PART III

YET OUR CAPACITIES ARE IN BONDAGE

XIX

THE CYNIC INTERJECTS A QUESTION

Some cynic, my mind’s eye tells me, is smiling over the picture of

human nature that emerges out of the preceding sections.

“You think you have shown that the feeling of disillusionment that

is spreading among us is a mood and a fashion rather than a rational

conviction; that the psychological evidence of our essential lowness

is weak; that our motivation is not a composite of instincts; that

in the evolutionary order, of which we are a part, desires as well

as structures evolve, so that the unprecedented in motives occurs

and is to be expected; that mind is marvellously plastic, and in

unconventional childhood is beautiful; that, under favorable school

conditions, creativeness bubbles up out of the commonplace; that after

the hot crucible of historical criticism has brought to the surface all

the dross of both great men and small, it reveals also precious gold;

that even within our selfish economic order high and fine strains of

desire can be seen, as if a god were struggling to create a superior

species through our mastery of natural resources. You find that, in

and through the complex that we call our motives there runs a demand

of personal-selves-in-the-making, a demand for mutual self-realization

in an order of reason, beauty, and good-will, in the creation of which

they are participants.

“All very soothing,” continues the cynic, “provided that you keep your

eyes straight ahead. But if you look to the right or the left of this

reasoning, this is what you see: In form, the argument defends the

dignity of life, but it does so only by picking out facts that shine

by contrast with our everyday conduct. Practically everything that has

been said includes or implies a protest against the ordinary run of

human motives, valuations, and habits. Thus, the passage from childhood

to adulthood is admitted to be a hardening process; it is admitted

that the capacities for creation occasionally displayed by the young

are generally thwarted, and that the very citadels of the spirit--the

home, the church, the school--are infected with the unspirituality of

our current economic standards and practices. It is made to appear,

further, that the economic order, which might and should have a main

part in the creation of man in cooperation with God, actually is an

enormous mechanism that subordinates men--capitalists and workers

alike--to a part, and the lower part, of their own motives, and these

largely misunderstood.

“You have proved that human nature contains factors that the current

disillusionment ignores or misrepresents, but you have shown also that

the actual exercise of men’s wills thwarts and imprisons the superior

motives that you are so concerned about.”

Thus the cynic; and he is right as to the facts provided that he

does not exaggerate the extent of this thwarting and imprisoning of

ourselves by ourselves. It does not necessarily follow, however, that

basic cynicism towards life can be justified, however useful as a

stimulus to inquiry the cynical comment may be. Men are inconsistent

with themselves; they do obstruct their own steps, and they trip over

themselves. What, then? Shall we acquiesce in our blunders? Shall

we end our forward steps in pity or scorn of ourselves? Or, shall we

endeavor to understand what has happened, hoping that we may find a way

to master the obstructive self that is within ourself? It should be

interesting, at least, to inquire into the nature of this checking and

thwarting of man by himself, for, in spite of the obviousness and the

disagreeableness of the fact, it is relatively neglected by the very

institutions that assume as their function the making of men.

It is true that religionists, moralists, and educationists for many

generations have talked about an inner conflict of forces. It is

represented now as competition between instincts; then as a struggle

of reason with impulse; again, as a strain between egoistic and social

motives. Though there is obvious truth in these conceptions, they

do not touch several questions that must be answered before we can

secure firm control of our situation. These questions are: Why is our

performance so much below our capacity all along the line? Where and

how does the leakage of power occur? How have we become inured to our

own inconsistencies of conduct and of motive? What is the technic for

recognizing real alternatives for what they are? What is the method for

keeping a continuously open road for our wiser selves?

As far as I can see, neither our churches nor our schools are handling

with aggressive vigor these overwhelmingly pertinent questions. Exalted

capacities are, indeed, ascribed to man, and lofty ideals of conduct

are unceasingly mentioned, recommended, sung about, and prayed about;

but who offers a technic for getting these capacities to do their

proper work? and who really believes in the practicability of what he

says?

This is a severe judgment, but it is a deliberate one, and if it is

true it is not unfair, as it certainly is not unfriendly. My own

life has been continuously identified with churches and educational

institutions, and I would not have it otherwise; but I do not see how

anyone who has intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with them can

deny that they are suffering from a profound dualism that they know

not how to heal. Of the general sincerity of their idealistic views

of man there need be no doubt; that both church and school exercise

a wholesome influence upon conduct in various respects is gladly

conceded; it is their lack of plan and method for the organization of

life, individual and collective, that is now in question. Now, this

lack is about the worst possible; for it not only permits mint, anise,

and cummin to get out of perspective; it not only foreshortens each

institution’s picture of itself; it also encourages the positive evil

of an illusory self-organization in the form of fair words and fair

sentiments instead of adequate purposes.

Assent to ideals, and emotional identification of oneself with America,

the church of all ages, or the will of God can be a species of

self-love and self-sophistication. Sunday after Sunday the churchgoer

says “Yes” in his heart to the prayer of confession; “Yes” to the

Godward aspirations of Scripture, hymn, and supplication; “Yes” to the

admonitions of the preacher and to every reference to love for man and

consecration to the Kingdom of God; and, departing from the sanctuary,

he has a comfortable self-feeling because he is a “Yes” man. He is on

this side, is he not? In school and college another set of sentimental

assents is evoked. Sportsmanship, patriotism, good citizenship,

admiration for the honesty, honor, and unselfish devotion shown by our

heroes--towards all these a “Yes,” a sincere glow, and “This is what we

are.”

A large part of the economic power of the Western world is in the hands

of men who worship the God of the prophets and of Jesus; yet we know

that business and industry will proceed during the week upon principles

other than those of love to God and man. The leaders of our civic

life, and most of the followers, have come out of our own schools for

generations, but neither our political parties, nor our officers of

state, nor our accepted state policies clearly reflect the idealism

of these schools. It is not hypocrisy that creates this gulf; rather,

confused helplessness in the presence of mixed motives. There is even

some awareness of this helplessness, but this awareness usually leads

to little more than speeding up the “Yes, yes” experience.

What boots it, then, to have shown that the current disillusionment

with respect to ourselves is illusory, if we don’t know how to give the

control of our lives into the keeping of the better elements that are

in us? In fact, our discussion thus far has done little more than clear

the ground for a tussle with our main problem, which concerns, not the

existence of high motives, but the bondage in which we find them. What

we must ascertain, if possible, is the nature of this bondage and how

we can release ourselves from it.

And first, the nature of our bondage. Let us frankly face the

disagreeable facts, not being outdone by the cynic himself in the

ferreting out of irrationalities. Only so can we hope to find the

remedy for our condition.

XX

OUR “LOWER NATURE” DOES NOT EXPLAIN OUR BONDAGE

If we could refer human folly all in a lump to our “lower nature” it

would be convenient in several ways. For one thing, like those who

refer their every slip to the solicitations of Satan, we should be

relieved from the laborious and often disagreeable task of tracing

out the particular threads of influence that make our conduct bad. On

the other hand, every accusation against our “lower nature” really

flatters whatever we happen to regard as our “higher nature.” The

Indian mystic says “Neti, neti” of the lower, finite, and merely

apparent reality, while he identifies his true self with the infinite.

Plato believes that, in his own person as philosopher, Reason, ever

pure and uncontaminated, though it be associated with the passions,

is manifested as a self-certifying and self-sufficient good. A

parallel self-gratulation was provided by Christian theology through

its doctrine that the Christian has a regenerated nature which

participates in some measure in the infallibility of God. Similarly,

our evolutionary relation to “the ape and tiger” is often used as a

foil for displaying our true dignity.

But this attribution of our irrational conduct to our “lower nature”

is altogether too convenient. It is like a child’s classification of

human beings into “good people” and “bad people.” As “bad people” are

partly good, so our “lower nature” is not altogether low; and, as “good

people” are not perfectly satisfactory, so--at least possibly--our

“higher nature” is not altogether high. In short, this whole theory of

our bondage requires re-examination.

In countries that are familiar with the Christian tradition, the

classical instance of the supposed clash of two natures is that of

Paul, who testified to a veritable warfare in his members. The good

that he would do, he did not, and the evil that he would not, that he

did. The more he struggled to keep “the law” the deeper became his

sense of guilt and helplessness. How shall we understand and evaluate

this experience? Not by manipulating merely abstract ideas such as

perfect righteousness (details unspecified and unspecifiable), nor the

holiness of God (specifications again impossible), nor sin (in the

sense of a generalized sinfulness); we could not judge Paul’s motives

and desires without inspecting them in their relation to particular

concrete situations, and this the record does not enable us to do.

If, as seems not improbable, his chief entanglement was sexual, then

the basic desire, as thinking Christians now agree, was not bad. As a

sex-creature he was not bad _simpliciter_ but only _secundum quid_.

