LIBERAL EDUCATION VS. PROPAGANDA
Whoever is concerned about his education should be on his guard against
propaganda. He who assists in the education of another should be doubly
cautious. The temptation to convert people to our own particular
cause, movement or belief is almost irresistible. An epidemic itch for
manipulating the public has infected the whole population. Perhaps
never was the business of “selling” ideas and interests of all sorts so
common a practice or so cleverly done. Press agents, publicity experts,
advertisers and propagandists have become a pest. Much of the news is
“treated” for interests which may or may not be disclosed. Militarists,
pacifists, prohibitionists, birth controlists, social workers, business
interests, anti-vivisectionists, radicals, reactionaries and all kinds
of reformers insinuate themselves everywhere like crawling insects.
Every legislative body is over-run with lobbyists. Every government,
our own included, fights with propaganda as deadly as poison gas.
Churches have reduced even the spreading of the gospel to the level of
advertising. And to judge by the popularity of one of the vulgarest
books ever written about the founder of Christianity, a large number
of churchmen are happy to believe that Jesus Christ was the world’s
greatest salesman and business executive!
It ought not to be necessary to say that propaganda is not education.
But the confusion of the two is common. It is often very difficult
to enlist the interest of people even in their own education if the
propagandist motive is left out of it. I find that our students are
often at first perplexed. They ask me, “What party or creed or social
movement do you represent? What are you trying to convert us to?” I
have even been asked why I lecture at all, if it is not my purpose to
tell students what they should think and do. The idea of a course of
study as an adventure in truth-seeking, an investigation deliberately
planned without made-in-advance conclusions or ulterior aims, is
difficult for many minds. If no partisan motive is apparent, students
often suspect that there must be some dark and secret conspiracy.
People like to have their instructors labeled and tagged. Otherwise
they feel that they are not being given anything. They prefer to be
told what to think.
And of course everyone wishes to tell his fellows what to think. The
general interest in our neighbor’s “education” rather than our own
is responsible for much of the present confusion of education with
propaganda. This is especially true in the education of children.
Scarcely one person in ten believes children should be told the truth.
Children are credulous and easily acquire habits which become fixed for
life: hence the tendency to take advantage of their innocence and while
giving them the instruction which it is now recognized that society
owes them, to add something which certain people wish them to believe
when they grow up. Consequently there has hardly ever been a time when
education was not to some extent diverted into propagandist channels.
Governments and churches and ruling classes and commercial groups have
always sought to get their hands on the institutions for the education
of youth and utilize them for their own interests. The tendency is
universal. Radicals denounce the Fundamentalists, the capitalists and
the Catholic Church for doing this sort of thing, and then do the same
thing themselves; as for example, in the revolutionary propaganda that
sometimes passes as “worker’s education,” the socialist Sunday School,
the system of public education in Soviet Russia.
The habit of speaking of propaganda as if it were education has
grown with the activities of the advertising profession and other
expert manufacturers of public opinion. Anyone with anything to sell
“educates” the public to buy his product. The word is so commonly
used for advertising that few question the legitimacy of such use. In
fact the popularity of this use of the word education has a definite
psychological cause. Many people would like to get their education
by the easy method of reading subway advertisements. It is pleasant
moreover to feel that we are being educated when we glance at the
billboards on the way from New York to Philadelphia or look over the
back pages in the Saturday Evening Post.
I once heard an editor of a farm journal boast that his paper had
educated the housewives of his state to buy cereal in packages
rather than in bulk. A recent well-written book on the psychology of
advertising by a gentleman who styles himself a “Public Relations
Counsel” explains the technique of making propaganda. The author refers
to such propagandist efforts as education, and says that the difference
between education and propaganda is this: when your side of the case is
given publicity, that is education; when your opponent publishes his
side, that is propaganda.
