DISORGANIZATION: OTHER TRADITIONS
DISORDER IN THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM—IN EDUCATION—IN HIGHER CULTURE——IN THE
FINE ARTS.
This same idea, of confusion and inefficiency in social functions
arising from the breaking up of old structures, might find illustration
in almost any phase of life which one might choose to investigate. The
economic system, for example, is in a state somewhat analogous to that
of the family and the church, and indeed the “industrial revolution” is
the chief seat of those phases of decay and reconstruction which most
affect the daily life of the people.
Location itself—to begin with man’s attachment to the soil—has been
so widely disturbed that possibly a majority of the people of the
civilized world are of recent migratory origin; they themselves or
their parents having moved from one land to another or from country to
city. With this goes a severing of traditions and a mixture of ideas
and races.
Still more subversive, perhaps, is the change in occupations, which
is practically universal, so that scarcely anywhere will you find
people doing the things which their grandparents did. The quiet
transmission of handicrafts in families and neighborhoods, never much
interrupted before, is now cut off, and the young are driven to look
for new trades. Nor is this merely one change, to which the world may
adapt itself once for all, but a series, a slide, to which there is
no apparent term. Seldom is the skill learned in youth available in
age, and thousands of men have seen one trade after another knocked
out of their hands by the unforeseen movement of invention. Even the
agriculturist, heretofore the symbol for traditionalism, has had to
supple his mind to new devices.
I need not point out in detail how the old legal and ethical
relations—the whole social structure indeed—of industry have mostly
broken down; how the craftsman has lost control of his tools and is
struggling to regain it through associations; how vast and novel forms
of combination have appeared; how men of all classes are demoralized by
the lack of standards of economic justice; these are familiar matters
which I mention only to show their relation to the principle under
discussion.
In general, modern industry, progressing chiefly in a mechanical sense,
has attained a marvellous organization in that sense; while the social
and moral side of it remains in confusion. We have a promising plant
but have not yet learned how to make it turn out the desired product of
righteousness and happiness.
Wherever there is power which has outstripped the growth of moral
and legal standards there is sure to be some kind of anarchy; and so
it is with our commerce and finance. On these seas piracy flourishes
alongside of honest trade; and, indeed, as in the seventeenth century,
many merchants practise both of these occupations. And the riches thus
gained often go to corrupt the state.
Tn the inferior strata of the commercial order we find that human
nature has been hustled and trodden under foot: “Things are in the
saddle and ride mankind.” The hand-worker, the clerk and the small
tradesman, generally insecure in the tenure of their occupations and
homes, are anxious and restless, while many classes suffer special and
grievous wrongs, such as exhaustion and premature old age, due to the
nervous strain of certain kinds of work, death and mutilation from
machinery, life in squalid tenements, and the debasement of children by
bad surroundings and premature work.
Although the individual, in a merely mechanical sense, is part of
a wider whole than ever before, he has often lost that conscious
membership in the whole upon which his human breadth depends: unless
the larger life is a moral life, he gains nothing in this regard, and
may lose. When children saw the grain growing in the field, watched
the reaping and threshing and grinding of it, and then helped their
mother to make it into bread, their minds had a vital membership in the
economic process; but now that this process, by its very enlargement,
has become invisible, most persons have lost the sense of it.[167] And
this is a type of modern industry at large: the workman, the man of
business, the farmer and the lawyer are contributors to the whole, but
being morally isolated by the very magnitude of the system, the whole
does not commonly live in their thought.
Is it not a universal experience that we cannot do anything with spirit
or satisfaction unless we know what it is for? No one who remembers
the tasks of childhood will doubt this; and it is still my observation
that so soon as I lose a sense of the bearing of what I am doing upon
general aims and the common life, I get stale and discouraged and
need a fresh view. Yet a great part not only of hand labor but of
professional work and business is of this character. The world has
become so complicated that we know not what we do, and thus suffer not
only in our happiness but in our moral steadfastness and religious
faith. There is no remedy short of making life a moral and spiritual as
well as a mechanical whole.
