Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

X
THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

It is good to be reasonable, but too much rationality puts the soul at odds with life. For rationality implies an almost superstitious reliance on logical proofs and logical motives, and it is logic that life mocks and contradicts at every turn. The most annoying people in the world are those who demand reasons for everything, and the most discouraging are those who map out ahead of them long courses of action, plan their lives, and systematically in the smallest detail of their activity adapt means to ends. Now the difficulty with all the prudential virtues is that they imply a world that is too good to be true. It would be pleasant to have a world where cause and effect interlocked, where we could see the future, where virtue had its reward, and our characters and relations with other people and the work we wish to do could be planned out with the same certainty with which cooks plan a meal. But we know that that is not the kind of a world we actually live in. Perhaps men have thought that, by cultivating the rational virtues and laying emphasis on prudence and forethought, they could bend the stubborn constitution of things to meet their ideals. It has always been the fashion to insist, in spite of all the evidence, that the world was in reality a rational place where certain immutable moral principles could be laid down with the same certainty of working that physical laws possess. It has always been represented that the correct procedure of the moral life was to choose one’s end or desire, to select carefully all the means by which that end could be realized, and then, by the use of the dogged motive force of the will, to push through the plans to completion. In the homilies on success, it has always been implied that strength of will was the only requisite. Success became merely a matter of the ratio between the quantity of effort and will-power applied, and the number of obstacles to be met. If one failed, it was because the proper amount of effort had not been applied, or because the plans had not been properly constructed. The remedy was automatically to increase the effort or rationalize the plans. Life was considered to be a battle, the strategy of which a general might lay out beforehand, an engagement in which he might plan and anticipate to the minutest detail the movement of his forces and the disposition of the enemy. But one does not have to live very long to see that this belief in the power and the desirability of controlling things is an illusion. Life works in a series of surprises. One’s powers are given in order that one may be alert and ready, resourceful and keen. The interest of life lies largely in its adventurousness, and not in its susceptibility to orderly mapping. The enemy rarely comes up from the side the general has expected; the battle is usually fought out on vastly different lines from those that have been carefully foreseen and rationally organized. And similarly in life do complex forces utterly confound and baffle our best laid plans.

Our strategy, unless it is open to instant correction, unless it is flexible, and capable of infinite resource and modification, is a handicap rather than an aid in the battle of life. In spite of the veracious accounts of youths hewing their way to success as captains of industry or statesmen, with their eye singly set on a steadfast purpose, we may be sure that life seldom works that way. It is not so tractable and docile, even to the strongest. The rational ideal is one of those great moral hypocrisies which every one preaches and no one practices, but which we all believe with superstitious reverence, and which we take care shall be proven erroneous by no stubborn facts of life. Better that the facts should be altered than that the moral tradition should die!

One of its evil effects is the compressing influence it has on many of us. Recognizing that for us the world is an irrational place, we are willing to go on believing that there are at least some gifted beings who are proving the truth and vindicating the eternal laws of reason. We join willingly the self-stigmatized ranks of the incompetent and are content to shine feebly in the reflected light of those whose master wills and power of effort have brought them through in rational triumph to their ends. The younger generation is coming very seriously to doubt both the practicability and worth of this rational ideal. They do not find that the complex affairs of either the world or the soul work according to laws of reason. The individual as a member of society is at the mercy of great social laws that regulate his fortune for him, construct for him his philosophy of life, and dictate to him his ways of making a living. As an individual soul, he is the creature of impulses and instincts which he does not create and which seem to lie quite outside the reach of his rational will. Looked at from this large social viewpoint, his will appears a puny affair indeed. There seems little room left in which to operate, either in the sphere of society or in his own spiritual life. That little of free-will, however, which there is, serves for our human purposes. It must be our care simply that we direct it wisely; and the rational ideal is not the wisest way of directing it. The place of our free will in the scheme of life is not to furnish driving, but directing power. The engineer could never create the power that drives his engine, but he can direct it into the channels where it will be useful and creative. The superstition of the strong will has been almost like an attempt to create power, something the soul could never do. The rational ideal has too often been a mere challenge to attain the unattainable. It has ended in futility or failure.

