selfishness. And that, of course, is the risk. But shall we not
dare to take the risk? It may be also that in our care to dodge the
pressures, we may lose all the inestimable influences of good that come
along mixed in with the hurtful. But shall we not take the risk? Our
judgments can only grow by exercise; we can only learn by constantly
discriminating. Self-recognition is necessary to know one’s road, but,
knowing the road, the price of the mistakes and perils is worth paying.
The following of that road will be all the discipline one needs.
Discipline does not mean being moulded by outside forces, but sticking
to one’s road against the forces that would deflect or bury the soul.
People speak of finding one’s niche in the world. Society, as we have
seen, is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of a statue
it likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.
But for us, not the niche but the open road, with the spirit always
traveling, always criticizing, always learning, always escaping the
pressures that threaten its integrity. With its own fresh power it will
keep strong and true to the journey’s end.
XII
FOR RADICALS
The great social movement of yesterday and to-day and to-morrow has
hit us of the younger generation hard. Many of us were early converted
to a belief in the possibilities of a regenerated social order, and to
a passionate desire to do something in aid of that regeneration. The
appeal is not only to our sympathy for the weak and exploited, but also
to our delight in a healthy, free, social life, to an artistic longing
for a society where the treasures of civilization may be open to all,
and to our desire for an environment where we ourselves will be able
to exercise our capacities, and exert the untrammeled influences which
we believe might be ours and our fellows’. All these good things the
social movement seems to demand and seems to offer, and its appeal is
irresistible. Before the age of machinery was developed, or before
the structure of our social system and the relations between classes
and individuals was revealed, the appeal might have been merely
sentimental. But it is no longer so. The aims of the social movement
to-day seem to have all the tremendous power of a practicable ideal.
To the satisfactions which its separate ideals give to all the finer
instincts of men is added the overwhelming conviction that those
satisfactions are most of them realizable here and now by concerted
methods which are already partly in operation and partially successful.
It is this union of the idealistic and the efficient that gives the
movement its hold on the disinterested and serious youth of to-day.
With that conversion has necessarily come the transvaluation of many
of our social values. No longer can we pay the conventional respect
to success or join in the common opinions of men and causes. The
mighty have been pulled down from their seats, and those of low degree
exalted. We feel only contempt for college presidents, editors, and
statesmen who stultify their talents and pervert their logical and
historical knowledge in defending outworn political philosophies and
economic codes. We can no longer wholly believe in the usefulness
or significance of those teachers and writers who show themselves
serenely oblivious to the social problems. We become keen analysts of
the society around us; we put uncomfortable questions to our sleek
and successful elders. We criticize the activities in which they
engage, the hitherto sacred professions and businesses, and learn to
distinguish carefully between actually productive work for society,
work which makes for the material and spiritual well-being of the
people for whom it is done, and parasitic or wasteful work, which
simply extends the friction of competition, or lives on the labor or
profits of others. We distinguish, too, between the instruction and
writing that consists in handing down unexamined and uncriticized moral
and political ideas, and ideas that let in the fresh air and sunlight
to the thick prejudices of men. We come to test the papers we read,
the teachers we learn from, the professional men we come into contact
with, by these new standards. Various and surprising are the new
interweavings we discover, and the contrasts and ironies of the modern
intellectual life. The childlike innocence in which so many seem still
to slumber is almost incredible to those whose vision is so clear. The
mechanical way in which educated men tend to absorb and repeat whole
systems of formulas is a constant surprise to those whose ideas hum
and clash and react against each other. But the minds of so many of
these men of position seem to run in automatic channels, such that,
given one set of opinions, one could predict with accuracy their whole
philosophy of life. Our distrust of their whole spiritual fabric thus
becomes fundamental. We can no longer take most of them seriously. It
is true that they are doing the serious work of the world, while we
do nothing as yet except criticize, and perhaps are doomed to fail
altogether when we try. To be sure, it is exactly their way of doing
that serious work that we object to, but still we are the dreamers,
they the doers; we are the theorists, they the practical achievers. Yet
the precision of our view will not down; we can see in their boasted
activity little but a resolute sitting on the lid, a sort of glorified
routine of keeping the desk clear. And we would rather remain dreamers,
we feel, than do much of their work. Other values we find are changed.
