merely made conditions favorable for full self-expression. There was
free appreciation, favorable or unfavorable, of the literature of past
and present, no one’s honest judgment being rebuked or authoritatively
overridden. There was a cooperative spirit that enabled the pupils
to profit from the judgments that they passed upon one another’s
productions--criticism did not quench the flame. There was help from
the teacher in the way of information about literary technic, and in
the way of encouragement to self-respect and self-confidence as well
as self-judgment. Individuality, rather than conformity of any kind,
received constant applause. This class had its setting in a school
that favors just these things. All this Mr. Mearns makes evident,
but he insists that these conditions and methods merely clear the
way for a creative urge that is present, he is sure, in children
and youth generally. He finds that small children make attempts at
original creation, but hide the product away, and fail to develop the
self-confidence and the practice that alone can bring their original
powers to fruitage. The point of all this is the naturalness of free
creation of beauty. Man is by nature a creator of beauty!
Parallel with Mearns’s book may be placed, as further and possibly
equal evidence of creative capacity in the young, the April-May-June,
1926 issue of _Progressive Education_ (Washington, D. C.). It contains
many reproductions, mostly in colors, of original pictures made
by children. In these child-productions there is vastly more than
imitation. One’s breath is taken away again and again, indeed, by the
seizure and vivid presentation of what is characteristic in a scene
or in a person; or, one is thrilled by the child-artist’s subtle
realization of just where lies the beauty of the object represented.
As a consequence we have here something beyond mere representation,
something more significant than technic learned from a teacher. We
find here insight (the product of originality in observation), and
self-expression that, being neither conventional nor merely generic but
individual, is truly creative.[4]
These poems and pictures are, of course, not the average productions
of their young authors, and the young authors themselves probably
have native talent considerably above the average. We must not make
haste to infer that children in general might reach this precise
level of performance. Nevertheless, we must not dismiss these unusual
productions by merely muttering “IQ.” They are not to be thought of
as the work of children who are freaks, or (in the biological sense)
sports. This is school work, produced in the ordinary routine of the
day. Schools always have had in them pupils whose intelligence-quotient
was high, but somehow the schools of yesterday had no such product to
show.
It is clear, then, that generation after generation can come and
go without discovering its own children. Without discovering, not
only what its ablest are capable of, but the others also. For it
is altogether probable--the newer sorts of school are accumulating
evidence all the time--that conditions that raise the performance of
gifted children raise the performance, also, of the rank and file.
This ray of light, shining out of a few new-type schools, illuminates
to some extent the whole problem of adult society, both its capacities
and the way to bring them to fruition. There is no reason in the
nature of things or in the nature of man why the creativeness that is
fostered in schools should not be fostered also in the larger society.
We need only make general the conditions that teachers are creating
in schools. This would involve the reversal of a habit that custom
transmits from age to age--a habit that I shall make bold to call the
psychical inbreeding of adults. By this I mean that it is traditional
for adults to segregate themselves as a supposedly self-sufficient
portion of society and to draw their standards, their expectations,
and their stimuli from among themselves. Through this inbreeding it
comes to pass that each generation of grown-ups becomes the spiritual
successor of the preceding generation of grown-ups, whereas it should
be the spiritual successor and heir of its own childhood.
Perhaps the younger portion of society will yet release us from our
disillusionment.
XIV
SMALLNESS IN GREAT MEN AND GREATNESS IN SMALL MEN
If your peace of mind depends upon your being able to bestow unmixed
admiration upon the great men and the great deeds of our national or
racial past, think twice before you read the present dominant types of
history, biography, and character-delineation. For they are subjecting
halos to spectrum-analysis! The result is that we are compelled, time
after time, to qualify the approvals that are traditional with us, and
to tone down our reverence. How “human,” after all, were these men and
these deeds that we had supposed to be so far removed from mere us. How
naïve or even gullible were many of our old attachments. We are tempted
to become cynical and to feel ourselves disillusioned.
But it is possible, where feelings are so actively involved, to jump
from the frying pan into the fire, exchanging an illusion of nothing
but greatness in our heroes for an illusion of nothing but meanness.
What the critical methods are showing is that motives are mixed in both
the greatly good and the greatly bad, as well as in us who are neither
the one nor the other. And the obverse of the discovery of smallness
in great men is the clearer and clearer demonstration of greatness
in small men. That is, the more objective and merciless our analysis
of men is, the more do particular qualities stand out in their own
light, and the more sharp become the contrasts. The lesson of the new
biography is not, “All men are alike,” but “Look for the particulars.”
Until a few years ago, when researches began to be made into the
psychology of “transfer of training,” we lacked means for understanding
the coexistence of opposite qualities in the same personality.
Worldly-wise observers knew that motives are mixed, but how they came
to be mixed, how ethical contradictories can endure the presence of
each other, and why the good influence of home, school, and church have
such equivocal results--all this was a matter of guess-work.
Some of this guess-work, taking the form of theology, accounted for
our contradictory selves by the theory that God and the devil, or
the Divine Spirit and human depravity, are at war in each of us. But
this did not explain the complacency with which a man can be good
and bad, great and small, at the same time. The easy way for thought
was to place each man in some broad category and then either ignore
conduct that did not fall into it, or else find excuses or sophistical
explanations. A man was either a Christian or a non-Christian _as
a whole_, it was assumed. If he was a Christian, his un-Christlike
conduct was assigned to a dim region of thought and then often
conveniently forgotten; if he was a non-Christian, his Christlike
conduct was the part assigned to this limbo and then forgotten.
Corresponding to this theology there was a naturalistic interpretation
of man that ran to the effect that human nature is essentially low, or
at least selfish and tricky, and that our virtues are either refined
and far-seeing selfishness, or else a mere cloak of respectability. The
dim region of thought in this instance, as in the theological judgment
upon non-Christians, was that in which moral purity, strength, or
greatness seemed spontaneously to spring from within the man.