It is doubtful, however, if members of the advertising profession
are the worst sinners in this respect. Nearly everyone with a cause
to promote does the same. We often hear single-taxers, socialists,
patriotic societies, or vegetarians, speak of their propaganda as
education. In the report on the prohibition situation issued by the
Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the suggestion is
made that there be a campaign of “education” in the interest of the
enforcement of the Volstead Act.
Although the educator and the propagandist are both concerned with
the dissemination of information, they have nothing else in common.
They use contrary methods and they strive for opposite goals. The
propagandist is interested in _what_ people think; the educator in
_how_ they think. The propagandist has a definite aim. He strives to
convert, to sell, to secure assent, to prove a case, to support one
side of an issue. He is striving for an _effect_. He wishes people
to come to a conclusion; to accept his case and close their minds
and act. The educator strives for the open mind. He has no case to
prove, which may not later be reversed. He is willing to reconsider,
to be experimental, to hold his conclusions tentatively. The result
for which he strives is a type of student who will not jump at the
propagandist’s hasty conclusions or be taken in by his catchwords.
To the one “learning” is passively accepting something; criticism of
the matter offered is not encouraged. To the other, learning comes by
examining. The propagandist need have no respect for the personalities
of those he manipulates. The educator must respect his student, since
the development of personality is his aim. In the end the question is
whether people are to be _used_ for purposes other than their own. This
is the sole object of the propagandist; its successful achievement is
the defeat of the educator.
Even in the service of a good cause, propaganda makes for
superficiality in both him who gives and him who receives it. The
convert has seen the light. He is on the right side. He need have
no more doubts or hesitation. Curiosity and further speculation
are no longer necessary. Reasoning henceforth can become special
pleading--mere rationalization, an array of clever plausibilities
designed to strengthen the faith and protect the devotee against the
danger that he may change his mind. He now becomes a propagandist
himself, a lay preacher as it were, whose mission in life is to convert
and uplift others. He begins to harp on one string. In his eagerness to
convince he resorts to the obvious, the thing said for effect. He is
more concerned with the force of his arguments than with the accuracy
of his statements. He is so busy with the general good that he neglects
to purify himself. With unwashed hands he breaks his bread and serves
it to his neighbors. I have seldom seen a person who has spent years
making converts, who has not lost in intellectual integrity. Emerson
noted this trait in the abolitionists of his day. It is a quality which
world menders of all types have in common. Sooner or later the passion
to convert, like any other passion over-indulged, warps the whole
personality. The propagandist becomes intemperate. He loses something
in delicacy and sense of humor. There is in his manner a mixture
of emotion and coercion and a kind of slyness. Finally from much
repetition of stock phrases the great cause itself becomes hackneyed
and professionalized. Most of the messages which men would carry to the
masses slip through the propagandists’ fingers and dribble out before
they arrive at their destination.
I have tried to make clear the differences between propaganda and
education. If I am correct, it follows that whenever the educator
becomes a propagandist he gives up his proper function. I do not mean
that a school teacher should not advocate political change or any other
reform he chooses. He is a citizen as well as a teacher, and has the
right to express his convictions, however unpopular they may be. But it
is not as a teacher that he does so. Ordinarily the public insists that
there are certain views that he may not express either in or outside
his class-room. At the same time he is required to be the advocate of
popular moral, religious and political prejudices, however erroneous
he knows them to be. Public education suffers much from this lack of
freedom, for it operates to keep independent minds out of the teaching
profession. Unless any subject may be presented and every relevant fact
discussed without fear or favor, the instruction offered students is a
cheat.
It is however in the process of teaching itself that the spirit of
the propagandist may supplant that of the educator. It is much easier
to appeal to authority than to experiment, to command assent than to
awaken curiosity, to tell the student what he must believe than to
wait for the maturing of his judgment. There are five devices commonly
in use among propagandists which may defeat the effort for a liberal
education. They are the fixation of ideas by repetition, the trick of
over-simplification, insinuation by appeal to prejudice, distortion of
fact, and coercion.
