American ideals, and other essays, social and political

by Theodore Roosevelt

Mr. Kidd’s greatest failing is his tendency to use words in false senses. He uses “reason” in the false sense “selfish.” He then, in a spirit of mental tautology, assumes that reason must be necessarily purely selfish and brutal. He assumes that the man who risks his life to save a friend, the woman who watches over a sick child, and the soldier who dies at his post, are unreasonable, and that the more their reason is developed the less likely they will be to act in these ways. The mere statement of the assertion in such a form is sufficient to show its nonsense to any one who will take the pains to think whether the people who ordinarily perform such feats of self-sacrifice and self-denial are people of brutish minds or of fair intelligence.

If none of the ethical qualities are developed at the same time with a man’s reason, then he may become a peculiarly noxious kind of wild beast; but this is not in the least a necessity of the development of his reason. It would be just as wise to say that it was a necessity of the development of his bodily strength. Undoubtedly the man with reason who is selfish and unscrupulous will, because of his added power, behave even worse than the man without reason who is selfish and unscrupulous; but the same is true of the man of vast bodily strength. He has power to do greater harm to himself and to others; but, because of this, to speak of bodily strength or of reason as in itself “profoundly anti-social and anti-evolutionary” is foolishness. Mr. Kidd, as so often, is misled by a confusion of names for which he is himself responsible. The growth of rationalism, unaccompanied by any growth in ethics or morality, works badly. The society in which such a growth takes place will die out, and ought to die out. But this does not imply that other communities quite as intelligent may not also be deeply moral and be able to take firm root in the world.

Mr. Kidd’s definitions of “supra-natural” and “ultra-rational” sanctions, the definitions upon which he insists so strongly and at such length, would apply quite as well to every crazy superstition of the most brutal savage as to the teachings of the New Testament. The trouble with his argument is that, when he insists upon the importance of this ultra-rational sanction, defining it as loosely as he does, he insists upon too much. He apparently denies that men can come to a certain state at which it will be rational for them to do right even to their own hurt. It is perfectly possible to build up a civilization which, by its surroundings and by its inheritances, working through long ages, shall make the bulk of the men and women develop such characteristics of unselfishness, as well as of wisdom, that it will be the rational thing for them as individuals to act in accordance with the highest dictates of honor and courage and morality. If the intellectual development of such a civilized community goes on at an equal pace with the ethical, it will persistently war against the individuals in whom the spirit of selfishness, which apparently Mr. Kidd considers the only rational spirit, shows itself strongly. It will weed out these individuals and forbid them propagating, and therefore will steadily tend to produce a society in which the rational sanction for progress shall be identical in the individual and the State. This ideal has never yet been reached, but long steps have been taken towards reaching it; and in most progressive civilizations it is reached to the extent that the sanction for progress is the same not only for the State but for each one of the bulk of the individuals composing it. When this ceases to be the case progress itself will generally cease and the community ultimately disappear.

Mr. Kidd, having treated of religion in a preliminary way, and with much mystic vagueness, then attempts to describe the functions of religious belief in the evolution of society. He has already given definitions of religion quoted from different authors, and he now proceeds to give his own definition. But first he again insists upon his favorite theory, that there can be no rational basis for individual good conduct in society, using the word rational, according to his usual habit, as a synonym of selfish; and then asserts that there can be no such thing as a rational religion. Apparently all that Mr. Kidd demands on this point is that it shall be what he calls ultra-rational, a word which he prefers to irrational. In other words he casts aside as irrelevant all discussion as to a creed’s truth.

Mr. Kidd then defines religion as being “a form of belief providing an ultra-rational sanction for that large class of conduct in the individual where his interests and the interests of the social organism are antagonistic, and by which the former are rendered subordinate to the latter in the general interest of the evolution which the race is undergoing,” and says that we have here the principle at the base of all religions. Of course this is simply not true. All those religions which busy themselves exclusively with the future life, and which even Mr. Kidd could hardly deny to be religious, do not have this principle at their base at all. They have nothing to do with the general interests of the evolution which the race is undergoing on this earth. They have to do only with the soul of the individual in the future life. They are not concerned with this world, they are concerned with the world to come. All religions, and all forms of religions, in which the principle of asceticism receives any marked development are positively antagonistic to the development of the social organism. They are against its interests. They do not tend in the least to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the organism “in the general interest of the evolution which the race is undergoing.” A religion like that of the Shakers means the almost immediate extinction of the organism in which it develops. Such a religion distinctly subordinates the interests of the organism to the interests of the individual. The same is equally true of many of the more ascetic developments of Christianity and Islam. There is strong probability that there was a Celtic population in Iceland before the arrival of the Norsemen, but these Celts belonged to the Culdee sect of Christians. They were anchorites, and professed a creed which completely subordinated the development of the race on this earth to the well-being of the individual in the next. In consequence they died out and left no successors. There are creeds, such as most of the present day creeds of Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, which do very noble work for the race because they teach its individuals to subordinate their own interests to the interests of mankind; but it is idle to say this of every form of religious belief.