We become hopelessly perverted by democracy. We no longer make the
careful distinctions between the fit and the unfit, the successful and
the unsuccessful, the effective and the ineffective, the presentable
and the unpresentable. We are more interested in the influences that
have produced these seeming differences than in the fact of the
differences themselves. We classify people by new categories. We look
for personality, for sincerity, for social sympathy, for democratic
feeling, for social productiveness, and we interpret success in terms
of these attainments.
The young radical, then, in such a situation and in possession of these
new social values, stands on the verge of his career in a mood of
great perplexity. Two questions he must answer,--“What is to be done?”
and “What must I do?” If he has had an education and is given a real
opportunity for the choice of a vocation, his position is crucial. For
his education, if it has been in one of the advanced universities, will
have only tended to confirm his radicalism and render more vivid the
contrast between the new philosophy which is being crystallized there
out of modern science and philosophy and the new interpretations of
history and ethics, and the obscurantist attitude of so many of our
intellectual guardians. The youth, ambitious and aggressive, desires an
effective and serviceable career, yet every career open to him seems
a compromise with the old order. If he has come to see the law as an
attempt to fit immutable principles of social action on a dynamic
and ever-growing society; if he has come to see the church as an
organization working along the lines of greatest spiritual resistance,
preaching a personal where the world is crying for a social gospel;
if he has come to see higher education as an esoteric institution
of savants, only casually reaching down to touch the mass of people
with their knowledge and ideas; if he has come to see business as
a clever way of distributing unearned wealth, and the levying of a
refined tribute on the property-less workers; if he has come to see
the press as devoted to bolstering up all these institutions in their
inefficiency and inertia;--if he has caught this radical vision of the
social institutions about him, he will find it hard to fit neatly into
any of them and let it set its brand upon him. It would seem to be a
treason not only to society but to his own best self. He would seem to
have become one of the vast conspiracy to keep things as they are. He
has spent his youth, perhaps, in studying things as they are in order
to help in changing them into things as they ought to be, but he is now
confronted with the question how the change can be accomplished, and
how he can help in that accomplishment.
The attempt to answer these questions seems at first to bring him to a
deadlock and to inhibit all his powers. He desires self-development
and self-expression, and the only opportunities offered him seem to be
ways of life and training that will only mock the best social ideals
that he has. This is the dilemma of latter-day youth, and it is a
dilemma which is new and original to our own age. Earnest men and
women have always had before them the task of adjusting themselves
to this world, of “overcoming the world,” but the proper method has
always been found in withdrawing from it altogether, or in passing
through it with as little spot and blemish as possible, not in plunging
into its activity and attempting to subjugate it to one’s ideals. Yet
this is the task that the young radical sets for himself. Subjugation
without compromise! But so many young men and women feel that this is
impossible. Confident of their sincerity, yet distrustful of their
strength, eager yet timorous, they stand on the brink, longing to
serve, but not knowing how, and too likely, through their distrust and
fears, to make a wreck of their whole lives. They feel somehow that
they have no right to seek their own welfare or the training of their
own talents until they have paid that service to society which they
have learned is its due.
It does not do to tell them that one of their best services will be
that training. They demand some more direct way of influencing their
fellows, some short road to radical activity. It would be good for them
to know that they cannot hope to accomplish very much in radiating
their ideals without the skill and personality which gives impetus to
that radiation. Good-will alone has little efficacy. For centuries
well-wishers of men have shown a touching faith in the power of pure
ideals to propagate themselves. The tragic failures of the beginnings
of the social movement itself were largely due to this belief. Great
efforts ended only in sentimentality. But we have no intention now that
the fund of intellectual and spiritual energy liberated by radical
thought in the younger generation shall die away in such ineffective
efforts. To radiate influence, one’s light must shine before men, and
it must glow, moreover, with a steady and resolute flame, or men will
neither see nor believe the good works that are being done.
