OUR DISSOLVING ETHICS
OUR DISSOLVING ETHICS
I
The scapegoat is one of the most venerable and widespread of human
institutions. The victim may be literally a goat, as among the Children
of Israel, or a rat or a monkey or other animal. Not infrequently it
is a human being. For example, among some tribes in Africa all persons
who during the year have committed incendiarism, witchcraft, theft,
adultery, or other crimes, chip in about ten dollars each and buy
a young girl, who is then dragged to the river and drowned for the
sins of the town. The sense of guilt requires some sort of expiation,
and this “cash and carry” system of expiating the sins of an entire
community by attributing them to someone else has obvious advantages.
It enables one to settle with one’s conscience and the social
conventions with a minimum of personal inconvenience and mental anguish.
Here in these United States in this post-war period, realizing that
all is not right with our world, we have found the scapegoat which
permits us to go about our business with a free mind. The name on its
collar is “The Younger Generation.” The absurdity of believing that the
older generation is not responsible for shaping the conditions which
have surrounded the younger, and that a world of mature men and women
is being set topsy-turvy by young persons but recently emancipated
from the nursery, seems to occur to no one. The hen which hatches a
duckling from the egg which some person has set under her unsuspecting
wings may well disclaim responsibility for the thoroughly disreputable
habits—from the standpoint of a hen—developed by her hatch, but can the
older human generation so easily disclaim its responsibility? They may
deny it individually and take refuge in the theory that the individual
is powerless to counteract the social forces of his time, but this
way of escape is as much open to the berated young as to the berating
elders. As a matter of fact, whatever we may say of the individual of
either generation, I think the responsibility of the older as a whole
to the younger as a whole is—to use a liquid measure—just about in the
ratio of dad’s quart bottle to son’s half-pint flask.
That youth is questioning the validity of our entire system of ethics
to an extent that is perturbing to parents and, in a lesser degree,
to grandparents may be admitted. But it cannot be so readily argued
that the babies born between 1900 and 1910 all received a hypodermic
injection of new original sin. The most distinguishing characteristic
of modern thought is its use of the genetic method. We explain the
present by the light of the past. We are most of us evolutionists,
except when it comes to the supposed iniquity of youth. But in fact is
there any break? Is not the present attitude of youth toward ethical
questions the direct and inevitable outcome of what has been going
on in our mental world for not one but many generations? That it is
so seems true to the author, who also feels that the salvation for
society lies in at least a questioning attitude on the part of the new
generation.
When we speak of the attitude of youth toward ethics we mean by ethics
those general ideas and rules that govern the individual in the
practical conduct of his or her life. These have always, in the main,
had two sanctions to assist in making them pass current without being
questioned by most people. One of these sanctions has been religion
and the other the public opinion of the particular class or group to
which the individual belonged. Backed by these sanctions, ethical ideas
and codes of conduct tend to become fixed, but they are in reality
never absolutely fixed. The forms may for long remain the same, but
in private conduct the individual, while still outwardly conforming,
may cease to be governed by them. Like the dollar, they may remain
the standard of value, but their own value—that is, their purchasing
power in happiness and human good—may come to vary greatly. The form,
however, will not be generally questioned so long as the sanctions
behind it are not brought seriously into question.
In the youth of the older generation—that is, let us say, in the
decade of the 1880’s—the sanctions of the established system of
ethics, although being undermined, were still standing firm, to all
appearance. These were the religious one of a belief in the Bible as
the inspired word of God to be taken literally, and the social one of a
code of conduct that belonged to the feudal rather than the industrial
phase of society. It is true that Darwin had been writing for twenty
years, but such a book as Mrs. Ward’s _Robert Elsmere_ was considered
too dangerous for young people to read, and, although the Industrial
Revolution had occurred, woman’s sphere in the only classes that were
supposed to count in those days was still the home. Very few girls
went to college, and even for them the intellectual problems set were
not particularly disquieting. The individual youth of either sex
may not have been religious or consciously interested in the social
sanction for ethical ideas, but on the other hand there was nothing in
upbringing or education to make them seriously question the accepted
code and standards. Theoretically, that the Bible said “thou shalt not”
or that one’s group frowned was pretty generally a sufficient guide
to conduct. What, in practice, that conduct may have been only the
memories of the older generation can reveal.
