freedom which we demand for ourselves, we must grant to every one.
Instead of falling with our spite upon those who vary from the textbook
rules of life, we must look upon their acts as new and very interesting
hypotheses to be duly tested and judged by the way they work when
carried out into action. Nonconformity, instead of being irritating
and suspicious, as it is now to us, will be distinctly pleasurable,
as affording more material for our understanding of life and our
formulation of its satisfying philosophy. The world has never favored
the experimental life. It despises poets, fanatics, prophets, and
lovers. It admires physical courage, but it has small use for moral
courage. Yet it has always been those who experimented with life,
who formed their philosophy of life as a crystallization out of that
experimenting, who were the light and life of the world. Causes have
only finally triumphed when the rational “gradual progress” men have
been overwhelmed. Better crude irrationality than the rationality that
checks hope and stifles faith.
In place, then, of the rational or the irrational life, we preach
the experimental life. There is much chance in the world, but there
is also a modicum of free will, and it is this modicum that we
exploit to direct our energies. Recognizing the precariousness and
haphazardness of life, we can yet generalize out of our experience
certain probabilities and satisfactions that will serve us as well
as scientific laws. Only they must be flexible and they must be
tested. Life is not a rich province to conquer by our will, or to
wring enjoyment out of with our appetites, nor is it a market where
we pay our money over the counter and receive the goods we desire. It
is rather a great tract of spiritual soil, which we can cultivate or
misuse. With certain restrictions, we have the choice of the crops
which we can grow. Our duty is evidently to experiment until we find
those which grow most favorably and profitably, to vary our crops
according to the quality of the soil, to protect them against prowling
animals, to keep the ground clear of noxious weeds. Contending against
wind and weather and pests, we can yet with skill and vigilance win a
living for ourselves. None can cultivate this garden of our personality
but ourselves. Others may supply the seed; it is we who must plough and
reap. We are owners in fee simple, and we cannot lease. None can live
my life but myself. And the life that I live depends on my courage,
skill, and wisdom in experimentation.
XI
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
For a truly sincere life one talent is needed,--the ability to steer
clear of the forces that would warp and conventionalize and harden the
personality and its own free choices and bents. All the kingdoms of
this world lie waiting to claim the allegiance of the youth who enters
on the career of life, and sentinels and guards stand ready to fetter
and enslave him the moment he steps unwarily over the wall out of the
free open road of his own individuality. And unless he dodges them
and keeps straight on his path, dusty and barren though it may be, he
will find himself chained a prisoner for life, and little by little
his own soul will rot out of him and vanish. The wise men of the past
have often preached the duty of this open road, they have summoned
youth to self-reliance, but they have not paid sufficient heed to the
enemies that would impede his progress. They have been too intent on
encouraging him to be independent and lead his own life, to point out
to him the direction from which the subtle influences that might
control him would come. As a result, young men have too often believed
that they were hewing out a career for themselves when they were really
simply offering themselves up to some institutional Moloch to be
destroyed, or, at the best, passively allowing the career or profession
they had adopted to mould and carve them. Instead of working out their
own destiny, they were actually allowing an alien destiny to work them
out. Youth enters the big world of acting and thinking, a huge bundle
of susceptibilities, keenly alive and plastic, and so eager to achieve
and perform that it will accept almost the first opportunity that comes
to it. Now each youth has his own unique personality and interweaving
web of tendencies and inclinations, such as no other person has ever
had before. It is essential that these trends and abilities be so
stimulated by experience that they shall be developed to their highest
capacity. And they can usually be depended upon, if freedom and
opportunity are given, to grow of themselves upward towards the sun and
air. If a youth does not develop, it is usually because his nature has
been blocked and thwarted by the social pressures to which every one of
us is subjected, and which only a few have the strength or the wisdom
to resist. These pressures come often in the guise of good fortune,
and the youth meets them halfway, goes with them gladly, and lets them
crush him. He will do it all, too, with so easy a conscience, for is
not this meeting the world and making it one’s own? It is meeting the
world, but it is too often only to have the world make the youth its
own.
Our spiritual guides and leaders, then, have been too positive, too
heartening, if such a thing be possible. They have either not seen the
dangers that lurked in the path, or they have not cared to discourage
and depress us by pointing them out. Many of our modern guides, in
their panegyrics on success, even glorify as aids on the journey these
very dangers themselves, and urge the youth to rely upon them, when he
should have been warned not to gaze at all on the dazzling lure. The
youth is urged to imitate men who are themselves victims of the very
influences that he should dodge, and doctrines and habits are pressed
upon him which he should ceaselessly question and never once make his
own unless he is sure that they fit him. He will have need to be ever
alert to the dangers, and, in early youth at least, would better think
more of dodging them than of attaining the goal to which his elders
tempt him. Their best service to him would be to warn him against
themselves and their influence, rather than to encourage him to become
like them.
