or exact knowledge in the life of man. Science, which is but the most
accurate information available about the world in which we live and
the nature of ourselves and of our fellow men, is not the whole of
life; and except to a few peculiar persons it can never be the most
absorbing and vivid of our emotional satisfactions. We are poetic and
artistic and romantic and mystical. We resent the cold analysis and
reduction of life to the commonplace and well substantiated--and this
is after all is said, the aim of scientific endeavor. But we have to
adjust ourselves to a changing world in the light of constantly
accumulating knowledge. It is knowledge that has altered the world and
we must rely on knowledge and understanding to accommodate ourselves
to our new surroundings and establish peace and order and security for
the pursuit of those things that to most of us are more enticing than
science itself.[27]
No previous generation has been so perplexed as ours, but none has
ever been justified in holding higher hopes if it could but reconcile
itself to making bold and judicious use of its growing resources,
material and intellectual. _It is fear that holds us back._ And fear
is begotten of ignorance and uncertainty. And these mutually reinforce
one another, for we feebly try to condone our ignorance by our
uncertainty and to excuse our uncertainty by our ignorance.
Our hot defense of our ideas and beliefs does not indicate an
established confidence in them but often half-distrust, which we try
to hide from ourselves, just as one who suffers from bashfulness
offsets his sense of inferiority and awkwardness by rude aggression.
If, for example, religious beliefs had been really firmly established
there would have been no need of "aids to faith"; and so with our
business system to-day, our politics and international relations. We
dread to see things as they would appear if we thought of them
honestly, for it is the nature of critical thought to metamorphose our
familiar and approved world into something strange and unfamiliar. It
is undoubtedly a nervous sense of the precariousness of the existing
social system which accounts for the present strenuous opposition to a
fair and square consideration of its merits and defects.
Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything
has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other. We
must be defending or attacking something; only the lily-livered hide
their natural cowardice by asking the impudent question, What is it
all about? The heroic gird on the armor of the Lord, square their
shoulders, and establish a muscular tension which serves to dispel
doubt and begets the voluptuousness of bigotry and fanaticism.[28] In
this mood questions become issues of right and wrong, not of
expediency and inexpediency. It has been said that the worthy people
of Cambridge are able promptly to reduce the most complex social or
economic problem to a simple moral issue, and this is a wile of the
Father of Lies, to which many of us yield readily enough.
It is, however, possible for the individual to overcome the fear of
thought. Once I was afraid that men might think too much; now, I only
dread lest they will think too little and far too timidly, for I now
see that real thinking is rare and difficult and that it needs every
incentive in the face of innumerable ancient and inherent
discouragements and impediments. We must first endeavor manfully to
free our own minds and then do what we can to hearten others to free
theirs. _Toujours de l'audace!_ As members of a race that has required
from five hundred thousand to a million years to reach its present
state of enlightenment, there is little reason to think that anyone of
us is likely to cultivate intelligence too assiduously or in harmful
excess.
17. WHAT OF IT?
Our age is one of unprecedented responsibility. As Mr. Lippmann has so
well said:
Never before have we had to rely so completely on ourselves. No
guardian to think for us, no precedent to follow without question,
no lawmaker above, only ordinary men set to deal with heartbreaking
perplexity. All weakness comes to the surface. We are homeless in a
jungle of machines and untamed powers that haunt and lure the
imagination. Of course our culture is confused, our thinking
spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. No mariner ever enters
upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born
in the twentieth century. Our ancestors thought they knew their way
from birth through all eternity; we are puzzled about day after
to-morrow.... It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and
liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship
of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts did not
free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.[29]
We must look forward to ever new predicaments and adventures. _Nothing
is going to be settled in the sense in which things were once supposed
to be settled, for the simple reason that knowledge will probably
continue to increase and will inevitably alter the world with which we
have to make terms_. The only thing that might conceivably remain
somewhat stabilized is an attitude of mind and unflagging expectancy
appropriate to the terms and the rules according to which life's game
must hereafter be played. We must promote a new cohesion and
co-operation on the basis of this truth. And this means that we have
now to substitute purpose for tradition, and this is a concise
statement of the great revolution which we face.