Education is another matter that might be discussed at much length
from this point of view. That radical changes are taking place in it
is hardly more obvious than that these changes are not altogether
beneficent. We may say of this department as of others that there is a
spirit of freedom and vigor abroad, but that its immediate results are
somewhat anarchical.
The underlying reason for the special growth of educational
institutions in our time is the free and conscious character of our
system, which demands a corresponding individual to work it. Thus
democracy requires literacy, that the voter may learn what he is voting
about, and this means schools. Under the plan of free competition
the son need not follow his father’s occupation, but may take the
open sea of life and find whatever work suits him; and this renders
obsolete household instruction in trades. Indeed, our whole life is so
specialized and so subject to change that there is nothing for it but
special schools.
We may probably learn also, as time goes on, that the enlarged sphere
of choice and the complexity of the relations with which it deals call
for a social and moral education more rational and explicit than we
have had in the past. There are urgent problems with which no power
can deal but an instructed and organized public conscience, for the
source of which we must look, in part, to public education.
In striving to meet new requirements our schools have too commonly
extended their system rather than their vital energies; they have
perhaps grown more rapidly in the number of students, the variety of
subjects taught, and in other numerable particulars, than in the inner
and spiritual life, the ideals, the traditions and the _personnel_ of
the teaching force. In this as in other expanding institutions life is
spread out rather thin.
In the country the schools are largely inefficient because of the
falling off in attendance, the poor pay and quality of the teachers,
and the persistence of a system of instruction that lacks vital
relation to country life, tending in fact to discredit it and turn
children toward the towns. In cities the schools are overcrowded—often
insufficient even to contain the children who swarm in the poorer
districts—and the teachers often confused, overworked and stupefied by
routine. Very little, as yet, is done to supply that rational training
for industry which is the urgent need of most children, and which
industry itself no longer furnishes. The discipline, both of pupils
by teachers and of teachers by officials, is commonly of a mechanical
sort, and promising innovations often fail because they are badly
carried out.
Our common schools no doubt compare well enough, on the whole, with
those of the past or of other countries; but when we think of what they
might and should do in the way of bringing order and reason into our
society, and of the life that is going to waste because they do not
nourish and guide it, there is no cause for congratulation.
In our higher education there is a somewhat similar mixture of new
materials, imperfectly integrated, with fragments of a decadent system.
The old classical discipline is plainly going, and perhaps it is best
that it should go, but surely nothing satisfactory has arisen to take
its place.
Among the many things that might be said in this connection I will
touch upon only one consideration, generally overlooked, namely
the value of a _common_ type of culture, corresponding in this
respect to what used to be known as “the education of a gentleman.”
Since the decay of the classical type set in our higher education,
notwithstanding so much that is excellent in it, has had practically
no common content to serve as a medium of communication and spiritual
unity among the educated class. In this connection as in so many others
the question arises whether even an inadequate type of culture is not
better than no type at all.
Not only was the classical tradition the widest and fullest current
of higher thought we had, but it was also a treasury of symbols and
associations tending to build up a common ideal life. Beginning with
Dante all imaginative modern literature appeals to the mind through
classical allusion and reverberation, which, mingling with newer
elements, went to make up a continuing body of higher feeling and idea,
upon which was nourished a continuing fellowship of those competent to
receive and transmit it. All that was best in production came out of it
and was unconsciously disciplined by its standards.
It would indeed be stupid to imagine that any assortment of
specialties can take the place of the culture stream from which all
civilization has been watered: to lose that would be barbarism. And, in
fact, it is a question whether we are not, in some degree and no doubt
temporarily, actually relapsing into a kind of barbarism through the
sudden decay of a culture type imperfectly suited to our use but much
better than none.
If one has an assembly of university graduates before him, what, in the
way of like-mindedness, can he count on their having? Certainly not
Latin, much less Greek; he would be rash indeed to venture a quotation
in these tongues, unless for mystification: nor would allusions to
history or literature be much safer. The truth is that few of the
graduates will have done serious work outside of their specialty; and
the main thing they have in common is a collective spirit animated by
the recollection of foot-ball victories and the like.
