SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF MIND—CONTINUED.
MORAL ASPECT OF THE ORGANIC VIEW—IT IMPLIES THAT REFORM SHOULD BE
BASED ON SYMPATHY—USES OF PRAISE AND BLAME—RESPONSIBILITY BROADENED
BUT NOT LOST—MORAL VALUE OF A LARGER VIEW—ORGANIC MORALITY CALLS FOR
KNOWLEDGE—NATURE OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION.
So far as the moral aspect is concerned, it should be the result of
this organic view of mind to make the whole teaching and practice of
righteousness more rational and effectual by bringing it closer to
fact. A moral view which does not see the individual in living unity
with social wholes is unreal and apt to lead to impractical results.
Have not the moral philosophies of the past missed their mark, in
great part, by setting before the individual absolute standards of
behavior, without affording him an explanation for his backwardness
or a programme for his gradual advance? And did not this spring from
not discerning clearly that the moral life was a social organism, in
which every individual or group of individuals had its own special
possibilities and limitations? In general such systems, pagan and
Christian, have said, “All of us ought to be so and so, but since
very few of us are, this is evidently a bad world.” And they have had
no large, well-organized, slow-but-sure plan for making it better.
Impracticable standards have the same ill effect as unenforcible law;
they accustom us to separate theory from practice and make a chasm
between the individual and the moral ideal.
The present way of thinking tends to close up this chasm and bring both
persons and ideals into more intelligible relations to real life. The
sins or virtues of the individual, it seems, are never fortuitous or
disconnected; they have always a history and collateral support, and
are in fact more or less pleasing phases of a struggling, aspiring
whole. The ideals are also parts of the whole; states of being,
achieved momentarily by those in front and treasured for the animation
and solace of all. And the method of righteousness is to understand
as well as may be the working of this whole and of all its parts, and
to form and pursue practicable ideals based on this understanding. It
is always to be taken for granted that there is no real break with
history and environment. Each individual may be required to put forth a
steadfast endeavor to make himself and his surroundings better, but not
to achieve a standard unconnected with his actual state. And the same
principle applies to special groups of all sorts, including nations,
races, and religions; their progress must be along a natural line of
improvement suggested by what they are. We are thus coming under the
sway of that relative spirit, of which, says Walter Pater, “the ethical
result is a delicate and tender justice in the criticism of human
life.”[3]
According to this, real reform must be sympathetic; that is, it must
begin, not with denunciation—though that may have its uses—but with
an intimate appreciation of things as they are, and should proceed
in a spirit opposite to that in which we have commonly attacked such
questions as the suppression of intemperance and the conversion of the
heathen.
Human nature, it appears, is very much the same in those we reckon
sinners as in ourselves. Good and evil are always intimately bound up
together; no sort of men are chiefly given over to conscious badness;
and to abuse men or groups in the large is unjust and generally
futile. As a rule the practical method is to study closely and kindly
the actual situation, with the people involved in it; then gradually
and carefully to work out the evil from the mixture by substituting
good for it. No matter how mean or hideous a man’s life is, the first
thing is to understand him; to make out just how it is that our common
human nature has come to work out in this way. This method calls for
patience, insight, firmness, and confidence in men, leaving little room
for the denunciatory egotism of a certain kind of reformers. It is
more and more coming to be used in dealing with intemperance, crime,
greed, and in fact all those matters in which we try to make ourselves
and our neighbors better. I notice that the most effectual leaders of
philanthropy have almost ceased from denunciation. Tacitly assuming
that there are excuses for everything, they “shun the negative side”
and spend their energy in building up the affirmative.
This sort of morality does not, however, dispense with praise and
blame, which are based on the necessity of upholding higher ideals by
example, and discrediting lower ones. All such distinctions get their
meaning from their relation to an upward-striving general life, wherein
conspicuous men serve as symbols through which the higher structure
may be either supported or undermined. We must have heroes, and perhaps
villains (though it is better not to think much about the latter),
even though their performances, when closely viewed, appear to be an
equally natural product of history and environment. In short it makes
a difference whether we judge a man with reference to his special
history and “lights,” or to the larger life of the world; and it is
right to assign exemplary praise or blame on the latter ground which
would be unwarranted on the former. There is certainly a special right
for every man; but the right of most men is partial, important chiefly
to themselves and their immediate sphere; while there are some whose
right is representative, like that of Jesus, fit to guide the moral
thought of mankind; and we cherish and revere these latter because they
corroborate the ideals we wish to hold before us.
