But (to continue this slight diatribe) imagine the staff of any newspaper even attempting to follow any rules save those which govern the survival of the fit, or failing to cast the Beatitudes out of doors when it comes to their special interests or the prosperity of the several functions which they perform! Editorially the Beatitudes prove profitable as texts for moral preachment and mass consumption, but in the counting-office or the gathering of news how different! And as for going two miles with a traveler when he had compelled you to go one, or turning the other cheek when the first had been smitten! These things do not fall within the realm of the practical and are therefore not in the purview of any newspaper organization except in the editorial or pulpiteering department, and that intended to catch the pennies of the religionists.
So daily we have the spectacle of pages that in one column misrepresent the motives of the social or political enemies of this or that particular newspaper organization, or that play up to the subtleties of vice or crime for their news or dramatic values, or that display to the eyes of the young and old alike all the misadventures and incalculable subterfuges of a treacherous universe, while in another column, constantly reiterated, appear the words right, justice, mercy, truth, tenderness, duty, etc., as representing a definite program for conduct for the other person always, easily followed and easily achieved—by him. Yes, for the other person, outside of any given newspaper office, there are always God-given and immutable rules which spell peace and happiness for him, that are invariably to be practiced, if you will believe these same papers, by the majority, especially of their readers. And indeed these rules are by them persistently represented as the will and thought of a definite, definable God—He who spoke from Sinai, or who walked to Calvary (quite different Gods, by the way!)—to fly in the face of whom or which leads only to destruction. Yet all that is needed, as they well know, in so far as a reasonable guide to conduct is concerned (and all that we ever get, whether via the law or the average motivating impulses of man) is the perception and the fact of the necessity for a certain equation or balance in all things, i. e., the Golden Rule, mystic heavens or hells and the clerical representatives of the same with their collections and false notions to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet where will you find a newspaper with sufficient courage to say so? Where? Is it not here that one should pause and inquire whether the newspapers, aside from their purely reportorial functions (which latter might well be viséd under stricter libel, perjury and false witness laws than those prevailing at present), should receive so much as even a moment’s serious consideration?
EQUATION INEVITABLE
A VARIANT IN PHILOSOPHIC VIEWPOINT
IN society, where man is constantly scheming out methods of procedure and how his ideas and feelings and appetites can be brought to a harmonious workable state, a certain reciprocating smoothness of exchange and balance must be, and apparently has been, achieved. It is like those constructive adjustments which make any machine possible, and has apparently given rise to such conceptions of the necessary conditions for exchange as are indicated by the words “harmony,” “justice,” “truth,” possibly even “tenderness” and “mercy,” all of which mean but one thing, if they mean anything at all: the need of striking a balance or achieving an equilibrium between plainly restless and conflicting elements. (Why restless? Who knows? Why conflicting? Who knows?) However, it is this same equation or balance which conditions so large a thing as a universe, whose prime impulse apparently is to achieve endless variety in homogeneity, and vice versa.
But these have been assumed, in an absolute and not a relative sense, to be attributes of a Supreme Being who is all-just, all-truthful, all-merciful, all-tender, rather than as mechanic or, if one accepts the created theory of life, as an intelligently and yet not moralistically worked-out system of minor arrangements, reciprocations and minute equations, which have little to do with the aspects and movements of much larger forces of which as yet we know nothing and which at first glance hinder rather than aid the intellect in perceiving the ultimate possibilities of the governing force in any direction. Indeed the rough balance or equation everywhere seen and struck between element and element, impulse and impulse, need and need, while they might seem to lend color to the existence of absolute right, justice, truth, honor, etc., really indicates nothing more than this rough approximation to equation in everything—force with matter, element with element—as an offset to incomprehensible and, to mortal mind, even horrible and ghastly extremes and disorder; nothing more. For in the face of all the schemes and contrivances whereby man may live in harmony with his neighbor there is the contrary fact that all these schemes are constantly being interfered with by contrary forces, decays, mistaken notions, dreams which produce inharmony. This can mean nothing if not an inherent impulse in Nature that makes for change and so rearrangement, regardless of any existing harmonies or balances, plus the curious impulse in man and Nature (inertia?) which seems to wish to avoid change.
In spite of all man’s laws, taboos, social understandings, agreements and beliefs, there are certain things done under the sun which do not make for perpetual peace, harmony, order, exact justice and so the welfare of the race as he conceives it; nor do they argue for the domination of a harmonious, all-powerful God as man conceives Him. Shocking as it may seem, certain individuals and groups contrive to live and thrive under conditions which, according to other masses and individuals who live and contemplate them, are apparently inimical to the so-called best interests of the race and the plans of its Creator. Indeed the latter is constantly, according to man or his theorists, trying to overcome them and so save Himself.