This superstition comes largely from our incorrigible habit of looking back over the past, and putting purpose into it. The great man looking back over his career, over his ascent from the humble level of his boyhood to his present power and riches, imagines that that ideal success was in his mind from his earliest years. He sees a progress, which was really the happy seizing of fortunate opportunities, as the carrying-out of a fixed purpose. But the purpose was not there at the beginning; it is the crowning touch added to the picture, which completes and satisfies our age-long hunger for the orderly and correct. But we all, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful, live from hand to mouth. We all alike find life at the beginning a crude mass of puzzling possibilities. All of us, unless we inherit a place in the world,—and then we are only half alive,—have the same precarious struggle to get a foothold. The difference is in the fortune of the foothold, and not in our private creation of any mystical force of will. It is a question of happy occasions of exposure to the right stimulus that will develop our powers at the right time. The capacity alone is sterile; it needs the stimulus to fertilize it and produce activity and success. The part that our free will can play is to expose ourselves consciously to the stimulus; it cannot create it or the capacity, but it can bring them together.

In other words, for the rational ideal we must substitute the experimental ideal. Life is not a campaign of battle, but a laboratory where its possibilities for the enhancement of happiness and the realization of ideals are to be tested and observed. We are not to start life with a code of its laws in our pocket, with its principles of activity already learned by heart, but we are to discover those principles as we go, by conscientious experiment. Even those laws that seem incontrovertible we are to test for ourselves, to see whether they are thoroughly vital to our own experience and our own genius. We are animals, and our education in life is, after all, different only in degree, and not in kind, from that of the monkey who learns the trick of opening his cage. To get out of his cage, the monkey must find and open a somewhat complicated latch. How does he set about it? He blunders around for a long time, without method or purpose, but with the waste of an enormous amount of energy. At length he accidentally strikes the right catch, and the door flies open. Our procedure in youth is little different. We feel a vague desire to expand, to get out of our cage, and liberate our dimly felt powers. We blunder around for a time, until we accidentally put ourselves in a situation where some capacity is touched, some latent energy liberated, and the direction set for us, along which we have only to move to be free and successful. We will be hardly human if we do not look back on the process and congratulate ourselves on our tenacity and purpose and strong will. But of course the thing was wholly irrational. There were neither plans nor purposes, perhaps not even discoverable effort. For when we found the work that we did best, we found also that we did it easiest. And the outlines of the most dazzling career are little different. Until habits were formed or prestige acquired which could float these successful geniuses, their life was but the resourceful seizing of opportunity, the utilization, with a minimum of purpose or effort, of the promise of the passing moment. They were living the experimental life, aided by good fortune and opportunity.

Now the youth brought up to the strictly rational ideal is like the animal who tries to get out of his cage by going straight through the bars. The duck, beating his wings against his cage, is a symbol of the highest rationality. His logic is plain, simple, and direct. He is in the cage; there is the free world outside; nothing but the bars separate them. The problem is simply to fortify his will and effort and make them so strong that they will overcome the resistance of the cage. His error evidently lies not in his method, but in his estimation of the strength of the bars. But youth is no wiser; it has no data upon which to estimate either its own strength or the strength of its obstacles. It counts on getting out through its own self-reliant strength and will. Like the duck, “impossible” is a word not found in its vocabulary. And like the duck, it too often dashes out its spirit against the bars of circumstance. How often do we see young people, brought up with the old philosophy that nothing was withheld from those who wanted and worked for things with sufficient determination, beating their ineffectual wings against their bars, when perhaps in another direction the door stands open that would lead to freedom!

