The more perfectly we understand the implications of the machine

technology upon which our civilization is based, the easier it will be

for us to live with it. We shall discern the ideals of our industry in

the necessities of industry itself. They are the direction in which it

must evolve if it is to fulfill itself. That is what ideals are. They

are not hallucinations. They are not a collection [p259] of pretty and

casual preferences. Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that

which is desirable in that which is possible. As we discern the ideals

of the machine technology we can consciously pursue them, knowing that

we are not vainly trying to impose our casual prejudices, but that we

are in harmony with the age we live in.

CHAPTER XIII [p260]

GOVERNMENT IN THE GREAT SOCIETY

1. _Loyalty_

The difficulty of discovering an industrial philosophy which fits

machine industry on a large scale has proved less trying than the

discovery of a political philosophy which fits the modern state. I do

not know why this should be so unless it be that, as compared with

politicians, business men have had a closer opportunity to observe

and more pressing reasons for trying to understand the transformation

wrought by machinery and scientific invention. Certainly even the best

political thinking is notably inferior in realism and in pertinence

to the economic thinking which now plays so important a part in the

direction of industry. To a very considerable degree the writer on

politics to-day is about where the economist was when all economic

theory began and for all practical purposes seemed to end with Robinson

Crusoe and his man Friday. Nobody takes political science very

seriously, for nobody is convinced that it is a science or that it has

any important bearing on politics.

In very considerable measure political theory in the modern world

is sterilized by its own ideas. There have been passed down from

generation to generation a collection of concepts which are so hallowed

and so dense that their only use is to excite emotions and to obscure

insight. [p261] How many of us really know what we are talking

about when we use words like the state, sovereignty, independence,

democracy, representative government, national honor, liberty, and

loyalty? Very few of us, I think, could define any of these terms

under cross-examination, though we are prepared to shed blood, or at

least ink, in their behalf. These terms have ceased to be intellectual

instruments for apprehending the facts we have to deal with and have

become push buttons which touch off emotional reflexes.

As good a way as any to raise the temperature of political debate is to

talk about loyalty. Everybody regards himself as loyal and resents any

imputation upon his loyalty, yet even a cursory inspection of this term

will show, I think, that it may mean any number of different things.

It is clearest when used in a military sense. A loyal soldier is one

who obeys his superior officer. A loyal officer is one who obeys his

commander-in-chief. But just exactly what is a loyal commander-in-chief

cannot be told so easily. He is loyal to the nation. He is loyal to the

best interests of the nation. But what those best interests may be,

whether they mean making peace or carrying the war into the enemy’s

country, is an exceedingly debatable question. When the citizen’s

loyalty is in question the whole matter becomes immensely subtle. Must

he be loyal to every law and every command issued by the established

authorities, kings, legislators, and aldermen? There are many who would

say that this is the definition of civic loyalty, to obey the law

without qualifications while it is a law. But such definition puts the

taint of disloyalty on almost all citizens [p262] of the modern state.

For the fact is that all the laws on the books are not even known, and

that a considerable portion are entirely disregarded, and many it is

impossible to obey. The definition, moreover, places outside the pale

many who rank as great patriots, men who defied the law out of loyalty

to some principle which the lawmakers have rejected. But what makes

matters even more complicated is the fact that in modern communities

the principle is accepted that the commands of the established

authorities not only may be criticized but that they ought to be.

At this stage of political development the military element in

loyalty has virtually disappeared. The idea of toleration, of freedom

of speech, and above all the idea of organized opposition, alters

radically the attributes of the sovereign. For a sovereign who has to

be obeyed but not believed in, whose decisions are legitimate matters

of dispute, who may be displaced by his bitterest opponents, has lost

all semblance of omnipotence and omniscience. “He has sovereignty,”

wrote Jean Bodin, “who, after God, acknowledges no one greater than

himself.” Our governors command only for the time being—and within

strict limits. Their authority is only such as they can win and hold.

Political loyalty under these conditions, whatever else it may be,

is certainly not unqualified allegiance to those who hold office, to

the policies they pursue, or even to the laws they enact. Neither the

government as it exists, nor its conduct, nor even the constitution by

which it operates, exercises any ultimate claim upon the loyalty of the

citizen. The most one can say, I think, is that the loyal citizen is

one who loves his country and regards the status quo as an arrangement

which he [p263] is at liberty to modify only by argument, according to

well-understood rules, without violence, and with due regard for the

interests and opinions of his fellow men. If he is loyal to this ideal

of political conduct he is as loyal as the modern state can force him

to be, or as it is desirable that he should be.

2. _The Evolution of Loyalty_

Broadly speaking, the evolution of political loyalty passes through

three phases. In the earliest, the most primitive, and for almost all

men the most natural, loyalty is allegiance to a chieftain; in the

middle phase it tends to become allegiance to an institution—that is

to say, to a corporate, rather than to a human, personality; and in the

last phase it becomes allegiance to a pattern of conduct. The kind of

government which any community is capable of operating is very largely

determined by the kind of loyalty of which its members are capable.

It is plain, for example, that among a people who are capable only of

loyalty to another human being the political system is bound to take

the shape of a hierarchy, in which each man is loyal to his superior,

and the man at the top is loyal to God alone. Such a society will be

feudal, military, theocratic. If it is successfully organized it will

be an ordered despotism, culminating, as the feudal system did, in

God’s Vice-gerent on earth. If it is unsuccessfully organized, as for

example, in the more backward countries of Central America to-day,

the system of personal allegiances will produce little factions each

with its chief, all of them contending for, without quite achieving,

absolute power. This type of organization is so fundamentally [p264]

human that it prevails even in communities which think they have

outgrown it. Thus it appears in what Americans call a political

machine, which is nothing but a hierarchy of professional politicians

held together by profitable personal loyalties. The political boss

is a demilitarized chieftain in the direct line of descent from his

prototypes.

The modern world has come to regard organization on the basis of human

allegiances as alien and dangerous. Yet the political machine exists

even in the most advanced communities. The reason for that is obvious.

With the enfranchisement of virtually the whole adult population,

political power has passed into the hands of a great mass of people

most of whom are altogether incapable of loyalty to institutions,

much less to ideas. They do not understand them. For these voters

the only kind of political behavior is through allegiance to a human

superior, and modern democracies are considered fortunate if the

political leaders and bosses on whom these human allegiances converge

are relatively loyal to the institutions of the country. This, for

example, is the meaning of the dramatic speech in which President

Calles on September 1, 1928, voluntarily renounced the continuation of

his own dictatorship. “For the first time in Mexican history,” he said,

“the Republic faces a situation (owing to the assassination of General

Obregon) whose dominant note is the lack of a military leader, which

is going to make it finally possible for us to direct the policy of

the country into truly institutional channels, striving to pass once

for all from our historical condition of one-man rule to the higher,

more dignified, more useful, and more civilized condition of a nation

of laws and institutions.” It is [p265] hardly to be supposed that

President Calles thought that the Mexican people as a whole could pass

once for all from their historical condition of one-man rule. What he

meant was that the political chieftains to whom the people were loyal

ought thereafter to arrange the succession and to exercise power not

as seemed desirable to them, or as they might imagine that God had

privately commanded them, but in accordance with objective rules of

political conduct.

The conceptions of sovereignty which we inherit are derived from the

primitive system of personal allegiances. That is why the conception

of sovereignty has become increasingly confused as modern civilization

has become more complex. In the Middle Ages the theory reached its

symmetrical perfection. Mankind was conceived as a great organism in

which the spiritual and temporal hierarchies were united as the soul

is united with the body in “an inseverable connection and an unbroken

interaction which must display itself in every part and also throughout

the whole.” But of course even in the Middle Ages the symmetry of this

conception was marred by the fierce disputes between the Emperors and

the Popes. After the Sixteenth Century the whole conception began to

disintegrate. There appeared a congeries of monarchs each claiming to

rule in his territory by divine right. But obviously when there are

many agents of the Lord ruling men, and when they do not agree, the

theory of sovereignty in its moral aspects is in grave difficulties.

As time went on, limitations of all kinds began to be imposed upon

sovereigns. The existence at the same time of many sovereigns produced

the need of international law, for obviously there could have been no

international [p266] law in a world where all of mankind, barring

infidels who did not have to be considered, were under one sovereign

power. The limitations imposed by international law from without were

accompanied by limitations imposed from within.

These limitations from within were based on quite practical

considerations. There grew up slowly in the Middle Ages the idea

that the State originated “in a contract of Subjection made between

People and Ruler.” The first modern writer to argue effectively that

government was based not on a warrant from the Lord, but on a “social

compact” is said to have been Richard Hooker, a clergyman of the

Established Church, who held, in 1594, that the royal authority was

derived from a contract between the king and the people. This idea

soon became popular, for it suited the needs of all those who did not

participate in the privileges of the absolute monarchy. It suited not

only the Church of England, when as in Hooker’s time it was assailed,

but also the dissenting churches, and then the rising middle class

whose ambitions were frustrated by the landed nobles with the king at

their head. The doctrine of the social compact was expounded in many

different forms in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries by men like

Milton, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

As an historical theory to explain the origin of human society it

is of course demonstrably false, but as a weapon for breaking up

the concentration of sovereign power and distributing it, the idea

has played a mighty role in history. It is almost certain to appear

wherever there is an absolutism which men feel the need of checking.

But the [p267] theory of the social compact disappears when power

has become so widely diffused that no one can any longer locate

the sovereign. That is what is happening in the advanced modern

communities. The sovereign, whom it was once desirable to put under

contract, has become so anonymous and diffuse that his very existence

to-day is a legal fiction rather than a political fact. And loyalty

by the same token is no longer provided with a personal superior of

indubitable prestige to which it can be attached.

3. _Pluralism_

The relationship between lord and vassals in which each man attaches

himself for better or worse to some superior person tends gradually to

disappear in the modern world. Its passing was somewhat prematurely

announced by the Declaration of the Rights of Man; it did not wholly

disappear by the dissolution of the bonds which bound one man to

another, for the psychological bonds are stronger than the legal.

Nevertheless the effect of modern civilization is to dissolve these

psychological bonds, to break up clannishness and personal dependence.

Men and women alike tend to become more or less independent persons

rather than to remain members of a social organism.

The reason for this lies in the diversification of their interests.

Life in the ancestral order was not only simpler and contained within

narrower limits than it is to-day, but there was a far greater unity

in the activity of each individual. Working the land, fighting,

raising a family, worshipping, were so closely related that they could

be governed by a very simple allegiance to the chief of the tribe

[p268] or the lord of the manor. In the modern world this synthesis

has disintegrated and the activities of a man cannot be directed by a

simple allegiance. Each man finds himself the center of a complex of

loyalties. He is loyal to his government, he is loyal to his state, he

is loyal to his village, he is loyal to his neighborhood. He has his

own family. He has his wife’s family. His wife has her family. He has

his church. His wife may have a different church. He may be an employer

of thousands of men. He may be an employee. He must be loyal to his

corporation, to his trade union, or his professional society. He is

a buyer in many different markets. He is a seller in many different

markets. He is a creditor and a debtor. He owns shares in several

industries. He belongs to a political party, to clubs, to a social set.

