PART I

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO HIMSELF CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

II

OUR BELIEF IN MAN YESTERDAY AND TODAY

A lumber-jack resolved that he would build himself a home, and settle down. Selecting a piece of timberland, he proceeded to clear it. Day after day, week after week, his great muscles worked with axe and saw, and with chain and reins until the trees were felled and burned, and the time for grubbing and planting had come. Then he looked at his cleared land, and behold, the ground was so rocky that it was not worth cultivating. For he was a specialist in subduing mighty forests, not in nurturing food-plants.

The western world, having found a key to the knowledge that is power--the key of scientific method--has been engaged for a few generations in unprecedented exploits in the mastery of nature. Her resources have been discovered and seized; processes of control have been devised; tools have been invented; hitherto intractable areas of the universe have been subdued; and power and possessions beyond all the dreams of our fathers are in our hands.[1]

The result is, of course, a changed position of man in the physical universe; but it is not merely this. Man’s position in relation to man has changed likewise. For we have been at work upon mankind as well as upon wood and iron. The occupations of men, and their possessions also, have silently wrought within the mind, the servant fashioning his master as well as the master the servant. Our inlooks as well as our outlooks have undergone a metamorphosis. Here, in men’s attitudes toward one another, and in what they think of themselves, we come upon the most significant product of modern science, invention, and industry.

The chief output of mines is miners and mine operators; the chief product of factories is operatives, managers, and absentee shareholders; the goods mainly dealt in by department stores are salespeople and customers; the outstanding contribution of finance in the modern world does not appear in the profit-and-loss account of any bank, for it is the banker himself and his clients. If we would estimate the efficiencies of the industrial age, we must study the men, women and children all about us, and among other things we must take account of what they think of one another.

Some of the things that are happening to us can readily be discerned. This high-strung humanity of ours is awake on some sides of its mind if not on others; it is highly organized, industrially focalized, scientifically managed, psychologically analyzed; it is rich in things, but it is distracted and ethically upset. At the moment when enormous power to work our will is added to us, we become partly unsure as to what we want, but mostly a sense of disillusionment pervades our powers. Disillusionment, that is, with respect to the genuine worth of all our motives and all our straining and striving and organizing.

The signs of this depression are unmistakable. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century our youth were nurtured upon Tennyson’s smooth confidence that “Nothing walks with aimless feet”; upon Browning’s morning song, “All’s well with the world”; upon Emerson’s apothegm that when two neighbors converse across a fence, “Jove nods to Jove over the head of each.” A divinity within man seemed to be attested by his conquest of nature, by his place in the system of evolution, by the progress of knowledge, by the developmental character of religions, and by the growth of philanthropy. Under the widely-heralded doctrine of divine immanence all creation was meaningful, and the human mind, in particular, was taken to be the point at which the otherwise hidden meanings of the universe blossomed forth. Even in the strain of economic life there was a certain lushness of belief in human capacity. Corresponding to the feeling that our natural resources were exhaustless, there was a prevalent assumption that success was within the reach of anyone who chose to be industrious and enterprising. An enormous increase of immigration was welcomed. Having purged ourselves of slavery, we believed that the United States had reached its political maturity, and that it was destined to be the political light of the whole world. The capacity of men to govern themselves was taken for granted. Thus, in America, at least, human kind felt itself to be young, growing, destined to high achievement; and these were taken to be simply human qualities that manifest themselves wherever environmental conditions are favorable.

At none of these points does the old confidence in man remain unimpaired. We are not so sure that progress is inherently provided for in the nature of man; we are far more sure of something old, crude, and of pine-stump quality in our make-up. Tacitly, if not overtly, men assume that irrational desires are the dominant forces within us, and that conflict has precedence in human motives. There is a growing skepticism of the worth of the common man. It is becoming almost popular to sneer at democracy. We rely--increasingly, it appears--upon force and cunning, or upon the automatic working of social mechanisms, instead of trusting to open eyes and to reason. We are afraid to use our freedom, or to let others enjoy the liberties that we have guaranteed in our laws and constitutions. We are putting up walls of many kinds to protect ourselves from our fellows. A partly blatant, partly furtive nationalism has displaced the bland and expansive political consciousness of the last generation, and both at home and abroad our policies are governed by an ungenerous caution. In all our history were we ever moved by fears as much as now? Were forward-looking proposals ever so regularly confronted with “Human nature being what it is, you cannot do it”?

A child with lots of playthings, but fidgeting, and dissatisfied with himself--here is a motif for a cartoonist who would depict the present condition of the western world.

How is this clouding of our sky to be accounted for, and what does it signify concerning the immediate tasks of our civilization? Is this depreciation of man simply a phase of the depression that always follows a great war? Is it a by-product of modern science, which reveals on the one hand the baffling immensity of nature, and on the other hand our blood-relationship with the lowest orders of living things? Is it a consequence of scientific psychology in general; or of behaviorism in particular; or, perchance, of psychoanalysis? Has it been “put over” on the populace by dramatists and fiction-mongers who find it remunerative to exaggerate the selfish and sensual aspects of life in the name of realism? Even if all these have combined to push us in the same direction, are they sufficient to account for what has happened? To what degree are they symptoms, and to what degree causes? May not the everyday conduct of all of us have had some influence in determining what we think of one another? If so, how does it happen that we have so behaved ourselves as to lower our estimate of human motives in general? What have we done to produce the present disillusionment?

III

WHAT THE WAR DID TO OUR BELIEF IN MAN

If the term “war” includes, as well it may, what goes on in the minds of men when nations cross swords, then the hardest battles, the greatest victories, and the greatest defeats of the Great War occurred, not upon the soil of France, but within our sense of the meaning and value of life. Looked at in this most profound and tragic way, the War is still going on. For in our own souls kindly and trustful sentiments are engaged in mortal combat with a powerful urge towards distrust and contempt, if not hate; and--what is of the utmost consequence--in _this_ battle national boundaries disappear altogether. We are to win or to lose for mankind as a whole; our respect for ourselves, with all that this implies, will go up or down with our respect for those that, nationalistically considered, have been or yet may be our enemies.

The psychological history of the War proves this. During the years that immediately preceded the outbreak of hostilities something like a mild, cosmopolitan humanitarianism prevailed in the mass of the people, even though it did not prevail and never had done so in the offices of state where, as a regular part of the day’s work, wars are forecast and prepared for. Surprise at the thunderous onset of the storm was followed immediately by desire to fix upon somebody the blame for it. This natural impulse was abetted directly and of policy by the various governments involved in order to enlist moral sentiment, or what the people felt to be moral sentiment, against the enemy. The truth concerning the causes of the War was not the concern of any of the warring states; rather, regimenting, militarizing the consciences of the people so that they would fight more bitterly and obey their commanders more unquestioningly, was the all-dominating policy.

Next came the exposition and interpretation of battlefield experience. Again it was in the nature of the situation that the people should spontaneously abhor the enemy--was he not killing and maiming our boys? Under these conditions two things were certain to happen: Combatants on both sides were bound to grow ruthless, and on both sides the ruthlessness of the enemy was bound to be exaggerated even without intent to deceive, while the ruthlessness of our own soldiers (whichever side we were on) was not described to us; it was a technical military detail.

Then was added deception of our own people as an apparently necessary military measure. To work up the whole people into one consuming fury, yet a fury utterly obedient to military command, seemed to be the dictate of mere efficiency. Hence tales of atrocities, in which fact, honest error, and deliberate lies were inextricably mixed, were fed to the populace by marvellously organized departments of propaganda. It happened that psychologists had just then worked out various problems of effective advertising, salesmanship, and personnel management, so that an instrument of enormous potentiality was available. Its power was at a maximum now, because the authorities of the state were able to close all competing channels of public information.

The first result of this psychic campaign was the arousal of much of the desired fury. It involved and evolved great simplicity of conviction: The enemy state is totally bad; then, the enemy people are totally bad, one and all; then, the racial stock is totally bad, so that even the children of the enemy are unfit to live; conversely, we, taken in our governmental capacity, are above criticism; yes, we belong to an innately superior stock, and our allies are about as good as we are.

Let us keep our eyes upon our main question, and not be diverted into the other lines of thought that are here near the surface. Our sole present concern is to see what effect the total War experience had upon our respect for human nature. At the culmination of the mental hostilities extreme contempt for a part of mankind was married to extreme approval of another part.

Here was, of course, unstable equilibrium; there was bound to be some sort of tip-over, perhaps a succession of tip-overs. Effort followed to prevent a radical reversal of this type of judgment, it is true, by hunting for innate superiorities and inferiorities of race. It is a safe guess that the future historian of science will smile at the nursing bottles that were offered to our self-esteem directly following the War! Such feeding was peculiarly inept in the United States. Here, where many races both mingle and intermarry, the notion of racial virtues and racial defects could not bolster up our national pride or our contempt for any other people.

