Family cohesion and authority no longer mean what they did even twenty
years ago. The youth of to-day are willful, selfish, heartless, in
their rebellion. They are changing the system blindly and blunderingly.
They feel the pressure, and without stopping to ask questions or
analyze the situation, they burst the doors and flee away. Their
seeming initiative is more animal spirits than anything else. They
have exploded the myth that their elders have any superhuman wisdom
of experience to share with them, or any incontrovertible philosophy
of life with which to guide their wandering footsteps. But it must be
admitted that most have failed so far to find a wisdom and a philosophy
to take its place. They have too often thrown away the benefits of
family influence on account of mere trivialities of misunderstanding.
They have not waited for the real warpings of initiative, the real
pressure of prejudice, but have kicked up their heels at the first
breath of authority. They have not so much dodged the pressure as
fled it altogether. Instead of being intent on brushing away the
annoying obstacles that interfered with the free growth of their
own worthier selves, they have mistaken the means for the end, and
have merely brushed off the interferences, without first having any
consciousness of that worthier self. Now of course this is no solution.
It is only as they substitute for the authority that they throw off
a definite authority of their own, crystallized out of their own
ideals and purposes, that they will gain or help others to gain. For
lack of a vision the people perish. For lack of a vision of their own
personalities, and the fresh, free, aggressive, forward, fearless,
radical life that we all ought to lead, and could lead if we only had
the imagination for it, the youth of to-day will cast off the narrowing
confining fetters of authority only to wander without any light at
all. This is not to say that this aimless wandering is not better than
the prison-house, but it is to say that the emancipation of the spirit
is insufficient without a new means of spiritual livelihood to take
its place. The youth of to-day cannot rest on their liberation; they
must see their freedom as simply the setting free of forces within
themselves for a cleaner, sincerer life, and for radical work in
society. The road is cut out before them by pioneers; they have but to
let themselves grow out in that direction.
I have painted the family pressures in this somewhat lurid hue
because they are patterns of the other attacks which are made upon
the youth as he meets the world. The family is a little microcosm,
a sheltered group where youth feels all those currents of influence
that sway men in their social life. Some of them are exaggerated, some
perverted, but they are most of them there in that little world. It
is no new discovery that in family life one can find heaven or one
can find hell. The only pressure that is practically absent in the
family is the economic pressure, by which I mean the inducements,
and even necessities, that a youth is under of conforming to codes
or customs and changing his ideals and ideas, when he comes to earn
his livelihood. This pressure affects him as soon as he looks for an
opening, as he calls it, in which to make his living. At that time
all this talk of natural talents or bents or interests begin to sound
far-away and ideal. He soon finds that these things have no commercial
value in themselves and will go but a short way towards providing him
with his living. The majority of us “go to work” as soon as our short
“education” is completed, if not before, and we go not by choice,
but wherever opportunity is given. Hence the ridiculous misfits, the
apathy, the restlessness and discontent. The world of young people
around us seems too largely to be one where both men and girls are
engaged in work in which they have no interest, and for which they
have no aptitude. They are mournfully fettered to their work; all they
can seem to do is to make the best of it, and snatch out of the free
moments what pleasure and exhilaration they can. They have little hope
for a change. There is too much of a scramble for places in this busy,
crowded world, to make a change anything but hazardous. It is true that
restlessness often forces a change, but it is rarely for the better, or
in the line of any natural choice or interest. One leaves one’s job,
but then one takes thankfully the first job that presents itself; the
last state may be worse than the first. By this economic pressure most
of us are sidetracked, turned off from our natural path, and fastened
irrevocably to some work that we could only acquire an interest in at
the expense of our souls.
