DEGENERATION AND WILL
THE WILL MAY BE DEGENERATE—A COMMON-SENSE VIEW OF FREEDOM—BELIEF IN
ABSOLUTE FREEDOM NOT BENEFICIAL—EXPERIENCE MAY BREAK DOWN THE
WILL—IS TEMPTATION GOOD FOR US?—DEGENERACY IS BASED ON NORMAL
IMPULSES—“NATURAL DEPRAVITY”—THE CONSTRUCTIVE METHOD IN REFORM
The human will, I take it, is no separate faculty, but the whole mind
functioning as a guide to action, its power being shown in grasping the
material which life offers and moulding it to rational ends. A person
with a vigorous will shows an onward growth which is in great measure
foreseen and intentional; he forms ideals and strives to realize them.
It does not follow, however, that this striving is in a right direction.
The will, like every form of life, is tentative and may take a
degenerate course, that is, a course which the better moral judgment
will declare to be wrong. As we see will actually working, in
individuals, in nations, or in what form you please, it is a creative
power, to be sure, but uncertainly guided, feeling its way and liable to
err. We know that a boy may devote really first-rate powers to the
leadership of a pernicious gang, or a nation devote an admirable
organization to an unjust war.
We may, from this point of view, distinguish two types of degeneracy,
one a strong type, in which the will is vigorous, but at variance with
higher social standards, and a weak type, in which it is ineffectual,
though possibly directed toward the good. With the latter we are all
familiar, and it is perhaps more common than the other. Most of us who
fail to help the world along do so not because we do not mean well, but
because we lack force and persistency in well-doing.
As to freedom, I may say at once that I am no mechanist or
predestinationist, but believe that the human will, individual and
collective, an organic whole of onward life, is a true creative process,
whose working may perhaps be anticipated by the imagination, which
shares in its creative nature, but not by mere calculation. I do not
care, however, to discuss the metaphysics of the matter, but would wish
to present it in a common-sense way which would appeal to every one’s
observation.
If we consider fairly the question of what the will can actually do we
see that its strength, whatever our philosophy of it may be, is in fact
limited—though we cannot exactly define the limits—and is greater or
smaller according to our native force and the influences that help or
hinder us. Our freedom is not a power to escape from our history and
environment, but something that works along with these, enabling us to
do things original but not discontinuous. While I believe that the human
spirit is part of a creative onward whole, building up life to unknown
issues, I believe also that the growth of this whole is gradual and
connected.
The matter is not at all mysterious when you consider it in practice. Is
a man, for example, free to paint a good picture? We know that if he has
good natural gifts and lively ambition, has been trained in a good
school and inspired by great examples, he stands a good chance to do so;
but that if nature or circumstance has denied him any of these
essentials he stands little or no chance. History shows that good
pictures are never painted except when certain conditions concur. There
is nothing mystical about freedom in this case; it is just every-day
life.
The same principle applies to moral achievement. If we have a man of
natural energy and breadth of human sympathy whose experience has
afforded him noble suggestions and examples, we need not be astonished
at some exalted action; and if we know him intimately enough we shall be
able to trace some history of this action in his previous conduct. But
if he was born feeble-minded he cannot have large conceptions, and if
his associates have been wholly depraved—supposing that possible—his
conduct will share this depravity.
Free will, if you call it that, is then simply a power of creative
growth, which we all have in some degree, and starts from our actual
situation. No one is free to do anything he has not worked up to.
I hold, for many reasons, that it is a bad thing to teach absolute
freedom of the will, as bad as to teach fatalism. It leads to
discouraging judgments of conduct, both our own and that of others, and
to a neglect of the training process by which everything good must be
prepared. The logical outcome of the doctrine of unlimited freedom would
seem to be that one should make a great effort to achieve at once what
he wants, without regard to his preparation. The logical outcome of the
view I suggest is that one sets about moulding his whole life into a
process from which success will naturally flow. No thoughtful observer
will doubt which is the better method.
It is an open secret, which few seem willing to utter, that ardent
spirits often make too much effort, exhausting and disheartening
themselves by attempting the impossible. I know a man of eager
temperament and rather slender physique who, on asking himself what was
the most serious and pervading mistake of his early life, finds the
answer to be “I tried too hard.” The prevalence of the idea of
unconditional freedom works to the advantage of phlegmatic people, who
cannot be harmed by it, and to the prejudice of the more impressible.