The multiplicity of his interests makes it impossible for him to give

his whole allegiance to any person or to any institution.

It may be, in fact for most men it must be, that in each of these

associations he follows a leader. In any considerable number of people

it is certain that they will group themselves in hierarchical form.

In every club, in every social circle, in every trade union, in every

stockholders’ meeting there are leaders and their lieutenants and the

led. But these allegiances are partial. Because a man has so many

loyalties each loyalty commands only a segment of himself. They are

not, therefore, whole-hearted loyalties like that of a good soldier

to his captain. They are qualified, calculated, debatable, and they

are sanctioned not by inherent authority but by expediency or inertia.

[p269]

The outward manifestation of these complex loyalties of the modern man

is the multitude of institutions through which the affairs of mankind

are directed. Now since each of these corporate entities represents

only a part of any man’s interest, except perhaps in the case of the

paid executive secretary, none of these institutions can count to the

bitter end upon the undivided loyalty of all its members. The conflicts

between institutions are in considerable measure conflicts of interest

within the same individuals. There is a point where the activity of a

man’s trade union may so seriously affect the value of the securities

he owns that he does not know which way his interest lies. The

criss-crossing of loyalties is so great in an advanced community that

no grouping is self-contained. No grouping, therefore, can maintain a

military discipline or a military character. For when men strive too

fiercely as members of any one group they soon find that they are at

war with themselves as members of another group.

The statement that modern society is pluralistic cannot, then, be

dismissed as a newfangled notion invented by theorists. It is a sober

description of the actual facts. Each man has countless interests

through which he is attached to a very complex social situation.

The complexity of his allegiance cannot fail to be reflected in his

political conduct.

4. _Live and Let Live_

One of the inevitable effects of being attached to many different,

somewhat conflicting, interdependent groupings is to blunt the edges

of partisanship. It is possible to [p270] be fiercely partisan only

as against those who are wholly alien. It is a fair generalization to

say that the fiercest Democrats are to be found where there are the

fewest Republicans, the most bloodthirsty patriots in the safest swivel

chairs. Where men are personally entangled with the groups that are

in potential conflict, where Democrats and Republicans belong to the

same country club and where Protestants and Catholics marry each other,

it is psychologically impossible to be sharply intolerant. That is

why astute directors of corporations adopt the policy of distributing

their securities as widely as they can; they know quite well that

even the most modest shareholder is in some measure insulated against

anti-corporate agitation. It is inherent in the complex pluralism of

the modern world that men should behave moderately, and experience

amply confirms this conclusion.

There is little doubt that in the great metropolitan centers there

exists a disposition to live and let live, to give and take, to agree

and to agree to differ, which is not to be found in simple homogeneous

communities. In complex communities life quickly becomes intolerable if

men are intolerant. For they are in daily contact with almost everybody

and everything they could conceivably wish to persecute. Their victims

would be their customers, their employees, their landlords, their

tenants and perhaps their wives’ relations. But in a simple community

a kind of pastoral intolerance for everything alien adds a quaint

flavor to living. For the most part it vents itself in the open air.

The terrible indictments drawn up in a Mississippi village against the

Pope in Rome, the Russian nation, the vices of Paris, and the [p271]

enormities of New York are in the main quite lyrical. The Pope may

never even know what the Mississippi preacher thinks of him and New

York continues to go to, but never apparently to reach, hell.

When an agitator wishes to start a crusade, a religious revival, an

inquisition, or some sort of jingo excitement, the further he goes from

the centers of modern civilization the more following he can attract.

It is in the backwoods and in the hill country, in kitchens and in

old men’s clubs, that fanaticism can be kindled. The urban crowd, if

it has been urban for any length of time and has become used to its

environment, may be fickle, faddish, nervous, unstable, but it lacks

the concentration of energy to become fiercely excited for any length

of time about anything. At its worst it is a raging mob, but it is

not persistently fanatical. There are too many things to attract its

attention for it to remain preoccupied for long with any one thing.

To responsible men of affairs the complexity of modern civilization is

a daily lesson in the necessity of not pressing any claim too far, of

understanding opposing points of view, of seeking to reconcile them, of

conducting matters so that there is some kind of harmony in a plural

society. This accounts, I think, for the increasing use of political

devices which are wholly unknown in simpler societies. There is, for

example, the ideal of a civil service. It is wholly modern and it is

quite revolutionary. For it assumes that a great deal of the business

of the state can and must be carried on by a class of men who have no

personal and no party allegiance, who are in fact neutral in politics

and concerned only with the execution [p272] of a task. I know how

imperfectly the civil service works, but that it should exist at all,

and that the ideal it embodies should be generally acknowledged,

is profound testimony as to how inherent in the modern situation

is the concept of disinterestedness. The theory of an independent

judiciary arises out of the same need for disinterested judgment.

Even more significant, perhaps, is the use in all political debates

of the evidence of technicians, experts, and neutral investigators.

The statesman who imagined he had thought up a solution for a social

problem while he was in his bath would be a good deal of a joke; even

if he had stumbled on a good idea, he would not dare to commit himself

to it without elaborate preliminary surveys, investigations, hearings,

conferences, and the like.

Men occupying responsible posts in the Great Society have become aware,

in short, that their guesses and their prejudices are untrustworthy,

and that successful decisions can be made only in a neutral spirit by

comparing their hypotheses with their understanding of reality.

5. _Government in the People_

It has been the cause of considerable wonder to many persons that the

most complex modern communities, where the old loyalties are most

completely dissolved, where authority has so little prestige, where

moral codes are held in such small esteem, should nevertheless have

proved to be far more impervious to the strain of war and revolution

than the older and simpler types of civilization. It has been Russia,

China, Poland, Italy, Spain, rather than England, Germany, Belgium,

and the United States which have been most disorderly in the post-war

[p273] period. The contrary might have been expected. It might well

have been anticipated that the highly organized, delicately poised

social mechanisms would disintegrate the most easily.

Yet it is now evident why modern civilization is so durable. Its

strength lies in its sensitiveness. The effect of bad decisions is

so quickly felt, the consequences are so inescapably serious, that

corrective action is almost immediately set in motion. A simple society

like Russia can let its railroads go gradually to wrack and ruin, but

a complex society like London or New York is instantly disorganized

if the railroads do not run on schedule. So many persons are at once

affected in so many vitally important ways that remedies have to be

found immediately. This does not mean that modern states are governed

as wisely as they should be, or that they do not neglect much that they

cannot really afford to neglect. They blunder along badly enough in all

conscience. There is nevertheless a minimum of order and of necessary

services which they have to provide for themselves. They have to keep

going. They cannot afford the luxury of prolonged disorder or of a

general paralysis. Their own necessities are dependent on such fragile

structures, and everyone is so much affected, that when a modern state

is in trouble it can draw upon incomparable reserves of public spirit.

“I made ninety-one local committees in ninety-one local communities to

look after the Mississippi flood,” Mr. Hoover once explained, “that’s

what I principally did.... You say: ‘a couple of thousand refugees are

coming. They’ve got to have accommodations. Huts. [p274] Water-mains.

Sewers. Streets. Dining-halls. Meals. Doctors. Everything.’... So

you go away and they go ahead and just simply do it. Of all those

ninety-one committees there was just one that fell down.” Mr. Hard,

who reports these remarks, goes on to make Mr. Hoover say that: “No

other Main Street in the world could have done what the American

Main Street did in the Mississippi flood; and Europe may jeer as it

pleases at our mass production and our mass organization and our mass

education. The safety of the United States is its multitudinous mass

leadership.” Allowing for the fact that these remarks appeared in a

campaign biography at a time when Mr. Hoover’s friends were rather

concerned about demonstrating the intensity of his patriotism, there

is nevertheless substantial truth in them. I am inclined to believe

that “multitudinous mass leadership” will be found wherever industrial

society is firmly established, that is to say, wherever a people has

lived with the machine process long enough to acquire the aptitudes

that it calls for. This capacity to organize, to administer affairs,

to deal realistically with necessity, can hardly be due to some

congenital superiority in the American people. They are, after all

only transplanted Europeans. That their aptitudes may be somewhat more

highly developed is not, however, inconceivable: the new civilization

may have developed more freely in a land where it did not have to

contend with the institutions of a military, feudal, and clerical

society.

The essential point is that as the machine technology makes social

relations complex, it dissolves the habits of obedience and dependence;

it disintegrates the centralization [p275] of power and of leadership;

it diffuses the experience of responsible decision throughout the

population, compelling each man to acquire the habit of making

judgments instead of looking for orders, of adjusting his will to the

wills of others instead of trusting to custom and organic loyalties.

The real law under which modern society is administered is neither the

accumulated precedents of tradition nor a set of commands originating

on high which are imposed like orders in an army upon the rank and file

below. The real law in the modern state is the multitude of little

decisions made daily by millions of men.

Because this is so, the character of government is changing radically.

This change is obscured for us in our theorizing by the fact that our

political ideas derive from a different kind of social experience.

We think of governing as the act of a person; for the actual king we

have tried to substitute a corporate king, which we call the nation,

the people, the majority, public opinion, or the general will. But

none of these entities has the attributes of a king, and the failure

of political thinking to lay the ghosts of monarchy leads to endless

misunderstanding. The crucial difference between modern politics and

that to which mankind has been accustomed is that the power to act and

to compel obedience is almost never sufficiently centralized nowadays

to be exercised by one will. The power is distributed and qualified so

that power is exerted not by command but by interaction.

The prime business of government, therefore, is not to direct the

affairs of the community, but to harmonize the direction which the

community gives to its affairs. [p276] The Congress of the United

States, for example, does not consult the conscience and its God and

then decree a tariff law. It enacts the kind of tariff which at the

moment represents the most stable compromise among the interests which

have made themselves heard. The law may be outrageously unfair. But if

it is, that is because those whose interests are neglected did not at

that time have the power to make themselves felt. If the law favors

manufacturers rather than farmers, it is because the manufacturers

at that time have greater weight in the social equilibrium than the

farmers. That may sound hard. But it is doubtful whether a modern

legislature can make laws effective if those laws are not the formal

expression of what the persons actually affected can and wish to do.

The amount of law is relatively small which a modern legislature can

successfully impose. The reason for this is that unless the enforcement

of the law is taken in hand by the citizenry, the officials as such

are quite helpless. It is possible to enforce the law of contracts,

because the injured party will sue; it is possible to enforce the law

against burglary, because almost everybody will report a burglary to

the police. But it is not possible to enforce the old-fashioned speed

laws on the highways because the police are too few and far between,

the pedestrians are uninterested, and motorists like to speed. There is

here a very fundamental principle of modern lawmaking: insofar as a law

depends upon the initiative of officials in detecting violations and in

prosecuting, that law will almost certainly be difficult to enforce. If

a considerable part of the population is hostile to the law, and if the

[p277] majority has only a platonic belief in it, the law will surely

break down. For what gives law reality is not that it is commanded by

the sovereign but that it brings the organized force of the state to

the aid of those citizens who believe in the law.

What the government really does is not to rule men, but to add

overwhelming force to men when they rule their affairs. The passage

of a law is in effect a promise that the police, the courts, and the

officials will defend and enforce certain rights when citizens choose

to exercise them. For all practical purposes this is just as true when

what was once a private wrong to be redressed by private action in law

courts on proof of specific injury has been made by statute a public

wrong which is preventable and punishable by administrative action.

