RELIGION AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT
BY
PAUL ELMER MORE, LITT.D., LL.D.
A couple of years ago one of the most distinguished of our social philosophers, Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University, was invited to lecture at the Imperial University of Japan, and, having delivered his message in Tokyo, proceeded to China, where he was welcomed eagerly by the younger malcontents as an exponent zof Western ideas. The character of these ideas which our collegiate missioner carried across the Pacific Ocean may be learned from the little book since published by him under the title of Reconstruction in Philosophy. His thesis, indeed, is simple almost to naïveté. Hitherto, he avers, philosophy and religion have been nothing but an attempt to “identify truth with authoritative dogma.” And this attempt has a double aspect, theoretical and practical. On the one hand, mankind is prone to forget the evils of yesterday and to gloat in memory over the good, so that by the combined force of memory and imagination the past remains with us as a kind of idealized dream, a lovely, impalpable curtain hanging between our vision and the hard realities of the present. From such an iridescent dream has grown the philosophical and religious belief in an immaterial world of ideas, a glamorous make-believe under whose sway “we squirm,” as Mr. Dewey says in his pragmatic style, “dodge, evade, disguise, cover up, find excuses and palliations—anything to render the mental scene less uncongenial,” and so to escape the actualities that confront us. Buddha, Plato, Jesus, and the other great masters and doctors of the life unseen were merely juggling with words and leading us nowhere; the discipline of character proposed by them and their offers of supernatural peace were a fraudulent perversion of the facts of human experience. The only true knowledge is that which comes to the farmer toiling at his crops, and to the carpenter laboring with his tools; the real facts of life are those that we can see and smell and taste and handle, and, so far as I can understand Mr. Dewey, such things alone.
That is the theoretical aspect of the reconstruction of philosophy proposed by our tender-hearted materialist; and the practical aspect is like unto it. Existing forms of government, established order, property, the church, institutions generally, draw their support from the idealizing illusions of memory and imagination; they are in truth the dead hand of the past clutching the throat of the living present. Throughout all the ages preceding the advent of Mr. Dewey, or by a gracious inclusion anterior to Francis Bacon, it has been the task of philosophers and religious leaders to find reasons for the existence of such institutions on ideal grounds, and to justify those who profit from them at the expense of the masses. Religion and philosophy have been simply the servile allies of the predatory classes of society. The hope of the world is in the new gospel of pragmatic materialism.
I trust I have not misrepresented Mr. Dewey’s teaching. Indeed, with an individual teacher I should have no quarrel, were he not in a position of authority; but it is another matter when such doctrines are spreading out from a lecture-room all over the country, and, as I hear from Chinese friends, are persuading the young reformers of the Far East that the only salvation for their people lies in adopting the crudest materialism of Western civilization, and in emancipating themselves from all that philosophy and religion hitherto have meant to the Occident as well as to the Orient. At least here is a matter to consider.
Now in one sense Mr. Dewey’s theory of religion—I use this word preferably, since the classical forms of philosophy which he would reconstruct belonged essentially to the field of religion—in one sense this theory is so far from being revolutionary that it has been current almost from the inception of human thought. Plato knew that the religious temper was naturally reverential of the past and conservative in its influence. It was, indeed, for this reason that he gave to religion and to a philosophy of the unseen world so thorough a control over the polity of his state. Polybius, the Greek historian of Rome, not only recognized this function of religion, but went so far as to maintain that even the palpable fictions of superstition should be upheld as a safeguard against political anarchy. “Since the multitude,” he argues, “is ever fickle and capricious, full of lawless passions, and irrational and violent resentments, there is no way left to keep them in order but the terrors of future punishment, and all the pompous circumstance that attends such kinds of fictions. On which account the ancients acted, in my opinion, with great judgment and penetration, when they contrived to bring in these notions of the gods and of a future state into the popular belief.” And on this basis Polybius goes on to show how the power and permanence of Rome were connected with a national morality grounded in irrational beliefs, whereas the inquisitive rationalism of Greece was the cause of her ethical and political decline. Livy’s annals of Rome are inspired throughout by the same idea, though without the tincture of scepticism that pervades the philosophy of the Greek historian. The city on the Tiber, Livy thought, grew mighty and conquered the world because of her faith in the gods and in that mystical Fatum which presided over her destiny, and kept her, through all the formal changes of her government, true to her original êthos. “You will find,” he writes, “all things have prospered for those who follow the gods, while adversity dogs those who spurn them—invenietis omnia prospera evenisse sequentibus deos, adversa spernentibus.” So, for Tacitus, religion was, as he expresses it in his epigrammatic way, instrumentum regni. Christianity, though it altered much, maintained this same view. The greatest preacher of the ancient church, Chrysostom, was fond of pointing to the connection of religious humility, mother of all the virtues, with the principle of orderly subordination, on which, as on the golden chain of divine law, depended the stability of society and the happiness of the people.
