Is there anything better than morality?
It is this lack of vision, this immature skepticism as to the service of morality to human welfare, that has fired a flame of revolt in certain minds, a revolt not merely against incidental defects and outworn conceptions of morality, but against morality uberhaupt. The declamations of these Promethean rebels make it clear, however, that their protest is but the old fault of condemning a necessary institution altogether for its imperfections or its abuses. Morality has been blended with superstition and tyranny, has been often blind, perverted, narrow, checking noble impulses and choking the rich and happy development of life. But it is one thing to arraign these accidents and corruptions of morality; it is quite another to discard the whole system of guidance of which they are but the excrescences and mistakes. This usurping is, of course, also in large part a thirst for novelty, a love of paradox, of practicing ingenuity in making the better appear the worse; it is in part a volcanic eruption of suppressed longings and a protest against the inadequacy of our present code to provide opportunity and happiness for the masses. The motives vary with the individual rebels.
It must suffice, however, from among the many leaders of this revolt, to quote that clever but unbalanced German iconoclast, Nietzsche. Typical of his doctrine is the following: [Footnote: Genealogy of Morals (ed. Alex. Tille), Foreword, p. 9.] "Never until now was there the least doubt or hesitation to set down the 'good' man as of higher value than the 'evil' man-of higher value in the sense of furtherance, utility, prosperity, as regards MAN in general (the future of man included). What if the reverse were true? What if in, the 'good' one also a symptom of decline were contained, and a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic by which the present might live AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FUTURE? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also in humbler style- more meanly? So that just morality were to blame, if a HIGHEST MIGHTINESS AND SPLENDOR of type of man-possible in itself were never attained? And that, therefore, morality itself would be the danger of dangers?"
The point of this tirade is that morality puts a wet blanket over human powers; it is a bourgeois ideal, saving men, indeed, from pain, but also robbing life of its picturesqueness and glory. Many people frankly prefer "interesting" to "good" people; Nietzsche generalizes this feeling. Morality is to him uninteresting, dull, a code for slaves, for the clash of combat, the tang of cruelty and lust, the tingle of unrestrained power. Every man for himself then, and the Devil take the hindmost. Shocked as we are by this brutal platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and adventurous spirit in us; after all, we are not far removed from the savage, and the thought of a psalm-singing, tea-drinking, tamely good world is abhorrent to the marrow of us. Stevenson, with his delightfully irresponsible audacity, sighs for an occasional "furlough from the moral law"; and there are times for most of us when it seems as if we should choke and smother under the everlasting "Thou shalt not!" But the daring rebel, the defiant Titan, comes creeping back to the shelter of morality with a headache or something worse, and discovers that his Promethean boldness was but childish petulance; that it is futile and foolish to try to escape the inexorable laws of human life. There are, in fact, two adequate answers that can be made to the despiser of morality:
(1) Dull or not, repressive or not, morality is absolutely necessary. It is better than the pain, the insecurity, the relapse into barbarism, that immorality implies. Our whole civilization, everything that makes human life better than that of the beasts of prey, would collapse without its foundation of moral obedience. The regime of slashing individualism would kill off many of the weaker who are precious to humanity-a Homer (if he was blind), a Keats, a Stevenson; nay, if carried to extreme, it would put an end to the race. For who are the weakest, the "hindmost," but the babies! Sympathy and love and self sacrifice, at least in parents, are necessary if the race is to endure a generation. But even for the individual, the penalties of immorality are too obvious to need recapitulation. If morality is repression, it is the minimal repression consistent with the maintenance of successful and happy life. Its real aim is to bring life, and life more abundantly.
