MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR
(Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the relative
importance of our various duties.)
So now we may say that we know what are the great and important things
in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite distress and waste and
failure, but yet inevitably, the life of man is being made over and
multiplied to infinity, by the power of the thinking mind, impelled by
the joy and thrill of the creative action, and guided by the sense of
responsibility, the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To
develop these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the
supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves.
So now we are in position to define the word moral. Assuming that our
argument be accepted, that action is moral which tends to foster the
best and highest forms of life we know, and to aid them in developing
their highest powers; that is immoral which tends to destroy the best
life we know, or to hinder its rapid development.
Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices of man; first
as an individual, and then as a social being. What are my duties to
myself, and what are my duties to the world about me?
You will note that these questions differ somewhat from those of the old
morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should love the Lord our God,
and, second, that we should love our neighbor as ourself. Some would say
that modern thought has dismissed God from consideration; but I would
prefer to say that modern thought has decided that the place where we
encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously expanding
consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty to make of ourselves the
most perfect product of the Divine Incarnation that we can become. Our
duty to our neighbor is to help him to do the same.
Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find that they overlap
and mingle inextricably; the two duties are really one duty looked at
from different points of view. We decide that we owe it to ourselves to
develop our best powers of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we
make ourselves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to
help our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by making
the city clean and decent, and we find that we have helped to save
ourselves from a pestilence.
The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most commonly preached,
of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do unto others as you would have
them do unto you." This formula is good so far as it goes, but you note
that it leaves undetermined the all-important question, what _ought_ we
to want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what I would
have others do unto me is to give me plenty of candy; therefore, under
the golden rule, my highest duty becomes to distribute free candy to the
world. The "golden rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of
self-indulgence, and with all forms of stagnation; it might result in a
civilization more static than China.
Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher Kant worked out
as the final product of his thinking: "Act so that you would be willing
for your action to become a general rule of conduct." Here again is the
same problem. There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some
would prefer one, some others; and there is no possible way of escape
from the fact that before men can agree what to do, they must decide
what they wish to make of their lives.
To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," the
answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my neighbor is not worthy of as much
love as myself?" To be sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to
decide this question; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great
inventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, of course,
a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may love the deeper
possibilities of his nature, which religious ecstasy can appeal to and
arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies and all efforts, it may be that
his disease--physical, mental and moral--has progressed to such a point
that it is necessary to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to
asphyxiate him painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself
is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the indiscriminate
preaching of such a formula would open the flood-gates of sentimentality
and fraud.
Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest possibilities of life,
and thou shalt labor diligently to foster them; moreover, because life
is always growing, and new possibilities are forever dawning in the
human spirit, thou shalt keep an open mind and an inquiring temper, and
be ready at any time to begin life afresh.
Such is the formula. It is not simple; and when we come to apply it, we
find that it constantly grows more complex. When we attempt to decide
our duty to ourselves, we find that we have in us a number of different
beings, each with separate and sometimes conflicting duties and needs.
We have in us the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor
for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, before
we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral man, or the artistic
man. So our life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments between
a thousand conflicting desires and duties; between the different beings
which we might be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain
times. We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another
of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, never an
absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can we shut our eyes, and
go blindly ahead upon one course of action, to the exclusion of every
other consideration! On the contrary, we sit in the seat of
self-determination as a highly trained and skillful engineer. We keep
our eyes upon a dozen different gauges; we press a lever here and touch
a regulator there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for
caution; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely of
ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the decisions of each
moment.