PART III

YET OUR CAPACITIES ARE IN BONDAGE

XIX

THE CYNIC INTERJECTS A QUESTION

Some cynic, my mind’s eye tells me, is smiling over the picture of human nature that emerges out of the preceding sections.

“You think you have shown that the feeling of disillusionment that is spreading among us is a mood and a fashion rather than a rational conviction; that the psychological evidence of our essential lowness is weak; that our motivation is not a composite of instincts; that in the evolutionary order, of which we are a part, desires as well as structures evolve, so that the unprecedented in motives occurs and is to be expected; that mind is marvellously plastic, and in unconventional childhood is beautiful; that, under favorable school conditions, creativeness bubbles up out of the commonplace; that after the hot crucible of historical criticism has brought to the surface all the dross of both great men and small, it reveals also precious gold; that even within our selfish economic order high and fine strains of desire can be seen, as if a god were struggling to create a superior species through our mastery of natural resources. You find that, in and through the complex that we call our motives there runs a demand of personal-selves-in-the-making, a demand for mutual self-realization in an order of reason, beauty, and good-will, in the creation of which they are participants.

“All very soothing,” continues the cynic, “provided that you keep your eyes straight ahead. But if you look to the right or the left of this reasoning, this is what you see: In form, the argument defends the dignity of life, but it does so only by picking out facts that shine by contrast with our everyday conduct. Practically everything that has been said includes or implies a protest against the ordinary run of human motives, valuations, and habits. Thus, the passage from childhood to adulthood is admitted to be a hardening process; it is admitted that the capacities for creation occasionally displayed by the young are generally thwarted, and that the very citadels of the spirit--the home, the church, the school--are infected with the unspirituality of our current economic standards and practices. It is made to appear, further, that the economic order, which might and should have a main

## part in the creation of man in cooperation with God, actually is an

enormous mechanism that subordinates men--capitalists and workers alike--to a part, and the lower part, of their own motives, and these largely misunderstood.

“You have proved that human nature contains factors that the current disillusionment ignores or misrepresents, but you have shown also that the actual exercise of men’s wills thwarts and imprisons the superior motives that you are so concerned about.”

Thus the cynic; and he is right as to the facts provided that he does not exaggerate the extent of this thwarting and imprisoning of ourselves by ourselves. It does not necessarily follow, however, that basic cynicism towards life can be justified, however useful as a stimulus to inquiry the cynical comment may be. Men are inconsistent with themselves; they do obstruct their own steps, and they trip over themselves. What, then? Shall we acquiesce in our blunders? Shall we end our forward steps in pity or scorn of ourselves? Or, shall we endeavor to understand what has happened, hoping that we may find a way to master the obstructive self that is within ourself? It should be interesting, at least, to inquire into the nature of this checking and thwarting of man by himself, for, in spite of the obviousness and the disagreeableness of the fact, it is relatively neglected by the very institutions that assume as their function the making of men.

It is true that religionists, moralists, and educationists for many generations have talked about an inner conflict of forces. It is represented now as competition between instincts; then as a struggle of reason with impulse; again, as a strain between egoistic and social motives. Though there is obvious truth in these conceptions, they do not touch several questions that must be answered before we can secure firm control of our situation. These questions are: Why is our performance so much below our capacity all along the line? Where and how does the leakage of power occur? How have we become inured to our own inconsistencies of conduct and of motive? What is the technic for recognizing real alternatives for what they are? What is the method for keeping a continuously open road for our wiser selves?

As far as I can see, neither our churches nor our schools are handling with aggressive vigor these overwhelmingly pertinent questions. Exalted capacities are, indeed, ascribed to man, and lofty ideals of conduct are unceasingly mentioned, recommended, sung about, and prayed about; but who offers a technic for getting these capacities to do their proper work? and who really believes in the practicability of what he says?

This is a severe judgment, but it is a deliberate one, and if it is true it is not unfair, as it certainly is not unfriendly. My own life has been continuously identified with churches and educational institutions, and I would not have it otherwise; but I do not see how anyone who has intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with them can deny that they are suffering from a profound dualism that they know not how to heal. Of the general sincerity of their idealistic views of man there need be no doubt; that both church and school exercise a wholesome influence upon conduct in various respects is gladly conceded; it is their lack of plan and method for the organization of life, individual and collective, that is now in question. Now, this lack is about the worst possible; for it not only permits mint, anise, and cummin to get out of perspective; it not only foreshortens each institution’s picture of itself; it also encourages the positive evil of an illusory self-organization in the form of fair words and fair sentiments instead of adequate purposes.

Assent to ideals, and emotional identification of oneself with America, the church of all ages, or the will of God can be a species of self-love and self-sophistication. Sunday after Sunday the churchgoer says “Yes” in his heart to the prayer of confession; “Yes” to the Godward aspirations of Scripture, hymn, and supplication; “Yes” to the admonitions of the preacher and to every reference to love for man and consecration to the Kingdom of God; and, departing from the sanctuary, he has a comfortable self-feeling because he is a “Yes” man. He is on this side, is he not? In school and college another set of sentimental assents is evoked. Sportsmanship, patriotism, good citizenship, admiration for the honesty, honor, and unselfish devotion shown by our heroes--towards all these a “Yes,” a sincere glow, and “This is what we are.”

A large part of the economic power of the Western world is in the hands of men who worship the God of the prophets and of Jesus; yet we know that business and industry will proceed during the week upon principles other than those of love to God and man. The leaders of our civic life, and most of the followers, have come out of our own schools for generations, but neither our political parties, nor our officers of state, nor our accepted state policies clearly reflect the idealism of these schools. It is not hypocrisy that creates this gulf; rather, confused helplessness in the presence of mixed motives. There is even some awareness of this helplessness, but this awareness usually leads to little more than speeding up the “Yes, yes” experience.

What boots it, then, to have shown that the current disillusionment with respect to ourselves is illusory, if we don’t know how to give the control of our lives into the keeping of the better elements that are in us? In fact, our discussion thus far has done little more than clear the ground for a tussle with our main problem, which concerns, not the existence of high motives, but the bondage in which we find them. What we must ascertain, if possible, is the nature of this bondage and how we can release ourselves from it.

And first, the nature of our bondage. Let us frankly face the disagreeable facts, not being outdone by the cynic himself in the ferreting out of irrationalities. Only so can we hope to find the remedy for our condition.

XX

OUR “LOWER NATURE” DOES NOT EXPLAIN OUR BONDAGE

If we could refer human folly all in a lump to our “lower nature” it would be convenient in several ways. For one thing, like those who refer their every slip to the solicitations of Satan, we should be relieved from the laborious and often disagreeable task of tracing out the particular threads of influence that make our conduct bad. On the other hand, every accusation against our “lower nature” really flatters whatever we happen to regard as our “higher nature.” The Indian mystic says “Neti, neti” of the lower, finite, and merely apparent reality, while he identifies his true self with the infinite. Plato believes that, in his own person as philosopher, Reason, ever pure and uncontaminated, though it be associated with the passions, is manifested as a self-certifying and self-sufficient good. A parallel self-gratulation was provided by Christian theology through its doctrine that the Christian has a regenerated nature which

## participates in some measure in the infallibility of God. Similarly,

our evolutionary relation to “the ape and tiger” is often used as a foil for displaying our true dignity.

But this attribution of our irrational conduct to our “lower nature” is altogether too convenient. It is like a child’s classification of human beings into “good people” and “bad people.” As “bad people” are

## partly good, so our “lower nature” is not altogether low; and, as “good

people” are not perfectly satisfactory, so--at least possibly--our “higher nature” is not altogether high. In short, this whole theory of our bondage requires re-examination.

In countries that are familiar with the Christian tradition, the classical instance of the supposed clash of two natures is that of Paul, who testified to a veritable warfare in his members. The good that he would do, he did not, and the evil that he would not, that he did. The more he struggled to keep “the law” the deeper became his sense of guilt and helplessness. How shall we understand and evaluate this experience? Not by manipulating merely abstract ideas such as perfect righteousness (details unspecified and unspecifiable), nor the holiness of God (specifications again impossible), nor sin (in the sense of a generalized sinfulness); we could not judge Paul’s motives and desires without inspecting them in their relation to particular concrete situations, and this the record does not enable us to do. If, as seems not improbable, his chief entanglement was sexual, then the basic desire, as thinking Christians now agree, was not bad. As a sex-creature he was not bad _simpliciter_ but only _secundum quid_. Moreover, it is not possible to affirm that his condemnation of himself was altogether balanced; he may have had a morbid conscience.

