legislators and physicians, the police officers and social workers
have no right to stop. They must push forward and force the public
life into paths of less injurious and less dangerous sexual habits and
customs. Their success will depend upon the energy with which they
keep themselves independent of the control of those who do not count
with realities. The hope that men will become sexually abstinent
outside married life is fantastic, and the book of history ought not
to have been written in vain. Any counting on this imaginary
overcoming of selfish desire for sexual satisfaction decreases the
chances of real hygienic reform. It would even be an inexcusable
hypocrisy of the medical profession if, with its consent, one group of
specialists behave as if sexual abstinence were the bodily ideal,
while thousands of no less conscientious physicians in the world,
especially those concerned with nervous diseases, feel again and again
obliged to advise sexual intercourse for their patients. We know
to-day, even much better than ten years ago, how many serious
disturbances result from the suppression of normal sexual life. The
past has shown, moreover, that when society succeeded in spreading
alarm and in decreasing prostitution by fear, the result was such a
rapid increase of perversion and nerve-racking self-abuse that after a
short while the normal ways were again preferred as the lesser evil.
And the reformers will need a second limitation of their efforts. They
cannot hope for success as long as they fancy that reasoning and
calculation and sober balancing of dangers and joys, of injuries and
advantages, can ever be the decisive factor of progress. They ought
not to forget that as soon as this whole problem is brought down to a
mere considering of consequences by the individual, their eugenic
hopes may be cruelly shaken. However distressing it is to say it
frankly, by mere appeal to reason we shall not turn many girls from
the way which leads to prostitution, nor many boys from the
anticipation of married life. The girl in the factory, who hesitates
between the hard work at the machine for the smallest pay, without
pleasures, and the easy money of the street, with an abundance of fun,
may in the regrettable life of prosaic reality balance the
consequences very differently from the moralist. She has discovered
that the ideal of virtue is not so highly valued in her circles as in
the middle classes. The loss of her virtue is not such a severe
hindrance in her life, and even if she yields for a while to earn her
extra money in indecent ways, the chances are great that she may
remain more attractive to a possible future husband from her set than
if she lived the depressing life of grief and deprivation. The
probability of her marrying and becoming the mother in a decent family
home may be greater than on the straighter path. It is, of course,
extremely sad that reality takes such an immoral way, but just here is
the field where the reformers ought to keep their eyes wide open,
instead of basing their appeals on illusory constructions about social
conditions which do not exist. And if the boys begin to reason, their
calculations may count on a still greater probability of good outcome,
if they indulge in their pleasures. More than that, the fate of
certain European countries shows that when it comes to this clear
reasoning, the great turn of the selfish man is from the dangerous
prostitute to the clean girl or married woman, to the sisters and
wives of his friends, and that means the true ruin of home life.
What is the consequence of all? That the fight ought to be given up?
Surely not. But that instead of relying on physical conditions, on
fear of diseases, on merely eugenic improvements and on clever
reasoning, the reform must come from within, must be one of education
and morality, must be controlled, not by bacteriology, but by ethics,
must find its strength not from horror of skin diseases, but in the
reverence for the ideal values of humanity.
VIII
We must not deceive ourselves as to the gravity of the problem. It is
not one of the passing questions which are replaced next season by new
ones. State laws and interstate laws may and ought to continue to
round off some of the sharp edges, institutions and associations may
and ought to succeed in diminishing some of the misery, but the
central problem of national policy in the treatment of the youth will
stay with us until it has been solved rightly; illustrative
instruction cannot be such a solution. We must see with open eyes
where we are standing. The American nation of to-day is no longer the
America of yesterday. The puritanism which certainly was a spirit of
restraint has gone and cannot be brought back. The new wealth and
power, the influx of sensuous South European and East European
elements, the general trend of our age all over the civilized world,
with its technical comfort and its inexpensive luxuries, the receding
of religion and many more factors, have given a new face to America in
the last fifteen years. A desire for the satisfaction of the senses, a
longing for amusements, has become predominant in thousandfold shades
from the refined to the vulgar. In such self-seeking periods the
sexual desire in its masked and its unmasked forms gains steadily in
importance and fascination.