Moreover, it is not possible to affirm that his condemnation of himself

was altogether balanced; he may have had a morbid conscience.

Whenever we are able to untangle the threads of impulse and to take

into account the circumstances of each, invariably the reference of our

defective conduct to our “lower nature” turns out to be mistaken--if

for no other reason, because it over-simplifies the facts. Always what

we find is a mix-up, and usually confusion. Witness, for example, the

gamut of motives involved, as we have seen, in the War and in our

economic and industrial system. Therefore, whoever would understand our

bondage must examine into the nature of this confusion; he must hunt

for the specific conditions that give a bad turn to motives that are

capable, under other circumstances, of building up instead of tearing

down. The conclusion towards which these facts push us is that that

which checks, thwarts, and imprisons our capacities is not a set of

particular drives but neglect of some relation or relations within

experience, or some twist in our methods of organizing ourselves.

If this inquiry tends to vacate the whole notion of a “lower nature”

that acts as a drag upon us, it tumbles us into a problem with respect

to the existence of a “higher nature.” Are any of our drives good

_simpliciter_, or, is the clue to goodness as well as badness to be

looked for in habits of organization rather than in particular and

ineradicable impulses? It is, in fact, easy to show that even within

our better conduct the same sorts of floundering occur as in our worst

behavior, so that the same problem of the organization of a self and of

selves is everywhere present. We have, as gifts of our nature, neither

radically bad drives against which we should arm ourselves, nor yet

radically good drives to which we can fly for effective protection. No

_vis a tergo_ will either ruin us or save us. The thing upon which the

issues of life depend is what I have called the motive that is in all

and through all, the desire to be a self in a world of selves.

The real nature of our bondage can be illustrated by a chain of

examples that reaches all the way from our handling of physiological

good and evil to our prayers. All along the line we shall find that

the good and the evil, the failures and the successes, depend upon

the organization of life as personal, and specifically upon the degree

in which, consciously and deliberately, we face situations, with

their alternative values, as wholes. We shall see that we are missing

on an enormous scale good things of life that are not beyond our

reach--things unquestionably good, unquestionably within our reach,

unquestionably more important than the things towards which we do

stretch ourselves. And all this is true of our more idealistic as well

as of our less idealistic interests. Now for the examples:

Let us begin with health and bodily vigor. We put up with physical

limitations that are entirely unnecessary--limitations that hygiene

and medical science can remove. It would be economical in the

financial sense to remove them, because our productive power would

thereby increase along with the joy of living. Why do we persist in

this conduct? We have everything to lose and nothing to gain by it.

We may phrase the answer in many ways, as inattention, distraction

by immediate stimuli, not connecting effects with causes, doing

as everybody else does; but all real explanations come down to

this, that we do not put enough of ourselves--our comprehending,

difference-perceiving, organizing selves--into the matter.

We permit thousands of distressing accidents to occur every year.

We permit them, for we could prevent them; we have sufficient

experience of the dangers, we have sufficient scientific knowledge,

and we have sufficient financial means. We could save thousands of

lives without even feeling a financial pinch, and most of the lives

saved would add to the financial resources of the country. But we

do not stop to think; that is, we do not put our whole selves into

our conduct.

We submit to a multitude of unnecessary discomforts--dirt, smoke,

noise, confusion, delays, undue fatigue, uncomfortable clothing,

senseless customs. Our intelligence concerning the conditions of

agreeable living, and our budgetary capacity for it, far outrun our

plans and policies.

We endure unsightly spots in cities and towns, and the despoiling

of natural beauty in the country. The persons who reap financial

advantage from our esthetic impoverishment do so, not by their own

inherent power, but by our acquiescence. Our trouble is lack of

head-work.

We read inferior stuff, not because it is more enjoyable than

literature, but because we wont take the trouble to enjoy

ourselves. Thus, because we are “not all there,” we let slip

opportunities for exciting adventures in imagination, thought, and

knowledge.

Our opinions are largely manufactured for us and imposed upon us,

or else we merely drift into them and afterwards, perhaps, search

for reasons in support of them. We permit ourselves to be treated

as herds--some writers even using this term with respect to us--not

because we are necessarily bovine but because we are unnecessarily

absent-minded. That is, the human in us acts fragmentarily instead

of integrally.

We are capable of having better government and better social

relations generally than we have. We could afford them without risk

of impoverishment and often to the benefit of our pocketbooks.

Our good precedents, our weakly professed convictions, our known

capacity for fruitful experimentation, all outrun our political and

social practice. Often we are pig-headed, not because there is a

porcine drive in our original nature, but because we get the habit

of over-fondness for our half-thoughts.

We are capable of providing far better schooling for our children

than we do provide. Even parental affection, which comes so near to

being unqualifiedly good, is a main support for mistaken education.

Moreover, education is a field in which most persons who have

not paused to investigate believe, nevertheless, that they are

competent to pass judgments. Thus, precisely where we think we are

using our heads, we fail to use them enough.

If there were such a thing as a “higher nature,” it should clearly

manifest itself in morals and religion. In the sphere of moral

conduct we should be able to discern particular drives that are

worthy of invariable and unqualified approval. Ethical philosophy

long endeavored to discover such pure springs of action, but

without success. It is true, likewise important, that some broadly

general types of policy, such as neighborliness, truthfulness,

and industry, are usually safe guides. Yet, when my improvident

neighbor asks me for a loan, or when an oppressor would use my

truthfulness as an instrument with which to reach an innocent

victim, or when I endeavor to apportion my time between work and

play, then not one of these policies suffices as a basis for

decision. “Love beauty” is good advice, but there are times when we

have to decide whether to rest our eyes upon the curves of beauty

or upon the harsh lines of actuality. “Pursue truth”; certainly,

but just when is the moment for action upon the basis of present

light, perhaps twilight? “Do as you would be done by”; of course,

but how, under some circumstances, would I be done by? That is to

say, in all such cases, the background-problem is, What sort of “I”

do I want my self and others to be?

Is it not true that good men are forever getting in the way of

the good? Consider any half dozen social changes that history has

proved to be wholesome, and then count over the men who opposed

them at the time they were made. You will perceive that the

mental clumsiness of bad men has an exact parallel in the moral

awkwardness of good men.

The case is not different with religion. Considered from the

standpoint of the drives that have made men pious, piety is by

no means an unmixed blessing. For history shows that any desire

whatever can receive the baptism of religious sanctity, with all

the reinforcement that results therefrom. On the one hand, it is

true, we see religion calling men to a life of righteousness;

on the other hand, there is no meanness nor narrowness that has

not somewhere at some time been a part of religion. For this

reason, religion is the most dangerous thing in the world. It can

promote either candor or prejudice, either self-will or sweet

reasonableness, either ruthlessness or the gentleness of a St.

Francis of Assisi. And no single religion can exempt itself from

the danger. In this country at the present moment--to take a single

case for illustration--there is a species of sincere Christianity

that seizes intellectual freedom by the throat in order to choke

it; that fans flames of hate; that commits deeds of lawless

violence. So impossible is it to find in religion the especial seat

of a higher nature! On the other hand, at various points in the

history of different faiths, religion has turned critically upon

itself, and by reorganizing itself upon unprecedented lines, it has

proved that, though we cannot rely upon a higher nature made up of

drives that everlastingly repeat themselves, nevertheless we have a

capacity for never-ending criticism and reconstruction of ourselves.

These facts put the bondage of our capacities into correct perspective.

We need not deny that untamed and partly tamed impulses tug at the bit,

kick, sometimes run away with us; but they are not our jailers. They

make difficulty for us, they wound and scar us, but they have within

themselves no coherence, whereas types of coherence within a self make

all the difference between freedom and bondage. If anyone insists

that human nature is depraved, he should place the seat of depravity

in the rational man, or the supposed higher nature that is expressed

in religion, morals, customs, government, social organization, and

deliberate purposes generally.

If we conceive the matter in the terms of evolution, then the problem

of our bondage centers in the latest-evolved, not the most ancient,

phases of human nature; not in raw impulses taken one by one, but in

the elaboration of conduct by thought and purpose; not in what is

wildest in us, but in what is most civilized and taken for granted.

Must we say, then, that within reason itself there is an irrational

lag? If this should prove to be the case, the wisest thing to do would

be to make allowance for it and by deliberate policy to counteract

it, just as the astronomical observer calculates and counteracts his

personal equation.

XXI

HOW REASON ITSELF BINDS US TO THE IRRATIONAL

Every progressive thinker is troubled by the following fact: In

order to live rationally, we must organize and institutionalize our

behavior, which implies giving a sort of mechanical or automatic power

to yesterday’s thoughts. But as soon as any institution begins to be

efficient, it resists rational inquiry with respect to itself. This is

true of all institutions without exception. They resist--here is the

heart of our difficulty--because they are not haphazard combinations

but institutions, which is to say that they are a deposit of reason.