I suspect that we may be participating in the rise of a new type of
culture which shall revise rather than abandon the old traditions, and
whose central current will perhaps be a large study of the principles
of human life and of their expression in history, art, philanthropy and
religion. And the belief that the new discipline of sociology (much
clarified and freed from whatever crudeness and pretension may now
impair it) is to have a part in this may not be entirely a matter of
special predilection.
Not very long since a critic, wrote of contemporary art as follows:
“Every one who is acquainted with technical matters in the fine arts
is aware that the _quietly perfect_ art of oil painting is extinct or
nearly so, and that in its place we have a great variety of extremely
clever and dexterous substitutes, resulting in skilful partial
expressions of artistic beauty, but not reaching that calm divine
harmony of aim and method which we find in Titian and Giorgione, and
even in such work as that of Velasquez. The greatest painting of past
times had one quality which no modern one really possesses—it had
_tranquillity_.”[168]
This touches upon something which—as we have already had occasion to
observe—impairs nearly all in the way of higher spiritual achievement
that our time produces—a certain breathlessness and lack of assured
and quiet power. And this is connected with that confusion which does
not permit the unquestioned ascendency of any one type, but keeps the
artist choosing and experimenting, in the effort to make a whole which
tradition does not supply ready-made.
In times of authoritative tradition a type of art grows up by
accretion, rich and pregnant after its kind, which each artist
unconsciously inherits and easily expresses. His forerunners have done
the heavy work, and all that he needs to do is to add the glamour of
personal genius. The grandeur of great literature—like the Bible, or
Homer, or even, though less obviously, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe—is
largely that of traditional accumulation and concentration. The matter
is old; it has been worked over and over and the unessential squeezed
out, leaving a pregnant remainder which the artist enlivens with
creative imagination. And the same is true of painting and sculpture.
So in architecture: a mediæval cathedral was the culmination of a long
social growth, not greatly dependent upon individual genius. “Not only
is there built into it,” says Mr. Ferguson in his History of Modern
Architecture, “the accumulated thought of all the men who had occupied
themselves with building during the preceding centuries ... but you
have the dream and aspiration of the bishop, who designed it, of all
his clergy, who took an interest in it, of the master-mason, who was
skilled in construction; of the carver, the painter, the glazier, of
the host of men who, each in his own craft, knew all that had been
done before them, and had spent their lives in struggling to surpass
the work of their forefathers.... You may wander in such a building
for weeks or for months together and never know it all. A thought
or a motive peeps out through every joint, and is manifest in every
moulding, and the very stones speak to you with a voice as clear and
as easily understood as the words of the poet or the teaching of the
historian. Hence, in fact, the little interest we can feel in even
the stateliest of modern buildings, and the undying, never satisfied
interest with which we study over and over again those which have been
produced under a different and truer system of art.”[169]
In the same way the Greek architect of the time of Pericles “had
before him a fixed and sacred standard of form.... He had no choice;
his strength was not wasted among various ideals; that which he had
inherited was a religion to him.... Undiverted by side issues as to the
general form of his monument, undisturbed by any of the complicated
conditions of modern life, he was able to concentrate his clear
intellect upon the perfection of his details; his sensitiveness to
harmony of proportion was refined to the last limits: his feeling for
purity of line reached the point of a religion.”[170]
The modern artist may have as much personal ability as the Greek or
the mediæval, but, having no communal tradition to share in his work,
he has to spread his personality out very thin to cover the too broad
task assigned to it, and this thinness becomes the general fault of
contemporary æsthetic production. If he seeks to avoid it by determined
concentration there is apt to be something strained and over-conscious
in the result.
FOOTNOTES:
[167] This illustration is used by Miss Jane Addams.
[168] Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Thoughts about Art, page 99.
[169] Page 24.
[170] Van Brunt, Greek Lines, 95 _ff._
_PART VI_
PUBLIC WILL