Now, when all human institutions so slowly and laboriously evolved
are impugned, every consensus challenged, every creed flouted, as
much as and perhaps even more than by the ancient Sophists, the
call comes to us ... to explore, test, and, if necessary, reconstruct
the very bases of conviction, for all open questions are new
opportunities. Old beacon lights have shifted or gone out. Some of
the issues we lately thought to be minor have taken on cosmic
dimensions. We are all "up against" questions too big for us, so
that there is everywhere a sense of insufficiency which is too deep
to be fully deployed in the narrow field of consciousness. Hence,
there is a new discontent with old leaders, standards, criteria,
methods, and values, and a demand everywhere for new ones, a
realization that mankind must now reorient itself and take its
bearings from the eternal stars and sail no longer into the unknown
future by the dead reckonings of the past.[30]
Life, in short, has become a solemn sporting proposition--solemn
enough in its heavy responsibilities and the magnitude of the stakes
to satisfy our deepest religious longings; sporty enough to tickle the
fancy of a baseball fan or an explorer in darkest Borneo. We can play
the game or refuse to play it. At present most of human organization,
governmental, educational, social, and religious, is directed, as it
always has been, to holding things down, and to perpetuating beliefs
and policies which belong to the past and have been but too gingerly
readjusted to our new knowledge and new conditions. On the other hand,
there are various scientific associations which are bent on revising
and amplifying our knowledge and are not pledged to keeping alive any
belief or method which cannot stand the criticism which comes with
further information. The terrible fear of falling into mere
rationalizing is gradually extending from the so-called natural
sciences to psychology, anthropology, politics, and political economy.
All this is a cheering response to the new situation.
But, as has been pointed out, really honest discussion of our social,
economic, and political standards and habits readily takes on the
suspicion of heresy and infidelity. Just as the "freethinker" who, in
the eighteenth century, strove to discredit miracles in the name of an
all-wise and foreseeing God (who could not be suspected of tampering
with his own laws), was accused of being an atheist and of really
believing in no God at all; so those who would ennoble our ideals of
social organization are described as "Intellectuals" or "parlor
Bolshevists" who would overthrow society and all the achievements of
the past in order to free themselves from moral and religious
restraints and mayhap "get something for nothing". The parallel is
very exact indeed.
The Church always argued that there were no new heresies. All would,
on examination, prove to be old and discredited. So the Vice-President
of the United States has recently declared that:
Men have experimented with radical theories in great and small ways
times without number and always, always with complete failure.
They are not new; they are old. Each failure has demonstrated
anew that without effort there is no success. The race never gets
something for nothing.[31]
But is this not a complete reversal of the obvious truth? Unless we
define "radical" as that which never does succeed, how can anyone with
the most elementary notions of history fail to see that almost all the
things that we prize to-day represent revolts against tradition, and
were in their beginnings what seemed to be shocking divergences from
current beliefs and practices? What about Christianity, and
Protestantism, and constitutional government, and the rejection of old
superstitions and the acceptance of modern scientific ideas? The race
has always been getting something for nothing, for creative thought
is, as we have seen, confined to a very few. And it has been the
custom to discourage or kill those who prosecuted it too openly, not
to reward them according to their merits.
One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase "getting
something for nothing", as if it were the peculiar and perverse
ambition of disturbers of society. Except for our animal outfit,
practically all we have is handed to us gratis. Can the most
complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of
writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic,
and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with
meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may
derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is
little else than getting something for nothing. Like other vested
interests, it is "the legitimate right to something for nothing".[32]
How much execrable reasoning and how many stupid accusations would
fall away if this truth were accepted as a basis of discussion! Of
course there is no more flagrant example of a systematic endeavor to
get something for nothing than the present business system based on
profits, and absentee ownership of stocks.
Since the invention of printing, and indeed long before, those fearful
of change have attempted to check criticism by attacking books. These
were classified as orthodox or heterodox, moral or immoral,
treasonable or loyal, according to their tone. Unhappily this habit
continues and shows itself in the distinction between sound and
unsound, radical and conservative, safe and dangerous. The sensible
question to ask about a book is obviously whether it makes some
contribution to a clearer understanding of our situation by adding or
reaffirming important considerations and the inferences to be made
from these. Such books could be set off against those that were but
expressions of vague discontent or emulation, or denunciations of
things because they are as they are or are not as they are not. I have
personally little confidence in those who cry lo here or lo there. It
is premature to advocate any wide sweeping reconstruction of the
social order, although experiments and suggestions should not be
discouraged. What we need first is a change of heart and a chastened
mood which will permit an ever increasing number of people to see
things as they are, in the light of what they have been and what they
might be. The dogmatic socialist with his unhistorical assumptions of
class struggle, his exaggerated economic interpretation of history,
and his notion that labor is the sole producer of capital, is shedding
scarcely more light on the actual situation than is the Lusk Committee
and Mr. Coolidge, with their confidence in the sacredness of private
property, as they conceive it, in the perennial rightness and
inspiration of existing authority and the blessedness of the profit
system. But there are plenty of writers, to mention only a few of the
more recent ones, like Veblen, Dewey, J. A. Hobson, Tawney, Cole,
Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, Graham Wallas, who may or may not
have (or ever have had) any confidence in the presuppositions and
forecasts of socialism, whose books do make clearer to any fair-minded
reader the painful exigencies of our own times.