Whenever we are able to untangle the threads of impulse and to take into account the circumstances of each, invariably the reference of our defective conduct to our “lower nature” turns out to be mistaken--if for no other reason, because it over-simplifies the facts. Always what we find is a mix-up, and usually confusion. Witness, for example, the gamut of motives involved, as we have seen, in the War and in our economic and industrial system. Therefore, whoever would understand our bondage must examine into the nature of this confusion; he must hunt for the specific conditions that give a bad turn to motives that are capable, under other circumstances, of building up instead of tearing down. The conclusion towards which these facts push us is that that which checks, thwarts, and imprisons our capacities is not a set of

## particular drives but neglect of some relation or relations within

experience, or some twist in our methods of organizing ourselves.

If this inquiry tends to vacate the whole notion of a “lower nature” that acts as a drag upon us, it tumbles us into a problem with respect to the existence of a “higher nature.” Are any of our drives good _simpliciter_, or, is the clue to goodness as well as badness to be looked for in habits of organization rather than in particular and ineradicable impulses? It is, in fact, easy to show that even within our better conduct the same sorts of floundering occur as in our worst behavior, so that the same problem of the organization of a self and of selves is everywhere present. We have, as gifts of our nature, neither radically bad drives against which we should arm ourselves, nor yet radically good drives to which we can fly for effective protection. No _vis a tergo_ will either ruin us or save us. The thing upon which the issues of life depend is what I have called the motive that is in all and through all, the desire to be a self in a world of selves.

The real nature of our bondage can be illustrated by a chain of examples that reaches all the way from our handling of physiological good and evil to our prayers. All along the line we shall find that the good and the evil, the failures and the successes, depend upon the organization of life as personal, and specifically upon the degree in which, consciously and deliberately, we face situations, with their alternative values, as wholes. We shall see that we are missing on an enormous scale good things of life that are not beyond our reach--things unquestionably good, unquestionably within our reach, unquestionably more important than the things towards which we do stretch ourselves. And all this is true of our more idealistic as well as of our less idealistic interests. Now for the examples:

Let us begin with health and bodily vigor. We put up with physical limitations that are entirely unnecessary--limitations that hygiene and medical science can remove. It would be economical in the financial sense to remove them, because our productive power would thereby increase along with the joy of living. Why do we persist in this conduct? We have everything to lose and nothing to gain by it. We may phrase the answer in many ways, as inattention, distraction by immediate stimuli, not connecting effects with causes, doing as everybody else does; but all real explanations come down to this, that we do not put enough of ourselves--our comprehending, difference-perceiving, organizing selves--into the matter.

We permit thousands of distressing accidents to occur every year. We permit them, for we could prevent them; we have sufficient experience of the dangers, we have sufficient scientific knowledge, and we have sufficient financial means. We could save thousands of lives without even feeling a financial pinch, and most of the lives saved would add to the financial resources of the country. But we do not stop to think; that is, we do not put our whole selves into our conduct.

We submit to a multitude of unnecessary discomforts--dirt, smoke, noise, confusion, delays, undue fatigue, uncomfortable clothing, senseless customs. Our intelligence concerning the conditions of agreeable living, and our budgetary capacity for it, far outrun our plans and policies.

We endure unsightly spots in cities and towns, and the despoiling of natural beauty in the country. The persons who reap financial advantage from our esthetic impoverishment do so, not by their own inherent power, but by our acquiescence. Our trouble is lack of head-work.

We read inferior stuff, not because it is more enjoyable than literature, but because we wont take the trouble to enjoy ourselves. Thus, because we are “not all there,” we let slip opportunities for exciting adventures in imagination, thought, and knowledge.

Our opinions are largely manufactured for us and imposed upon us, or else we merely drift into them and afterwards, perhaps, search for reasons in support of them. We permit ourselves to be treated as herds--some writers even using this term with respect to us--not because we are necessarily bovine but because we are unnecessarily absent-minded. That is, the human in us acts fragmentarily instead of integrally.

We are capable of having better government and better social relations generally than we have. We could afford them without risk of impoverishment and often to the benefit of our pocketbooks. Our good precedents, our weakly professed convictions, our known capacity for fruitful experimentation, all outrun our political and social practice. Often we are pig-headed, not because there is a porcine drive in our original nature, but because we get the habit of over-fondness for our half-thoughts.

We are capable of providing far better schooling for our children than we do provide. Even parental affection, which comes so near to being unqualifiedly good, is a main support for mistaken education. Moreover, education is a field in which most persons who have not paused to investigate believe, nevertheless, that they are competent to pass judgments. Thus, precisely where we think we are using our heads, we fail to use them enough.

If there were such a thing as a “higher nature,” it should clearly manifest itself in morals and religion. In the sphere of moral conduct we should be able to discern particular drives that are worthy of invariable and unqualified approval. Ethical philosophy long endeavored to discover such pure springs of action, but without success. It is true, likewise important, that some broadly general types of policy, such as neighborliness, truthfulness, and industry, are usually safe guides. Yet, when my improvident neighbor asks me for a loan, or when an oppressor would use my truthfulness as an instrument with which to reach an innocent victim, or when I endeavor to apportion my time between work and play, then not one of these policies suffices as a basis for decision. “Love beauty” is good advice, but there are times when we have to decide whether to rest our eyes upon the curves of beauty or upon the harsh lines of actuality. “Pursue truth”; certainly, but just when is the moment for action upon the basis of present light, perhaps twilight? “Do as you would be done by”; of course, but how, under some circumstances, would I be done by? That is to say, in all such cases, the background-problem is, What sort of “I” do I want my self and others to be?

Is it not true that good men are forever getting in the way of the good? Consider any half dozen social changes that history has proved to be wholesome, and then count over the men who opposed them at the time they were made. You will perceive that the mental clumsiness of bad men has an exact parallel in the moral awkwardness of good men.

The case is not different with religion. Considered from the standpoint of the drives that have made men pious, piety is by no means an unmixed blessing. For history shows that any desire whatever can receive the baptism of religious sanctity, with all the reinforcement that results therefrom. On the one hand, it is true, we see religion calling men to a life of righteousness; on the other hand, there is no meanness nor narrowness that has not somewhere at some time been a part of religion. For this reason, religion is the most dangerous thing in the world. It can promote either candor or prejudice, either self-will or sweet reasonableness, either ruthlessness or the gentleness of a St. Francis of Assisi. And no single religion can exempt itself from the danger. In this country at the present moment--to take a single case for illustration--there is a species of sincere Christianity that seizes intellectual freedom by the throat in order to choke it; that fans flames of hate; that commits deeds of lawless violence. So impossible is it to find in religion the especial seat of a higher nature! On the other hand, at various points in the history of different faiths, religion has turned critically upon itself, and by reorganizing itself upon unprecedented lines, it has proved that, though we cannot rely upon a higher nature made up of drives that everlastingly repeat themselves, nevertheless we have a capacity for never-ending criticism and reconstruction of ourselves.

These facts put the bondage of our capacities into correct perspective. We need not deny that untamed and partly tamed impulses tug at the bit, kick, sometimes run away with us; but they are not our jailers. They make difficulty for us, they wound and scar us, but they have within themselves no coherence, whereas types of coherence within a self make all the difference between freedom and bondage. If anyone insists that human nature is depraved, he should place the seat of depravity in the rational man, or the supposed higher nature that is expressed in religion, morals, customs, government, social organization, and deliberate purposes generally.

If we conceive the matter in the terms of evolution, then the problem of our bondage centers in the latest-evolved, not the most ancient, phases of human nature; not in raw impulses taken one by one, but in the elaboration of conduct by thought and purpose; not in what is wildest in us, but in what is most civilized and taken for granted.

Must we say, then, that within reason itself there is an irrational lag? If this should prove to be the case, the wisest thing to do would be to make allowance for it and by deliberate policy to counteract it, just as the astronomical observer calculates and counteracts his personal equation.

XXI

HOW REASON ITSELF BINDS US TO THE IRRATIONAL

Every progressive thinker is troubled by the following fact: In order to live rationally, we must organize and institutionalize our behavior, which implies giving a sort of mechanical or automatic power to yesterday’s thoughts. But as soon as any institution begins to be efficient, it resists rational inquiry with respect to itself. This is true of all institutions without exception. They resist--here is the heart of our difficulty--because they are not haphazard combinations but institutions, which is to say that they are a deposit of reason. Thus our necessary rational procedures imprison reason as naturally “as the sparks fly upward.”