Psychology has taught the advertising profession the selling power of
mere monotonous repetition. At one of the stations of the Hudson Tube I
counted five posters all displaying the same advertisement of a certain
shaving cream. The advertiser had not leased so much space because of
extravagance, nor was he afraid that people would fail to notice his
advertisement if he displayed it on only one board. It was so large and
vivid that the passerby could easily see it. His aim was to deepen the
impression by repetition. For the same reason a flashing intermittent
electric sign on which the same letters are illuminated again and again
is more effective than one with a continuous light. Another example of
this method is the poster containing the name of a popular cigarette
together with the command, “Read this out loud.”
Advertisement of this nature makes no attempt to argue or explain or
persuade, or to call attention to the merit of the article for sale.
Many commodities in common use owe their popularity not to the fact
that people are persuaded that they are superior to a rival but because
a trade word has become fixed in memory through endless repetition.
A similar method is often used in selling ideas and movements.
Santayana says, “A confused competition of propaganda is carried on
by the most expert psychological methods--for instance, by always
repeating a lie instead of retracting when it is exposed. A formula of
this nature may not be a conscious lie, it need only be so fixed in
the mind by long repetition that it becomes compulsive. The person who
continues repeating it becomes unable to consider the facts which would
contradict it.”
Thus the religious propagandist will continue repeating an obsolete
dogma long after its untruth is a matter of common knowledge. The use
which propagandists make of rumor is another example of this principle.
During the war we saw much of this sort of thing. The wildest
fabrications were accepted uncritically; when everyone was repeating
them it seemed disloyal to question their bases of fact. In any
political campaign the editorials and speeches are made up largely of
repetitions. Popular moral ideas are psychologically similar; we call
them platitudes. In fact public discussion which is mostly propaganda
of one sort or another consists almost wholly of monotonous repetition.
Anyone who has had experience with an open forum will, I think, agree
with me that the discussion from the floor--and not unfrequently the
platform also--shows an amazing monotony of repetition. I have known
men for years to gain the recognition of the chair and repeat the
same phrases night after night, no matter what was the subject under
discussion. We love routine.
There is I believe less routine learning, less mere memory drill, in
our schools now than in former years. I doubt if many students learn
geography or history or the multiplication tables or Latin grammar
in the manner I was made to learn these subjects. However, it is
not in these subjects, which are at best the mere scaffolding of
knowledge, that humdrum does the greatest harm. It is in its failure
to stimulate genuine thinking about the important human interests that
education commonly falls short of its liberalizing function. There is
a dullness about sing-song repetition of the multiplication table or
the recital of the names of the rivers of China, but it does not equal
in monotony the uniformity with which college graduates will say the
same things about politics, the protective tariff, the labor problem,
the constitution of the United States, or the relation of commerce to
culture. I recently heard a professor, who holds an important chair in
one of our leading universities say that his institution strove not
so much for scholarship as to develop a certain type of college man.
No doubt he had in mind a desirable type of man, but any attempt to
mould a group to a single form can succeed only at the expense of the
individuality of the student. Moreover, such a goal naturally causes
the authorities to adopt methods of drill and standardization. Whenever
the aim of education is fixed in advance, it tends to propaganda and
illiberalism.
The habit of repetition develops a credulous and incurious mind. It
produces a type of person who not only accepts his beliefs second-hand,
but also tends to over-simplify any subject under consideration, and
so never get to the bottom of it as an educated mind should strive
to do. It is very convenient to stop speculation with a half-true
generalization stated as the conclusion of the whole matter. We love
big words; catch phrases are easy to remember and to repeat. Moral and
religious teachers know this, hence their use of aphorisms. One does
not stop to analyze an aphorism; it is self-evident, final.
Propagandists and advertisers are also aware of this human trait, and
they delight in making slogans for us. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,”
“Children cry for it,” “Four out of five now lose,” are examples of a
type of advertising familiar to all. Recently an effort was made in New
York to check the “crime wave” with a slogan. A poster addressed to
potential robbers was displayed in various parts of the city containing
the words, “You can’t win.” A comparison of the number of convictions
with the number of crimes of violence would seem to indicate that this
slogan had about the same measure of truthfulness as most others.