II
However unquestioningly the average boy or girl of the 1880’s may have
accepted the traditional views of ethics in relation to the world, many
forces of different sorts had long been operative which almost before a
new generation should be born were going to blow the old world to bits
and create a new one so different as to be almost unrecognizable. That
the old ethics and the old sanctions should in all respects have fitted
nicely in all the adjustments with that new world is surely too much to
expect. And if they did not fit, the only thing to do was to face that
fact and try to work out some new adjustment between ideals of conduct
and the new environment. It is that need which the older generation has
for the most part refused to recognize but which has been recognized
by the younger, in many cases heedlessly, but in many more cases
seriously, sanely, bravely.
That there may be need for a revaluation of our ethics is obvious to
them. Why should it be to them and not to so many of their elders? For
one thing, these youngsters have been fed on a different intellectual
fare from that on which their parents were fed. It must not be lost to
sight, however, that this fare has been prepared for them by their
parents, or at least by their elders. It must also be noted that they
are receiving instruction in enormously increased numbers. College is
no longer for the exceptional man only, socially or intellectually.
Young men of all grades, and, what is more important, young women
also, are going to college by the hundreds of thousands annually.
The responsibility for what happens to them there intellectually is
squarely up to the older generation. The institutions are provided and
run by that generation, the young are in great measure sent by it, and
the instruction is almost wholly provided by it.
Before we pass on to consider the intellectual environment of the
younger generation, we may note another point with regard to the
general atmosphere which has been provided for it by the older. That
atmosphere is one of intense absorption in the material basis of
life. The older generation has lost its spiritual bearings by its
mad scramble for money at any spiritual cost in order to pay for the
so-called high standard of living which, to a great extent, has been
due to lack of character, that character which enables a person to
perceive clearly what is for his genuine good and to reject what is
not as forcibly as the body tries to reject poison. The high standard
is, in most of its aspects, a high standard on a low plane, and to a
considerable extent it has been made possible because people have given
up using their energies and resources to attain to any standard on the
higher plane. Having, with all the accumulated resources of a wealthy
and powerful civilization, devoted their energies to the easier task of
elaborating their life on the lower, the material plane, it is little
wonder that they have achieved “the highest standard” _on that plane_
the world has seen.
But by devoting all their energies to the elaboration and piling up
of things, to the making of the possession of things a necessity of
their lives, a symbol of success and a basis of personal appraisal,
they have brought about a situation in which the obtaining of money
in quantities wholly unnecessary for a sane ordering of life has
become the overwhelming preoccupation of their minds. The softness of
intellectual fibre that makes the search for material good so much
easier than the search for spiritual, that lack of character that makes
us easy victims of the opinions and standards of others, that lack of
resisting power that makes us the victims of any advertising expert or
persuasive salesman, that fear of mass opinion, that love of luxury
which is always insidious and which grows by what it feeds upon,—all
combine to make us believe that we are rising to a higher life when we
are in reality losing that life in a complete devoting of ourselves to
the mere machinery of life.
Man always attempts to rationalize any position he assumes, and to give
high-sounding motives to what may in reality stem from the basest.
Because we choose to make making money our main preoccupation, we call
it service. Because we choose to put off the day when the nation shall
turn to other things, we say “America is young.” Because we choose to
yield to the seduction of every new toy and luxury, we claim that we
are establishing a “high standard of living.” Because we cannot resist
giving ourselves everything, we say that we devote ourselves to our
mad rush for money in order that we may give our children everything,
regardless of the fact that by raising their standard of income and
needs, and lowering their standard of life, we are in reality making
their future infinitely more difficult for them. The ethics of the
older generation have dissolved in part from the hypocrisy that has
been bred in it by this desire for money and what it will bring in
luxury and social consideration. The dissolution is evident not only
in our having become a nation of speculators who are forever trying to
get something for nothing, not merely in the defalcations and greater
or lesser crimes committed by the weaker, but in that more subtle crime
against our higher natures, and against the new generation, the crime
of cloaking our weakness and material desires in the guise of a “high
standard” and of “giving our children everything.”