For “institution” we can substitute any term for a job that is deliberately done, or for any devotion that is a day old, and the proposition that reason imprisons reason still holds. Whenever thought makes a nest for itself where it can incubate, it turns out to have mated with unreason, and it produces a mongrel offspring.

How the principle works can be seen in the relatively simple institution of the family. For example, a parent who, in the course of family government, makes a decision with respect to the children, immediately adopts this decision as a precedent that is binding upon himself also, he won’t budge from it; if it is questioned he finds reasons in support of it; or, if he is pushed into a corner, he reasserts it upon the ground of the inherent rationality of parental authority. That is, by a process of thought he identifies himself with what he has been, and he equates reason with one of its incidental products. Many a parent-child fellowship has been wrecked in this way.

Just so, when the idea of sex-equality appeared upon the horizon, many a person prepared to defend the family against dissolution! Many a potential conjugal fellowship has been blasted because of unreadiness to re-think the old assumption of sex-servitude. One is unready to re-think it, not because of any imperious natural drive of the male to sex-mastery, not because the female naturally prefers submission, but because one has bound one’s mind by a partial use and habit of intelligence; a has-been-so has been taken as inherently natural and reasonable.

The same sort of retardation of thought by itself appears, likewise, in our larger and more complicated institutions. For example, in the economic order at the present moment, in spite of its creakiness, there is enough that is humanly valuable to supply a basis for the reconstruction that is so sorely needed. Why, then, do we not delightedly hasten to build a fairer structure upon our present goodness? The usual reply that selfishness stands in the way, is a lazy explanation. “Innate selfishness” is perhaps the trickiest of all our merely plausible general ideas, for it applies to almost anything that we dislike in ourselves or anybody else, yet tells us nothing specific. The sticking-point in economic thinking is the point where

## particular drives or alternatives are adjusted to one another. This

point, unfortunately often, is characterized by economic precedents taken as dictates of reason or nature. Self-imitation, that is to say, has generated an economic orthodoxy which is the true “original sin” of the system. And it is the sacredness of the orthodoxy that makes the gooseflesh rise upon us when we contemplate the possibility of reversing our ways. We have sufficient stamina to stand losses or to get along with less wealth, but the uncertainties of a reconstructive policy make us quail. Thus we trust yesterday’s thought more than we trust any fresh thinking.

Orthodoxy, which is the acceptance of yesterday’s agreed-upon conclusions as an assumption that must govern today’s thought, is not a sporadic or merely incidental occurrence; it insinuates itself everywhere; there are as many varieties of it as there are kinds of human association.

Political orthodoxies are, of course, rather obvious. The remark is commonplace that parties retain their coherence after the reason for their existence has faded away, and that, at last, lacking genuine meaning, they stand upon trumped-up platforms which often are a blind erected by hunters of office or by those whom they serve. The main support of bad politics is found in men who are not bad but only conventionally good. The difficulty with them is that they treat a petrified idea as if it were a living thought--they are politically orthodox.

Our laws, likewise, are streaked with anachronisms that at their best are clumsy and obstructive, but at their worst are instruments--well known as such!--whereby social obligation is evaded and injustice committed. The intellectual clarity of laws and courts is accompanied by an emotional haze, amounting at times to ethical obscurantism, that is taken as the light of a sanctuary, but is in reality the shrinking into itself of a mind that is unready for fresh thinking even in its own field.

Forms of government and constitutions, too--living thoughts at the beginning--become mechanized thoughts after a time, and then they are a precarious asset. Precarious because, though they are properly only instruments to assist us in our adjustments to the conditions of life, they become the objects to which adjustment is made. The notion of sovereignty, for example--that ark of the covenant within the holy of holies of political principles--has become a mechanized thought and an obstacle to the establishment of any rule of reason in the world as a whole.

The professions and the other occupations, likewise, always run into the danger of introversion as soon as they begin to think about themselves. Each wants to fix its functions so that they will “stay put.” Traditions of many sorts now become, essentially, dogmas; divisions and subdivisions of function are established, and each functionary becomes a breathing precedent. Machinery unending is interjected between the needs of client or customer or employer and the satisfaction of these needs. Some business men, it is said, have undertaken to create a tribunal of their own that shall settle their legal difficulties without resort to the law. What a comment is this upon the legal profession! There is a considerable area of human need that calls for both spiritual and medical help, yet physicians and ministers can hardly get together upon the most obvious cases because professional precedents have not paved the road thereto. Just so, the dentist goes his way, and the physician his, to the detriment of the patient, all because one is dentist and the other physician.

The orthodoxies of religion, whether conservative or liberal, are natural enough, for they reflect a sense of the greater issues of life and a sense of the importance of any truth about them that we may be able to reach. Yet the endeavor of piety to think itself and to put itself into the form of propositions has become a bane to piety. For accepting pious declarations both deludes us into classifying ourselves as pious, and excuses us from looking straight into the eye of actuality, whether contemporary or ancient. Limiting the freedom of the mind is perhaps not the worst thing about orthodoxy, though it is bad enough. Rather, ecclesiastical custodianship of particular religions or

## particular types within a religion, tends to displace thought-activity

from the greater issues of life to the minor ones. The great issues having been settled, as is supposed, ministers, church boards, and denominational leaders betake themselves to making the church, which already has the truth, get the men, get the means, build machinery, and make it go.

How do we account for the ecclesiastical situation that is revealed by the church announcements in the daily papers of any large city? I shall not stop to characterize either the sermon topics or the publicity methods that are here disclosed, for this has been done many times, and the facts speak too loudly for themselves. Many explanations have been offered, but the background reason usually remains unnoticed. It is that the church already _has_ religion. It has it, and therefore peddles it; it peddles it, and therefore all the devices of the advertiser, the hawker, and the auctioneer become appropriate; and because they are appropriate, the church that is most up-to-date in using them esteems itself the most enterprising. The ministerial and ecclesiastical jazz and piffle are direct results of having minds that are at rest upon the main issues. Reliance upon yesterday’s thought produces the vacant, noisy mind of today. Orthodoxy did it!

Every orthodoxy, whether it emphasizes a formula of thought, or loyalty to an institution, or the propriety of an habitual process--every orthodoxy, whether economic, political, social, professional, educational, scientific, or religious (and we have them all)--every one, though created by reason, is a drag upon reason.

Yet orthodoxy is only an organized or social expression of a necessary and inescapable factor in the exercise of intelligence. It is because we remember, form judgments, make inferences, and then use the products of this process as data both for immediate decisions where action is necessary and for new judgments--it is for this reason that we are humans at all and not brutes. Our fairest structures are built upon past thinking as well as through present thinking. There is no other way. Irrationalism or pure romanticism may be useful now and then as a protest or as a spur, but this is never the horse that carries the load. Here, then, is our paradoxical situation: We must guide thinking by thinking; we must trust reason; but reason itself, in this process, binds us to the irrational. What would be a reasonable policy in this situation?

XXII

THE DEEP DEPRAVITY OF OUR RESPECTABLE FAULTS

Men check their own growth by self-imitation. Now, inasmuch as each self exists in and through reciprocity with other selves, self-imitation becomes a criss-cross of copyings. This mutual imitation of one another is “respectability.”

Every healthy-minded person desires, of course, to have the approval of his fellows, and to be worthy of their approval. And this is no insignificant thing, for sharing, or universalizing, is of the essence of reason. But reason makes its characteristic slip; when individuals reciprocally approve one another, they forthwith generalize the basis of their judgment, whatever this basis is, and the generalization becomes a social fence with an inside and an outside. Our judgment may soundly represent a situation and a value, yet for this very reason we may fancy that we have reached the summit of a social mountain when we have merely come to a turn in the trail.

The momentum of a gyroscope can be given, in fact, to practically any way of accommodating ourselves to one another. The assent that “was” then becomes an assent that “ought to be.” Reciprocal approvals are now funded and they become a vested interest of the stockholders. The stockholders, in the fashion of our latest corporations, do not even vote their stock--they merely draw dividends.

Two results follow: First, the ethical perspective that is required by free and growing minds is lost. The trivialities of respectability, when we look at them from the outside (as in the satirical novel and drama), are amazing. I am reminded of an incident in a college. A member of a sorority, being asked why one of the students who had been “rushed” had not been initiated, replied, “Well, at our ‘rushing party’ we had squab on toast, and she ate the toast, evidently not knowing any better. So we didn’t elect her. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere, you know.”