Thus our necessary rational procedures imprison reason as naturally “as

the sparks fly upward.”

For “institution” we can substitute any term for a job that is

deliberately done, or for any devotion that is a day old, and the

proposition that reason imprisons reason still holds. Whenever thought

makes a nest for itself where it can incubate, it turns out to have

mated with unreason, and it produces a mongrel offspring.

How the principle works can be seen in the relatively simple

institution of the family. For example, a parent who, in the course

of family government, makes a decision with respect to the children,

immediately adopts this decision as a precedent that is binding upon

himself also, he won’t budge from it; if it is questioned he finds

reasons in support of it; or, if he is pushed into a corner, he

reasserts it upon the ground of the inherent rationality of parental

authority. That is, by a process of thought he identifies himself with

what he has been, and he equates reason with one of its incidental

products. Many a parent-child fellowship has been wrecked in this way.

Just so, when the idea of sex-equality appeared upon the horizon, many

a person prepared to defend the family against dissolution! Many a

potential conjugal fellowship has been blasted because of unreadiness

to re-think the old assumption of sex-servitude. One is unready to

re-think it, not because of any imperious natural drive of the male

to sex-mastery, not because the female naturally prefers submission,

but because one has bound one’s mind by a partial use and habit of

intelligence; a has-been-so has been taken as inherently natural and

reasonable.

The same sort of retardation of thought by itself appears, likewise,

in our larger and more complicated institutions. For example, in the

economic order at the present moment, in spite of its creakiness,

there is enough that is humanly valuable to supply a basis for

the reconstruction that is so sorely needed. Why, then, do we not

delightedly hasten to build a fairer structure upon our present

goodness? The usual reply that selfishness stands in the way, is a

lazy explanation. “Innate selfishness” is perhaps the trickiest of all

our merely plausible general ideas, for it applies to almost anything

that we dislike in ourselves or anybody else, yet tells us nothing

specific. The sticking-point in economic thinking is the point where

particular drives or alternatives are adjusted to one another. This

point, unfortunately often, is characterized by economic precedents

taken as dictates of reason or nature. Self-imitation, that is to say,

has generated an economic orthodoxy which is the true “original sin”

of the system. And it is the sacredness of the orthodoxy that makes

the gooseflesh rise upon us when we contemplate the possibility of

reversing our ways. We have sufficient stamina to stand losses or to

get along with less wealth, but the uncertainties of a reconstructive

policy make us quail. Thus we trust yesterday’s thought more than we

trust any fresh thinking.

Orthodoxy, which is the acceptance of yesterday’s agreed-upon

conclusions as an assumption that must govern today’s thought, is

not a sporadic or merely incidental occurrence; it insinuates itself

everywhere; there are as many varieties of it as there are kinds of

human association.

Political orthodoxies are, of course, rather obvious. The remark is

commonplace that parties retain their coherence after the reason for

their existence has faded away, and that, at last, lacking genuine

meaning, they stand upon trumped-up platforms which often are a blind

erected by hunters of office or by those whom they serve. The main

support of bad politics is found in men who are not bad but only

conventionally good. The difficulty with them is that they treat a

petrified idea as if it were a living thought--they are politically

orthodox.

Our laws, likewise, are streaked with anachronisms that at their best

are clumsy and obstructive, but at their worst are instruments--well

known as such!--whereby social obligation is evaded and injustice

committed. The intellectual clarity of laws and courts is accompanied

by an emotional haze, amounting at times to ethical obscurantism, that

is taken as the light of a sanctuary, but is in reality the shrinking

into itself of a mind that is unready for fresh thinking even in its

own field.

Forms of government and constitutions, too--living thoughts at the

beginning--become mechanized thoughts after a time, and then they are

a precarious asset. Precarious because, though they are properly only

instruments to assist us in our adjustments to the conditions of life,

they become the objects to which adjustment is made. The notion of

sovereignty, for example--that ark of the covenant within the holy of

holies of political principles--has become a mechanized thought and an

obstacle to the establishment of any rule of reason in the world as a

whole.

The professions and the other occupations, likewise, always run into

the danger of introversion as soon as they begin to think about

themselves. Each wants to fix its functions so that they will “stay

put.” Traditions of many sorts now become, essentially, dogmas;

divisions and subdivisions of function are established, and each

functionary becomes a breathing precedent. Machinery unending is

interjected between the needs of client or customer or employer and

the satisfaction of these needs. Some business men, it is said, have

undertaken to create a tribunal of their own that shall settle their

legal difficulties without resort to the law. What a comment is this

upon the legal profession! There is a considerable area of human need

that calls for both spiritual and medical help, yet physicians and

ministers can hardly get together upon the most obvious cases because

professional precedents have not paved the road thereto. Just so, the

dentist goes his way, and the physician his, to the detriment of the

patient, all because one is dentist and the other physician.

The orthodoxies of religion, whether conservative or liberal, are

natural enough, for they reflect a sense of the greater issues of life

and a sense of the importance of any truth about them that we may be

able to reach. Yet the endeavor of piety to think itself and to put

itself into the form of propositions has become a bane to piety. For

accepting pious declarations both deludes us into classifying ourselves

as pious, and excuses us from looking straight into the eye of

actuality, whether contemporary or ancient. Limiting the freedom of the

mind is perhaps not the worst thing about orthodoxy, though it is bad

enough. Rather, ecclesiastical custodianship of particular religions or

particular types within a religion, tends to displace thought-activity

from the greater issues of life to the minor ones. The great issues

having been settled, as is supposed, ministers, church boards, and

denominational leaders betake themselves to making the church, which

already has the truth, get the men, get the means, build machinery, and

make it go.

How do we account for the ecclesiastical situation that is revealed by

the church announcements in the daily papers of any large city? I shall

not stop to characterize either the sermon topics or the publicity

methods that are here disclosed, for this has been done many times,

and the facts speak too loudly for themselves. Many explanations have

been offered, but the background reason usually remains unnoticed. It

is that the church already _has_ religion. It has it, and therefore

peddles it; it peddles it, and therefore all the devices of the

advertiser, the hawker, and the auctioneer become appropriate; and

because they are appropriate, the church that is most up-to-date in

using them esteems itself the most enterprising. The ministerial and

ecclesiastical jazz and piffle are direct results of having minds that

are at rest upon the main issues. Reliance upon yesterday’s thought

produces the vacant, noisy mind of today. Orthodoxy did it!

Every orthodoxy, whether it emphasizes a formula of thought, or loyalty

to an institution, or the propriety of an habitual process--every

orthodoxy, whether economic, political, social, professional,

educational, scientific, or religious (and we have them all)--every

one, though created by reason, is a drag upon reason.

Yet orthodoxy is only an organized or social expression of a necessary

and inescapable factor in the exercise of intelligence. It is because

we remember, form judgments, make inferences, and then use the products

of this process as data both for immediate decisions where action is

necessary and for new judgments--it is for this reason that we are

humans at all and not brutes. Our fairest structures are built upon

past thinking as well as through present thinking. There is no other

way. Irrationalism or pure romanticism may be useful now and then as

a protest or as a spur, but this is never the horse that carries the

load. Here, then, is our paradoxical situation: We must guide thinking

by thinking; we must trust reason; but reason itself, in this process,

binds us to the irrational. What would be a reasonable policy in this

situation?

XXII

THE DEEP DEPRAVITY OF OUR RESPECTABLE FAULTS

Men check their own growth by self-imitation. Now, inasmuch as

each self exists in and through reciprocity with other selves,

self-imitation becomes a criss-cross of copyings. This mutual imitation

of one another is “respectability.”

Every healthy-minded person desires, of course, to have the approval

of his fellows, and to be worthy of their approval. And this is no

insignificant thing, for sharing, or universalizing, is of the essence

of reason. But reason makes its characteristic slip; when individuals

reciprocally approve one another, they forthwith generalize the basis

of their judgment, whatever this basis is, and the generalization

becomes a social fence with an inside and an outside. Our judgment may

soundly represent a situation and a value, yet for this very reason we

may fancy that we have reached the summit of a social mountain when we

have merely come to a turn in the trail.

The momentum of a gyroscope can be given, in fact, to practically any

way of accommodating ourselves to one another. The assent that “was”

then becomes an assent that “ought to be.” Reciprocal approvals are

now funded and they become a vested interest of the stockholders. The

stockholders, in the fashion of our latest corporations, do not even

vote their stock--they merely draw dividends.

Two results follow: First, the ethical perspective that is required by

free and growing minds is lost. The trivialities of respectability,

when we look at them from the outside (as in the satirical novel and

drama), are amazing. I am reminded of an incident in a college. A

member of a sorority, being asked why one of the students who had been

“rushed” had not been initiated, replied, “Well, at our ‘rushing party’

we had squab on toast, and she ate the toast, evidently not knowing any

better. So we didn’t elect her. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere,

you know.”