When the citizens are no longer interested in preventing or punishing

specific instances of what the statute declares is a public wrong, the

statute becomes a dead letter. The principle is most obviously true in

the case of a sumptuary law like prohibition. The reason prohibition

is unenforceable in the great cities is that the citizens will not

report the names and addresses of their bootleggers to the prohibition

officials. But the principle is no less true in less obvious cases,

as, for example, in tariffs or laws to regulate railroads. Thus it is

difficult to enforce the tariff law on jewels, for they are easily

smuggled. Insofar as the law is enforced it is because jewelers find

it profitable to maintain an organization which detects smuggling.

Because they know the ins and outs of the trade, and have men in all

the jewelry markets of the world who have an interest in catching

smugglers, it is possible for the United [p278] States Government to

make a fair showing in administering the law. The government cannot

from hour to hour inspect all the transactions of its people, and

any law which rests on the premise that government can do this is

a foolish law. The railroad laws are enforced because shippers are

vigilant. The criminal laws depend upon how earnestly citizens object

to certain kinds of crime. In fact it may be said that laws which make

certain kinds of conduct illicit are effective insofar as the breach

of these laws arouses the citizenry to call in the police and to take

the trouble to help the police. It is not enough that the mass of the

population should be law-abiding. A minority can stultify the law if

the population as a whole is not also law-enforcing.

This is the real sense in which it can be said that power in the modern

state resides not in the government but in the people. As that phrase

is usually employed it alleges that ‘the people,’ as articulated by

elected officials, can govern by command as the monarch or tribal

chieftain once governed. In this sense government by the people is a

delusion. What we have among advanced communities is something that

might perhaps be described as government in the people. The naively

democratic theory was that out of the mass of the voters there arose a

cloud of wills which ascended to heaven, condensed into a thunderbolt,

and then smote the people. It was supposed that the opinion of masses

of persons somehow became the opinion of a corporate person called The

People, and that this corporate person then directed human affairs like

a monarch. But that is not what happens. Government is in the people

and stays there. Government is [p279] their multitudinous decisions in

concrete situations, and what officials do is to assist and facilitate

this process of governing. Effective laws may be said to register an

understanding among those concerned by which the law-abiding know

what to expect and what is expected of them; they are insured with

all the force that the state commands against the disruption of this

understanding by the recalcitrant minority. In the modern state a law

which does not register the inward assent of most of those who are

affected will have very little force as against the breakers of that

law. For it is only by that inward assent that power becomes mobilized

to enforce the law. The government in the person of its officials, its

paltry inspectors and policemen, has relatively little power of its

own. It derives its power from the people in amounts which vary with

the circumstances of each law. That is why the same government may act

with invincible majesty in one place and with ludicrous futility in

another.

6. _Politicians and Statesmen_

The role of the leader would be easier to define if it were agreed

to give separate meanings to two very common words. I mean the words

“politician” and “statesman.” In popular usage a vague distinction

is recognized: to call a man a statesman is eulogy, to call him a

politician is to be, however faintly, disparaging. The dictionary, in

fact, defines a politician as one who seeks to subserve the interests

of a political party _merely_; as an afterthought it defines him as

one skilled in political science: a statesman. And in defining a

statesman the [p280] dictionary says that he is a political leader of

distinguished ability.

These definitions can, I think, be improved upon by clarifying the

meanings which are vaguely intended in popular usage. When we think

offhand of a politician we think of a man who works for a partial

interest. At the worst it is his own pocket. At the best it may be

his party, his class, or an institution with which he is identified.

We never feel that he can or will take into account all the interests

concerned, and because bias and partisanship are the qualities of

his conduct, we feel, unless we are naively afflicted with the same

bias, that he is not to be trusted too far. Now the word ‘statesman,’

when it is not mere pomposity, connotes a man whose mind is elevated

sufficiently above the conflict of contending parties to enable him to

adopt a course of action which takes into account a greater number of

interests in the perspective of a longer period of time. It is some

such conception as this that Edmund Burke had in mind when he wrote

that the state “ought not to be considered as nothing better than a

partnership in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or

some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary

interest and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.... It is a

partnership in a higher and more permanent sense—a partnership in all

science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in

all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained

in many generations it becomes a partnership not only between those

who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be

born.” [p281]

The politician, then, is a man who seeks to attain the special objects

of particular interests. If he is the leader of a political party he

will try either to purchase the support of particular interests by

specific pledges, or if that is impracticable, he will employ some

form of deception. I include under the term ‘deception’ the whole art

of propaganda, whether it consists of half-truths, lies, ambiguities,

evasions, calculated silence, red herrings, unresponsiveness, slogans,

catchwords, showmanship, bathos, hokum, and buncombe. They are, one and

all, methods of preventing a disinterested inquiry into the situation.

I do not say that any one can be elected to office without employing

deception, though I am inclined to think that there is a new school of

political reporters in the land who with a kind of beautiful cruelty

are making it rather embarrassing for politicians to employ their old

tricks. A man may have to be a politician to be elected when there is

adult suffrage, and it may be that statesmanship, in the sense in which

I am using the term, cannot occupy the whole attention of any public

man. It is true at least that it never does.

The reason for this is that in order to hold office a man must array in

his support a varied assortment of persons with all sorts of confused

and conflicting purposes. When then, it may be asked, does he begin to

be a statesman? He begins whenever he stops trying merely to satisfy or

to obfuscate the momentary wishes of his constituents, and sets out to

make them realize and assent to those hidden interests of theirs which

are permanent because they fit the facts and can be harmonized with the

interests of their neighbors. The politician says: “I [p282] will give

you what you want.” The statesman says: “What you think you want is

this. What it is possible for you to get is that. What you really want,

therefore, is the following.” The politician stirs up a following; the

statesman leads it. The politician, in brief, accepts unregenerate

desire at its face value and either fulfills it or perpetrates a fraud;

the statesman re-educates desire by confronting it with the reality,

and so makes possible an enduring adjustment of interests within the

community.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions

is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which

converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate

from the naive self-interest of each group to its permanent and real

interest. It is a difficult art which requires great courage, deep

sympathy, and a vast amount of information. That is why it is so rare.

But when a statesman is successful in converting his constituents from

a childlike pursuit of what seems interesting to a realistic view of

their interests, he receives a kind of support which the ordinary glib

politician can never hope for. Candor is a bitter pill when first it is

tasted but it is full of health, and once a man becomes established in

the public mind as a person who deals habitually and successfully with

real things, he acquires an eminence of a wholly different quality from

that of even the most celebrated caterer to the popular favor. His hold

on the people is enduring because he promises nothing which he cannot

achieve; he proposes nothing which turns out to be a fake. Sooner or

later the politician, because he deals in unrealities, is found out.

Then he either goes to jail, or he is tolerated [p283] cynically as a

picturesque and amiable scoundrel; or he retires and ceases to meddle

with the destinies of men. The words of a statesman prove to have value

because they express not the desires of the moment but the conditions

under which desires can actually be adjusted to reality. His projects

are policies which lay down an ordered plan of action in which all the

elements affected will, after they have had some experience of it,

find it profitable to co-operate. His laws register what the people

really desire when they have clarified their wants. His laws have force

because they mobilize the energies which alone can make laws effective.

It is not necessary, nor is it probable, that a statesmanlike policy

will win such assent when it is first proposed. Nor is it necessary

for the statesman to wait until he has won complete assent. There are

many things which people cannot understand until they have lived with

them for a while. Often, therefore, the great statesman is bound to

act boldly in advance of his constituents. When he does this he stakes

his judgment as to what the people will in the end find to be good

against what the people happen ardently to desire. This capacity to

act upon the hidden realities of a situation in spite of appearances

is the essence of statesmanship. It consists in giving the people

not what they want but what they will learn to want. It requires the

courage which is possible only in a mind that is detached from the

agitations of the moment. It requires the insight which comes only from

an objective and discerning knowledge of the facts, and a high and

imperturbable disinterestedness.

CHAPTER XIV [p284]

LOVE IN THE GREAT SOCIETY

1. _The External Control of Sexual Conduct_

While the changes which modernity implies affect the premises of

all human conduct, the problem as a whole engages the attention of

relatively few persons. The larger number of men and women living

within the orbit of the Great Society are no doubt aware that their

inherited beliefs about religion, politics, business, and sex do not

square entirely with the actual beliefs upon which they feel compelled

to act. But the fundamental alterations in political and economic

ideals which the machine technology is inducing come home to each man

only indirectly and partially. The consequences are subtle, delayed,

and what is even more important, they are outside the scope of the

ordinary man’s personal decision. There is little that is urgent,

immediate, or decisive which he can do, even if he understands them,

about the changes in the structure and purpose of industry and the

state. Most men can manage, therefore, to live without ever attempting

to decide for themselves any fundamental question about business or

politics. But they can neither ignore changes in sexual relations nor

do they wish to. It is possible for a man to be a socialist or an

individualist without ever having to make one responsible decision

in which his theories play any part. But what he thinks [p285]

about divorce and contraception, continence and license, monogamy,

prostitution, and sexual experience outside of marriage, are matters

that are bound at some point in his life to affect his own happiness

immediately and directly. It is possible to be hypocritical about

sex. But it is not possible for any adult who is not anæsthetic to be

indifferent. The affairs of state may be regulated by leaders. But the

affairs of a man and a woman are inescapably their own.

That obviously is the reason why in the popular mind it is immediately

assumed that when morals are discussed it is sexual morals that are

meant. The morals of the politician and the voter, of the shareholder

and executive and employee, are only moderately interesting to the

general public: thus they almost never supply the main theme of popular

fiction. But the relation between boy and girl, man and woman, husband

and wife, mistress and lover, parents and children, are themes which

no amount of repetition makes stale. The explanation is obvious. The

modern audience is composed of persons among whom only a comparatively

negligible few are serenely happy in their personal lives. Popular

fiction responds to their longings: to the unappeased it offers some

measure of vicarious satisfaction, to the prurient an indulgence, to

the worried, if not a way out, then at least the comfort of knowing

that their secret despair is a common, and not a unique, experience.

Yet in spite of this immense preoccupation with sex it is

extraordinarily difficult to arrive at any reliable knowledge of what

actual change in human behavior it reflects. This is not surprising.

In fact this is the very [p286] essence of the matter. The reason it

is difficult to know the actual facts about sexual behavior in modern

society is that sexual behavior eludes observation and control. We know

that the old conventions have lost most of their authority because we

cannot know about, and therefore can no longer regulate, the sexual

behavior of others. It may be that there is, as some optimists believe,

a fine but candid restraint practiced among modern men and women. It

may be that incredible licentiousness exists all about us, as the

gloomier prophets insist. It may be that there is just about as much

unconventional conduct and no more than there has always been. Nobody,

I think, really knows. Nobody knows whether the conversation about

sex reflects more promiscuity or less hypocrisy. But what everybody

must know is that sexual conduct, whatever it may be, is regulated

personally and not publicly in modern society. If there is restraint it

is, in the last analysis, voluntary; if there is promiscuity, it can be

quite secret.