Slogans used in commercial advertising are for the most part innocent
enough. But there are slogans used in types of propaganda which are
not innocent. I will discuss the distortion of fact later; my point
is that the type of phrase-making we are discussing tends at best to
close the mind. Every movement tends to dry up into a verbal cult
with a fixed phraseology the repetition of which seems to satisfy
the adherents’ hunger for truth. The thinking of most men consists of
little more than the repetition of the phrases which characterize the
group to which they belong. There are groups which regularly assemble
to listen to their familiar verbal formulas repeated again and again,
deriving much satisfaction from the time-worn phrases. Any deviation
from regularity or omission of any part is resented in the same spirit
that caused primitive men to hold that any deviation from the magic
ritual was sinful. It was the observation of this wide-spread trait
in many forms that led me to the conclusion that there is practically
only one soap-box speech on socialism, one address on the principles
of the single tax, one revival sermon, one type of campaign speech for
each party. At least I find that most members of any movement all say
the same thing. If one knows what kind of an “_ist_” a man happens to
be and is familiar with the ritual of that “_ism_,” one can ordinarily
predict what the man will say on any subject. Frequently propagandists
do not recognize their own principles when they hear them stated in
ordinary English.
And once the cult phrases are thoroughly learned it is very difficult
for an individual to learn anything more. This is why the teaching
of any subject should never be permitted to take on a set form, for
cult ideas reduce an issue or situation to a statement so simple that
it is a mere caricature. Subjects that require exhaustive analysis
and deep meditation or much more information than anyone possesses
are settled with amazing finality by oracular-minded people. How many
matters of vital importance are met with such phrases as “One hundred
percent American,” “My country right or wrong,” “Every Bolshevik
should be stood up against a wall and shot,” “Plenty of room at the
top,” “Reward of Merit,” “Progressive,” “Reactionary,” “The cure
for democracy is more democracy,” “Let the people rule,” “Down with
capitalist exploitation,” “Labor produces all wealth,” “The demon rum,”
“Godless evolution.”
The habit which politicians, professional reformers and other
propagandists have of appealing to popular prejudice in order to gain
adherents is a well-known phenomenon of social psychology. Every
political campaign is an orgy of this sort of thing. Mayor Hylan of
New York, when his incompetence was exposed, diverted attention by
denouncing the “interests.” In the same city a few years ago those who
were opposed to modernizing the public school system stirred up a large
section of the population with the assertion that the “Gary School” was
a Steel Trust school. During the war men were elected to office not
because of their record but according to how strenuously they professed
their Americanism and denounced alleged pro-Germans and socialists. A
“friend of the people” attacks Wall Street as a matter of course. Any
man who questions the wisdom of the prohibition laws is immediately
said to be in league with the “liquor interests.” In prohibition
propaganda effective use was made of the fact that many brewers were
of German descent. In the South the Ku Klux Klan is mainly anti-Negro,
in the Middle West it is anti-Catholic. In the East it takes on an
anti-Semitic coloring. It is by such appeals that multitudes are
marshalled and led first in one direction and then in another, always
to the temporary advantage of a group of leaders. Into all this an
ulterior purpose, a quite personal interest is often insinuated. During
the war I made a collection of advertisements in which all sorts of
articles were urged upon the purchaser with the statement that in
buying such goods the public was helping win the war.
It is obvious that whenever a crowd movement is created its propaganda
has a marked illiberal influence upon institutions of learning. During
the war public education in this country suffered seriously. A spirit
of intolerance often wholly irrelevant to the winning of the war took
possession of many educators. Eminent scientists lost their heads and
ceased to behave with that good judgment which people expect of a
scholar in a critical situation.
