It is the same thing with service. The older generation has attempted
an insidious compromise with the new social democracy by combining the
words “social” and “service.” Under cover of the ideal of service it
tries to appropriate to itself the glory of social work, and succeeds
in almost convincing itself and the world that its Christianity has
always held the same ideal. The faithful are urged to extend their
activities. The assumption is that, by doing good to more individuals,
you are thereby becoming social. But to speak of “social democracy,”
which of course means a freely coöperating, freely reciprocating
society of equals, and “service,” together, is a contradiction of
terms. For, when you serve people or do good to them, you thereby
render yourself unequal with them. You insult the democratic ideal.
If the service is compulsory, it is menial and you are inferior. If
voluntary, you are superior. The difference, however, is only academic.
The entire Christian scheme is a clever but unsuccessful attempt to
cure the evils of inequality by transposing the values. The slave
serves gladly instead of servilely. That is, he turns his master
into a slave. That is why good Christian people can never get over
the idea that Socialism means simply the triumph of one class over
another. To-day the proletarian is down, the capitalist up. To-morrow
the proletarian will be up and the capitalist down. To pull down the
mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree is the highest
pitch to which Christian ethics ever attained. The failure of the older
generation to recognize a higher ethic, the ethic of democracy, is the
cause of all the trouble.
The notorious Victorian era, which in its secret heart this older
generation still admires so much, accentuated all the latent
individualism of Christian ethics, and produced a code which, without
the rebellion of the younger generation, would have spiritually
guaranteed forever all moral caste divisions and inequalities of
modern society. The Protestant Church, in which this exaggerated ethic
was enshrined, is now paying heavily the price of this debauch of
ethical power. Its rapidly declining numbers show that human nature
has an invincible objection to being individually saved. The Catholic
Church, which saves men as members of the Beloved Community, and not
as individuals, flourishes. When one is saved by Catholicism, one
becomes a democrat, and not a spiritual snob and aristocrat, as one
does through Calvinism. The older generation can never understand that
superb loyalty which is loyalty to a community,--a loyalty which,
paradoxical as it may seem, nourishes the true social personality in
proportion as the individual sense is lessened. The Protestant Church
in its tenacious devotion to the personal ideal of a Divine Master--the
highest and most popular Christian ideal of to-day--shows how very far
it still is away from the ideals and ethics of a social democracy, a
life lived in the Beloved Community.
The sense of self-respect is the very keystone of the personality in
whose defence all this individualistic philosophy has been carefully
built up. The Christian virtues date from ages when there was a vastly
greater number of morally depressed people than there is now. The
tenacious survival of these virtues can be due only to the fact that
they were valuable to the moral prestige of some class. Our older
generation, with its emphasis on duty, sacrifice, and service, shows us
very clearly what those interests were. I deliberately accuse the older
generation of conserving and greatly strengthening these ideals, as a
defensive measure. Morals are always the product of a situation; they
reflect a certain organization of human relations which some class or
group wishes to preserve. A moral code or set of ideals is always the
invisible spiritual sign of a visible social grace. In an effort to
retain the _status quo_ of that world of inequalities and conventions
in which they most comfortably and prosperously live, the older
generation has stamped, through all its agencies of family, church and
school, upon the younger generation, just those seductive ideals which
would preserve its position. These old virtues upon which, however, the
younger generation is already making guerilla warfare are simply the
moral support with which the older generation buttresses its social
situation.
The natural barriers and prejudices by which our elders are cut
off from a freely flowing democracy are thus given a spiritual
justification, and there is added for our elders the almost sensual
luxury of leaping, by free grace, the barriers and giving themselves
away. But the price has to be paid. Just as profits, in the socialist
philosophy, are taken to be an abstraction from wages, through the
economic power which one class has over another, so the virtues of the
older generation may be said to be an abstraction from the virtue of
other classes less favorably situated from a moral or personal point of
view. Their swollen self-respect is at the expense of others.
How well we know the type of man in the older generation who has been
doing good all his life! How his personality has thriven on it! How he
has ceaselessly been storing away moral fat in every cranny of his
soul! His goodness has been meat to him. The need and depression of
other people has been, all unconsciously to him, the air which he has
breathed. Without their compensating misfortune or sin, his goodness
would have wilted and died. If good people would earnestly set to
work to make the world uniformly healthy, courageous, beautiful, and
prosperous, the field of their vocation would be constantly limited,
and finally destroyed. That they so stoutly resist all philosophies
and movements which have these ends primarily in view is convincing
evidence of the fierce and jealous egoism which animates their so
plausibly altruistic spirit. One suspects that the older generation
does not want its vocation destroyed. It takes an heroic type of
goodness to undermine all the foundations on which our virtue rests.
