Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

To satisfy this craze and this ambition, however, it was necessary to break many of the innumerable bonds—religious, moral, æsthetic, and political,—which limited the energy and initiative of our forefathers. How could so many millions of men have brought themselves to emigrate to America, if the spirit of tradition had not been weakened in Europe, and if everybody had continued to hold, as they did once upon a time, that the greatest good fortune a man could have was that of being buried in the church in which he had been baptised? Even to-day there are those who lament the diminution, in all the Christian churches during the last few centuries, of the number, complexity, and rigour of the rites and ceremonies, just as others lament that the ceremonial of social life and etiquette is dying out. But would not men who are obliged to work, travel, and rush about as we do nowadays find themselves embarrassed beyond the point of endurance by a religion which made them spend too much time over rites, and by a complicated etiquette like that which still prevails in the states of the East, requiring a large part of the day to be spent in compliments and ceremonies? Europeans often laugh at the architecture of New York; and I must confess that I, too, found it distinctly bizarre. On the other hand, could that vast city have grown and renovated itself so rapidly in the last century, and have found accommodation for the countless multitudes which throng to it from all the corners of the world, if those who built it had troubled themselves to observe the rules formulated by the great architects of the sixteenth century, in the days when it took as much time to build a palace and a church as it now does to construct a city?

Modern society, if compared with the societies which preceded it, may seem in many of its aspects—and in fact it is—ugly, poor in artistic beauty, coarse, and brutal. It may even seem atheistic and irreverent, frivolous and superficial in matters of religion, and, in certain respects, morally lax or downright licentious. This kind of disorder, however, which is such a common subject of heart-burning, is only the necessary effect of the outburst of our energy over the world and nature on its path of conquest. A civilisation cannot produce, refine, or perfect arts or traditions of elegance and of social life, or a morality and a religion, if it does not adopt an attitude of reserve, if it does not limit itself to some extent, if it does not sacrifice its other ambitions and aspirations to this object. A civilisation like ours, whose supreme aspiration it is to extend in the shortest possible time and as far as it can its empire over the world; to surpass all the limits which nature seeks to oppose to its restless ambitions and to the multiform energy of man, must needs sacrifice beauty, refinement, elegance, and moral delicacy to rapidity, energy, activity, and daring. The discovery and development of new countries, the marvellous progress of America, the discoveries of science, the perfection of machinery, the ideas of liberty which emerge triumphant from political revolutions and changes in customs, the weakening of the spirit of authority in every department of social life, the abolition of so many limits which once entangled the movements of man, are all phenomena which are mutually and indissolubly connected.

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“Yes,” many will say; “and they are phenomena which all go to make up the grandeur and glory of the modern world. We have power, wealth, knowledge, and liberty, the four blessings of which our forefathers had little, if any, knowledge. What cause have we then to grumble? And amongst all the blessings which modern times shower upon us, perhaps the most precious—more precious than wealth, power, and knowledge—is liberty. If we have no reason to regret the past, it is chiefly because our forefathers lived, imprisoned, and in suffering, within limits which we have overstepped. Is there any greater joy for a man than that of being able in thought, feeling, and action to follow the inner impulse of his own conscience, instead of making it bend to an external will, whether it be that of the law, or that of the public, or that of a tradition? Surely the modern world is the greatest as well as the most fortunate which has ever existed?”

That is what many people think, and thoughts like this breed the optimism which at the present day cheers so many minds. This thought is, moreover, partially true; but only partially. For in the intoxication of their triumph over nature, of the riches which they have conquered so easily and in such abundance, men seem not to recognise that this civilisation without limits is little by little allowing that same unbridled energy to hurry it into excesses which threaten to drive it back into that very state of barbarism from which it has made so many efforts to escape. The impetus which it has acquired, now that it has cast off so many of its ancient restraints, is great; but the danger is precisely that this impetus may carry it too far.

I have already said that amongst the limits abolished by modern civilisation are those which preceding civilisations had placed on luxury. How great a change has taken place in men’s ideas on this subject during two centuries! Simplicity and austerity were considered for centuries virtues proper to saints and heroes. Christianity had gone so far as to glorify poverty in so many words. Man, by increasing his needs, only increased the number of his masters and tyrants; only multiplied for himself occasions for sorrow. The more simply a man could live, the freer, stronger, and happier he was. In short, in ancient times, up to the French Revolution, religion, law, and tradition set limits on every side to man’s desire to possess and to enjoy; and these limits were so numerous and so close, that they entailed no little suffering on the generations constrained to live within them. That is why we have upset them all. And what is the result? That we no longer have any sure criterion by which to distinguish reasonable consumption from insensate waste, legitimate need from vice. We can no longer say what are the limits at which it is reasonable and wise for the peasant, the artisan, the small tradesman, the man of leisure, the millionaire, the multi-millionaire, the child, the woman, the old man, respectively, to cry a halt to their desires. All men and all classes arrogate to themselves the right to desire, to spend, even to waste as much as they can. No one has any clear idea of a standard by which to distinguish what he may desire and what he ought to deny himself. A kind of universal prodigality is becoming obligatory in every class; and modern civilisation is hurrying towards an unbridled, gross, and oppressive orgy. There is already a large number of men in Europe and America who eat, drink, and smoke to excess; who over-indulge in intoxicating and stimulating drinks; and who spend themselves in that continual whirl of diversions and distractions which form so large a part of modern life. The number is fated, however, to grow yet larger, rapidly and indefinitely. Is not production increasing on every side? Is not progress for us first and foremost the continual increase of production? And what avails it to produce more, if the riches produced do not find consumers?

