THE APPRECIATION OF HUMAN WORTH
I have a number of neighbors whose sons and daughters are at present
suffering the agony of preparation for college. What a nightmare it
is possible to make of education! Three or four years of attendance
at expensive private schools where the sole aim seems to be to get
the student through his college entrance examinations with a passing
grade. Students terrified, parents anxiously awaiting reports of work
done or not done, teachers tired out, one student fails in his Latin,
another in algebra, a third is sent home because of loss of interest in
study, and there are tears, family conferences, special tutors, reviews
and memory drills in vacation time, until finally the student “gets
through” and drops the subject, his interest in it dead.
I am not one of those who believe that education may be achieved
without effort. But study is not work only, it is also a form a
enjoyment. There are many things which it is a delight to know, not
because such knowledge is useful or is required for a passing grade,
but because it is an aid to the appreciation of value. It is fun.
There are people who attend concerts from a sense of duty, striving
thereby to improve their souls, but it is possible to listen to music
with no other motive than the wish to enjoy it. It is the person who
enjoys music who in the end becomes the discriminating listener. The
same is true of the reading of books. William James once said the
classics are necessary to education because knowledge of them makes us
“connoisseurs of human excellence.” Literature has a charm which is
often lost when it is made “required reading.”
An intelligent boy of seventeen who was having difficulty with his
school work recently said to me, “I think it is because I really am
not interested, and the things I wish to know they do not teach in our
school because the colleges will not give credit for them.” When I
asked him what study would interest him, he replied that he thought he
would like to try philosophy and requested me to suggest a good book
for a beginner, declaring that he intended to take up this study in
addition to his school work.
I have no doubt that had he made this request of one of his instructors
he would have been told that he had better spend his time preparing
his lessons. But I took a chance that his interest might be genuine,
and told him that I thought he would find Plato’s “Republic” a good
introduction to Philosophy, and suggested that he read the first
four books. During the previous semester he had been permitted to
drop one of his courses because reading was “too great a strain upon
his eyes.” When I next saw the boy I inquired how he had got on with
the “Republic.” He said, “Why, I found it so exciting that I did not
stop at the end of the first four books, but read all ten.” When I
asked him what he found interesting in the dialogues, he said, “I do
not understand many of the conclusions they reached, but I enjoyed
listening in on those conversations. They are so logical, and I liked
the way Socrates leads the others along, springs surprises on them, and
makes them see what they mean by what they say. I begin to see what the
difference is between thinking and just talking--and many passages
were beautiful also.” For the first time in his life, he had realized
that the pursuit of knowledge could be an interesting adventure.
Moreover, his parents told me that he had shown improvement in his
regular studies.
When the ancients said that knowledge is knowledge of the good,
they meant in part that with the increase of knowledge comes better
discrimination. If education is _for_ anything it is that we learn to
choose the good. By the “good” I do not mean good in general, or good
as an abstraction of philosophical discourse, nor the conventionally
good. I mean any excellence whatsoever. In order to see and appreciate
excellence, you must yourself have struggled for it. He who has never
striven to surpass himself, surrounds himself with the shoddy, the
second-rate, the cheap. In matters of taste, of sentiment, of good
workmanship, he cannot distinguish between that which is genuine and
that which is imitation. In matters of taste there is much that is
purely arbitrary and conventional, so that what is good taste in one
age may be bad taste in another. Nevertheless, there is a psychological
soundness in our use of the word taste to designate certain judgments
of worth. It implies some degree of self-restraint, a sensitiveness to
subtle stimuli which comes with the habit of giving attention to minute
differences of quality. In contrast, animals which gulp down their food
hastily and in great quantities do not pause to taste it. Similarly,
the mind which has not disciplined itself “swallows things whole,”
as we say. It is not disturbed by the incongruous or the hideous. It
is sensitive only to coarser stimuli: it prefers the hackneyed, the
raucous, the loud and flashy.
I once knew a church in a small town which worshipped in a plain
rectangular old building with colonial windows. When a rival
denomination erected a monstrous building with a huge circular
stained-glass window facing the street, the group which worshipped
in the old structure became dissatisfied. After much difficulty
in securing the money, a committee was sent to a near-by city and
purchased a quantity of gaudily-colored translucent paper similar to
that one used occasionally to see on the front door of a saloon. This
paper the congregation proudly pasted on its colonial window panes.