Into this thought-situation came experimental psychology, taking to
pieces these complex mental facts instead of interpreting them by
broad concepts that are more or less speculative. Why, it asked, are
the spelling papers of a given school pupil scrupulously neat, but
his arithmetic-papers slovenly? The same pupil is actually both neat
and not neat! How is it that a child humanely reared so that in his
maturity he is sensitive to the pleasures and pains of his kin, his
neighbors, and even the lower animals, exhibits also insensitiveness to
the weal and woe of his competitors or his employes? The same man is
kindly, yet cruel! How can one who has been trained to strict honesty
of thought by mathematical study be evasive and untrustworthy? Nay, how
is it that one can sincerely believe obviously contradictory doctrines,
as that God is infinitely benevolent as well as infinitely wise and
powerful, and yet sends into eternal torment persons whom He himself
has created and sustained in existence up to the moment of their doom?
The upshot of research into this problem is--some technicalities
omitted--the proof that training or experience can have a wider or
narrower “spread” according to the components or the method of it.
Training to neatness can be narrowly directed to spelling papers, or
it can be so handled that some effect upon arithmetic papers also will
appear. There is no general trait of neatness; there are, rather,
neatnesses, though these may be brought into the unity of a common
ideal and habit. Similarly, there is no general quality of kindliness
or cruelty that presides over all one’s human relations. The man whom
we index as humane can be hard as flint; the one whom we have set down
as unfeeling can perform acts of delicate or heroic kindness. So with
honesty. Pupils who habitually cheat in one subject resist temptation
to cheat in other subjects or in games. What wonder, then, that sincere
belief in obvious contradictories occurs? As there is no general trait
of honesty, so there is no “faculty” of reason that spreads itself
equally through all our intellectual activities. But more or less
generalization does occur in both thought and conduct, and whether it
shall be more or whether it shall be less is partly in our keeping. We
can train ourselves to participate in broad issues and ideals, we can
form a habit of noticing the elements in new situations so that we see
what principle applies, and we can discipline ourselves into paying the
price of an organized personality.
We have no reason, then, to suppose that a man who is great in one
respect will be great or good in all respects, nor, conversely, to
suppose that a man who is small in several ways will be small in all
his ways. There is as yet no really all ’round education or all ’round
experience; we do not yet know how much can be done by schools or homes
to provide such education or experience.
This little excursion into the borders of psychology should enable us
to render fair judgment upon current types of disillusioning biography.
To the extent that a biographer burrows into weaknesses under the
assumption that the worst in a man is the real clue to him--to this
extent the supposedly enlightened writer reproduces the wholesale
naturalism that endeavored to offset the equally wholesale theology.
Such biography is pre-psychological. On the other hand, why should we
object to the publication of any well-authenticated fact concerning any
public character? We have every reason to expect that minute scrutiny
will reveal some sort of smallness in any great man. What we should
beware of is the obscuring of what is admirable by the dust that goes
into the air when these smallnesses are dug out.
That hero-worship has had a setback is not a matter for regret, but
rather for congratulation. For not only was it careless of historical
truth, but it separated from us those who are of us, making us feel
unduly inferior to good men, and (as the psychoanalyst would say with
some show of reason) making a false compensation for our own defects by
adulation of men who were supposed not to have them.
There are other reasons, too, for rejoicing at the growth of realistic
methods in the appraisals of men. For it is not merely historical
distance that creates illusion, but social distance also, and likewise
interests that are served by making distances appear where they do
not exist. Let me speak without reserve. The achievement of success
in any commonly accepted sense of “success” ordinarily produces
self-gratulation of an expansive sort. That is, one attributes to
oneself admirable qualities other than those that produced the success.
Jack Horner said “What a big boy am I!” Moreover, the successful man’s
neighbors, too, admire the whole man instead of merely the particular
acts and qualities that bring him into notice. Thus it is that
practically any successful man is overestimated by both himself and his
contemporaries.
In the same way, distinctions of birth, wealth, and official position
automatically inflate themselves. Even in societies that count
themselves democratic there is an astonishing amount of kow-towing to
station. Yesterday Mr. X was nothing but a politician, a leader of a
party or of a section of a party. His own maneuvers and those of his
friends having secured for him nomination for a high office, he began
now to be more remote from the common. Rumors that a great and wise
man had been discovered blew over the land with every breeze. But even
this campaign puffiness was a slight thing in comparison with the size
that the man seemed to take on after he was seated in a chair of state.
There was now not only deference to his office, but also breathless
watching for his every next word or move, as though he were the arbiter
of destiny; and this--let it be noted--was not chiefly fear of his
power; it was belief in his true greatness, wisdom, and goodness.
Though no act of outstanding ability or courage could be credited to
him; though he had neither eloquence, nor wit, nor marked idiosyncrasy;
though he lacked even the picturesqueness of the adventurer; yet
was he, for the time being, taken to be one of the great characters
of history. Two factors, of course, worked together to create this
impression: On the one hand, politico-economic propaganda, which found
it more useful to exalt a leader than to argue a policy; and on the
other hand, on the part of the populace, inherited assumptions that
there is a great distance between the ruler and the ruled, and that the
greatness of one’s country somehow passes over to the leaders of its
affairs.
What is needed here is realistic, analytic thinking upon authentic
data as to the specific acts of a leader. Such thinking upon such
data is bound to deflate some reputations. When we look for the
particulars, thrones and bishoprics and large places in the sun lose
their awesomeness. To the reasonably cautious mind, common acclaim is
unimpressive; one has discovered the social assumptions and influences
that too often are back of it.
Nevertheless, if we are not to fall into a disillusionment that
is speculative or subjective; if we are not to make sweeping
generalizations from picked facts, this critical mood must not
forthwith reduce the greatly good personages of history or of the
present to the mean and the commonplace. They will henceforth have less
mythological and legendary set-apartness; they will be more like plain
us (a mixture of qualities), but we shall not have a flat landscape.