The reverse side to respectability’s over-sensitiveness to trifles is frequent insensibility to master-values, as the work of creative thinkers, artists, saviors of mankind. Such work does not bestow respectability.

And not only is perspective lost; there supervenes a kind of blindness. Respectability means sanctioning conduct that is unfitted to new conditions that have now arrived, and condemning conduct that is. It means not seeing, or slurring over, or hushing up facts that could not stand the light of critical analysis. There is a self-excusing that produces a self-blinding that is worse for the world than straightforward badness. Respectability connotes the constricted mind, the involved and indirect mind, the self-deceived mind.

These are the reasons why dramatists can so easily make unconventional badness seem superior to conventional goodness. The recipe is simple: Place upon one side of the stage a typical conformist whose respectability is as easily read as a wayside billboard; a man who is orthodox in business, in politics, and in religion, and in excellent standing among his associates; whose virtues are stereotyped and stamped with the appreciation of his set, and whose faults are ignored, or camouflaged, or possibly praised in the restricted circle in which he moves. Over against him place a person without social standing, a creature of strong and unconcealed natural impulses who is free from scruples, over-caution, and self-deception; one who is just his natural, uncalculating self. This turns the trick, and the audience applauds. Why does it applaud? Few of its members could tell you, and the psychoanalyst has only a fraction of the truth when he explains that our repressed instincts have release and go on a picnic through subtle self-identification with the character upon the stage. There is also gladness in having the way cleared for re-thinking, the acceptance of an invitation to judge basically, a feeling of liberation, not into unbridled instinct, but into a fresh effort at rational objectivity.

A woman who had been reared in a “protected” and conventional way, never guessing that she might think for herself, experienced in mature life an intellectual awakening that took the direction of extreme revolt against all orthodoxies, moral axioms included. She declared that she did not feel a need for God; was happier without any belief in him; and that she had rejected the whole notion of moral laws. “But,” she added, “I believe in being decent!” She had not reverted to irrational impulse; she was endeavoring to let reason retrieve errors that arose through reason.

That membership in a circle of the respectable sometimes assists in hiding evil so gross that respectability itself would be shocked by it need not be urged, for it is merely incidental. The more important faults are the commonplace ones--the ones that are common because they spring directly from the process that founds respectable society. Here they are:

1--Respectability is the standardization of compromises by using them as precedents. Compromising is, of course, not the same as discovering either truth or righteousness; it is at best a detour over a temporary and perishable bridge. Its service lies in keeping us peaceable or cooperative in spite of disagreements; its goal is not to repeat itself endlessly, but to fade into a no-compromise because we have come out into clear light. When we make compromise the standard procedure, then we sanctify our defects and bestow upon them capacity for unlimited progeny.

2--Respectability measures conduct in terms of the average performance, the average praise and blame, or the average acquiescent silence, of a limited society, instead of directly evaluating the consequences of an act for all the persons concerned. Conventional standards are not useless, of course, but they lack full ethical objectivity, and for this reason they can conceal as well as reveal. I can be “honest” in a transaction that is cruel; I can obey all the ten commandments and yet lack the one essential thing. Because the standards of respectability are not derived from the consequences of conduct to all persons concerned, but only some, it comes about that, without losing self-respect or forfeiting caste, respectable men as a fact do share in acts that result in nearly every form of inhumanity.

3--Respectability, fixing an artificial horizon-line for social fellowship, prevents us from knowing either ourselves or human nature in the large. We cannot know ourselves or others by merely noting how we respond to one another in a club or clique. Many a hitherto conventional individual has found liberation and enlargement by fishing with an illiterate guide, riding with a cow-puncher, attending a meeting of radicals, doing social work in the slums, or getting acquainted with criminals or harlots. Between Jesus and such persons there was no barrier of respectability, as, on the opposite side, he had no prejudice towards persons of wealth, power, or culture. When church membership connotes respectability, let the church beware! Its Master did not belong to the respectable classes. The deep danger here is retardation of spiritual growth followed by fixation, self-complacency, and the use of one’s power against the influences that make for a broader, more humane life.

4--Coordinate with this encysting of our ethical capacities is the habit, almost universal in respectable circles, of shunting the blame for the evils of the world to other classes of society. Even in America, where we have made so large a beginning of trust in the common man, it has been customary to assume that the main danger to the republic inheres in the “lower classes,” which term denotes now the uneducated, now the unpropertied, now the hand-workers, now the immigrants, now the discontented.

The fact is that every major peril that we have encountered has had its seat “above” the “lower classes.” Sectionalism, slavery, political

## partizanship, corrupt politics, a depraved civil service, dominance

of government by the money power--these do not spring from the less privileged classes, however much these classes may have been used by leaders. If, as common opinion has it, civil government reaches its lowest level in our cities, the reason is found, not in the character of the masses of city dwellers, but in the forces that organize them, use them, and exploit them for profit or for the advancement of a political party and the financial interests back of it.

There are just two ways in which those designated as the “lower classes” might become the means of our undoing: Some of “the interests” which have respectable standing might persuade, deceive, wheedle, or inflame them into the support of some evil that they could not originate; or, long-continued injustice and repression might lead to an explosion. No significant explosion of the classes in question will be brought about in any other way. In other words, what makes the “lower classes” dangerous, as far as they are dangerous, is the respectable classes.

The depravity of our respectable thinking upon social and political interests shows itself, thus, in the actual (though, of course, unintended) meanness of blaming others where we ourselves deserve the blame, and even of attributing to others the evils that we cause through them when we use them for our own ends.

5--Nothing is more characteristic of respectability than its habit of finding exalted reasons for justifying conventional conduct, whatever it is. High ground for our conventional domestic conduct is found in the unalterable nature of the sexes, or in a trust committed by society, or in some ancient scripture. Reason for unlimited profit-getting is found by manufacturing psychology to order (the pseudo-psychology of the motives for enterprise), and in the old, comfortable middle-class self-sophistication that asserts that private selfishness is the best way to serve the common good. In ecclesiastical matters we have been much pushed in later years to find divinely good reasons for our customary conformities, such as saying in worship what we do not mean; keeping straight faces in the presence of small men arrayed in large historical and institutional dignities; supporting a denominationalism that we say we deplore, and excusing an evangelism that obviously needs an explanation. We are put to it to place all these things within a system of rational thought, but we manage to do it, though it takes some culture to accomplish the feat. In education--I speak from the inside--it is positively funny how many old and creaky things, and how few new things can be justified by mere guesses.

This respectable habit of finding that we always are in every respect respectable makes it next to impossible for us to repent for even the deeper wrongs of conventional social practice. Even the harlots, Jesus declared, enter the Kingdom of Heaven before those who could give twenty reasons why harlots cannot get in at all.

All this separatism, evasion, and self-sophistication leads on with entire naturalness to the habit of reliance upon authority and finally upon force. Respectability never quite commits the adjudication of its interests to open ethical thinking. It regards its case as already closed. In other words, it claims for itself a privileged position for which the only remaining defence is force in one form or another--economic force, partizan laws, ostracism, defamation, blacklisting, the denial of freedom of speech, war. All these are, in fact, appropriate once the main assumption has been accepted, and consistency is a virtue, is it not? Hence it is that these acts, some of which are positively base and not merely muddle-headed, do not produce self-condemnation among good people. So depraved can our respectable faults finally become! This is not the hardness, of course, of minds that see themselves as they are and yet do not blush; it is still worse than this, for it is the hardness of the paralyzed nerve, the hardness of the eye that sends no light to the intelligence, the hardness of a blocked intelligence that closes the heart to its proper world.

Socrates maintained that to do wrong knowingly is not as bad as to do it ignorantly.

XXIII

EVEN OUR PASSIONS ARE PRECEDENT-RIDDEN

The problem with which we are wrestling is, How account for the low average performance of beings as highly endowed as ourselves? The usual explanation--that we are made up of two natures, a higher and rational one, and a lower and irrational one--turns out not to explain, for neither an unmixed lower nature nor an unmixed higher nature can be anywhere discerned.