It matters little for these larger purposes whether the sins or virtues
of conspicuous persons are conscious or not; our concern is with what
they stand for in the general mind. In fact conscious wickedness is
comparatively unimportant, because it implies that the individual
is divided in his own mind, and therefore weak. The most effective
ill-doers believe in themselves and have a quiet conscience. And, in
the same way, goodness is most effectual when it takes itself as a
matter of course and feels no self-complacency.
Blame and punishment, then, are essentially symbolic, their function
being to define and enforce the public will, and in no way imply that
the offenders are of a different nature from the rest of us. We feel
it to be true that with a little different training and surroundings
we might have committed almost any crime for which men are sent to
prison, and can readily understand that criminals should not commonly
feel that they are worse than others. The same principle applies to
those malefactors, more dangerous perhaps, who keep within the law, and
yet are terribly punished from time to time by public opinion.
Perhaps it would be well if both those who suffer punishment and those
who inflict it were more distinctly aware of its symbolic character
and function. The former might find their sense of justice appeased
by perceiving that though what they did was natural and perhaps not
consciously wrong, it may still need to be discredited and atoned
for. The culprit is not separated from society by his punishment, but
restored to it. It is his way of service; and if he takes it in the
right spirit he is better off than those who do wrong but are not
punished.
The rest of us, on the other hand, might realize that those in the
pillory are our representatives, who suffer, in a real sense, for us.
This would disincline us to spend in a cheap abuse of conspicuous
offenders that moral ardor whose proper function is the correction of
our own life. The spectacle of punishment is not for us to gloat over,
but to remind us of our sins, which, as springing from the same nature
and society, are sure to be much the same as that of the one punished.
It is precisely because he is like us that he is punished. If he were
radically different he would belong in an insane asylum, and punishment
would be mere cruelty.
Under the larger view of mind responsibility is broadened, because
we recognize a broader reach of causation, but by no means lost in
an abstract “society.” It goes with power and increases rapidly in
proportion as the evil comes nearer the sphere of the individual’s
voluntary action, so that each of us is peculiarly responsible for the
moral state of his own trade, family, or social connection. Contrary
to a prevalent impression, it is in these familiar relations that
the individual is least of all justified in being no better than his
environment.
Every act of the will, especially where the will is most at home,
should be affirmative and constructive; it being the function and
meaning of individuality that each one should be, in the direction of
his chief activities, something other and better than his surroundings.
Once admit the plea “I may do what other people do,” and the basis of
righteousness is gone; perhaps there is no moral fallacy so widespread
and so pernicious as this. It is these no-worse-than-other-people
decisions that paralyze the moral life in the one and in the whole,
involving a sort of moral _panmixia_, as the biologists say, which,
lacking any progressive impulse, must result in deterioration. In the
end it will justify anything, since there are always bad examples to
fall back upon.
It is commonly futile, however, to require any sharp break with the
past; we must be content with an upward endeavor and tendency. It is
quite true that we are all involved in a net of questionable practices
from which we can only escape a little at a time and in coöperation
with our associates.
It is an error to imagine that the doctrine of individual
responsibility is always the expedient and edifying one in matters of
conduct. There is a sort of people who grow indignant whenever general
causes are insisted upon, apparently convinced that whether these are
real or not it is immoral to believe in them. But it is not invariably
a good thing to urge the will, since this, if over-stimulated, becomes
fagged, stale, and discouraged. Often it is better that one should
let himself go, and trust himself to the involuntary forces, to the
nature of things, to God. The nervous or strained person only harasses
and weakens his will by fixing attention upon it: it will work on
more effectually if he looks away from it, calming himself by a view
of the larger whole; and not without reason Spinoza counts among the
advantages of determinism “the attainment of happiness by man through
realizing his intimate union with the whole nature of things; the
distinction between things in our power and things not in our power;
the avoidance of all disturbing passions, and the performance of social
duties from rational desire for the common good.”[4]
An obvious moral defect of the unbalanced doctrine of responsibility
is that it permits the successful to despise the unfortunate, in the
belief that the latter “have only themselves to blame,” a belief not
countenanced by the larger view of fact. We may pardon this doctrine
when it makes one too hard on himself or on successful wrong-doers, but
as a rod with which to beat those already down it is despicable.