The reverse side to respectability’s over-sensitiveness to trifles

is frequent insensibility to master-values, as the work of creative

thinkers, artists, saviors of mankind. Such work does not bestow

respectability.

And not only is perspective lost; there supervenes a kind of blindness.

Respectability means sanctioning conduct that is unfitted to new

conditions that have now arrived, and condemning conduct that is. It

means not seeing, or slurring over, or hushing up facts that could

not stand the light of critical analysis. There is a self-excusing

that produces a self-blinding that is worse for the world than

straightforward badness. Respectability connotes the constricted mind,

the involved and indirect mind, the self-deceived mind.

These are the reasons why dramatists can so easily make unconventional

badness seem superior to conventional goodness. The recipe is

simple: Place upon one side of the stage a typical conformist whose

respectability is as easily read as a wayside billboard; a man who is

orthodox in business, in politics, and in religion, and in excellent

standing among his associates; whose virtues are stereotyped and

stamped with the appreciation of his set, and whose faults are ignored,

or camouflaged, or possibly praised in the restricted circle in which

he moves. Over against him place a person without social standing,

a creature of strong and unconcealed natural impulses who is free

from scruples, over-caution, and self-deception; one who is just his

natural, uncalculating self. This turns the trick, and the audience

applauds. Why does it applaud? Few of its members could tell you, and

the psychoanalyst has only a fraction of the truth when he explains

that our repressed instincts have release and go on a picnic through

subtle self-identification with the character upon the stage. There is

also gladness in having the way cleared for re-thinking, the acceptance

of an invitation to judge basically, a feeling of liberation, not into

unbridled instinct, but into a fresh effort at rational objectivity.

A woman who had been reared in a “protected” and conventional way,

never guessing that she might think for herself, experienced in mature

life an intellectual awakening that took the direction of extreme

revolt against all orthodoxies, moral axioms included. She declared

that she did not feel a need for God; was happier without any belief

in him; and that she had rejected the whole notion of moral laws.

“But,” she added, “I believe in being decent!” She had not reverted to

irrational impulse; she was endeavoring to let reason retrieve errors

that arose through reason.

That membership in a circle of the respectable sometimes assists in

hiding evil so gross that respectability itself would be shocked by

it need not be urged, for it is merely incidental. The more important

faults are the commonplace ones--the ones that are common because they

spring directly from the process that founds respectable society. Here

they are:

1--Respectability is the standardization of compromises by using them

as precedents. Compromising is, of course, not the same as discovering

either truth or righteousness; it is at best a detour over a temporary

and perishable bridge. Its service lies in keeping us peaceable or

cooperative in spite of disagreements; its goal is not to repeat itself

endlessly, but to fade into a no-compromise because we have come out

into clear light. When we make compromise the standard procedure, then

we sanctify our defects and bestow upon them capacity for unlimited

progeny.

2--Respectability measures conduct in terms of the average performance,

the average praise and blame, or the average acquiescent silence, of

a limited society, instead of directly evaluating the consequences

of an act for all the persons concerned. Conventional standards are

not useless, of course, but they lack full ethical objectivity, and

for this reason they can conceal as well as reveal. I can be “honest”

in a transaction that is cruel; I can obey all the ten commandments

and yet lack the one essential thing. Because the standards of

respectability are not derived from the consequences of conduct to all

persons concerned, but only some, it comes about that, without losing

self-respect or forfeiting caste, respectable men as a fact do share in

acts that result in nearly every form of inhumanity.

3--Respectability, fixing an artificial horizon-line for social

fellowship, prevents us from knowing either ourselves or human nature

in the large. We cannot know ourselves or others by merely noting

how we respond to one another in a club or clique. Many a hitherto

conventional individual has found liberation and enlargement by

fishing with an illiterate guide, riding with a cow-puncher, attending

a meeting of radicals, doing social work in the slums, or getting

acquainted with criminals or harlots. Between Jesus and such persons

there was no barrier of respectability, as, on the opposite side, he

had no prejudice towards persons of wealth, power, or culture. When

church membership connotes respectability, let the church beware!

Its Master did not belong to the respectable classes. The deep

danger here is retardation of spiritual growth followed by fixation,

self-complacency, and the use of one’s power against the influences

that make for a broader, more humane life.

4--Coordinate with this encysting of our ethical capacities is the

habit, almost universal in respectable circles, of shunting the

blame for the evils of the world to other classes of society. Even

in America, where we have made so large a beginning of trust in the

common man, it has been customary to assume that the main danger to

the republic inheres in the “lower classes,” which term denotes now

the uneducated, now the unpropertied, now the hand-workers, now the

immigrants, now the discontented.

The fact is that every major peril that we have encountered has had

its seat “above” the “lower classes.” Sectionalism, slavery, political

partizanship, corrupt politics, a depraved civil service, dominance

of government by the money power--these do not spring from the less

privileged classes, however much these classes may have been used by

leaders. If, as common opinion has it, civil government reaches its

lowest level in our cities, the reason is found, not in the character

of the masses of city dwellers, but in the forces that organize them,

use them, and exploit them for profit or for the advancement of a

political party and the financial interests back of it.

There are just two ways in which those designated as the “lower

classes” might become the means of our undoing: Some of “the interests”

which have respectable standing might persuade, deceive, wheedle,

or inflame them into the support of some evil that they could not

originate; or, long-continued injustice and repression might lead to an

explosion. No significant explosion of the classes in question will be

brought about in any other way. In other words, what makes the “lower

classes” dangerous, as far as they are dangerous, is the respectable

classes.

The depravity of our respectable thinking upon social and political

interests shows itself, thus, in the actual (though, of course,

unintended) meanness of blaming others where we ourselves deserve

the blame, and even of attributing to others the evils that we cause

through them when we use them for our own ends.

5--Nothing is more characteristic of respectability than its habit

of finding exalted reasons for justifying conventional conduct,

whatever it is. High ground for our conventional domestic conduct is

found in the unalterable nature of the sexes, or in a trust committed

by society, or in some ancient scripture. Reason for unlimited

profit-getting is found by manufacturing psychology to order (the

pseudo-psychology of the motives for enterprise), and in the old,

comfortable middle-class self-sophistication that asserts that private

selfishness is the best way to serve the common good. In ecclesiastical

matters we have been much pushed in later years to find divinely good

reasons for our customary conformities, such as saying in worship what

we do not mean; keeping straight faces in the presence of small men

arrayed in large historical and institutional dignities; supporting a

denominationalism that we say we deplore, and excusing an evangelism

that obviously needs an explanation. We are put to it to place all

these things within a system of rational thought, but we manage

to do it, though it takes some culture to accomplish the feat. In

education--I speak from the inside--it is positively funny how many

old and creaky things, and how few new things can be justified by mere

guesses.

This respectable habit of finding that we always are in every respect

respectable makes it next to impossible for us to repent for even the

deeper wrongs of conventional social practice. Even the harlots, Jesus

declared, enter the Kingdom of Heaven before those who could give

twenty reasons why harlots cannot get in at all.

All this separatism, evasion, and self-sophistication leads on with

entire naturalness to the habit of reliance upon authority and finally

upon force. Respectability never quite commits the adjudication

of its interests to open ethical thinking. It regards its case as

already closed. In other words, it claims for itself a privileged

position for which the only remaining defence is force in one form

or another--economic force, partizan laws, ostracism, defamation,

blacklisting, the denial of freedom of speech, war. All these are,

in fact, appropriate once the main assumption has been accepted, and

consistency is a virtue, is it not? Hence it is that these acts, some

of which are positively base and not merely muddle-headed, do not

produce self-condemnation among good people. So depraved can our

respectable faults finally become! This is not the hardness, of course,

of minds that see themselves as they are and yet do not blush; it is

still worse than this, for it is the hardness of the paralyzed nerve,

the hardness of the eye that sends no light to the intelligence, the

hardness of a blocked intelligence that closes the heart to its proper

world.

Socrates maintained that to do wrong knowingly is not as bad as to do

it ignorantly.

XXIII

EVEN OUR PASSIONS ARE PRECEDENT-RIDDEN

The problem with which we are wrestling is, How account for the low

average performance of beings as highly endowed as ourselves? The usual

explanation--that we are made up of two natures, a higher and rational

one, and a lower and irrational one--turns out not to explain, for

neither an unmixed lower nature nor an unmixed higher nature can be

anywhere discerned.

A wide vista into the sources of our trouble opened, however, when we

inspected reason, the discriminating and thinking function, not in

abstraction or as an ideal, but in operation as a guide to behavior.

We behold it saving us, indeed, from utter rawness and brutish fixity

by analysis that indefinitely enlarges the range of selection within

experience; but at the same time we discovered that it customarily

stumbles over its own products, checks its own progress, and becomes

an instrument of the very rawness that it should leave behind. This

difficulty we found to be inherent in reason as such because thinking

depends upon memory, and thought-guided conduct upon precedents.

