SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM
The Commission "has kept constantly in mind that to offer a
contribution of any value such an offering must be, first, moral;
second, reasonable and practical; third, possible under the
Constitutional powers of our Courts; fourth, that which will square
with the public conscience of the American people."--The Vice
Commission of Chicago--Introduction to Report on the Social Evil.
Having adjusted such spectacles the Commission proceeded to look at "this
curse which is more blasting than any plague or epidemic," at an evil
"which spells only ruin to the race." In dealing with what it regards as
the greatest calamity in the world, a calamity as old as civilization,
the Commission lays it down beforehand that the remedy must be "moral,"
constitutional, and satisfactory to the public conscience. I wonder in
all seriousness what the Commission would have done had it discovered a
genuine cure for prostitution which happened, let us say, to conflict
with the constitutional powers of our courts. I wonder how the Commission
would have acted if a humble following of the facts had led them to a
conviction out of tune with the existing public conscience of America.
Such a conflict is not only possible; it is highly probable. When you
come to think of it, the conflict appears a certainty. For the
Constitution is a legal expression of the conditions under which
prostitution has flourished; the social evil is rooted in institutions
and manners which have promoted it, in property relations and business
practice which have gathered about them a halo of reason and
practicality, of morality and conscience. Any change so vast as the
abolition of vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice, law and
conscience.
A scientist who began an investigation by saying that his results must be
moral or constitutional would be a joke. We have had scientists like
that, men who insisted that research must confirm the Biblical theory of
creation. We have had economists who set out with the preconceived idea
of justifying the factory system. The world has recently begun to see
through this kind of intellectual fraud. If a doctor should appear who
offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that it was justified by
the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the
American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should
promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of
Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against
Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as
eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we read of the
savage way in which a leper was treated out West; his leprosy was not
regarded as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I remember
correctly, the Bible was quoted in court as an authority on leprosy. The
treatment seemed entirely moral and squared very well with the conscience
of that community.
I have heard reputable physicians condemn a certain method of
psychotherapy because it was "immoral." A woman once told me that she had
let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life because "a mother should
never mention anything 'embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are still
blushing for the way America treated Gorki when it found that Russian
morals did not square with the public conscience of America. And the time
is not yet passed when we punish the offspring of illicit love, and visit
vengeance unto the third and fourth generations. One reads in the report
of the Vice Commission that many public hospitals in Chicago refuse to
care for venereal diseases. The examples are endless. They run from the
absurd to the monstrous. But always the source is the same. Idols are set
up to which all the living must bow; we decide beforehand that things
must fit a few preconceived ideas. And when they don't, which is most of
the time, we deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling of our
theory to any deeper understanding of the real problem before us.
It seems as if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind
it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an
authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been
shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire,
"neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional phrases that
cloak all sorts of thievery, of the common law precedents that tyrannize
over us, history begins to look almost like the struggle of man to
emancipate himself from phrase-worship. The devil can quote Scripture,
and law, and morality and reason and practicality. The devil can use the
public conscience of his time. He does in wars, in racial and religious
persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisition; he does in the
American lynching.
For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral. Conquerors
have gone forth with the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God
before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and pillage. The ruthless
exploitation of India becomes the civilizing fulfilment of the "white
man's burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drummer, and prospector
are embodied in one man. In the nineteenth century church, press and
university devoted no inconsiderable part of their time to proving the
high moral and scientific justice of child labor and human sweating. It
is a matter of record that chattel slavery in this country was deduced
from Biblical injunction, that the universities furnished brains for its
defense. Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Englishman alone when
he said in "The Man of Destiny" that "... you will never find an
Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you
on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles...."
Liberty, equality, fraternity--what a grotesque career those words have
had. Almost every attempt to mitigate the hardships of industrialism has
had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor organization, factory laws,
health regulations are still fought as infringements of liberty. And in
the name of equality what fantasies of taxation have we not woven? what
travesties of justice set up? "The law in its majestic equality," writes
Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep in the
streets and to steal bread." Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan
by which we refuse to enact what is called "class legislation"--a policy
which in theory denies the existence of classes, in practice legislates
in favor of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged are laws friendly to
business; class legislation means working-class legislation.
You have to go among lawyers to see this idolatrous process in its most
perfect form. When a judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution, what
is it that he does? He takes a sentence written by a group of men more
than a hundred years ago. That sentence expressed their policy about
certain conditions which they had to deal with. In it was summed up what
they intended to do about the problems they saw. That is all the sentence
means. But in the course of a century new problems arise--problems the
Fathers could no more have foreseen than we can foresee the problems of
the year two thousand. Yet that sentence which contained their wisdom
about particular events has acquired an emotional force which persists
long after the events have passed away. Legends gather about the men who
wrote it: those legends are absorbed by us almost with our mothers' milk.
