.
Evangelism, 58, 176.
Evolution, Ch. IV, 52, Ch. X, 145, 156, 163;
see also “Variations”, “Mutations”, and “Continuity”.
Experience as source of wisdom, 197.
Experimental schools, Ch. XIII.
Ezekiel the prophet, 21.
Faculty psychology, 37.
Family, the, 40, 52, 121, 126, 130, 132, 135, 138, 164 f., 175, 221,
233, 248.
Fate, 28.
Faust, Dr., 4.
Fear, 10, 243;
see also “security, desire for”.
Fellowship, see “Friendship”.
Food, desire for, 39, 41, 75 ff.
Force, belief in and use of, 18, 133, 176.
Fosdick, H. E., 249.
Francis, Saint, of Assisi, 162.
Freedom, 10, 72, 104 f., 125, 130, 162, 176, Ch. XXIV, 200, 210, 216,
Ch. XXX, 255, 258.
Friendship, 213, 231, 233, 257.
Frost, Robert, 244.
Fundamentalism, 22, 24 f.
Galileo, 189.
Gandhi, M. K., 49.
Gautama, the Buddha, 146.
Germany, 204.
Gestalt-psychology, 42, 84 ff.
Ghosts, 37, 80.
God, 25 f., 50, 58, 60, 63 f., 70, 113 f., 118, 136 f., 140, 146,
154 f., 156, 172, 205, 211, 245 ff., 256 f., 258.
Goldman, Emma, 187.
Good men, badness of, 161.
Good-will, 255.
Government, and its forms, 160, 167;
see also, “Courts of Law”, “Laws of the State”, and “U. S.
Constitution”.
Grace, divine, 57.
Great Britain, 213.
Great men, Ch. XIV.
Greed, 179;
See also, “Profits”, etc.
Greek notion of self-realization, 250.
Health, 159.
Hegel, 242.
Help, mutual, 23.
Herd-action, 182, 232.
Heredity, 104 f.;
see also, “Environment, influence of”.
Hero-worship, 116.
“Higher nature”, our, 158, 161.
History, 110 ff., 136.
Humanitarianism, 23, 32.
Human nature, the paradox of, 209.
Humor, 243 ff.
Huxley, Thomas, 23 f.
Hylan, J. F., 249.
Immanence of God, 9.
Imperialism, economic, 51.
Industry, 8, 247.
Industrialism, v, 46, 48, 56, 58 f., 61 ff., 90, Ch. XV, 139, 155.
Instincts, theory of, 28, 39, 41 f., 45, 82 f., 84, 87, 93, 97, 145.
Institutionalism, 164.
Intelligence tests, 89 ff., 93, 104.
Intelligentsia, the, 248.
Interests, 78, 235.
Invention, 8.
Irrationality of man, Ch. V.
Jacks, L. P., 257.
James, William, 80, 82, 101.
Jealousy, 39, 179.
Jesus, 63 f., 127, 140, 146, 174, 198, 201.
John, Gospel of, 4.
Kant, Immanuel, 244.
Koffka, K., 84, 94 (note).
Krutch, J. W., 30.
Labor, labor movement, 64, 121, 132;
see also, “Workingmen”.
Ladd, G. T., 82.
Land hunger, 131.
Lauder, Harry, 123.
Laws of nature, 258;
see also, “Science”, etc.
Laws of the State, 166 f., 190;
see also, “Constitution of the U. S.”
Laughter, 243 ff.
“Lazarus”, Eugene O’Neill’s play, 246.
Lewis, Sinclair, 31, 201.
Life, 125, 252.
Lincoln, Abraham, 75, 90.
Literature of disillusionment, Ch. V, 52, 56, 92 f., 210.
Louis XIV, 90.
“Lower classes, the”, 174.
“Lower nature, our”, Ch. XX, Ch. XXIII.
Lust, 179, 181 f.
Lynchings, 182.
MacCurdy, J. T., 87, 94 (note).
“Main Street”, Sinclair Lewis’s story, 79.
Majorities, 216 f., 242;
see also, “Minorities.”
Malice, 179.