(2) But if we are looking for something great, for adventure and excitement and battle against odds, we can find it much better than in brutally slashing at our fellows, or running amuck at the beck of our impulses, by putting our valor at the service of some really great human endeavor. If we want to get into the big game, the great adventure, we must pit ourselves, with the leaders of mankind, against the hostile universe. The men and women who set our blood tingling and our hearts beating fastest are-Darwin, discoverer by patient labor of a great cosmic law; Pasteur, conqueror at last over a terrible human disease; Peary, first to plant foot upon the axis of the world; Goethals, builder of a canal that links the oceans. The steady march of a moralized civilization, presenting united front to the cosmos, is infinitely more glorious than the futile, aimless, and petty struggles of an anarchic immorality. Our half-disciplined life is already far richer and more romantic than the life of Nietzsche's "supermen" could be; and we are only a little way along the road of moral progress. The real superman will be a BETTER man, a man of tenderness and chivalry, of loyalty and self-control, a man of disciplined heart and purified will; to attain to such a supermanliness is, indeed, a heroic and splendid achievement, worthy of our utmost endeavor, and calling into play all our noblest powers.
Some there are, accustomed to the vision of tables of stone engraved by the hand of God and set up for man's obedience amid Sinaitic thunders, for whom the discovery of the humble human and prehuman origin, and the stumbling hit-or-miss evolution, of morality dulls its sanctity. But any one who is tempted for this reason to deride morality may console himself with the reflection that everything else of supreme importance in human life is of plebeian ancestry. Reason, art, government, religion, had their crude and superstition-ridden beginnings. Man himself was once hardly different from a monkey. Yet there is a spark of the divine in him and in all these arts and institutions which he with the aid of the cosmic forces has evolved. Surely a juster judgment may find a sublimity in this age-long march from the clod toward the millennium that could never belong to the spectacular but very provincial myths of the Semites. The emotions ever lag behind the intellect; and our hearts may still yearn for the neighborly and passionate battle-god of the Pentateuch. Moreover, we shall continue to recognize a vast fund of truth and insight in those early folk tales and primitive codes. But there comes a deeper breath to the man who realizes that morality and religion long antedate the Jewish revelation, and comes to see God in the tens and hundreds of thousands of years of slow but splendid human progress. Historical codes of morals are, indeed, seamed with superstition and are progressively displaced; but morality persists. At no time has man wholly solved the problem of life, but he must ever live by the best solution he has found. The innumerable codes are so many experiments, their very differences bearing witness to the need of some set of guiding principles for conduct.
It is sometimes said that morality, being a merely human invention, may be discarded when we choose. To this we may reply that morality bears, indeed, the indisputable marks of human instinct, will, and reason; but it is not an invention; it is a lesson, slowly learned. In its humanness lies its value. It is not an alien code, irrelevant to human nature; it is a natural function; it is the greatest of human institutions unless that be religion, which is its flower and consummation. Morality is made for man, for his use and guidance; what could possibly have greater sanctity or authority for him? Rebel as he may, and chafe under its restraints, he always comes back to morality; perhaps to a revised code, but to essentially the same control; for he cannot do without it. Our morality has its defects, but it is on the right track. A clearer insight into its teleological necessity, the purpose it exists to serve, will direct us in our efforts to revise it, so to fashion it as to make it productive of still greater good in the time to come. But if we discard it altogether, we are "like the base Indian" who "threw a pearl away, Richer than all his tribe."
What we need is not to abandon but to steadily improve our code; and whereas any one can pick flaws, only the man of trained mind and controlled desire can discover feasible lines of advance. "When all is said, there is nothing as yet to be changed in our old Aryan ideal of justice, conscientiousness, courage, kindness, and honor. We have only to draw nearer to it, to clasp it more closely, to realize it more effectively; and, before going beyond it, we have still a long and noble road to travel beneath the stars." [Footnote: Maeterlinck, "Our Anxious Morality," in The Measure of the Hours.] The conception of morality as the organization of interests will be found in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Ethics, and in many recent ethical books and papers. Among them are R. B. Perry's Moral Economy, G. Santayana's Reason in Science (chap. IX); William James, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (in the Will to Believe and Other Essays).
A discussion of whether morality really makes for happiness will be found in Leslie Stephen, System of Ethics, chap. X; W. L. Sheldon, An Ethical Movement, chap. VIII. For Nietzsche's theory, see his Beyond Good and Evil. There are many excellent replies; a brief but adequate one will be found in Perry, op. cit, chap. I.