Even if this race-discrimination that calls itself scientific were well established and agreed upon by experts, it could not protect our self-respect against calamities that came to it directly from the War. For the nature of governmental propaganda was found out. Citizens learned that they had been deliberately, systematically, and grossly deceived by their own virtue-professing governments. This of itself would have been sufficient to take away both the glamour of our assumed superiority and the hideousness of the enemy’s depravity. But this revelation of the real nature of the modern state was only one of several experiences that focussed at the same point. Dissatisfaction with the terms of the peace and with the post-bellum tactics of our allies; the realization that more wars are now in the making, and that even one more war may wreck civilization; the financial costs and the financial entanglements entailed by our martial exploit; revelations concerning the profits of patriotism; finally, analyses of the intelligence tests that were given to our soldiers--all these worked directly against the high-flown self-esteem that buoyed us up during the clash of arms.

But the bursting of the bubble has not produced the humility of the penitent or of the learner. Instead of being stimulated to a reasonable re-assessment of our national needs, we are irritated, we fall a-scrambling among ourselves, our life as a people lacks meaning to us ourselves--unless, indeed, this meaning be economic imperialism, of which more later.

Thus it is that, in the by and large, our estimate of the motives of men, our own motives included, has shifted by reason of our war-experience in the direction of what we believed the enemy to be while we were fighting him in the field. It is true that our estimate of him has been modified, for the most part grudgingly, yet “In the War you see what human nature really is” comes painfully close to being the net average judgment of the whole psychic tragedy. It is not only the cynic who says this; it is not only an occasional psychologist who thinks that man is by nature a fighting animal; the statesman, the financier, the industrialist, and the “man in the street” are more on guard against man as such.

But this is not the whole story; the “inside of the cup” still requires examination. What if the War itself sprang from causes that were already undermining man’s confidence in man? What if the silliness of our views of man in 1918 were merely a pustule through which a systemic social disease poured itself? Certainly the current “There you see what human nature really is” is less a discovery than a confirmation of an antecedent opinion; it is an “I told you so.” It is patent to all who think about such matters that the Great War was no meteorite, dropping upon us from outside our system of everyday life, but a direct and entirely to-be-expected growth within this system. Society did not suddenly change its habits, or suddenly get sick. Conflict was already here under other names--the language was industrial, commercial, economic, but the hand was the hand of Jacob. We shall have occasion, a little later in our inquiry, to ask somewhat in detail what motives industrialism has been bringing to the fore, and what part, accordingly, industrialism has had in bringing about the present sense of disillusionment. Certainly the roots of the modern war-system derive their chief sustenance from economic desires; and just as certainly we were judging men before the War by these desires and by the conduct that they produced.

This mind-set, already present when hostilities started, helps explain several items in the psychic history of the War. Take, for example, the grotesque psychic compound, patriotism plus profiteering. How was it possible, it has been said, for citizens to profess intense patriotism and utter devotion to winning the War at the very moment when they extorted high payment for their support of it? Did they want the War merely for the sake of the profits it brought them? No, for they gave their sons with alacrity. The human-nature puzzle that we have to work out is that of a sincere patriotism that could be at the same time (as far as the profiteer’s consciousness is concerned) an eager, self-regarding, profit-making business enterprise. The solution of the puzzle, apart from the general principle of mixed motives, is to be found in the habitual meaning that life already had acquired. Of course one must make profits from every move; why not? The irony of the situation--unperturbed and sincere devotion to a way of life that produces wars that sacrifice one’s own offspring in battle--is obvious to anyone who stands outside industrialism as an observer and critic of it. To some extent, the people have begun to see it; the emotional color of the term “war profiteer” is evidence; but we shall not appreciate the whole truth until we realize that in and through the accepted ways of industrialism a degraded view of “what we are here for” had come to be taken for granted.

It is partly because men did not assume nobility in man, and were therefore unready to look for it or notice it, and therefore did not tell others of it when it did break forth, that we heard so little concerning the finest conduct of the soldiers of all the belligerent powers, friend and foe alike. Think of the sportsmanlike treatment of enemies while the fighting was still going on; the magnanimity that was taken for granted in individual relations between warriors; the countless deeds of mercy both within the area of hostilities and round about, both during and after the conflict; the half dumb, and wholly blind, belief of many a soldier that he was doing his utmost for an ideal cause; and do not forget the sincere response of the mass of the American people to the idealism of the “Fourteen Points.” Weigh all this, and then add to it the fact that war-makers cannot get their own people to fight without first deceitfully frightening them or artificially working up hatred by means of propaganda.

Here, as in the case of the war-profiteer, we behold moral confusion, but on the whole a downward trend in our regard for our own qualities. Our returning soldiers, voicing the slogan “Treat ’em rough!” and applying it alike to former enemies and to citizens who made moral distinctions with respect to former enemies, gave us a hint of the extent to which belief in force as the arbiter of human relations was spreading. Taken simply and without qualification, this belief means, among other things, that men are bound to fight, and that when they fight they will be ruthless butchers on the field and smug profiteers at home. This is not quite true, but why do we constantly drift towards a belief that it is? Why do we not counteract it by bringing into the foreground the generosity that men actually exhibit, and even the fact that lower and higher motives are struggling within them? A war does not suddenly create such beliefs. They were here before 1914; they helped make the world-catastrophe possible, but they have now been accelerated by their own work.

We now have the clue to certain incidents and phases of the peace-making. It was a peace-making only in the relatively superficial sense of pausing in the use of explosives. It was not reconciliation; it was external, not psychic; and it was external because all the peacemakers assumed that the conventionally accepted motives are fundamental in human nature and are to be dominant “world without end.” Underneath all the instability of the peace and all the insincerity of such measures as the mandates is a low conception of what we are, what we want, and what we are capable of becoming--a conception that was not created by the War.

Why is it that the universal horror of this War does not lead to repentance for war-making? Repentance, that is, for the habitual indulgence of motives and methods of daily living that make armies and navies, secretaries of war (actually normal in times of peace), international animosities, and finally war itself a characteristic phase of nationalism? Why don’t we turn over a new leaf? Made-to-order psychology which attributes the climax of fighting to a fighting instinct, ignoring the actual antecedents of every actual war, does not get us far toward an explanation, even if it has within itself a fragment of truth. We must go back to our everyday living if we are to explain our reluctance to repent for war-making, and we must see our everyday living in terms primarily of our wants and our notions about them. Practically nobody wants war; we are not exactly tigers and vultures; but something prevents us from having robust confidence in our ability to avoid the fatal steps. Fortunately, we are not consistently depreciative of ourselves. Even at Versailles, much more in the League of Nations (with all its handicaps and timidities), still more, possibly, in the World Court, an inextinguishable hope, a living shoot of real confidence in human nature, is perceptible. What shall come of it will depend, in some measure, upon stopping to consider what we want, and then thinking straight.

IV

HAS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION DEGRADED US IN OUR OWN EYES?

What keeps alive the notion that the theory of evolution derogates from the dignity of man? One would suppose, offhand, that nothing but our own conduct could either disgrace or dignify us except to minds that judge by perverted standards. In a period of history in which society has begun to shake off artificial class-distinctions, and to permit men to rise or fall by virtue of their own individual force or lack of force, how can we revert to an exaggerated pride or shame of ancestry?

A third of a century ago a college student, for the first time coming to close quarters with the biological view of man, asked, “Professor, what becomes of our respect for man if he is a blood-relative of the beasts?” I replied, mindful of the fact that this student and his family were new Americans, “Does the worth of an individual depend upon what his grandfather was, or rather upon what he himself is?” The student, with a laugh, promptly took the position of all believers in democracy--“A man’s a man for a’ that!”

Even Ezekiel of old, with few democratic traditions, but deeply reflecting upon the ways of God, rejected the doctrine that worth or desert depends upon membership in any ancestral or other group. The people expressed their traditional view in the aphorism, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are on edge,” but the prophet declared that God judges “everyone according to his ways.” One would expect those who are not only heirs of the democratic tradition but also lovers of the Bible to take the same point of view. Yet it is chiefly persons versed in the Bible who complain that belief in evolution must degrade us in our own eyes. Perhaps “versed in the Bible” is not the best designation, for the persons in question are those who are most inclined to a literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation, which declares that man was made “out of the dust of the ground.” How, one wonders, does this text affect the Fundamentalist’s notion of human dignity?