America, moreover, is in a particularly difficult situation. This new
longing for joy, even with its erotic touch, brings with it many
valuable enrichments of every national life, not least among them the
spreading of the sense of beauty. But what is needed is a wholesome
national self-control by which an antisocial growth of these emotions
will be suppressed. Our present-day American life so far lacks these
conditions for the truly harmonious organization of the new
tendencies. There are many causes for it. The long puritanic past did
not allow that slow European training in æsthetic and harmless social
enjoyments. Moreover, the widespread wealth, the feeling of democratic
equality, the faintness of truly artistic interests in the masses, all
reinforce the craving for the mere tickling of the senses, for
amusement of the body, for vaudeville on the stage and in life. The
sexual element in this wave of enjoyment becomes reinforced by the
American position of the woman outside of the family circle. Her
contact with men has been multiplied, her right to seek joy in every
possible way has become the corollary of her new independence, her
position has become more exposed and more dangerous. And in addition
to all this, the chief factor, which alone would be sufficient to give
to the situation a threatening aspect: American educationalists do not
believe in discipline. As long as the community was controlled by the
moral influence of puritanism, the lack of training in subordination
under social authority and obedient discipline was without danger,
while it strengthened the spirit of political liberty. But to-day, in
the period of the new antipuritanic life, the lack of discipline in
education means an actual threat to the social safety.
In such a situation what can be more fraught with dangers than to
abolish the policy of silence and to uphold the policy of talking and
talking about sexual matters with those whose minds were still
untouched by the lure. It means to fill the atmosphere in which the
growing adolescent moves with sultry ideas, it means to distort the
view of the social surroundings, it means to stir up the sexual
desires and to teach children how to indulge in them without immediate
punishment. Just as in a community of graft and corruption the
individual soon loses the finer feeling for honesty, and crime
flourishes simply because every one knows that nobody expects anything
better, so in a community in which sexual problems are the lessons of
the youth and the dinner talk of the adult, the feeling of respect for
man's deepest emotions fades away. Man and woman lose the instinctive
shyness in touching on this sacred ground, and as the organic desires
push and push toward it, the youth soon discovers that the barriers to
the forbidden ground are removed and that in their place stands a
simple signal with a suggestive word of warning against some easily
avoided traps.
From a psychological point of view the right policy would be to reduce
the external temptations, above all, the opportunities for contact.
Coeducation, for instance, was morally without difficulties twenty
years ago, but it is unfit in high schools and colleges for the
eastern part of the nation in the atmosphere of to-day. Moreover, the
æsthetic spirit ought to be educated systematically, and above all,
the whole education of the youth ought to be built on discipline; the
lesson by which the youth learns to overcome the desire and to inhibit
the will is the most essential for the young American of to-morrow.
The policy of silence has never meant that a girl should grow up
without the consciousness that the field of sexual facts exists in our
social world; on the contrary, those feelings of shame and decency
which belong to the steady learning of a clean child from the days of
the nursery have strongly impressed on the young soul that such
regions are real, but that they must not be approached by curiosity or
self-seeking wilfulness. This instinct itself brought something of
ideal value, of respect and even of reverence into the most trivial
life, however often it became ruined by foul companionship. To
strengthen this instinctive emotion of mysterious respect, which makes
the young mind shrink from brutal intrusion, will remain the wisest
policy, as long as we cannot change that automatic mechanism of human
nature by which the sexual thought stimulates the sexual organs. The
masses are, of course, in favour of the opposite programme, which is
in itself only another symptom of the erotic atmosphere into which the
new antipuritanic nation has come. That mechanism of the nervous
system furnishes them a pleasant excitement when they read and hear
the discussions and plays which bristle with sexual instruction. The
magazines which, with the best intentions, fight for the new policy,
easily find millions of readers; the plays with their erotic overflow
and the moral ending are crowded, and mostly by those who hardly need
the instruction any longer. A nation which tries to lift its sexual
morality by dragging the sexual problems to the street for the
inspection of the crowd, without shyness and without shame, and which
wilfully makes them objects of gossip and stage entertainment, is
doing worse than Munchausen when he tried to lift himself by his
scalp. It seems less important that the youth learn the secrets of
sexual intercourse than that their teachers and guardians learn the
elements of physiological psychology; the sexual sins of the youth
start from the educational sins of the elders.