Let us consider further a few of the ideas which are familiar to the
younger generation and which to a great extent were not so to the
youth of the older one. For one thing, we may cite the comparative
study of religion. There are only two methods of intellectual approach
to any subject, whether religious or scientific. We may rely upon
authority—that is, someone else’s judgment—or upon our own. From the
time that Protestantism rejected the authority of the Catholic Church
and insisted upon the right of personal searching and interpretation of
the Scriptures the way was opened for the decline in the prestige of
authority. (I may say that I am not a Catholic.) Of course particular
sects could establish new creeds and try to set up new authority in
the place of old; and because man is not wholly a logical creature,
and because most men still believed in the verbal inspiration of the
Bible however they chose to interpret it, this served to maintain its
authority until almost the present day. With the rise, however, of
the higher criticism, and more particularly the study of comparative
religion, the religious sanction for ethics received a severe blow.
For one young person who bothers to read a textual criticism of any
Biblical book, numbers are familiar with and delight in Frazer’s
_Golden Bough_. Nothing serves more subtly to break down a belief
in the theology of Christianity than to find, for example, that the
idea of a dying god is common to many religions and many people, that
likewise is the idea of an immaculate conception or a virgin birth, and
that even the doctrine of transubstantiation and the eating of bread
which somehow becomes the body of a god is widespread. The question
naturally arises why, if we must reject these doctrines as taught by
every religion except Christianity, should we be obliged to accept them
as true in that? Religion and theology are very different things. The
younger generation are not irreligious. In the truest sense they want
a religion, but they do not want as a substitute the theology preached
by many clergymen or the mere husk of social service given in so many
churches in place of both theology and religion. It is my experience
that many boys and girls who cannot be induced to go to church are more
genuinely religious than the clergyman who bewails the fact that they
will not come to hear him preach. But for them a mere sentence in the
Bible can no longer be appealed to as affording a sufficient sanction
for an ethical idea or a code of conduct that has no other apparent
reason for being.
In another comparative study, that of anthropology, they also find
much to make them question current ethics. By a study of the various
tribes and races of the world in different times and places the student
finds that they all, indeed, have codes and ethics, but that these all
vary and have grown out of specific social or economic needs under
particular conditions. The institution of the family, for example, and
the relations of the sexes have assumed many forms. The whole question
is thrown into the intellectual melting pot as one for discussion, and
the sanction tends to become not some religious authority but the good
of society and the individual. The older generation was taught that God
gave certain commands, regarding sexual and other relations, engraved
on a tablet of stone, to a Hebrew some thousands of years ago. It is
useless to tell that to a young person to-day and expect it to settle
the matter.
If he turns to philosophy he comes in contact with a world, not of
fixed ideas, of eternal verities, but a world where all is in a state
of flux. It is not that certain “eternal truths” are being attacked
in order to substitute others in their places, but that the lasting
validity of truths, any truths, is itself under fire. No teacher,
perhaps, has been more popular or exerted greater influence than the
late William James, and the pragmatism associated with his name is, in
the form of its presentation at least, one of the original American
contributions to philosophy. Now the essence of pragmatism is that the
truth or validity of an idea depends on whether it works in practice.
“The truest scientific hypothesis,” he says in one of his most popular
books, “is that which, as we say, ‘works best’; and it can be no
otherwise with religious hypotheses.” For the reader to add “ethical
hypotheses” is to take an obvious step. Again he says: “The true ...
is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is
only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” It is true that he adds
“expedient in the long run and on the whole,” but if the true and the
right can only be tested by their working it is evident that, as the
world is made up of individuals, the only experimental tests possible
must be made by individuals.
This philosophy is thoroughly consonant with the American temperament
and natural outlook on life. We are not mentally a subtle or an
abstract people. If a thing does not work, it is of no use. If it does,
that is a sufficient answer to any attack, and it is this pragmatic
sanction that, consciously or not, many a thoughtful young person of
to-day is seeking for the new ethics. In the writings of the most
influential living American philosopher, John Dewey, he again finds
this sense of fluidity in life and thought. “The first distinguishing
characteristic of thinking is facing the facts,” says Dewey, in words
which appeal to one of the finest sides of the young people. Dewey
as an ardent evolutionist, and a disbeliever in any fixed forms or
species, holds out as the hope for the future—and disagreement with
him would seem to plunge us in hopeless pessimism—that human nature is
not unchangeable, that there is possibility of unlimited alteration by
change in the environment, and that this change may be brought about
by taking conscious thought and not awaiting the slow alteration of
nature. This again throws open the way for a serious consideration as
to whether, if we can change the environment and human nature,—and both
_have_ been enormously changed,—we keep unchanged codes of conduct.