I often think of the economic historians of, say, two centuries hence
who may find time to dig up the vestiges of the economic literature of
to-day. We may in imagination appeal to their verdicts and in some
cases venture to forecast them. Many of our writers they will throw
aside as dominated by a desire merely to save the ill-understood
present at all costs; others as attempting to realize plans which were
already discredited in their own day. Future historians will,
nevertheless, clearly distinguish a few who, by a sort of persistent
and ardent detachment, were able to see things close at hand more
fully and truly than their fellows and endeavored to do what they
could to lead their fellows to perceive and reckon with the facts
which so deeply concerned them. Blessed be those who aspire to win
this glory. On the monument erected to Bruno on the site where he was
burned for seeing more clearly than those in authority in his days, is
the simple inscription, "Raised to Giordano Bruno by the generation
which he foresaw."
We are all purblind, but some are blinder than others who use the
various means available for sharpening their eyesight. As an onlooker
it seems to me safe to say that the lenses recommended by both the
"radicals" and their vivid opponents rather tend to increase than
diminish our natural astigmatism.
Those who agree, on the whole, at least, with the _facts_ brought
together in this essay and, on the whole, with the main _inferences_
suggested either explicitly or implicitly, will properly begin to
wonder how our educational system and aims are to be so rearranged
that coming generations may be better prepared to understand the
condition of human life and to avail themselves of its possibilities
more fully and guard against its dangers more skillfully than previous
generations. There is now widespread discontent with our present
educational methods and their elaborate futility; but it seems to me
that we are rather rarely willing to face the fundamental difficulty,
for it is obviously so very hard to overcome. _We do not dare to be
honest enough to tell boys and girls and young men and women what
would be most useful to them in an age of imperative social
reconstruction._
We have seen that the ostensible aims of education are various,[33]
and that among them is now included the avowed attempt to prepare the
young to play their part later as voting citizens. If they are to do
better than preceding generations they must be brought up differently.
They would have to be given a different general attitude toward
institutions and ideals; instead of having these represented to them
as standardized and sacred they should be taught to view them as
representing half-solved problems. But how can we ever expect to
cultivate the judgment of the young in matters of fundamental social,
economic, and political readjustment when we consider the really
dominating forces in education? But even if these restraints were
weakened or removed, the task would remain a very delicate one. Even
with teachers free and far better informed than they are, it would be
no easy thing to cultivate in the young a justifiable admiration for
the achievements and traditional ideals of mankind and at the same
time develop the requisite knowledge of the prevailing abuses,
culpable stupidity, common dishonesty, and empty political buncombe,
which too often passes for statesmanship.
But the problem has to be tackled, and it may be tackled directly or
indirectly. The direct way would be to describe as realistically as
might be the actual conditions and methods, and their workings, good
and bad. If there were better books than are now available it would be
possible for teachers tactfully to show not only how government is
supposed to run, but how it actually is run. There are plenty of
reports of investigating committees, Federal and state, which furnish
authentic information in regard to political corruption, graft, waste,
and incompetency. These have not hitherto been supposed to have
anything to do with the _science_ of government, although they are
obviously absolutely essential to an _understanding_ of it. Similar
reflections suggest themselves in the matter of business,
international relations, and race animosities. But so long as our
schools depend on appropriations made by politicians, and colleges and
universities are largely supported by business men or by the state,
and are under the control of those who are bent on preserving the
existing system from criticism, it is hard to see any hope of a kind
of education which would effectively question the conventional notions
of government and business. They cannot be discussed with sufficient
honesty to make their consideration really medicinal. We laud the
brave and outspoken and those supposed to have the courage of their
convictions--but only when these convictions are acceptable or
indifferent to us. Otherwise, honesty and frankness become mere
impudence.[34]
No doubt politics and economics could be taught, and are being taught,
better as time goes on. Neither of them are so utterly unreal and
irrelevant to human proceedings as they formerly were. There is no
reason why a teacher of political economy should not describe the
actual workings of the profit system of industry with its restraints
on production and its dependence on the engineer, and suggest the
possibility of gathering together capital from functionless absentee
stockholders on the basis of the current rate of interest rather than
speculative dividends. The actual conditions of the workers could be
described, their present precarious state, the inordinate and wasteful
prevalence of hiring and firing; the policy of the unions, and their
defensive and offensive tactics. Every youngster might be given some
glimmering notion that neither "private property" nor "capital" is the
real issue (since few question their essentiality) but rather the new
problem of supplying other than the traditional motives for industrial
enterprise--namely, the slave-like docility and hard compulsion of the
great masses of workers, on the one hand, and speculative profits, on
the other, which now dominate in our present business system. For the
existing organization is not only becoming more and more patently
wasteful, heartless, and unjust, but is beginning, for various
reasons, to break down. In short, whatever the merits of our present
ways of producing the material necessities and amenities of life, it
looks to many as if they could not succeed indefinitely, even as well
as they have in the past, without some fundamental revision.