But I must not fatigue you with examples. Passing on to the eighteenth century, one finds the politico-religious thought of England and France dominated by the Polybian notion that religion was imposed more or less deliberately on the people by their masters as an instrument of government, only with this important difference, that in England the imposition was commonly regarded even by the more radical deists and freethinkers as a salutary and necessary fraud, whereas across the channel a more logical and less prudential habit of speech led the bolder spirits at least to spurn the whole fabric of traditional religion as an impediment to liberty and progress. It was characteristic of the British mind, then as it has always been, to stop short of final conclusions and to be tolerant of a certain penumbra of illusion about the ultimate principles of life, a trait which has resulted on the one hand in the national willingness “to muddle through,” and, on the other hand, in a deeper sense of spiritual mysteries. Bolingbroke, atheist or deist, as you choose to call him, would take the position frankly that the truths of scepticism are for the enlightened few who, as Aristotle said, have learned from philosophy to do voluntarily what other men do under compulsion. Religion, to Bolingbroke and his class, was simply an integral part of that marvellous fiction, the British Constitution. “To make a government effectual to all the good purposes of it,” he says, “there must be a religion; this religion must be national, and this national religion must be maintained in reputation and reverence.” And a little later in the century one of the correspondents of that admirable and very British gentleman, Sir William Pepys, condemns Gibbon for divulging to the public the sort of scepticism which he might have enjoyed lawfully in his closet. “I agree,” avows our correspondent, “that no man should ‘take the bridle out of the mouth of that wild Beast Man’ (as Bolingbroke writes to Swift).... Tho’ a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, he shall not be permitted to vend them as cordials.” (Which, so far as I know, is the first attempt recorded in history to evade, prophetically, the Eighteenth Amendment of our own Constitution.) Nothing is more characteristic of the ruling temper of England than the fact that this same Gibbon, he who had expended his wit and his vast erudition in “sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,” in his old age should have confessed admiration for Burke’s chivalry, even for his “superstition,” and should have planned a dialogue of the dead, wherein Lucian and Erasmus and Voltaire were to be heard discussing the danger of shaking the ancient faith of the people in religious institutions.
But the French mind could not rest in this severance of logic and practice. To their more incisive and less humble way of thinking, true was true and false was false, and to confound the boundaries of truth and falsehood was only to pay homage to canting hypocrisy. There was no distinction for them between an illusion and a plain lie, nor would they rest satisfied with a suppression of truth as known to individual reason, in order to leave room for a practical faith as taught by public experience. So it happened that the philosophes as a body were not theoretical sceptics merely but militant atheists. If, as La Mettrie believed, “the soul is an empty word of which no one has any idea,” if men are no more than blind “moles creeping in the field of nature,” then, o’ God’s name, out with the truth of it; society can only profit from universal knowledge of the facts. In like manner a Holbach will take up the old theory of Polybius, but without the Polybian and the British “reserve.” “Experience,” he says, “teaches us that sacred opinions were the real source of the evils of human beings. Ignorance of natural causes created gods for them. Imposture made these gods terrible. This idea hindered the progress of reason.” And again: “An atheist ... is a man who destroys chimeras harmful to the human race, in order to lead men back to nature, to experience, and to reason, which has no need of recourse to ideal powers to explain the operations of nature.”
And the French view has prevailed, or threatens to prevail, as courageous views inevitably tend to supplant timid views, however true it may be that courage in such matters may sometimes be another name for insensibility, not to say conceit. So Leslie Stephen, writing of the eighteenth century in England, with a sneer that contrives to combine the French boldness with the British reserve, declares that “the church, in short, was excellent as a national refrigerating machine; but no cultivated person could believe in its doctrines.” And at last Mr. Dewey, perhaps the most influential teacher to-day in America, is renewing the old cry and persuading our young men that religion is a fallacy of the reason devised to maintain the more fortunate classes in their iniquitous claims, and that progress and democracy are bound up with the materialistic pragmatism that emanates from his own chair of reconstructed philosophy.