Yonder researcher in science or history may be not a whit wiser in a
thousand respects than his next-door neighbor; even in his laboratory
and his library lower and higher motives may jostle each other, but
in sheer fairness and objectivity we must perceive that a high end
that he labels “truth” lures him on, restrains contrary motives, and
rewards him from within itself. The artist who believes in his art
against the odds of conventionalized criticism; the medical man who, as
practitioner or as researcher, never swerves from the main purpose of
the utmost increase of health; the social worker who really “believes
in people”--in the human as such--when social prejudices make this
belief costly; the religious prophet who at the expense of persecution
or crucifixion calls upon us to lift up our eyes from our pettiness to
the coming Kingdom of God--these are true specimens of what the human
can be and sometimes is in point of motivation.
Between the more creative, or the more favorably placed, of these
persons and the common run of men there is no gap or partition in
the matter of motives. When we achieve a deep acquaintance with men,
though we realize as never before the extent of their foibles, we
come upon a residuum that evokes our respect. But deep acquaintance
means something far more intimate and therefore insightful than
our classifying devices. Of course, no one who exercises coercion
understands those whom he coerces, and whoever exploits men is blinded
by his point of view. A mere observer, moreover, an outsider standing
aloof, may perceive more clearly than others do a part of what is
going on in his fellows, yet his very aloofness, because it places
inhibitions upon those whom he inspects, defeats his quest. Hence
it is that the generalizations of the “hard-boiled” are never quite
convincing to persons who live in friendly, cooperative relations
with one another. The greater authorities upon what the common man is
capable of wanting are those enlightened souls whose un-self-seeking
unreserve and participation in the neighbor’s hopes and fears, and ups
and downs, thaw out the ordinary barriers between man and man. Now,
almost universally those who have had the widest experience in dealing
with men on this basis of intimacy have the firmest faith in humanity.
I do not mean sentimentalists who indulge humanitarian emotions at a
distance, nor yet lovers who may--or may not--deceive themselves by
over-idealization, but persons like some social workers whom anyone
could name who unite a cool head with a warm heart. They, if anybody,
should be disillusioned, for they, more often than the rest of us,
witness frailty and frustration close at hand, yet they are most
unshakenly respectful of the common man.
XV
THE MIXED MOTIVES OF BUSINESS
It is necessary to distinguish between the qualities of the industrial
system and the qualities of the men who run it. It is true that they
have created it, that they endeavor to express themselves in it, and
that they interpret themselves by their own creation; but it does
not follow that they have succeeded particularly well in expressing
themselves, or that their interpretation of themselves is adequate.
There was a time when our ancestors expressed themselves in idols, the
work of their own hands and imaginations, and interpreted themselves
thereby, even offering human sacrifice as a normal part of the system.
But we know that the wants of these worshippers outran the prayers
that, for the time being, they were able to frame. The man was better
than his religion.
May it not be that industrial man is better than industrialism? And
if so, is it not conceivable that the mechanism of business that
now tyrannizes over us as ancient religions tyrannized over their
worshippers may yet go through transformations as profound as those
that separate the Druid from the believer in ethical monotheism?
The gravitation of the _system_, we have seen, is towards a depressing
view of human nature, and unquestionably the system is to some extent
forming men in its own image. But even as they yield to economic
custom, they make excuses for yielding, and they hunt up excuses for
the system that coerces them just as the idols of old coerced our
ancestors. Such a system is as imperfect an index of the nature of man
as would be a motor car running away down a hill because the brakes
have been allowed to get out of order. In such a car human nature is
both represented and misrepresented.
If, under such terms as “love of money,” “desire for gain,” “profit
motive,” or “economic motive,” we think to explain the “go” of
business, we shall be caught in an abstraction or over-simplification.
It is as if one were to say that the reason why any man buys an
automobile is that he desires to ride rather than walk. This is not
misleading, but it is abstract and inadequate. The experience of
riding, it is true, may beget a desire simply to ride and ride, and
similarly the experience of making money may become a source of direct
satisfaction; but any concrete situation is almost certain to be far
less simple than this. The motives of business--later we shall see
whether the same is true of the worker--are decidedly mixed. Let us see.
The vast majority of those who employ capital for the making of profits
mingle their own daily labor in an intimate way with their capital.
A truck-driver who owns his own truck; a small grocer who lives at
the back of his grocery; a fisherman who owns his own nets and a
“one-lunger” motorboat--what is the economic motive in their case? It
is scarcely distinguishable from the motives of a skilled workman who
makes no profits, but receives wages only. Enough for the family to
eat; a comfortable home; opportunities for the children; recognition
by one’s fellows as amounting to something; a chance at amusements
and recreations (to own a radio-set and a motor-car, of course),
and--very important--security against sickness and old age--these are
the meanings of prosperity for such small capitalists, at least the
fundamental and primary meanings.
One of these meanings, as desire for security, may become dominant; or
secondary meanings may arise, as wanting to outdistance a particular
competitor; and the individual may so identify himself with the
mechanism of his occupation that his establishment becomes practically
an end in itself. So complicated, and so modifiable, is the economic
drive in its more simple and human aspects.
At the higher points in the scale of possessions and of power we see
the same fundamental motives at work, but in changed proportions and
with different proliferations. Some drives decrease or disappear simply
because there is now a regular and abundant supply for the wants
involved. When wealth comes, one no longer bothers much about mere
necessities; instead, one reaches out for luxuries, for variety, or
for intangible goods such as “standing” in “society” or in financial
circles.
The desire for security, rather paradoxically, appears to grow rather
than become quiescent when insecurity of the primary type recedes.
The reason is that the possessor tends to identify himself and his
family with his “pile,” so that whenever the “pile” increases, not
only is there more to protect against shrinkage, but there is also
a bigger-seeming self to feel the loss. It is said that perhaps
no other single motive plays as large a part in the minds of the
financially already-strong as longing to get safely above the buffets
of circumstance--to be utterly secure. But how much must one accumulate
if one is to be superior to the vicissitudes of fortune? In the words
of Harry Lauder, “When is a man fu’? Eh? Eh?” I protect what I have by
adding a financial outpost; then this requires protection. Thus the
motive of security transforms itself into the policy of increasing
possessions without limit.
Oddly enough, one of the motives of religion also is desire to be safe
in a changing and largely unpredictable world.
I have been young, and now am I old;
Yet have I never seen the righteous man forsaken,
Nor his children begging bread.