Precedents are necessary to thought-guided action, but they imprison

us, especially through the social process, wholesome and necessary as

this is.

It must not be supposed that we are handicapped by a down-pulling

lower nature plus a lag in our higher nature. What we have found is

a hesitation that spreads through the whole range of functions as

far as they are human at all. This truth is two-edged. It means not

only that our reason is never, in practice, completely pure, but also

that the instinctive or impulsively raw “factors” in behavior never

can be isolated, and therefore never are factors in the strict sense

but only abstracted aspects. They are as abstract as “pure reason.” A

few examples will show that even our passions are precedent-ridden,

and that the control of them has to be effected by manipulating this

thought-factor. Even in the region of ourselves that is commonly called

lower, both the down-drag and the up-push inhere in the rationality

that we regard as our distinguishing mark. If this truth conduces to

modesty, it justifies also hope, for it means that even in our passions

we discriminate occasions and reach after rational selection.

That precedents guide even our passions is not quite the same as

saying that all emotional responses become “conditioned” after the

first instance of them in infancy. Precedents arise through analysis,

discrimination, and comparison, not automatically, and they can be

changed and dethroned by the same process that creates them.

Let us turn, now, to a few illuminating examples. By the “passions” we

are to understand such emotional eagernesses as anger, malice, revenge,

jealousy, greed, lust; and we are to take the most volcanic of them,

anger and lust, as objects of our especial scrutiny. The question is,

Is there a thought-determined selection of the occasions upon which

each shall dominate the individual’s conduct, of the object towards

which action shall be directed, of the form that action shall take, and

of the distance it shall go? Are there fashions here as well as in our

appreciations of art and of religion?

Does anger arise from the same provocations and run the same course

in a club, upon a college campus, among workmen in a factory, between

“society people,” between an employer and his employe, a teacher and

a pupil, close friends, business competitors? Evidently not. If my

friend craftily grabs the good things in sight and leaves me in the

lurch, I am affronted; but not if my business competitor does the same

thing. When a teacher corrects a pupil’s error, all remains serene, but

when a pupil corrects a teacher’s error we cannot be so sure of calm

weather. If one of my society acquaintances spills hot tea upon me, I

am more likely to pity him than to be angry with him; but suppose that

a waiter in a restaurant spills anything on me! What would be an insult

in a club or on the golf links is only bluff geniality among workmen,

or coltishness among college students. One of the most astonishing

instances of the control of primitive feelings by a social precedent,

preliminary practice being entirely lacking, may be seen in hazings and

initiations among collegians.

So sensitive is anger to its setting within a system of ideas.

Moreover, the particular expressions of it, when it does arise, are

almost purely conventional. Whether one shall stiffen up in haughty

silence and stare at the offender; speak a frigid word; utter a hot

epithet; swear; or deliver a fisticuff, or a challenge to a duel

depends upon already accepted notions as to what is appropriate in the

given social setting. The object towards which it is directed, also,

is often thought-selected. If I get “hot” when a dining-car waiter

serves my roast and potato cold I may “roast” either the waiter, the

cook, the steward, or the railroad company. It appears to have been

a custom of ancient potentates to punish messengers who brought bad

news, but we esteem ourselves fortunate if our newsgatherers tell the

truth whether or not it pains us. If some Chinese, out of patience at

our delay in the revocation of the unequal treaties, insult and abuse

or kill some of our nationals, our resentment will flame, according to

our thought-habits, against the Chinese who did the act, against the

Chinese people, or against our own officials who were dilatory about

removing an irritation.

How far anger shall go, once it gets started, is likewise largely

a matter of social tradition. In some circles of society, physical

chastisement for provoking conduct is entirely proper, and it is

administered then and there; in other circles, this so far offends

good form that it scarcely occurs at all. Though knocking a man down

for an insulting word may be applauded, kicking a man when he is down

is the act of a “mucker.” “Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go

down upon your wrath.” That is, though a sudden and temporary burst of

this passion be excusable, the nursing of wrath is not. Yet there are

populations in which the nursing of wrath until revenge can be had is

the mark of a man.

Even lust is guided by thought-out distinctions. With one individual

it acts within wedlock and stops there; with another it acts towards

courtesans, but despises seduction; with still others it permits

seduction of girls of other races or of a different social class,

but not girls of one’s own class and race; and all these differences

between men depend very largely upon the male company one keeps. That

is, lust acts by code. Moreover, every permission that any of these

codes grants is accompanied by prohibitions also; at every level

distinctions are made between better and worse, and customs of regard

for the better actually prevail.

The passions that sway men in masses are similarly obedient to

precedents. You cannot account for lynchings by naming human instincts,

nor by this plus a description of the crimes that lynchers seek to

avenge, nor yet by adding a color-contrast between lynchers and

lynched. Who is to be lynched, by whom, upon what provocation, and by

what method depends upon a set of discriminated ideas already present

when the provocation occurs. An acquaintance of mine tells me that,

being in the vicinity of a town where this summary procedure was

threatened, he took means to ascertain just what was done. In this

instance--it is doubtless an extreme one, but it is none the less

instructive--the populace assembled at a prearranged hour and without

tumult; prayer was offered; the victim was calmly hanged from a bridge,

and his body was riddled with bullets; after which, this business

being attended to, the crowd went about its other business. If most

lynchings are less orderly, they nevertheless are ruled by the same

sort of traditions; see how alike these crimes are, and how unruffled

the surrounding populace can remain.

It should scarcely be necessary to say how conventionalized are the

passions that make nations fight one another. Like the personal-honor

code of the duelist is diplomacy’s schedule of the degrees of

possible offensiveness in the conduct of other nations and their

representatives, with a parallel column for appropriate ways of

resenting each sort of disagreeableness. And the extreme mode of

resentment, war, has a definite place in this code. Nations do not wait

to be hurtled into war by explosions of popular wrath. The matter is

much more in the control of reason than this. War-making is one of

the legally recognized functions of the state, and all the necessary

machinery--from secretaries of war to a supply of gas-masks--is kept

constantly on hand. How odd it is that the people as a rule think of

wars, even modern wars, as calamities that, like a tornado or a tidal

wave, just happen, or as a horror that “bad” nations thrust upon

“good” ones. Wars occur, just as fisticuffs or shootings occur among a

frontier populace, and just as measured words of resentment are spoken

where culture prevails, namely, as an expression of the recognized

system for dealing with situations of certain sorts. There is nothing

inevitable about any of them.

When an individual follows the social code of resentment from a

sense of duty rather than from hot passion, we find the situation

amusing. But when a people that does not desire to fight is governed

by officials that do, then occurs the most remarkable, as it is also

the most tragic, example of the actual relation between passion and

precedent. The populace must now be worked up into a mood that will

impel them to kill and to do it with a clear conscience. And how

is the war-passion, in fact, aroused? By bringing the proposed or

already-declared war under some appropriate precedent or precedents.

Farmers and grocers, say, have not kept up with international events

sufficiently to know what the friction is all about, or which side is

right if either side is, or what probability there is that war will set

things right; but they won’t submit to a foreign invader or oppressor,

they love their country and its traditions, and they hate the

ruthlessness that ravishes women, and starves and mutilates children

and wounded soldiers. So, it is

“Fight for your altars and your fires;

Fight for the green graves of your sires,

God and your native land!”

The whole scheme of war-propaganda consists in inducing people to

classify another country, or a foreign leader, or events under

appropriate headings. So precedent-ridden is the passion that has rent

the world asunder and now threatens to destroy it.

The struggle to control and guide any of our passions, or if need be

to cause them to atrophy from disuse, must be directed chiefly to

current assumptions, types of thought, social standards, and customary

classifications. This is one reason why the world cannot be saved by

rescuing individuals one by one from their evil ways. While we are

rebuilding one individual in this way, social precedents are stamping

themselves upon ten children. It follows that the reconstructive work

of religion and of education must be done chiefly by discrediting

currently accepted precedents and causing a rethinking of the

alternatives.

XXIV

FREE MEN FEAR THEIR FREEDOM. WHY?

Our fathers gave their all that we might be free, but we are abashed

by the bequest that they have left us. We are abashed, not by the

moral grandeur, the holiness, of our inheritance, nor by the height of

the obligations with which it endows us, but by apprehension that the

inside of it may not be as fair as the outside. We decorate ourselves

with the name and the glory of free men; they grace our historic

records and our festal occasions; but in our daily conduct we accept

the functions of free men with reservations. We are “judicious,” as we

call it.

