The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

But what would you say if instead of any one of these three or other answers that may suggest themselves, some one were to reply: “Not a bit of it. The motive that really controls human life, that does actually and not theoretically play the largest part in determining the conduct of men and women, is—fear.” And before we pass that contention by it may be worth our while to look at it and ask whether, or how far, it is true.

Take it in the matter of dress, for example. Does not fear play a large part there,—either the fear of being unlike everybody else, or the fear of being too much like everybody else? In every land, more even in civilized lands than in uncivilized, the element of fear enters into the small external characteristics of our daily living.

And in the matter of opinion. We speak of public opinion as though it were a free and stable and trustworthy thing. But the public opinion of one generation contradicts the public opinion of another generation. The public opinion of one section of the land denies the public opinion of another section, in the same way in which two sections of society in one community think in opposite ways. Why? Not because all the individuals of these particular generations, or sections, or portions of the community really and independently have thought the thing out for themselves, but because, held under the atmospheric constraint of fear, they are unwilling to break away from what is determined for them by the opinions in the midst of which they live. There is a good deal of pacifist opinion and a great deal more of militarist which is not free and personal at all, but simply herd intimidation. And a great deal of race prejudice and international suspicion is nothing but the miasma arising from cowardice or that bullying selfishness which is essentially cowardly.

And a great deal of religion is of the same character. The predominant element in many of the non-Christian religions is fear. It is so in all of the earlier or animistic religions, where men live in constant terror of the spirits that haunt the air or the world, and where a large element of their worship is shaped by that dominant principle of their religion, the dread of the unseen and the unexperienced. Even among us is there not a great deal, both of religious orthodoxy and of religious heresy, that is only the child of fear? There is a coercion of sound doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, and a great many men and women belong to their school of religious opinion simply because they are afraid to break away from the companionship in which they have always been or to disagree with the associations which condition them.

Much religious conduct, too, springs only from the fear of one’s environment. One of the saddest things which one meets in going out across the world is the great multitude, especially of young men, who, when they have left Christian lands and the environment and support of Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in all their religious conviction and character. Asia is strewn from one end of it to the other with the wrecks of men who, while they were at home, supposedly were men of religious character and conviction, but who showed when they went away from home that it was not a matter of their own real selves at all. It was just a matter of their timid servility and acceptance of the conditions imposed upon them from without, so that once they were away from home and free to do as they pleased and had no longer the help and uplift of their surroundings, their environmental religion collapsed and they went in an entirely different way.

And I think if only we would go deep enough in our own lives, and be honest enough with ourselves to gain a clear insight into our motives and impulses, we would discover how large a part fear has played in us,—fear, of course, in all the wide range of its aspects, that shades off on the one side into arrant cowardice and on the other side into a mere hesitancy of character and timidity, but fear nevertheless. Some of us are even now cloaking the things that lie deepest in our hearts, because we are afraid to give expression to them. We go into communities, into circles, into conditions where what has been natural and real to us is unnatural and abnormal, and we hide our colours and conceal our principles. And we do things we ought not to do or we do not do the thing we know we ought to do simply because of fear.

I had an experience a little while ago when this diagnosis was confirmed to me. In a visit to one of our colleges, among the boys who came around to talk quietly was one whom I knew as one of the leading men in the life of the institution. He played on the eleven; he was president of his class. He was very timid about talking lest somebody should overhear, but when assured that we had the whole house to ourselves he took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to me.

He said: “Mr. Speer, I wish you would read this.”

I looked at it and saw that it was written in a girl’s handwriting, and said: “No, tell me about it.”

“No,” he said, “please read it. It will tell you a great deal better than I can.”