Evidently there is something in the background of the objector’s mind that is not specified in his argument. What is this unmentioned premise? Is the complaint that the dignity of man is affronted by the theory of evolution a case of “rationalization,” that is, the invention of a reason that for some cause is more convenient than the facts--an invention that may not be realized to be thus artificial?

The objection does not rest upon any alleged letting-down of conduct that can be traced to a belief in evolution. It may very well have happened that, by the roundabout way of a different sort of rationalization, consciousness of our evolutionary origin has promoted loose living. For example, those whose philosophy of life already was, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” might have said, “We are animals anyway; let us live as such.” This would have been self-sophistication, of course, for no evolution-theory ever said that we are not, _qua_ human, different from other animals; moreover, the “Let us” was not derived or derivable from the theory. At most, we have here a rationalizing excuse by which to maintain one’s “face” to oneself or to others. But anti-evolutionists fail to give specific evidence that even in this indirect and sophistical way the theory has produced a letting down.

It is possible that the mistaken identification of evolution with a single theory of its process, struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, has aided and abetted selfishness and ruthlessness in competitive business and competitive nationalism. But this kind of competition does not wait for scientific justification, and when it alleges evolution as an excuse, it indulges in self-sophistication just as do the sybarites who have been mentioned. For “existence” does not mean the same thing for man and his animal ancestors, and therefore “fittest” does not. In pre-human species there is no precedent for the alternatives between which the business man and the statesman have to choose. Rationalization again!

It is scarcely necessary to inquire whether academic ethical theory has been seduced by the evolutionary aspect of life. Little more is needed than to recall a name and a circumstance or two. The name is that of Huxley, rigorous evolutionist, who with all the emphasis that he could command insisted that the tooth-and-claw principle does not apply to the human species. An important circumstance is the blossoming of humanitarian service during this period, with its inevitable reverberation in ethical thinking. The ethical life is now almost universally understood to be the life of mutual helpfulness. This view is strongly backed up by sociology, theoretical and practical, with its continual reminder of the solidarity of men, and by the parallel development of social psychology, which finds that personal existence as such is a mutual affair.

All the more reason, then, for asking why anybody supposes that our respect for ourselves depends at all upon our holding or not holding the evolution theory. If, in order to answer this question, I must flail some old straw, the excuse is that the search for the sources of our twentieth-century depreciation of man is worthy of some thoroughness. Well, then, it is clear that there is no logical thoroughfare between our disillusionment and the theory of descent. As far as the logic of the theological anxiety is concerned, Huxley’s retort to Wilberforce in the famous sitting of the British Association is final. If we were logical, it would be far more derogatory to our _amour propre_ to be related to a human scoundrel, or even, as Huxley so crushingly said, to an evasive, only half-honest debater, than to reckon ape-like creatures in our ancestry.

As a matter of fact, we do retain our regard for ourselves in the full light of our blood-relationship with men of all sorts of evil traits, even brutish ones. Fox, tiger, serpent, viper, shark, blood-sucker, vulture--all these epithets--some of them actually biblical--have long been applied to members of our species. Within the consanguinity of the most convinced Fundamentalist there are thieves, murderers, ravishers, maniacs, and idiots. One whose self-respect remains intact in the presence of this truth is simply self-deceived if he imagines that his sense of human dignity would be affronted by admitting that the anthropoids are his distant cousins. No, each of us readily asserts his superiority to his relatives, so readily that the theory of evolution simply cannot have had the effect supposed. At the most, advantage has been taken of it to emphasize or reinforce notions that have their source elsewhere. In the case of the Fundamentalists, antagonism to the concept of evolution upon this ground is a cloak that is employed, more or less unconsciously, to cover some other reason for the opposition.

The more one looks into the course of religious thought, and of popular thought in general, since Darwin, the more certain becomes this conclusion. Biologists and biological psychologists, as far as I am aware, never claimed to add a single item to the already recognized list of beast-like qualities in men, and theologians never attacked evolution upon any such ground. Rather, what the new view of us added was an explanation of “how we got that way,” and the explanation--mark this--constituted a partial excuse (not justification, but excuse) for much of our bad conduct. It actually lifted from us a part of the condemnation that was inherent in the theological view of special creation.

It is a fact, moreover, that--whether logically or not--from the evolutionary view of the past men gathered confidence in their own capacity for progress. Today we are actually embarrassed by the too-easy identification of evolution with progress. Men’s self-esteem was too much enhanced and soothed.

What is not less interesting from the theological point of view is that the previously current views of the nature and work of God were ennobled. Whether logically or not, men thought that they saw more meanings, or saw them more clearly, in the system of nature. “Star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,” to use Emerson’s phrase, were not just “there”; they were getting ready to be the home of living things; and the lower forms of life were regarded as pointers-forward to higher forms. Again to borrow from the Concord “prophet of the soul,”

And the poor worm shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man.

A recent declaration by a number of eminent men, some of them on the highest round of the scientific ladder, that the evolutionary view of nature ennobles the thought of God is historically true at least; the event has occurred. In short, the atmospheric change was not toward the depression of a sultry day but toward the invigoration of a fresh, appetite-creating breeze.

The sophistic that turned this into an alleged depletion of our moral vim is not far to seek. The reason why certain persons did not rejoice at the excuses that evolution provides for much of our faultiness is that they did not want us to be excused, but condemned. They wanted this, not because they were vicious, but because they held a theology that required them to think so. And because this authoritative theology had settled upon one way as the only one whereby man could be released from the sins that beset him, it could not rejoice to discover that there are other openers of prison doors.

If many of the dogmatically faithful did not think their way into quite all this detail, they realized at least that to accept at the hands of evolution an ennobled view of man or of God would involve admitting inadequacy and lack of true authority in the dogmatic system. The dogmas never were complimentary to human nature, but--O droll self-delusion--when science offered us a real compliment, dogma insisted that it was an insult to our exalted dignity!

V

THE IRRATIONALITY OF MAN AS A LITERARY MOTIF

“What a noble work is man!” is a characteristic sentiment of classical English literature. “What a work is man!” is the burden of the most distinctive literature of our day. The difference between the two exclamations is the difference between sunshine with clouds and clouds without sunshine.

Our literature always has had rogues and villains galore, hypocrites and egotists, folly in good people and goodness in bad people. Human life and human nature have been pictured as spotted and mixed-up, and strife and confusion have not always been cleared up in the dénouement. But this was a mixture, a confusion, and a strife, of genuine opposites. That there are truly noble motives was not doubted; it was, indeed, the entanglements of nobility in a world that contains also stupidity, selfishness, sensuality, and cruelty that furnished the main dramatic situations, whether between individuals or within an individual’s own soul.

The same objective material receives in our day a fundamentally different treatment. That we have fewer “happy endings” is not the main point, and it is not necessarily significant. What is significant is a shift of the main basis of dramatic contrasts and oppositions, and the insertion of a new set of tensions, together with the assumption, or the mood, that lies back of the change.

Whereas, our classical tradition opposed moral ugliness or weakness to moral beauty or strength, the new mode is not certain that there are any such dividing lines in our experience. It finds in life, rather, a mêlée of impulses in which there intermingles more or less policing that imagines itself to be of superior quality but is actually part and parcel of the mêlée. In the instincts a literary bonanza has been discovered. Pit them against one another; tangle them up; make them intense and ruthless to the point of savagery or beastliness, or make them crafty and adroitly unscrupulous; ignore the presence in the world of religious aspiration, or, better still, expose it as a self-deceived servitor of the powers that it would rule--in short, play irrationality against irrationality, some of it deceiving itself by its own camouflage, and you will be up to date.

If this literature cannot paint with epic strokes because its theme, man, lacks heroic proportions, it does create a complicated and many-patterned chiaroscuro that, I am ready to believe, is a real contribution to literary technic. But whatever virtues or vices of technical art one may find here (which is not my concern), the inlooks are disillusioning. Even if the lines do not say so, you will find it between the lines. It permeates the assumptions of the characters or, if it does not, it suffuses the plot, governing the choice of characters, situations, incidents, developments; it is testified to by atmosphere, perspective, and very effectively by silences. If, as sometimes happens in current plots as well as in classic tragedy, Fate is the chief actor, it is not sublimely grand or even mysterious, giving the spectator a feeling that even the irremediable ills of life are a tribute to the greatness and dignity of existence, but a mean Fate (rather, fate), a mere mechanical determinism in the sphere of desire. The spectator goes away unawed, unadmiring, untrustful toward his species. Life is a mole that burrows under the garden of our ideals, nipping off at the roots one plant after another. Or, life is a firecracker; a glittering splutter, then an explosion or a fizzle, then fragments of smoking refuse--nothing but combustion.