As for political life, a good deal would be accomplished if students
could be habituated to distinguish successfully between the empty
declamations of politicians and statements of facts, between vague
party programs and concrete recommendations and proposals. They should
early learn that language is not primarily a vehicle of ideas and
information, but an emotional outlet, corresponding to various
cooings, growlings, snarls, crowings, and brayings. Their attention
could be invited to the rhetoric of the bitter-enders in the Senate or
the soothing utterances of Mr. Harding on accepting the nomination for
President:
"With a Senate advising as the Constitution contemplates, I would
hopefully approach the nations of Europe and of the earth, proposing
that understanding which makes us a willing participant in the
consecration of nations to a new relationship, to commit the moral
forces of the world, America included, to peace and international
justice, still leaving America free, independent, self-reliant, but
offering friendship to all the world. If men call for more specific
details, I remind them that moral committals are broad and
all-inclusive, and we are contemplating peoples in the concord of
humanity's advancement."
After mastering the difference between language used to express facts
and purposes and that which amounts to no more than a pious
ejaculation, a suave and deprecating gesture, or an inferential
accusation directed against the opposing party, the youth should be
instructed in the theory and practice of party fidelity and the
effects of partisanship on the conduct of our governmental affairs. In
fine, he should get some notion of the motives and methods of those
who really run our government, whether he learned anything else or
not.
These _direct_ attempts to produce a more intelligently critical and
open-minded generation are, however, likely to be far less feasible
than the _indirect_ methods. Partly because they will arouse strenuous
opposition from the self-appointed defenders of society as now
regulated, and partly because no immediate inspection of habits and
institutions is so instructive as a study of their origin and progress
and a comparison of them with other forms of social adjustment. I hope
that it has already become clear that we have great, and hitherto only
very superficially worked, resources in History, as it is now coming
to be conceived.
We are in the midst of the greatest intellectual revolution that has
ever overtaken mankind. Our whole conception of mind is undergoing a
great change. We are beginning to understand its nature, and as we
find out more, intelligence may be raised to a recognized dignity and
effectiveness which it has never enjoyed before. An encouraging
beginning has been made in the case of the natural sciences, and a
similar success may await the studies which have to do with the
critical estimate of man's complicated nature, his fundamental
impulses and resources, the needless and fatal repressions which these
have suffered through the ignorance of the past, and the discovery of
untried ways of enriching our existence and improving our relations
with our fellow men.
There[35] is a well-known passage in Goethe's "Faust" where he likens
History to the Book with Seven Seals described in Revelation, which no
one in heaven, or on the earth or under the earth, was able to open
and read therein. All sorts of guesses have been hazarded as to its
contents by Augustine, Orosius, Otto of Freising, Bossuet,
Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Herder, Hegel, and many others, but none of
them were able to break the seals, and all of them were gravely misled
by their fragmentary knowledge of the book's contents. For we now see
that the seven seals were seven great ignorances. No one knew much (1)
of man's physical nature, or (2) the workings of his thoughts and
desires, or (3) of the world in which he lives, or (4) of how he has
come about as a race, or (5) of how he develops as an individual from
a tiny egg, or (6) how deeply and permanently he is affected by the
often forgotten impressions of infancy and childhood, or (7) how his
ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in the dark
ignorance of savagery.