The modern world, in freeing men’s desires from all the ancient limits and restraints, has given a vigorous impulse to human industry. In order to satisfy the increased needs of the masses, man has invented machinery, and has put a premium on the new countries. But precisely because there is no longer limit or restraint to men’s desires, industry, which in the past was the handmaiden of human needs, is now becoming their tyrant. It is creating and multiplying our needs with a view to their subsequent satisfaction. In order that it may never be short of work, it is tempting men in a thousand ways to desire and to consume more. Therefore our civilisation has made of riches not the fitting means of satisfying reasonable and legitimate needs, but an end in themselves. We are obliged to produce them in order to consume them, and to consume them in order to produce them. Every moment which a man does not spend in producing riches, he must spend in consuming the riches produced by others; so that he can never stay still for one instant, but must jump from occupation to amusement, and from amusement back again to occupation. He must try to make the day as long as possible, accustoming himself to do everything at full speed, and cutting down the hours of sleep as much as possible. Everybody knows that we moderns, especially in the great cities, are losing the habit of sleeping.

We have not yet mentioned, however, the most serious drawbacks of the present-day lack of any fixed limit to men’s desires. In the past ages, the efforts of religion were directed to educating men to self-introspection; to teaching them to explore their own consciences, to render account to themselves of their own sins and vices, and to try to amend them. One might even go so far as to say that from one point of view Christianity was principally a melancholy meditation on the perversity of human nature, and an effort to purify it through meditation, suffering, and the love of God. One has only to read the letters of Saint Catherine, or the Divine Comedy, or Pascal’s Pensées to realise to what an extent the moral refinement which is the fruit of these meditations preoccupied the loftiest minds, and, at second hand, the great ones of the earth in past centuries. A considerable part of the energies of every generation was consumed in this introspective effort, instead of in action; for centuries and centuries, saints, moralists, and preachers abounded in Europe, while men of action, fit to conquer the world and its riches, nature and her secrets, were scarce.

This searching of the inward parts was not always soothing by any manner of means. For the past century and a half, numerous writers and philosophers have denounced it as one of the refinements of torture with which religion in the past made men’s lives a burden to them. Perhaps, however, they are wrong; for this effort, which religion made for so many centuries to habituate man to self-introspection, self-knowledge, and self-judgment, demands a less superficial explanation. However great be the force of the laws and the vigilance of public opinion, there can be no convenient order in a social system, if man does not help by exercising some sort of surveillance over himself, if he does not give ear to an inward voice, forbidding him to take advantage of every opportunity of doing evil with impunity which may offer itself. This necessity for self-restraint is particularly urgent in connection with three duties: the duty of speaking the truth, the duty of checking one’s own inclination to pleasure, especially in the relations between the sexes, and the duty of not using one’s own strength improperly at the expense of the weak. Many are the times when we could tell a lie with impunity, or even with advantage to ourselves, if we wished to do so; and yet it is necessary that we should speak the truth spontaneously, in order that justice may triumph. How easy it is for the man who has become the slave of vice to evade the eyes of his fellows and to satisfy in secret his most perverse passions! And what system of laws can be conceived which will be wise and perfect enough to bar all the countless ways in which the stronger can impose upon the weaker?

Every religion with more or less success—and none with more success than Christianity—in centuries past helped law and public opinion to regulate this most important part of morality. They all made a sacred thing of an oath, which is nothing but a covenant which every individual enters into with himself to speak the truth, even when he could lie with impunity or with advantage to himself. They all created a sexual morality to regulate love, marriage, and the family. They endeavoured in various ways to awaken in the consciences of the rich and powerful the recognition of certain duties of moderation and charity towards the weak and the poor. Nowadays, on the contrary, men no longer have time to examine their consciences, or to reflect on their own vices and defects, or on their own duties and rights. The whole atmosphere of our lives is exterior to ourselves; we are always moving about and always busy. We have become almost incapable of meditation and self-introspection. Our times no longer lay any store by this education of our inner feelings. The only discipline they impose on man is that of work. Everybody, whether of high degree or of low, is required, under penalty of losing his daily bread or of dropping in the social scale, to fill with exactness, precision, diligence, and correctness, the rôle, be it little or big, which has been allotted to him in the immense operations of our times. But, for the rest, everyone is to-day much more free than he was in the past to adjust his line of action to his own beliefs, and to make for himself his own standard and his own laws.