It is far from the purpose of this characterization to indulge in any general literary criticism, or completely to assess the movement now in question. The only reason for alluding to it is that here, in a clearly influential portion of current writing, the disillusionment now under consideration is a ruling presence. The spirit of it is displayed in fiction, drama, poetry, and biography. It is bent upon stripping off the disguises of men, puncturing their pride, and revealing them as creatures of elemental, a-moral, not-to-be-denied impulses. Now and then an impression of power is conveyed by the sheer intensity or explosiveness of an instinctive desire, but anon human wants appear narrow, mean, vulgar, or sordid. “Spoon River” and “Main Street!” Authors psychologizing, just as diplomats do, with hard cynicism. And this cynicism is not intended as caricature, with its precious privilege of telling the truth by exaggeration, nor satire, isolating foibles in order to put them into the pillory; the literature in question intends to present the actuality of human life as against the conventionalized dreaming of the Victorian period.

Two or three examples may be adduced for the sake of concreteness. A reviewer gives the following exposition of the philosophy of life that actuates Mr. Dreiser’s novels: “To him it seemed ... that novelists, ... enamoured of moral delicacy and psychological subtleties, ... had forgotten the simple motives by which the vast majority of mankind are moved; so with a single shrug he sloughed off once and for all the implications of the theory that man is primarily a moral animal, and he did this much as the behaviorists in psychology sloughed off the soul. He adopted, instead, what he called ‘a theory of animal conduct.’” The leading character in Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” the reviewer goes on to say, “is not unaware of the moral precepts which his parents have inculcated, nor is he unmoved by the thought of another’s pain. But these things are pale shadows in comparison with needs and lusts which are nourished, not by ideas and habits, but by blood. They may go forth to battle but they never win; they may haunt the mind like overtones or like ghosts but they never direct a crucial action.... At no point in all the vast and closely woven story does any motive based upon moral, social, or religious abstractions count” (Joseph Wood Krutch in the _Nation_, Feb. 10, 1926, p. 152).

The same writer of analytic reviews calls Eugene O’Neill’s “The Great God Brown” a “passionate attempt to expound the mystery of the artist’s maladjustment and of that perpetual tendency of his to slide into the mud while aspiring toward the stars. Its hero, ... unhappy himself, ... has been the cause of unhappiness in others, and when he dies he knows no more than that he has lived.... He has not seen the face of either God or Devil clearly enough to know which was which, and it is with curses that he has uttered the sincerest of his prayers.... The thirteen scenes ... are thirteen dancing stars still molten and fluid like the chaos from which they sprung. They are moments in the life of a man described in a brilliantly poetic sentence as one who ‘had looked into his own dark and was afraid’; and they are thus, it is difficult not to believe, fragmentary confessions from that dramatist who has peered more intently than any of his countrymen at the fantastic shadows cast by reality upon the walls of the dark cavern which is the self” (Same number of the _Nation_, pp. 164 f.).

A less tempestuous form of disillusionment appears in the (would-be-bestowed) Pulitzer Prize novel, Sinclair Lewis’s “Arrowsmith.” The main action takes place upon the plane, not of brawling passions, but of the supposably rational life. Most persons of intelligence assume that, however mixed or fragile the values of other undertakings may be, scientific research is a truly noble and profoundly worthwhile type of human conduct. Very well, says the author of “Arrowsmith,” let us look at the thing in actual operation in our present world. Are you carried away by the researcher’s dispassionate objectivity and his passionate devotion to truth? In fact, this dispassionate passion is in a constantly losing fight with enemies both within and without the researcher.

For, first, since research must be cooperative and organized, institutionalism seizes the opportunity to lay the long fingers of its dead hand upon every condition and plan. Next, vulgar utility, because it purveys the physical sustenance of science, craftily opens and closes the doors through which the researcher has to walk. Then, the mixed motives of the individuals with whom the researcher must be associated--the desire for recognition in the scientific world, the desire for quick results, or for official position--insinuate themselves like sand in the cogwheels of a fine mechanism. Humanitarianism, with its well-meaning desire promptly to relieve distress, throws its arms around the neck of plain truth-seeking and drags it under the waves of popular clamor or applause. Even within the mind of the researcher, there is no real peace nor unity. Anger and impatience, plain sex-instinct, and even domestic virtues entangle his interests and divert him from the straight line of loyalty to his scientific aspirations. At times uncertainty seizes him as to whether the near-by values of efficiency as the world measures it be not greater, in fact, than the far values of fundamental truth.

Thus is pictured the life of reason at its intellectual climax. This is the focus of the story, but not the whole of it. Around the central character cluster varied types of life-history, but every type is either self-contradictory, or consistently shallow, or inadequate because of its unwise goodness. Not less than in the rabble of instincts in O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but only in a different manner, and on a more refined level, man is the victim of himself. The idea is pursued with both continuity and subtlety. With continuity because it pervades the minor as well as the major characters and incidents of the plot; with subtlety because over-simplification of motives is skilfully avoided. The finer qualities are presented as fine and sincere even though the life within which they occur be smitten with ultimate futility. There is, indeed, biting cynicism for virtues that are cold and calculating, but not for warm, impulsive goodness.

But nobody arrives at any destination. As reason fails to guide the researcher to his desired haven, so also instinctive wholesomeness fails of its goal. The one deeply lovable person in the entire story would have demonstrated, if anyone could do it under the presuppositions of the author, that life can achieve a worth-while destiny otherwise than through knowledge. Leora is natural, spontaneous, affectionate; she makes adjustments by simple directness of feeling without artifice or ambition; though she has no discernible philosophy of life, she is dependable; on the whole, she seems to be contented. But her simplicity is that of narrowness, not of comprehension; she achieves adaptation but not mastery of her situations, and in the end her lack of any real understanding of the scientific habits and standards of her husband overwhelms them both in a needless tragedy.

Everywhere is frustration by inherent, unchangeable defects; yet no tears, no pathos (for there is no “might have been”); the irrational is both foreground and background. A surd in every experience would not necessarily mean defeat if there were any self-sustaining meanings also. But if our supposed meanings turn out to be surds!

There shines in the earlier parts of the story the steady brilliance of one ideal, that of unswerving devotion to pure science--wanting to know the exact truth at all costs. This ideal is incarnated in a sturdy-willed, growly old priest of the laboratory from whom young men of science catch the holy flame. They, one and all, allow it to flicker and smolder; some of them let it go out; but for a long time the old priest’s light burns steadily on. The reader half believes that here, for just once, rationality is to vindicate itself. At last there comes to the veteran researcher an opportunity to guard research, and to extend it, by administering a research institution that possesses abundant funds. Unknowing that his motives are mixed and contradictory, he accepts the fatal advancement, becomes compromised, and is lost. As a symbol of his descent the novelist makes him sink into senile dementia. “Vanity of vanities!... All is vanity.”

How much has this literary exploitation of the irrational in man had to do with the disillusionment that has been spreading among us? Have we here chiefly a cause, or chiefly an effect? If a cause, is it a major or a minor one? In any case we have a symptom or diagnostic fact. Disillusionment has gone far enough to be represented in a considerable body of literature that cannot be ignored. Whatever much-read novels and much-witnessed plays reveal concerning a people or an age is here revealed; whatever they do to people is being done here and now.

The suggestibleness of human beings is too great to leave them unaffected by such presentations of the supposed realities of life; this literature certainly is furthering disillusionment. But as a secondary cause. The primary cause is something actual that sets these literary workers going and then provides the popular applause. The applauders have had some sort of experience that makes the picture seem to have some verisimilitude. Thus we are forced back to the question, What makes this literature plausible? What has gotten into our common life that tends to make us think meanly of ourselves, and that causes us, particularly, to take our wants as a continuous and never to be resolved squabble among our desires?

Whatever it is, undoubtedly it is the same thing that we came upon in the “I told you so” of the war psychology. In all probability it is so commonplace that ordinarily it is not noticed, or if it is noticed, is taken as a to-be-expected expression of the nature of things. When a world-catastrophe shakes us, we begin to wake up to the assumptions that we have so easily fallen into, and when they appear in a new literature, we say that it is revealing--as it is. But of just what? The professed derivation of this interpretation of life from psychology suggests that we look in this direction for further light upon our problem.

VI

HAS PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINED OUR SELF-RESPECT

The Sphinx attends a meeting of the Psychological Sodality.