The dangers that I speak of are the influences and inducements which
come to youth from family, business, church, society, state, to
compromise with himself and become in more or less degree conformed
to their pattern and type. “Be like us!” they all cry, “it is easiest
and safest thus! We guarantee you popularity and fortune at so small
a price,--only the price of your best self!” Thus they seduce him
insidiously rather than openly attack him. They throw their silky
chains over him and draw him in. Or they press gently but ceaselessly
upon him, rubbing away his original roughness, polishing him down,
moulding him relentlessly, and yet with how kindly and solicitous a
touch, to their shape and manner. As he feels their caressing pressure
against him in the darkness, small wonder is it that he mistakes it for
the warm touch of friends and guides. They are friends and guides who
always end, however, by being masters and tyrants. They force him to
perpetuate old errors, to keep alive dying customs, to breathe new life
into vicious prejudices, to take his stand against the saving new.
They kill his soul, and then use the carcass as a barricade against the
advancing hosts of light. They train him to protect and conserve their
own outworn institutions when he should be the first, by reason of his
clear insight and freedom from crusted prejudice, to attack them.
The youth’s only salvation lies, then, in dodging these pressures. It
is not his business to make his own way in life so much as it is to
prevent some one else from making it for him. His business is to keep
the way clear, and the sky open above his head. Then he will grow and
be nurtured according to his needs and his inner nature. He must fight
constantly to keep from his head those coverings that institutions
and persons in the guise of making him warm and safe throw over his
body. If young people would spend half the time in warding away the
unfavorable influences that they now spend in conscientiously planning
what they are going to be, they would achieve success and maintain
their individuality. It seems, curiously enough, that one can live
one’s true life and guarantee one’s individuality best in this indirect
way,--not by projecting one’s self out upon the world aggressively,
but by keeping the track clear along which one’s true life may run.
A sane, well-rounded, original life is attained not so much by taking
thought for it as by the dodging of pressures that would limit and warp
its natural growth. The youth must travel the straight road serenely,
confident that “his own will come to him.” All he must strive for is
to recognize his own when it does come, and to absorb and assimilate
it. His imagination must be large enough to envisage himself and his
own needs. This wisdom, however, comes to too many of us only after
we are hopelessly compromised, after we are encrusted over so deeply
that, even if we try to break away, our struggles are at the expense
of our growth. The first duty of self-conscious youth is to dodge the
pressures, his second to survey the world eagerly to see what is “his
own.” If he goes boldly ahead at first to seek his own, without first
making provision for silencing the voices that whisper continually at
his side, “Conform!”--he will soon find himself on alien ground, and,
if not a prisoner, a naturalized citizen before he has time to think.
Nor is this a mere invitation to whimsicality and eccentricity. These
epithets, in our daily life, are somewhat loosely used for all sorts
of behavior ranging from nonconformity to pure freakishness. If we
really had more original, unspoiled people in the world, we should
not use these terms so frequently. If we really had more people who
were satisfying their healthy desires, and living the life that
their whole inner conscience told them was best, we should not find
eccentric or queer the self-sustaining men and women who live without
regard to prejudice. And all real whimsicality is a result rather of
the thwarting of individuality than of letting it run riot. It is
when persons of strong personality are subjected to pressures heavier
than they can bear that we get real outbursts of eccentricity. For
something unnatural has occurred, a spontaneous flow and progress has
been checked. Your eccentric man par excellence is your perfectly
conventional man, who never offends in the slightest way by any
original action or thought. For he has yielded to every variety of
pressure that has been brought to bear upon him, and his original
nature has been completely obscured. The pressures have been, however,
uniform on every side, so that they have seemingly canceled each other.
But this equilibrium simply conceals the forces that have crushed
him. The conventional person is, therefore, not the most natural
but the most unnatural of persons. His harmlessness is a proof of
his tremendous eccentricity. He has been rubbed down smooth on all
sides like a rock until he has dropped noiselessly into his place in
society. But at what a cost does he obtain this peace! At the cost of
depersonalizing himself, and sacrificing his very nature, which, as in
every normal person, is precious and worthy of permanence and growth.