We never again read that sentence straight. It has a gravity out of all
proportion to its use, and we call it a fundamental principle of
government. Whatever we want to do is hallowed and justified, if it can
be made to appear as a deduction from that sentence. To put new wine in
old bottles is one of the aims of legal casuistry.
Reformers practice it. You hear it said that the initiative and
referendum are a return to the New England town meeting. That is supposed
to be an argument for direct legislation. But surely the analogy is
superficial; the difference profound. The infinitely greater complexity
of legislation to-day, the vast confusion in the aims of the voting
population, produce a difference of so great a degree that it amounts to
a difference in kind. The naturalist may classify the dog and the fox,
the house-cat and the tiger together for certain purposes. The historian
of political forms may see in the town meeting a forerunner of direct
legislation. But no housewife dare classify the cat and the tiger, the
dog and the fox, as the same kind of animal. And no statesman can argue
the virtues of the referendum from the successes of the town meeting.
But the propagandists do it nevertheless, and their propaganda thrives
upon it. The reason is simple. The town meeting is an obviously
respectable institution, glorified by all the reverence men give to the
dead. It has acquired the seal of an admired past, and any proposal that
can borrow that seal can borrow that reverence too. A name trails behind
it an army of associations. That army will fight in any cause that bears
the name. So the reformers of California, the Lorimerites of Chicago, and
the Barnes Republicans of Albany all use the name of Lincoln for their
political associations. In the struggle that preceded the Republican
Convention of 1912 it was rumored that the Taft reactionaries would put
forward Lincoln's son as chairman of the convention in order to
counteract Roosevelt's claim that he stood in Lincoln's shoes.
Casuistry is nothing but the injection of your own meaning into an old
name. At school when the teacher asked us whether we had studied the
lesson, the invariable answer was Yes. We had indeed stared at the page
for a few minutes, and that could be called studying. Sometimes the
head-master would break into the room just in time to see the conclusion
of a scuffle. Jimmy's clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you throw
chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny, and then under his breath to
placate God's penchant for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once in
Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel. The waitress brought me
a glass of yellowish liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top. No
tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition state looked like that.
Though it was tea, it might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled or
winked in ordering the tea, it would have been beer. The two looked alike
in Portland; they were interchangeable. You could drink tea and fool
yourself into thinking it was beer. You could drink beer and pass for a
tea-toper.
It is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial and so deliberate. The
openness cleanses it. Advertising, for example, would be nothing but
gigantic and systematic lying if almost everybody didn't know that it
was. Yet it runs into the sinister all the time. The pure food agitation
is largely an effort to make the label and the contents tell the same
story. It was noteworthy that, following the discovery of salvarsan or
"606" by Dr. Ehrlich, the quack doctors began to call their treatments
"606." But the deliberate casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is
not so difficult to deal with. The very deliberation makes it easier to
detect, for it is generally awkward. What one man can consciously devise,
other men can understand.
But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No one escapes it entirely. A
wealth of evidence could be adduced to support this from the studies of
dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian school of psychologists. They
have shown how constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a shallow
incident--how the superficial is all the time being shoved into the light
of consciousness in order to conceal a buried intention; how inveterate
is our use of symbols.
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of
idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this
into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we
build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and
personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much
easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights
of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the
theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their
fate and forget their original content.
For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstractions of all kinds are
nothing but the porous vessels into which life flows, is contained for a
time, and then passes through. But our reverence clings to the vessels.
The old meaning may have disappeared, a new one come in--no matter, we
try to believe there has been no change. And when life's expansion
demands some new container, nothing is more difficult than the
realization that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the present need.
It is interesting to notice how in the very act of analyzing it I have
fallen into this curious and ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor
is taken for the reality: I have used at least six metaphors to state it.
Abstractions are not cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and
life doesn't flow like water. What they really are you and I know
inwardly by using abstractions and living our lives. But once I attempt
to give that inwardness expression, I must use the only weapons I
have--abstractions, theories, phrases. By an effort of the sympathetic
imagination you can revive within yourself something of my inward sense.
As I have had to abstract from life in order to communicate, so you are
compelled to animate my abstractions, in order to understand.