It is a pressure, too, that cannot easily be dodged. We can frankly
recognize our defeat, plunge boldly at the work and make it a part
of ourselves; this course of action, which most of us adopt, is
really, however, simply an unconditional surrender. We can drift
along apathetically, without interest either in our work or our own
personalities; this course is even more disastrous. Or we can quietly
wait until we have found the vocation that guarantees the success of
our personalities; this course is an ideal that is possible to very
few. And yet, did we but know it, a little thought at the beginning
would often have prevented the misfit, and a little boldness when
one has discovered the misfit would often have secured the favorable
change. That self-recognition, which is the only basis for a genuine
spiritual success in life, is the thing that too many of us lack. The
apathy comes from a real ignorance of what our true work is. Then
we are twice a slave,--a prey to our circumstance and a prey to our
ignorance.
Like all discoveries, what one’s work is can be found only by
experiment. But this can often be an imaginative experiment. One can
take an “inventory of one’s personality,” and discover one’s interests,
and the kind of activity one feels at home with or takes joy in. Yet
it is true that there are many qualities which cannot be discovered by
the imagination, which need the fairy touch of actual use to develop
them. There is no royal road to this success. Here the obstacles are
usually too thick to be dodged. We do not often enough recognize the
incredible stupidity of our civilization where so much of the work is
uninteresting and monotonous. That we should consider it a sort of
triumph that a man like Mr. John Burroughs should have been able to
live his life as he chose, travel along his own highroad, and develop
himself in his own natural direction, is a curious reflection on our
ideals of success and on the incompleteness of our civilization. Such a
man has triumphed, however, because he has known what to dodge. He has
not been crushed by the social opinion of his little world, or lured by
specious success, or fettered by his “job,” or hoodwinked by prejudice.
He has kept his spirit clear and pure straight through life. It would
be well for modern youth if it could let an ideal like this color their
lives, and permeate all their thoughts and ambitions. It would be well
if they could keep before them such an ideal as a pillar of fire by day
and a cloud by night.
If we cannot dodge this economic pressure, at least we can face it.
If we are situated so that we have no choice in regard to our work,
we may still resist the influences which its uncongeniality would
bring to bear upon us. This is not done by forcing an interest in
it, or liking for it. If the work is socially wasteful or useless or
even pernicious, as so much business and industrial work to-day is,
it is our bounden duty not to be interested in it or to like it. We
should not be playing our right place in society if we enjoyed such a
prostitution of energies. One of the most insidious of the economic
pressures is this awaking the interest of youth in useless and wasteful
work, work that takes away energy from production to dissipate in
barter and speculation and all the thousand ways that men have
discovered of causing money to flow from one pocket to another without
the transference of any fair equivalent of real wealth. We can dodge
these pressures not by immolating ourselves, but by letting the routine
work lie very lightly on our soul. We can understand clearly the nature
and effects of this useless work we are doing, and keep it from either
alluring or smothering us. We can cultivate a disinterested aloofness
towards it, and keep from breathing its poisonous atmosphere. The extra
hours we can fill with real interests, and make them glow with an
intensity that will make our life almost as rich as if we were wholly
given over to a real lifework. We can thus live in two worlds, one
of which is the more precious because it is one of freedom from very
real oppression. And that oppression will seem light because it has the
reverse shield of liberty. If we do drudgery, it must be our care to
see that it does not stifle us. The one thing needful in all our work
and play is that we should always be on top, that our true personality
should always be in control. Our life must not be passive, running
simply by the momentum furnished by another; it must have the motive
power within itself; although it gets the fuel from the stimulation of
the world about it, the steam and power must be manufactured within
itself.