The Chairman of the Meeting:

Brothers--er, er, Brothers and Sisters: We have the pleasure, I may say even the honor, of having as our guest this evening a most venerable member, if not of our inmost circle (which is not yet venerable itself, having the age of only a generation), yet a member of the long and honorable succession of inquirers into what is, perhaps, the most difficult problem that has engaged the scientific intellect--the problem of the nature of man. I say “perhaps” the most difficult problem, for we who have observed the reactions of the white rat are aware how, under the rub of exact research, man disappears, like vanishing cream, in the pores of “the organism.” I am reminded of this with peculiar force upon the present occasion because our distinguished guest, like our laboratories, combines the human and the sub-human in a single synthesis. Renowned for her cautious judgment, she is yet more illustrious for her skill in the formulation of problems. Let me assure her that the members of this Sodality will have open ears for her questions, and that we shall be glad to focus upon them the combined and unified results of our respective lines of research. Fellow Members, I present The Sphinx!

The Sphinx:

Your Chairman does me too great honor when he says that I combine the upper and the lower part of me in a single synthesis. The fact is that the two parts of me never have lived together in harmony. The trouble is with my head. It’s forever saying, “I’m human, but what is it to be human?” and this keeps the whole of me in turmoil. I’ve been asking this question for thousands of years, and asking it is as far as ever I get. Tough luck; but not as bad as trying to answer questions that you don’t know how to ask. Believe me, asking the right question is the greatest discovery anybody ever makes; it’s the high-trapeze act of the whole scientific circus. It makes me tired--I’ve been too tired to stir for as much as five thousand years--to hear philosophers, and preachers, and guides of youth “explain” the mystery of human existence by prating of ghosts, and souls, and faculties that always are just around the corner and never where you can get your eyes upon them (Applause). It all comes about from asking the wrong question. In this instance, it’s the mud-pie question: What’s it made of? This question plays the very deuce. By the way, all of you guys are done with mud pies, I suppose? I haven’t seen the last number of your Annals.

A Practicing Psychologist:

May I introduce myself to our distinguished speaker by explaining that I am a certified practicing psychologist? From the point of view of my profession the question that has been put to us is readily answered: We are done with mud pies. We are not at all concerned to know whether man is made out of the dust of the ground or out of the breath of divinity. Our job is simply to enable men to control, manage, and manipulate themselves and one another so as to get what they want with the greatest certainty and the least expense. And we have had no mean success in this job. If a child is backward in school, we find out why, and we tell the teacher what to do. We have evolved technics for advertising that increase sales, whip up competition, and compel combination. We can tell you how to manage salespeople or factory operatives so that both they and their foremen will be happier, the output will increase, and dividends will grow. It was a technic that we devised that enabled our officials at Washington to do the people’s thinking for them during the War while the people supposed all the time that they were doing their own thinking. Psychology is what psychology does.

The Sphinx:

You’re just the pin in a haymow that I’ve been looking for ever since Bacchus went on his first spree! Nothing else has puzzled me half as much as this phase of my old question, namely: What do human beings want? Since the management of minds is your specialty, practice on me; tell me how I can manage my head or the minds of men so as to find out what would really satisfy a human being.

Practicing Psychologist:

I did not say that the practicing psychologist knows the whole anatomy of man’s desires. For the most part he takes the word of his clients as to what they want, and then goes ahead. I simply do not ask what other demands of human nature may possibly exist. At the same time I must admit that, in order to find the economical way to handle the human factor in any situation, I must always take account of a complex of instincts. The farther I go in my work, too, the more complicated the instincts appear to be. For example, we are discovering that the workman wants out of his work a great many things besides wages, even things that wages won’t buy. As yet, however, we are not sure that the capitalist (except a queer one now and then) desires anything but profits. The acquisitive instinct seems completely to explain the conduct of business.

A Biological Psychologist:

What has just been said illustrates the need of an inclusive point of view from which to approach the problem of the instincts. Biology, in its concept of adjustment, presents us with such a point of view. All living beings exhibit a push towards the maintenance and the reproduction of themselves. Thus, there are two great trunk-roots of behavior, the demand for self-maintenance (at base the requirement of food), and the demand for reproduction. Where reproduction is sexual, we may say that food and sex, broadly considered, contain the clue to all behavior. It is necessary, of course, to perceive that each of these trunk-roots divides into branches and subdivides into rootlets. Thus, food-getting includes accumulation for future use, and so it founds what is sometimes called the acquisitive instinct. Rivalry, jealousy, and pugnacity belong to the same trunk-root. On the other hand, the reproductive drive differentiates into complex activities of courtship, the care of offspring, the family organization, and all the social institutions that have sprung from it.

The Sphinx:

You puzzle me. I haven’t been hungry or amorous since the pyramids were built, and I know I never wanted offspring. The only thing I’ve really wanted for these thousands of years is to know what man is--that is, what he really wants. At this minute I’m all excited about a particular aspect of this general question of mine: Does man himself, or only this queer head of mine, want to know what he wants? And if so, of which of the two trunk-roots of instinct is this a rootlet?

An Analytical Psychologist:

The question just asked by our venerable friend reinforces a consideration that I have many times presented in our Sodality. Psychology cannot be satisfied to work within the very broad categories of biology; she must find her categories within the specific material with which she deals, and she must pursue her analyses to the end--that is, until the simple elements are laid bare. Pursuing this truly scientific procedure, she finds that mind is a general term for aggregates of sense-elements on the one hand and elementary drives on the other. These drives, inherited, of course, and having biological significance, are more numerous than we once supposed. Each of the so-called trunk-roots is in reality a cluster of roots, and there are others not contained in either cluster. The sex-instinct knows nothing of offspring; does not look forward to progeny nor provide care for the young--often quite the opposite. These things are managed by another set of instincts. Moreover, food-getting is not the only sort of instinctive getting. Curiosity, the prime root of science, is obviously instinctive. Therefore we may affirm that the trouble with The Sphinx’s head is the unrest of an unsatisfied instinct.

A Single-Track Behaviorist:

This makes me as tired as it must make The Sphinx. Instincts, forsooth! An instinct is nothing but a name for a class of responses; it does not do anything nor explain anything. You can have as many or as few instincts as you like by choosing your method of classifying behavior. In fact, the whole notion that desires, instinctive or other, explain the occurrence of anything is simply a leftover from the belief in flitting ghosts who did things in the dark but never where you could see just what was happening. Bring the facts into the light, and what do you see (for I know nothing but what I see and touch)? You behold in our behavior nothing whatever but a few reflex movements modified in numerous ways by the conditions, purely physical, under which they occur. Behavior, which is change of place, has to be explained from within its own genus, which is, change of place. This is the last mountain height of psychology; climb up here, and you shall see that there are no desires, no wants. Men don’t want anything; a want is nothing but a bit of vocal or sub-vocal behavior.

The Sphinx:

Professor, you are a man after my own heart. You make things so simple. From what you say I get a hunch that maybe I have been foolish to be so inquisitive. For thousands of years I have believed that I was asking my big question about man because I wanted an answer. You make it clear that I didn’t ask because I desired an answer, or anything else, but only because I liked to ask questions. Come to think of it--it’s plain as a wart on a nose--I couldn’t ask a question _because_ of anything. In fact, it was not questions, but movements of my lips, that occurred. I’ve just been kidding myself, and I don’t need to worry any more about what goes on in this head of mine. I really don’t want an answer, and I don’t want to ask questions. Still, I should like to know what the rest of you fellows think about this.

A Gestalt-Psychologist:

The latest experiments upon both men and lower animals fail to justify any of the theories that man’s mind or his behavior is a composite of elements. The behavior of men, of chimpanzees, and even of domestic hens displays types of organization that cannot be explained as conditioned reflexes, or instinctive pushes, or associations of sense-elements. The organization is there when the response first occurs, not merely afterwards, and new organizations appear within new responses. The unit for psychology is the configuration, which is not a simple element. We are not composites of any kind of elements; we do not merely repeat and recombine old reactions; our behavior, through and through, looks forward to the organized world in which we live. I find the question of The Sphinx, therefore, not only rational, but inevitable. The supreme problem of psychology is: Whither? What are these already organized wholes that we recognize as mind? How and in what direction do they grow, and what are they going towards? Applied to man, the question is, What does this species really want?

A Self-Psychologist:

The circle is returning into itself! Psychology took its start--it always does so--from the experience of being a conscious self. This is the prime datum; it is the concrete actuality, from which all your alleged “elements,” sensory, affective, or instinctive, are derived by abstraction. Mind, as the Gestalt-Psychologist says, is a self-organizing object. Its activity, wherever you find it, is purposive striving. I should say that what ails the Sphinx’s head is simply the painful effort to become a complete self.

The Sphinx:

Thank you! You have saved my self-respect, and ...

