Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The fact that our fathers did not need correspondence schools or night schools, or such things, implies either that they were not so anxious as we to count in the world, or that success was an easier matter in their day, either of which conclusions furnishes a pretty good extenuation of our apparent incapacity. We cannot but believe that our difficulties are greater in this generation; it is hard to see that the effort we put forth to overcome these difficulties is not proportional to that increase. I am aware that to blame your surroundings when the fault lies in your own character is the one impiety which rouses the horror of present-day moral teachers. Can it not count to us for good, then, that most of us, while coming theoretically to believe that this economic situation explains so much of our trouble, yet continue to act as if our deficiencies were all our own fault?

Our critics are misled by the fact that we do not talk about unselfishness and self-sacrifice and duty, as their generation apparently used to do, and conclude that we do not know what these things mean. It is true that we do not fuss and fume about our souls, or tend our characters like a hot-house plant. This is a changing, transitional age, and our view is outward rather than inward. In an age of newspapers, free libraries, and cheap magazines, we necessarily get a broader horizon than the passing generation had. We see what is going on in the world, and we get the clash of different points of view, to an extent which was impossible to our fathers. We cannot be blamed for acquiring a suspicion of ideals, which, however powerful their appeal once was, seem singularly impotent now, or if we seek for motive forces to replace them, or for new terms in which to restate the world. We have an eagerness to understand the world in which we live that amounts almost to a passion. We want to get behind the scenes, to see how the machinery of the modern world actually works. We are curious to learn what other people are thinking, and to get at the forces that have produced their point of view. We dabble in philanthrophy as much from curiosity to see how people live as from any feeling of altruism. We read all sorts of strange philosophies to get the personal testimony of men who are interpreting the world. In the last analysis, we have a passion to understand why people act as they do.

We have, as a result, become impatient with the conventional explanations of the older generation. We have retained from childhood the propensity to see through things, and to tell the truth with startling frankness. This must, of course, be very disconcerting to a generation, so much of whose activity seems to consist in glossing over the unpleasant things or hiding the blemishes on the fair face of civilization. There are too many issues evaded which we would like to meet. Many of us find, sooner or later, that the world is a very different sort of place from what our carefully deodorized and idealized education would have us believe.

When we find things simply not as they are painted, is it any wonder that we turn to the new prophets rather than to the old? We are more than half confident that the elder generation does not itself really believe all the conventional ideals which it seeks to force upon us, and much of our presumption is a result of the contempt we naturally feel for such timorousness. Too many of your preachers seem to be whistling simply to keep up your courage. The plain truth is that the younger generation is acquiring a positive faith, in contact with which the elder generation with its nerveless negations feels its helplessness without knowing just what to do about it except to scold the young.

This positive aspect is particularly noticeable in the religion of the rising generation. As our critic says, the religious thinking of the preceding generation was destructive and uncertain. We are demanding a definite faith, and our spiritual centre is rapidly shifting from the personal to the social in religion. Not personal salvation, but social; not our own characters, but the character of society, is our interest and concern. We feel social injustice as our fathers felt personal sin. Settlement work and socialist propaganda, things done fifty years ago only by rare and heroic souls like Kingsley, Ruskin, and Maurice, are now the commonplaces of the undergraduate.

The religion that will mean anything to the rising generation will be based on social ideals. An essay like ex-President Eliot’s “Religion of the Future,” which in a way synthesizes science and history and these social ideals and gives them the religious tinge which every age demands, supplies a real working religious platform to many a young man and woman of the rising generation, and an inspiration of which our elders can form no conception. Perhaps it is unfair to call this religion at all. Perhaps it is simply the scientific attitude toward the world. But I am sure that it is more than this; I am sure that it is the scientific attitude tinged with the religious that will be ours of the rising generation. We find that we cannot keep apart our religion, our knowledge, our practice, and our hopes in water-tight compartments, as our ancestors did. We are beginning to show an incorrigible tendency to work our spiritual assimilations into one intelligible, constructive whole.

It is to this attitude rather than to a softening of fibre that I think we may lay our growing disinclination to deify sacrifice and suffering. A young chemistry student said to me the other day, “Science means that nothing must be wasted!” This idea somehow gets mixed up with human experience, and we come to believe that human life and happiness are things that must not be wasted. Might it not be that such a belief that human waste of life and happiness was foolish and unnecessary would possibly be of some avail in causing that waste to disappear? And one of the most inspiring of the prophets to the rising generation, William James, has told us that certain “moral equivalents” of these things are possible which will prevent that incurable decaying of fibre which the elder generation so anxiously fears.

Another result of this attitude is our growing belief in political machinery. We are demanding of our preachers that they reduce quality to quantity. “Stop talking about liberty and justice and love, and show us institutions, or concerted attempts to model institutions that shall be free or just or lovely,” we cry. You have been trying so long to reform the world by making men “good,” and with such little success, that we may be pardoned if we turn our attention to the machinery of society, and give up for a time the attempt to make the operators of that machinery strictly moral. Indeed, the charm of Socialism to so many of the rising generation is just that scientific aspect of it, its claim of historical basis, and its very definite and concrete organization for the attainment of its ends. A philosophy which gives an illuminating interpretation of the present, and a vision of the future, with a definitely crystallized plan of action with concrete methods, however unsound it may all be, can hardly be said to appeal simply to the combination of “a weak head, a soft heart, and a desire to shirk.”

Placed in such a situation as we are, and with such an attitude toward the world, we are as interested as you and the breathless generations behind you to see what destinies we shall work out for ourselves. An unpleasantly large proportion of our energy is now drained off in fighting the fetishes which you of the elder generation have passed along to us, and which, out of some curious instinct of self-preservation, you so vigorously defend. We, on the other hand, are becoming increasingly doubtful whether you believe in yourselves quite so thoroughly as you would have us think. Your words are very brave, but the tone is hollow. Your mistrust of us, and your reluctance to convey over to us any of your authority in the world, looks a little too much like the fear and dislike that doubt always feels in the presence of conviction, to be quite convincing. We believe in ourselves; and this fact, we think, is prophetic for the future. We have an indomitable feeling that we shall attain, or if not, that we shall pave the way for a generation that shall attain.

Meanwhile our constructive work is hampered by your distrust, while you blame us for our lack of accomplishment. Is this an attitude calculated to increase our responsibility and our self-respect? Would it not be better in every way, more constructive and more fruitful, to help us in our aspirations and endeavors, or, failing that, at least to strive to understand just what those aspirations and endeavors are?