A wide vista into the sources of our trouble opened, however, when we inspected reason, the discriminating and thinking function, not in abstraction or as an ideal, but in operation as a guide to behavior. We behold it saving us, indeed, from utter rawness and brutish fixity by analysis that indefinitely enlarges the range of selection within experience; but at the same time we discovered that it customarily stumbles over its own products, checks its own progress, and becomes an instrument of the very rawness that it should leave behind. This difficulty we found to be inherent in reason as such because thinking depends upon memory, and thought-guided conduct upon precedents. Precedents are necessary to thought-guided action, but they imprison us, especially through the social process, wholesome and necessary as this is.

It must not be supposed that we are handicapped by a down-pulling lower nature plus a lag in our higher nature. What we have found is a hesitation that spreads through the whole range of functions as far as they are human at all. This truth is two-edged. It means not only that our reason is never, in practice, completely pure, but also that the instinctive or impulsively raw “factors” in behavior never can be isolated, and therefore never are factors in the strict sense but only abstracted aspects. They are as abstract as “pure reason.” A few examples will show that even our passions are precedent-ridden, and that the control of them has to be effected by manipulating this thought-factor. Even in the region of ourselves that is commonly called lower, both the down-drag and the up-push inhere in the rationality that we regard as our distinguishing mark. If this truth conduces to modesty, it justifies also hope, for it means that even in our passions we discriminate occasions and reach after rational selection.

That precedents guide even our passions is not quite the same as saying that all emotional responses become “conditioned” after the first instance of them in infancy. Precedents arise through analysis, discrimination, and comparison, not automatically, and they can be changed and dethroned by the same process that creates them.

Let us turn, now, to a few illuminating examples. By the “passions” we are to understand such emotional eagernesses as anger, malice, revenge, jealousy, greed, lust; and we are to take the most volcanic of them, anger and lust, as objects of our especial scrutiny. The question is, Is there a thought-determined selection of the occasions upon which each shall dominate the individual’s conduct, of the object towards which action shall be directed, of the form that action shall take, and of the distance it shall go? Are there fashions here as well as in our appreciations of art and of religion?

Does anger arise from the same provocations and run the same course in a club, upon a college campus, among workmen in a factory, between “society people,” between an employer and his employe, a teacher and a pupil, close friends, business competitors? Evidently not. If my friend craftily grabs the good things in sight and leaves me in the lurch, I am affronted; but not if my business competitor does the same thing. When a teacher corrects a pupil’s error, all remains serene, but when a pupil corrects a teacher’s error we cannot be so sure of calm weather. If one of my society acquaintances spills hot tea upon me, I am more likely to pity him than to be angry with him; but suppose that a waiter in a restaurant spills anything on me! What would be an insult in a club or on the golf links is only bluff geniality among workmen, or coltishness among college students. One of the most astonishing instances of the control of primitive feelings by a social precedent, preliminary practice being entirely lacking, may be seen in hazings and initiations among collegians.

So sensitive is anger to its setting within a system of ideas. Moreover, the particular expressions of it, when it does arise, are almost purely conventional. Whether one shall stiffen up in haughty silence and stare at the offender; speak a frigid word; utter a hot epithet; swear; or deliver a fisticuff, or a challenge to a duel depends upon already accepted notions as to what is appropriate in the given social setting. The object towards which it is directed, also, is often thought-selected. If I get “hot” when a dining-car waiter serves my roast and potato cold I may “roast” either the waiter, the cook, the steward, or the railroad company. It appears to have been a custom of ancient potentates to punish messengers who brought bad news, but we esteem ourselves fortunate if our newsgatherers tell the truth whether or not it pains us. If some Chinese, out of patience at our delay in the revocation of the unequal treaties, insult and abuse or kill some of our nationals, our resentment will flame, according to our thought-habits, against the Chinese who did the act, against the Chinese people, or against our own officials who were dilatory about removing an irritation.

How far anger shall go, once it gets started, is likewise largely a matter of social tradition. In some circles of society, physical chastisement for provoking conduct is entirely proper, and it is administered then and there; in other circles, this so far offends good form that it scarcely occurs at all. Though knocking a man down for an insulting word may be applauded, kicking a man when he is down is the act of a “mucker.” “Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” That is, though a sudden and temporary burst of this passion be excusable, the nursing of wrath is not. Yet there are populations in which the nursing of wrath until revenge can be had is the mark of a man.

Even lust is guided by thought-out distinctions. With one individual it acts within wedlock and stops there; with another it acts towards courtesans, but despises seduction; with still others it permits seduction of girls of other races or of a different social class, but not girls of one’s own class and race; and all these differences between men depend very largely upon the male company one keeps. That is, lust acts by code. Moreover, every permission that any of these codes grants is accompanied by prohibitions also; at every level distinctions are made between better and worse, and customs of regard for the better actually prevail.

The passions that sway men in masses are similarly obedient to precedents. You cannot account for lynchings by naming human instincts, nor by this plus a description of the crimes that lynchers seek to avenge, nor yet by adding a color-contrast between lynchers and lynched. Who is to be lynched, by whom, upon what provocation, and by what method depends upon a set of discriminated ideas already present when the provocation occurs. An acquaintance of mine tells me that, being in the vicinity of a town where this summary procedure was threatened, he took means to ascertain just what was done. In this instance--it is doubtless an extreme one, but it is none the less instructive--the populace assembled at a prearranged hour and without tumult; prayer was offered; the victim was calmly hanged from a bridge, and his body was riddled with bullets; after which, this business being attended to, the crowd went about its other business. If most lynchings are less orderly, they nevertheless are ruled by the same sort of traditions; see how alike these crimes are, and how unruffled the surrounding populace can remain.

It should scarcely be necessary to say how conventionalized are the passions that make nations fight one another. Like the personal-honor code of the duelist is diplomacy’s schedule of the degrees of possible offensiveness in the conduct of other nations and their representatives, with a parallel column for appropriate ways of resenting each sort of disagreeableness. And the extreme mode of resentment, war, has a definite place in this code. Nations do not wait to be hurtled into war by explosions of popular wrath. The matter is much more in the control of reason than this. War-making is one of the legally recognized functions of the state, and all the necessary machinery--from secretaries of war to a supply of gas-masks--is kept constantly on hand. How odd it is that the people as a rule think of wars, even modern wars, as calamities that, like a tornado or a tidal wave, just happen, or as a horror that “bad” nations thrust upon “good” ones. Wars occur, just as fisticuffs or shootings occur among a frontier populace, and just as measured words of resentment are spoken where culture prevails, namely, as an expression of the recognized system for dealing with situations of certain sorts. There is nothing inevitable about any of them.

When an individual follows the social code of resentment from a sense of duty rather than from hot passion, we find the situation amusing. But when a people that does not desire to fight is governed by officials that do, then occurs the most remarkable, as it is also the most tragic, example of the actual relation between passion and precedent. The populace must now be worked up into a mood that will impel them to kill and to do it with a clear conscience. And how is the war-passion, in fact, aroused? By bringing the proposed or already-declared war under some appropriate precedent or precedents. Farmers and grocers, say, have not kept up with international events sufficiently to know what the friction is all about, or which side is right if either side is, or what probability there is that war will set things right; but they won’t submit to a foreign invader or oppressor, they love their country and its traditions, and they hate the ruthlessness that ravishes women, and starves and mutilates children and wounded soldiers. So, it is

“Fight for your altars and your fires; Fight for the green graves of your sires, God and your native land!”

The whole scheme of war-propaganda consists in inducing people to classify another country, or a foreign leader, or events under appropriate headings. So precedent-ridden is the passion that has rent the world asunder and now threatens to destroy it.

The struggle to control and guide any of our passions, or if need be to cause them to atrophy from disuse, must be directed chiefly to current assumptions, types of thought, social standards, and customary classifications. This is one reason why the world cannot be saved by rescuing individuals one by one from their evil ways. While we are rebuilding one individual in this way, social precedents are stamping themselves upon ten children. It follows that the reconstructive work of religion and of education must be done chiefly by discrediting currently accepted precedents and causing a rethinking of the alternatives.

XXIV

FREE MEN FEAR THEIR FREEDOM. WHY?

Our fathers gave their all that we might be free, but we are abashed by the bequest that they have left us. We are abashed, not by the moral grandeur, the holiness, of our inheritance, nor by the height of the obligations with which it endows us, but by apprehension that the inside of it may not be as fair as the outside. We decorate ourselves with the name and the glory of free men; they grace our historic records and our festal occasions; but in our daily conduct we accept the functions of free men with reservations. We are “judicious,” as we call it.