Such results of propaganda are not limited to times of warfare. I know
a college where the work of every department was seriously disorganized
for a semester by a religious revival in the town. The pressure of
religious prejudices upon institutions of learning in this country is
one of the most serious forces with which education has to contend.
The hostility in the West and South toward the teaching of any other
account of the origin of man than that contained in the book of
Genesis, is not new. It is merely the giving of legislative support to
religious dogma which strikes us as new. And that has also happened
many times in history. Popular religion has always watched education
with jealous eyes. However, there is one factor in the present
Fundamentalist attack upon the theory of evolution which seems to have
escaped general notice. There is revealed an attitude toward education
in general which should give us concern because it seems to be held by
many people who are not rural Fundamentalists. When those who conceived
of teaching as imparting a doctrine--let us say of special creation
or the authority of the Bible--found that students were being made
acquainted with biological science and its various hypotheses regarding
the evolution of species, they could not understand that science could
be taught in any other spirit than that of theology. They still thought
of teaching as imposing upon the uncritical student mind a system of
belief, a rival creed but still something alleged to be a final truth,
which must be accepted on authority. Persons who speak in this manner
of teaching simply do not know what education is. How could a scientist
go about teaching evolution in this way? Nobody but a propagandist
ever teaches a theory. The scientific laboratory itself is a witness
against such a philosophy of education. Here the student is exposed to
the phenomena to be studied, and to the sources of information and is
aided to discover the facts for himself and draw his own conclusions.
Science learned by any other process is a mere pretense to knowledge. I
suspect it was not the doctrine of evolution so much as permitting the
student to draw his own conclusions from the facts that most disturbed
the advocates of popular religious dogma. Yet few people saw the
issue in this light. At the Dayton trial of the instructor who broke
the statute passed by the legislature of Tennessee, chief emphasis
seems to have been laid on the issue whether after all evolution is
contrary to Genesis. Most people seem to have accepted without comment
the Fundamentalist notion of what teaching is. The whole meaning of
education is involved in this issue. Education is not the substitution
of new creeds for old. Appeals to popular prejudice will continue
to do harm to education so long as it is conceived of as “teaching”
any beliefs whatsoever. As long as students are to be indoctrinated,
naturally every group will wish its own propaganda taught.
In this connection I should say a word about adult education. Those
engaged in this branch of instruction are loud in their criticism
of the propaganda which passes for education in school and college.
Many of them have turned to adult education in order to spread some
propaganda of their own. Teachers in this field are constantly
tempted to yield to the prejudices of their students in order to
gain popularity and keep up attendance. Each type of institution or
special group has its peculiar prejudices and will insist that the
instruction given in its classes be so presented as to lend support
to its interests and beliefs. Where churches maintain classes, adult
education will tend to take on a certain color. It will assume another
in the trade union, still another when the appeal is to radicals. We
have already seen that a school of adult education may be in fact a
socialist theological seminary. Many others merely provide continued
employment for people who had been professional Americanization
propagandists in the hectic years that followed the war.
A favorite method among propagandists is distortion of fact. It
is difficult for anyone who takes an intensely partisan view of a
situation to be honest with himself or careful about matters of
fact. Respect for the truth is, I think, an acquired taste. And the
propagandist is a special pleader. There is always the tendency to
load the dice, to over-emphasize anything that lends support and to
gloss over and explain away any fact that might weaken the case. Rumor,
allegation, mere surmise, will, if it happens to be useful, to put
out as fact established beyond the possibility of doubt. An excellent
example of this practice is a statement recently issued by a committee
of one of the large Protestant denominations attacking both the
Governor of the State and the Mayor of New York. On the occasion of the
latter’s visit to the South I quote a sentence or two.
“The South will be interested to know Mr. Walker’s connection with
New York’s odorous prize-fighting game and with those elements in
New York which are doing their best to murder American standards of
morality.... Let it remember the propaganda which is systematically
organized to incite to crime in the South and West in order that the
prohibition law may be overthrown by these criminal activities....