The architecture of the average church in this country and the hymns
the people sing are much better indications of the level of their
spiritual life than are the creeds they profess. The general cultural
level of the population is revealed by the style of houses men build,
the kind of furniture with which they surround themselves, the type of
motion picture which becomes popular, the magazines on the news stands,
the character of the journals which have the largest circulation,
the “song hits” of the day, the programs which are broadcast for the
radio. These things all have spiritual significance, they indicate a
prevailing type of reaction toward all the values of experience.
The public is curiously indifferent to the lack of genuineness of
sentiment; “hocum” and bathos; deliberate and obvious counterfeits
of emotional reactions characterize practically every appeal to
the general public. Think of the popularity of a play like “Abie’s
Irish Rose,” or of that, a generation ago, of a song like “After the
Ball,” or of a book like “The Man Nobody Knows.” Think of the typical
Chautauqua lecture or political address. Think of the notorious
insincerity of the motion pictures. People ask, “What is the matter
with the movies?” The answer is, the audience. Half-educated people do
not seem to be sensitive to the difference either between good and bad
workmanship or between artistic sincerity and insincerity. Standards
of value, in all the older forms of art, have been set by the knowing
ones. The artist was obliged to submit his creation to the criticism
of persons who had some background of tradition and general knowledge.
With the quantity production methods of the motion pictures, it becomes
possible for the first time to make the man on the street the critic,
on whose judgment depends survival, and as the New Testament says,
“By what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” In selecting our
preferences we pass judgment on ourselves.
The multitude dupes itself with its desire to get something for
nothing; hence its love of the miraculous. All appeals to it are thus
over-capitalized, and made to appear grand and glorious. Shirking
the effort necessary for real achievement leads to the preference of
quackery. There is a story that a physician who had yielded to the
temptation to make easy money by advertising himself as the discoverer
of a magic remedy for disease, received a call from a former friend and
colleague who disapproved of the practice. When the visitor sought to
persuade him that such methods would not pay, the other stepped to the
window and said, “Come now, look with me at the faces of the people
passing along the street; how many of them do you think would become
your patients and how many mine?” I am told by a professor of biology
who gives a pre-medical course in a Western university that less than a
third of the cases of sickness in the country are treated by reputable
members of the medical profession.
I have been somewhat interested in the popularization of psychology.
On the occasion of a visit to a great public library, I was assured
by the librarian that there was a tremendous popular demand for books
which deal with the subject of psychology. I was shown a section in
which these books were kept so that they would be easily accessible.
The greater number were written by persons who had no knowledge of
the subject. They were utterly misleading. Psychology was commonly
presented as a wonderful, easily practiced device for performing
miracles, a system of secret formulae for curing disease, for getting
into harmony with the divine source of all being, for manipulating the
“subconscious” in ways that assured peace, prosperity, self-mastery,
and power over others. I think it is a conservative statement to
say that nine-tenths of the stuff that bears the name “Psychology”
in popular magazines devoted to the subject, in widely advertised
books, in lectures and correspondence courses in self-improvement, is
pure charlatanism and sleight-of-hand arranged for those who wish to
indulge themselves in systematic self-deception. It is not mere lack of
information which causes people to prefer the cheap. With respect to
the things of the mind, people have various standards of living.
A teacher of economics says that by a person’s standard of living we
mean to designate those things which he insists upon having even if
it is necessary to give up marriage and parenthood to possess them.
However much people may desire and strive for comfort and abundance,
from the standpoint of economics, those who marry and beget children
in poverty have a low standard of living. Hence the standard is
not directly a function of the amount of per capita wealth, but is
psychologically determined. And the standard often applies to other
things besides material possession. Persons who have a high standard
are often poor. They might easily turn their efforts to the acquiring
of wealth, but they will deprive themselves and postpone marriage for
the sake of some cultural interest, education, a scholarly or literary
career. They will go without a motor car in order to have money to
buy books. It would be interesting to make a comparative study of the
families of college professors and certain groups of artisans, who have
about the same income as that of the average professor, in order to
see which type had the greater number of children, and which sent the
greater number of their young people to college, also which possessed
the greater number of automobiles or radios. Thus the standard of
living applies not to what one wishes to possess, but to what one is
willing to pay for a certain kind of living. It has to do with quality,
not mere quantity. This principle applies to intellectual standards of
value. People are content with the second-rate because it is easier.
With learning there comes a new reverence. Perhaps I might speak of
it as the educated man’s faith. Respect for the excellent is possible
only to a mind which has learned to recognize distinctions of worth.
