Education and life

by James H. Baker

ELEMENTS OF AN IDEAL LIFE.

ELEMENTS OF AN IDEAL LIFE.
THE MODERN GOSPEL OF WORK.

A gentleman who had resided some years in Central and South America, conversing one evening with friends upon a doctrine of happiness, illustrated his argument with an anecdote. A Yankee living in South America observed that the native bees had no care for the morrow. He thought to make a fortune by bringing hard-working honey bees from the North to this land of perennial flowers, where they could store up honey the year around, and he tried the experiment. The bees worked eagerly for a time, but soon discovered that there was no winter in this paradise, and they perched on the flowers and trees and dozed the livelong day. Our philosopher assumed that the indolent, improvident life of the ignorant natives of sunny climes is the one of real happiness, and that a life of great activity is not to be desired. If his theory holds, then the savage under his palm tree is happier than the civilized man of the temperate zone, the monkey in the tropical jungle is better off than the savage, and the clam is happiest of all.

An observant traveller, returning by the southern route from California, studies Indians of various tribes at successive stages of the journey. Near the Mohave desert he sees abject beings loafing about the railway station to beg from the curious passengers; further east he sees self-respecting red people offering for sale pottery or blankets—their own handiwork; later he notes members of another tribe working on railroad construction by the side of white laborers; as he approaches the settled region he observes yet others who have homes and farms and engage in civilized industry, and his thought runs along the ascending scale of being until he contemplates the highest energy of the most cultured and forceful minds of our best civilization. He instinctively decides that the desirable life is on the upper scale of intelligence, feeling, and action.

Happiness through work is the creed of the dawning century. The romance of chivalry gives place to the poetry of steam; democracy is teaching wealth and position the dignity of labor; evolution and psychology show action to be the consummate flower of thought and feeling; recent literature illustrates the gospel of effort; and religion reaffirms the doctrine that faith without works is dead.

Herbert Spencer’s philosophy defines life to be “the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” This adjustment implies self-activity. If man has been evolved through a long period of change, he is a survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. His ancestral history is one of exertion, his powers have been developed by use, he maintains himself by striving, his normal state is in the field of labor, and logically it is there his welfare and happiness are found.

Max Nordau wrote a book on “Degeneration.” It contains much interesting matter, many wholesome suggestions, and considerable false theory. He claims that the demands of modern civilization place men under too great a strain, that the human race is tending toward insanity, and that by and by we shall stop our daily newspapers, remove the telephones from our homes, and return to a life of greater simplicity. It is true that tension never relaxed loses its spring, and worry kills, but the most potent causes of degeneration are false pleasures and lack of healthful work. Evolution’s most important ethical maxim is that deadheads in society degenerate as do parasites in the lower animal kingdom. Every idler violates a great law of his being, which demands that thought and feeling shall emerge in action. Every class of people has its idlers, men who desire to possess without earning. The aimless son of wealth and the tramp tread the same path. Universal interest in honest, healthful employment would cure nearly all the evils of society and state. Manual labor is the first moral lesson for the street Arab and the criminal, and the best cure for some species of insanity. True charity does not give when it can provide the chance to earn. Idlers, lacking the normal source of happiness, seek harmful pleasures, and learn sooner or later that for every silver joy they must pay in golden sorrow. False stimuli, false excitement, purposeless activities, take the place of vocation. Tramps are not the only vagabonds; there are mental and moral vagabonds whom a fixed purpose, a definite interest and principles of conduct would turn from degeneration to regeneration. Balzac, with his keen analysis, describes the career of a graceless spendthrift who, finally weary of himself, one day resolved to give himself some reason for living. Under good influences he took up a life of regularity, simplicity, and usefulness, and learned that men’s happiness and saneness of mind are proportionate to their labors. This is the great lesson of Goethe’s “Faust,” set in imperishable drama for the instruction of the ages. Balzac’s Curé of Montegnac speaks to a repentant criminal: “There is no sin beyond redemption through the good works of repentance. For you, work must be prayer. The monasteries wept, but acted too; they prayed, but they civilized. Be yourself a monastery here.” Repentance, prayer, work—these are the way of salvation.

Every man of broad mind has full regard for the problems of labor and has faith in a progress that shall mean better conditions for the less fortunate, but Edwin Markham’s “Man With the Hoe,” as applied, not to special and extreme conditions of hardship, but in general to the problems of the human race, is wrong at the foundation; it is neither correct science, good philosophy, nor accurate history. It is the doctrine of the fall of man rather than of the ascent of man; it is the doctrine that labor is a curse. Without the hoe the human race would be chimpanzees, savages, tramps and criminals. In human development no useful labor ever “loosened and let down the brutal jaw” or “slanted back the brow” or “blew out the light within the brain” or deprived man of his birthright. At a stage of his progress, by cultivating the soil man of necessity cultivates his soul. The hoe has been an indispensable instrument to the growth of intelligence and morals, has been the great civilizer—a means of advance toward Plato and the divine image. Hardship may arrest development, but seldom causes degeneration. Our problem is not to free from bondage to work, but to relieve of burdens that are too heavy, and place a larger part on the shoulders of the strong and selfish.

Our educational philosophy at times wanders in dangerous bypaths, but there is a recent return to the plain highway. Some late notable utterances maintain that character must be formed by struggle, that a good impulse must prove its quality by a good act, that education is self-effort, and that passive reception of knowledge and rules of conduct may make mental and moral paupers. Here is an apt thrust from a trenchant pen: “Soft pedagogics have taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense to suppose that every step in education can be interesting. The fighting impulse must often be appealed to.”

I like to discover philosophy in the literature of the day, literature which does not rank as scientific, but contains half-conscious, incidental expression of deep perceptions of human nature. Kipling at his best sounds great moral depths, and teaches the lesson of life’s discipline. He has a plain message for America as she takes her new place in the congress of the world. Civilized nations must take up the burden of aiding less favored peoples, not for glory or gain, but as an uncompromising duty without hope of appreciation or reward. We must expect the untaught races will weigh our God, our religion, and us by our every word and act in relation to them. We, as a nation, may no longer wear the lightly proffered laurel, but must expect the older, civilized nations will judge us by our wisdom, equity, and success in discharge of our new responsibilities. In Kipling’s “McAndrew’s Hymn” many years of hardship, sternly borne in obedience to duty, atone for misspent days under the influence of the soft stars in the velvet skies of the Orient. In “The ’Eathen” the author refers to the native inhabitants of India, whose most familiar household words are “not now,” “to-morrow,” “wait a bit,” and whose chief traits are dirtiness, laziness, and “doin’ things rather-more-or-less.” He describes the raw English recruit, picked out of the gutter, recounts the stages of discipline that make him a good soldier, and finally a reliable non-commissioned officer—a man that, returned to his country, would prove a good and useful citizen.