Let it remember that Governor Smith and his friends were the first
political group in America to introduce a religious issue into a
convention of a political party, an atrocious thing to do in a
country where all religions stand on the same basis.”
Note how the impression is given that the Mayor’s alleged sympathy
with those who wish to repeal the Volstead Act is a connection with
propaganda systematically organized to incite to crime and undermine
American morals. The reference to Governor Smith is typical of much
propaganda.
This method of championing causes is so common that it is almost
impossible to get at the truth about any public question. I have very
little interest in what is happening in Russia. If I had, I should not
know what to believe. Spokesmen for both the Bolshevists and their
enemies seem to be about equally unable to tell the truth.
The pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of the truth about something,
and since propaganda is not the pursuit of truth, its influence upon
educational institutions is illustrated by many of the text books on
American History in common use in the Public Schools. When attempts
were made to write the account of the American Revolution with
fairness to both sides and, in the light of established fact, certain
over-patriotic propagandists became much excited and thought they had
discovered a pro-British conspiracy to deliver this republic again
into the clutches of the British monarchy.
Subject matter which is even remotely associated with popular
dogmas of religion, morals, patriotism, is likely to be modified so
as to appear to be in harmony with such dogmas when presented to
students. Each religious sect has its own version of Church history.
Radicals who wish to hold the environment--hence the present social
system--responsible for human failure, are always inclined to accept
uncritically the biological doctrine of the inheritance of acquired
characters. Patriotism makes it almost impossible for students anywhere
to gain a correct knowledge of the history of their own country. The
moral interest inevitably influences the study of literature. We have
already discussed the teaching of the classics. Their educational value
consists chiefly in opening windows upon a way of life very different
from our own. It broadens our sympathy with all that is human to gain
an understanding of men who were inspired by ideals often the contrary
of those held sacred in our own parish. Yet it is just this educational
value which is commonly lost in the teaching of the classics,
especially in Puritanical communities. The least significant books of
antiquity, writings like Caesar’s Commentaries and Cicero’s political
orations, are often selected as required studies. It is not an accident
that the works most commonly studied are those least shocking to
conventionally minded people, not those which give the student the
best account of ancient civilization. Likewise in the teaching of
modern literature, there is so much expurgation, censorship, evasion,
that most students get the impression that literature is produced by
Sunday School teachers for the edification of very nice people. If, as
many believe, it is best to protect younger students in this manner,
I think they should at least be led to understand what is happening.
Otherwise they are likely to leave school convinced that their own
one-sided and somewhat infantile view of life and letters is the
correct and only possible view and so influence the public authorities
to enact legislation establishing censorships over literature and art,
designed to impose their own limitations upon everyone.
Finally when opportunity is favorable or occasion requires it, most
propagandists will resort to coercion. History has revealed this fact
again and again. It has often been said that the martyrs of today are
the persecutors of tomorrow. With the possibility of the seizure of
power in sight, methods of moral suasion become irksome; they are too
slow. Men must be forced to do what is good for them. Propaganda is
designed to gather a crowd to the support of an idea. I have shown
elsewhere that when the crowd mind appears any group will practice
coercion if it can. Hardly a generation passed after the Edict of
Milan, setting Christians free from persecution, before the Christians
themselves practiced persecution. The French Revolution set up a
guillotine in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. New England
pilgrims of religious liberty persecuted Quakers and other “heretics.”
Radicals proclaim their faith in industrial democracy, free speech, the
brotherhood of man, and the Bolsheviks gain power by a coup d’etat, and
hold it by means of a policy of terror. Santayana says that the many
propagandas which today float in the blue sky of liberalism are only
waiting to show their true colors and resort to open attack and that
whoever is victorious will make an end of liberalism. When physical
force is not in actual use, it hides just around the corner. In much
moral suasion there is a note of intolerance and of invasion. The man
who knows he is right puts you always on the defensive.