The paradox of liking and disliking freedom at the same time is not a superficial one; it is deep in our nature; it is an apparently inevitable seesaw in our motives. There is in our endowment something so grand that ordinary men accept any privation in preference to comfortable slavery. So majestic is the mind of man when it is aroused that no pain that our fellows can inflict counterbalances the value of uncoerced thinking and speaking. We know that this freedom, with all the risks and burdens that it entails, is fundamental to every great thing that humanity has done in the modern period. Milton’s _Areopagitica_ and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States are flags upon the mountain peaks of history. Nevertheless, the meaning of every achieved enfranchisement is in practice toned down by the enfranchised themselves, and in consequence even our old and taken-for-granted liberties have continually to be rewon.

The sincerity of this cautiousness is not to be questioned. For we are apprehensive not only that social classes other than our own, and other individuals (as, the young) will fail to “make a wise use of freedom,” but that we ourselves shall fail to do so. We are on guard against our own enjoyment of powers and prerogatives that nevertheless we highly esteem. Father and mother, instead of being eager to confer freedom upon their child as rapidly as possible, make it their policy to shield him as long as possible from the dangers of freedom; and in accord with this policy they measure the correctness of their own conduct in the presence of children by its restraints, not by its resistance of restraints. Teachers, likewise, from the elementary school to the college, are as a rule engaged in putting upon young spirits a yoke made by others instead of assisting pupils to make harnesses of their own. It is regarded as an achievement of good teaching when pupils are kept happy and active in the process of being yoked to precedents. And teachers themselves are an ensample to their flock. If there is anybody in the world who, under a régime of freedom, should be characterized by constant unfixing of precedents, it is the teacher, but it is safe to guess that not one person in a thousand could name an instance of it in any school.

If we were to judge religion by its great creative periods, we should perhaps say that the religious leader, even more than the teacher, should be a dyed-in-the-wool user of freedom. But, obviously, the fear of a flexible faith is greater, except at crisis-points in religious history, than the fear that faith may become stereotyped, mechanical, and dead. In nearly all ecclesiastical folds, if not in all of them, it is assumed that no clergyman “of good judgment” will use all the liberty that the constitution and the laws of his denomination permit. There is an unwritten law of repression within the written guarantees of liberty. Many years ago a Catholic professor was asked whether the advice of the Pope upon a certain point in education was an _ex cathedra_, officially authoritative, pronouncement. “No,” said the professor, “but we obey it just as if it were.” A passage from John Wesley concerning the Virgin Birth was submitted to a Methodist Episcopal bishop with the question whether this--the source not being named--was a view of the matter fit for a Methodist. The bishop’s reply was an emphatic negative. Upton Sinclair trapped a ministers’ meeting by reading a fresh translation of the denunciation of rich men in the Epistle of James and attributing the words to Emma Goldman. Most of the ministers thought that such utterances justified putting her into prison.

If we drew our presumptions from history, we should assume that, in every area of church life, what is now going on is partly valid and

## partly not; and believers in the _status quo_ and disbelievers in it

would discuss each question upon a plane of friendly equality. But they do not meet as equals; the freedom to repeat our thoughts is, so to say, greater than the freedom to do fresh thinking. Note how many liberals strive, as far as honesty permits, to make it appear that they are not radical nor anything more than progressively orthodox. That is to say, it is taken for granted that something has the precedence of real freedom. Churchmen have no such fear of their past as the facts warrant; their fears always prick up ears towards anything that is in any significant way novel. Was ever a minister brought to trial for backwardness of mind, or for obstructing the freedom of others? And did the acceptance or rejection of any candidate for the ministry ever hinge upon whether he was sufficiently liberty-loving to guard the guarantees of freedom in the church constitution? The fears are on the other side, and there the defenders of the faith patrol their beat.

As for individual ministers who believe in real freedom yet submit to the informal censorship of church opinion, it is by no means necessary to suppose that they sell their silence for place or salary, though the spiritual peril here is immeasureable. Some of them, without doubt, by their really large and just-permitted variations from the ordinary, are helping to keep alive the tradition of freedom. On the other hand, what shall be said of those who, though they believe in freedom in the abstract, are convinced that, if it is not actually a subordinate interest of the spirit, at least it can better afford postponement than other interests? It is fair to say that they lay it away in a napkin.

I should not like to have these remarks add force to the common opinion that religious institutions are inherently more repressive than others. This opinion is at least a grave exaggeration. It forgets the glorious chapters in religious history that record the identification of faith with the bursting of bonds--ecclesiastical, political, social, intellectual, ethical. It forgets, too, the character of our secular institutions. Let us look at a few of them.

Within the tradition of academic freedom, exactly as within ecclesiastical practice, there exists an unwritten law of abstention. It restrains professors and administrators alike, though at different points. Not all professors or all administrators, of course, but the great mass of them. Self-restriction expresses itself in solicitude for “the standing of the institution”; in the professor’s choice of his field for research and publication; in acute tenderness for the immature judgment of students (most of them either in possession of the ballot or about to reach their majority); in the censorship of student publications that criticize the social and educational _status quo_; in decisions as to what speakers may be heard upon the campus; in the use of the term “good judgment” or its opposite when variant professors are attacked; in the selection and promotion of members of the staff; in the budget; in consciousness of the legislature at state institutions, and in consciousness of the donor at others; finally, in the development of the present dominant type of college and university administration. If we compare state institutions with privately endowed ones in these matters, we do not discover any great difference. The same scale, from overt repression, through tacit abstention, to courageous championship of real freedom, is found filled up by both, and institutions representing the religious motive have no distinctive place of their own upon this scale. Fear to use academic freedom is not a mark of either religious or secular institutions; it is merely academic! In short, real freedom for the mind is as much a problem in our day as in that of Galileo. It is the subject-matter that has changed.

Not that hypocrisy is in the academic saddle. No; our trouble is the confusion that arises from sincerely believing in freedom but also sincerely fearing it. This is why technicalities of procedure play so large a rôle; this is the reason why so much depends upon judicious silence. It is because we are not quite at one with ourselves in our own souls that what might be the lusty exercise of our powers of variation becomes merely the absence of certain external restraints. Fear puts us on the defensive; whereupon, quietly reducing the points of possible attack appears to be a dictate of practical wisdom.

The handling of freedom in our legal system is not a whit more daring than in our ecclesiastical and educational institutions. It is not customary to construe particular laws in the spirit of an expanding liberty; nor do courts, as a rule, endeavor to get at the core of justice, ethically considered. The technical theory of their function is that they are umpires between litigants, responsible merely for seeing that contests are conducted according to prescribed rules.

In fact, and of course, courts are and must be more than this; they cannot be merely automatic appliers of laws and precedents. We do not impugn the integrity of judges if we say that they cannot help being influenced in their decisions by their understanding of the world in which they live, and also by their own appreciation of values in life, in society, in law and government. It was no statutory obligation, but his chosen use of the discretion allowed him that gave its noteworthy character to Judge Thayer’s conduct of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. In the celebrated contest over a sweat-shop law in the State of New York, it was a belated outlook upon industrial changes that dictated the first decision of the Court of Appeals, and a changed outlook that brought about the reversal of it. Appointments to the supreme bench of the United States are not made upon the basis of ability, probity, and experience alone; the appointing power has regard also to social attitudes. The subsequent votes of appointees cannot be accounted for without recognizing the influence of these attitudes.

All this has been pointed out again and again. The purpose of saying it once more is to raise the question why courts do not more often give the weight of their discretion to the expansive use of freedom? Why do not judges openly and frankly avow the principles that control them when they perform discretionary acts? Why minimize the fact that discretion is used and that thereby something new under the sun might be brought to birth? Consider the often-cited treatment of “freedom of contract.” Since coercion takes new forms in our changing society, it was inevitable that real freedom of contract should move its old line fences. But how timid the legal and judicial mind has been toward the plain fact, and how reluctant to draw the necessary inference. Timidity counsels, “Make no new precedents.” The short of it is that here is the same fear of freedom that we found in parents, clergymen, teachers, professors, and college administrators.