The circumstances which have wrought this change are inherent in modern

ways of living. Until quite recently the main conventions of sex were

enforced first by the parents and then by the husband through their

control over the life of the woman. The main conventions were: first,

that she must not encourage or display any amorous inclinations except

where there was practical certainty that the young man’s intentions

were serious; second, that when she was married to the young man

she submitted to his embraces only because the Lord somehow failed

to contrive a less vile method of perpetuating the species. All the

minor conventions were [p287] subsidiary to these; the whole system

was organized on the premise that procreation was the woman’s only

sanction for sexual intercourse. Such control as was exercised over

the conduct of men was subordinate to this control over the conduct of

women. The chastity of women before marriage was guarded; that meant

that seduction was a crime, but that relations with “lost” or unchaste

women were tolerated. The virtuous man, by popular standards, was one

who before his marriage did not have sexual relations with a virtuous

woman. There is ample testimony in the outcries of moralists that even

in the olden days these conventions were not perfectly administered.

But they were sufficiently well administered to remain the accepted

conventions, honored even in the breach. It was possible, because of

the way people lived, to administer them.

The woman lived a sheltered life. That is another way of saying

that she lived under the constant inspection of her family. She

lived at home. She worked at home. She met young men under the

zealous chaperonage of practically the whole community. No doubt,

couples slipped away occasionally and more went on than was known or

acknowledged. But even then there was a very powerful deterrent against

an illicit relationship. This deterrent was the fear of pregnancy.

That in the end made it almost certain that if a secret affair were

consummated it could not be kept secret and that terrible penalties

would be exacted. In the modern world effective chaperonage has become

impracticable and the fear of pregnancy has been virtually eliminated

by the very general knowledge of contraceptive methods. [p288]

The whole revolution in the field of sexual morals turns upon the fact

that external control of the chastity of women is becoming impossible.

2. _Birth Control_

The Biblical account of how Jehovah slew Onan for disobeying his

father’s commandment to go to his brother’s widow, Tamar, and “perform

the duty of an husband’s brother,” shows that the deliberate prevention

of conception is not a new discovery. Mr. Harold Cox must be right when

he says “it is fairly certain that in all ages and in all countries

men and women have practiced various devices to prevent conception

while continuing to indulge in sexual intercourse.” For while I know

of no positive evidence to support this, it appears to be self-evident

that the human race within historical times has not multiplied up to

the limits of human fecundity. Since it is hardly probable that this

has been due to the continence of husbands, nor wholly to infanticide,

abortion, infant mortality, and postponement of marriage, it is safe to

conclude that birth control is an ancient practice.

Nevertheless, it was not until the Nineteenth Century that the

practice of contraception began to be publicly advocated on grounds

of public policy. Until the industrial age the weight of opinion was

overwhelmingly in favor of very large families. Kings and nobles needed

soldiers and retainers: “As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are

the children of youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of

them. They shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies

in the [p289] gate.” Fathers of families desired many sons. The early

factory owners could use abundant cheap labor. There had been men from

Plato’s time who had their doubts about the value of an indefinitely

growing population. But the substantial opinion down to the end of

the Eighteenth Century was Adam Smith’s that: “the most decisive mark

of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its

inhabitants.”

Apparently it was the sinister character of the early factory system,

and the ominous unrest which pervaded Europe after the French

Revolution, which rather suddenly changed into pessimism this bland

optimism about an ever growing population. Malthus published the first

edition of his _Essay on Population_ in 1798. This book is undoubtedly

one of the great landmarks of human culture, for it focussed the

attention of Europe on the necessity of regulating the growth of

population. Malthus himself, it seems, hoped that this regulation

could be achieved by the postponement of marriage and by continence.

It is not clear whether he disapproved of what is now called

neo-Malthusianism, or whether he did not regard it as practicable.

Nevertheless, within less than twenty-five years James Mill in the

_Encyclopædia Britannica_ had in guarded fashion put forward the

neo-Malthusian principle, and shortly thereafter, that is in 1823, an

active public propaganda was set on foot, most probably by Francis

Place, by means of what were known as the “diabolical handbills.”

These leaflets were addressed to the working classes and contained

descriptions of methods for preventing conception. Some of them were

sent to a good lady named Mrs. Fildes, who [p290] indignantly, but

mistakenly from her point of view, assisted the nefarious propaganda

by exposing it in the public prints. Fifty years later Mr. Bradlaugh

and Mrs. Besant had themselves indicted and tried for selling an

illustrated edition of Knowlton’s _Fruits of Philosophy_. After that

advertisement, neo-Malthusian principles and practices were known and

were, therefore, available to all but the poorest and most illiterate.

No propaganda so threatening to the established moral order ever

encountered such an ineffective opposition. I do not know how much

money has been spent on the propaganda nor how many martyrs have had

to coerce reluctant judges to try them. But it is evident that once it

was known that fairly dependable methods of contraception exist, the

people took the matter into their own hands. For the public reasons by

which neo-Malthusianism was justified were also private reasons. The

social philosopher said that population must be adjusted to the means

of subsistence. Man and wife said that they must have only as many

children as they could afford to rear. The eugenist said that certain

stocks ought not to multiply. Individual women decided that too many

children, or even any children, were bad for their health. But these

were not the only reasons which explain the demand for neo-Malthusian

knowledge. There was also the very plain demand due to a desire to

enjoy sexual intercourse without social consequences.

On this aspect of birth control the liberal reformers have, I think,

been until recently more than a little disingenuous. They have been

arguing for the removal of the prohibitory laws, and they have built

their case on two [p291] main theses. They have argued, first, that

the limitation of births was sound public policy for economic and

eugenic reasons; and second, that it was necessary to the happiness

of families, the health of mothers, and the welfare of children. All

these reasons may be unimpeachable. I think they are. But it was idle

to pretend that the dissemination of this knowledge, even if legally

confined to the instruction of married women by licensed physicians,

could be kept from the rest of the adult population. Obviously that

which all married couples are permitted to know every one is bound

to know. Human curiosity will make that certain. Now this is what

the Christian churches, especially the Roman Catholic, which oppose

contraception on principle, instantly recognized. They were quite

right. They were quite right, too, in recognizing that whether or

not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most

revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.

For when conception could be prevented, there was an end to the theory

that woman submits to the embrace of the male only for purposes of

procreation. She had to be persuaded to co-operate, and no possible

reason could be advanced except that the pleasure was reciprocal.

She had to understand and inwardly assent to the principle that it

is proper to have sexual intercourse with her husband and to prevent

conception. She had, therefore, to give up the whole traditional theory

which she may have only half-believed anyway, that sexual intercourse

was an impure means to a noble end. She could no longer believe that

procreation alone mitigated the vileness of cohabiting with a man, and

so she had to change her valuation [p292] and accept it as inherently

delightful. Thus by an inevitable process the practice of contraception

led husbands and wives to the conviction that they need not be in the

least ashamed of their desires for each other.

But this transvaluation of values within the sanctity of the marital

chamber could hardly be kept a secret. What had happened was that

married couples were indulging in the pleasures of sex because

they had learned how to isolate them from the responsibilities of

parenthood. When we talk about the unconventional theories of the

younger generation we might in all honesty take this fact into account.

They have had it demonstrated to them by their own parents, by those

in whom the administering of the conventions is vested, that under

certain circumstances it is legitimate and proper to gratify sexual

desire apart from any obligation to the family or to the race. They

have been taught that it is possible to do this, and that it may be

proper. Therefore, the older generation could no longer argue that

sexual intercourse as such was evil. It could no longer argue that it

was obviously dangerous. It could only maintain that the psychological

consequences are serious if sexual gratification is not made incidental

to the enduring partnership of marriage and a home. That may be, in

fact, I think it can be shown to be, the real wisdom of the matter.

Yet if it is the wisdom of the matter, it is a kind of wisdom which

men and women can acquire by experience alone. They do not have it

instinctively. They cannot be compelled to adopt it. They can only

learn to believe it.

That is a very different thing from submitting to a convention upheld

by all human and divine authority. [p293]

3. _The Logic of Birth Control_

With contraception established as a more or less legitimate idea in

modern society, a vast discussion has ensued as to how the practice

of it can be rationalized. In this discussion the pace is set by

those who accept the apparent logic of contraception and are prepared

boldly to revise the sexual conventions accordingly. They take as

their major premise the obvious fact that by contraception it is

possible to dissociate procreation from gratification, and therefore

to pursue independently what Mr. Havelock Ellis calls the primary and

secondary objects of the sexual impulse. They propose, therefore, to

sanction two distinct sets of conventions: one designed to protect

the interests of the offspring by promoting intelligent, secure, and

cheerful parenthood; the other designed to permit the freest and

fullest expression of the erotic personality. They propose, in other

words, to distinguish between parenthood as a vocation involving public

responsibility, and love as an art, pursued privately for the sake of

happiness.

As a preparation for the vocation of parenthood it is proposed

to educate both men and women in the care, both physical and

psychological, of children. It is proposed further that mating for

parenthood shall become an altogether deliberate and voluntary

choice: the argument here is that the duties of parenthood cannot

be successfully fulfilled except where both parents cheerfully and

knowingly assume them. Therefore, it is proposed, in order to avert the

dangers of love at first sight and of mating under the blind compulsion

of instinct, that a period of free experimentation [p294] be allowed

to precede the solemn engagement to produce and rear children. This

engagement is regarded as so much a public responsibility that it is

even proposed, and to some extent has been embodied in the law of

certain jurisdictions, that marriages for parenthood must be sanctioned

by medical authority. In order, too, that no compulsive considerations

may determine what ought to be a free and intelligent choice, it is

argued that women should be economically independent before and during

marriage. As this may not be possible for women without property

of their own during the years when they are bearing and rearing

children, it is proposed in some form or other to endow motherhood.

This endowment may take the form of a legal claim upon the earnings of

the father, or it may mean a subsidy from the state through mothers’

pensions, free medical attention, day nurseries, and kindergartens. The

principle that successful parenthood must be voluntary is maintained

as consistently as possible. Therefore, among those who follow the

logic of their idea, it is proposed that even marriages deliberately

entered into for procreation shall be dissoluble at the will of either

party, the state intervening only to insure the economic security of

the offspring. It is proposed, furthermore, that where women find the

vocation of motherhood impracticable for one reason or another, they

may be relieved of the duty of rearing their children.

Not all of the advanced reformers adopt the whole of this program, but

the whole of this program is logically inherent in the conception of

parenthood as a vocation deliberately undertaken, publicly pursued, and

motivated solely by the parental instincts. [p295]

The separate set of conventions which it is proposed to adopt for the

development of love as an art have a logic of their own. Their function

is not to protect the welfare of the child but the happiness of lovers.

It is very easy to misunderstand this conception. Mr. Havelock Ellis,

in fact, describes it as a “divine and elusive mystery,” a description

which threatens to provide a rather elusive standard by which to fix a

new set of sexual conventions. But baffling as this sounds, it is not

wholly inscrutable, and a sufficient understanding of what is meant can

be attained by clearing up the dangerous ambiguity in the phrase “love

as an art.”