It is easy to say, as the social reformers and the vice commissioners
and the sex instructors and many others have repeated in ever new
forms, that "all children's questions should be answered truthfully,"
and to work up the whole sermon to the final trumpet call, "The truth
shall make you free." Yet this is entirely useless as long as we have
not defined what we mean by freedom, and above all what we mean by
truth. If the child enjoys the beautiful softness of the butterfly's
coloured wing, it is surely a truth, if we teach him that seen under
the microscope in reality there is no softness there, but large ugly
bumps and hollows and that the beautiful impression is nothing but an
illusion. But is this truth of the microscope the only truth, and is
science the only truth, and is there ever only one truth about the
concrete facts of reality? Does truth in this sense not simply mean a
certain order into which we bring our experience in the service of
certain purposes of thought? We may approach the chaos of life
experience with different purposes, and led by any one of them we may
reach that consistent unity of ideas for the limited outlook which we
call truth. The chemist has a right to consider everything in the
world as chemical substances, and the mathematician may take the same
things as geometric objects. And yet he who seeks a meaning in these
things and a value and an inner development may come to another kind
of truth. Only a general philosophy of life can ultimately grade and
organize those various relative truths and combine them in an
all-embracing unity.
No doubt the physician's scientific discoveries and observations are
perfectly true. Man is an animal, and anatomical and physiological
conditions control his existence, and if we want to understand this
animal's life and want to keep it healthy, we have to ask for the
truth of the physician. But shame upon him who wants to educate youth
toward the view that man as an animal is the true man! If we educate
at all, we educate in the service of culture and civilization. All
building up of the youthful mind is itself service to human progress.
But this human progress is not a mere growth of the animal race. It
has its total meaning in the understanding of man as a soul,
determined by purposes and ideals. Not the laws of physiology, but the
demands of logic, ethics, æsthetics, and religion control the man who
makes history and who serves civilization. He who says that the
child's questions ought to be answered truthfully means in this
connection that lowest truth of all, the truth of physiology, and
forgets that when he opens too early the mind of the boy and the girl
to this materialistic truth he at the same time closes it, and closes
it perhaps forever, to that richer truth in which man is understood as
historic being, as agent for the good and true and beautiful and
eternal.
Give to the child the truth, but that truth which makes life worth
living, that truth which teaches him that life is a task and a duty,
and that his true health and soundness and value will depend upon the
energy with which he makes the world and his own body with its selfish
desires subservient to unselfish ideals. If you mean by the truth that
half-truth of man as a sexual creature of flesh and nerves, the child
to whom you offer it will be led to ever new questions, and if you go
on answering them truthfully as the new fashion suggests, your
reservoir will soon be emptied, even if the six volumes of Havelock
Ellis' "Psychology of Sex" are fully at your disposal. But the more
this species of truth is given out, the more life itself, for which
you educate the child, will appear to him unworthy and meaningless. If
the truth of civilized life is merely that which natural science can
analyze, then life has lost its honour and its loyalty, its enthusiasm
and its value. He who sees the truth in the idealistic aspect of man
will not necessarily evade the curious question of the child who is
puzzled about the naturalistic processes around him. But instead of
whetting his appetite for unsavoury knowledge, he will seriously
influence the young mind to turn the attention into the opposite
direction. He will speak to him about the fact that there is
something animal-like in the human being, but will add that the true
values of life lie just in overcoming the low instincts in the
interest of high aims. He will point to those hidden naturalistic
realities as something not overimportant, but as something which a
clean boy and girl do not ask about and with which only the
imagination of bad companions is engaged. An instinctive indifference
and aversion to the contact with anything low and impure can easily be
developed in every healthy child amid clean surroundings. Why is the
boy to live and to die for the honour of his country? Why is he to
devote himself to the search for knowledge? Why is he to fight for the
growth of morality? Why does he not confine himself to mere seeking
for comfort and ease and satisfaction of the senses? All which really
creates civilization and human progress depends upon symbols and
belief. As soon as we make all those symbols of the historic
community, all the ideals of honour and devotion, righteousness and
beauty, glory and faithfulness, mere matters of scientific
calculation, they stare us in the face as sheer absurdities; and yet
we might again misname that as truth. Then it is the untruth which
makes us free, it is the non-scientific, humanistic aspect which
liberates us from the slavery of our low desires.
Certainly there will always be some wild boys and girls in the school
who try to spread filthy knowledge, but if the atmosphere is filled
with respect and reverence, and the minds are trained by inner
discipline and morality, the contagion of such mischievous talk will
reach only those children who have the disposition of the degenerate.