A Psychoanalyst:

Pardon me, not too fast! Don’t respect yourself until you find out whether you are respectable, and above all, don’t rationalize. I am sure that you will welcome this interruption when I tell you that I am dealing daily with the dynamics of human conduct in its most intimate phases, so intimate that people cannot even recognize them as their own without my help. I walk among the mud-geysers and the volcanoes that show what’s really inside. What men think they want--in fact, most of what you psychologists think they want--isn’t what they really want, for the most part, but a lot of deceptive substitutes for what men really want and have failed to get. Dig down into the Unconscious, and you shall find libido, the simple spring that turns all the wheels of the machine. It is sex-desire broadly considered, though some would say desire to exalt the ego, or desire just to live (of which sex-desire is, of course, the chief constituent). Because these desires are repressed by social conventions, they seek outlets in strange and deceptive ways, and thus what we call our character becomes chiefly a mass of self-deluded virtues and self-deluded faults. Now, this restless longing of The Sphinx, which she thinks is a genuine desire to know what man is, conceals ...

Several Voices:

Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman, I ...

The Chairman:

Brethren, every member of this Sodality knows exactly what every other member is about to say. Would it not be well, instead of listening to ourselves, to hear the comments of our honored guest?

The Sphinx:

I won’t admit, no I won’t, that this discussion has given me a headache. I want you to think me more hard-headed than that, and moreover I might unwittingly reveal something in my insides that would shock the Psychoanalyst. All I can say, in view of your hospitality, is this: When you find out what you want, I hope you’ll one and all get what you want, provided you care to have that kind of want. As for me, the next steamer back to Egypt, where I shall brood over these things, perhaps, for a few more thousand years.[2]

* * * * *

To the question whether modern psychology has undermined our self-respect a partial reply would be, as we now see, Which modern psychology? One psychology is pitted against another whenever the nature of our motives is in question. Here science has problems rather than solutions, points of view rather than a point of view.

Only a small proportion of the populace, moreover, reads scientific psychology. Not by any logical use of established conclusions of research, then, has the present disillusionment reached its wide extent. We are dealing with a mood or sentiment and a habit into which men have slipped, not with insight that they have achieved by intellectual labor.[3]

Undoubtedly psychological rumors that have trickled into town have had an influence. Everybody who has an articulate desire to be modern is thinking about human nature in terms that he supposes to be those of the psychologist. In particular, three propositions have attained some vogue: That men are moved by the same instincts as the lower species; that instinctive conduct is mechanically determined; and that the reasons conventionally given for conduct are mostly sophistical “rationalizations” (that is, merely supposed reasons for that which in reality is determined by emotion rather than thought). These ideas give support to the current mood, but they cannot have had much to do with creating it. As here used, they are themselves “rationalizations.” The basis of the mood is some form of common or at least wide-spread experience. No great ground-swell of popular sentiment ever originated from anything else.

Indeed, can we reasonably assume that the wind blows in only one direction--from psychology to popular opinion, but not from the popular mood into the psychology laboratory? Surely psychologists are human, which is to say that we need a psychology of their psychologizing. Here is an item of it: (1) The area that one chooses for investigation; (2) The questions that one asks; (3) The facts that one notices or fails to notice; (4) The values that are noticed in the work of another; and (5) The apparent size of the sphere within which one acts--all these are influenced by some interest then and there present. Now, interest can be awakened in all sorts of ways. The spirit of the times can shunt research onto this track or that, and it can make this datum or that prominent in the mind of the researcher.

It is easy, in fact, to trace to their origin several of the dominant interests of psychology. Thus it struggled for scientific standing at a period when “science” connoted, most clearly of all, physical science; at a time when the biological concept of evolution filled the sky; at a time when it was necessary, in order to be let alone, to seem not to meddle with theological interests; and, above all, at a time when industrialism was rushing swiftly towards its present climax. We shall do no despite to science nor to any of its devotees if we say that there is a subtle connection between the dominance of machinery in our civilization, the prominence of a machine-like view of motivation in the many works on psychology, and the predilection of the popular mood for just this idea of human nature.

VII

ACCORDING TO INDUSTRIALISM, WHAT IS MAN?

An ancient poet celebrated the greatness of man in the following glowing words:

O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who hast set thy glory above the heavens.... When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the gods, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.

“Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.” Simple-minded poet, son of herdsman, hunter, or fisherman, you think man is great because he domesticates sheep and oxen, and is successful in his hunting and fishing--so great that even the maker of the heavens regards him as important! What would you say if you could witness the conquests of nature that have followed upon modern science and invention? You might ride in a car that is propelled, heated, and lighted by a river a hundred miles away; you might speak in your natural voice at Jerusalem and be heard in Egypt; with a turn of a hand you could start moving a mass that a thousand of your Palestinian oxen could not budge.

How is it that this enormous increase in our dominion over nature adds so little to our appreciation of man? Nay, that it makes us less appreciative than this rustic?

The answer will be found in some phase of the process of securing this dominion, or in some use made of it. Outside of industrialism, in fact, the obvious trend of history is towards a higher and higher estimate of human nature. The growth of civil and political liberty; the spread of popular education; emancipation from many superstitious fears; the increase of humanitarianism--what a truly glorious period in human evolution do these witness. And yet, in spite of them all, a depressed view of ourselves hangs heavy in the atmosphere. We have canvassed all the more obvious partial causes of it, only to be pointed in every instance towards our everyday occupations as the more important source.

What is industrialism doing to us, then? Under this term may be included for convenience the entire system by which, in the period of steam and electric power--still a short one--goods are produced and distributed, and commerce and finance are carried on. This system, originating in the West but now spreading to the Orient, reorganizes human relationships in a manner that is almost revolutionary. It shifts populations from place to place; it dissolves old connections, and creates new ones, separating men who were together, and bringing together those who were strangers; it produces a large-scale consciousness of one another--ultimately, it seems, an almost feverish consciousness--but without ever making the reorganization of human relations any part of its main business. That is, the all-absorbing industrial system is not organized and run with reference to its main output, a changed humanity; we are not in business, as has been said, for our health; and this inversion of values, at first not clearly foreseen, or intended as a philosophy of life (but only practised), is now becoming a clearly conscious and, in the Western world, a generally accepted interpretation of our own worth. We are taking our occupations seriously.

It is hard for us who are most close to the facts to see them in perspective. We are rarely conscious of the human movement in the large because the whole immediate human environment moves with us. But Oriental observers like Tagore and Gandhi perceive that Western civilization is developing towards a world-tragedy--pigmy purposes wielding the power of giants. It may be that we shall be jarred into something wiser by the jolts that are occurring within the machine itself. For the human factor is increasingly the problem-setting item in the industrial system. All the other sources of difficulty--the weather, the changes of the seasons, the supply of raw materials, the chemistry of industrial processes, the control of elemental forces--all these taken together occasion less anxious thought than the question, What can we rely upon in the sphere of human conduct? The puzzle of organization is personnel; the nightmare of the employer is labor; the riddle of labor is organized capital and its instrument, the manager and the boss; at the spear-point of practically every enterprise appears the opposing spearhead of sharper and sharper competition. Experience of friction is leading to modifications of mechanical processes and some improvements in human relations. But meantime, there goes on, by virtue of the inner logic of the system as a whole, an increasing depression of spirit, an increasing skepticism of the worth of human motives in their totality.

Let not our question be confused with others. We are not asking whether the industrial system breeds injustice; not even what sorts of men it produces by this or that particular method of “handling” men. Our sole interest at this point is in the notions concerning the motives of men that spring up, or receive emphasis and currency, by virtue of the general characteristics of the system. Some wariness is advisable here, for the field is not entirely homogeneous, and (as we shall see more fully in a later section) motives are mixed and more or less misunderstood. That industrialism is producing, and, until it becomes greatly modified, must produce, a depressed view of man, however, is a safe proposition. For no one will question that there is in it a kind of gravitation towards the following specific judgments:

(_a_) That in the organization and the use of capital the dominant motive, almost invariably taken for granted, is not the glory of God (however this be understood), nor the improvement of human life (one’s own or others’), nor supplying the wants of men, but accumulation of profits and of power for the enjoyment of the possessor, or of the possessor and his family.

(_b_) That among the employed classes the dominant attitude with respect to the relations between employer and employe is to get the most possible for the least return; and that a corresponding attitude on the part of employers is taken as a matter of course.

(_c_) That, since conflict is of the essence of industrialism--competition of capitalist with capitalist, of laborer with laborer, and chronic strains between capital and labor--an essentially pugnacious self-interest is fundamental to human nature; consequently, that the natural, to-be-expected policy of all concerned is to obtain compulsory power over others.