There are two arts of love and it makes a considerable difference

which one is meant. There is the art of love as Casanova, for example,

practiced it. It is the art of seduction, courtship, and sexual

gratification: it is an art which culminates in the sexual act. It

can be repeated with the same lover and with other lovers, but it

exhausts itself in the moment of ecstasy. When that moment is reached,

the work of art is done, and the lover as artist “after an interval,

perhaps of stupor and vital recuperation” must start all over again,

until at last the rhythm is so stale it is a weariness to start at

all; or the lover must find new lovers and new resistances to conquer.

The aftermath of romantic love—that is, of love that is consummated

in sexual ecstasy—is either tedium in middle age or the compulsive

adventurousness of the libertine.

Now this is not what Mr. Ellis means when he talks about love as an

art. “The act of intercourse,” he says, “is only an incident, and not

an essential in love.” Incident to what? His answer is that it is an

incident to an [p296] “exquisitely and variously and harmoniously

blended” activity of “all the finer activities of the organism,

physical and psychic.” I take this to mean that when a man and woman

are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and

victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think

more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and

interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could

do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire

as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of

the inward delight of desire pervading an active life. Love of this

sort can grow: it is not, like youth itself, a moment that comes and is

gone and remains only a memory of something which cannot be recovered.

It can grow because it has something to grow upon and to grow with;

it is not contracted and stale because it has for its object, not the

mere relief of physical tension, but all the objects with which the

two lovers are concerned. They desire their worlds in each other, and

therefore their love is as interesting as their worlds and their worlds

are as interesting as their love.

It is to promote unions of this sort that the older liberals are

proposing a new set of sexual conventions. There are, however,

reformers in the field who take a much less exalted view of the sexual

act, who regard it, indeed, not only as without biological or social

significance, but also as without any very impressive psychological

significance. “The practice of birth control,” says Mr. C. E. M. Joad,

for example, “will profoundly modify our sexual habits. It will enable

the pleasures of sex to be tasted without its penalties, and it will

remove the most [p297] formidable deterrent to irregular intercourse.”

For birth control “offers to the young ... the prospect of shameless,

harmless, and unlimited pleasure.” But whether the reformers agree with

Mr. Ellis that sexual intimacy is, as he says, a sacrament signifying

some great spiritual reality, or with Mr. Joad that it is a harmless

pleasure, they are agreed that the sexual conventions should be revised

to permit such unions without penalties and without any sense of shame.

They ask public opinion to sanction what contraception has made

feasible. They point out that “a large number of the men and women

of to-day form sexual relationships outside marriage—whether or

not they ultimately lead to marriage—which they conceal or seek to

conceal from the world.” These relationships, says Mr. Ellis, differ

from the extra-marital manifestations of the sexual life of the past

in that they do not derive from prostitution or seduction. Both of

these ancient practices, he adds, are diminishing, for prostitution is

becoming less attractive and, with the education of women, seduction

is becoming less possible. The novelty of these new relations, the

prevalence of which is conceded though it cannot be measured, lies in

the fact that they are entered into voluntarily, have no obvious social

consequences, and are altogether beyond the power of law or opinion to

control. The argument, therefore, is that they should be approved, the

chief point made being that by removing all stigma from such unions,

they will become candid, wholesome, and delightful. The objection of

the reformers to the existing conventions is that the sense of sin

poisons the spontaneous goodness of such relationships. [p298]

The actual proposals go by a great variety of fancy names such as free

love, trial marriage, companionate marriage. When these proposals are

examined it is evident they all take birth control as their major

premise, and then deduce from it some part or all of the logical

consequences. Companionate marriage, for example, is from the point

of view of the law, whatever it may be subjectively, nothing but

a somewhat roundabout way of saying that childless couples may be

divorced by mutual consent. It is a proposal, if not to control, then

at least to register, publicly all sexual unions, the theory being that

this public registration will abolish shame and furtiveness and give

them a certain permanence. Companionate marriage is frankly an attempt

at a compromise between marriages that are difficult to dissolve and

clandestine relationships which have no sanction whatever.

The uncompromising logic of birth control has been stated more clearly,

I think, by Mr. Bertrand Russell than by anyone else. Writing to Judge

Lindsey during the uproar about companionate marriage, Mr. Russell said:

I go further than you do: the things which your enemies say about

you would be largely true of me. My own view is that the state

and the law should take no notice of sexual relations apart from

children, and that no marriage ceremony should be valid unless

accompanied by a medical certificate of the woman’s pregnancy.

But when once there are children, I think that divorce should be

avoided except for very grave cause. I should not regard physical

infidelity as a very grave cause and should teach people that

it is to be expected and tolerated, but should not involve the

begetting of illegitimate children—not because illegitimacy is

bad in [p299] itself, but because a home with two parents is

best for children. I do not feel that the main thing in marriage

is the feeling of the parents for each other; the main thing is

cooperation in bearing children.

In this admirably clear statement there is set forth a plan for that

complete separation between the primary and secondary function of

sexual intercourse which contraception makes possible.

4. _The Use of Convention_

It is one thing, however, to recognize the full logic of birth control

and quite another thing to say that convention ought to be determined

by that logic. One might as well argue that because automobiles can be

driven at a hundred miles an hour the laws should sanction driving at

the rate of a hundred miles an hour. Birth control is a device like the

automobile, and its inherent possibilities do not fix the best uses to

be made of it.

What an understanding of the logic of birth control does is to set

before us the limits of coercive control of sexual relations. The law

can, for example, make divorce very difficult where there are children.

It could, as Mr. Bertrand Russell suggests, refuse divorce on the

ground of infidelity. On the other hand the law cannot effectively

prohibit infidelity, and as a matter of fact does not do so to-day.

It cannot effectively prohibit fornication though there are statutes

against it. Therefore, what Mr. Russell has done is to describe

accurately enough the actual limits of effective legal control.

But sexual conventions are not statutes, and it is important to define

quite clearly just what they are. In the [p300] older world they were

rules of conduct enforceable by the family and the community through

habit, coercion, and authority. In this sense of the word, convention

tends to lose force and effect in modern civilization. Yet a convention

is essentially a theory of conduct and all human conduct implies some

theory of conduct. Therefore, although it may be that no convention

is any longer coercive, conventions remain, are adopted, revised, and

debated. They embody the considered results of experience: perhaps the

experience of a lonely pioneer or perhaps the collective experience of

the dominant members of a community. In any event they are as necessary

to a society which recognizes no authority as to one which does. For

the inexperienced must be offered some kind of hypothesis when they

are confronted with the necessity of making choices: they cannot be so

utterly open-minded that they stand inert until something collides with

them. In the modern world, therefore, the function of conventions is to

declare the meaning of experience. A good convention is one which will

most probably show the inexperienced the way to happy experience.

Just because the rule of sexual conduct by authority is dissolving,

the need of conventions which will guide conduct is increasing.

That, in fact, is the reason for the immense and urgent discussion

of sex throughout the modern world. It is an attempt to attain an

understanding of the bewilderingly new experiences to which few men or

women know how to adjust themselves. The true business of the moralist

in the midst of all this is not to denounce this and to advocate that,

but to see as clearly as he can into the meaning of it, so that out

of the chaos of [p301] pain and happiness and worry he may help to

deliver a usable insight.

It is, I think, to the separation of parenthood as a vocation from love

as an end in itself that the moralist must address himself. For this is

the heart of the problem: to determine whether this separation, which

birth control has made feasible and which law can no longer prevent, is

in harmony with the conditions of human happiness.

5. _The New Hedonism_

Among those who hold that the separation of the primary and secondary

functions of the sexual impulse is good and should constitute the major

premise of modern sexual conventions, there are, as I have already

pointed out, two schools of thought. There are the transcendentalists

who believe with Mr. Havelock Ellis that “sexual pleasure, wisely used

and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and

most exalted activities,” and there are the unpretentious hedonists

who believe that sexual pleasure is pleasure and not the stimulus or

liberator of anything important. Both are, as we say, emancipated:

neither recognizes the legitimacy of objective control unless a child

is born, and both reject as an evil the traditional subjective control

exercised by the sense of sin. Where they differ is in their valuation

of love.

Hedonism as an attitude toward life is, of course, not a new thing in

the world, but it has never before been tested out under such favorable

conditions. To be a successful hedonist a man must have the opportunity

to seek his pleasures without fear of any kind. Theodorus of Cyrene,

[p302] who taught about 310 B.C., saw that clearly, and therefore

to release men from fear openly denied the Olympian gods. But the

newest hedonism has had an even better prospect than the classical:

it finds men emancipated not only of all fear of divine authority

and human custom but of physical and social consequences as well. If

the pursuit of pleasure by carefree men were the way to happiness,

hedonism ought, then, to be proving itself triumphantly in the modern

world. Possibly it is too early to judge, but the fact is nevertheless

highly significant, I think, that the new hedonists should already have

arrived at the same conclusion as the later hedonists in the classical

world. Hegesias, for example, wrote when hedonism had already had a

great vogue: he was called, rather significantly, the “persuader to

die.” For having started from the premise that pleasure is the end of

life, he concluded that, since life affords at least as much pain as

pleasure, the end of life cannot be realized. There is now a generation

in the world which is approaching middle age. They have exercised the

privileges which were won by the iconoclasts who attacked what was

usually called the Puritan or Victorian tradition. They have exercised

the privileges without external restraint and without inhibition. Their

conclusions are reported in the latest works of fiction. Do they report

that they have found happiness in their freedom? Well, hardly. Instead

of the gladness which they were promised, they seem, like Hegesias, to

have found the wasteland.

“If love has come to be less often a sin,” says that very discerning

critic of life and letters, Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, “it has come also

to be less often a supreme privilege. [p303] If one turns to the

smarter of those novelists who describe the doings of the more advanced

set of those who are experimenting with life—to, for example, Mr.

Aldous Huxley or Mr. Ernest Hemingway,—one will discover in their

tragic farces the picture of a society which is at bottom in despair

because, though it is more completely absorbed in the pursuit of love

than in anything else, it has lost the sense of any ultimate importance

inherent in the experience which preoccupies it; and if one turns to

the graver of the intellectual writers,—to, for example, Mr. D. H.

Lawrence, Mr. T. S. Eliot, or Mr. James Joyce,—one will find both

explicitly and implicitly a similar sense that the transcendental value

of love has become somehow attenuated, and that, to take a perfectly

concrete example, a conclusion which does no more than bring a man and

woman into complete possession of one another is a mere bathos which

does nothing except legitimately provoke the comment, ‘Well, what of

it?’ One can hardly imagine them concerned with what used to be called,

in a phrase which they have helped to make faintly ridiculous, ‘the

right to love.’ Individual freedom they have inherited and assumed

as a right, but they are concerned with something which their more

restricted forefathers assumed—with, that is to say, the value of love

itself. No inhibitions either within or without restrain them, but they

are asking themselves, ‘What is it worth?’ and they are certainly no

longer feeling that it is obviously and in itself something which makes

life worth the living.