The Lord is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear
Even though the earth be removed
And the mountains be cast into the sea.
Be not anxious ... for your Heavenly Father understands that
ye have need of these things.
All things are yours.
From facts like these some persons have drawn the conclusion that
unquenchable thirst for possessions is in reality “thirst for the
Infinite” mistaking its own nature.
Another factor or phase of the motivation of business is thirst for
power. But this, in turn, is not a single or uniform thing; it is
complex and variable. What is it to experience power and to rejoice
in it? It is to be able to express oneself; to have the experience of
being a cause; to exercise some specific talent; to be noticed of men,
or followed by them; to construct or create something, or to cause
something to grow, and to have it to contemplate and to show to others
(whether as farmer, breeder, artizan, author, artist, builder of a
business or of a fortune); to feel stimulated instead of depressed in
the face of obstacles; to feel that what one is doing is a game, a
“sporting proposition”; to be fascinated by the everlasting “beyond”;
to be thrilled by such an onward pull as a mountain climber feels who
cannot be satisfied with any attained peak as long as a higher one
is visible. Economic power may mean any of these; it may mean, too,
possessing the means to do some desired thing outside the business, as
patronizing art or learning, or carrying out a pet philanthropy.
When the economic motive takes the form of thirst for power, how like
some of the motives of religion it becomes!
They that trust in the Lord shall renew their strength.
They shall mount up with wings as eagles;
They shall run and not be weary:
They shall walk and not faint.
I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.
On the other hand, the power-motive can include, often does include,
desire for mastery over the personality of others, and pugnacity or
even destructive fury when they resist or stand in the way. Desire
for selfhood and for mastering and creatively reconstructing the
conditions of life, taken socially (_our_ selves, _our_ world), is the
heart of ethical living; but, taken egoistically, it nurtures conceit,
self-will, ruthlessness, and the illusion that achieved strength
can satisfy by inbreeding with itself without creating beauty, or
discovering truth, or promoting fellowship.
The motivation of the economic order is related, likewise, to our
consciousness of the shortness of life. I am fleeting, but my property
will be here after I have disappeared; can I not put the stamp of
myself upon it? A college president repeatedly remarked to a man of
wealth, “Mr. M, if I were in your place, I should build myself a
monument.” This, and nothing more, time and again, until the man of
wealth remarked one day, “Doctor, I have decided to build myself a
monument, namely a building upon your campus.” To identify myself with
something that will speak in my name when I am gone, something that
will act upon men so that I still count with them--this, in some cases
at least, is a constituent of the desire for gain. It may take the
form of ambition merely to build up a great estate that shall bear my
name; to perpetuate this estate in its integrity as long as the law
permits; not only to endow my children and grandchildren with wealth,
but also to prevent them from dissipating it; by my beneficence to be
really good for something in the long future; to cause my name to be
gratefully spoken of by future generations, forever, if possible.
Again, how like religion, with its interest in survival after death!
All things are yours, whether ... life or death.
Make to yourself friends of unrighteous Mammon (said Jesus
derisively) so that they may receive you into everlasting
habitations!
Clearly, then, we shall only partly understand the driving power of
the economic system if we fail to perceive that, like science, art,
and religion, it contains aspirations to be free, to be recognized
by others, to fulfil the impulses of family affection, to enthrone
personality above circumstance, to be a creator, and to baffle the grim
Reaper.
The industrial revolution wrought havoc within this garden of motives.
Factory production separates the experience of producing from the
experience of consuming, thereby concealing something of the meaning
of both. Moreover, in place of face-to-face dealings between men,
which keep the human factor in the foreground, we now have mass or
group relations between persons who never meet one another, and
these relations are mediated on the side of capital by laws, rules,
standards, and officials that represent a somewhat-less-than-human
interest. The dominant assumption is one that can be expressed in a
balance-sheet, which is merely a summary of the non-human aspects of a
business--a summary, that is to say, of that to which no _meanings_ are
as yet assigned. Was there ever anything more abstract than a balance
sheet? The business man, his family and friends, his employes, his
country, his church, the whole human race might be blest or injured to
any extent by his business, but the balance-sheet would not yield the
slightest hint of the fact. Yet the balance-sheet--this abstraction--is
taken as the main guide of business conduct!
The moral tragedy of industrialism lies not in the fact that we are so
bent upon mastering the material resources of the world, but in the
abstraction of this mastery from the motives that started it going
and that give it its only meaning. But we have not quite smothered
ourselves with the works of our hands; the man within the business
man, fortunately, is commonly inconsistent with business philosophy.
Prosperity is not the measure of his satisfactions and desires. Though
surrounded by plenty, he is restless; though efficient, he has not yet
expressed himself. Something greater than industrialism is struggling
to be born.
The evidence of this inner struggle can be seen in Rotary clubs and
similar organizations, with their effort to promote friendliness among
competitors, their interest in some forms of public welfare, and their
emphasis upon “service” as the test of good business management.
This talk about “service” does not yet mean, of course, that Jesus’
principle has been adopted and selfish ends abandoned; it certainly
means that I make the largest profits by consulting my customer’s
interests as well as my own; but even so, it contains a glimmering
recognition that our real interests are mutual interests. Through this
recognition some warmth and enlargement are coming to the business
consciousness.
But there is another side to this consciousness--a side that likewise
speaks of satisfactions not yet found. When men become nervously
concerned for orthodoxy, assuming that an issue is already closed
and that they have the key to it, we may be sure that there is a
lurking skepticism within. Orthodoxy is organized distrust not only
of unbelievers but also of believers, oneself included. And business
orthodoxy grows apace!