Marot, Helen, 129, also note.
Mastery, motives of, 124.
Maturity, Ch. XII (esp. 99-101), Ch. XXV.
Mearns, H., 108.
Mencken, H. L., 201.
Metaphysics, 71, 81, 252, 258.
Milton, 185.
Minorities, Ch. XXVII, 238, 242, 255;
see also, “Majorities.”
Modern spirit, the, 69.
“Morality Play for the Leisured Class, A”, Balderston’s comedy, 146.
Morals, experimentation in, 224.
“Motive”, two senses of, 143.
Münsterberg, H., 82.
Musical compositions of children, 110 (note).
Mutations, biological, 74.
Mysticism, 65, 156.
Nation, The (periodical), 245.
Nationalism, 23, 51, 167.
Naturalism, 73, 113, 115, 250.
Nature, 74, 258;
see also, “Science”, etc.
Nature and nurture, 104.
Neighborhood Playhouse, The, 146.
Nero, 90.
New York Court of Appeals, 190.
Obligation, 255.
Occidental civilization, 49, 61.
Occupational introversion, 167.
O’Neill, Eugene, 30, 32, 246.
Open-mindedness, 239.
Organic view of physical nature, 82, 84 f.
“Organism, the”, 36.
Orthodoxies, various, 127, 166, 168 f., 187, 220.
Pain, 148.
Parker, Carleton, 129, also note.
Partizanship in education, 213.
Pasadena Community Playhouse, 246.
Passions, the, Ch. XXIII.
Patriotism, 213.
Paul, the Apostle, 157, 212.
Peace Treaty of Versailles, 18 f.
Penn, William, 90.
Persons, see “Self”, etc.
Pessimism, 69 f.
Pictures by children, 109 f.
Plato, 146, 156.
Play, 231.
Pleasure, devotion of youth to, 196.
Poems by the young, 108.
Political corruption, 227.
Political parties, 217.
Pope, the, 187.
Power, desire for and effects of possessing, 123, 218 ff.
Profit system and profit motive, 17, 39, 50 f., 58, 70, 121, 139, 175.
Progressive Education Association and magazine, 109 f.
Progressive Party, 217.
Propaganda, 13, 15, 117, 160.
Property, ethics of, 54 f., 62.
Prophets, 118, 239.
Protestantism, 62 f., 64 f., 211, 222.
Psychiatry, 93, 100;
see also, “Psychoanalysis”.
Psychoanalysis, 43, 52, 86 ff., 101 f., 172.
Psychology, vi, 23, 25, 35, Ch. VI, 45 f., 52, 156, Ch. XI, 85 ff.,
114.
Psychology of religion, v.
Pugnacity, 39, 51, 124, 243.
Puritanism, 62.
Quaker meetings, 234.
Race superiority, 14.
Rashness of youth, 202.
Rationality in children, 106.
Rationalization, 22 f., 43, 45, 54.
Reading matter, 160.
Reason and the irrational, 163, Ch. XXI, 170.
Recapitulation theory, the, 97.
Reflexes, conditioned, 41 f., 84.
Reform movements, 210.
Regeneration, 57, 60, 156.
Release of our capacities, Part IV.
Religion, v, 4, 123, 125, 139, 162, 184, 186 ff., 210;
see also, “Church”, “Protestantism”, “Roman Catholic Church”.
Religious education, v, 213.
Repentance, 60 f., 176, 238, 246 f., 255.
Research and researchers, 31, 118, 234.
Respectable faults, Ch. XXII.
Revenge, 179.
Revivals, see “Evangelism”.
Rivalry, 39.
Roman Catholic Church, 62, 64 f., 221.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 217.
Rotary Clubs, 52, 60, 127.
Russia, 204.
Sacco-Vanzetti case, the, 190.
Sacrament, production as a, 140.
Satan, 156.
Savagery, 3 f.
Schools, 38, 102 f., Ch. XIII, 138, 153, 161, 186, 212, 224 f.;
see also, “Colleges and universities”.
Science and scientific method, 7 f., 31, 78, 125, 193 f., 234.
Secular, the idea of the, 139.