It is equally idle to pretend that this principle, which Mr. Kidd says lies at the base of all religions, does not also lie at the base of many forms of ethical belief which could hardly be called religious. His definition of religion could just as appropriately be used to define some forms of altruism or humanitarianism, while it does not define religion at all, if we use the word religion in the way in which it generally is used. If Mr. Kidd should write a book about horses, and should define a horse as a striped equine animal found wild in South Africa, his definition would apply to certain members of the horse family, but would not apply to that animal which we ordinarily mean when we talk of a horse; and, moreover, it would still be sufficiently loose to include two or three entirely distinct species. This is precisely the trouble with Mr. Kidd’s definition of religion. It does not define religion at all as the word is ordinarily used, and while it does apply to certain religious beliefs, it also applies quite as well to certain non-religious beliefs. We must, therefore, recollect that throughout Mr. Kidd’s argument on behalf of the part that religion plays he does not mean what is generally understood by religion, but the special form or forms which he here defines.

Undoubtedly, in the race for life, that group of beings will tend ultimately to survive in which the general feeling of the members, whether due to humanitarianism, to altruism, or to some form of religious belief proper, is such that the average individual has an unselfish—what Mr. Kidd would call an ultra-rational—tendency to work for the ultimate benefit of the community as a whole. Mr. Kidd’s argument is so loose that it may be construed as meaning that, in the evolution of society, irrational superstitions grow up from time to time, affect large bodies of the human race in their course of development, and then die away; and that this succession of evanescent religious beliefs will continue for a very long time to come, perhaps as long as the human race exists. He may further mean that, except for this belief in a long succession of lies, humanity could not go forward. His words, I repeat, are sufficiently involved to make it possible that he means this, but, if so, his book can hardly be taken as a satisfactory defence of religion.

If there is justification for any given religion, and justification for the acceptance of supernatural authority as regards this religion, then there can be no justification for the acceptance of all religions, good and bad alike. There can, at the outside, be a justification for but one or two. Mr. Kidd’s grouping of all religions together is offensive to every earnest believer. Moreover, in his anxiety to insist only on the irrational side of religion, he naturally tends to exalt precisely those forms of superstition which are most repugnant to reasoning beings with moral instincts, and which are most heartily condemned by believers in the loftiest religions. He apparently condemns Lecky for what Lecky says of that species of unpleasant and noxious anchorite best typified by St. Simeon Stylites and the other pillar hermits. He corrects Lecky for his estimate of this ideal of the fourth century, and says that instead of being condemned it should be praised, as affording striking evidence and example of the vigor of the immature social forces at work. This is not true. The type of anchorite of which Mr. Lecky speaks with such just condemnation flourished most rankly in Christian Africa and Asia Minor, the very countries where Christianity was so speedily overthrown by Islam. It was not an example of the vigor of the immature social forces at work; on the contrary, it was a proof that those social forces were rotten and had lost their vigor. Where an anchorite of the type Lecky describes, and Mr. Kidd impliedly commends, was accepted as the true type of the church, and set the tone for religious thought, the church was corrupt, and was unable to make any effective defence against the scarcely baser form of superstition which received its development in Islamism. As a matter of fact, asceticism of this kind had very little in common with the really vigorous and growing part of European Christianity, even at that time. Such asceticism is far more closely related to the practices of some loathsome Mohammedan dervish than to any creed which has properly developed from the pure and lofty teachings of the Four Gospels. St. Simeon Stylites is more nearly kin to a Hindoo fakir than to Phillips Brooks or Archbishop Ireland.

Mr. Kidd deserves praise for insisting as he does upon the great importance of the development of humanitarian feelings and of the ethical element in humanity during the past few centuries, when compared with the mere material development. He is, of course, entirely right in laying the utmost stress upon the enormous part taken by Christianity in the growth of Western civilization. He would do well to remember, however, that there are other elements than that of merely ceremonial Christianity at work, and that such ceremonial Christianity in other races produces quite different results, as he will see at a glance, if he will recall that Abyssinia and Hayti are Christian countries.

In short, whatever Mr. Kidd says in reference to religion must be understood as being strictly limited by his own improper terminology. If we should accept the words religion and religious belief in their ordinary meaning, and should then accept as true what he states, we should apparently have to conclude that progress depended largely upon the fervor of the religious spirit, without regard to whether the religion itself was false or true. If such were the fact, progress would be most rapid in a country like Morocco, where the religious spirit is very strong indeed, far stronger than in any enlightened Christian country, but where, in reality, the religious development has largely crushed out the ethical and moral development, so that the country has gone steadily backward. A little philosophic study would convince Mr. Kidd that while the ethical and moral development of a nation may, in the case of certain religions, be based on those religions and develop with them and on the lines laid down by them, yet that in other countries where they develop at all they have to develop right in the teeth of the dominant religious beliefs, while in yet others they may develop entirely independent of them. If he doubts this let him examine the condition of the Soudan under the Mahdi, where what he calls the ultra-rational and supra-natural sanctions were accepted without question, and governed the lives of the people to the exclusion alike of reason and morality. He will hardly assert that the Soudan is more progressive than say Scotland or Minnesota, where there is less of the spirit which he calls religious and which old-fashioned folk would call superstitious.