It would be an easy way out of the dilemma if we could all adopt the
solution of Kropotkin, the Russian radical writer, and engage in
radical journalism. This seems to be the most direct means of bringing
one’s ideals to the people, to be a real fighting on the firing
line. It is well to remember, however, that a weak propagandist is a
hindrance rather than an assistance, and that the social movement needs
the best of talent, and the skill. This is a challenge to genius, but
it is also a reminder that those who fight in other ranks than the
front may do as valiant and worthy service. One of the first lessons
the young radical has to learn is that influence can be indirect as
well as direct, and will be strongest when backed by the most glowing
personality. So that self-cultivation becomes almost a duty, if one
wants to be effective towards the great end. And not only personality
but prestige; for the prestige of the person from whom ideals come is
one of the strongest factors in driving home those ideas to the mind of
the hearer and making them a motive force in his life. Vested interests
do not hesitate to make use of the services of college presidents
and other men of intellectual prestige to give their practices a
philosophic support; neither should radicals disdain, as many seem to
disdain, the use of prestige as a vantage-ground from which to hurl
their dogmas. Even though Kropotkin himself deprecated his useless
learning, his scientific reputation has been a great factor in
spreading his radical ideas.
It is the fashion among some radicals to despise the applause of the
conventional, unthinking mass, and scorn any success which has that
appreciation as an ingredient. But this is not the way to influence
that same crass, unthinking mass or convert it to one’s doctrines. It
is to alienate at the beginning the heathen to whom the gospel is being
brought. And even the radical has the right to be wise as a serpent
and harmless as a dove. He must see merely that his distinctiveness is
based on real merit and not, as many reputations are, on conformity
to an established code. Scientific research, engineering, medicine,
and any honest craft, are vocations where it is hard to win prestige
without being socially productive; their only disadvantage lies in the
fact that their activity does not give opportunity for the influence
of the kind the radical wishes to exert. Art, literature, and teaching
are perilous; the pressures to conform are deadly, but the triumphs of
individuality splendid. For one’s daily work lies there directly in
the line of impressing other minds. The genius can almost swing the
lash over men’s spirits, and form their ideas for them; he combines
enormous prestige with enormous direct influence. Law, the ministry,
and business seem to be peculiarly deadly; it is hard to see how
eminence can be attained in those professions except at the cost of
many of one’s social ideals.
The radical can thus choose his career with full knowledge of the
social possibilities. Where he is forced by economic necessity to
engage in distasteful and unsocial work, he may still leave no doubt,
in the small realm he does illuminate, as to his attitude and his
purpose, his enthusiasm and his hope. For all his powers and talents
can be found to contribute something; fusing together they form his
personality and create his prestige, and it is these that give the
real impetus and the vital impulse that drive one’s beliefs and ideals
into the hearts of other men. If he speaks, he will be listened to,
for it is faith and not doubt that men strain their ears to hear. It
is the believing word that they are eager to hear. Let the social
faith be in a youth, and it will leak out in every activity of his
life, it will permeate his words and color his deeds. The belief and
the vision are the essentials; these given, there is little need for
him to worry how he may count in society. He will count in spite of
himself. He may never know just how he is counting, he may never hear
the reverberations of his own personality in others, but reverberate it
will, and the timbre and resonance will be in proportion to the quality
and power of that vision.
The first concrete duty of every youth to whom social idealism is more
than a phrase is to see that he is giving back to society as much
as or more than he receives, and, moreover, that he is a nourisher
of the common life and not a drain upon its resources. This was
Tolstoy’s problem, and his solution to the question--“What is to be
done?”--was--“Get off the other fellow’s back!” His duty, he found,
was to arrange his life so that the satisfaction of his needs did not
involve the servitude or the servility of any of his fellow men; to do
away with personal servants, and with the articles of useless luxury
whose production meant the labor of thousands who might otherwise have
been engaged in some productive and life-bringing work; to make his own
living either directly from the soil, or by the coöperative exchange of
services, in professional, intellectual, artistic, or handicraft labor.