I know of no other method of communication between two people. Language
is always grossly inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is merely
passive, if he falls into the mistake of the literal-minded who expect
words to contain a precise image of reality. They never do. All language
can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the imagination enabling the
reader to recreate the author's insight. The artist does that: he
controls his medium so that we come most readily to the heart of his
intention. In the lyric poet the control is often so delicate that the
hearer lives over again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the
words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the
time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous
vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at
the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means
when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his
system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign to the thinker.
That too is why debating is such a wretched amusement and most
partisanship, most controversy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue
from the opponent's language, never from his insight. You take him
literally, you pick up his sentences, and you show what nonsense they
are. You do not try to weigh what you see against what he sees; you
contrast what you see with what he says. So debating becomes a way of
confirming your own prejudices; it is never, never in any debate I have
suffered through, a search for understanding from the angles of two
differing insights.
And, of course, in those more sinister forms of debating, court trials,
where the stakes are so much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is
to make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the other lawyer's
contention. Men have been hanged as a result. How often in a political
campaign does a candidate suggest that behind the platforms and speeches
of his opponents there might be some new and valuable understanding of
the country's need?
The fact is that we argue and quarrel an enormous lot over words. Our
prevailing habit is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not about
the realities they express. In controversy we do not try to find our
opponent's meaning: we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts to
shape policies we do not seek out what is worth doing: we seek out what
will pass for moral, practical, popular or constitutional.
In this the Vice Commission reflected our national habits. For those
earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of
abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to
four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to
be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect
that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that
cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could
then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It
means these changes in industry, sex relations, law and public opinion.
If you think it is worth the cost you can begin to deal with the problem.
If you don't, then confess that you will not abolish prostitution, and
turn your compassion to softening its effects."
That would have left the issues clear and wholesome. But the procedure of
the Commission is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions may "square
with the public conscience of the American people" but they will not
square with the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell you at the
top of the page that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
ultimate ideal and twenty lines further on that the method must be
constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence.
Calf-worship was never more idolatrous than this. Truth would have slept
more comfortably in Procrustes' bed.
Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived ideas of the
Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused
no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to
conventionality--I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report,
and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent
hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too
shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the
minds of the Commission, and without them the report cannot be
understood. They are typical idols of the American people. This report
offers an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping them.
A valuable contribution, then, must be _moral_. There is no doubt that
the Commission means sexually moral. We Americans always use the word in
that limited sense. If you say that Jones is a moral man you mean that he
is faithful to his wife. He may support her by selling pink pills; he is
nevertheless moral if he is monogamous. The average American rarely
speaks of industrial piracy as immoral. He may condemn it, but not with
that word. If he extends the meaning of immoral at all, it is to the
vices most closely allied to sex--drink and gambling.
Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined for the Commission. As we
have seen, it means that sex must be confined to procreation by a
healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple. All other sexual
expression would come under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do the
Commission no injustice. Now this limited conception of sex has had a
disastrous effect: it has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual
impulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any modification of the
relationship of men and women was immediately put out of consideration.
Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Havelock Ellis make could, of
course, not even get a hearing.
With this moral ideal in mind, not only vice, but sex itself, becomes an
evil thing. Hence the hysterical and minute application of the taboo
wherever sex shows itself. Barred from any reform which would reabsorb
the impulse into civilized life, the Commissioners had no other course
but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this they were compelled to
discard the precious values of art, religion and social life of which
this superfluous energy is the creator. Driven to think of it as bad,
except for certain particular functions, they could, of course, not see
its possibilities. Hence the poverty of their suggestions along
educational and artistic lines.
A valuable contribution, we are told, must be _reasonable_ and
_practical_. Here is a case where words cannot be taken literally.
"Reasonable" in America certainly never even pretended to mean in
accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"--well one thinks of
"practical politics," "practical business men," and "unpractical
reformers." Boiled down these words amount to something like this: the
proposals must not be new or startling; must not involve any radical
disturbance of any respectable person's selfishness; must not call forth
any great opposition; must look definite and immediate; must be tangible
like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance, or a policeman's
club. Above all a "reasonable and practical" proposal must not require
any imaginative patience. The actual proposals have all these qualities:
if they are "reasonable and practical" then we know by a good
demonstration what these terms meant to that average body of citizens.