This treason to one’s self is perhaps the greatest mistake of youth,
the one unpardonable sin. It is worse than sowing one’s wild oats,
for they are reaped and justice is done; or casting one’s bread upon
the waters, for that returneth after many days. But this sin is the
throwing away in willfulness or carelessness the priceless jewel of
self-hood, and with no return, either of recompense or punishment.
How early and insidious is the pressure upon us to conform to some
type whose fitness we have not examined, but which we are forced to
take strictly on authority! On the children in the family what a
petty tyranny of ideas and manners is imposed! Under the guise of
being brought up, how many habits of doubtful value we learned, how
many moral opinions of doubtful significance we absorbed, how many
strange biases that harass and perplex us in our later life we had
fastened upon our minds, how many natural and beautiful tendencies
we were forced to suppress! The tyranny of manners, of conventional
politeness, of puritanical taboos, of superstitious religion, were all
imposed upon us for no reason that our elders could devise, but simply
that they in turn had had them imposed upon them. Much of our early
education was as automatic and unconscious as the handing down of the
immemorial traditions in a primitive savage tribe. Now I am far from
saying that this household tradition of manners and morals is not an
excellent thing for us to acquire. Many of the habits are so useful
that it is a wise provision that we should obtain them as naturally as
the air we breathe. And it is a pressure that we could not, at that
age, avoid, even if we would. But this childhood influence is a sample
of true pressure, for it is both unconscious and irresistible. Were we
to infringe any of the rules laid down for us, the whole displeasure of
the family descended upon our heads; they seemed to vie with each other
in expressing their disapproval of our conduct. So, simply to retain
our self-respect, we were forced into their pattern of doing things,
and for no other reason than that it was their pattern.
This early pressure, however, was mild in comparison with what we
experienced as we grew older. We found then that more and more of
our actions came insensibly but in some way or other before this
court of appeal. We could choose our friends, for instance, only with
reservations. If we consorted with little boys who were not clean, or
who came from the less reputable portions of the town, we were made to
feel the vague family disapproval, perhaps not outspoken, but as an
undercurrent to their attitude. And usually we did not need flagrantly
to offend to be taught the need of judicious selection, for we were
sensitive to the feeling that we knew those around us would entertain,
and so avoided the objectionable people from a diffused feeling that
they were not “nice.” When we grew old enough to move in the youthful
social world, we felt this circle of tyranny suddenly widen. It was
our “set” now that dictated our choices. The family pressure had been
rather subtle and uneasy; this was bold and direct. Here were the most
arbitrary selections and disqualifications, girls and boys being banned
for no imaginable reason except that they were slightly out of the
ordinary, and our little world circumscribed by a rigid public opinion
which punished nonconformity by expulsion. If we tried to dodge this
pressure and assert our own privileges of making lovers and friends, we
were soon delivered an ultimatum, and if we refused to obey, we were
speedily cast out into utter darkness, where, strange to say, we lacked
even the approbation of the banned. Sometimes we were not allowed to
choose our partners to whom we paid our momentary devotions, sometimes
we were not allowed to give them up. The price we paid for free
participation in the parties and dances and love-affairs of this little
social world of youth was an almost military obedience to the general
feeling of propriety and suitability of our relationships with others,
and to the general will of those in whose circle we went. There was apt
to be a rather severe code of propriety, which bore especially upon
the girls. Many frank and natural actions and expressions of opinion
were thus inhibited, from no real feeling of self-respect, but from
the vague, uncomfortable feeling that somebody would not approve. This
price for society was one that we were all willing to pay, but it was a
bad training. Our own natural likings and dislikings got blunted; we
ceased to seek out our own kind of people and enjoy them and ourselves
in our own way, but we “went with” the people that our companions
thought we ought to “go with,” and we played the games and behaved
generally as they thought we ought to do.
The family rather corroborated this pressure than attempted to fortify
us in our own individuality. For their honor seemed to be involved in
what we did, and if all our walk in life was well pleasing to those
around us, they were well pleased with us. And all through life, as
long at least as we were protected under the sheltering wing of the
family, its members constituted a sort of supreme court over all our
relations in life. In resisting the other pressures that were brought
to bear on us, we rarely found that we had the family’s undivided
support. They loved, like all social groups, a smoothly running person,
and as soon as they found us doing unconventional things or having
unusual friends they were vaguely uneasy, as if they were harboring
in their midst some unpredictable animal who would draw upon them the
disapproving glances of the society around them. The family philosophy
has a horror for the “queer.” The table-board is too often a place
where the eccentricities of the world get thoroughly aired. The dread
of deviation from accepted standards is impressed upon us from our
youth up. The threat which always brought us to terms was,--“If you do
this, you will be considered queer!” There was very little fight left
in us after that.
