Consonantly with the psychologist’s recognition that, of the two polar feelings determining human action, the (positive) attraction of pleasure is far less potent than the (negative) repulsion of pain, it seems as if our future ethics would emphasize not good actions but bad ones. That will be following up the rule-of-thumb wisdom of the Commandments, of which the surviving ones are all “thou shalt not”; the positive ones about loving God and honouring Father and Mother having become either difficult to enforce or optional. I am glad of that word optional, because it leads to the remark that Intelligence is surely abolishing that neutral territory whence “good actions” can issue at “good” people’s good pleasure and as an expression of their goodness, but which no one has a right to insist upon; indeed, which they have a perfect right to withhold, since they are patted on the back for doing them, or have their hands kissed, as children were taught to kiss those of the “revered author of their being.” I expect that before so very long Intelligence may bluntly suggest that if the action, whatever it happen to be, is really good, that must mean that it is really needed; and if it is really needed, your fellow men can claim it and oblige you to claim it from your unwilling self. And to dishonour that claim may become in their eyes (mirrored in your own), mean, disgraceful, dirty. In the language of contemporary youth, it will not be decent.[1] That substitution of the word decency for the word virtue gives, methinks, the clue to the future revaluation of our moral standards. It implies, as I have suggested, a more intelligent and, in some ways, more indulgent, morality; but a morality on the whole more austere, a stark notion of duty armed with the relentless imperative which nowadays makes us abashed at the revelation in ourself of physical cowardice or bodily dirtiness. A morality, I venture to add, eventually able to do without the adornments coming under the head of “Moral Beauty.”
[1] “No, we may not be as moral as they (i.e. the older generation) are, but we are fifty times decenter.”—G. B. Stern, Tents of Israel, 1924; p. 244.
And, speaking of a future standard of “decency,” there will necessarily come sundry revaluations quite intolerable to our present morality. I will not speak (since far too much is nowadays being spoken concerning what, after all, is but a small part of conduct) about such revaluations of sexual morals as Dædalus prognosticates from transplantation of ovaries. That, and coming facilitations for changing one’s sex, cannot, indeed, fail to modify family arrangements; although I have greater belief in the effects of future methods of producing and exchanging, not offspring, but other commodities, and the consequent alteration in our tenure and conception of property. Indissoluble marriage, which already strikes some of us as scarcely decent, will lose its practical utility once inheritance is more or less abolished, and the subsistence and education of children no longer a charge on parents. Nor is this all: a more restricted practice and therefore habitual notion of ownership may at some distant day educate men and women, parents and children, lovers and friends, nay, masters and disciples, to admit Proteus even into the impregnable stronghold and inviolable sanctuary of human selfishness called Love. The “marriage of true minds” may, like the other one, come to be supplemented by honourable divorce. Exclusive reciprocal attachment, surely of all spiritual essences the most delicate, if not most volatile, may cease to be regarded as an inalienable piece of property, guaranteed by honour more terrible than law; and which, while all else (and ourselves most!) alters and shifts, cannot be altered and shifted without guilt of theft. There may come an end to the ideal of such fidelity as implies the claim of him or her once preferred to be preferred for ever; the duty also of continuing to prefer once having begun. Like much of the morality of a more intelligent age, “decent” behaviour in matters of sentiment will be based less upon an ought than an is. And I can conceive that such a change may make love’s tenure less insecure and less routinish and perfunctory. It will, at least, save one of the finest kinds of happiness (and the multiplying factor of many other ones) not indeed from the passing misery of change, but from the ignominy of claimed or accepted sacrifice, and the cruel pollution of jealousy, not between lovers only, but between all who love. And when there shall be applied to love the solemn saying “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” we may learn to temper our loss by the intenser gratitude for whatever, even if only for a time, has been ours.
As with fidelity in love, so also with “loyalty” to persons, even to causes and ideas. But such, too often degrading, loyalty will, I imagine, be more than compensated for by the condemnation of a new sin against the Holy Ghost, and by insistence on a minimum (at least!) of consistency in one’s own ideas and a minimum of conformity between one’s judgment of others and one’s judgment of oneself: the mote in one’s brother’s eye awakening the suspicion of the beam in one’s own.
At the same time (which is not our time!), and as Intelligence takes on a leading part in morals, there will come the indulgent recognition that such a “decency” as we may exact (or try to exact) from ourselves, cannot, any more than personal cleanliness in our own day, be exacted from all our neighbours. It may take a good many transformations of Proteus before the mote can always be removed from our brother’s eye, even supposing the beam to have been taken away from our own. It is no easy matter to be always clean inside and out, especially when, like the little boy in Stevenson’s rhyme, “your dear Papa is poor,” poor in spirit, perchance one of a long line of moral paupers. Neither is “decency” always attainable where there has been no past charwoman to prepare your easy tidiness at expense of previous dirty hands. Still less when, as nowadays, wallowing in excess or in cruelty is the only excitement many people can get out of life. Hence it may be a long while yet before the bare decencies of the spirit, even if recognized for such, can lose the value of rarity and the status of virtues. For, let us remember that, the fouler mankind’s surroundings and sores, the greater the need for incense and myrrh and even for the questionable odour of sanctity. Is not early Christianity’s, say St. Paul’s, insistence on chastity and mansuetude the expression of the otherwise inexpressible bestiality, cruelty, and vaingloriousness of decadent Rome? And what is the foolish Franciscan laudation of beggary save the measure of mediæval rapine and simony?
So, for the time being and the world as it may, alas! long continue, mankind will need something besides a taste for moral decency, to wit, an admiration for generous, nay, quixotic impulses and for tender sensibilities. These Intelligence, respectful towards the need for them, can neither create, nor, except by negative measures, even increase. But it can do something as necessary. Intelligence, and only Intelligence, can see to it that, even to-day, such rare and precious impulses and sensibilities be not diverted to evil results, wasted in barren self-sacrifice, or the fostering of hide-bound selfishness. Wasted, above all, in hecatombs to the Molochs of collective superstition, like the one which is only just over, and may begin again to-morrow.
III
PROTEUS AND ÆSTHETICS
“If there be any truth in these forecasts of what your fine Intelligence may bring about or justify in the domain of ethics, then” (it’s a certain kind of reader interrupting), “then may I never enter, nay, cast a glance into this detestable world of rationalized righteousness! Human do you call it, because you have made it godless? What is this Intelligence of yours worth if it fails to perceive that God exists because Man has need of Him; and that the true mission of virtue, of truth, of heroism, is not to make the world more endurable, but to satisfy our deepest human craving, that for greater harmony and loveliness, for deeper, steadier passion than otherwise life affords?”