MAKING OUR MORALS
(Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit human
facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.)
Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it
appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will,
guided by human intelligence. Man finds himself in the position of the
crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how
the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he
has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship is steered, and
the meaning of the compass. So now he takes charge of the ship, and
keeps it afloat amid many perils; and meantime, on the bridge of the
vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the
ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.
It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful
because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the
conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with
which he finds himself confronted. The moral and legal codes of mankind
may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman
of the vessel. Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a
heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard,
then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. If he
does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is
going to some other part of the world. Next morning the passengers may
wake up and find the ship on the rocks--because the helmsman persisted
in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an
ancient Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!
If life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern
conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of
continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. If man is free
to work upon this changing environment, he must be free to make new
tools and devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose
among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then
clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws
and customs and moral codes.
This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all
religions. So far as I know there is no religion which does not teach
that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by
some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules.
It is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact,
to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than
any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.
Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, for a test, the
Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon stone tablets some
four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since.
"Thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no
murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of
controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while
if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you
accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men,
provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a
special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of
their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war;
and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself
maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method
of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy
the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.
And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the
killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon
a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You
consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe
and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the
divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason;
and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him
by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you
send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual
practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and
tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of
killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you bully and
beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your
dungeons.
Or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. Surely this
is a law about which we can agree! But presently we discover that
unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow
them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more
adultery than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and
revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if a man
takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved
piece of paper permitting him to do so. But some of the followers of
religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. The Catholic
Church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who
divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal
sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as that; it allows
the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. Other churches are content
to accept the state law as it stands. Is it not manifest that all these
groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the
interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?
Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can all agree upon
that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have
to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to
seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for
your own, and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course,
that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your
statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of
years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and
held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against the fact that it is
not stealing, if it is done by the State, by men who have been dressed
up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.
Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while
other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? Some of
us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals,"
and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of
stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and
tubercular infection. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system
of land monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of
his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and sends the
man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and
I have heard a great many respectable Americans venture so far in
"radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such
circumstances.
One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to
make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk
about "divine" rules for human conduct. Regardless of any ideas you may
hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply
your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from
the task of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right or
to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself
and upon all who come into contact with you. How much more sensible,
therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual
responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to
deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your
judgment so that you will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness
and certainty!
"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without
any guide or authority. How can human beings act, how can they deal with
one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"
The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does
not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working
principles. Many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical
purposes--the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life
of many generations. We are not likely to see in our time the end of the
ancient Hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited
upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a
course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his
children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. The Catholic Church
has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon
its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of
research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the
arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will
ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has added to
gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for
beverage purposes; we have done this in spite of the manifest fact that
the drinking of wine was not merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New
Testament religious rite.
To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries and new powers
make necessary new laws and moral customs, is to say something so
obvious that it might seem a waste of paper and ink. Man has invented
the automobile and has crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt
a rigid set of traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never
occurred to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation
for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" at
Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, at five o'clock in the
afternoon. But modern science has created new economic facts, just as
unprecedented as the automobile; it has created new possibilities of
spending and new possibilities of starving for mankind; it has made new
cravings and new satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the
great mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in their
readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which have no more
relationship to these facts than they have to the affairs of Mars!
I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest and most devoted
souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems of her life, and of her
large family of children and grand-children, according to sentences
which she picks out, more or less at random, from certain more or less
random chapters of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some
words which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her devout
eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing on the matter,
which say exactly the opposite. She will place the strangest and most
unimaginable interpretations upon the words, and yet will be absolutely
certain that her interpretation is the voice of God speaking directly to
her. If you try to tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye
have always with you"; which means that it is interfering with Divine
Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large scale. This lady is
ready instantly to relieve any single case of want; she regards it as
her duty to do this; in fact, she considers that the purpose of some
people's poverty is to provide her with a chance to do the noble action
of relieving it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence,
"Spare the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one
could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean that God
forbade the physical chastisement of children, and preferred them
"spoiled." She held this idea for half a lifetime--until it was pointed
out to her that the sentence was not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an
old English poem!