The author of an article on The Handicapped, by One of Them, says: “It
was my own fate to be just strong enough to play about with the other
boys, and attempt all their games and ‘stunts,’ without being strong
enough actually to succeed in any of them. It never used to occur to me
that my failure and lack of skill were due to circumstances beyond my
control, but I would always impute them, in consequence of my rigid
Calvinistic bringing-up, I suppose, to some moral weakness of my own. I
never resigned myself to the inevitable, but over-exerted myself
constantly in a grim determination to succeed.... I simply tantalized
myself, and grew up with a deepening sense of failure.”[38]
The strongest men, I should say, usually understand that their strength
is limited, and husband it accordingly, taking care to keep a reserve
force, the mere appearance and consciousness of which win most of their
victories.
It is a fact of observation that social experience may be such as to
break down strength of will. A large part of it is confidence, and this
comes from the habit of success. A healthy will, if it tries and fails,
will try again, perhaps try harder. No one can say how many trials will
be made, but it is certain that one cannot go on indefinitely putting
forth his full strength in the face of uniform failure. A man may try a
dozen times to scramble over an eight-foot board fence; but if it proves
too much for him he will presently cease his efforts and avoid such
fences in the future. The process known as “losing your grip” is
primarily a loss of self-respect and self-confidence due to a series of
failures. Imagined loss of the respect of others enters largely into it,
and it is hastened by the inability to dress well and to keep clean,
also by poor food, anxiety, loss of sleep, and physical deterioration.
Sensual excitement is sought as a relief, and often completes the ruin.
Any candid man must, I think, admit that it is easy to imagine a course
of experience which would leave him as completely “down and out” as any
tramp. The habit of accomplishment and that alone gives self-respect,
hope, and courage to face the eyes of men. The disheartened man is no
man, and if kept disheartened for a long enough time he is matter for
the scrap-heap. The healthy growth of the will requires difficulty, to
be sure, and even failure, but only such failure and difficulty as can
be and are overcome in a sufficient proportion of cases to keep
confidence alive. The power to resist a given temptation is no more
absolute than the power to swim a mile; one can do it if his previous
life has been such as to train his strength to the requisite point;
otherwise not. It is as certain in the one case as in the other that
many simply cannot do it.
Each of us, I suppose, knows that he has weaknesses that his will has
been unable to overcome, that he has had times of defeat when the
assailing forces, if persistent, would have crushed his character, that
he has had friends, no worse than himself, whose characters have been
crushed. We had better, then, say nothing of the unlimited power of the
human will, but ascribe our escape to a preponderance of favoring
conditions.
It seems strange, when you think of it, that we have pity and hospitals
for the sick in body, but for sick spirits—often a more deadly
illness—we have no hospitals (except for the insane), few skilled
physicians, and very little understanding. I suppose it is because this
kind of trouble is not tangible enough to impress itself upon us, and
also because we shun the effort of the imagination that would be
required to understand it. Here, certainly, is a field for “social
work.”
One often encounters the doctrine that reforms are useless and even
harmful, because temptation alone can strengthen the will, as when Sir
Thomas Browne says that “They that endeavor to abolish Vice destroy also
Virtue; for contraries, although they destroy one another, are yet the
life of one another.” The argument is constantly used against the
restriction of prostitution and the liquor traffic.
Now, it is true that the will grows by exercise. Life is ever a
struggle, a struggle, moreover, in which there must always, probably, be
more or less failure. We may agree with Milton when he says, advocating
the knowledge of evil: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her
adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to
be run for, not without dust and heat.”[39] But what is commonly
overlooked is that, since this is an onward world, the struggle ought to
keep rising to higher levels, and that unnecessary struggle is mere
waste and dissipation. We do not need to preserve evil, as the English
preserve foxes, for the exercise of hunting it. And yet poverty, disease
and vice are frequently upheld on this ground.
There is no danger that struggle will disappear, so long as human energy
remains: if it is no longer against drink or licentiousness or war, it
can go on to something higher. Every temptation is a conflict, and if it
is not a necessary conflict it is a waste of strength: to contend over
and over again with the _same_ temptation is a sign of arrested
development. Solicitation merely defiles the mind, and a community which
tolerates preventable vice wrongs itself in the same way as a man who
reads a salacious book.
There is, no doubt, this much in the argument for undergoing temptation,
that if the general conditions are such that one is almost sure to be
exposed to it sooner or later, it is well to be armed against it by
previous knowledge and discipline. Thus the best preventives of
licentiousness are probably a wholesome social intercourse between boys
and girls from childhood, and a knowledge of and respect for the higher
functions of sex. But even here “sex-teaching” may easily be pernicious.