The majority will remain uncontaminated. Plenty of lewd literature in
the circulars of the quacks and even in the sensational newspapers
will reach their eye and their brain, and yet it will leave not the
slightest trace. The trained, clean mind develops a moral antitoxin
which at every pulse-beat of life destroys the poisonous toxins
produced by the germs which enter the system. The red lanterns will
never be entirely extinguished in any large city the world over, but
the boy who has developed a sense of respect and reverence and an
instinctive desire for moral cleanliness and a power to overcome
selfish impulses, will pass them by and forget them when he comes to
the next street corner. But the other, whose imagination has been
filled with a shameless truth and who receives as his protection
merely a warning which appeals to his fear of diseases, may pass that
red lantern entrance at first, but at the next block his tainted
imagination will have overcome the fear, and with the reckless
confidence that he will know how to protect himself and that he will
have good luck he, too, like the moth, will feel attracted toward the
red light and will turn back. We can prohibit alcohol, but we cannot
prohibit the stimulus to sexual lust. It is always present, and the
selfish desire, made rampant by a society which craves amusement, will
always be stronger than any social argument or any talk of possible
individual danger. The only effective check is the deep inner respect,
and we must teach it to the youth, or the whole nation will have to be
taught it soon by the sterner discipline of history. The genius of
mankind cannot be deceived by philistine phrases about the conspiracy
of silence. The decision to be silent was a solemn pledge to the
historic spirit of human progress, which demands its symbols, its
conventions, and its beliefs. To destroy the harvest of these ideal
values, because some weeds have grown up with them, by breaking down
the dams and allowing the flood of truth-talk to burst in is the great
psychological crime of our day. There is only one hope and salvation:
let us build up the dam again to protect our field for a better
to-morrow.
II
SOCIALISM
The history of socialism has been a history of false prophecies.
Socialism started with a sure conviction that under the conditions of
modern industry the working class must be driven into worse and worse
misery. In reality the development has gone the opposite way. There
are endlessly more workingmen with a comfortable income than ever
before. The prophets also knew surely that the wealth from
manufacturing enterprises would be concentrated with fewer and fewer
men, while history has taken the opposite turn and has distributed the
shares of the industrial companies into hundreds of thousands of
hands. Other prophecies foretold the end of the small farmer, still
others the uprooting of the middle class, others gave the date for the
great crash; and everything would have come out exactly as the
prophets foresaw it, if they had not forgotten to consider many other
factors in the social situation which gave to the events a very
different turn. But it may be acknowledged that the wrong prophesying
was done not only by the socialists, but no less by the spectators. I
myself have to confess my guilt. Many years ago when I wrote my German
book on "The Americans," I declared with the ringing voice of the
prophet that socialism would never take hold of America. It was so
easy to show that its chief principles and fundamental doctrines were
directly opposed to the deepest creeds of Americanism and that the
whole temper of the population was necessarily averse to the
anticapitalistic fancies. The individualistic striving, the faith in
rivalry, the fear of centralization, the political liberty, the lack
of class barriers which makes it possible for any one to reach the
highest economic power, all work against socialism, and all are
essential for American democracy. Above all, the whole American life
was controlled by the feeling that individual wealth is the
measurement of individual success, and even puritanism had an internal
affinity to capitalism. Hence socialism could not mean anything but an
imported frill which could not be taken seriously by the commonwealth.
In later editions of the book I modified my predictions slightly, and
to-day I feel almost inclined to withdraw my prophecy entirely.
To be sure, I still think that the deepest meaning of Americanism and
of the American mission in the world is farther away from socialism
than the spirit of any other nation. And yet--I do not say that I
fear, or that I hope, but I believe--socialism has in no other land at
present such good chances to become the policy of the state. The
country has entered into a career of progressive experiments; the
traditional respect for the old constitutional system of checks and
balances to the mere will of the crowd has been undermined. The real
legislative reign of the masses has just begun and it would seem only
natural that such an entirely new movement should be pushed forward by
its own momentum. If the genius of America, which was conservative,
turns radical, the political machinery here would be more fit than
that of any other land to allow the enforcement of socialism. This
will not come to-day or to-morrow, but that socialism may suddenly be
with us the day after to-morrow is the possibility with which the
neutral observer must count. There is no need of directly reversing
the prophecies, as there are many energies in the soul of the nation
which may react against this new tendency and may automatically check
this un-American economic capture. It is a fight with equal chances,
and which side will win cannot be foreseen. But if socialism really
has entered the realm of practical possibilities, it becomes the duty
of everybody to study the new demands from his own standpoint. The
nation must see the facts from many angles before it can decide on
this tremendous issue. Any one-sidedness, whether in favour of or
against the new programme, must be dangerous. In such a situation even
the psychologist may be excused for feeling tempted to contribute his
little share to the discussion.