These counsels of aloofness from drudgery suggest the possibilities of
avoiding the economic pressures where they are too heavy completely to
dodge, and where the work is an irrevocable misfit. But the pressures
of success are even more deadly than those of routine. How early is
one affected by that first pressure of worldly opinion which says that
lack of success in business or a profession is disgraceful! The one
devil of our modern world is failure, and many are the charms used by
the medicine men to ward him away. If we lived in a state of society
where virtue was its own reward, where our actions were automatically
measured and our rewards duly proportioned to our efforts, a lack of
success would be a real indication of weakness and flaw, or, at best,
ill-preparation. But where business success is largely dependent on
the possession of capital, a lucky risk, the ability to intimidate or
deceive, and where professional success is so often dependent upon
self-assertion or some irrelevant but pleasing trait of personality,
failure means nothing more than bad luck, or, at most, inability to
please those clients to whom one has made one’s appeal. To dodge this
pressure of fancied failure and humiliation is to have gone a long way
towards guaranteeing one’s real success. We are justified in adopting
a pharisaical attitude towards success,--“Lord, I thank thee that I
have not succeeded as other men have!” To have judged one’s self by
the inner standards of truth to one’s own personality, to count the
consciousness of having done well, regardless of the corroboration of
a public, as success, is to have avoided this most discouraging of
pressures.
It is even doubtful whether business or professional success, except
in the domain of science and art, can be attained without a certain
betrayal of soul. The betrayal may have been small, but at some point
one has been compressed, one has yielded to alien forces and conformed
to what the heart did not give assent to. It may be that one has kept
silent when one should have spoken, that one has feigned interests
and enthusiasms, or done work that one knew was idle and useless, in
order to achieve some goal; but always that goal has been reached not
spontaneously but under a foreign pressure. More often than not the
fortunate one has not felt the direct pressure, has not been quite
conscious of the sacrifice, but only vaguely uneasy and aware that all
was not right within him, and has won his peace only by drugging his
uneasiness with visions of the final triumph. The pressure is always
upon him to keep silent and conform. He must not only adopt all the
outward forms and ceremonies, as in the family and social life, but he
must also adopt the traditional ideals.
The novice soon finds that he is expected to defend the citadel, even
against his own heresies. The lawyer who finds anomalies in the law,
injustice in the courts, is not encouraged to publish abroad his
facts, or make proposals for reform. The student who finds antiquated
method, erroneous hypotheses in his subject, is not expected to use
his knowledge and his genius to remodel the study. The minister who
comes upon new and living interpretations for his old creeds is not
encouraged to speak forth the truth that is in him. Nor is the business
man who finds corrupt practices in his business encouraged to give the
secrets away. There is a constant social pressure on these “reformers”
to leave things alone.
And this does not arise from any corrupt connivance with the wrong,
or from any sympathy with the evildoers. The cry rises equally from
the corrupt and the holy, from the men who are responsible for the
abuses and those who are innocent, from those who know of them and
those who do not. It is simply the instinctive reaction of the herd
against anything that savors of the unusual; it is the tendency of
every social group simply to resist change. This alarm at innovation is
universal, from college presidents to Catholic peasants, in fashionable
club or sewing circle or political party. On the radical there is
immediately brought, without examination, without reason or excuse,
the whole pressure of the organization to stultify his vision and
force him back into the required grooves. The methods employed are
many: a warning is issued against him as being unsound and unsafe; his
motive is to make trouble, or revenge himself on the directors for some
slight; finally he is solemnly pilloried as an “enemy of the people.”
Excellent reasons are discovered for his suppression. Effective working
of an organization requires coöperation, but also subordination; in
the interests of efficiency, therefore, individual opinion cannot be
allowed full sway. The reputation of the organization before the world
depends on its presenting a harmonious and united front; internal
disagreements and criticisms tend to destroy the respect of the public.
Smoothness of working is imperative; a certain individual liberty must,
therefore, be sacrificed for the success of the organization. And if
these plausible excuses fail, there is always the appeal to authority
and to tried and tested experience. Now all these reasons are simply
apologies brought up after the fact to justify the first instinctive
reaction. What they all mean is this, and only this: He would unsettle
things; away with him!
In olden times, they had sterner ways of enforcing these pressures.
