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.
The seals are all off now. The book at last lies open before those who are capable of reading it, and few they be as yet; for most of us still cling to the guesses made in regard to its contents before anyone knew what was in it. We have become attached to the familiar old stories which now prove to be fictions, and we find it hard to reconcile ourselves to the many hard sayings which the book proves to contain—its constant stress on the stupidity of "good" people; its scorn for the respectable and normal, which it often reduces to little more than sanctimonious routine and indolence and pious resentment at being disturbed in one's complacent assurances. Indeed, much of its teaching appears downright immoral according to existing standards.
One awful thing that the Book of the Past makes plain is that with our animal heritage we are singularly oblivious to the large concerns of life. We are keenly sensitive to little discomforts, minor irritations, wounded vanity, and various danger signals; but our comprehension is inherently vague and listless when it comes to grasping intricate situations and establishing anything like a fair perspective in life's problems and possibilities. Our imagination is restrained by our own timidity, constantly reinforced by the warnings of our fellows, who are always urging us to be safe and sane, by which they mean convenient for them, predictable in our conduct and graciously amenable to the prevailing standards.
But it is obvious that it is increasingly dangerous to yield to this inveterate tendency, however comfortable and respectable it may seem for the moment.
History, as H. G. Wells has so finely expressed it, is coming more and more to be "a race between education and catastrophe. Our internal policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations". There can be no secure peace now but a common peace of the whole world; no prosperity but a general prosperity, and this for the simple reason that we are all now brought so near together and are so pathetically and intricately interdependent, that the old notions of noble Isolation and national sovereignty are magnificently criminal.
In the bottom of their hearts, or the depths of their unconscious, do not the conservatively minded realize that their whole attitude toward the world and its betterment is based on an assumption that finds no least support in the Great Book of the Past? Does it not make plain that the "conservative", so far as he is consistent and lives up to his professions, is fatally in the wrong? The so-called "radical" is also almost always wrong, for no one can foresee the future. But he works on a right assumption—namely, that the future has so far always proved different from the past and that it will continue to do so. Some of us, indeed, see that the future is tending to become more and more rapidly and widely different from the past. The conservative himself furnishes the only illustration of his theory, and even that is highly inconclusive. His general frame of mind appears to remain constant, but he finds himself defending and rejecting very different things. The great issue may, according to the period, be a primeval taboo, the utterances of the Delphic oracle, the Athanasian creed, the Inquisition, the geocentric theory, monarchy by the grace of God, witchcraft, slavery, war, capitalism, private property, or noble isolation. All of these tend to appear to the conservative under the aspect of eternity, but all of these things have come, many of them have gone, and the remainder would seem to be subject to undreamed-of modifications as time goes on. This is the teaching of the now unsealed book.