The ethics of Hercules

by Robert Chenault Givler

In another strain, it is sometimes alleged that psychology is simply a new head set upon the body of ancient Roman stoicism. But it must be remembered that the detachment which the Stoics cultivated lacked all the elements of a scientific inquisitiveness. It was marked chiefly by a sweet indifference and unconcern, traits which were derived from the belief that Reason which ruled the world was interested only in the headlines of universal news. The psychologist, far from being indifferent to the most transient phenomena of human experience, regards them most steadfastly. Nevertheless, he endeavors to maintain an equality of interest in all human affairs, knowing full well that as soon as he takes sides, he loses his sense of the proportions of the whole. Unlike the Stoic, he admits the reality and inevitableness of pain and anguish; yet while he studies these phenomena, he keeps a sharp lookout lest his personal equation obtrude itself in the shape of sympathetic sorrows,—these he steadfastly refuses to add to his report of the objective facts. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that had not the elements of stoic indifference been a basic capacity of human protoplasm, the psychological attitude might not have been evolved.

Curiously enough, psychology has been both defended and attacked on the basis of its supposed kinship with certain doctrines of Jesus, as, for example, the Golden Rule. No psychologist is greatly interested in any debate carried out on these lines. When Edwin Holt’s “The Freudian Wish” first appeared a few years ago, some caustic reviewer accused its author of “having gotten religion in the form of Freud.” It is doubtful whether anyone, be he Christian or non-Christian, would regard such a remark either as a help or a hindrance to the acceptance of psychology as a contribution to the technique of ethics. As far as the Golden Rule is concerned, its relations to scientific method may be briefly indicated by saying that while this maxim can be interpreted to imply a kind of other-regard which seems to possess the elements of scientific detachment, yet other things must also be considered before final judgment is passed. For this hypothetical imperative,—“Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them,”—is only possible of application among equals of intellect or of sentiment, and it can be used then only by a forehanded and judicious person, one with discriminative sympathies, and able to mature his wishes into wills. Psychology ventures to make no universal rules of conduct, especially since it must first take an inventory of human nature in order to find out what rules there are to which man will give his uncoerced and unconscious loyalty.

Let it not be assumed, however, that the psychologist urges an ethical moratorium while he is pursuing his search into the secret places of human nature. The method of scientific detachment has itself provided such an insight into the problems of conduct as to make any such assumption absurd. He who catches a glimpse of what it means to understand his fellow-men, rather than to regard them primarily as creatures to be classified as either good or bad, virtuous or vicious, begins to grow into an ethically adult person. He at once loses that ancient, clandestine, stultifying tendency to obtrude his own bias into his social environment, and he no longer finds his chief comfort in adoring those who are most like unto himself, or in mentally lynching in advance those who rub his ego the wrong way. Scientific neutrality hath also its victories. The application of the psychological method to prison reform, where the criminal is regarded as an effect as well as a cause of social mal-adjustments, has already been acknowledged as humanly great. Is it not possible that we see in such phenomena the passing of an age in which maxims were necessary, and the birth of an era where the educative methods of wise and kind men will take their places?

The further drift of this would be hard, indeed, to conceal. Ethics as a branch of psychology is inevitably bound up with the abolition of praise and blame, and of reward and punishment, as the chief themes in the judgments we pass upon our fellow-men. The tendency to make such bi-polar judgments usually implies a prejudice inherited from a pre-scientific age. With this change, of course, many of the traditional moral categories will be replaced by the true categories of the understanding,—categories derived from psychological insight into the ethical potentialities of the natural man. Even now, however, such a replacement is in progress, the results of which are neither small nor unimportant.

We refer here to the wide-spread use of trait analyses, both in business and in education, by which a man is estimated on the basis of his tendencies, capacities, and powers. His body is measured for its strength and resiliency, and where defects are discovered, a regimen leading to the re-education of his physique is prescribed. His mental developments are tested, and the common attributes of the human mind, such as sensory acuity, retention, discrimination, and the like, are estimated and recorded. The special talents he possesses are revealed by performance tests, and his hitherto undeveloped potentialities are induced to betray themselves. The emotions from which he either profits or suffers are discovered by methods adroitly devised for the purpose. Likewise, the individual’s sociability,—whether it be merely gang-attachment, or a zest for cooperative endeavors,—is made a matter of sympathetic study; while still other bases upon which a man may be estimated are employed in the attempt to help him find out just what manner of man he is.

While it is admitted that physical and mental tests are often stupidly devised and bigotedly inflicted on the testee, yet it seems likely that we have given here a method which can be employed to the greatest advantage even in every-day ethics. For the psychological method, in that it teaches one first to become analytical and discriminative, replaces the old, unfounded prejudice that men are unequivocally either good or bad, virtuous or vicious, saints or sinners, by a desire to know just what can be done with and for them. And while the methods of psychology will probably always rank men on a scale from low to high, and will always employ opposite poles in its judgments, yet in the multitude of such antonyms there is safety. Scientific judgments are, by being unemotional, devoid both of that extreme congratulation and sharp censure which attach to purely moral estimates, while the wide range of observation upon which they are made provides for the greatest number of human contacts and of educative measures possible. To extol a man is often not much different in effect than to blame him, and both praise and blame can equally hinder his power to acquire an ethical technique. Men differ too variously to be fitted to any one Procrustean bed; the human mind has infinitely more than two dimensions. Moreover, the moralist’s use of bi-polar judgments tends inevitably to separate men, rather than to unite them, or to teach them to cooperate with one another. And when we consider that from now on, at least, the predicaments of this planet will be common liabilities of the whole human race, the pragmatic urgency to employ the methods of psychology in attaining social harmony are undisguisedly patent.