But although the stake and dungeon have disappeared, the spirit of
conservatism does not seem to have changed very much. Educated men
still defend the hoariest abuses, still stand sponsor for utterly
antiquated laws and ideals. That is why the youth of this generation
has to be so suspicious of those who seem to speak authoritatively. He
knows not whom he can trust, for few there are who speak from their own
inner conviction. Most of our leaders and moulders of public opinion
speak simply as puppets pulled by the strings of the conservative
bigotry of their class or group. It is well that the youth of to-day
should know this, for the knowledge will go far towards steeling him
against that most insidious form of pressure that comes from the
intellectual and spiritual prestige of successful and honored men. When
youth sees that a large part of their success has been simply their
succumbing to social pressure, and that their honor is based largely
on the fact that they do not annoy vested interests with proposals or
agitations for betterment, he will seek to discover new standards of
success, and find his prophets and guides among the less fortunate,
perhaps, but among those who have retained their real integrity.
This numbing palsy of conservative assent which steals over so many
brilliant and sincere young men as they are subjected to the influence
of prestige and authority in their profession is the most dangerous
disease that threatens youth. It can be resisted only by constant
criticism and candid vigilance. “Prove all things; hold fast to that
which is good,” should be the motto of the intellectual life. Only
by testing and comparing all the ideals that are presented to one is
it possible to dodge that pressure of authority that would crush the
soul’s original enthusiasms and beliefs. Not doubt but convention is
the real enemy of youth.
Yet these spiritual pressures are comparatively easy to dodge when
one is once awake to them. It is the physical pressure that those in
power are able to bring to bear upon the dissenter that constitutes
the real problem. The weak man soon becomes convinced of his hardihood
and audacity in supposing that his ideas could be more valuable than
the running tradition, and recants his heresies. But those who stick
stiff-neckedly out are soon crushed. When the youth is settled in life,
has trained for his profession and burned his bridges behind him, it
means a great deal to combat authority. For those in power can make
use of the economic pressure to force him to conformity. It is the
shame of our universities that they are giving constant illustrations
of this use of arbitrary power, directed usually against nonconformity
in social and political opinion. Recent examples show the length to
which even these supposedly enlightened institutions are willing to
go to prevent social heresy in their midst. Often such harsh measures
are not needed. A subtle appeal to a man’s honor is effective. “While
you are a member of a society,” it is said, “it is your duty to think
in harmony with its ideals and policies. If you no longer agree with
those ideals, it is your duty to withdraw. You can fight honorably for
your own ideas only from the outside.” All that need be said about this
doctrine, so fair and reasonable on the surface, is that it contains
all the philosophic support that would perpetuate the evil of the
world forever. For it means attacking vested evil from the weakest
vantage-point; it means willfully withdrawing to the greatest distance,
shooting one’s puny arrows at the citadel, and then expecting to
capture it. It means also to deny any possibility of progress within
the organization itself. For as soon as dissent from the common inertia
developed, it would be automatically eliminated. It is a principle,
of course, that plays directly into the hands of the conservators. It
is an appeal to honor that is dishonorable. Let it seduce no man’s
sincerity!
The principal object of every organization, as every youth soon
discovers who feels dissatisfaction with the policies of church,
club, college, or party, is to remain true to type. Each is organized
with a central vigilance committee, whose ostensible function is
direction, but whose real business is to resist threatening change
and keep matters as they are. The ideal is smoothness; every part of
the machine is expected to run along in its well-oiled groove. Youths
who have tried to introduce their new ideas into such organizations
know the weight of this fearful resistance. It seems usually as if
all the wisdom and experience of these elders had taught them only
the excellence of doing nothing at all. Their favorite epithet for
those who have individual opinions is “trouble-makers,” forgetting
that men do not run the risk of the unpopularity and opprobrium that
aggressiveness always causes, for the sheer love of making trouble.
Through an instinct of self-preservation, such an organization always
places loyalty above truth, the permanence of the organization above
the permanence of its principles. Even in churches we are told that to
alter one’s opinion of a creed to which one has once given allegiance
is basely to betray one’s higher nature. These are the pressures that
keep wavering men in the footpaths where they have once put their feet,
and stunts their truer, growing selves. How many souls a false loyalty
has blunted none can say; perhaps almost as many as false duty!