“To Huxley and Hemingway—I take them as the most conspicuous exemplars

of a whole school—love is at times only a sort of obscene joke. The

former in particular has [p304] delighted to mock sentiment with

physiology, to place the emotions of the lover in comic juxtaposition

with quaint biological lore, and to picture a romantic pair ‘quietly

sweating palm to palm.’ But the joke is one which turns quickly bitter

upon the tongue, for a great and gratifying illusion has passed away,

leaving the need for it still there. His characters still feel the

psychological urge, and, since they have no sense of sin in connection

with it, they yield easily and continually to that urge; but they

have also the human need to respect their chief preoccupation, and

it is the capacity to do this that they have lost. Absorbed in the

pursuit of sexual satisfaction, they never find love and they are

scarcely aware that they are seeking it, but they are far from content

with themselves. In a generally devaluated world they are eagerly

endeavoring to get what they can in the pursuit of satisfactions which

are sufficiently instinctive to retain inevitably a modicum of animal

pleasure, but they cannot transmute that simple animal pleasure into

anything else. They themselves not infrequently share the contempt with

which their creator regards them, and nothing could be less seductive,

because nothing could be less glamorous, than the description of the

debaucheries born of nothing except a sense of the emptiness of life.”

This “generally devaluated world,” of which Mr. Krutch speaks, what

is it after all, but a world in which nothing connects itself very

much with anything else? If you start with the belief that love is

the pleasure of a moment, is it really surprising that it yields only

a momentary pleasure? For it is the most ironical of all illusions

to suppose that one is free of illusions in contracting any [p305]

human desire to its primary physiological satisfaction. Does a man

dine well because he ingests the requisite number of calories? Is he

freer from illusions about his appetite than the man who creates an

interesting dinner party out of the underlying fact that his guests and

he have the need to fill their stomachs? Would it really be a mark of

enlightenment if each of them filled his stomach in the solitary and

solemn conviction that good conversation and pleasant companionship are

one thing and nutrition is another?

This much the transcendentalists understand well enough. They do

not wish to isolate the satisfaction of desire from our “finest

and most exalted activities.” They would make it “the stimulus and

the liberator” of these activities. They would use it to arouse to

“wholesome activity all the complex and interrelated systems of the

organism.” But what are these finest and most exalted activities which

are to be stimulated and liberated? The discovery of truth, the making

of works of art, meditation and insight? Mr. Ellis does not specify. If

these are the activities that are meant, then the discussion applies to

a very few of the men and women on earth. For the activities of most

of them are necessarily concerned with earning a living and managing

a household and rearing children and finding recreation. If the art

of love is to stimulate and liberate activities, it is these prosaic

activities which it must stimulate and liberate. But if you idealize

the logic of birth control, make parenthood a separate vocation,

isolate love from work and the hard realities of living, and say that

it must be spontaneous and carefree, what have you done? You have

separated [p306] it from all the important activities which it might

stimulate and liberate. You have made love spontaneous but empty, and

you have made home-building and parenthood efficient, responsible, and

dull.

What has happened, I believe, is what so often happens in the first

enthusiasm for a revolutionary invention. Its possibilities are so

dazzling that men forget that inventions belong to man and not man to

his inventions. In the discussion which has ensued since birth control

became generally feasible, the central confusion has been that the

reformers have tried to fix their sexual ideals in accordance with the

logic of birth control instead of the logic of human nature. Birth

control does make feasible this dissociation of interests which were

once organically united. There are undoubtedly the best of reasons

for dissociating them up to a point. But how completely it is wise

to dissociate them is a matter to be determined not by saying how

completely it is possible to dissociate them, but how much it is

desirable to dissociate them.

All the varieties of the modern doctrine that man is a collection of

separate impulses, each of which can attain its private satisfaction,

are in fundamental contradiction not only with the traditional body of

human wisdom but with the modern conception of the human character.

Thus in one breath it is said in advanced circles that love is a series

of casual episodes, and in the next it transpires that the speaker is

in process of having himself elaborately psychoanalyzed in order to

disengage his soul from the effects of apparently trivial episodes

in his childhood. On the one hand it is asserted that sex pervades

everything and on the other that sexual behavior is inconsequential.

[p307] It is taught that experience is cumulative, that we are what

our past has made us and shall be what we are making of ourselves now,

and then with bland indifference to the significance of this we are

told that all experiences are free, equal, and independent.

6. _Marriage and Affinity_

It is not hard to see why those who are concerned in revising sexual

conventions should have taken the logic of birth control rather than

knowledge of human nature as their major premise. Birth control is an

immensely beneficent invention which can and does relieve men and women

of some of the most tragic sorrows which afflict them: the tragedies of

the unwanted child, the tragedies of insupportable economic burdens,

the tragedies of excessive child bearing and the destruction of youth

and the necessity of living in an unrelenting series of pregnancies. It

offers them freedom from intolerable mismating, from sterile virtue,

from withering denials of happiness. These are the facts which the

reformers saw, and in birth control they saw the instrument by which

such freedom could be obtained.

The sexual conventions which they have proposed are really designed to

cure notorious evils. They do not define the good life in sex; they

point out ways of escape from the bad life. Thus companionate marriage

is proposed by Judge Lindsey not as a type of union which is inherently

desirable, but as an avenue of escape from corrupt marriages on the

one hand and furtive promiscuity on the other. The movement for free

divorce comes down to this: it is necessary because so many marriages

[p308] are a failure. The whole theory that love is separate from

parenthood and home-building is supported by the evidence in those

cases where married couples are not lovers. It is the pathology of

sexual relations which inspires the reformers of sexual conventions.

There is no need to quarrel with them because they insist upon remedies

for manifest evils. Deep confusion results when they forget that these

remedies are only remedies, and go on to institute them as ideals.

It is better, without any doubt, that incompatible couples should

be divorced and that each should then be free to find a mate who is

compatible. But the frequency with which men and women have to resort

to divorce because they are incompatible will be greatly influenced by

the notions they have before and during marriage of what compatibility

is, and what it involves. The remedies for failure are important. But

what is central is the conception of sexual relations by which they

expect to live successfully.

They cannot—I am, of course, speaking broadly—expect to live

successfully by the conception that the primary and secondary functions

of sex are in separate compartments of the soul. I have indicated

why this conception is self-defeating and why, since human nature is

organic and experience cumulative, our activities must, so to speak,

engage and imply each other. Mates who are not lovers will not really

cooperate, as Mr. Bertrand Russell thinks they should, in bearing

children; they will be distracted, insufficient, and worst of all they

will be merely dutiful. Lovers who have nothing to do but love each

other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is

nothing else. The emotion of love, in spite [p309] of the romantics,

is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many

things together, and not merely each other. It is this understanding

that love cannot successfully be isolated from the business of living

which is the enduring wisdom of the institution of marriage. Let the

law be what it may be as to what constitutes a marriage contract and

how and when it may be dissolved. Let public opinion be as tolerant

as it can be toward any and every kind of irregular and experimental

relationship. When all the criticisms have been made, when all

supernatural sanctions have been discarded, all subjective inhibitions

erased, all compulsions abolished, the convention of marriage still

remains to be considered as an interpretation of human experience. It

is by the test of how genuinely it interprets human experience that the

convention of marriage will ultimately be judged.

The wisdom of marriage rests upon an extremely unsentimental view of

lovers and their passions. Its assumptions, when they are frankly

exposed, are horrifying to those who have been brought up in the

popular romantic tradition of the Nineteenth Century. These assumptions

are that, given an initial attraction, a common social background,

common responsibilities, and the conviction that the relationship is

permanent, compatibility in marriage can normally be achieved. It is

precisely this that the prevailing sentimentality about love denies.

It assumes that marriages are made in heaven, that compatibility is

instinctive, a mere coincidence, that happy unions are, in the last

analysis, lucky accidents in which two people who happen to suit

each other happen to have met. The convention of marriage rests on

an interpretation of [p310] human nature which does not confuse the

subjective feeling of the lovers that their passion is unique, with

the brutal but objective fact that, had they never met, each of them

would in all probability have found a lover who was just as unique.

“Love,” says Mr. Santayana, “is indeed much less exacting than it

thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, for one-tenth

that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidentally at hand,

an almost identical passion would probably have been felt for some one

else; for, although with acquaintance the quality of an attachment

naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes that person

its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow of the

passion is much the same for every object.”

This is the reason why the popular conception of romantic love as the

meeting of two affinities produces so much unhappiness. The mysterious

glow of passion is accepted as a sign that the great coincidence has

occurred; there is a wedding and soon, as the glow of passion cools, it

is discovered that no instinctive and preordained affinity is present.

At this point the wisdom of popular romantic marriage is exhausted. For

it proceeds on the assumption that love is a mysterious visitation.

There is nothing left, then, but to grin and bear a miserably dull and

nagging fate, or to break off and try again. The deep fallacy of the

conception is in the failure to realize that compatibility is a process

and not an accident, that it depends upon the maturing of instinctive

desire by adaptation to the whole nature of the other person and to the

common concerns of the pair of lovers.

The romantic theory of affinities rests upon an immature [p311] theory

of desire. It springs from an infantile belief that the success of

love is in the satisfactions which the other person provides. What

this really means is that in childlike fashion the lover expects

his mistress to supply him with happiness. But in the adult world

that expectation is false. Because nine-tenths of the cause, as Mr.

Santayana says, are in the lover for one-tenth that may be in the

object, it is what the lover does about that nine-tenths which is

decisive for his happiness. It is the claim, therefore, of those

who uphold the ideal of marriage as a full partnership, and reject

the ideal which would separate love as an art from parenthood as a

vocation, that in the home made by a couple who propose to see it

through, there are provided the essential conditions under which

the passions of men and women are most likely to become mature, and

therefore harmonious and disinterested.

7. _The Schooling of Desire_

They need not deny, indeed it would be foolish as well as cruel for

them to underestimate, the enormous difficulty of achieving successful

marriages under modern conditions. For with the dissolution of

authority and compulsion, a successful marriage depends wholly upon the

capacity of the man and the woman to make it successful. They have to

accomplish wholly by understanding and sympathy and disinterestedness

of purpose what was once in a very large measure achieved by habit,

necessity, and the absence of any practicable alternative. It takes

two persons to make a successful marriage in the modern world, and

that fact more than doubles its difficulty. For these reasons alone

the modern state ought to do what it [p312] would none the less be

compelled to do: it ought to provide decent ways of retreat in case of

failure.

But if it is the truth that the convention of marriage correctly

interprets human experience, whereas the separatist conventions are

self-defeating, then the convention of marriage will prove to be the

conclusion which emerges out of all this immense experimenting. It

will survive not as a rule of law imposed by force, for that is now, I

think, become impossible. It will not survive as a moral commandment

with which the elderly can threaten the young. They will not listen.

It will survive as the dominant insight into the reality of love and

happiness, or it will not survive at all. That does not mean that all

persons will live under the convention of marriage. As a matter of fact

in civilized ages all persons never have. It means that the convention

of marriage, when it is clarified by insight into reality, is likely

to be the hypothesis upon which men and women will ordinarily proceed.

There will be no compulsion behind it except the compulsion in each man

and woman to reach a true adjustment of his life.

It is in this necessity of clarifying their love for those who are

closest to them that the moral problems of the new age come to a

personal issue. It is in the realm of sexual relations that mankind is

being schooled amidst pain and worry for the novel conditions which

modernity imposes. It is there, rather than in politics, business, or

even in religion, that the issues are urgent, vivid, and inescapable.