To see that is to see exposed an important facet of the American
temperament. Our dislike of "talk"; the frantic desire to "do something"
without inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dollar standard; the
unwillingness to cast any bread upon the waters; our preference for a
sparrow in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the naïve inability to
understand the inner satisfactions of bankrupt poets and the
unworldliness of eccentric thinkers; success-mania; philistinism--they
are pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure or unwillingness to
project the mind beyond the daily routine of things, to play over the
whole horizon of possibilities, and to recognize that all is not said
when we have spoken. In those words "reasonable and practical" is the
Chinese Wall of America, that narrow boundary which contracts our vision
to the moment, cuts us off from the culture of the world, and makes us
such provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own problems. Fixation
upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land
meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One
suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real feeling
that the world is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce panics.
How this fascination of the obvious has balked the work of the Commission
I need not elaborate. That the long process of civilizing sex received
perfunctory attention; that the imaginative value of sex was lost in a
dogma; that the implied changes in social life were dodged--all that has
been pointed out. It was the inability to rise above the immediate that
makes the report read as if the policeman were the only agent of
civilization.
For where in the report is any thorough discussion by sociologists of the
relations of business and marriage to vice? Why is there no testimony by
psychologists to show how sex can be affected by environment, by
educators to show how it can be trained, by industrial experts to show
how monotony and fatigue affect it? Where are the detailed proposals by
specialists, for decent housing and working conditions, for educational
reform, for play facilities? The Commission wasn't afraid of details:
didn't it recommend searchlights in the parks as a weapon against vice?
Why then isn't there a budget, a large, comprehensive budget, precise and
informing, in which provision is made for beginning to civilize Chicago?
That wouldn't have been "reasonable and practical," I presume, for it
would have cost millions and millions of dollars. And where would the
money have come from? Were the single-taxers, the Socialists consulted?
But their proposals would require big changes in property interests, and
would that be "reasonable and practical"? Evidently not: it is more
reasonable and practical to keep park benches out of the shadows and to
plague unescorted prostitutes.
And where are the open questions: the issues that everybody should
consider, the problems that scientists should study? I see almost no
trace of them. Why are the sexual problems not even stated? Where are the
doubts that should have honored these investigations, the frank statement
of all the gaps in knowledge, and the obscurities in morals? Knowing
perfectly well that vice will not be repressed within a year or
prostitution absolutely annihilated in ten, it might, I should think,
have seemed more important that the issues be made clear and the thought
of the people fertilized than that the report should look very definite
and precise. There are all sorts of things we do not understand about
this problem. The opportunities for study which the Commissioners had
must have made these empty spaces evident. Why then were we not taken
into their confidence? Along what lines is investigation most needed? To
what problems, what issues, shall we give our attention? What is the
debatable ground in this territory? The Commission does not say, and I
for one, ascribe the silence to the American preoccupation with
immediate, definite, tangible interests.
Wells has written penetratingly about this in "The New Machiavelli." I
have called this fixation on the nearest object at hand an American
habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an English one too. But in this
country we have a philosophy to express it--the philosophy of the
Reasonable and the Practical, and so I do not hesitate to import Mr.
Wells's observations: "It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men,
have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out
the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of the
purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves
to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the
perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma,
persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the
stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good
intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought,
crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any
extension of social organization is at present achieved. Directly,
however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is grasped, directly
the dominating importance of this critical, less personal, mental
hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind in the race is
understood, the whole problem of the statesman and his attitude toward
politics gains a new significance, and becomes accessible to a new series
of solutions...."
Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to cultivate what Mr. Wells
calls the "mental hinterland" is a vice peculiar to the business man. The
colleges submit to it whenever they concentrate their attention on the
details of the student's vocation before they have built up some cultural
background. The whole drift towards industrial training in schools has
the germs of disaster within it--a preoccupation with the technique of a
career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities of our schools and
colleges, still less am I a lover of shallow specialists. The
unquestioned need for experts in politics is full of the very real danger
that detailed preparation may give us a bureaucracy--a government by men
divorced from human tradition. The churches submit to the demand for
immediacy with great alacrity. Look at the so-called "liberal" churches.
Reacting against an empty formalism they are tumbling over themselves to
prove how directly they touch daily life. You read glowing articles in
magazines about preachers who devote their time to housing reforms, milk
supplies, the purging of the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of
their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the political absorption
of their sermons, you are told that the church must abandon forms and
serve the common life of men. There are many ways of serving everyday
needs,--turning churches into social reform organs and political rostra
is, it seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of performing that
service. When churches cease to paint the background of our lives, to
nourish a Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate purposes and reaffirm
the deepest values of life, then churches have ceased to meet the needs
for which they exist. That "hinterland" affects daily life, and the
church which cannot get a leverage on it by any other method than
entering into immediate political controversy is simply a church that is
dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform, but it has ceased to be a
church.