We do not hear enough of the tragedies of misplaced ambition. When the plans of the man of will and determination fail, and the inexorable forces of life twist his purposes aside from their end, he is sure to suffer the prostration of failure. His humiliation, too, is in proportion to the very strength of his will. It is the burden of defeat, or at best the sting of petty success, that crushes men, and crushes them all the more thoroughly if they have been brought up to believe in the essential rationality of the world and the power of will and purpose. It is not that they have aimed too high, but that they have aimed in the wrong direction. They have not set out experimentally to find the work to which their powers were adapted, they did not test coolly and impartially the direction in which their achievement lay. They forgot that, though faith may remove mountains, the will alone is not able. There is an urgency on every man to develop his powers to the fullest capacity, but he is not called upon to develop those that he does not possess. The will cannot create talent or opportunity. The wise man is he who has the clear vision to discern the one, and the calm patience to await the other. Will, without humor and irony and a luminous knowledge of one’s self, is likely to drive one to dash one’s brains out against a stone wall. The world is too full of people with nothing except a will. The mistake of youth is to believe that the philosophy of experimentation is enervating. They want to attack life frontally, to win by the boldness of their attack, or by the exceeding excellence of their rational plans and purposes. But therein comes a time when they learn perhaps that it is better to take life not with their naked fists, but more scientifically,—to stand with mind and soul alert, ceaselessly testing and criticizing, taking and rejecting, poised for opportunity, and sensitive to all good influences.

The experimental life does not put one at the mercy of chance. It is rather the rational mind that is constantly being shocked and deranged by circumstances. But the dice of the experimenter are always loaded. For he does not go into an enterprise, spiritual or material, relying simply on his reason and will to pull him through. He asks himself beforehand whether something good is not sure to come whichever way the dice fall, or at least whether he can bear the event of failure, whether his spirit can stand it if the experiment ends in humiliation and barrenness. It is surprising how many seeming disasters one finds one can bear in this anticipatory look; the tension of the failure is relieved, anyhow. By looking ahead, one has insured one’s self up to the limit of the venture, and one cannot lose. But to the man with the carefully planned campaign, every step is crucial. If all does not turn out exactly as he intends, he is ruined. He thinks he insures himself by the excellence of his designs and the craftiness of his skill. But he insures himself by the strange method of putting all his eggs in one basket. He thinks, of course, he has arranged his plans so that, if they fall, the universe falls with them. But when the basket breaks, and the universe does not fall, his ruin is complete.

Ambition and the rational ideal seem to be only disastrous; if unsuccessful, they produce misanthropists; if successful, beings that prey upon their fellow men. Too much rationality makes a man mercenary and calculating. He has too much at stake in everything he does to know that calm disinterestedness of spirit which is the mark of the experimental attitude towards life. Our attitude towards our personal affairs, material and spiritual, should be like the interest we take in sports and games. The sporting interest is one secret of a healthy attitude towards life. The detached enthusiasm it creates is a real ingredient of happiness. The trouble with the rational man is that he has bet on the game. If his side wins, there is a personal reward for him; if it loses, he himself suffers a loss. He cannot know the true sporting interest which is unaffected by considerations of the end, and views the game as the thing, and not the outcome. To the experimental attitude, failure means nothing beyond a shade of regret or chagrin. Whether we win or lose, something has been learned, some insight and appreciation of the workings of others or of ourselves. We are ready and eager to begin another game; defeat has not dampened our enthusiasm. But if the man who has made the wager loses, he has lost, too, all heart for playing. Or, if he does try again, it is not for interest in the game, but with a redoubled intensity of self-interest to win back what he has lost. With the sporting interest, one looks on one’s relations with others, on one’s little rôle in the world, in the same spirit that we look on a political contest, where we are immensely stirred by the clash of issues and personalities, but where we know that the country will run on in about the same way, whoever is elected. This knowledge does not work against our interest in the struggle itself, nor in the outcome. It only insures us against defeat. It makes life livable by endowing us with disinterestedness. If we lose, why, better luck next time, or, at worst, is not losing a part of life?