Even the specific guarantees of freedom that we have incorporated into our organic law do not get themselves enforced with the simple directness that should mark real faith in them. Liberty of speech, of press, of assemblage, and of domiciliary privacy, as liberty was understood and intended by the framers of our scheme of self-government, is boldly invaded in several of our states by the police, the executive arm, and the legislatures. And the courts comply, as they surely would not do if the mental climate were to change. Now, it is especially interesting to note that the police never stop a meeting of jingoes and fire-eaters even though they advocate illegal violence; that no legislature has attempted to put a check upon those who would subvert the constitution by suppression of freedom; that those who actually have interfered with the constitutional liberties of others go unpunished; and that a Department of Justice that keeps a wary eye upon pacifists is untroubled when beliefs and policies like the following are blazoned: That force is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs; that our government must act accordingly; that we should enforce our economic self-interest against our weaker neighbors regardless of their liberties; that there is an inevitable clash between our self-interest and that of other great powers (sometimes named), and that we must fight these powers, not relying upon conciliation, arbitration, or anything else that signifies that humanity is capable of growing towards rationality in its conduct.

The paradox of all this deepens towards the ridiculous or the tragic when one discovers that these men who despitefully use the constitutional guarantees are fervid worshippers of the Constitution, and firm believers that the founders, who based their policy upon trust in human nature, made the greatest political discovery of all ages, a discovery that is destined to bless the whole world! Here is intellectual hara-kiri. Asked to explain it, those who practice it tell us sincerely that they believe in freedom as an everyday method of getting along; it is only when we get into a pinch, when vital interests are at stake, or when freedom is abused, that suppression is required. What deep distrust is this! The freedom that cost our fathers so dearly precisely because it applied to the major and contested concerns of society now becomes a convenience in handling small affairs but is of no use in emergencies.

In all these mixings-up of faith and unfaith in our supposably achieved liberties one can discern a foundation-issue in our philosophy of life. The whole universe of our experience--the solid earth, the sea, the sky, the past and present of society, the achievements of science, the devices and desires of the heart, the inspiring faiths--all this confronts us with the question, What do you really want, and how much will you dare on behalf of it? Our answer involves our assessment of our own selfhood. Usually the alternatives for our enterprise are, on the one hand, increasing or stabilizing some conventional and comfortable function, or, on the other hand, reaching after an unconventional blessing that costs the pain of self-reconstruction. We cannot have brotherhood, democracy, industrial justice, world-peace, _or freedom_ at a lower cost than this. Shall we, then, experiment, explore, adventure in the area of selfhood as we are doing at the present moment in the sky? Can the mind, as well as the body, support itself in a less dense medium than that in which it has moved in the past?

The scientific movement has made us daring in the realm of ponderables but not with respect to ourselves. Pure science seeks only one value, that of knowing the connections of things; its one interest in personality is that scientific method should be employed; its one interest in freedom is this. In our academic institutions a spiritually delicate sensitivity at this point may be joined with indifference to freedom in the other essays of man. A kind of daring different from that of the laboratory or even of polar exploration is required if we are to cast off the moorings of an old selfhood and voyage forth in search of new spiritual continents.

Further, the scientific spirit can be and often is inattentive to the life-values or dis-values that are promoted by the application of its discoveries. The uncriticized purposes of the present, accordingly, have unobstructedly capitalized on their own static behalf our enormously increased power over nature. Indeed, these purposes, because they use new and shining machinery, have actually acquired something of the éclat of the sciences. A current writer, according to an announcement that has appeared since this chapter was begun, declares that science has actually been accepted as a sort of messiah, deliverer, or solver of life’s final problems--a rôle for which it is totally unqualified.[8] The obverse of this attitude toward science is inertia toward the values that science as such does not feel.

The weight of precedent is, indeed, on the side of force, not of cooperative thinking, as the arbiter of human relations; it is on the side of class privilege, not of democracy; of repression, not of liberty. But always the light shines in this darkness, though the darkness comprehend it not. For nobody wants sheer force, nobody approves all that class-selfishness implies, everybody believes (after a fashion) in liberty even though with contradictory restrictions. The picture is that of a world of personal selves in evolution. If, in any species that belongs to an evolutionary order, thought mixes with desire; if self-guidance arrives at all, these paradoxical inconsistencies are bound to occur. The present satisfaction, once thought about, is certain to resist any and every not-yet-experienced good. There always will be trepidation when the half-gods go.

But, wherever thought and desire do mix, there occurs the process of emancipation from authority; freedom is the very soul of moral evolution. We see why it is feared; but need it be? Is it not possible to devise a technic for freedom whereby we shall be somewhat less inconsistent, somewhat less distrustful of one another, somewhat more wisely venturesome in the realm of selfhood?

XXV

THE MOTIVES OF YOUTH COMPARED WITH THOSE OF AGE

The problem of freedom and restraint, of impulse and reason, of the real nature of human motive forces, comes far to the fore today in world-wide perplexity over the present restlessness of youth. Our young people won’t “stay put.” Many of them refuse to postpone life’s satisfactions--“they want theirs now.” A few are asking the critical questions, wherein life’s greater satisfactions consist, and whether our present ways of life lead toward them. On all hands there is a loosening of the bonds that tie the present to the past; the face of youth is towards the future, whether the next evening or the next century. Here, accordingly, is an unparalleled opportunity to “see the wheels go ’round” in human conduct. Here is life only a step removed from naïveté; and here is a display, side by side, of inexperienced youth and experienced age.

Perhaps it would not be misleading to say inexperienced youth with “the lid off,” and experienced age with “the lid on.” What, then, are the main differences between them in point of motivation? The usual answer is simplicity itself--that is, the answer usually given by experienced age. These youngsters are carried away, we are told, by “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life”--to use an ancient phrase for pleasure-seeking instincts; whereas--so the assumption runs--we oldsters are guided by a rationality that governs our instincts and keeps them in their place. Most persons of maturity are sure that, in the by and large, experience brings wisdom, that the rules and precedents that the mature observe are dictates of practiced reason, and therefore that youths who do not follow substantially in our footsteps act irrationally, and thereby subject themselves to the penalties of rashness.

This view of the matter contains a grain of truth, of course, but only a grain. A burnt child does dread the fire, but a child with a stomachache does not dread the unwholesome food that produced it. “Experience” at the dining-room table often results in wrong dietary habits that even maturity regards as right. “Experience” as a parent can fix upon the mind the most futile and injurious conceptions of parental authority--it has done so in multitudes of cases. “Experience” as a teacher fastened upon us a kind of school-teaching that we are now struggling, with enormous effort, to free ourselves from. So, in statecraft, in churchcraft, in industrial and economic relations, in social customs, we oldsters are dragging about with us a terrible weight of unnecessary and injurious habit and precedent. In fact, experience has brought us, along with some wisdom, a lot of unwisdom which it has baptized with the sanctity of our years.

Accumulation of experience or of years is not of great inherent significance; neither is the lack of years. What is important is the way in which we deal with experiences as they arise. This is the problem for age and youth alike, and here is the basis for the most useful approach to the youth-question. It is not enough to say that in childhood and adolescence instinctive impulses are more varied and more clamorous; nor have we said enough when we add to this that in our day there is an unusually wide cleft between the ways of the young and the ways of the old. The really important comparison is that between the characteristic technic of the young and of the old in the making and the unmaking of approved precedents.

When we make this comparison, what do we find? On the side of age we find man measuring himself by his own past, mechanizing the wisdom of yesterday so that it cannot grow through today’s experiences, making his own imperfections into virtues. We behold, consequently, accumulations of property, of personal and institutional influence, and even of scientific knowledge bolstering customs and standards after they have become plainly questionable. If we of the older generation had the grit to be historically, psychologically, and ethically realistic towards ourselves, we should see the irony of our position. We have a timid wisdom, a self-restricting wisdom, a pseudo-wisdom, for we have no adequate technic for getting out of new experiences what they could teach us, nor for graduating from precedents whose teaching is already completed.

When the Disciples asked, “Who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus set a small child in the midst, saying, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

On the other hand--what a paradox! who is more unwilling than an adolescent to become as a little child? Are modern youths very ready to learn? This is the test for them, and when they prove that they are in the attitude of learning, they must next show whether they will take the trouble to acquire a technic for learning. We say that youth is forward-reaching; it thinks in terms of the future. But in what sense is this true? Most commonly in the sense of aspiration to be classified with adults and to enjoy their prerogatives. It does not usually mean a stretching towards any unprecedented good. Youth sheds the precedents of its own childhood only to adopt the precedents of those a little older than itself! The “flapper” of fourteen gets herself up and conducts herself as if she were eighteen at least; the boy of sixteen wants to be “a man of the world” right now; almost any youth of twenty can be relied upon to conform scrupulously to the customs of some group, set, or type that, in his estimation, has “arrived.”