Philosophical and scientific ideas are coming to affect the thinking
of people, who may never read the books in which they are primarily
expressed, with steadily increasing acceleration. It took many
generations for the discovery by Copernicus that the earth was not the
centre of the universe, but moved round the sun, to affect religious
and other ideas. It took something more than a generation for Darwin’s
theory of evolution to revolutionize all our thinking. Who knows what
the influence, not merely in science, but in all social thinking,
including ethics, may very soon be of Einstein’s theory of relativity?
It has already had great influence, in spite of the fact that those of
us who are not mathematicians cannot comprehend it. But to be told—to
mention only one aspect of his theory—that there is no such thing as a
“correct size” of anything, but that for human knowledge the size of
anything depends on the relative speed maintained by the observer and
the thing observed, is, literally, appalling. This fact brings to us in
startling fashion and in mathematical terms the realization that things
are not absolute but relative. The theory of relativity is far more of
a solvent for the eternal verities than either the Copernican or the
Darwinian theory, and its effect, already being felt, is bound to be
profound in realms of thought seemingly remote from physics.
III
In a few words, the young generation has a religion, but it is
nebulous. It may to some extent serve, at moments when it is felt,
as a source of strength, as an aid to being straight and decent. At
many times it is not felt. In any case it issues no commands covering
specific conduct. It has no decalogue, and the question of what is
decent and straight is left open by it. The youngster’s ethics,
therefore, have no religious sanction which points out any specific
rules of conduct. On the other hand, through his anthropological and
sociological studies he comes to realize that there are innumerable
ways of living and choices of conduct, all of which have been or are
thought right and moral by some people, sometime, somewhere. What
constitutes right conduct depends, therefore, apparently on conditions
and not on any eternal rules. The prevailing temperament of his nation
and its most popular philosophy teach him that the only test of
validity is “work-ability”—that if an idea has good results it is good,
if it has not it is bad. The world has never been a very satisfactorily
organized place, and nowadays, what with the results of the war, our
socially developed conscience, and all the conditions of present life,
it can hardly be said to look like an outstanding success. Those
who have lived long have for the most part become either reconciled
or hopeless over the situation. But for the young it is different,
fortunately. They see the poverty, the social injustice, the frequent
emotional maladjustment between the individual and society, and they
do not see, and let us hope that they are right, that such things need
always be.
The ethics of the older person do not change. He too may have, as he
probably has, lost the religious sanction, but as the twig is bent
the tree has grown. He was taught so-and-so and he sticks to it, and
anything else seems wrong. Moreover, he has learned that one cannot
meet every moral emergency by thinking it out as a unique case. Life is
short, emergencies come suddenly, and one must have some general rules
to guide. He is accustomed to the old rules, it is his habit to obey
them, and he simplifies his life by continuing to do so. The youngster,
however, has no ready-made adjustments and is intensely interested
in life, and willing to take time and risks. His entire education
has taught him to take a scientific view of life, and to reject mere
authority. It is not enough for a parent to point out that something
is “right” or “wrong.” The youth asks “Why?” The only satisfactory
answer is one that will convince him that a certain line of conduct
will or will not conduce to his own good or that of society.
With the education which we give to youth, I do not see how we could
expect any other result. The fact is that the younger generation is
simply carrying forward where we leave off. The decay in belief in the
Christian theology, the loss of religious sanction for ethics, the
development of such comparative studies as religion and anthropology,
the pragmatic philosophy, the Freudian psychology of inhibitions and
complexes, and the various scientific and mechanical discoveries
which have transformed the world, have all been the work of the older
generation. The youth who are coming forward to-day receive the full
force of all this straight in the face and all at once. And the changes
are coming faster and faster.