The paradox of liking and disliking freedom at the same time is not

a superficial one; it is deep in our nature; it is an apparently

inevitable seesaw in our motives. There is in our endowment something

so grand that ordinary men accept any privation in preference to

comfortable slavery. So majestic is the mind of man when it is

aroused that no pain that our fellows can inflict counterbalances the

value of uncoerced thinking and speaking. We know that this freedom,

with all the risks and burdens that it entails, is fundamental to

every great thing that humanity has done in the modern period.

Milton’s _Areopagitica_ and the First Amendment of the Constitution

of the United States are flags upon the mountain peaks of history.

Nevertheless, the meaning of every achieved enfranchisement is in

practice toned down by the enfranchised themselves, and in consequence

even our old and taken-for-granted liberties have continually to be

rewon.

The sincerity of this cautiousness is not to be questioned. For we are

apprehensive not only that social classes other than our own, and other

individuals (as, the young) will fail to “make a wise use of freedom,”

but that we ourselves shall fail to do so. We are on guard against our

own enjoyment of powers and prerogatives that nevertheless we highly

esteem. Father and mother, instead of being eager to confer freedom

upon their child as rapidly as possible, make it their policy to shield

him as long as possible from the dangers of freedom; and in accord

with this policy they measure the correctness of their own conduct

in the presence of children by its restraints, not by its resistance

of restraints. Teachers, likewise, from the elementary school to the

college, are as a rule engaged in putting upon young spirits a yoke

made by others instead of assisting pupils to make harnesses of their

own. It is regarded as an achievement of good teaching when pupils are

kept happy and active in the process of being yoked to precedents. And

teachers themselves are an ensample to their flock. If there is anybody

in the world who, under a régime of freedom, should be characterized by

constant unfixing of precedents, it is the teacher, but it is safe to

guess that not one person in a thousand could name an instance of it in

any school.

If we were to judge religion by its great creative periods, we should

perhaps say that the religious leader, even more than the teacher,

should be a dyed-in-the-wool user of freedom. But, obviously, the fear

of a flexible faith is greater, except at crisis-points in religious

history, than the fear that faith may become stereotyped, mechanical,

and dead. In nearly all ecclesiastical folds, if not in all of them,

it is assumed that no clergyman “of good judgment” will use all

the liberty that the constitution and the laws of his denomination

permit. There is an unwritten law of repression within the written

guarantees of liberty. Many years ago a Catholic professor was asked

whether the advice of the Pope upon a certain point in education was

an _ex cathedra_, officially authoritative, pronouncement. “No,” said

the professor, “but we obey it just as if it were.” A passage from

John Wesley concerning the Virgin Birth was submitted to a Methodist

Episcopal bishop with the question whether this--the source not being

named--was a view of the matter fit for a Methodist. The bishop’s reply

was an emphatic negative. Upton Sinclair trapped a ministers’ meeting

by reading a fresh translation of the denunciation of rich men in the

Epistle of James and attributing the words to Emma Goldman. Most of

the ministers thought that such utterances justified putting her into

prison.

If we drew our presumptions from history, we should assume that, in

every area of church life, what is now going on is partly valid and

partly not; and believers in the _status quo_ and disbelievers in it

would discuss each question upon a plane of friendly equality. But

they do not meet as equals; the freedom to repeat our thoughts is, so

to say, greater than the freedom to do fresh thinking. Note how many

liberals strive, as far as honesty permits, to make it appear that they

are not radical nor anything more than progressively orthodox. That is

to say, it is taken for granted that something has the precedence of

real freedom. Churchmen have no such fear of their past as the facts

warrant; their fears always prick up ears towards anything that is in

any significant way novel. Was ever a minister brought to trial for

backwardness of mind, or for obstructing the freedom of others? And

did the acceptance or rejection of any candidate for the ministry ever

hinge upon whether he was sufficiently liberty-loving to guard the

guarantees of freedom in the church constitution? The fears are on the

other side, and there the defenders of the faith patrol their beat.

As for individual ministers who believe in real freedom yet submit to

the informal censorship of church opinion, it is by no means necessary

to suppose that they sell their silence for place or salary, though the

spiritual peril here is immeasureable. Some of them, without doubt, by

their really large and just-permitted variations from the ordinary,

are helping to keep alive the tradition of freedom. On the other hand,

what shall be said of those who, though they believe in freedom in

the abstract, are convinced that, if it is not actually a subordinate

interest of the spirit, at least it can better afford postponement than

other interests? It is fair to say that they lay it away in a napkin.

I should not like to have these remarks add force to the common opinion

that religious institutions are inherently more repressive than

others. This opinion is at least a grave exaggeration. It forgets the

glorious chapters in religious history that record the identification

of faith with the bursting of bonds--ecclesiastical, political, social,

intellectual, ethical. It forgets, too, the character of our secular

institutions. Let us look at a few of them.

Within the tradition of academic freedom, exactly as within

ecclesiastical practice, there exists an unwritten law of abstention.

It restrains professors and administrators alike, though at different

points. Not all professors or all administrators, of course, but the

great mass of them. Self-restriction expresses itself in solicitude

for “the standing of the institution”; in the professor’s choice of

his field for research and publication; in acute tenderness for the

immature judgment of students (most of them either in possession of

the ballot or about to reach their majority); in the censorship of

student publications that criticize the social and educational _status

quo_; in decisions as to what speakers may be heard upon the campus;

in the use of the term “good judgment” or its opposite when variant

professors are attacked; in the selection and promotion of members of

the staff; in the budget; in consciousness of the legislature at state

institutions, and in consciousness of the donor at others; finally, in

the development of the present dominant type of college and university

administration. If we compare state institutions with privately endowed

ones in these matters, we do not discover any great difference. The

same scale, from overt repression, through tacit abstention, to

courageous championship of real freedom, is found filled up by both,

and institutions representing the religious motive have no distinctive

place of their own upon this scale. Fear to use academic freedom is

not a mark of either religious or secular institutions; it is merely

academic! In short, real freedom for the mind is as much a problem

in our day as in that of Galileo. It is the subject-matter that has

changed.

Not that hypocrisy is in the academic saddle. No; our trouble is the

confusion that arises from sincerely believing in freedom but also

sincerely fearing it. This is why technicalities of procedure play so

large a rôle; this is the reason why so much depends upon judicious

silence. It is because we are not quite at one with ourselves in our

own souls that what might be the lusty exercise of our powers of

variation becomes merely the absence of certain external restraints.

Fear puts us on the defensive; whereupon, quietly reducing the points

of possible attack appears to be a dictate of practical wisdom.

The handling of freedom in our legal system is not a whit more daring

than in our ecclesiastical and educational institutions. It is not

customary to construe particular laws in the spirit of an expanding

liberty; nor do courts, as a rule, endeavor to get at the core of

justice, ethically considered. The technical theory of their function

is that they are umpires between litigants, responsible merely for

seeing that contests are conducted according to prescribed rules.

In fact, and of course, courts are and must be more than this; they

cannot be merely automatic appliers of laws and precedents. We do not

impugn the integrity of judges if we say that they cannot help being

influenced in their decisions by their understanding of the world in

which they live, and also by their own appreciation of values in life,

in society, in law and government. It was no statutory obligation, but

his chosen use of the discretion allowed him that gave its noteworthy

character to Judge Thayer’s conduct of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. In

the celebrated contest over a sweat-shop law in the State of New York,

it was a belated outlook upon industrial changes that dictated the

first decision of the Court of Appeals, and a changed outlook that

brought about the reversal of it. Appointments to the supreme bench

of the United States are not made upon the basis of ability, probity,

and experience alone; the appointing power has regard also to social

attitudes. The subsequent votes of appointees cannot be accounted for

without recognizing the influence of these attitudes.

All this has been pointed out again and again. The purpose of saying

it once more is to raise the question why courts do not more often

give the weight of their discretion to the expansive use of freedom?

Why do not judges openly and frankly avow the principles that control

them when they perform discretionary acts? Why minimize the fact that

discretion is used and that thereby something new under the sun might

be brought to birth? Consider the often-cited treatment of “freedom of

contract.” Since coercion takes new forms in our changing society, it

was inevitable that real freedom of contract should move its old line

fences. But how timid the legal and judicial mind has been toward the

plain fact, and how reluctant to draw the necessary inference. Timidity

counsels, “Make no new precedents.” The short of it is that here is the

same fear of freedom that we found in parents, clergymen, teachers,

professors, and college administrators.