In the dodging of these pressures many a man finds the real spiritual
battle of his life. They are a challenge to all his courage and faith.
Unless he understands their nature, his defeat will bring despair
or cynicism. When the group is weak and he is strong, he may resist
successfully, press back in his turn, actually create a public opinion
that will support him, and transfuse it all with his new spirit and
attitude. Fortunate, indeed, is he who can not only dodge these
pressures but dissolve them! If he is weak and his efforts are useless,
and the pressure threatens to crush him, he would better withdraw and
let the organization go to its own diseased perdition. If he can remain
within without sacrifice to his principles, this is well, for then he
has a vantage-ground for the enunciation of those principles. Eternal
vigilance, however, is the price of his liberty.
The secret ambition of the group seems to be to turn out all its
members as nearly alike as possible. It seeks to create a type to
which all new adherents shall be moulded. Each group, then, that we
have relations with is ceaselessly working to mould us to its type and
pattern. It is this marvellous unseen power that a group has of forming
after its own image all that come under its influence, that conquers
men. It has the two instincts of self-preservation and propagation
strongly developed, and we tend unthinkingly to measure its value in
terms of its success in the expression of those instincts. Rather
should it be measured always in terms of its ability to create and
stimulate varied individuality. This is the new ideal of social life.
This is what makes it so imperative that young men of to-day should
recognize and dodge the pressures that would thwart the assertion of
this ideal. The aim of the group must be to cultivate personality,
leaving open the road for each to follow his own. The bond of cohesion
will be the common direction in which those roads point, but this is
far from saying that all the travelers must be alike. It is enough that
there be a common aim and a common ideal.
Societies are rarely content with this, however; they demand a close
mechanical similarity, and a conformity to a reactionary and not a
progressive type. If we would be resolute in turning our gaze towards
the common aim, and dodging the pressure of the common pattern, our
family, business, and social life would be filled with a new spirit. We
can scarcely imagine the achievement and liberation that would result.
Individuality would come to its own; it would no longer be suspect.
Youth would no longer be fettered and bound, but would come to its own
as the leaven and even leader of life. Men would worship progress as
they now worship stagnation; their ideal in working together would be a
living effectiveness instead of a mechanical efficiency.
This gospel is no call to ease and comfort. It is rather one of peril.
The youth of this generation will not be so lightly seduced, or go so
innocently into the bonds of conservatism and convention, under the
impression that they are following the inspired road to success. Their
consciences will be more delicate. They know now the dangers that
confront them and the road they are called on to tread. It is not an
easy road. It is beset with opportunities for real eccentricity, for
selfishness, for willfulness, for mere bravado. It would be surprising,
after the long premium that has been placed on the pattern, not to see
a reaction in favor of sheer freakishness. Many of our modern radicals
are examples of this reaction. Yet their method is so sound, their
goal so clear and noble, their spirit so sincere, that they are true
pioneers of the new individuality. Their raciness is but the raciness
of all pioneers everywhere. And much of their irresponsibility is a
result of that intolerable pressure against which they are revolting.
They have dodged it, but it dogs them and concentrates itself sullenly
behind them to punish them for their temerity. The scorn of the world
hurts and hampers them. That ridicule which the family employed against
deviation is employed in all large social movements against the
innovators. Yet slowly and surely the new social ideal makes its way.
It is not a call to the surrendering of obligations, in family
or business or profession, but it is a call to the criticism of
obligations. Youth must distinguish carefully between the essential
duties and the non-essential, between those which make for the
realization of the best common ideals, and those which make merely for
the maintenance of a dogma or unchallenged superstition. By resisting
the pressures that would warp, do we really best serve society; by
allowing our free personality to develop, do we contribute most to
the common good. We must recognize that our real duty is always found
running in the direction of our worthiest desires. No duty that runs
rough-shod over the personality can have a legitimate claim upon us. We
serve by being as well as by doing.