Who and what are these inimical forces which are supposed to defy God Himself? Criminals, liars, lechers, murderers, self-aggrandizing intellects of all types and sizes, plus accident, disease, cataclysm. At the same time and as if working in harmony with them, and to the dismay of the religionist at least, there are vast legions of inimical non-moral and seemingly socially non-helpful or even destructive microbes and animals which seize on man, the image of God, whose welfare God seeks, and which live and thrive without sign of consciousness of God, equation, or anything else. I am thinking of the germs of cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, as well as plagues of locusts, worms, wood-lice or scales, rats and the like, which while destroying vegetation and wealth most necessary to man at one point at the same time may and do nourish birds inimical or helpful to him and cause all things to develop methods of defending themselves and so aid their growth. The chemic or mechanistic interpreter of life discovers equation here well enough, and even a kind of rough harmony, although the religionist does not, and so while it is entirely possible for a monistic or evolutionary mystic to believe in a series of individually severe but racially helpful checks and balances which in some of their aspects are non-moral but are still driving man on to something, good or ill, it is not possible for the religionist or the moralist, taking him at his own dogmatic valuation, so to do. God must be good, exactly just, always merciful, as man understands those things in the realm in which he moves. Though a world of scientific data may now be brought forward to demonstrate that God is not a personality with a given moral direction or bias, as we understand morals, or with a here decipherable purpose, yet he must deny that. The nature of God, if not revealed by a voice of thunder from a mountain top, is, according to him, seen in the works of Nature; and the works of Nature are good.
But if God, or Good, is imminent, working for some far-off, Divine event, why the intermediate pother? I wonder at times why those who ponder these things with a view of “saving” the race and so eventually establishing truth, justice, mercy here on earth, are not permanently confused or hushed into silence by the overwhelming evidence that no one thing, however put together by the human brain to endure, succeeds ultimately in maintaining itself or that which it dreams it will maintain. Religions come and go. Laws are written and fade away. Moral laws change with groups and climates. There remains only this necessity for equation, some form of adjustment, reciprocity, balance between the integral factors of each group, good, bad or indifferent, which no one thinks of translating as the only omnipresent evidence of so-called Divine Will. Indeed, since it is not necessarily directly connected with the welfare of the individual but is something to which, willy-nilly, he must at least roughly adjust himself, however successfully he may temporarily evade it, if he wishes to live, it has come to be looked upon by him as the machinations of a devil who opposes his God. In other words, dogmatic morals, as we understand these, have been introduced, although these same, or our interpretation of what is essential to the welfare of life, may not agree with the larger chemic urge and the import of this compulsion of balance as Nature views or uses the same.
It follows, then, that many things which we now consider essential to our racial or spiritual development, especially those which are intended to fit us for a purely mythical heaven, may not be essential at all. Especially may this be true of the many taboos and so-called moral social arrangements which we have established here to make comfortable our little passing state and which, by a process of egoism and self-interest, we ascribe to the will of God. Asceticism in morals, as well as self-imposed deprivations of any kind intended to bring us into conformity with the exact righteousness of Nature or God, may have nothing to do with any Divine mandate or impulse whatsoever. The investigations of the mechanists and the monists throw a very disturbing light on Nature (Loeb; Crile; Snyder). Excess, we know—or its equivalent, strain—is destructive to any organism, and the dogmatic moralist may well caution against it. Yet does a Creator who creates by billions and allows whole races, such as the American Indians, for example, to disappear almost in a generation, care particularly whether this, that or the other organism is broken down by this, that or the other strain or excess? It may be that excess is entirely gratifying to Him or It—like a shell maker pleased with the explosive power of his shells. What is one man, one organism, one race of organisms, to a thing that produces them by quintillions, age in and age out? So a conditioning law of equation or balance which compels a rough reciprocity between parts, all parts, may not remove the effects of or the necessity for strain or excess in the relationship of some men or some races, or all men and all races. War certainly indicates as much, and all the plottings and struggles and injustices and deaths which are concomitants if not essentials of all forms of progress. Again, what we might consider necessary in the way of equation or balance, and what Nature would, are two very different things. Our very finite minds can see but finitely. So our seemingly necessary limitations on individuals may be accidental and trivial and so detrimental to the larger purposes of Nature, which must betimes sweep them away with huge murderous wars or movements and so restore the changeful balance which she must keep in ways different from the minor arrangements which spring up here.
Even now Nature may be constructing individuals and forces which will completely undo, or at least enlarge, our theories of individual limitations and powers. We do not as yet know what Nature is seeking through man, if anything—certainly not his immortality; there is no evidence as to that—nor can we guess how she is seeking it. One thing we do know: our impulses do not always accord with moral or religious law, the so-called will of the Creator here on earth, and yet our impulses are assuredly provided us by a Creator, if no more than the mechanistic one of the chemists and physicists. We do not compound ourselves. We cannot always by any means control the impulses of our compounds. Only the warring, frustrating impulses of other compounds (or individuals or forces, social opinion being a phase of them) do that for us; hence we are not privileged to say that God, or the Creator, wishes us to do thus and so. We can only say that changing conditions compel us to or prevent us from doing thus and so. Nature may wish us to be forceful in many strange ways in order that we may contest, bicker with other things equally forceful in other ways (all created by Her) so that out of the contest such as we see may come something which we can never see. Who knows?