Personally I do not see how we can quarrel with the general ideas that
the younger generation has as to its ethical problem—that is, that
there is no indubitable religious or other authoritarian sanction for
any specific rules of conduct; that different ethical codes have best
suited different peoples, times, and conditions; that the best test of
any hypothesis is whether it will work; and that in a world in flux
there is no reason for positing and insisting upon an eternally fixed
code of ethics. We do know that such codes will gradually alter in
any case. The question is whether it is possible to use intelligence
in altering them or whether we have to trust to the slow process of
an unintelligent alteration. If they do gradually get adjusted to new
social conditions and structures, then it is reasonable to suppose
that such an adjustment should bear some time relation to the rapidity
of change in society. With the increasing speeding up both of thought
and of scientific discovery, the rate of change in society is also
speeding up enormously. Unless we can assist intelligently the process
of adjusting ethical ideas and codes to the social change, the amount
of injustice and individual maladjustments, emotional, economic, and
other, may increase so rapidly as to endanger the social structure
itself.
The economic independence of the younger generation of women has
already profoundly altered the whole family relation and that of the
two sexes. The motor car, whether one likes it or not, has almost
equally altered the whole question of the supervision of the two sexes
at an earlier stage. Again, whether one likes it or not, the scientific
investigations now being carried on in several parts of the world into
the question of methods of birth control may have still more profound
effects within the lifetime of the coming generation. The changes which
have come already since the Industrial Revolution and the harnessing
of steam are probably nothing to what we may expect within the next
generation if the present rate of discovery and alteration continues.
To say that rules of personal conduct established under sanctions which
no longer exist for most people, and for conditions which have already
been changed almost beyond recognition, must last unaltered forever is
simply to refuse to see the facts and to court disaster, individual or
social.
Our ethics and their old sanctions are already in dissolution. That has
been accomplished by the older, not the younger, generation. What the
younger generation and their children may be called upon to do may
be to make the most rapid, far-reaching, and consciously intelligent
readjustment of ethical ideas to altered social structure that the race
has ever been called upon to make. We of the older generation have
played with ideas and let loose forces the power of which we little
dreamed of. We have, indeed, sowed the wind, and it will be those of
the younger generation who will reap the whirlwind unless they can
control it. Individually we may feel guiltless. We may merely have been
busy with our intellectual hobbies, our money-getting, our loving and
striving, but we surely cannot lay the blame for the intellectual or
moral conditions upon the scapegoat of the “Younger Generation.” To
condemn them and regard ourselves complacently is as unjust as it is
unwarranted. They have inherited, perhaps, the biggest mess and biggest
problem that was ever bequeathed by one generation to another. Never
has the road been wilder or the signposts fewer.
We may address the young in the words of FitzJames Stephen: “Each must
act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.
We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding
mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may
be deceptive. If all stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we
take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly
know whether there is any right one. What must we do? “Be strong and
of a good courage.” Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what
comes. If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.”
But if that is all the injunction we can give them, are we performing
our duty, and can we blame them, instead of ourselves, if they take the
wrong road, or if death ends all? We of the older generation believe
both from education in youth and from the experiences of our lives that
there are certain values in life. In our minds they have the sanctions
of tradition and experience. The new generation has no experience and
declines to accept mere tradition. Is it not the duty of the older
generation to face the problem, both for its own sake and that of the
young, and seriously to attempt to arrive at some reasonable philosophy
of life that shall validate the values it believes in?
Is it not the plain truth that in all too many cases the older
generation has had both its intellectual and its moral fibre sapped
by its own mad desire to make money? While paying lip service to the
old values of life, which it repeats, without being able to produce
any sanction for them, to the young, has it itself lived according to
those values or has it not abandoned them for the sake of piling up
riches? In the past forty years have the ethics of the counting room,
the office, the factory, and the legislatures been those of the church
and the drawing-room? Has the older generation lived soberly, has it
spent sanely, has it lived chastely, has it preferred the spiritual to
the material things of life, has it refrained from bribing policemen
and legislatures, has it voted from principle, has it tried to insist
upon honesty in its public servants, has it tried to cultivate its mind
and taste, has it tried honestly to think things through and attain
a sound philosophy of living that it may pass on to its children?
These questions to a great extent answer themselves. They are not
put to absolve the younger generation from responsibility but from
blame. In the moulding of character, example, after all, is perhaps of
more importance than moral saws or authoritative sanctions. When the
older generation looks at the younger it is looking in the mirror at
itself. It is itself, only far from the safe shelter of home, straying
inexperienced on the “mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow
and blinding mist.” Would the younger generation be out in the storm
so utterly without guidance, if the older had not devoted its time,
strength and mental energy to the gaining of wealth and luxury instead
of to the values of a sane and humane life?