Another sign that defence mechanisms are forming in the business mind
is flight into generalizations and abstractions. I have spoken already
of the element of insincerity in the perennial claim that public
benefits flow from any and every scheme out of which I secure private
gain. But this is more than mere tactics; it is more than an economic
theory now outworn; it is also a flight into generalizations and
abstractions. It has become so much a habit that it has secreted from
itself a sense of sincerity. The business of coal-mining is ceasing to
be to the owners the particular facts of this mine and these miners;
it is something larger, more general and public. I do not think we
can otherwise explain the tolerance of mine-owners towards the facts
revealed to a Senate committee that recently investigated the human
conditions at mines in Western Pennsylvania. It is true that the
stock-and-bond method of capitalizing an enterprise makes it difficult
for the absentee owners, whether of a mine, a factory, or a power
plant, to know what is going on. But it is not merely the absentees who
escape the force of facts; managers who are close to the works do it
too. In short, there is more or less shrinking on the part of business
men from the literal actualities of business and industry; the motives
thereof are not at peace among themselves, and the manhood of these
men has not yet found the way of adequate self-expression. What the
business man “really wants” he has still largely to find out.
XVI
MOTIVES OF THE WORKINGMAN
If you want to know the inside of the worker’s mind, do not ask him
any generalized questions about it, for, like the capitalist, the
employe has his attention fixed upon the mechanisms of industry and
upon the particular things that, at the moment, he thinks will better
his condition. A generalized answer from him may throw no more light
upon his complex springs of action than “love of money” throws upon
the conduct of captains of industry. Do not ask his employer, either,
what the worker really desires, for the employer will apply to others
some over-simple explanation that parallels the one that he applies to
himself.
Our best sources of general information are men and women who have
lived and labored side by side with the workers in an endeavor to
understand and help them--persons like Carleton Parker, Helen Marot,
and Whiting Williams.[5] The return from such studies is not simple.
You cannot compress the soul of the workingman or of anybody else into
a simple formula, nor can you explain him by naming the social or
economic class to which he belongs. The pigeonholing of men, by the
way, is one of the major immoralities!
What the workingman wants, first of all, is work; he wants to be sure
of a job. This means, for him, his foothold upon this earth. He wants
to know where the next meal is coming from, and the more thoughtful
individual determines that sickness and old age must not find the
cupboard empty if he can prevent it. How like his employer, who
likewise is struggling to rise above the vicissitudes of existence!
The workingman wants a job that gives him standing among his fellows.
High pay can give him such standing; or an occupation that requires
skill, or judgment, or daring; or even connection with a renowned or
admired enterprise. Thus again, employer and employe meet in a common
desire for social recognition.
The worker is bent upon amusements and recreations. They occupy his
mind even at his labor, especially where high subdivision of labor
permits the hands to be employed almost mechanically. Moreover, with
the increasing mechanization of industrial processes, which implies
ever decreasing spontaneity and self-expression, and ever-deepening
dulness in the routine, thought turns with ever greater insistence to
amusements that promise contrasting experiences of freedom, variety,
strong stimulation or excitement, and social contacts. Not so unlike
the experience of the employer, for he too, as his business becomes
mechanized, builds up for himself a second world in which real living
is contrasted with work.
Family interests affect the worker about as they affect other persons,
but with this important difference in the application: Whereas the
capitalist seeks to make the future secure for his children by endowing
them with property, the workingman endeavors, largely through the
education of his children, to get them out of his economic status into
a higher one, such as that of a “white-collar job” for the son and
clerical work or school-teaching for the daughter.
Widespread, too, is “land-hunger,” particularly among agricultural
workers, though not exclusively among them by any means. To have “a
place that one can call one’s own”; to put thought and muscle upon a
garden or a house, feeling that the results will not at once slip away
out of one’s hands and sight; to express one’s very own taste without
let or hindrance; to have one’s personality identified in the community
with something stable, like real estate--here is one focus of the
ambition of many and many a worker.
Closely related to this attachment for the land is an impulse--alas,
how often thwarted--to express one’s individuality in and through
one’s work. You can witness the joy of creation in a child who for
the first time makes a whistle that really whistles; in a housewife
who achieves a new flavor in her pickles or luxuriant blossoms upon
her window-plants; in a blacksmith when he fits and tempers a piece
of iron just right; in anybody who performs the whole process of
creation from raw material to finished product. Even in factories
which, by subdivision of tasks, make this impossible, there appears now
and then a partial compensation in that workmen identify themselves
imaginatively with the establishment or its products. Notice the pride
in the machine that one superintends, or in a piano or a locomotive
that one has helped build.
The worker wants a large wage, but it is not true that this is his
sole or all-dominant concern. Time and again opportunity for larger
wages is rejected in favor of opportunity for self-expression, or
pride of workmanship, or social recognition. Nor is the desire for
maximum wages an altogether simple motive. Increase of income may mean
saving or insurance; it may mean education for the children; or more
family excursions into open spaces; or a radio set in the home, or what
not? The other day a gentleman remarked, “I have been amazed at the
intelligence of my chauffeur who, as far as schools are concerned, is
an uneducated man. The secret of it is that he has procured a radio set
wherewith he listens to lectures and sermons. Every Sunday, he says, he
hears a sermon by an eminent clergyman.”
It is folly to look upon the labor movement as simply organized
grabbing. It may become this, of course, precisely as a corporation
may become a depersonalized snatching-tool for capital. But the demand
for reasonable hours of labor, for decent working conditions, for a
living wage, for collective bargaining, and recently for a share in
the management of industries represents a wide and deep motivation.
Everything that “my family” means to a man, or social recognition, or
security, or desire for individual selfhood is included in the movement.
Yet it is not possible to take a roseate view of the pressure of
industrialism upon the spirit of either employe or employers and
financiers. A man who was subsisting upon the borderline between worker
and employer had opportunity for gain by a shady transaction. It
consisted in taking surreptitious advantage of a municipality in such
a way that permanent gain would accrue to a corporation with which he
was “in cahoots.” He laughed at scruples, saying, “I’m going to get
mine while the getting is good. They’re all doing it.” Of course it
isn’t true that all are doing it, but will anyone deny that the system
in which both worker and capitalist have become enmeshed exercises
upon both of them a gravitational pull away from the wholesome motives
that have been named in this and the preceding sections, and towards a
narrow-minded policy of _getting_ simply as such?
