Speaking again only for myself I could not assent to the position that finality appertains to the ethical teachings of the Gospel, that they or their Author have spoken the last word in ethics. I could not persuade myself that this is so because I failed to get from these teachings, inestimably precious as they are, an answer to the question that most pressed upon me—Instrumental in what sense, instrumental to what end?
CHAPTER V
SOCIAL REFORM
My position at that time may be summarized as follows: There is a divine power in the world, not individual, manifest in the moral law as revealed in human experience. The moral law involves recognition of the presence of a something holy in each human being. Since the world presents innumerable examples of the grossest violation of human personality (e.g., prostitution and exploitation of laborers), the business immediately in hand is to make an end of these violations. There was as yet in my mind no positive definition of personality. Clarification and further development were promoted by the necessity of grappling with the problems of poverty and with the attempted solutions of the Socialists and of other social reformers. At this period, the notion of personality in my mind being still without determinate content, empirical matter intruded, and a species of millennialism for a time vitiated my thinking. In order to set up a goal for humanity, I dallied with Utopias, and flattered my imagination with the vision of something like a state of ultimate earthly felicity. The cheap cry of “Let us have heaven on earth” was also on my lips, though the delusion did not last long and perhaps never penetrated very deeply.
The problem of poverty, as mentioned above, engrossed me early. I acted as chairman of the meeting at which Henry George was first introduced to the public in New York City. But Henry George’s remedy,—a single draught of Socialism with unstinted individualism thereafter—never attracted me, while his descriptions of the misery of the poor, eloquent as they were, and fitted to awaken persons unacquainted with actual conditions, conveyed to me no novel message. I had before then been profoundly stirred by the chapters in Karl Marx’s Kapital in which he collects from the English Blue Books frightful evidence of the mistreatment of laborers and especially of children in the early part of the nineteenth century. My errands in the tenement slums of New York had also made me fairly familiar with the bitter facts, and throughout my life I have been in touch in a practical way with the appalling complexus of misery and wrong which we abstractly designate as the Labor Question. I shall not here take time to discuss Socialism or other social reform movements in detail. My intention is to sketch a certain philosophy of life, and to trace the steps by which I reached it. My reaction against Socialism and related movements, however, was a prime factor in this inner development; and it is of this reaction and the causes of it that I must speak.
The evils inherent in poverty are, in the first place, obviously, the privations entailed by it; secondly, the fact that the greater part of the life of the poor is consumed in efforts to provide the bare necessaries, the mind being thus kept in bondage to bodily needs and prevented from rising to other interests more appropriate to rational beings; thirdly, the fact that the first two wrongs are caused, not wholly it is true, but yet in a large measure, by fellow human beings.[13] The sting in poverty is not so much the hardships suffered, as the contempt for the manhood of the poor, exhibited by their exploiters,—the inequity being thus turned into iniquity.
Now my reaction against Socialism was and is that it neglects the third, the moral evil, and stresses only the first and second. I am now speaking of Marxian Socialism, with which in its rigid form I early acquainted myself. The Marxian Socialist does not deny the pain felt in consequence of the inequity, nor the desire of those who suffer to become the equals of their masters; but he regards this desire as a fact of nature explicable on deterministic grounds, a consequence of improvement in the technique or tools of industry. He does not deny that there are so-called moral ideas, but he considers them epiphenomena or by-products of economic development. The tendency toward equilibrium of power in human society, termed democracy, is to him just a fact and nothing more. The mere desire for it apart from the rightness of the desire is the efficient cause which leads to social readjustments. But evidently this account of the matter will be persuasive only in case the efficient cause proves to be really efficient, that is to say, in case the desire for equilibration is on the point of effectuating itself. If it is not, if the desire of the masses for power is thwarted, if the realization of their hopes is indefinitely postponed, then the foundations of the theory are undermined. Hence Marxian Socialism has been coupled with and depends on a belief which is a kind of materialistic parallel of the apocalyptic vision of Jesus,—the belief that the end of the present world (the world of the wage system) is close at hand, only with the difference that the end is to be brought about not by divine interference but automatically by the acquisition of power on the part of the masses.
To me neither hunger nor the bondage of the mind to physical necessities nor the bare fact of inequity seem sufficient to justify the demand for social reconstruction, apart from moral right. If there be no such thing as morality, or if morality be but an epiphenomenon of economic conditions, what warrant have the hungry or the disadvantaged for complaining? Animals, too, hunger and sicken. If man be like them a mere chance product of nature, why should he not share their fate? Let the weak succumb! Surely the bald fact that the democratic masses today chafe under the yoke of their masters and demand a better state of things, is no more a ground of obligation for the former than the tendency toward an ultimate equilibrium in nature of which scientists speak can be a ground of obligation. The tendency will effectuate itself or not as the acting forces determine. There is in truth no such thing as obligation from this point of view. Then why not fold our arms and wait for what will happen? The notion of democracy currently held is obnoxious to the same criticism. Leave out the moral basis in the claim to equity, and nothing remains but the brute fact that men, being egotists, fret under the exercise of superior power by their fellow egotists. But let Nietzsche or some one else demonstrate that certain higher values, higher merely because subjectively relished as higher, are incompatible with equilibrium of power, and he will be justified at least in his own eyes in scoffing at equality and scourging the democratic dogs back to their kennels. No one denies that the masses have the desire to be treated as the equals of their masters (very inconveniently for the latter), but it is quite another matter whether their desire ought to be gratified. Social reconstruction, in other words, must be motivated by other considerations than those by which according to Marx the great change is to come about.
I have not stopped to consider whether the Socialistic scheme is workable, whether the run of mankind are capable of coöperative effort on a large scale without the preëminent leadership of master minds; whether Socialism, if carried out, would really breed, as it is expected to, the sentiment of ideal brotherhood; whether the sentiment of brotherhood itself, unless it be rooted in the closer family and national ties, is morally sound, whether the emotional forces that sweep through and overwhelm large aggregations of men, can be bridled and sufficiently enlightened to promote the ends of Socialism. All such questions as these touch the feasibility of the ideal proposed; my own reaction was and is against the ideal itself. Instead of pronouncing as some do that mankind are not yet ripe to carry out so high an ideal, I found myself seriously challenging and finally rejecting the very ideal on the ground that it is not a genuine moral ideal at all. It is ethically spurious, because it omits the notion of right and substitutes for it that of power.
A different objection lies against certain modifications of Socialism and against many of the social reform movements of our time. In these movements the idea of personality is not absent as in Marx’s theory. The inherent dignity of every human being is deeply felt, and per contra the indignity of the present condition of the greater number. Man is worth while; and for the sake of the worth in him, the unfavorable circumstances which stifle the promise of his nature are to be changed. My objection in this case is that the higher spiritual nature of man, or the notion of personality, is left indefinite and remains vaguely in the background. It supplies indeed the initial motive for practical efforts; but the instrumental relation of the goods of life to the supreme good is not apprehended positively. And thus the door is left open, as we shall presently see, for corrupting influences to enter in.