It is there that they touch most poignantly and most radically the

organic roots of human personality. And it is there, in the ordering of

their personal attachments, [p313] that for most men the process of

salvation must necessarily begin.

For disinterestedness in all things, as Dean Inge says, is a mountain

track which the many are likely in the future as in the past to find

cold, bleak, and bare: that is why “the road of ascent is by personal

affection for man.” By the happy ordering of their personal affections

they may establish the type and the quality and the direction of their

desires for all things. It is in the hidden issues between lovers,

more than anywhere else, that modern men and women are compelled, by

personal anguish rather than by laws and preachments or even by the

persuasions of abstract philosophy, to transcend naive desire and to

reach out towards a mature and disinterested partnership with their

world.

CHAPTER XV [p314]

THE MORALIST IN AN UNBELIEVING WORLD

1. _The Declaration of Ideals_

Of all the bewilderments of the present age none is greater than that

of the conscientious and candid moralist himself. The very name of

moralist seems to have become a term of disparagement and to suggest

a somewhat pretentious and a somewhat stupid, perhaps even a somewhat

hypocritical, meddler in other men’s lives. In the minds of very many

in the modern generation moralists are set down as persons who, in the

words of Dean Inge, fancy themselves attracted by God when they are

really only repelled by man.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is an historical

accident. It so happens that those who administered the affairs of the

established churches have, by and large, failed utterly to comprehend

how deep and how inexorable was the dissolution of the ancestral order.

They imagined either that this change in human affairs was a kind of

temporary corruption, or that, like the eighty propositions listed in

the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, it could be regarded as due to “errors”

of the human mind. There were, of course, churchmen who knew better,

but on the whole those who prevailed in the great ecclesiastical

[p315] establishments could not believe that the skepticism of mind

and the freedom of action which modern men exercise were due to

inexorable historic causes. They declined to acknowledge that modern

freedom was not merely a wilful iconoclasm, but the liquidation of an

older order of human life.

Because they could not comprehend the magnitude of the revolution in

which they were involved, they set themselves the task of impeding its

progress by chastising the rebels and refuting their rationalizations.

This was described as a vindication of morals. The effect was to

associate morality with the vindication of the habits and dispositions

of those who were most thoroughly out of sympathy with the genuine

needs of modern men.

The difficulties of the new age were much more urgent than those which

the orthodox moralists were concerned with. The moralists insisted

that conduct must conform to the established code; what really worried

men was how to adjust their conduct to the novel circumstances which

confronted them. When they discovered that those who professed to be

moralists were continuing to deny that the novelty of modern things had

any bearing upon human conduct, and that morality was a word signifying

a return to usages which it was impossible to follow, even if it were

desirable, there was a kind of tacit agreement to let the moralists be

moral and to find other language in which to describe the difference

between good and bad, right and wrong. Mr. Joad is not unrepresentative

of this reaction into contempt when he speaks of “the dowagers, the

aunts, the old maids, the parsons, the town councillors, the clerks,

the members of vigilance committees and purity [p316] leagues, all

those who are themselves too old to enjoy sex, too unattractive to

obtain what they would wish to enjoy, or too respectable to prefer

enjoyment to respectability.” Thus for many the name of moralist came

to be very nearly synonymous with antipathy to the genius and the

vitality of the modern age.

But it is idle for moralists to ascribe the decline of their influence

to the perversity of their fellow creatures. The phenomenon is

world-wide. Moreover, it is most intensely present at precisely those

points where the effect of science and the machine technology have

been most thoroughly manifested. The moralists are not confronted

with a scandal but with history. They have to come to terms with a

process in the life of mankind which is working upon the inner springs

of being and altering inevitably the premises of conduct. They need

not suppose that their pews are empty and that their exhortations are

ignored because modern men are really as wilful as the manners of the

younger generation lead them to conclude. Much of what appears to be a

tough self-sufficiency is protective: it is a brittle crust covering

depths of uncertainty. If the advice of moralists is ignored, it is

not because this generation is too proud to listen, or unaware that

it has anything to learn. On the contrary there is such curiosity and

questioning as never before engaged so large a number of men. The

audience to which a genuine moralist might speak is there. If it is

inattentive when the orthodox moralist speaks, it is because he seems

to speak irrelevantly.

The trouble with the moralists is in the moralists themselves: they

have failed to understand their times. They [p317] think they are

dealing with a generation that refuses to believe in ancient authority.

They are, in fact, dealing with a generation that cannot believe in

it. They think they are confronted with men who have an irrational

preference for immorality, whereas the men and women about them are

ridden by doubts because they do not know what they prefer, nor why.

The moralists fancy that they are standing upon the rock of eternal

truth, surveying the chaos about them. They are greatly mistaken.

Nothing in the modern world is more chaotic—not its politics, its

business, or its sexual relations—than the minds of orthodox moralists

who suppose that the problem of morals is somehow to find a way of

reinforcing the sanctions which are dissolving. How can we, they say in

effect, find formulas and rhetoric potent enough to make men behave?

How can we revive in them that love and fear of God, that sense of the

creature’s dependence upon his creator, that obedience to the commands

of a heavenly king, which once gave force and effect to the moral code?

They have misconceived the moral problem, and therefore they

misconceive the function of the moralist. An authoritative code of

morals has force and effect when it expresses the settled customs of

a stable society: the pharisee can impose upon the minority only such

conventions as the majority find appropriate and necessary. But when

customs are unsettled, as they are in the modern world, by continual

change in the circumstances of life, the pharisee is helpless. He

cannot command with authority because his commands no longer imply the

usages of the community: they express the prejudices of the moralist

rather than the practices of men. When that [p318] happens, it is

presumptuous to issue moral commandments, for in fact nobody has

authority to command. It is useless to command when nobody has the

disposition to obey. It is futile when nobody really knows exactly

what to command. In such societies, wherever they have appeared among

civilized men, the moralist has ceased to be an administrator of usages

and has had to become an interpreter of human needs. For ages when

custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist

cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He

has to seek insight rather than to preach.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to

their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the

moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the

good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary. For sanctions cannot

be artificially constructed: they are a product of agreement and

usage. Where no agreement exists, where no usages are established,

where ideals are not clarified and where conventions are not

followed comfortably by the mass of men, there are not, and cannot

be, sanctions. It is possible to command where most men are already

obedient. But even the greatest general cannot discipline a whole army

at once. It is only when the greater part of his army is with him that

he can quell the mutiny of a faction.

The acids of modernity are dissolving the usages and the sanctions to

which men once habitually conformed. It is therefore impossible for the

moralist to command. He can only persuade. To persuade he must show

that the course of conduct he advocates is not an arbitrary pattern

[p319] to which vitality must submit, but that which vitality itself

would choose if it were clearly understood. He must be able to show

that goodness is victorious vitality and badness defeated vitality;

that sin is the denial and virtue the fulfilment of the promise

inherent in the purposes of men. The good, said the Greek moralist, is

“that which all things aim at”; we may perhaps take this to mean that

the good is that which men would wish to do if they knew what they were

doing.

If the morality of the naive hedonist who blindly seeks the

gratification of his instincts is irrational in that he trusts immature

desire, disregards intelligence and damns the consequences, the

morality of the pharisee is no less irrational. It reduces itself to

the wholly arbitrary proposition that the best life for man would be

some other kind of life than that which satisfies his nature. The true

function of the moralist in an age when usage is unsettled is what

Aristotle who lived in such an age described it to be: to promote good

conduct by discovering and explaining the mark at which things aim. The

moralist is irrelevant, if not meddlesome and dangerous, unless in his

teaching he strives to give a true account, imaginatively conceived,

of that which experience would show is desirable among the choices

that are possible and necessary. If he is to be listened to, and if

he is to deserve a hearing among his fellows, he must set himself

this task which is so much humbler than to command and so much more

difficult than to exhort: he must seek to anticipate and to supplement

the insight of his fellow men into the problems of their adjustment to

reality. He must find ways to make clear and ordered and expressive

those concerns [p320] which are latent but overlaid and confused by

their preoccupations and misunderstandings.

Could he do that with perfect lucidity he would not need to summon the

police nor evoke the fear of hell: hell would be what it really is,

and what in all inspired moralities it has always been understood to

be, the very quality of evil itself. Nor would he find himself in the

absurd predicament of seeming to argue that virtue is highly desirable

but intensely unpleasant. It would not be necessary to praise goodness,

for it would be that which men most ardently desired. Were the nature

of good and evil really made plain by moralists, their teachings would

appear to the modern listener not like exhortations from without, but

as Keats said of poetry: “a wording of his own highest thoughts and ...

almost a remembrance.”

2. _The Choice of a Way_

What modernity requires of the moralist is that he should see with an

innocent eye how men must reform their wants in a world which is not

concerned to make them happy. The problem, as I have tried to show, is

not a new one. It has been faced and solved by the masters of wisdom.

What is new is the scale on which the problem is presented—in that so

many must face it now—and its radical character in that the organic

bonds of custom and belief are dissolving. There ensues a continual

necessity of adjusting their lives to complex novelty. In such a

world simple customs are unsuitable and authoritative commandments

incredible. No prescription can now be written which men can naively

and obediently follow. They have, therefore, to reeducate their

[p321] wants by an understanding of their own relation to a world

which is unconcerned with their hopes and fears. From the moralists

they can get only hypotheses—distillations of experience carefully

examined—probabilities, that is to say, upon which they may begin to

act, but which they themselves must constantly correct by their own

insight.

It is difficult for the orthodox moralists to believe that amidst the

ruins of authority men will ever learn to do this. They can point to

the urban crowds and ask whether anyone supposes that such persons are

capable of ordering their lives by so subtle an instrument as the human

understanding. They can insist with unanswerable force that this is

absurd: that the great mass of men must be guided by rules and moved

by the symbols of hope and fear. And they can ask what there is in

the conception of the moralist as I have outlined it which takes the

character of the populace into account.

What I take into account first of all is the fact, which it seems to

me is indisputable, that for the modern populace the old rules are

becoming progressively unsuitable and the old symbols of hope and fear

progressively unreal. I ascribe that to the inherent character of the

modern ways of living. I conclude from this that if the populace must

be led, if it must have easily comprehended rules, if it must have

common symbols of hope and fear, the question is how are its leaders

to be developed, rules to be worked out, symbols created. The ultimate

question is not how the populace is to be ruled, but what the teachers

are to think. That is the question that has to be settled first: it is

the preface to everything else.

For while moralists are at sixes and sevens in their own [p322]

souls, not much can be done about morality, however high or low may

be our estimates of the popular intelligence and character. If it

were necessary to assume that ideals are relevant only if they are

universally attainable, it would be a waste of time to discuss them.

For it is evident enough that many, if not most men, must fail to

comprehend what modern morality implies. But to recognize this is not

to prophesy that the world is doomed unless men perform the miracle

of reverting to their ancestral tradition. This is not the first time

in the history of mankind when a revolution in the affairs of men

has produced chaos in the human spirit. The world can endure a good

deal of chaos. It always has. The ideal inherent in any age is never

realized completely: Greece, which we like to idealize as an oasis of

rationality, was only in some respects Hellenic; the Ages of Faith

were only somewhat Christian. The processes of nature and of society

go on somehow none the less. Men are born and they live and die with

some happiness and some sorrow though they neither envisage wholly nor

nearly approximate the ideals they pursue.