Even commercial advertising frequently reveals this spirit. Perhaps
advertisers got the idea from the posters used by the government
during the war. We all remember the commanding figure of Uncle Sam,
finger pointed at our faces and beneath the figure the words, “_You_
buy Liberty Bonds.” Many advertisements now seek to command in such
a manner. We are ordered to buy this and that--not asked if we want
it. Or our privacy is otherwise invaded. I recently saw on a subway
platform an advertisement of soap which contained these words, “Are you
clean or only nearly clean?”
When a crowd of world reformers becomes a crusade, men do not confine
themselves to asking impertinent questions. They are not even deterred
by constitutional guaranties of personal rights. The storm rages
until it blows itself out and leaves behind only the debris of what
before had been good feeling among men. When a crusade is on--and
there are usually several going at the same time in a democracy like
ours--educational institutions are pressed into its service, and are
forced to take sides, or at best maintain a precarious middle of the
road policy. This is not the task of those interested in education.
They are not “in the middle of the road.” They are not on the trampled
highway at all. Their task, while others are wrangling over unreal
issues that today take their toll of life and tomorrow are forgotten,
is to keep the lights of civilization burning, to humanize their own
behavior with reasonableness and good taste.
As Emerson said, history has been mean: all nations have been mobs.
The populace runs after this passing cause and that popular hero. To
the populace your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of
all standards. But there is a time in each man’s education when he
arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is
suicide, that he must take himself for better or for worse. All men
preen themselves on the improvement of society and no man improves.
Society never advances, it recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
the other. Society is a wave; the wave moves forward, but the water
of which it is composed does not. Whoso would be a man must be a
non-conformist.
Such a suggestion as this at once meets serious objection. It is
contrary to the habits of this busybody age. Many will ask, how
can we have done with propaganda? We live in the age of publicity
and organization, of causes and needed reforms. Great movements
challenge our complacency and invite our support. What, without these
interests, could we live for? How could we accomplish anything for the
common good? Is not the educated person as you depict him aloof and
ineffective, a monastic sort of person who disdains the common ways
and devotes his days to idle contemplation? And have you not yourself
said again and again that intellect does not exist as a sequestered,
inactive thing or end in itself, but that thinking is a part of doing?
How then can intellect be trained in indifference to the affairs of men?
But I have not argued that one seclude himself. Is there nothing to
occupy the modern man except to stuff himself with half-truths and
regulate society? Does existence lose its value at the mere suggestion
that man mind his own business? What I have said is that a person
cannot educate himself by filling his head with propaganda.
I do think people of our age are too much devoted to causes and not
enough to their own education. Perhaps I should say that people’s
devotion to causes is too narrow, too impatient, too uncritical.
Doubtless we should serve our cause better if we stopped to look before
we leap. I am not sure that ignorance, however devoted and active, ever
accomplishes much good for mankind.
I might ask in turn, do our propagandas often get the results expected?
Look at pacifist propaganda, or the slogan about the war to end war,
look at socialist propaganda today after a half century and more of
it, consider prohibition. The intellectuals of our generation have
exhausted themselves running after this and that new sociological
magic. And there is a general feeling of frustration and futility.
Where progress has been made in our times, it has been in matters
that do not lend themselves easily to propaganda; success had been
achieved in the arts and sciences. Intellect has failed when playing at
leadership of social movements.
The ends sought by propaganda may be and often are good. But education
is also an end. We are not required to occupy ourselves with any cause
to the extent that we fail to educate ourselves. The first social
obligation of any man is his own education. I am a mere muddler and
a nuisance if I act on the principle that I have any obligations to
society that go beyond my knowledge of means and ends and of good
and evil. Social service should be a by-product of education. I do
not imagine that Socrates or Erasmus sought education in order that
they could be more useful to society. Social obligation or no social
obligation, you and I have the right to such education as we have the
native intelligence to acquire. We have that right because we are
the kind of animals we are. No cause is more important than this. Let
us serve where and when we can, but let us not surrender our mental
integrity for any man’s sake.