CHAPTER VI

A MAN IS KNOWN BY THE DILEMMAS HE KEEPS

William James said that wherever there is selection among alternatives there is mental life. Man is a choosing animal, and his choices determine both the ends sought and the means to be employed. We will not discuss the question whether our choices are spontaneous or are determined wholly or in part by environmental and hereditary factors. Whatever determines them, our habits of choosing,--the general character of the things we prefer,--reveal the kind of people we are. And as learning is not merely the acquiring of more and more information but is accompanied by a gradual transformation of habit systems, its progress is manifest not merely by what a man knows at any stage in his education, but also by the kind of issue that is real to him, the questions which he permits life to put to him, the sort of temptations he has to struggle to avoid, the kind of goods that are vital to him. When I was a boy my parents used to tell me, “A man is known by the company he keeps.” The saying, while designed to protect youth from the dangerous influence of evil companionship, is not wholly true. Many persons, from ambition or other motives, seek the society of persons unlike themselves. Those who are more gregarious than selective may exercise little choice among their associates. But ordinarily people like to be with their own kind. Criminals keep company with other criminals, golfers with other golfers, stamp collectors with others who have the same interest. We wish our friends to be interested in the things that interest us. Groups long associated tend to become homogeneous. When marked differences of taste and opinion develop, companions drift apart. Hence it is obvious that the company one keeps is determined in part by the dilemmas he keeps.

We do not normally keep the same set of dilemmas through life. Each stage of development presents new challenges, problems, alternatives; as we mature our habits of judgment change. We see things in a different light. What was once a matter of vital concern becomes a dead issue. Our interest is caught and our choice determined by aspects of situations to which we did not react at all at an earlier stage. We do not solve all the problems of any stage, but we outgrow them,--get over them.

Psychopathology today has much to say about the nature and sequence of the dilemmas which at any period haunt the mind of an individual. The matter is so important that I wonder more has not been made of it by those interested in education. The public, it seems, would have the educator fill the student’s head with useful information but expects the student to keep the same beliefs and general outlook on life that he had before. We speak of rising to a higher mental plane; this is little else than learning to wrestle with more and more significant problems. A little girl in her third summer says, “I’m a nice girl; I don’t bite sister now.” To bite or not to bite, to keep one’s self clean, to refrain from crying, are normally the dilemmas of early childhood. If they are not dead issues to a person twenty years old, they may be regarded as psychopathic symptoms. When a mature individual is found wrestling with impulses which should have been reduced to habit and dismissed from consciousness in earlier years, we have a phenomenon which psychologists call “regression,” or “fixation” of emotional interest in mental habits that are normally outgrown. Toward the tasks and situations of adult life, the individual strives to maintain an infantile attitude and hence fails to adjust himself. Sometimes the regression shows a preoccupation with infantile wishes, and sometimes with those of early adolescence; in any case there is struggle to maintain the inhibitions or the defenses which veil the inadequately repressed impulses.

The manner in which lessons learned from experience normally transform an impulse from its expression in very simple and crude dilemmas to its later and more subtle manifestations may be seen in the forms with which people exhibit and disguise their egoism during successive stages of development. When a very young child is beginning to discover himself and his little world, he finds his own body and its functions tremendously interesting. Soon he discovers that certain of his performances command attention. He learns to make use of such performances in order to get what he wants. He will exercise his power over parent or nurse by throwing his toys on the floor again and again and howling until some one picks them up. Long before he condescends to talk, he notices when people admire him and say complimentary things about him. A very young child will do little stunts by way of showing off, and will exhibit irritation if ignored or left alone. He cries out at any restraint upon his movements or resistance to his wishes.

The egoism of everyone retains something of the infantile quality. But family discipline, social experience, and the awakening of powers of observation and thought result in new forms of expression. This ego interest becomes associated with an ideal of self and its importance which the individual guards as his honor, his reputation. Every man is intent upon keeping up his feeling of self-importance; each feels that one so important deserves special consideration. Egoism in normal people becomes to some extent liberated from its infantile interests and is sublimated, that is, attached to ends that are socially permissible. The original impulse remains, but it wrestles with new problems. The wish to be admired is a factor in all ambition, also in romantic love. A love affair is even more a mutual admiration society than a phenomenon of sex interest. The impulse to command which in the nursery led the child to throw toys on the floor for others to pick up, later becomes a desire for leadership, a struggle for political power, a passion for manipulating or reforming others.

We also find the infantile egoism transferred to religion, where it plays an important part in adult life. Many of the very images and emotional attitudes of infancy may thus be kept alive. The believer may still feel that he is loved as the infant is loved by the parent,--loved now by the Heavenly Father. He may again feel that he can have what he desires by asking the father in prayer. Self-importance survives as belief in the immortality of the soul and as assurance of salvation. Thus with development and experience, the same ego interest becomes transformed in the tasks it progressively sets itself, and in widening the range of the ends for which it strives. Each stage of development presents its peculiar problems, its peculiar goods and evils, its possible alternative attitudes toward the values of experience. Therefore it ought to be quite as possible to determine a person’s mental age by noting the kind of things which satisfy his ego interest, as by any other device of mental measurement. In common practice this is the way in which we judge people.

A man stands revealed both by the things he strives to gain and by those he seeks to avoid. The thing that most easily shocks him is usually that which he himself is struggling to overcome. It represents something to which in his secret heart he can say neither yes nor no. His dilemma troubles him. He seeks to avoid the inner gnawing by carrying the fight into the open. He turns his personal conflict into the appearance of a public issue, and you then have the moral reformer. People who repeat scandal, demand laws for the censorship of books and plays, and search through literature intent upon deleting passages they think are obscene, are too much preoccupied with vice and obscenity. They are like those compulsion neurotics who spend their time writing alibis to prove their innocence of the crime they are constantly tempted to commit.