A large wing of the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It
boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical."
Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great
achievement. It forgets the difference between voting the Socialist
ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is the tangible thing, and
for that these Socialist politicians work. They get the votes, enough to
elect them to office. In the City of Schenectady that happened as a
result of the mayoralty campaign of 1911. I had an opportunity to observe
the results. A few Socialists were in office set to govern a city with no
Socialist "hinterland." It was a pathetic situation, for any reform
proposal had to pass the judgment of men and women who did not see life
as the officials did. On no important measure could the administration
expect popular understanding. What was the result? In crucial issues,
like taxation, the Socialists had to submit to the ideas,--the general
state of mind of the community. They had to reverse their own theories
and accept those that prevailed in that unconverted city. I wondered over
our helplessness, for I was during a period one of those officials. The
other members of the administration used to say at every opportunity that
we were fighting "The Beast" or "Special Privilege." But to me it always
seemed that we were like Peer Gynt struggling against the formless
Boyg--invisible yet everywhere--we were struggling with the unwatered
hinterland of the citizens of Schenectady. I understood then, I think,
what Wells meant when he said that he wanted "no longer to 'fix up,' as
people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the development of
that needed intellectual life without which all his shallow attempts at
fixing up are futile." For in the last analysis the practical and the
reasonable are little idols of clay that thwart our efforts.
The third requirement of a valuable contribution, says the Chicago
Commission, is the constitutional sanction. This idol carries its own
criticism with it. The worship of the constitution amounts, of course, to
saying that men exist for the sake of the constitution. The person who
holds fast to that idea is forever incapable of understanding either men
or constitutions. It is a prime way of making laws ridiculous; if you
want to cultivate _lèse-majesté_ in Germany get the Kaiser to proclaim
his divine origin; if you want to promote disrespect of the courts,
announce their infallibility.
But in this case, the Commission is not representative of the dominant
thought of our times. The vital part of the population has pretty well
emerged from any dumb acquiescence in constitutions. Theodore Roosevelt,
who reflects so much of America, has very definitely cast down this idol.
Now since he stands generally some twenty years behind the pioneer and
about six months ahead of the majority, we may rest assured that this
much-needed iconoclasm is in process of achievement.
Closely related to the constitution and just as decadent to-day are the
Sanctity of Private Property, Vested Rights, Competition the Life of
Trade, Prosperity (at any cost). Each one of these ideas was born of an
original need, served its historical function and survived beyond its
allotted time. Nowadays you still come across some of these ancient
notions, especially in courts, where they do no little damage in
perverting justice, but they are ghost-like and disreputable, gibbering
and largely helpless. He who is watching the ascendant ideas of American
life can afford to feel that the early maxims of capitalism are doomed.
But the habit of mind which would turn an instrument of life into an
immutable law of its existence--that habit is always with us. We may
outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or Private Property only to
establish some new totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate
tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by no means confined to
the arts. Politics, religion, science are subject to it,--in politics we
call it conservative, in religion orthodox, in science we describe it as
academic. Its manifestations are multiform but they have a common source.
An original creative impulse of the mind expresses itself in a certain
formula; posterity mistakes the formula for the impulse. A genius will
use his medium in a particular way because it serves his need; this way
becomes a fixed rule which the classicalist serves. It has been pointed
out that because the first steam trains were run on roads built for carts
and coaches, the railway gauge almost everywhere in the world became
fixed at four feet eight and one-half inches.
You might say that genius works inductively and finds a method; the
conservative works deductively from the method and defeats whatever
genius he may have. A friend of mine had written a very brilliant article
on a play which had puzzled New York. Some time later I was discussing
the article with another friend of a decidedly classicalist bent. "What
is it?" he protested, "it isn't criticism for it's half rhapsody; it
isn't rhapsody because it is analytical.... What is it? That's what I
want to know." "But isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad
it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew what it was...." And so the
argument ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the article under certain
categories he had come to accept, appreciation was impossible for him. I
have many arguments with my classicalist friend. This time it was about
George Moore's "Ave." I was trying to express my delight. "It isn't a
novel, or an essay, or a real confession--it's nothing," said he. His
well-ordered mind was compelled to throw out of doors any work for which
he had no carefully prepared pocket. I thought of Aristotle, who denied
the existence of a mule because it was neither a horse nor an ass.