The annals of religion show that the moral life has always these
two aspects, the particular and the general, as in the doctrines of
freedom and predestination, or in the wrestlings with sin followed
by self-abandonment that we find in the literature of conversion.[5]
Perhaps we may say that the deterministic attitude is morally good
in at least two classes of cases: First, for nervous, conscientious
individuals, like Spinoza, whose wills need rather calming than
stimulating, also for any one who may be even temporarily in a state of
mental strain; second, in dealing on a large scale with social or moral
questions whose causes must be treated dispassionately and in a mass.
These questions of free-will _versus_ law, and the like, are but
little, if at all, questions of fact—when we get down to definite
facts bearing upon the matter we find little or no disagreement—but
of point of view and emphasis. If you fix attention on the individual
phase of things and see life as a theatre of personal action, then
the corresponding ideas of private will, responsibility, praise, and
blame rise before you; if you regard its total aspect you see tendency,
evolution, law and impersonal grandeur. Each of these is a half truth
needing to be completed by the other; the larger truth, including both,
being that life is an organic whole, presenting itself with equal
reality in individual and general aspects. Argument upon such questions
is without limit—since there is really nothing at issue—and in that
sense the problem of freedom _versus_ law is insoluble.
Above all, the organic view of mind calls for social knowledge as the
basis of morality. We live in a system, and to achieve right ends, or
any rational ends whatever, we must learn to understand that system.
The public mind must emerge somewhat from its subconscious condition
and know and guide its own processes.
Both consciously and unconsciously the larger mind is continually
building itself up into wholes—fashions, traditions, institutions,
tendencies, and the like—which spread and diversify like the branches
of a tree, and so generate an ever higher and more various structure
of differentiated thought and symbols. The immediate motor and guide
of this growth is interest, and wherever that points social structure
comes into being, as a picture grows where the artist moves his pencil.
Visible society is, indeed, literally, a work of art, slow and mostly
subconscious in its production—as great art often is—full of grotesque
and wayward traits, but yet of inexhaustible beauty and fascination. It
is this we find in the history of old civilizations, getting from it
the completed work of the artist without that strain and confusion of
production which defaces the present. We get it, especially, not from
the history of the theorist or the statistician, but from the actual,
naïve, human record to be found in memoirs, in popular literature, in
architecture, painting, sculpture, and music, in the industrial arts,
in every unforced product of the mind.
Social organization is nothing less than this variegation of life,
taken in the widest sense possible. It should not be conceived as
the product merely of definite and utilitarian purpose, but as the
total expression of conscious and subconscious tendency, the slow
crystallization in many forms and colors of the life of the human
spirit.
Any fairly distinct and durable detail of this structure may be called
a social type; this being a convenient term to use when we wish to
break up the whole into parts, for analysis or description. Thus there
are types of personality, of political structure, of religion, of
classes, of the family, of art, of language; also of processes, like
communication, coöperation, and competition; and so on. The whole is
so various that from every new point of view new forms are revealed.
Social types are analogous to the genera, species, and varieties of
the animal world, in being parts of one living whole and yet having a
relative continuity and distinctness which is susceptible of detailed
study. Like biological types, also, they exist in related systems and
orders, are subject to variation, compete with one another, flourish
and decay, may be flexible or rigid, and may or may not form prolific
crosses with one another.
Without forgetting to see life as individuals, we must learn to see it
also as types, processes, organization, the latter being just as real
as the former. And especially, in order to see the matter truly, should
we be able to interpret individuals by wholes, and _vice versa_.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] See his essay on Coleridge.
[4] Pollock’s Spinoza, 2d ed., 195.
[5] Amply expounded, with due stress on the moral value of letting-go,
by William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience: “This
abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act
in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It
antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies ... it is
capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative
creed.” Page 289.