The benefits derived from employing the psychological method in ethics are, however, by no means exclusively social. The use of this method reacts directly upon the user in several significant ways. In the first place, the man who employs even as few as twenty-five of the newer categories in making a trait analysis of his fellows, soon becomes aware of the fact that his former analysis of himself is in need of revision. Exaggerated self-preference is thus broken down, and replaced, not by its opposite,—self-abasement,—but by an estimate which arises from comparisons and contrasts resulting from the use of an objective standard. Again, the user of this method learns that human behavior is not the product of some mysterious mental element called “character,” but that character itself is the product of traits, and, furthermore, that every trait has had a developmental history, which is at every point a record of the effect of environmental stimulus upon original nature. His own character thereafter becomes subject to scientific scrutiny, and he realizes, for example, that his previous emotional repugnances were not always signs of incorruptibility, but very frequently, indeed, signs of the extent to which his own desires had been prevented from reaching their maturity. And, only to mention one more of the many benefits of such new scientific insight, the use of this method reveals that times out of number purely moral judgments are employed to quench, rather than to quicken thought, and are uttered not so much to indicate that discriminative sympathies are being acquired, as to show that they have long since ceased to germinate. Henceforth the employment of the psychological method goes hand in hand with the urgency to prevent as many young minds as possible from suffering on account of a retarded development.

Such a change of emphasis from traditional morals to scientific methods implies unequivocally that the problems of ethics are henceforth to be solved by experts. Already the recognition of the need of such a change is evident in the reliance that is being placed upon psychiatrists and other medical men to assist in the cure of those who are maladjusted to their environment. Health-clinics likewise are being both promoted and attended by those who realize that the virtues go as deep as the viscera, and that often such things as ignorance of the shape of one’s stomach have been the source of many a lapse from normality. This reliance upon trained experts is, moreover, a sign of still further changes in our occidental philosophy of life. It means that we are acquiring the conviction that constructive criticism is better than ritual, and analysis more efficacious than prayer. For we have begun to see that progress must come by honest, painstaking efforts in the here and now, rather than by presuming upon the perfection of a universe which we have only begun to understand. It is indeed the well-born sentiment of many thousands of people today that science wisely employed for the benefit and use of men is the only true word of God.

Herewith, also, the question of what sort of ideals an applied mechanistic psychology of conduct provides may have an answer. On this point we need not be dumb, nor can we make a “sentimental compromise.” When the mechanist asserts that we are what we do, he does not thereby denounce ideals; on the contrary, he thus only affirms his purpose to take the whole question of ideals seriously, more seriously, in fact, than it was ever taken before. Herein also he declares for the Ethics of Hercules rather than the “Ethics of Cinderella.” For while he must admit that there is, accordingly, no class of people who can be truthfully said to be “the pure in heart,”—owing to the fatigue of attention incident to all other-worldly contemplation,—yet he also asserts that the man who knows his capacities and powers as the result of an objective analysis, is by that means equipped to advance to more inclusive levels of conduct than he who merely cultivates an inner life of private mystery. The mechanist would therefore let new standards grow out of the development of natural human capacities, out of the struggle to educate men so that their desires and abilities mature simultaneously, and out of the freedom which can thus be achieved by those able to achieve it.

“Great love comes from great knowledge,” said Leonardo da Vinci, and the advance of science today in all its branches corroborates this assertion. Although at the present hour it does not seem clear just what the universe is doing, yet they who recognize even in seemingly disastrous tumults the struggles of man to enlarge his power to think, will see that even if nature’s way appears to be circuitous and even at times crude, it is nevertheless nature’s inevitable way. Much lamentation is heard today over the changes which evolution has brought to this planet, and the outcry is even raised that science has taken away our souls. Is it necessary to reply that a faith in stagnation is clearly out of joint with the creative functions of time, or that the loss of an ancient belief may be the sign of a truly ethical advance? Indeed, we can well be assured that the type of soul which is composed of self-stifled desires, of restless sentiments due to an ignoble retreat from reality, of the fear of ultimate annihilation, not only will die, but it also ought to die. There is another and a better kind of soul,—the one created out of sagacity, skill, and kindness, which generates power, wisdom, and peace,—and this type of soul, as long as the sun remains hot, and the earth’s crust keeps flowering into men, will have its immortality guaranteed. This is the mechanist’s religion,—a consequence of, rather than an apology for, his ethics. For religion, though it be a word made base by those who claim to have an endless copyright on truth, and a retroactive monopoly on the deeper human emotions, means to a mechanist something more closely allied to its original signification. It means a reliance on that much of nature, and a support from that much of humanity, as contributes to the development of a man’s talents, to the freedom of his actions, and to his peace of mind. The new labors of Hercules will consist in making this true for the whole human race.