Industrialism in its present form unquestionably pushes into the
background the motives of concrete well-living, and brings into the
foreground a desire for “efficiency” or “results” as measured by
a mechanical or abstract standard. Both employer and employe feel
impelled to get the most possible out of each other, for the system as
such (and its leaders insist that its “as-suchness” is both natural
and reasonable) has no inherent reference to a possible mutuality in
well-living for all concerned. Well-living is not the job of business
or of industry, least of all mutual well-living; instead, conflict of
interests is assumed to be basic and permanent.
In this assumed conflict of interests, possession is the objective.
Hence the employer, since he already has possessions, which mean power,
has an advantage which the worker sees no way to offset except by
arbitrary action or inaction. Hence effort to “get by” with the least
exertion; mechanized listlessness; loss of heart (“I’m not going to
strain myself in order to increase his profits”); the warlike strategy
of the union; resentment when defeated in this game of “get”; and,
when conflict reaches a climax, resort to force. And, in and through
all, the Tempter whispering that class-interest is a finality in our
organized life, and that force is the final arbiter of everything.
This on the side of labor; and, on the side of capital, parallel
abstraction from the more vital enjoyments, parallel drying and
hardening of the mental tissue, and final resort to cunning and
force. There is scarcely a mean motive, apart from brutal lust, that
does not now come into play upon both sides. And yet, the same men,
both employers and employes, are partly actuated in their economic
activities by motives that culminate in religion!
XVII
ECONOMIC PRODUCTION AS A MODE OF SELF-REALIZATION
Within the evolution of economic production one can read a story of
the gradual molding of the human clay by human hands. Yes, _the_ story
of it, for the range of the interests that enter into the day’s work
is without limit, and the same interests, modified by the day’s work,
radiate outward into all phases of culture.
Hunting makes a hunter; fishing makes a fisherman; when man achieved
the domestication of animals, he achieved likewise some taming of
himself. When seeds began to be planted, and fixed dwellings to be
built, then seed-thoughts were sown in the mind, and he who erected
a roof “built better than he knew,” for an advance took place in the
structure of domestic society. In our own country we have seen the
frontier produce the frontiersman, and industrialism a vastly different
type of personality. Slave labor in the south created one sort of
capitalist, free labor in the north another sort. The economic process
and its economic product--whether weapon, tool, commodity of any
sort--makes the man as truly as the man makes the product. The story of
the day’s work is the story of man, discovering himself, changing and
diversifying himself, sometimes maiming his mind as well as his members
with tools, weapons, and machines of his own devising, but again
recovering himself and going forward.
In this sense an economic interpretation of history is possible; but it
means, not that the whole of culture is controlled by “desire for gain”
or any other narrow (and indeed abstract) spring of action, but that
what we do with natural resources influences all sides of human nature
and capacity. The new history, employing the polarizing lenses of
psychology, reveals everywhere and at all periods unbroken continuity
between, on the one hand, men’s daily occupation of transforming raw
materials, of getting and spending, of buying and selling, of employing
and being employed, and, on the other hand, the substance of the
social life and of the political order, literature and the fine arts,
religion, science, and philosophy.
The economic order, that is to say, is not a thing _per se_. If church
worship, or the goings-on at an amusement park make a strong appeal
because they are different from the daily grind, even here we see
the continuity. It is the man, the personal self, that has gone into
the grind and that has come out of it seeking something specifically
different. The personal self, though it has remarkable capacity
for inconsistency and forgetfulness, contains no really watertight
compartments. A point of view, or an attitude, that has become habitual
in any sphere of life can control us in subtle as well as overt ways.
For example, the laymen who most strenuously insist that ministers
should attend to “spiritual” affairs, letting business alone, represent
in their own persons, and that vividly, the impossibility of a real
separation of religious experience from economic experience.
Production and distribution of economic goods at its best--nay, why
should we not say at its normal point--is, then, a working together
with God in the creation, not so much of plants and fruits and
domestic animals and structures of wood, stone, and steel, as man
himself. The economic order is a chief sphere, if not the chief one,
for the realization of personal selves.
This is the only coherent meaning that we can give to it. Therefore,
whenever we find it turning out undeveloped, depressed, or distorted
personalities, they must not be taken as by-products or incidents;
they are the main concern, and therefore the system is here sick and
self-defeating. To say that we are engaged in making goods and not
men is in any case simply not so. We actually do make men of one
sort or another in all our sowing and reaping, mining and smelting,
manufacture, commerce, and finance. For better or for worse this is so;
there is no escaping it.
But our modern world deludes itself on this point by endeavoring to
maintain and cultivate a spiritual life _alongside_ the economic.
By “spiritual” life I mean the only thing that it can signify to us
moderns, namely, regard for personal selves, all selves within our
purview. This concept of the spiritual includes a scale of attitudes
long enough to reach all the way from comforting a frightened child
to worshipping God. We are self-deceived in that we have turned
over the making of selves to schools, homes, and churches as their
specialty, for the making of selves takes place just as truly and not
less effectively in and through the economic order. We have rather
lazily assumed, too, that the superior personal relations experienced
or talked about in home, school, and church will somehow--rarely does
anyone even attempt to say just how--pass over into the field, the
factory, the market, and the financial institution.
Undoubtedly considerable seepage into economic relations does occur.
For, even where the system is most mechanized, it is not quite
shameless, and the sporadic cases of concern for human values are
neither few nor insignificant in quality. Nevertheless, on the whole,
we undertake to base our economic conduct upon economic principles
that are supposed (though mistakenly) to be self-sustaining or even
self-evident, and our ethical and religious life upon a contrasting
set of principles, supposed (though mistakenly) to be likewise
self-sustaining. The result in multitudes of instances is a dual life;
always it is confusion, blurring, and relative inefficiency in the
human concerns that most count.
In fact, the seepage from our spiritual life into the economic is large
or fully offset by a reverse penetration of depersonalized economic
principles and practices into the very citadels of spirituality.
Consider, for example, the prerogatives assumed by and commonly granted
to “the man who pays the bill.” Does the entirely unspiritual fact
of carrying the purse give one a preferred position with respect to
spiritual relations within the family? Yes or no? Does economic power,
or does it not, either intentionally or by mere drift, determine what
shall be soft-pedaled in schools, colleges, and theological seminaries?
