If Human Engineering had been established long ago our social system would have been different, our civilization would have been much higher, this war would have been avoided. We do not need to delude ourselves. The World War was the result of badly balanced social and economic forces. The world needs other “balances of power” than such as are devised by lawyers and politicians, by single-selfish or group-selfish interests. Humanity is reaching out for a science and art of human guidance based upon a right understanding of human nature.
Chapter IX. Manhood Of Humanity
In a previous chapter I have said that the World War marks the end of one vast period in the life of humankind and marks the beginning of another. It marks the end of Humanity's Childhood and the beginning of Humanity's Manhood.
Our human Past is a mighty fact of our world. Many facts are unstable, impermanent, and evanescent—they are here to-day, and to-morrow they are gone. Not so with the great fact of our human Past. Our past abides.
“It is permanent. It can be counted on. It is nearly eternal as the race of man. Out of that past we have come. Into it we are constantly returning. Meanwhile, it is of the utmost importance to our lives. It contains the roots of all we are, and of all we have of wisdom, of science, of philosophy, of art, of jurisprudence, of customs and institutions. It contains the record or ruins of all the experiments that man has made during a quarter or a half million years in the art of living in this world.” (Keyser, Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking.)
In our relation to the past there are three wide-open ways in which one may be a fool. One of the ways is the way of ignoring the past—the way of [pg 168] remaining blankly ignorant of the human past as the animals are blankly ignorant of their past and so of drifting through life as animals do, without reference to the experience of bygone generations. Fools of this type may be called drifting fools or Drifters. Another way to be a fool—a very alluring way—is that of falsifying the past by idealizing it—by stupidly disregarding its vices, misery, ignorance, slothfulness, and folly, and stupidly magnifying its virtues, happiness, knowledge, achievements and wisdom; it is the way of the self-complacent—the way of those who, being comfortably situated and prosperous, are opposed to change; the past, they say, was wise for it produced the present and the present is good—let us alone. Fools of this type may be called idolatrous fools, worshiping the Past; or static fools, contented with the Present; or cowardly fools, opposed to change, fearful of the Future. A third way to be a fool—which is also alluring—is the opposite of the foregoing; it is the way of those who falsify the past by stupidly and contemptuously disregarding its virtues, its happiness, its knowledge, its great achievements, and its wisdom, and by stupidly or dishonestly magnifying its vices, its misery, its ignorance, its great slothfulness, and its folly; it is apt to be the way of the woeful, the unprosperous, the desperate—especially the way of such as find escape from the bore of routine life in the excitements [pg 169] of unrest, turbulence, and change; the past, they say, was all wrong, for it produced the present and the present is thoroughly bad—let us destroy it, root and branch. Fools of this type may be called scorning fools, Scorners of the Past; or destroying fools, Destroyers of the Present; or dynamic fools, Revelers in the excitements of Change.
Such are the children of folly: (1) Drifting fools—ignorers of the past—disregarders of race experience—thoughtless floaters on the shifting currents of human affairs; (2) Static fools—idealizers of the past—complacent lovers of the present—enemies of change—fearful of the future; (3) Dynamic fools—scorners of the past—haters of the present—destroyers of the works of the dead—most modest of fools, each of them saying: “What ought to be begins with Me; I will make the world a paradise; but my genius must be free; now it is hampered by the existing ‘order’—the bungling work of the past; I will destroy it; I will start with chaos; we need light—the Sun casts shadows—I will begin by blotting out the Sun; then the world will be full of glory—the light of my genius.”
In striking contrast with that three-fold division of Folly, the counsel of Wisdom is one, and it is one with the sober counsel of Common Sense. What is that counsel? What is the united counsel of wisdom and common sense respecting the past? The [pg 170] answer is easy and easy to understand. The counsel is this: Do not ignore the past but study it—study it diligently as being the mightiest factor among the great factors of our human world; endeavor to view the past justly, to contemplate it as it was and is, to see it whole—to see it in true perspective—magnifying neither its good nor its evil, neither its knowledge nor its ignorance, neither its enterprise nor its slothfulness, neither its achievements nor its failures; as the salient facts are ascertained, endeavor to account for them, to find their causes, their favoring conditions, to explain the facts to understand them, applying always the question Why? Centuries of centuries of cruel superstition—Why? Centuries of centuries of almost complete ignorance of natural law—Why? Centuries of centuries of monstrous misconceptions of human nature—Why? Measureless creations, wastings and destructions of wealth—Why? Endless rolling cycles of enterprise, stagnation, and decay—Why? Interminable alterations of peace and war, enslavements and emancipations—Why? Age after age of world-wide worship of man-made gods, silly, savage, enthroned by myth and magic, celebrated and supported by poetry and the wayward speculations of ignorant "sages"—Why? Age upon age of world-wide slow developments of useful inventions, craftsmanship, commerce, and art—Why? Ages of dark impulsive groping [pg 171] before the slow discovery of reason, followed by centuries of belief in the sufficiency of ratiocination unaided by systematic observation and experiment—Why? At length the dawn of scientific method and science, the growth of natural knowledge, immeasurable expansion of the universe in Time and in Space, belief in the lawfulness of Nature, rapidly increasing subjugation of natural forces to human control, growing faith in the limitless progressibility of human knowledge and in the limitless perfectibility of human welfare—Why? The widely diverse peoples of the world constrained by scientific progress to live together as in one community upon a greatly shrunken and rapidly shrinking planet, the unpreparedness of existing ethics, law, philosophy, economics, politics and government to meet the exigencies thus arising—Why?