If we attempt to moralize upon the basis of these facts, we arrive at a conclusion something like this: it is right to use one’s energies in organized effort—the more highly organized the better. And if we ask what is the impulse or trait or quality which makes people turn from an easy to a hard life, from loafing to sport, from sport to work, and which makes them contemptuous of each other and of themselves if they neglect an opportunity or evade a challenge to go into something still harder and more exacting—if we ask what it is that despite all our pretensions of laziness pushes us up more and more difficult paths of effort, we are obliged to call it Enterprise.

And when we face the fact that Enterprise is a love of difficulties for their own sake, we realize that the normal human being has, within certain limits, a pleasure in pain: for it is painful to run a race, to learn a language, to write a sonnet, to put through a deal—and pleasurable precisely because it is, within these limits, painful. If it is too easy, there is no fun in it. The extremer sorts of enterprise we call courage and heroism. But though we admire the fireman who risks his life in a burning building, we would not admire the man who deliberately set fire to his own bed in order to suffer the pangs of torture by fire; nor, although we admire the airmen who come down frozen from high altitudes, would we applaud a man who locked himself in a refrigerator over the week-end in order to suffer the torture of great cold. We would feel, in both these hypothetical cases, that there was no relevancy of their action to the world of reality. But upon this point our emotions are after all uncertain. We do not begrudge applause to the football-star who is carried from the field with a broken collar-bone, or to the movie-star who drives a motor-car off a cliff into the sea, though it is quite clear that these actions are relevant to and significant in the world of fantasy rather than the world of reality. What it comes down to is the intelligibility of the action. Does it relate to any world, of reality or of fantasy, which we can understand, which has any significance for us?

When we turn to the child, we find that normally he has no lack of enterprise. But his enterprise is relevant to a world of childish dreaming to which we have lost the key. His activities are largely meaningless to us—that is why we are so annoyed by them. And, in the same way, our kinds of enterprise are largely meaningless to him. That is why he usually objects so strongly to lessons and tasks. They interrupt and interfere with the conduct of his own affairs. He is as outraged at having to stop his play to put a shovelful of coal on the furnace, as a sober business man would be at being compelled, by some strange and tyrannical infantile despotism, to stop dictating letters and join, at some stated hour, in a game of ring-around-the-rosy. Most of what we object to as misconduct in children is a natural rebellion against the intrusion of an unimaginative adult despotism into their lives.

Nevertheless, it is our adult world that they are going to have to live in, and they must learn to live in it. And it is true, moreover, that much of their enterprise is capable of finding as satisfactory employment in what we term the world of reality as in their world of dreams. What we commonly do, however, is to convince them by punishment and scolding that our world of reality is unpleasant. What we ought to do is to make it more agreeable, more interesting, more fascinating, than their world of dreams. Our friend the Artist has already told us how this may be done, and our friend the Philosopher has given some oblique hints on the same subject. I merely note here that the school is the place in which the transition from the world of dreams to the world of realities may be best effected.

But there are various kinds of enterprise in our adult world. It is undoubtedly enterprising to hold up a pay-train, a la Jesse James. But though when the act involves real daring, we cannot withhold an instinctive admiration, yet we know that it is wrong. Why wrong? Because such acts disorganize and discourage, and if unchecked would ruin, the whole elaborate system of enterprise by which such trains are despatched and such money earned. It is obvious that train-robbery and wage-labor cannot fairly compete with one another; that if train-robbery goes on long enough, nobody will do wage-labor, and there will eventually cease to be pay-trains to rob. The law does not take cognizance of these reasons, but punishes train-robbery as a crime against property. Yet if we look into the matter for a moment, we realize that loyalty to any property system ultimately rests upon the conviction that its destruction would result in the total frustration of the finer sorts of human enterprise; it is for this reason that conservative people always persuade themselves that any change in the economic arrangements of society, from a new income-tax to communism, is a kind of train-robbery, bound to end in universal piracy and ruin. And this moral indignation, whether in any given instance appropriate or not—or whether, as in the case of many piratical kinds of business enterprise, left for long in abeyance—is the next step in our human morality. If we ask ourselves, why should not human enterprise turn into a welter of primitive piracy, with all the robbers robbing each other, we are compelled to answer that in the long run it would not be interesting. For, although destruction is temporarily more exciting, it is only construction that is permanently interesting. And if we ask why it is more interesting, we find that it is because it is harder. It is too easy to destroy. Destruction may be occasionally a good thing, as a tonic, something to give to individuals or populations a sense of power; but their most profound instinct is toward creation.

But the child, by reason of the primitive stage of his development, tends to engage rather more enthusiastically in destruction as a mode of enterprise than in creation. He tires of building, and it is a question whether or not the pleasure he takes in knocking over his houses of blocks does not exceed his pleasure in building them. He prefers playing at hunting and war to playing at keeping house. And his imagination responds more readily to the robber-exploits of Robin Hood than to the Stories of Great Inventors. This is a fact, but it need not discourage us. What is necessary is for him to learn the interestingness of creation. If what he builds is not a house of blocks on the nursery floor, but a wigwam in the woods, his destructive energies are likely to be satisfied in cutting down the saplings with which to build it. This simply means that his destructive energies have become subordinated to his constructive ones, as they are in adult life. But they cannot become so subordinated until what he constructs is wholly the result of his own wishes, and until moreover it is more desirable as the starting-point of new creative activities than as something to destroy. Those conditions are fulfilled whenever a group of children play together and have free access to the materials with which to construct. And that is what the school is for—to provide the materials, and the freedom, and be the home of a process by which children learn that it is more fun to create than to destroy.

XXIII. Democracy

BUT in our adult world, there is still another moral quality demanded of our human enterprise. It is not merely better to create than to destroy, but it is better to create something which is useful, or desirable, to others. Our moral attitude is a little uncertain upon this point, for the artist knows that his coarsest and easiest kind of enterprise is likely to be valued by others, and his finer and more difficult enterprises neglected and scorned. And so he has the impulse to work only for himself; nevertheless, he realizes that if he does work only for himself he is doing wrong. For he really feels a deep-lying moral obligation to work for others—a moral obligation which comes, of course, from his egoistic need of the spiritual sustenance of praise. The fact is that others are necessary to him, and that his work must please others. So if he ignores the crowd, it is because he wishes to compel it to take something better than what it asked for. And this democratic quality in enterprise becomes the third test of civilized life. Does a given action fit in everybody else’s scheme as well as in your own: and, if it conflicts with the outside scheme, is it with a fundamentally altruistic intention? There are prophets and false prophets and of those who take the difficult course of disagreeing with their fellows, the best we can immediately demand of them is that they afflict us because they think it good for us and not because they do not care. Yet even so they differ from us at their peril. For we are to be the final judges of whether we are being imposed on or not. If we do not, after full consideration, feel that we can play our game if Napoleon or the Kaiser plays his, we put him out of business.