No one takes the trouble to deny that laymen of means have influence in
the churches altogether out of proportion both to their number and to
their religious intelligence, and no one questions that this influence
colors the teachings called religious.
The spiritual does not succeed in maintaining itself alongside the
economic. In the nature of the case, it cannot do so; the economic
experience is bound, for good or for ill, to be the area in which some
of the chief character-forming forces are generated.
The present partition of ourselves into secular and religious,
industrial and cultural, practical and idealistic is deceptive and
ruinous. It results in half-conscious gropings, tangled purposes,
self-defeating self-assertions, fallacious self-justifications, and
diluted standards of spirituality. In consequence of it the economic
order lacks definite meaning. It should mean production for use and
for the enlargement of life all along the line, but instead it is not
unambiguously directed towards any human good whatsoever. It feeds the
hungry (some of them), but it also exploits their hunger. It indirectly
supports education, science, art, philanthropies, and religion; but at
the same time it promotes senseless luxury, conspicuous spending, a
commercialized amusement fever, political corruption, and the kind of
national economy that makes for war. If it has sharpened the wits of
many, and opened to them wider vistas, it has likewise made multitudes
of minds hard, materialistic, mechanical. It has produced class
consciousness and class conflict so general and so acute that sober
observers are wondering whether the system is not bound to destroy
itself by its internal friction.
We shall not recover from this sickness by developing more spiritual
life alongside an industrialism that treats persons as means rather
than as ends, but only by spiritualizing the industrial system itself.
The obvious necessity, the only way to spiritualize industrialism, is
to develop through the entire range of its personnel the joy of being
a producer, as distinguished from the satisfaction of receiving wages
or making profits. When motives focus upon wages and profits, which are
extraneous both to the thing produced and to the persons who use the
product, the realization of one’s self in one’s work is squeezed out,
and the realization of other selves as benefited by us is squelched.
Moreover, when the motives for production become thus uncreative, the
goods produced convey to the consumer little or no ethical meaning; he
procures and uses them as mere things, ignoring the human life that has
gone into them, and therefore realizing no spiritual relationship by
means of them.
If men are to be religious in any deep sense _within_ the economic
experience, the raw materials and the finished products that pass from
hand to hand, and the machinery for manufacture and distribution, must
acquire something of a sacramental character, becoming outward and
visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. To make a button, or to
buy and sell one is, in reality, to participate in a great complex of
personal relationships, whether high or low; right here we determine,
in part, the level of our common life.
On the other hand, when the massive walls, arches, and towers of a
magnificent house of worship arise upon some lofty point in a great
center of population, what spiritual significance can one see therein?
You answer that multitudes will worship God inside this structure.
But what of the structure itself as an _economic fact_? Human life,
the life of persons to whom Jesus attributed value beyond measure,
went into the quarrying of these stones, the smelting of this metal,
the mixing of this mortar, the financing of a multitude of major and
minor operations. What happened to this life of persons through its
participation in the making of a sanctuary? Did men find God, and one
another as sons of God, here? What is the spiritual significance,
moreover, of the contribution that I make for the erection of this
towering monument to our faith? How did this money come into my
keeping? That is, what human relationships, what makings or marrings
of personality, what wages of bitterness or hardenings of heart have
gone thus indirectly into the edifice that is meant to signify divine
fatherhood and human brotherhood?
Is our religious thinking so feeble that we actually expect to solve
the problem of worship by saying and singing within the sanctuary
sentiments that are contradicted by the very walls and roof that
shelter the congregation? On the other hand, is our economic thinking
to be so abstract as to go on assuming that the aspirations of the
heart of man are for the inside of the sanctuary, and not equally
for quarry, mine, mill, and banking house? The unstable state of
both organized religion and the industrial and economic structure at
the present time suggests that we are in the grip of an inevitable
issue. It is not over-rash to surmise that we are going to have a
spiritualized industrial and economic order, or else a pseudo-spiritual
and actually degraded religion. Degraded, that is, by increasing
subservience to an unspiritual system of dealing with the material
resources of nature.
That there is any inescapable drag in the direction of such a fatal
system does not appear from any broadly objective scrutiny of the
motives of either capitalist or worker. On both sides mixed motives
are the rule, and the two mixtures largely coincide. On either side
one or another motive gains or loses influence by the shifting of
conditions that are within our power. It is as if the ancient word had
been spoken to our generation: “I have laid before you life and death;
choose life.”
After three years’ experience as a worker in mines and factories,
Whiting Williams declares that the mainspring of the worker--we have
seen that this is true also of the employer--is the wish for worth,
the wish to be a person, to realize that he counts and that others
recognize the fact; and, Williams adds, “through our work, if anywhere
in all the universe, we may hope to become a person, meaningful and
valuable--aye, indispensable--to others.”[6]
XVIII
THE MOTIVE THAT IS IN ALL AND THROUGH ALL
The lines of our inquiry converge upon the following conception of the
motives of men: Rooted in the conditions of individual and racial life
are various “drives” that are related to nutrition, sex, avoidance
of discomfort and danger, activity and repose, and the presence or
conduct of other members of the species. But these are not elementary
units that in their aggregate constitute human motivation. For, in and
through them, using them, giving meaning to them, and creating new
meanings through them, is the affirmation of a personal self, and the
coordinate and equally inevitable affirmation of other selves. And this
affirmation of selves does not consist in sucking at the breast of
Nature, but in reconstructing the gifts of Nature, and in constructing
and reconstructing ourselves and society to suit ourselves as our
experiences, desires, and insights evolve.
There is an old distinction, which is both useful and necessary though
it frequently is ignored, between two senses of the term “motive.” This
term sometimes signifies psychic pressure in one direction or another
without forethought or consideration of results--what one may call a
_vis a tergo_ or “push from behind.” In this sense, thirst for water,
or sex-hunger, or spontaneous liking or disliking counts as a motive.
On the other hand, an end-in-view, something that awakens desire when
we think about it, a “pull from in front,” likewise goes under the name
of motive.