Heedlessness of precedents is not characteristic of youth. Youth is avid for them. If satisfactory ones are not found in the generation that is just ahead, any pleasant thing that happens twice is seized upon and stereotyped. Placed in as free an environment as the modern college campus, young people form rigidly conventional groupings and adopt rigid campus customs. The average college student cannot stand alone; he is a very bond-slave to social precedents; and he is one of the most intolerant critics of those who are more individual than himself. Even at the points where modern youths flout adult conventions, other conventions quickly form. The very follies of youth are conventionalized. Why the hip flask at dancing parties? Why the present wave in the ancient stream of “petting” and “necking”? Why is “jazz” for the time being the only music that is interesting? Why Valentinitis? Doubtless the starting-point of each of them is a

## particular situation that involves a stimulus or a deficiency, but

the rapid spread occurs through imitation and mutual suggestion; and the self-accepted excuse or justification lies, not in the nature and results of the act or the experience, but in the fact that it is the conventional or expected thing.

The similarity between the ways of youth and the ways of age is remarkable. Think of the money and the time that adults have spent in the last ten years in order to listen to radio trash. Compare the silly social compulsions of the college campus with the force that compels everybody to stand whenever “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung or played. Or compare, in point of mental process, young women’s adulation of Valentino with mature men’s adulation of Coolidge. Does any fever of modern youth reach a higher temperature than automobilitis among the parents?

Moreover, just as it would be unfair to the present generation of mature men and women to characterize it solely by such flightiness, so we should do injustice to the young people of today if we judged them by these shallow performances and conventionalities. For the opening of eyes and the enlargement of horizons is as marked a fact as the other. The new freedom assumed by the youth of today, the increase in spending money, the widened range of activities made possible by machinery, and the multiplication of attractive objects or experiences that can be had for a money consideration--all these, taken together, stimulate thought as well as instinct. They present alternatives, awaken conflicting motives, make uncertainties vivid; all of which is favorable to reflection. It is probable that even “jazzy” young people are doing more thinking upon life’s alternatives than was done by the average youths of yesterday. Many who appear to be blown hither or thither by popular folly are really experimenting, watching, putting limits to their indulgences, endeavoring to be ethically realistic; all of which should be reassuring to those of us who are able to trust the human mind when it is awake and at work.

Furthermore, from a minority of youths, very modern youths, there flash forth upon our distraught world some of the most hopeful signs. I refer not so much to the impulsive idealism of some, so strongly contrasting with the frivolity of others, as to the union of critical thinking with sober idealism that appears in spots all over the world. Let the conventional self-flattery of maturity take heed to itself, for “a chiel’s amang ye, takin’ notes” upon our efficiencies and inefficiencies. The most effective critics of modern life are not Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, but younger spirits who possess both a scientific attitude of inquiry and an idealism that is not tired or sour. In the colleges such youngsters are engaged not only in “de-bunking” the customs of both faculties and students but also in thinking out something better.

To the credit of the older generation be it here recorded that various presidents and faculties are welcoming this critical scrutiny by much younger heads. Before me, for example, lies an official college bulletin that consists of a report by a student committee upon the curriculum, the teaching, and other official affairs of the institution. Similarly, there is a stirring in the churches. Young people are holding conventions in which they ask such questions and propose such measures as have not proceeded from youth at any time within the memory of men now living, if ever. And again it is remarkable to see how much of their freshness is welcomed by the older generation.

There is danger, indeed, that the hospitality of adult minds will divert these younger minds from their journey of exploration. Palliatives will be sought for in situations that require a drastic study of causes. Cooperation in a respectable good will postpone appraisement of the limitations of it. The lack of experience on the part of thinking young people, together with their sense of being at official disadvantage as compared with their elders, makes them too thankful for half-loaves where whole loaves are needed.

Youth’s rashness, and the perils that it involves, require closer analysis than they ordinarily receive. The fault of the great majority is precipitate acceptance of adult standards and ways of life. This is youth’s most characteristic rashness. Here is a young workingman who says that the “powers that be” are so strongly intrenched in the state and in industry that his vote can make no difference; hence, he pursues a policy of merely wriggling within his immediate environment so as to get out of it what he can. Here is a high-school senior who declares outright that the professed standards of adults do not represent the forces whereby things get done; money and power _are_ the things that count; the strong _do_ exploit the weak; this _is_ the road to success, and he intends to walk in it. Here are multitudes of young men and young women who are so rash as to accept the class-consciousness of their parents as though it were self-evidently correct. And here are myriads of members of church young-people’s societies who actually regard the conventional religion about them as a fulfilment of Jesus’ double law of love. The great and deadly rashness of youth takes the form of hasty acquiescence in things as they are or seem to be.

Of those who do not acquiesce, by far the larger number will be found in the following classes: Those who make an idealistic spurt, but grow tired, or become discouraged because of the inertness or the antagonism of others; those who talk but do not act; those who act but are too thankful for “small favors,” too gratified by minor improvements, to do anything really fundamental; and those who, seeing this lag in things fundamental, “give it up.” All these become swallowed up, in the end, by the insatiable respectability of the _status quo_.

Radicalism, whether that of the mere skeptic, or that which discards the good for the better and the better for the best, is not characteristic of the young. There is only a small minority of thinking youths who make any sustained effort to go to the bottom of things. Of these there are three main types: The attackers, the appliers, and the investigators.

The attackers turn life inside out in order to show how irrational or futile the accepted order of things is. The working hypothesis appears to be that whatever enjoys official power or general acceptance is either misled or misleading. The results are, of course, one sided, but they are not useless. Until our institutions provide for self-criticism, they are bound to be victims of self-deception; therefore they must be “shown up” again and again. Probably attack is good, in the end, even for our valid convictions, because they get tangled with what is temporary and merely specious. It is true, of course, that these young attackers are, to a considerable extent, imitators of the mature writers, mentioned in an earlier section, who exploit our irrationality as a literary gold mine. There is, therefore, a touch of conventionality and dependence in these would-be emancipated youngsters. They should be listened to, however, because they are on track of aspects of truth that are commonly overlooked.

The appliers are those who endeavor to go the whole length with some approved principle, as, for example, Jesus’ injunction to treat all men as brothers. This sort of endeavor, in turn, leads to a critique of life not less drastic than that of the attackers, but more likely to be patient and considerate towards our weaknesses. Moreover, the appliers exhibit various attempts to govern their present conduct by exalted standards for which the society about them is not ready. The service of such youths is various. It reveals to us the disparity between the pious phrases of our lips and our daily conduct in church, state, and occupation. It presents many a living example of fidelity to an ideal. It spreads the contagion of faith, making better things practicable because we believe that they are so.

The third, or investigator, type of non-conventional youth goes behind the appearance of things by intellectual processes that sometimes have all the coolness of science. He must be “shown”; neither _ipse dixit_ nor general acquiescence satisfies him. What does the curriculum of this college include and what does it omit, and why? What are the most effective methods of teaching, and do our professors use them? What are the real values of our extra-curricular activities? How are our teachers chosen and promoted, and how much are they paid? Why do we have religious denominations, creeds, missions, worship? What is the truth about our international relations? What is the life of the industrial worker like? How is “hiring and firing” done? I’ll get a job and find out. What really is happening in Germany or Russia? Why shouldn’t I go over there to see for myself? This sort of questioning is growing, and it is bound to spread in colleges and high schools. It is one of the most solidly hope-giving aspects of the entire youth situation.

These three types of aggressive non-conformity overlap and blend, of course. As a rule students of the investigator type are moved by dissatisfaction with the _status quo_; they investigate in order to find the road towards some ideal. Not seldom the applier type discovers the fascination of social statistics and even of history. The attacker, in turn, will usually be found working for specific reforms. All three types make freedom their common cause--freedom to think without fear of consequences; freedom to speak with sincerity upon great issues; freedom to listen to speakers who represent disagreeable minority positions; freedom to participate in the determination of the conditions under which they shall live.

In these youths who really transcend conventions we have a hint of what might be, what ought to be, the normal place of young people in society. Yes--let me answer your doubt before you state it--there is danger that, taking advantage of the questioning mood, the dissenting mood, or the consciousness of freedom, wayward impulse will make the worse appear the better reason. There is danger in asking questions, but God took this risk when he created man; and by far the greater danger is that we shall not ask questions enough, nor questions that go deep enough. By far the greatest evil in the youth-life of today is that so few young men and women find any antidote to the way men imitate themselves and one another--any antidote, that is to say, to the pseudo-wisdom of age.

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