Dramatic critics follow Aristotle in more ways than one. A play is
produced which fascinates an audience for weeks. It is published and read
all over the world. Then you are treated to endless discussions by the
critics trying to prove that "it is not a play." So-and-so-and-so
constitute a play, they affirm,--this thing doesn't meet the
requirements, so away with it. They forget that nobody would have had the
slightest idea what a play was if plays hadn't been written; that the
rules deduced from the plays that have already been written are no
eternal law for the plays that will be.
Classicalism and invention are irreconcilable enemies. Let it be
understood that I am not decrying the great nourishment which a living
tradition offers. The criticism I am making is of those who try to feed
upon the husks alone. Without the slightest paradox one may say that the
classicalist is most foreign to the classics. He does not put himself
within the creative impulses of the past: he is blinded by their
manifestations. It is perhaps no accident that two of the greatest
classical scholars in England--Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern--are
political radicals. The man whom I call here the classicalist cannot
possibly be creative, for the essence of his creed is that there must be
nothing new under the sun.
The United States, you imagine, would of all nations be the freest from
classicalism. Settled as a great adventure and dedicated to an experiment
in republicanism, the tradition of the country is of extending
boundaries, obstacles overcome, and pioneering exploits in which a
wilderness was subdued to human uses. The very air of America would seem
to be a guarantee against formalism. You would think that self-government
finds its surest footing here--that real autonomy of the spirit which
makes human uses the goal of effort, denies all inhuman ideals, seeks out
what men want, and proceeds to create it. With such a history how could a
nation fail to see in its constitution anything but a tool of life, like
the axe, the spade or the plough?
The West has in a measure carried its freedom over into politics and
social life generally. Formalism sets in as you move east and south into
the older and more settled communities. There the pioneering impulse has
passed out of life into stupid history books, and the inevitable
classicalism, the fear of adventure, the superstition before social
invention, have reasserted themselves. If I may turn for a moment from
description to prophecy, it is to say that this equilibrium will not hold
for very long. There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms
which it needs to-day--reforms which will free its economic life from the
credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the
marketing of its products--will follow the way of all agricultural
communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer
does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain
unnatural irritants which may be summed up as absentee ownership. The
West is suffering from foreignly owned railroads, power-resources, and an
alien credit control. But once it recaptures these essentials of its
economic life, once the "progressive" movement is victorious, I venture
to predict that the agricultural West will become the heart of American
complacency. The East, on the other hand, with its industrial problem
must go to far more revolutionary measures for a solution. And the East
is fertilized continually by European traditions: that stream of
immigration brings with it a thousand unforeseeable possibilities. The
great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the
wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. To-day perhaps,
it is still predominantly a question for the East. But it means that
America is turning from the contrast between her courage and nature's
obstacles to a comparison of her civilization with Europe's. Immigration
more than anything else is drawing us into world problems. Many people
profess to see horrible dangers in the foreign invasion. Certainly no man
is sure of its conclusion. It may swamp us, it may, if we seize the
opportunity, mean the impregnation of our national life with a new
brilliancy.
I have said that the West is still moved by the tapering impulse of the
pioneer, and I have ventured to predict that this would soon dwindle into
an agricultural toryism. That prediction may very easily be upset.
Far-reaching mechanical inventions already threaten to transform farming
into an industry. I refer to those applications of power to agriculture
which will inevitably divorce the farmer from the ownership of his tools.
An industrial revolution analogous to that in manufacture during the
nineteenth century is distinctly probable, and capitalistic agriculture
may soon cease to be a contradiction in terms. Like all inventions it
will disturb deeply the classicalist tendency, and this disturbance may
generate a new impulse to replace the decadent one of the pioneer.
Without some new dynamic force America, for all her tradition, is not
immune to a hardening formalism. The psychological descent into
classicalism is always a strong possibility. That is why we, the children
of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly
with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In
many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the
people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid
sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different
civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism:
universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial
success; we have no tradition of intellectual revolt. The American
college student has the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court
judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical
habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the
"sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a
boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is
regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism
which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new
ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment with him.
It seems at times as if our capacity for appreciating originality were
absorbed in the trivial eccentricities of fads and fashions. The obvious
novelties of machinery and locomotion, phonographs and yellow journalism
slake the American thirst for creation pretty thoroughly. In serious
matters we follow the Vice Commission's fourth essential of a valuable
contribution--_that which will square with the public conscience of the
American people_.
I do not care to dilate upon the exploded pretensions of Mr. and Mrs.