Security, desire for, 122, 130, 132, 257.
Self, the personal, 43, 55, 86, 124, 131 f., Ch. XVII, Ch. XVIII,
158, 165 f., 170 f., 193 f., 220, 230, Ch. XXIX, 256 f.
Service, motive of, 127.
Sex impulse and conduct, 39 f., 44, 52 f., 70, 75 ff., 99, 157, 165;
see also, “Lust”.
Sin, 211.
Sinclair, Upton, 187.
Skepticism, 256.
“Smart” minds, 241, 243.
Smith, Gypsy, 249.
Social capacities of children, 106 f.
Social distance, 166 ff., 173.
Social recognition, 125, 130, 132.
Social workers, 118 f.
Society, life of, v, 143 ff., 210.
Sociology, 23.
Socrates, 146, 177.
Sophists, the, 146.
Soul, the, 37.
Sovereignty, political, 167.
Speech, freedom of, 191.
Sphinx, The, Ch. VI.
“Spiritual” affairs, 136.
Spiritual life, 137.
“Spoon River Anthology” of Masters, 29.
State, the civil, 15, 62, 167, 247.
Stoics, The, 3.
Strong, Josiah, 249.
Survival, 125.
Sympathy, 231.
Tagore, R., 49.
Tennyson, A., 9.
Tests, see “Intelligence tests”.
Thanksgiving Day, 63.
Thayer, Judge, 190.
Theological seminaries, 138.
Theology, 25 f., 46, 57, 113, 115 f., 156.
Thinking cooperatively, Ch. XXVIII.
Thorndike, E. L., 83, 94 (note).
Thrift, 63.
Times, The New York, 7.
Timidity of age, 198.
Toleration, religious, 211.
Tragedy, nature of, 71.
Transfer of training, 113 ff.
Truth, 23, 256.
Twentieth century, 7.
Unconscious, the, 43, 87 f.
United States, The, 9, 213.
United States Constitution, The, 185, 191 f.
Valentine, 199 f.
Valuation, vii, 145 f.
Vested interests, 220.
Victorian period, 29.
Wages, 121, 131 f., 139.
Wants, 3 f., Ch. VI, 38, 70, 252, _et passim_.
War, nature and causes of, 51, 62, 70, 139, 176, 182 ff.
War, The Great, Ch. III, 52, 56, 158, 249.
Washington, George, 90.
Watson, J. B., 84, 94 (note).
Wealth, 64.
Wesley, J., 187.
Whitehead, A. N., 81 f., 84 f., 94 (note).
Wilberforce, W., 24.
Williams, Whiting, 129 (also note), 142.
Wisdom from experience, 198.
Woodworth, R. S., 84, 94 (note).
Work, 148.
Workmanship, 132.
Workingmen, 39, 50, Ch. XVI;
see also, “Labor”, “Industrialism”, etc.
World-self, 258.
Worship, 141, 154 f., 175, 211, 213, 258.
Yale University, vii.
Youth and age, Ch. XXV.
[FOOTNOTES]
[1] This and several other paragraphs first appeared in the New York
Times, 1926.
[2] Reprinted, with modifications, from Religious Education, January,
1928, pp. 62-65.
[3] In the present section I endeavor to show merely what psychology
has contributed to this mood. In due time (Section II) I shall discuss
in a direct manner the present status of the psychology of motivation,
asking what really is established.
[4] For parallel evidence of musical creativeness in children see the
July-August-September 1926, issue of the same magazine, Progressive
Education.
[5] Carleton H. Parker, The Casual Laborer and other Essays, New York,
1920.
Helen Marot, The Creative Impulse in Industry, New York, 1918.
Whiting Williams, Mainsprings of Men, New York, 1925.
[6] _Mainsprings of Men._ New York, 1925, p. 224.
[7] By John L. Balderston (New York, 1924). I shall take the liberty
of telling parts of the story of this play in my own language, not
scrupling to modify the plot slightly and the dialog considerably.
[8] Ayres, C. E., Science the False Messiah.
[9] See Harrison Elliott: _The Process of Group Thinking_, Association
Press, 1928.
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