Splendidly sound as this solution is, both ethically and economically,
the tragic fact remains that so inextricably are we woven into the
social web that we cannot live except in some degree at the expense of
somebody else, and that somebody is too often a man, woman, or even
little child who gives grudgingly, painfully, a stint of labor that we
may enjoy. We do not see the labor and the pain, and with easy hearts
and quiet consciences we enjoy what we can of the good things of life;
or, if we see the truth, as Tolstoy saw it, we still fancy, like him,
that we have it in our power to escape the curse by simple living and
our own labor. But the very food we eat, the clothes we wear, the
simplest necessities of life with which we provide ourselves, have
their roots somewhere, somehow, in exploitation and injustice. It is a
cardinal necessity of the social system under which we live that this
should be so, where the bulk of the work of the world is done, not for
human use and happiness, but primarily and directly for the profits of
masters and owners. We are all tainted with the original sin; we cannot
escape our guilt. And we can be saved out of it only by the skill and
enthusiasm which we show in our efforts to change things. We cannot
help the poisonous soil from which our sustenance springs, but we can
be laboring mightily at agitating that soil, ploughing it, turning it,
and sweetening it, against the day when new seed will be planted and a
fairer fruitage be produced.
The solution of these dilemmas of radical youth will, therefore, not
come from a renunciation of the personality or a refusal to participate
actively in life. Granted the indignation at our world as it is,
and the vision of the world as it might and ought to be, both the
heightening of all the powers of the personality and a firm grappling
with some definite work-activity of life are necessary to make that
indignation powerful and purging, and to transmute that vision into
actual satisfaction for our own souls and those of our fellows. It is
a fallacy of radical youth to demand all or nothing, and to view every
partial activity as compromise. Either engage in something that will
bring revolution and transformation all at one blow, or do nothing,
it seems to say. But compromise is really only a desperate attempt
to reconcile the irreconcilable. It is not compromise to study to
understand the world in which one lives, to seek expression for one’s
inner life, to work to harmonize it and make it an integer, nor is it
compromise to work in some small sphere for the harmonization of social
life and the relations between men who work together, a harmonization
that will bring democracy into every sphere of life, industrial and
social.
Radical youth is apt to long for some supreme sacrifice and feels that
a lesser surrender is worth nothing. But better than sacrifice is
efficiency! It is absurd to stand perplexedly waiting for the great
occasion, unwilling to make the little efforts and test the little
occasions, and unwilling to work at developing the power that would
make those occasions great. Of all the roads of activity that lie
before the youth at the threshold of life, one paramount road must be
taken. This fear that one sees so often in young people, that, if they
choose one of their talents or interests or opportunities of influence
and make themselves in it “competent ones of their generation,” they
must slaughter all the others, is irrational. It is true that the stern
present demands singleness of purpose and attention. A worthy success
is impossible to-day if the labor is divided among many interests. In
a more leisurely time, the soul could encompass many fields, and even
to-day the genius may conquer and hold at once many spiritual kingdoms.
But this is simply a stern challenge to us all to make ourselves
geniuses. For serious and sincere as the desire of radical youth may
be to lead the many-sided life, a life without a permanent core of
active and productive interest, of efficient work in the world, leads
to dilettantism and triviality. Such efficient work, instead of killing
the other interests of life, rather fertilizes them and makes them in
turn enrich the central activity. Instead of feeding on their time, it
actually creates time for the play of the other interests, which is all
the sweeter for its preciousness.
Always trying to make sure that the work, apart from the inevitable
taint of exploitation which is involved in modern work, is socially
productive, that it actually in some way contributes to the material
or spiritual welfare of the people for whom it is done, and does not
simply reiterate old formulas, does not simply extend the friction
of competition or consist simply in living on the labor and profits
of others. Such work cannot be found by rule. The situation is a
real dilemma for the idealistic youth of to-day, and its solution is
to be worked out in the years to come. It is these crucial dilemmas
that make this age so difficult to live in, that make life so hard to
harmonize and integrate. The shock of the crassnesses and crudities of
the modern social world thrown against the conventionally satisfying
picture which that world has formed of itself makes any young life of
purpose and sincerity a real peril and adventure. There are all sorts
of spiritual disasters lying in wait for the youth who embarks on the
perilous ocean of radicalism. The disapproval of those around him is
likely to be the least of his dangers. It should rather fortify his
soul than discourage him. Far more dangerous is it that he lose his way
on the uncharted seas before him, or follow false guides to shipwreck.
But the solution is not to stay at home, fearful and depressed. It is
rather to cultivate deliberately the widest knowledge, the broadest
sympathy, the keenest insight, the most superb skill, and then set
sail, exulting in one’s resources, and crowding on every inch of sail.