Grundy. They are a fairly disreputable couple by this time because we are
beginning to know how much morbidity they represent. The Vice Commission,
for example, bowed to what might be called the "instinctive conscience"
of America when it balked at tracing vice to its source in the
over-respected institutions of American life and the over-respected
natures of American men and women. It bowed to the prevailing conscience
when it proposed taboos instead of radical changes. It bowed to a
traditional conscience when it confused the sins of sex with the
possibilities of sex; and it paid tribute to a verbal conscience, to a
lip morality, when, with extreme irrelevance to its beloved police, it
proclaimed "absolute annihilation" the ultimate ideal. In brief, the
commission failed to see that the working conscience of America is to-day
bound up with the very evil it is supposed to eradicate by a relentless
warfare.
It was to be expected. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal
verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means
a radical change in conscience. In order to do away with vice America
must live and think and feel differently. This is an old story. Because
of it all innovators have been at war with the public conscience of their
time. Yet there is nothing strange or particularly disheartening about
this commonplace observation: to expect anything else is to hope that a
nation will lift itself by its own bootstraps. Yet there is danger the
moment leaders of the people make a virtue of homage to the unregenerate,
public conscience.
In La Follette's Magazine (Feb. 17, 1912) there is a leading article
called "The Great Issue." You can read there that "the composite judgment
is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the
judgment of any one individual mind. The people have been betrayed by
their representatives again and again. The real danger to democracy lies
not in the ignorance or want of patriotism of the people, but in the
corrupting influence of powerful business organizations upon the
representatives of the people...."
I have only one quarrel with that philosophy--its negativity. With the
belief that government is futile and mischievous unless supported by the
mass of the people; with the undeniable fact that business has corrupted
public officials--I have no complaint. What I object to is the emphasis
which shifts the blame for our troubles from the shoulders of the people
to those of the "corrupting interests." For this seems to me nothing but
the resuscitation of the devil: when things go wrong it is somebody
else's fault. We are peculiarly open to this kind of vanity in America.
If some wise law is passed we say it is the will of the people showing
its power of self-government. But if that will is so weak and timid that
a great evil like child labor persists to our shame we turn the
responsibility over to the devil personified as a "special interest." It
is an old habit of the race which seems to have begun with the serpent in
the Garden of Eden.
The word demagogue has been frightfully maltreated in late years, but
surely here is its real meaning--to flatter the people by telling them
that their failures are somebody else's fault. For if a nation declares
it has reached its majority by instituting self-government, then it
cannot shirk responsibility.
These "special interests"--big business, a corrupt press, crooked
politics--grew up within the country, were promoted by American citizens,
admired by millions of them, and acquiesced in by almost all of them.
Whoever thinks that business corruption is the work of a few inhumanly
cunning individuals with monstrous morals is self-righteous without
excuse. Capitalists did not violate the public conscience of America;
they expressed it. That conscience was inadequate and unintelligent. We
are being pinched by the acts it nourished. A great outcry has arisen and
a number of perfectly conventional men like Lorimer suffer an undeserved
humiliation. We say it is a "moral awakening." That is another dodge by
which we pretend that we were always wise and just, though a trifle
sleepy. In reality we are witnessing a change of conscience, initiated by
cranks and fanatics, sustained for a long time by minorities, which has
at last infected the mass of the people.
The danger I spoke of arises just here: the desire to infect at once the
whole mass crowds out the courage of the innovator. No man can do his
best work if he bows at every step to the public conscience of his age.
The real service to democracy is the fullest, freest expression of
talent. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must
whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not
the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
Hostile critics of democracy have long pointed out that mediocrity
becomes the rule. They have not been without facts for their support. And
I do not see why we who believe in democracy should not recognize this
danger and trace it to its source. Certainly it is not answered with a
sneer. I have worked in the editorial office of a popular magazine, a
magazine that is known widely as a champion of popular rights. By
personal experience, by intimate conversations, and by looking about, I
think I am pretty well aware of what the influence of business upon
journalism amounts to. I have seen the inside working of business
pressure; articles of my own have been suppressed after they were in
type; friends of mine have told me stories of expurgation, of the
"morganization" of their editorial policy. And in the face of that I
should like to record it as my sincere conviction that no financial power
is one-tenth so corrupting, so insidious, so hostile to originality and
frank statement as the fear of the public which reads the magazine. For
one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are
rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the
farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer
girl. Anybody can take a fling at poor old Mr. Rockefeller, but the great
mass of average citizens (to which none of us belongs) must be left in
undisturbed possession of its prejudices. In that subservience, and not
in the meddling of Mr. Morgan, is the reason why American journalism is
so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.
