In limine, let us note the significant fact that this spirit of revolt against authority is not confined to the political state, and therefore its causes lie beyond that sphere of human action.
Human life is governed by all manner of man-made laws—laws of art, of social intercourse, of literature, music, business—all evolved by custom and imposed by the collective will of society. Here we find the same revolt against tradition and authority.
In music, its fundamental canons have been thrown aside and discord has been substituted for harmony as its ideal. Its culmination—jazz—is a musical crime. If the forms of dancing and music are symptomatic of an age, what shall be said of the universal craze to indulge in crude and clumsy dancing to the vile discords of so-called "jazz" music? The cry of the time is:
"On with the dance, let joy be" unrefined.
In the plastic arts, the laws of form and the criteria of beauty have been swept aside by the futurists, cubists, vorticists, tactilists, and other aesthetic Bolsheviki.
In poetry, where beauty of rhythm, melody of sound and nobility of thought were once regarded as the true tests, we now have in freak forms of poetry the exaltation of the grotesque and brutal. Hundreds of poets are feebly echoing the "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, without the redeeming merit of his occasional sublimity of thought.
In commerce, the revolt is against the purity of standards and the integrity of business morals. Who can question that this is pre-eminently the age of the sham and the counterfeit? Science is prostituted to deceive the public by cloaking the increasing deterioration in quality of merchandise. The blatant medium of advertising has become so mendacious as to defeat its own purpose.
In the recent deflation in commodity values, there was widespread "welching" among business men who had theretofore been classed as reputable. Of course, I recognize that a far greater number kept their contracts, even when it brought them to the verge of ruin. But when in the history of American business was there such a volume of broken faith as in the drastic deflation of 1920?
In the greater sphere of social life, we find the same revolt against the institutions which have the sanction of the past. Social laws, which mark the decent restraints of print, speech and dress, have in recent decades been increasingly disregarded. The very foundations of the great and primitive institutions of mankind—like the family, the Church, and the State—have been shaken. Nature itself is defied. Thus, the fundamental difference of sex is disregarded by social and political movements which ignore the permanent differentiation of social function ordained by Nature.
All these are but illustrations of the general revolt against the authority of the past—a revolt that can be measured by the change in the fundamental presumption of men with respect to the value of human experience. In all former ages, all that was in the past was presumptively true, and the burden was upon him who sought to change it. To-day, the human mind apparently regards the lessons of the past as presumptively false—and the burden is upon him who seeks to invoke them.