The difference between a psychic push and a psychic pull is not
merely that between immediate and postponed fulfillment of action
or of satisfaction, nor yet this plus the difference between simple
and complicated drives. There is a further and even more important
distinction to be made. Consider, for example, the following series of
cases:
1--The reaction of a carnivore upon smelling raw flesh.
2--The conduct of an acquaintance of mine who, when sugar grew
scarce during the War, seized an opportunity to buy a barrel of it
for the use of his family.
3--In a canyon not far from where these words are being written, a
county is building a great and costly dam in order to control the
flood waters of the surrounding mountain slopes. Control of these
waters means safety for life and property, irrigation for orange
groves, and a supply of water for domestic use.
4--An acquaintance of mine worked hard and spent little in order
that a son, still a small boy, might have a college education.
Meantime the state in which they lived taxed itself heavily on
behalf of a system of education that reaches from the kindergarten
to the university.
An intimate history of the conduct of the individuals concerned in each
of these cases would reveal primitive urges, as those for food, for
escape from peril, for care of offspring; but in all instances except
the first it would reveal also something more than just a summation of
such rudimentary drives. Even in case 2 they are redirected, canalized,
weighed against one another, dovetailed together, related to the
whole significance of the family for its members. In cases 3 and 4
it is still more obvious that work has been done _upon_ the primitive
drives, not merely by them, for there is organization of selves and
organization of society that are not at all predictable from any
scrutiny of raw drives; indeed, here power over conduct flows out of
valuations that, a little way back in our history, could not have been
felt or understood. We have reached a point where we are able to say
what sort of selves we want to be; we have begun to have preferences
concerning types of society; already, through law, education, religion,
and eugenics we are upon the edge of deliberate control of the
evolution of our species.
Thus far, for the sake of convenience in dealing with a complicated
matter, I have spoken of primitive or raw drives or pushes, for
the most part, as though they were so many separate and distinct
actualities. In fact, however, hunger, sex-attraction, and all the
rest are generalizations. In the human species at least each actual
instance of hunger is less simple than mere hunger; each instance of
sex-attraction requires, if we are to describe it completely, something
more than an isolated instinct. With man, an instinctive satisfaction
is not the terminus of a railroad but an intermediate station through
which as well as to which he moves. The whole truth is that, though the
raw material of our personal selves is given to or thrust upon us, just
as sap is given to or thrust upon a tree, nevertheless it is from the
beginning human material; within it from the beginning personal selves
are in process of forming themselves, and society is in process of
forming itself. This motive is in all and through all the dynamics of
human conduct.
You can stop mere hunger by filling the stomach, but by no stuffing
process can you appease the life-urge that is human. Much of
the devastating irony that Plato’s Socrates directs against the
Sophists is based upon this truth. Gautama saw the merely negative
aspect of it, but he did not perceive, as Jesus did, that creative
self-activity--ethical love, for example--contains a satisfaction of
its own--a satisfaction, too, that is by no means to be equated with
other satisfactions, since it bestows value upon them or withholds it
from them. Self-discipline is a fact; so is voluntary acceptance of
work, and even of pain and loss and obloquy. If men revile you, and
persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, still you are
blessed or happy if this experience comes because you are loyal to
“the ever-coming Kingdom of God.” It is partly by this transvaluation
of values, this conversion of our native drives, that men now and then
transmute both their environment and themselves into forms that yield
unprecedented beauty, and truth, and fellowship. In human experience,
I repeat, the motive of being a personal self among personal selves is
in all and through all. It may be weak or retarded, or it may become
distorted, yet even in conditions most unpropitious we find the spark
not quite extinguished.
A few years ago, a one-act play, a curtain-raiser, entitled “A Morality
Play for the Leisured Class,”[7] was given at the Neighborhood
Playhouse in New York City. There were two characters, a modern man
who had just been killed in an automobile smash-up, and an experienced
inhabitant of the other world. The deceased, gradually coming to
himself, and wondering where he is, calls out in the misty twilight
that surrounds him,
“Is anybody there?”
The mist clears away, revealing a shining Presence with wings. The
Presence asks,
“Can I do anything for you, Sir?”
The deceased wants to know what’s to be had here.
“Anything you like,” is the reply. “Anticipating your desires, I have
already taken thirty years from your age.”
“Perpetual youth, eh?” exclaims the newcomer. “It looks as if I’d come
to the good place, after all. But what about the golden crown?”
“You can have one if you like,” comes the answer, and presto! a starry
golden crown encircles the stranger’s brow.
“Exactly according to the specifications,” says he. “And now, what else
have you got here?”
“Anything you like,” replies the angel.
“I can have everything I desire? Absolutely everything?” asks the soul
excitedly.
“Subject only to certain restrictions imposed by the nature of the
place,” is the reply. “There is neither pain, nor suffering, nor
struggle here. Anything else that you desire I will procure for you.”
There follows a succession of requests and realizations: The best of
things to eat and drink; luxurious living quarters; “period” furniture
and decorations; masterpieces of painting and statuary; the society
of beauteous women (Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and others). But each
of these exalted experiences proves to be insufficient and finally
cloying, and the experimenter demands a change. “This everlasting
perfection palls,” he says. “The sights are too uniformly beautiful,
the ladies too uniformly clever, charming, and obliging.... I know what
I want! I want some work.” But he discovers that, since work implies
wanting something that one cannot have by merely wanting it, whereas
here one gets a thing by merely asking for it, the satisfaction of work
is out of the question.
He and his obliging attendant ransack their minds to think of something
that might possibly relieve the tedium. The attendant, at his wits’ end
and discouraged, turns to go, saying, “I don’t know what to propose,
Sir. But if anything occurs to you,” ...
“Hold on!” cries the seeker; “I’ve got it! I want some pain; that’s it.”
“I’m sorry, Sir,” comes the polite answer, “but no one is allowed to
have any pain in this place. You’ll get used to the restriction after
you’ve been here a few thousand years. They all feel as you do at
first, but they all get accustomed, after a while, to this mode of
existence.”
“But,” ejaculates the neophyte, “I can’t stand this damned everlasting
bliss! I’d rather be in hell.”
The Presence, stepping back and looking at him in astonishment, asks,
“And wherever do you think you _are_, Sir?”