(_d_) That insincerity permeates the whole--insincerity in that, though every one is for himself, everybody endeavors to make it appear that what he wants is for the good of the others. Thus, men actually ascribe virtue to themselves because their occupation supplies some human want, though these same men confess that their motive is profits, and that they ignore wants that it is less profitable to supply. “The public good” is known to be a continual excuse for economic partizanship in laws, administration, and politics generally. Under the guise of patriotism, self-interest pursues world-policies that make for economic imperialism, unfairness to weaker peoples, and war. Each struggling class, laborers and employers alike, conceals from the public the narrower, more partizan phases of its activities. It is not necessary to suppose that all this is entirely conscious, or that all men are equally paralysed in their moral nature by this poison. Let us give the benefit of the doubt wherever we can. But indubitably our industrial system creates a belief that our life is thus honeycombed with insincerity.

These, let it be repeated, are not a portrait, but only certain selected features; they do not fully describe any situation; they do not constitute an accusation of depravity. But no one who impartially surveys the human relationships that most characterize industrialism can deny that the impressions that have been described are being made by it, and are being believed with increasing generality.

If we ask how this factor in the present disillusionment compares with the others--the Great War, the belief in evolution, the literature of irrationality, general psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis--we shall conclude that it is more influential than all of them put together. The reason is not merely that the War covered only a few short years, whereas experience with the industrial system is more than a century old; and not merely that science and literature reach only a portion of the population; there is a still deeper reason for the profound influence of industrialism upon our conception of ourselves. Wherever our voluntary activities, our efforts and struggles, are chiefly expended, there we get our deepest impressions as to the nature of reality. Men who through life spend from eight to ten of their freshest hours each day in the economic struggle tend to become conformed in their personal attitudes to the facts and forces with which and against which they work. They surely become conformed unless they take part in efforts to change the system. We do not understand even the pleasures of the people until we inspect their labor; the same is true of family life, and--more than we suspect--of religion.

Not only is industrialism the chief of several sources of our disillusionment; it is the background source that either produces or gives popular plausibility to the others. It produced the War; it aggravates all the general problems of the family and of sex-life; it intensifies everything that makes us distrust one another and everything that makes us content to be selfish. Industrial efficiency practically identifies itself with a mechanization of life that leaves the least possible scope for the exercise of thought, and choice, and personality. When release from work comes, the imprisoned vitality of the worker gushes into a kind of freedom that gives one an impression that the real basis of life is simply instinct. If, as some suppose, a flood of sexuality has descended upon us, the reason will be found, not chiefly in psychoanalysis, but in such conditions of modern life as the industrial city. Granted industrialism, ramifying into the home, the people’s recreations, politics and law; industrialism, growing more and more efficient according to its self-secreted standard of efficiency, what should one expect but disillusionment as to the worth of human motives? “Gentlemen,” said a college president to some students who were bibulously inclined, “there is one thing in this world that you can rely upon--the morning head!”

If one cares to listen for a coda to the harsh symphony of industrialism, one can discern it in many sorts of effort to reassure oneself of one’s goodness. Promoters of one of our enormous wastes, competitive advertising, will tell you that strict truth-telling is one of the standards of their profession; and one can see them measuring the moral worth of the profession by this one minor consideration. When big business is under fire because of its exploitation of both employe and consumer, we are told that business is growing more moral because competitors treat one another more honorably. We need not scent hypocrisy in the welfare work of great factories, but why should kindness to dependents be offered as an offset to objections to this very sort of dependence? Rotarians are helping their communities in various ways from unquestionably good motives; I should be sorry if any word of mine discounted their interest, say, in boys; but why should business men think that such extra-business activities reflect any credit upon the system or have any claim to soften the criticisms that are directed against it? What we perceive here is men who are better, and want to be counted as better, than the system that has caught them and victimized them.

But these “rationalizations,” if such they be, are less portentous than the infiltration of the principles of industrialism into the ethics that is generally recognized as obligatory. The major emphases in current practical ethics are the emphases that will not hurt the system. They center chiefly about two poles, property and contracts. It is well recognized that the American system of law is organized chiefly around property as the basic right, and at least one eminent public man has declared that unless we can somehow amend this foundation-principle it will get us into no end of trouble. Now, this assumption as to basic legal obligation has passed insensibly into an assumption as to moral obligation and moral character, with ironic results in our current moral judgments. Compare, for example, the intense reprobation of an embezzler with the entire respectability of a manufacturer who grows wealthy out of factory labor by children. He has not stolen property from children! Compare, again, our attitude toward dishonesty in making and fulfilling a contract with our attitude toward employers who have resisted with might and main every measure, whether proposed by a labor union or in a legislature, to safeguard the health of factory operatives. They are men of their word! Ask the next hundred men you meet what are the ethical obligations of business, or of employers, or of employees, or of buyers and sellers; you will not hear from five of them, probably not from one, a word about obligations other than the formal ones of honesty, respect for property, and fulfilment of contracts. The main issues--what property is for, what the main aim of production is, what constitutes success, the fundamental immorality of treating persons as mere means rather than ends--will not be mentioned. You may possibly receive from some church member a Scripture verse, “Love your neighbor as yourself”; but what do you think he will mean by it? Will he mean governing the main aims and processes of the economic life by this principle? Do you really think he will?

VIII

THE DILEMMA OF CHRISTIANITY

The relation of the dominant religion of the West--the garden-plot of industrialism--to these depressed views of the motives of men is as odd as it is complicated. The tradition of official Christianity has run to the effect that the heart of man is desperately wicked; that it is selfish, sensual, and self-deceived; and that it is incapable of improving itself until an infusion of divine power has made possible, first repentance, then a new life.

Like the melancholy tolling of a bell, our War experience, our popular psychologies, our popular literature, and our everyday economic occupations repeat after religion that, under the surface, we are a madhouse of clamant impulses, and that we have no power to become anything else. How, we may ask, does theology like this confirmation of itself?

Not too well! And for interesting reasons. Within the memory of men now living the evangelical churches were strenuously combating the notion that man is naturally good; today, when popular thought is inclined to classify human nature with that of the beasts, the same churches are exerting themselves to assert the natural nobility and dignity of the human race, and its unique significance in the order of nature. Just what has brought about this change of front? And how deep down does it go?

Secondary reasons for this change need not here be enumerated, as, for example, the modification of theological thought from within by its own re-examination of its historical bases. For a great about-face of popular religious consciousness never takes place at the command of historical scholarship but only at the command of a pervasive experience. In this instance, the pervasive experience that dominates religious thought lies precisely in the area that we already have had under consideration.

The doctrine that man’s nature is evil had as its counterpart and counterweight (partly relieving it of its gruesomeness) the dogma that divine grace, acting through the Scriptures and the church, is able (and some said, is ever ready,) to take away the evil desires and fill their place with good. Now, it would be intolerable to the churches to think so ill of man’s original nature unless the actuality of regeneration also could be believed in. But--here is the rub--living belief in regeneration could not be maintained upon biblical grounds or upon authority alone; it had to be made manifest in the common life to common men.

In order to retain the doctrine of depravity under such modern conditions as freedom of thought, popular education, and greatly widened acquaintance with humanity, a three-fold demonstration would have been necessary:

_First_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a great and evident contrast between the daily lives of those who experienced and those who did not experience the asserted special infusion of divine power. If the doctrine was true, some experience here and now, not merely in the hereafter, had to separate men into sheep and goats.

_Second_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a regenerate church as an organ of world-regeneration. Not necessarily an infallible church; not necessarily an organization perfect in its constitution and free from foibles in its administration, but at least one clearly discriminable from all other social institutions by the intensity, the continuity, and the independence of a superior motive.

_Third_, it would have been necessary to demonstrate the reversal of human nature’s evil traits socially as well as individually, and outside the church as well as inside it. In particular, the “new creature” would have had to appear within the structure of the industrial order. Not that any sudden or complete conversion of the industrial order is here implied, but at least some recognizable beginning, some certain evidence that the process of industrial regeneration is starting. Feeding those who are left hungry by the economic machine, or binding up the wounds of those who have been hurt by it, or soothing the asperities of the industrial warfare, is not enough; the required demonstration had to reach and modify the central motives that give to the system its specific character. Unless objective evidence could be adduced that the kingdom of property, profits, wealth, and wages can be transformed into a Kingdom of God--not, of course, by charitable distribution of a surplus, but by shifting the main direction--then nothing could keep alive the doctrine of regeneration.

In not one of these directions have the churches made a convincing showing to the world at large or even to themselves. It is true that evangelism has turned many an individual permanently from evil ways--a fact that is today strangely understressed by the churches, and not sufficiently followed up in work with individuals. But evangelism at its best has always left us in a condition of strain, with evangelism’s own chosen problem not really solved. For the converted man turns out to be, like his unregenerate neighbor, a mixture of yeses and noes; and, with dismaying frequency--dismaying, that is, for the doctrine of depravity-removed-by-regeneration--the fruits of the Spirit have been abundant in the supposably unregenerate and scanty in the supposably regenerate. The point is not that conversion, if it is to back up the doctrine, must make a man perfect at a clip, but that it must make him sufficiently different to enable observers to identify him as actually different, in point of dominant motives, from men who have been trained otherwise than by the church.