But if civilization is to be coherent and confident it must be _known_

in that civilization what its ideals are. There must exist in the form

of clearly available ideas an understanding of what the fulfilment of

the promise of that civilization might mean, an imaginative conception

of the good at which it might, and, if it is to flourish, at which

it must aim. That knowledge, though no one has it perfectly, and

though relatively few have it at all, is the principle of all order

and certainty in the life of that people. By it they can clarify the

practical conduct [p323] of life in some measure, and add immeasurably

to its dignity.

To elucidate the ideals with which the modern world is pregnant is

the original business of the moralist. Insofar as he succeeds in

disentangling that which men think they believe from that which

it is appropriate for them to believe, he is opening his mind to

a true vision of the good life. The vision itself we can discern,

only faintly, for we have as yet only the occasional and fragmentary

testimony of sages and saints and heroes, dim anticipations here and

there, a most imperfect science of human behavior, and our own obscure

endeavor to make explicit and rational the stresses of the modern

world within our own souls. But we can begin to see, I think, that the

evidence converges upon the theory that what the sages have prophesied

as high religion, what psychologists delineate as matured personality,

and the disinterestedness which the Great Society requires for its

practical fulfilment, are all of a piece, and are the basic elements of

a modern morality. I think the truth lies in this theory.

If it does, experience will enrich and refine it, and what is now an

abstract principle arrived at by intuition and dialectic will engender

ideas that marshal, illuminate, and anticipate the subtle and intricate

detail of our actual experience. That at least can be our belief. In

the meantime, the modern moralist cannot expect soon to construct a

systematic and harmonious moral edifice like that which St. Thomas

Aquinas and Dante constructed to house the aspirations of the mediæval

world. He is in a much earlier phase in the evolution of his world,

in the phase of inquiry and prophecy rather than of ordering and

harmonizing, [p324] and he is under the necessity of remaining close

to the elements of experience in order to apprehend them freshly.

He cannot, therefore, permit the old symbols of faith and the old

formulations of right and wrong to prejudice his insight. Insofar as

they contain wisdom for him or can become its vehicles, he will return

to them. But he cannot return to them with honor or with sincerity

until he has himself gone and drunk deeply at the sources of experience

from which they originated.

Only when he has done that can he again in any honest sense take

possession of the wisdom which he inherits. It requires wisdom to

understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

In the great moral systems and the great religions of mankind are

embedded the record of how men have dealt with destiny, and only the

thoughtless will argue that that record is obsolete and insignificant.

But it is overlaid with much that is obsolete and for that reason it

is undeciphered and inexpressive. The wisdom it contains has to be

discovered anew before the old symbols will yield up their meaning.

That is the only way in which Bacon’s aphorism can be fulfilled,

that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth

in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” The depth

in philosophy which can bring them about is a much deeper and more

poignant experience than complacent churchmen suppose.

It can be no mere settling back into that from which men in the ardor

of their youth escaped. This man and that may settle back, to be sure;

he may cease to inquire though his questions are unanswered. But such

conformity is sterile, and due to mere weariness of mind and [p325]

body. The inquiry goes on because it has to go on, and while the

vitality of our race is unimpaired, there will be men who feel with Mr.

Whitehead that “to acquiesce in discrepancy is destructive of candor

and of moral cleanliness,” and that “it belongs to the self-respect of

intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.”

The crisis in the religious loyalties of mankind cannot be resolved by

weariness and good nature, or by the invention of little intellectual

devices for straightening out the dilemmas of biology and Genesis,

history and the Gospels with which so many churchmen busy themselves.

Beneath these little conflicts there is a real dilemma which modern men

cannot successfully evade. “Where is the way where light dwelleth?”

They are compelled to choose consciously, clearly, and with full

realization of what the choice implies, between religion as a system of

cosmic government and religion as insight into a cleansed and matured

personality: between God conceived as the master of that fate, creator,

providence, and king, and God conceived as the highest good at which

they might aim. For God is the supreme symbol in which man expresses

his destiny, and if that symbol is confused, his life is confused.

Men have not, hitherto, had to make that choice, for the historic

churches have sheltered both kinds of religious experience, and the

same mysteries have been the symbols of both. That confusion is no

longer benign because men are no longer unconscious of it. They are

aware that it is a confusion, and they are stultified by it. Because

the popular religion of supernatural governments is undermined, the

symbols of religion do not provide clear channels [p326] for religious

experience. They are choked with the debris of dead notions in which

men are unable to believe and unwilling to disbelieve. The result is a

frustration in the inner life which will persist as long as the leaders

of thought speak of God in more senses than one, and thus render all

faith invalid, insincere, and faltering.

3. _The Religion of the Spirit_

The choice is at last a personal one. The decision is rendered not by

argument but by feeling. Those who believe that their salvation lies

in obedience to, and communion with, the King of Creation can know how

whole-hearted their faith is by the confidence of their own hearts. If

they are at peace, they need inquire no further. There are, however,

those who do not find a principle of order in the belief that they are

related to a supernatural power. They cannot be argued into the ancient

belief, for it has been dissolved by the circumstances of their lives.

They are deeply perplexed. They have learned that the absence of belief

is vacancy; they know, from disillusionment and anxiety, that there is

no freedom in mere freedom. They must find, then, some other principle

which will give coherence and direction to their lives.

If the argument in these pages is sound, they need not look for and,

in fact, cannot hope for, some new and unexpected revelation. Since

they are unable to find a principle of order in the authority of a

will outside themselves, there is no place they can find it except

in an ideal of the human personality. But they do not have to invent

such an ideal out of hand. The ideal way of life for men who must make

their own terms with experience and find [p327] their own happiness

has been stated again and again. It is that only the regenerate, the

disinterested, the mature, can make use of freedom. This is the central

insight of the teachers of wisdom. We can see now, I think, that it

is also the mark at which the modern study of human nature points. We

can see, too, that it is the pattern of successful conduct in the most

advanced phases of the development of modern civilization. The ideal,

then, is an old one, but its confirmation and its practical pertinence

are new. The world is able at last to take seriously what its greatest

teachers have said. And since all things need a name, if they are to be

talked about, devotion to this ideal may properly be called by the name

which these greatest teachers gave it; it may be called the religion

of the spirit. At the heart of it is the knowledge that the goal of

human effort is to be able, in the words I have so often quoted from

Confucius, to follow what the heart desires without transgressing what

is right.

In an age when custom is dissolved and authority is broken, the

religion of the spirit is not merely a possible way of life. In

principle it is the only way which transcends the difficulties. It

alone is perfectly neutral about the constitution of the universe, in

that it has no expectation that the universe will justify naive desire.

Therefore, the progress of science cannot upset it. Its indifference to

what the facts may be is indeed the very spirit of scientific inquiry.

A religion which rests upon particular conclusions in astronomy,

biology, and history may be fatally injured by the discovery of new

truths. But the religion of the spirit does not depend upon creeds and

cosmologies; it has no vested interest in any particular truth. It is

[p328] concerned not with the organization of matter, but with the

quality of human desire.

It alone can endure the variety and complexity of things, for the

religion of the spirit has no thesis to defend. It seeks excellence

wherever it may appear, and finds it in anything which is inwardly

understood; its motive is not acquisition but sympathy. Whatever is

completely understood with sympathy for its own logic and purposes

ceases to be external and stubborn and is wholly tamed. To understand

is not only to pardon, but in the end to love. There is no itch in

the religion of the spirit to make men good by bearing down upon them

with righteousness and making them conform to a pattern. Its social

principle is to live and let live. It has the only tolerable code of

manners for a society in which men and women have become freely-moving

individuals, no longer held in the grooves of custom by their ancestral

ways. It is the only disposition of the soul which meets the moral

difficulties of an anarchical age, for its principle is to civilize the

passions, not by regulating them imperiously, but by transforming them

with a mature understanding of their place in an adult environment.

It is the only possible hygiene of the soul for men whose selves have

become disjointed by the loss of their central certainties, because

it counsels them to draw the sting of possessiveness out of their

passions, and thus by removing anxiety to render them harmonious and

serene.

The philosophy of the spirit is an almost exact reversal of the

worldling’s philosophy. The ordinary man believes that he will be

blessed if he is virtuous, and therefore virtue seems to him a price

he pays now for a blessedness he [p329] will some day enjoy. While

he is waiting for his reward, therefore, virtue seems to him drab,

arbitrary, and meaningless. For the reward is deferred, and there is

really no instant proof that virtue really leads to the happiness he

has been promised. Because the reward is deferred, it too becomes

vague and dubious, for that which we never experience, we cannot truly

understand. In the realm of the spirit, blessedness is not deferred:

there is no future which is more auspicious than the present; there

are no compensations later for evils now. Evil is to be overcome now

and happiness is to be achieved now, for the kingdom of God is within

you. The life of the spirit is not a commercial transaction in which

the profit has to be anticipated; it is a kind of experience which is

inherently profitable.

And so the mature man would take the world as it comes, and within

himself remain quite unperturbed. When he acted, he would know that he

was only testing an hypothesis, and if he failed, he would know that he

had made a mistake. He would be quite prepared for the discovery that

he might make mistakes, for his intelligence would be disentangled from

his hopes. The failure of his experiment could not, therefore, involve

the failure of his life. For the aspect of life which implicated his

soul would be his understanding of life, and, to the understanding,

defeat is no less interesting than victory. It would be no effort,

therefore, for him to be tolerant, and no annoyance to be skeptical.

He would face pain with fortitude, for he would have put it away

from the inner chambers of his soul. Fear would not haunt him, for

he would be without compulsion to seize anything and without anxiety

[p330] as to its fate. He would be strong, not with the strength of

hard resolves, but because he was free of that tension which vain

expectations beget. Would his life be uninteresting because he was

disinterested? He would have the whole universe, rather than the prison

of his own hopes and fears, for his habitation, and in imagination all

possible forms of being. How could that be dull unless he brought the

dullness with him? He might dwell with all beauty and all knowledge,

and they are inexhaustible. Would he, then, dream idle dreams? Only if

he chose to. For he might go quite simply about the business of the

world, a good deal more effectively perhaps than the worldling, in

that he did not place an absolute value upon it, and deceive himself.

Would he be hopeful? Not if to be hopeful was to expect the world to

submit rather soon to his vanity. Would he be hopeless? Hope is an

expectation of favors to come, and he would take his delights here and

now. Since nothing gnawed at his vitals, neither doubt nor ambition,

nor frustration, nor fear, he would move easily through life. And so

whether he saw the thing as comedy, or high tragedy, or plain farce, he

would affirm that it is what it is, and that the wise man can enjoy it.

APPENDIX [p331]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the suggestion of the publishers, the references which follow have

been segregated in an appendix instead of being scattered as footnotes

through the text. They felt, rightly enough, I think, that in a book of

this character the purpose of the notes was to acknowledge indebtedness

for the material cited rather than to support the argument, and

that the reader would prefer not to have the text encumbered by the

apparatus of a kind of scholarship to which the author makes no

pretensions.