The people should be supreme, yes, its will should be the law of the
land. But it is a caricature of democracy to make it also the law of
individual initiative. One thing it is to say that all proposals must
ultimately win the acceptance of the majority; it is quite another to
propose nothing which is not immediately acceptable. It is as true of the
nation as of the body that one leg cannot go forward very far unless the
whole body follows. That is a different thing from trying to move both
legs forward at the same time. The one is democracy; the other
is--demolatry.
It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol. It would be
an endless task to hunt down all the masks, the will-o'-the-wisps and the
shadows which divert us from our real purpose. Each man carries within
himself the cause of his own mirages. Whenever we accept an idea as
authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the
plough, and not the fruit. And from this habit there is no permanent
escape. Only effort can keep the mind centered truly. Whenever criticism
slackens, whenever we sink into acquiescence, the mind swerves aside and
clings with the gratitude of the weary to some fixed idea. It is so much
easier to follow a rule of thumb, and obey the constitution, than to find
out what we really want and to do it.
* * * * *
A great deal of political theory has been devoted to asking: what is the
aim of government? Many readers may have wondered why that question has
not figured in these pages. For the logical method would be to decide
upon the ultimate ideal of statecraft and then elaborate the technique of
its realization. I have not done that because this rational procedure
inverts the natural order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical
tangles and pseudo-problems. They come from an effort to state abstractly
in intellectual terms qualities that can be known only by direct
experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if you begin by announcing
that politics must achieve "justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even
though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly what these words mean
translated into concrete experiences, it is very doubtful whether you can
really convey your meaning to anyone else. "Plaisante justice qu'une
rivière borne. Vérité, au deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au de là," says
Pascal. If what is good in the world depended on our ability to define it
we should be hopeless indeed.
This is an old difficulty in ethics. Many men have remarked that we
quarrel over the "problem of evil," never over the "problem of good."
That comes from the fact that good is a quality of experience which does
not demand an explanation. When we are thwarted we begin to ask why. It
was the evil in the world that set Leibniz the task of justifying the
ways of God to man. Nor is it an accident that in daily life misfortune
turns men to philosophy. One might generalize and say that as soon as we
begin to explain, it is because we have been made to complain.
No moral judgment can decide the value of life. No ethical theory can
announce any intrinsic good. The whole speculation about morality is an
effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively
feel is good. No formula can express an ultimate experience; no axiom can
ever be a substitute for what really makes life worth living. Plato may
describe the objects which man rejoices over, he may guide them to good
experiences, but each man in his inward life is a last judgment on all
his values.
This amounts to saying that the goal of action is in its final analysis
æsthetic and not moral--a quality of feeling instead of conformity to
rule. Words like justice, harmony, power, democracy are simply empirical
suggestions which may produce the good life. If the practice of them does
not produce it then we are under no obligation to follow them, we should
be idolatrous fools to do so. Every abstraction, every rule of conduct,
every constitution, every law and social arrangement, is an instrument
that has no value in itself. Whatever credit it receives, whatever
reverence we give it, is derived from its utility in ministering to those
concrete experiences which are as obvious and as undefinable as color or
sound. We can celebrate the positively good things, we can live them, we
can create them, but we cannot philosophize about them. To the anæsthetic
intellect we could not convey the meaning of joy. A creature that could
reason but not feel would never know the value of life, for what is
ultimate is in itself inexplicable.
Politics is not concerned with prescribing the ultimate qualities of
life. When it tries to do so by sumptuary legislation, nothing but
mischief is invoked. Its business is to provide opportunities, not to
announce ultimate values; to remove oppressive evil and to invent new
resources for enjoyment. With the enjoyment itself it can have no
concern. That must be lived by each individual. In a sense the politician
can never know his own success, for it is registered in men's inner
lives, and is largely incommunicable. An increasing harvest of rich
personalities is the social reward for a fine statesmanship, but such
personalities are free growths in a cordial environment. They cannot be
cast in moulds or shaped by law. There is no need, therefore, to generate
dialectical disputes about the final goal of politics. No definition can
be just--too precise a one can only deceive us into thinking that our
definition is true. Call ultimate values by any convenient name, it is of
slight importance which you choose. If only men can keep their minds
freed from formalism, idol worship, fixed ideas, and exalted
abstractions, politicians need not worry about the language in which the
end of our striving is expressed. For with the removal of distracting
idols, man's experience becomes the center of thought. And if we think in
terms of men, find out what really bothers them, seek to supply what they
really want, hold only their experience sacred, we shall find our
sanction obvious and unchallenged.