An undiscriminating multitude clings to its idols or substitutes new
idolatries for old precisely because it is blind to those differences
of value which constitute the meaning of existence for mankind. People
seek something “given” to believe in, some universal formula of
salvation, because they are unable to distinguish the relative worth
of concrete experiences actual or possible. Those who shrink from the
responsibility of their own yes or no take refuge in an imaginary
_cosmic_ yes and no. But ground your faith in the difference between
the better and the worse, and you have a faith which grows stronger
with the increase of knowledge. All other “faiths” grow weaker because
they are substitutes and evasions, futile attempts to possess value
without the exercise of discrimination.
If existence as a whole has a purpose or a universal meaning, I do
not see how our minds could know it, or what use it could ever be to
the mind that grasped it. I have tried to show that our thoughts and
beliefs are _human ways_, that our thinking is partial. As James said,
all meanings depend upon the fact that we are “interested spectators”
and prefer some things to others. Aside from our human interests and
preferences, everything being so far as we can see equally inevitable,
has the same degree of existence, or right to be, and all is equally
important. Nothing then has any special importance. And if nothing is
important, nothing has any meaning. It might be said that each thing
has meaning for the whole. But since the whole lies beyond our ken,
such a statement does not help us much. The world of meanings and of
truths therefore does not have an independent existence but is related
to our preferences and is a human creation. I am not, however, at
present concerned with the problem of the meaning of truth. Truth is
itself a value. I am trying to state a simple creed by which a man may
best order his life and discover that which an intelligent mind may
reverence. It is, “I believe in the distinction of worth.”
The loss of belief in distinction turns both society and the world of
values upside down. It is symptomatic of the dominance of mediocrity.
With the degradation of power there is a corresponding degradation of
value. The power which rules the modern world is the power of numbers.
Many will say it is the power of money. This too is a numerical force,
having nothing to do with quality or the discrimination of value: the
possession of money does not as such lift the possessor out of the
mass. There is much talk about the conflict of the masses with the
capitalists, but since on both sides the struggle is one for economic
advantage rather than for spiritual value, it may be regarded merely
as the conflict between successful and unsuccessful mass units over a
common interest. Money power and the power of numbers are not really
a confrontation of contrasting valuations of the possibilities of
experience. On both sides the conflict is waged on about the same
level and for identical ends. Capitalism is not really the foe of
democracy, it is democracy’s first-born child. The self-made successful
business man is the “success” in democratic society, its ideal. He is
what the mass as a whole strives to become. Some people think this is
individualism. Infrequently it is, usually it is not. Dollars still
are numbered, and money power is the power of numbers. Its power is
the same as concentrated mass power, since it is of this same order.
We speak of “amassing” money. The mass idea and the ideals of the mass
prevail all round. Capitalism holds sway by virtue of its mass appeal,
and by virtue of the fact that the capitalist is the realization of the
average man’s ambition. The mass because it is powerful and can grant
or withold favors, lords it over the realm of values. Emphasis is laid
upon that which produces an identical type of reaction in a maximum
number of people. The commonplace is rated high because it is the
average.
The rare, the unique, the excellent, cannot be syndicated and
drops out of consideration. The standards which prevail are those
of undifferentiated men. Mass appeal asserts the equal importance
of all individuals, as if a man’s worth consisted in his mere
“number-oneness.” This is the democratic dogma of equality. Critics
of the dogma frequently say that it represents the foolish attempt to
declare all men equal in all respects. I doubt this. It seems to me
that this dogma is perfectly correct so far as it goes. It declares
all men to be equal _before the law_. And law is no respecter of
persons, hence all men are equal before that which does not respect
their personalities. Which is to say that all men are equal in one
respect--that each is a numerical unit when he is considered as a
member of the mass. It is not denied that men may be unequal in other
respects. The point is that these “other respects” do not get a
hearing. But the only recognition of the individual that amounts to
anything is that which recognizes the differences of one from another.
When we emphasize excellence, good workmanship, sincerity, ability,
virtue, wisdom, we have in mind matters concerning which the
differences among men are the differences between superiority
and inferiority. Hence discrimination of value is recognition of
distinctions of worth among men. Lose sight of distinctions of
worth--of the very desirability of distinction as a social good--and
all values decline to the level of mediocrity.
In the supremacy of man as mass the mediocre man, he who in all things
corresponds to type, and is most reducible to average, is King. For him
books and journals are published; clergymen and editors speak for him
and say what they think he believes; laws are made in his interest.
Programs for the radio and motion pictures are made to please him. His
dilemmas are held up as the dilemmas of every one. His goods become the
standards to which all are expected to conform. He has purchasing power
and he has votes. He can make and unmake heroes. He determines the
direction of the course of events in his day and generation. Society
moves in the direction of the type of man about whom there is most
general concern, the man whose preferences set the pace.