Even the specific guarantees of freedom that we have incorporated

into our organic law do not get themselves enforced with the

simple directness that should mark real faith in them. Liberty of

speech, of press, of assemblage, and of domiciliary privacy, as

liberty was understood and intended by the framers of our scheme of

self-government, is boldly invaded in several of our states by the

police, the executive arm, and the legislatures. And the courts comply,

as they surely would not do if the mental climate were to change. Now,

it is especially interesting to note that the police never stop a

meeting of jingoes and fire-eaters even though they advocate illegal

violence; that no legislature has attempted to put a check upon

those who would subvert the constitution by suppression of freedom;

that those who actually have interfered with the constitutional

liberties of others go unpunished; and that a Department of Justice

that keeps a wary eye upon pacifists is untroubled when beliefs and

policies like the following are blazoned: That force is the ultimate

arbiter in human affairs; that our government must act accordingly;

that we should enforce our economic self-interest against our weaker

neighbors regardless of their liberties; that there is an inevitable

clash between our self-interest and that of other great powers

(sometimes named), and that we must fight these powers, not relying

upon conciliation, arbitration, or anything else that signifies that

humanity is capable of growing towards rationality in its conduct.

The paradox of all this deepens towards the ridiculous or the

tragic when one discovers that these men who despitefully use the

constitutional guarantees are fervid worshippers of the Constitution,

and firm believers that the founders, who based their policy upon

trust in human nature, made the greatest political discovery of all

ages, a discovery that is destined to bless the whole world! Here is

intellectual hara-kiri. Asked to explain it, those who practice it

tell us sincerely that they believe in freedom as an everyday method

of getting along; it is only when we get into a pinch, when vital

interests are at stake, or when freedom is abused, that suppression is

required. What deep distrust is this! The freedom that cost our fathers

so dearly precisely because it applied to the major and contested

concerns of society now becomes a convenience in handling small affairs

but is of no use in emergencies.

In all these mixings-up of faith and unfaith in our supposably achieved

liberties one can discern a foundation-issue in our philosophy of life.

The whole universe of our experience--the solid earth, the sea, the

sky, the past and present of society, the achievements of science,

the devices and desires of the heart, the inspiring faiths--all this

confronts us with the question, What do you really want, and how much

will you dare on behalf of it? Our answer involves our assessment

of our own selfhood. Usually the alternatives for our enterprise

are, on the one hand, increasing or stabilizing some conventional

and comfortable function, or, on the other hand, reaching after an

unconventional blessing that costs the pain of self-reconstruction. We

cannot have brotherhood, democracy, industrial justice, world-peace,

_or freedom_ at a lower cost than this. Shall we, then, experiment,

explore, adventure in the area of selfhood as we are doing at the

present moment in the sky? Can the mind, as well as the body, support

itself in a less dense medium than that in which it has moved in the

past?

The scientific movement has made us daring in the realm of ponderables

but not with respect to ourselves. Pure science seeks only one

value, that of knowing the connections of things; its one interest

in personality is that scientific method should be employed; its one

interest in freedom is this. In our academic institutions a spiritually

delicate sensitivity at this point may be joined with indifference to

freedom in the other essays of man. A kind of daring different from

that of the laboratory or even of polar exploration is required if we

are to cast off the moorings of an old selfhood and voyage forth in

search of new spiritual continents.

Further, the scientific spirit can be and often is inattentive to the

life-values or dis-values that are promoted by the application of its

discoveries. The uncriticized purposes of the present, accordingly,

have unobstructedly capitalized on their own static behalf our

enormously increased power over nature. Indeed, these purposes,

because they use new and shining machinery, have actually acquired

something of the éclat of the sciences. A current writer, according

to an announcement that has appeared since this chapter was begun,

declares that science has actually been accepted as a sort of messiah,

deliverer, or solver of life’s final problems--a rôle for which it is

totally unqualified.[8] The obverse of this attitude toward science is

inertia toward the values that science as such does not feel.

The weight of precedent is, indeed, on the side of force, not of

cooperative thinking, as the arbiter of human relations; it is on

the side of class privilege, not of democracy; of repression, not of

liberty. But always the light shines in this darkness, though the

darkness comprehend it not. For nobody wants sheer force, nobody

approves all that class-selfishness implies, everybody believes (after

a fashion) in liberty even though with contradictory restrictions.

The picture is that of a world of personal selves in evolution. If,

in any species that belongs to an evolutionary order, thought mixes

with desire; if self-guidance arrives at all, these paradoxical

inconsistencies are bound to occur. The present satisfaction, once

thought about, is certain to resist any and every not-yet-experienced

good. There always will be trepidation when the half-gods go.

But, wherever thought and desire do mix, there occurs the process

of emancipation from authority; freedom is the very soul of moral

evolution. We see why it is feared; but need it be? Is it not possible

to devise a technic for freedom whereby we shall be somewhat less

inconsistent, somewhat less distrustful of one another, somewhat more

wisely venturesome in the realm of selfhood?

XXV

THE MOTIVES OF YOUTH COMPARED WITH THOSE OF AGE

The problem of freedom and restraint, of impulse and reason, of the

real nature of human motive forces, comes far to the fore today in

world-wide perplexity over the present restlessness of youth. Our

young people won’t “stay put.” Many of them refuse to postpone life’s

satisfactions--“they want theirs now.” A few are asking the critical

questions, wherein life’s greater satisfactions consist, and whether

our present ways of life lead toward them. On all hands there is a

loosening of the bonds that tie the present to the past; the face of

youth is towards the future, whether the next evening or the next

century. Here, accordingly, is an unparalleled opportunity to “see the

wheels go ’round” in human conduct. Here is life only a step removed

from naïveté; and here is a display, side by side, of inexperienced

youth and experienced age.

Perhaps it would not be misleading to say inexperienced youth with

“the lid off,” and experienced age with “the lid on.” What, then, are

the main differences between them in point of motivation? The usual

answer is simplicity itself--that is, the answer usually given by

experienced age. These youngsters are carried away, we are told, by

“the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life”--to

use an ancient phrase for pleasure-seeking instincts; whereas--so the

assumption runs--we oldsters are guided by a rationality that governs

our instincts and keeps them in their place. Most persons of maturity

are sure that, in the by and large, experience brings wisdom, that the

rules and precedents that the mature observe are dictates of practiced

reason, and therefore that youths who do not follow substantially in

our footsteps act irrationally, and thereby subject themselves to the

penalties of rashness.

This view of the matter contains a grain of truth, of course, but

only a grain. A burnt child does dread the fire, but a child with a

stomachache does not dread the unwholesome food that produced it.

“Experience” at the dining-room table often results in wrong dietary

habits that even maturity regards as right. “Experience” as a parent

can fix upon the mind the most futile and injurious conceptions of

parental authority--it has done so in multitudes of cases. “Experience”

as a teacher fastened upon us a kind of school-teaching that we are

now struggling, with enormous effort, to free ourselves from. So, in

statecraft, in churchcraft, in industrial and economic relations, in

social customs, we oldsters are dragging about with us a terrible

weight of unnecessary and injurious habit and precedent. In fact,

experience has brought us, along with some wisdom, a lot of unwisdom

which it has baptized with the sanctity of our years.

Accumulation of experience or of years is not of great inherent

significance; neither is the lack of years. What is important is the

way in which we deal with experiences as they arise. This is the

problem for age and youth alike, and here is the basis for the most

useful approach to the youth-question. It is not enough to say that in

childhood and adolescence instinctive impulses are more varied and

more clamorous; nor have we said enough when we add to this that in our

day there is an unusually wide cleft between the ways of the young and

the ways of the old. The really important comparison is that between

the characteristic technic of the young and of the old in the making

and the unmaking of approved precedents.

When we make this comparison, what do we find? On the side of age we

find man measuring himself by his own past, mechanizing the wisdom

of yesterday so that it cannot grow through today’s experiences,

making his own imperfections into virtues. We behold, consequently,

accumulations of property, of personal and institutional influence, and

even of scientific knowledge bolstering customs and standards after

they have become plainly questionable. If we of the older generation

had the grit to be historically, psychologically, and ethically

realistic towards ourselves, we should see the irony of our position.

We have a timid wisdom, a self-restricting wisdom, a pseudo-wisdom, for

we have no adequate technic for getting out of new experiences what

they could teach us, nor for graduating from precedents whose teaching

is already completed.

When the Disciples asked, “Who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?”

Jesus set a small child in the midst, saying, “Except ye become as

little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

On the other hand--what a paradox! who is more unwilling than an

adolescent to become as a little child? Are modern youths very ready to

learn? This is the test for them, and when they prove that they are in

the attitude of learning, they must next show whether they will take

the trouble to acquire a technic for learning. We say that youth is

forward-reaching; it thinks in terms of the future. But in what sense

is this true? Most commonly in the sense of aspiration to be classified

with adults and to enjoy their prerogatives. It does not usually mean a

stretching towards any unprecedented good. Youth sheds the precedents

of its own childhood only to adopt the precedents of those a little

older than itself! The “flapper” of fourteen gets herself up and

conducts herself as if she were eighteen at least; the boy of sixteen

wants to be “a man of the world” right now; almost any youth of twenty

can be relied upon to conform scrupulously to the customs of some

group, set, or type that, in his estimation, has “arrived.”