But the family has other formidable weapons for bringing us to terms.
It knows us through and through as none of our friends and enemies know
us. It sees us in undress, when all our outward decorations of spirit
and shams and pretenses are thrown off, and it is not deceived by the
apologies and excuses that pass muster in the world at large and even
to our own conscience. We can conceal nothing from it; it knows all
our weakest spots and vulnerable feelings. It does not hesitate to
take shameless advantage of that knowledge. Its most powerful weapon
is ridicule. It can adopt no subtler method, for we in our turn know
all its own vulnerabilities. And where the world at large is generally
too polite to employ ridicule upon us, but works with gentler methods
of approbation and coldness, our family associates feel no such
compunction. Knowing us as they do, they are able to make that ridicule
tell. We may have longings for freedom and individuality, but it is a
terrible dilemma that faces us. Most men would rather be slaves than
butts; they would rather be corralled with the herd than endure its
taunts at their independence.
Besides the pressure on a youth or girl to think the way the family
does, there is often the pressure brought upon them to sacrifice
themselves for its benefit. I do not mean to deprecate that perfectly
natural and proper desire to make some return for the care and kindness
that have been lavished upon them. But the family insistence often goes
much further than this. It demands not only that its young people shall
recompense it for what it has done for them, but that they do it in the
kind of work and vocation that shall seem proper to it. How often, when
the youth or girl is on the point of choosing a congenial occupation
or profession, does the family council step in and, with the utmost
apparent good-will in the world, dictate differently! And too often the
motives are really policy or ambition, or, at best, sheer prejudice.
If the youth be not persuaded, then he must bear the brunt of lonely
toil without the sympathy or support of those most dear to him. Far
harder is the lot of the young woman. For there is still so much
prejudice against a girl’s performing useful work in society, apart
from her God-given duty of getting married, that her initiative is
crushed at the very beginning. The need of cultivating some particular
talent or interest, even if she has not to earn her living, seems to be
seldom felt. Yet women, with their narrower life, have a greater need
of sane and vigorous spiritual habits than do men. It is imperative
that a girl be prevented from growing up into a useless, fleshly, and
trivial woman, of the type one sees so much of nowadays. Even if a
girl does marry, a few intellectual interests and gifts and tastes
will not be found to detract from her charm or usefulness. The world
never needed so much as it does to-day women of large hearts and large
minds, whose home and sphere are capable of embracing something beyond
the four corners of their kitchen. And the world can get such women
only by allowing them the initiative and opportunity to acquire varied
interests and qualities while they are young.
The family often forges sentimental bonds to keep it living together
long after the motive and desire have departed. There is no group so
uncongenial as an uncongenial family. The constant rubbing together
accentuates all the divergencies and misunderstandings. Yet sometimes
a family whose members are hopelessly mismated will cling together
through sheer inertia or through a conscientious feeling of duty. And
duty to too many of us is simply a stimulus to that curious love for
futile suffering that form some of the darker qualities of the puritan
soul. Family duty may not only warp and mutilate many a life that would
bloom healthily outside in another environment, but it may actually
mean the pauperization of the weaker members. The claims of members
of the family upon each other are often overwhelming, and still more
often quite fictitious in their justice. Yet that old feeling of the
indissolubility of the family will often allow the weak, who might, if
forced to shift for themselves, become strong, to suck the lifeblood
from the stronger members. Coöperation, when it is free and spontaneous
and on a basis of congeniality, is the foundation of all social life
and progress, but forced cohesion can do little good. The average
family is about as well mated as any similar group would be, picked
out at random from society. And this means, where the superstition
of indissolubility is still effective, that the members share not
only all the benefits, but also all each others’ shortcomings and
irritations. Family life thus not only presses upon its youth to
conform to its customs and habits and to the opinions of the little
social world in which it lives, but also drags its youth down with
its claims, and warps it by its tension of uncongeniality, checks
its spontaneity by its lack of appreciation, and injures its soul by
friction and misunderstanding.
This family pressure upon youth is serious, and potent for much good
and evil in his later life. It is necessary that he understand how to
analyze it without passion or prejudice, and find out just how he can
dodge the unfavorable pressure without injury to the love that is borne
him or the love that he bears to the others. But let him not believe
that his love is best shown by submission. It is best shown by a
resolute determination and assertion of his own individuality. Only he
must know, without the cavil of a doubt, what that individuality is; he
must have a real imaginative anticipation of its potentialities. Only
with this intuition will he know where to dodge and how to dodge.