In the current sense of evangelism, of conversion, of regeneration, or--most generally--of being a Christian, there is no generally recognized implication of incongruity with the accepted motivation of industrialism. I do not say that being a Christian even in the conventional sense does not somewhat moderate the selfishness of this motivation; sometimes a Christian industrialist is made superbly inconsistent by his religion. The point is that Christians, like anybody else, are expected to live out their workaday lives within industrialism upon its own terms. And industrialism is playing spiritual havoc!

A regenerate church, accordingly, is non-existent. This means, not that unregenerate individuals slip into membership; not that a united church is still merely hoped for; not that there is no insurance against corruption in any ecclesiastical body, local or general. It means, rather, that no church is definitely committed institutionally to the extirpation of the causes that degrade man in his own eyes. What is the motivation of the churches as such? What is the official motivation of the select number of their members to whom is committed the spiritual oversight of the flock? What does the word “ecclesiasticism” mean? When is a church successful, or healthily growing? In terms of motives operating from within the churches upon the causes of our disillusionment, what is the real meaning of church statistics? Compare what the churches do to able ministers who preach the Rotarian type of idealism with what they do to equally able or more able ministers who preach unequivocally that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. Ask leaders of industry who hold that its principles are inviolable whether the churches are allies of the system or makers of trouble for it. The answer that you will receive is that, though individual ministers are breeders of discontent, the churches as a whole are an asset to the system. No; there is no regenerate church.

We now have the groundwork for an explanation of the decay of belief in depravity even among those who have regarded themselves as faithful to the traditions of the elders. The doctrine, taken by itself, unrelieved by a counterbalancing doctrine of regeneration through the intervention of a merciful God, is too dreadful, too accusing of the Creator, to be endured. Therefore, when the doctrine of regeneration fails to be convincing in practice, the conviction grows that men are not so bad, after all. Natural amiability becomes more impressive, more suggestive of the hand of God in the creation of man, and natural unamiability actually gets overlooked or slurred over! The preaching of repentance loses its bite, too. An odd swing of the pendulum, this. For, whereas the thunders of the law broke forth against the natural depravity of man, which he couldn’t help, the bad conduct of naturally good men is not found particularly exciting!

Is it possible, then, that the churches are becoming a fellowship of natural amiability, and that, failing to regenerate the industrial system, they are being assimilated to it? This would involve topsy-turvydom with respect to ecclesiastical views of the motives of men, it is true. For it would mean, on the one hand, accommodation to industrialism’s assumptions regarding our innate selfishness and the conflicts by which it enforces itself, but, on the other hand, the giving up, or shoving into the background, of the one Christian doctrine, depravity, with which these assumptions at all harmonize. The practical outcome of this confused drifting would be either a sharing by the churches in the current disillusionment, or an evasion of it by fellowship in thinking about more pleasant things, and a fellowship in doing good things that do not bring the issue to the fore.

The anti-Christian movement in China bases itself to a considerable extent upon the proposition that the Christian churches of the Occident are in alliance, conscious or unconscious, with the industrialism that exploits weaker peoples and disrupts the world. What truth is there in this judgment? If we of the churches are acquiescing in the interpretation of human motives that is the spiritual essence of the present industrial order, then we cannot wholly escape the accusation, no matter how generally amiable and innocent-minded our piety is. And there is only one way to prove that we are not acquiescing, and that is to attack. We must attack either by making a demonstration of regeneration (industrialism’s low estimate of motives being accepted), or by exposing the falsity of this low estimate, in either case calling for repentance and for a reversal of the main direction of our organized conduct.

A significant body of historical study is bringing to light an amazing array of evidence that Christianity has, in fact, adopted the ethical fundamentals of the industrial consciousness. The anti-spiritual presuppositions of an acquisitive system have actually been baptized into the name of Christ, and taught as virtues. Even Catholicism, in spite of its reverence for tradition, shies at--more than shies, objurgates--social aspirations that reflect an early Christian attitude towards property and towards the organization of society. Moreover, the dominant Catholic conception of loyalty to the State obligates the laity to follow industrialism, whenever it so commands, onto the field of carnage. Rome has the grit to teach her children when to disobey the powers of this world, but she has not had the spiritual clarity to see that the kind of docility and contentedness that she inculcates plays into the hands of Mammon, the chief enemy of the Christ. Protestants often marvel at the adaptability that this ancient, stiffly authoritarian church has shown in its adjustments to the modern secular State and to popular government. What makes this adaptability possible is the restricted limits of the sphere within which Catholicism actually exercises authority. This sphere is not coextensive with the forces that make or mar personality, bestowing dignity or throwing contempt upon it. According to the decree of the Vatican Council, the Pope may speak with infallible authority upon any and all questions of both faith and morals; but he does not speak upon all of them. If he did speak, in specific and understandable terms, of the meaning of Jesus’ teachings as applied to present spiritual conditions, the position of Catholicism in industrial society would be far less comfortable than it now is.

The historical studies just referred to maintain that Protestantism,

## particularly Puritanism, has to a significant extent assimilated its

conception of both the sphere and the method of the spiritual life to the economic process. That is, instead of insisting that this process be brought up to the standards implied in the teachings of Jesus, Protestantism has _first_, acquiesced in the doctrine that the economic order somehow secretes from within itself its own rules, standards of value, and grounds of self-justification; _second_, assumed that what the economic system counts as virtues really are virtues, and that here the spiritual life gets its discipline, and character its solidity; _finally_, persuaded itself that the function of the anti-Mammon teachings of Jesus is to prevent excesses such as sacrificing integrity to cupidity, taking undue advantage of the weak, pride of wealth, forgetting the poor, and losing the sense of dependence upon God. Nay, prosperity in the sense of mere accumulation (not in the sense of wants of personality actually met) becomes a sign of God’s kindness or even approval.

Hence austere industriousness (without regard to one’s place in the economic scale) has been valued above play; above the enjoyment of nature, literature, or the fine arts; above even the joys of human fellowship. The habit of saving so as to accumulate a surplus has been almost identified with strength of character. A serious life has been evidenced by intense devotion to business, and winning a competence by working the system hard has been one of the surest guarantees of general respect even within the religious circle. As to the relation of God to the system, consider the tone and contents of Thanksgiving Day proclamations and of prayers and sermons upon this festival day. For what do people give thanks? And does it not appear that God himself is contented with the system?

In short, here are clear tendencies towards making Christianity into a bourgeois religion--the sanctification of the struggles of the middle class within a _given_ industrial order. Such a religion has difficulty in understanding either the discontent of the laborer, or the necessarily disintegrating effect of private wealth upon personality (yes, the necessarily disintegrating effect, as Jesus unqualifiedly declared), or the spiritual significance of freedom in thinking and in the development of ethical principles.

This is not intended to be a statement of the whole situation in Protestantism, but of a drift within it. If a debit and credit judgment were in order, one would have to study carefully the upspringing within both Protestantism and Catholicism (and Judaism, too) of a social movement that to some extent opposes this drift. But our concern here is simply to discover the relation between Christianity and the disillusionment with respect to himself that is creeping upon twentieth-century man. This is what we find: Both Catholicism and Protestantism are entangled with industrialism, both its practice and its philosophy--entangled, that is to say, with the force that has most to do with lowering us in our own eyes. Christianity in the western world is therefore in a dilemma of the most vital kind. If it affirms the greatness and nobility of the human person (whether innate or achievable by a special infusion of divine grace), it must demand fundamental reconstruction of the industrial order because in theory this order denies and in practice it thwarts every such affirmation. On the other hand, if Christianity continues to compromise as it is now doing, it cannot maintain even such spiritual values as it now hugs to its breast. Its faith in God will decline--it is now declining--with its inability to see or produce the Christlike in the common man engaged in the common occupations of the day. Its continuity with Jesus will grow thinner and thinner because of growing inability to speak or understand the plainest of his language. The Protestant churches will more and more become clubs for the enjoyment of conventional and uncreative idealisms, and the Catholic church will protect itself from the advancing spiritual disintegration of Western society by immuring the sacramental life more and more in places of worship and in the esthetic appeal of symbolism. In both Protestantism and Catholicism, mystical experiences will have the character of a flight from life instead of being “the practice of the presence of God” not only in our kitchens but also in our factories, our department stores, and our offices of finance. Such a mystical flight has begun, in fact, not guessing its actual route, innocent of the possibility that it may even be another instrument whereby Mammon conceals the fact that it is--just Mammon.

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