The goal set by “modern ideas” would seem to be not the attainment of
a higher level of values, not greater personal worth among men, but
the more complete supremacy of man as mass. Recognition of personal
worth is discouraged, for it necessitates the admission that some
persons are by nature, or as a result of effort, superior to others.
Such an admission is contrary to the idealization of the mass, which is
the worship of the power of numbers. Personal distinction is frowned
upon and discounted. Differences of superiority or inferiority are,
if grudgingly admitted, said to be the result not of difference in
native endowment or of individual achievement, but mere products of
environment. Hence human excellence is an accident.
There is a wide-spread tendency to minimize and deny the significance
of personality. An advanced school of psychology holds that belief
in the existence of personality is a superstition. Personality is
simply the way the nervous organization works and is similar to the
running of a gas engine. Any hereditary differences of capacity or of
teachableness are negligible. All individual traits are reducible to
conditioned reflexes which are what they are because of the coincidence
of certain stimuli. I am what I am because somebody co-operating with
the environment conditioned me in this way. I have absolutely nothing
to do with the matter. Consciousness, interest, attention, will, have
no place in this psychology. The same may be said of all attempts to
explain the phenomena of life in mechanistic terms. Historic movements
are explained as if individuals had nothing to do with them. Social
change is said to be the product of impersonal economic forces, and
progress the result of mass action. Thus the Great Man at best only
represents the mass tendencies of his times. Even for discoveries in
science and creative achievement in the arts, the mass is given credit
although it may have resisted these things when they were new.
I believe that such attempts to _depersonalize_ humanity are
consciously or unconsciously motivated by the wish to avoid the
recognition of the possibility of superiority in an age when the
values of civilization are largely committed to the tender custody of
man acting as mass in the struggle for power. Whether distinctions of
worth are recognized or not, deny that they may exist, deny that men
may have greater or less worth in themselves, and human achievement
becomes merely the attainment of bodily comfort, or social power, or
satisfaction of egoistic desires. There are many who would hold that
such is the case. But our existence is not measured by what we can
get or what we can do, but by what with our getting and doing we may
_become_. Mankind differs from other animals not merely in getting and
doing, man is himself different, and is more than they. It is in this
that his evolution is seen. The same is true of the individuals in the
mass; some are more in themselves than others. So obvious a truth would
never require statement except in a standardized, crowd-manipulating
age in which there is much that encourages the inferior to abound.
I am not suggesting that we devise some plan for picking out all the
superior individuals for preferment and honor, or that we weed out the
inferior ones by some process of elimination, or that the educated man
should or could pose as a superior person. He who must make an effort
to exhibit any excellence has attained little of it. If the world is
spiritually right side up, people will be selected by the standards
of value that prevail. When you buy a newspaper, vote a party ticket,
go to a theatre, listen to a lecture, read a book, express a moral
sentiment or show any preference whatever, you are doing more than just
that thing. Our daily choices determine what we ourselves become, and
they do something else also; the total of them has survival value for
some particular type of man. We are thus daily deciding whose dilemmas
shall determine the quality of living, and what kind of human life is
to be lived on this planet, and who shall thrive and who shall perish.
Human progress is not something we achieve directly by joining a
movement and forcing our convictions upon others. It is something we
help determine every day in the choices we make. The elements of it
come like the variations which appear in the structure of plants and
animals. And as Darwin said it is the function of the environment,
in causing modifications of species, to select certain variants
for survival and to eliminate others; so also in the progress of
civilization do our daily preferences operate. Natural selection and
primitive custom operate blindly and automatically and without reason.
It is because education improves judgment and the appreciation of value
that Thomas Davidson spoke of it as “conscious evolution.”
The education of a people at any time is its answer to the riddle of
life. This answer is more than giving an account of the processes of
nature; it is the opening and closing of doors upon the possibilities
of experience--and upon various human types. Thus education is
selective. It is the sifting out of the relative worth of men. It finds
the significance of living to be the struggle for excellence. Its goal
is a higher type of living man and woman. Its great task therefore,
in the modern world, is the reassertion of the _inequalities_ which
mass appeal ignores, the rediscovery for the modern spirit of the
distinction between superiority and inferiority. It is impossible
to lift any mind from a lower to a higher plane when that which
distinguishes one plane from another is obliterated by placing all on
a level. Appreciation of distinctions of worth is an essential of a
liberal education, as it is of the whole spiritual life of man.