Degeneration does not spring from a special part of human nature, but is
based on normal impulses, which take a higher or lower direction
according as they are guided. Our native traits are for the most part
vague capacities which are morally indeterminate at the outset of life,
and out of which, for better or worse, the most various kinds of
behavior may grow. We know, for example, that the sexual impulses are
back of the family, and of all the good which the family at its best
brings with it; many psychologists, moreover, believe that these
instincts, contained and transformed, are the prime movers of nearly all
our higher life, of love, art, religion, and social aspiration. But if
we pervert or waste this energy it engenders the foulest things we know,
sensualism, prostitution, loathsome diseases, spiritual corruption, and
despair.
In the same way the need of excitement, relaxation, and change is ever
impelling us to new things, but whether to literature, art, and
wholesome sport, or to gambling, drink, and degrading shows, is largely
a matter of opportunity and education. The mere need of companionship,
the very element in which human nature lives, co-operates with a bad
environment to entice us into all kinds of evil courses. The boy is
bound to join a gang of some sort, and if the gangs in his neighborhood
are vicious and criminal the outlook for him is bad; while a girl who
has no better kind of society will be likely to frequent questionable
dance-halls and accept automobile rides with strange men.
There is, in fact, a certain practical truth in the idea of the “natural
depravity” of human nature. That is to say, the higher life of the human
mind is co-operative, is reached and sustained only through the higher
sort of social organization; and, in the absence of this, human nature,
thrown back upon crude impulse, falls into sensualism and disorder.
Lust, violence, greed, crude generosity, are natural in a sense that
self-control, consideration for others and observance of moral standards
are not so; they spring more immediately from primitive emotions, and
require no higher thought and discipline. In other words, righteousness,
in every form, is the difficult achievement of the social whole when
working at its best, and is impaired whenever this is impaired. A good
soldier can exist only as part of a good army, and a good Christian can
exist only as a member of a Christian community, visible or invisible.
How will a man’s mind work when he is released from the higher
incentives of society, from public ambitions, inspiring literature, the
oversight of opinion, the expectation of friends and the control of law?
Except in so far as he can carry these with him in his imagination he
must fall back upon unschooled impulses, such as those of sex, of
appetite for food and drink, of a crude sociability and craving for
excitement. We see how this works in frontier towns and in the confused
populations of our cities; and any one who leaves the restraints of home
to live among strangers is likely to feel a kind of irresponsibility and
moral decay setting in. Without the support of a moral order the
individual degenerates.
The great thing, then, if we aim to combat degeneracy in a large way, is
to build up an affirmative, constructive, many-sided community life,
that can draw the individual into its own current, and evoke his higher
possibilities. Any one who will look about him may see unnumbered
examples of the waste of human nature in our disorderly civilization,
the gross and futile expense of energies out of which a little
leadership and discipline might make the best things of life. We find
prosperous country towns, with almost no poverty, where the younger
people are given over to sexual and other vices, chiefly because no
organizing spirit has provided a higher outlet for their energies. The
prevalent feeling, as expressed in a student’s account, is, “Good Lord,
I wish we could scare up something to do,” and if the Lord does not
answer a prayer of this kind we know who does. In another town where
factory girls get high wages, they buy twenty-dollar hats and silk hose,
and have a reputation for being “tough.” I knew of two boys, aged about
seventeen, who started out with the manly purpose of sampling all the
kinds of intoxicating drinks that were sold in town. They were good
boys, and this seemed to them a high adventure. Many boys enter houses
of prostitution for the first time in a similar spirit.
A student who had helped conduct a boys’ club in a neglected part of
town made this answer to the question, Why should the boys have grown
worse without the club? “We merely reply that our experience with boys
of this age in the environment these boys are in, near the railroad and
near the shops and factories, and near some hell-hole saloons, tells us
that the boys, if they had been allowed to develop unguided, would have
followed the course of the boys of the generation next above them in
age, and formed into a semi-criminal gang, with no use for school or
order, and with a community of interest in the lower forms of
amusement.” Another student, who had been a school-teacher in a
lethargic and depraved rural community, speaks of the surprising effect
upon his pupils of hearing “a talented soprano singer.” “You could see
their souls, purged of all their hopeless provincial badness, shine in
their faces.” Even in our colleges, notwithstanding the social and
athletic activities of which we hear so much, there is a good deal of
dissipation ascribable to the fact that the need of companionship and
self-expression, among boys and girls cut off from former associations,
is after all very imperfectly met, and the freshman hungering for these
things is apt to find them most accessible in degenerate groups.
Any individual is a place where lower and higher tendencies are in
conflict, and how the battle goes depends, other things equal, on the
vigor and insistence with which the opposing suggestions are presented.
If vice is organized, urgent, skilfully advertised, while virtue is not,
it is certain that many balanced choices will swing the wrong way.