Heedlessness of precedents is not characteristic of youth. Youth is

avid for them. If satisfactory ones are not found in the generation

that is just ahead, any pleasant thing that happens twice is seized

upon and stereotyped. Placed in as free an environment as the modern

college campus, young people form rigidly conventional groupings

and adopt rigid campus customs. The average college student cannot

stand alone; he is a very bond-slave to social precedents; and he is

one of the most intolerant critics of those who are more individual

than himself. Even at the points where modern youths flout adult

conventions, other conventions quickly form. The very follies of

youth are conventionalized. Why the hip flask at dancing parties? Why

the present wave in the ancient stream of “petting” and “necking”?

Why is “jazz” for the time being the only music that is interesting?

Why Valentinitis? Doubtless the starting-point of each of them is a

particular situation that involves a stimulus or a deficiency, but

the rapid spread occurs through imitation and mutual suggestion; and

the self-accepted excuse or justification lies, not in the nature and

results of the act or the experience, but in the fact that it is the

conventional or expected thing.

The similarity between the ways of youth and the ways of age is

remarkable. Think of the money and the time that adults have spent in

the last ten years in order to listen to radio trash. Compare the silly

social compulsions of the college campus with the force that compels

everybody to stand whenever “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung or

played. Or compare, in point of mental process, young women’s adulation

of Valentino with mature men’s adulation of Coolidge. Does any fever of

modern youth reach a higher temperature than automobilitis among the

parents?

Moreover, just as it would be unfair to the present generation of

mature men and women to characterize it solely by such flightiness, so

we should do injustice to the young people of today if we judged them

by these shallow performances and conventionalities. For the opening of

eyes and the enlargement of horizons is as marked a fact as the other.

The new freedom assumed by the youth of today, the increase in spending

money, the widened range of activities made possible by machinery, and

the multiplication of attractive objects or experiences that can be had

for a money consideration--all these, taken together, stimulate thought

as well as instinct. They present alternatives, awaken conflicting

motives, make uncertainties vivid; all of which is favorable to

reflection. It is probable that even “jazzy” young people are doing

more thinking upon life’s alternatives than was done by the average

youths of yesterday. Many who appear to be blown hither or thither by

popular folly are really experimenting, watching, putting limits to

their indulgences, endeavoring to be ethically realistic; all of which

should be reassuring to those of us who are able to trust the human

mind when it is awake and at work.

Furthermore, from a minority of youths, very modern youths, there

flash forth upon our distraught world some of the most hopeful signs.

I refer not so much to the impulsive idealism of some, so strongly

contrasting with the frivolity of others, as to the union of critical

thinking with sober idealism that appears in spots all over the world.

Let the conventional self-flattery of maturity take heed to itself,

for “a chiel’s amang ye, takin’ notes” upon our efficiencies and

inefficiencies. The most effective critics of modern life are not

Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, but younger spirits who possess

both a scientific attitude of inquiry and an idealism that is not

tired or sour. In the colleges such youngsters are engaged not only in

“de-bunking” the customs of both faculties and students but also in

thinking out something better.

To the credit of the older generation be it here recorded that

various presidents and faculties are welcoming this critical scrutiny

by much younger heads. Before me, for example, lies an official

college bulletin that consists of a report by a student committee

upon the curriculum, the teaching, and other official affairs of the

institution. Similarly, there is a stirring in the churches. Young

people are holding conventions in which they ask such questions

and propose such measures as have not proceeded from youth at any

time within the memory of men now living, if ever. And again it is

remarkable to see how much of their freshness is welcomed by the older

generation.

There is danger, indeed, that the hospitality of adult minds will

divert these younger minds from their journey of exploration.

Palliatives will be sought for in situations that require a drastic

study of causes. Cooperation in a respectable good will postpone

appraisement of the limitations of it. The lack of experience on the

part of thinking young people, together with their sense of being at

official disadvantage as compared with their elders, makes them too

thankful for half-loaves where whole loaves are needed.

Youth’s rashness, and the perils that it involves, require closer

analysis than they ordinarily receive. The fault of the great majority

is precipitate acceptance of adult standards and ways of life. This is

youth’s most characteristic rashness. Here is a young workingman who

says that the “powers that be” are so strongly intrenched in the state

and in industry that his vote can make no difference; hence, he pursues

a policy of merely wriggling within his immediate environment so as to

get out of it what he can. Here is a high-school senior who declares

outright that the professed standards of adults do not represent the

forces whereby things get done; money and power _are_ the things that

count; the strong _do_ exploit the weak; this _is_ the road to success,

and he intends to walk in it. Here are multitudes of young men and

young women who are so rash as to accept the class-consciousness of

their parents as though it were self-evidently correct. And here are

myriads of members of church young-people’s societies who actually

regard the conventional religion about them as a fulfilment of Jesus’

double law of love. The great and deadly rashness of youth takes the

form of hasty acquiescence in things as they are or seem to be.

Of those who do not acquiesce, by far the larger number will be found

in the following classes: Those who make an idealistic spurt, but grow

tired, or become discouraged because of the inertness or the antagonism

of others; those who talk but do not act; those who act but are too

thankful for “small favors,” too gratified by minor improvements, to do

anything really fundamental; and those who, seeing this lag in things

fundamental, “give it up.” All these become swallowed up, in the end,

by the insatiable respectability of the _status quo_.

Radicalism, whether that of the mere skeptic, or that which discards

the good for the better and the better for the best, is not

characteristic of the young. There is only a small minority of thinking

youths who make any sustained effort to go to the bottom of things. Of

these there are three main types: The attackers, the appliers, and the

investigators.

The attackers turn life inside out in order to show how irrational

or futile the accepted order of things is. The working hypothesis

appears to be that whatever enjoys official power or general acceptance

is either misled or misleading. The results are, of course, one

sided, but they are not useless. Until our institutions provide for

self-criticism, they are bound to be victims of self-deception;

therefore they must be “shown up” again and again. Probably attack

is good, in the end, even for our valid convictions, because they

get tangled with what is temporary and merely specious. It is true,

of course, that these young attackers are, to a considerable extent,

imitators of the mature writers, mentioned in an earlier section, who

exploit our irrationality as a literary gold mine. There is, therefore,

a touch of conventionality and dependence in these would-be emancipated

youngsters. They should be listened to, however, because they are on

track of aspects of truth that are commonly overlooked.

The appliers are those who endeavor to go the whole length with some

approved principle, as, for example, Jesus’ injunction to treat all men

as brothers. This sort of endeavor, in turn, leads to a critique of

life not less drastic than that of the attackers, but more likely to be

patient and considerate towards our weaknesses. Moreover, the appliers

exhibit various attempts to govern their present conduct by exalted

standards for which the society about them is not ready. The service

of such youths is various. It reveals to us the disparity between the

pious phrases of our lips and our daily conduct in church, state, and

occupation. It presents many a living example of fidelity to an ideal.

It spreads the contagion of faith, making better things practicable

because we believe that they are so.

The third, or investigator, type of non-conventional youth goes behind

the appearance of things by intellectual processes that sometimes have

all the coolness of science. He must be “shown”; neither _ipse dixit_

nor general acquiescence satisfies him. What does the curriculum of

this college include and what does it omit, and why? What are the

most effective methods of teaching, and do our professors use them?

What are the real values of our extra-curricular activities? How are

our teachers chosen and promoted, and how much are they paid? Why do

we have religious denominations, creeds, missions, worship? What is

the truth about our international relations? What is the life of the

industrial worker like? How is “hiring and firing” done? I’ll get a

job and find out. What really is happening in Germany or Russia? Why

shouldn’t I go over there to see for myself? This sort of questioning

is growing, and it is bound to spread in colleges and high schools.

It is one of the most solidly hope-giving aspects of the entire youth

situation.

These three types of aggressive non-conformity overlap and blend,

of course. As a rule students of the investigator type are moved by

dissatisfaction with the _status quo_; they investigate in order

to find the road towards some ideal. Not seldom the applier type

discovers the fascination of social statistics and even of history. The

attacker, in turn, will usually be found working for specific reforms.

All three types make freedom their common cause--freedom to think

without fear of consequences; freedom to speak with sincerity upon

great issues; freedom to listen to speakers who represent disagreeable

minority positions; freedom to participate in the determination of the

conditions under which they shall live.

In these youths who really transcend conventions we have a hint of

what might be, what ought to be, the normal place of young people in

society. Yes--let me answer your doubt before you state it--there is

danger that, taking advantage of the questioning mood, the dissenting

mood, or the consciousness of freedom, wayward impulse will make the

worse appear the better reason. There is danger in asking questions,

but God took this risk when he created man; and by far the greater

danger is that we shall not ask questions enough, nor questions that

go deep enough. By far the greatest evil in the youth-life of today

is that so few young men and women find any antidote to the way men

imitate themselves and one another--any antidote, that is to say, to

the pseudo-wisdom of age.