If then I object to the ethical philosophy of the older generation on
the ground that it is too individualistic, and, under the pretense
of altruism, too egoistic, I object to its general intellectuality
as not individual enough. Intellectually the older generation seems
to me to lead far too vegetative a life. It may be that this life
has been lived on the heights, that these souls have passed through
fires and glories, but there is generally too little objective
evidence of this subjective fact. If the intuition which accompanies
experience has verified all the data regarding God, the soul, the
family, and so forth,--to quote one of the staunchest defenders of the
generation,--this verification seems to have been obtained rather that
the issues might be promptly disposed of and forgotten. Certainly the
older generation is rarely interested in the profounder issues of life.
It never speaks of death,--the suggestion makes it uncomfortable. It
shies in panic at hints of sex-issues. It seems resolute to keep life
on as objective a plane as possible. It is no longer curious about
the motives and feelings of people. It seems singularly to lack the
psychological sense. If it gossips, it recounts actions, effects; it
rarely seeks to interpret. It tends more and more to treat human beings
as moving masses of matter instead of as personalities filled with
potent influence, or as absorbingly interesting social types, as I am
sure the younger generation does.
The older generation seems no longer to generalize, although it
gives every evidence of having once prodigiously generalized, for
its world is all hardened and definite. There are the good and the
criminal, and the poor, the people who can be called nice, and the
ordinary people. The world is already plotted out. Now I am sure
that the generalizations of the truly philosophical mind are very
fluid and ephemeral. They are no sooner made than the mind sees their
insufficiency and has to break them up. A new cutting is made, only in
turn to be shaken and rearranged. This keeps the philosopher thinking
all the time, and it makes his world a very uncertain place. But he
at least runs no risk of hardening, and he has his eyes open to most
experience.
I am often impressed with the fact that the older generation has grown
weary of thinking. It has simply put up the bars in its intellectual
shop-windows and gone off home to rest. It may well be that this is
because it has felt so much sorrow that it does not want to talk about
sorrow, or so much love that to interpret love tires it, or repulsed
so many rude blows of destiny that it has no interest in speaking of
destiny. Its flame may be low for the very reason that it has burned
so intensely. But how many of the younger generation would eagerly
long for such interpretations if the older would only reveal them!
And how little plausible is that experience when it is occasionally
interpreted! No, enthusiasm, passion for ideas, sensuality, religious
fervor,--all the heated weapons with which the younger generation
attacks the world, seem only to make the older generation uneasy. The
spirit, in becoming reconciled to life, has lost life itself.
As I see the older generation going through its daily round of
business, church, and family life, I cannot help feeling that its
influence is profoundly pernicious. It has signally failed to broaden
its institutions for the larger horizon of the time. The church remains
a private club of comfortable middle-class families, while outside
there grows up without spiritual inspiration a heterogeneous mass of
people without ties, roots, or principles. The town changes from a
village to an industrial center, and church and school go through their
time-honored and listless motions. The world widens, society expands,
formidable crises appear, but the older generation does not broaden, or
if it does, the broadening is in no adequate proportion to our needs.
The older generation still uses the old ideas for the new problem.
Whatever new wine it finds must be poured into the old bottles.
Where are the leaders among the older generation in America who,
with luminous faith and intelligence, are rallying around them the
disintegrated numbers of idealistic youth, as Bergson and Barrès
and Jaurès have done in France? A few years ago there seemed to be
a promise of a forward movement toward Democracy, led by embattled
veterans in a war against privilege. But how soon the older generation
became wearied in the march! What is left now of that shining army and
its leader? Must the younger generation eternally wait for the sign?
The answer is, of course, that it will not wait. It must shoulder
the gigantic task of putting into practice its ideals and
revolutionary points of view as wholeheartedly and successfully as
our great-grandfathers applied theirs and tightened the philosophy
of life which imprisons the older generation. The shuddering fear
that we in turn may become weary, complacent, evasive, should be the
best preventive of that stagnation. We shall never have done looking
for the miracle, that it shall be given us to lighten, cheer, and
purify our “younger generation,” even as our older has depressed and
disintegrated us.