The thing a man must make an effort to conceal always betrays him. We all know the type of person who strives in all things to appear refined, who makes painful efforts for correct speech and proper manners. There are those who are seriously concerned about being in what they call society, and those who read books of etiquette and are disturbed by such important questions as whether when escorting a lady you should take her arm or let her take yours. And there is the man who signs his name with ornate flourish and tries to impress waiters and hotel servants with his importance, and there are the people who are much exercised over the forgiveness of their sins. All in one way or another place themselves on their own level.

The correlation between people’s material desires and their general intellectual interests is so universal that it is used as a guide in placing advertisements. There are “class” papers, each designed to appeal to readers who occupy a certain cultural stratum. The advertising appeals which such papers carry vary with the reading matter. The older, more literary magazines present a sharp contrast both in reading matter and in advertising to the newer fiction magazines. In the first group the essay predominates, with poetry and literary criticism, and only an occasional work of fiction. In the second group there is hardly anything but fiction, with possibly a brief hortatory editorial. Both types are evidently published to interest readers of average wealth. The number of advertisements of automobiles, real estate, and securities and other investments is in about the same proportion in both. But the former group, which is obviously designed to appeal to more thoughtful and intelligent readers, contains a larger number of pages given over to advertisements of books, schools, colleges, places of travel, works of art.

We need not discuss the cheaper fiction magazines. They are obviously prepared for a still different reading public. The public to which the better ones appeal is indicated by the dominant character of the advertising, which consists largely of aids to beauty and correspondence courses in self-improvement. The stories in such periodicals are as typical as the advertisements. Thus it is that in their daily preferences, as truly as in the greater issues of their lives, people select themselves and are segregated into classes, or spiritual types--types which may live in daily contact with one another, yet worlds apart.

Democracy strives to ignore the cultural differences among people. Education intensifies them. The attempt to place everyone on the same mediocre plane, even though it be a level considerably above the lowest, is not education; it is a kind of social work. Education means finding one’s own level. Like all progress it is qualitative and differentiating. Just as organic evolution is a process which can be measured only in the extent of the differences it has made between higher and more complex organisms and lower ones, so with education. It brings out distinctions of human worth, places people on the rounds of a ladder, the gradations of which are discernible in the kind of interests they have, in the quality of their choices, the perplexities they wrestle with and overcome, the tasks and issues they set themselves.

The general advance of civilization is in some respects like that of the individual. We may learn much about the general cultural attainment of any age by noting the issues that divided people at that time and the problems that troubled them. There are all sorts of “cultural lags” in the course of progress, but it helps us to estimate the general intellectual level Europe had attained at the close of the middle ages to learn that whole communities could be terribly disturbed over the question, “What is the evil omen of a comet which suddenly appears in the zenith?”--so disturbed indeed that on one occasion it is said popular pressure forced the Pope to go out and pronounce an official curse upon a comet and command it to leave the sky, which it did much to everybody’s peace of mind. Again, we can form something of an opinion of the mentality of an age in which there is general interest in such a question as “Shall a person accused of witchcraft be put to torture to compel him to testify against himself?” or, “How far may one walk on the Sabbath day without committing sin?” or “Does the doctrine of the rights of man apply to negro slaves?” or “Who amongst us has committed the unpardonable sin,” or “Will a child that dies without baptism go to Hell,” or, by way of illustrating something of the spirit of contemporary America, “Who’s your bootlegger?”

I have said that many of our dilemmas are not resolved, but are outgrown. This leads us to a further observation of their educational significance. Many of the issues which stir a community are insoluble because they rest upon presuppositions which are unsound and so long as the assumption remains unchallenged the issue will haunt men’s minds. When one goes back of the issue and sees the premises to be false, the whole wrangle becomes meaningless. The question about torturing people accused of witchcraft presupposes the superstition that it is possible for an individual to enter into a contract with the devil. Get rid of belief in devils and witch trials themselves cease. So the nightmare about the “damnation of babes” ceases to be a live issue for a mind that has become sufficiently civilized to have passed beyond the primitive man’s terror of Hell. And so I think it is with most popular beliefs and public issues and partisan conflicts, as well as with many of our private dilemmas. As stated they presuppose a disguised error, or are the fruit of factors that remain unconscious. So long as we accept the fatal assumption the issue is real to us. We are caught and held in the dilemma and our educational progress stops.

Progress in thinking, without which learning is mere repeating, comes by examining foundations. The educated mind differs from the uneducated in the insight which enables it to file a demurrer, dismiss the case, or restate it in terms that lead somewhere. It is in getting us over our dilemmas that education frees our minds.

It is often said that the aim of education is to equip the student with a set of principles and beliefs which will serve him through life. Yes, but principles are _leading ideas_. Their function is to lead us to correct conclusion and right action. They are instruments, not ends in themselves, and they must occasionally be re-tested. They are not final statements of the issues of living. Much misunderstanding and mental suffering--most of our false dilemmas--grow out of popular confusion about principles. Men feel that if they change their beliefs or arrive at unexpected conclusions or resolve their dilemmas away they are losing or compromising their principles. There is no sacrifice of principle in re-stating an issue as a result of better knowledge and insight. There is no defense of principle in a controversial spirit which cares more for partisan victory than for truthfulness. The level on which a controversy is waged is often a matter of greater importance than the victory of either side. If the victory of either means the triumph of the same irrational type of man, it makes little difference who wins. In most partisan and sectarian struggles the principle at stake--if any--is lost sight of in a mass of confusion. It frequently happens that both sides contend for the same “ideal” and base their contentions upon the same mistaken premises. In most cases men’s principles are little more than phrases which justify in their own minds their contentiousness and will to power.

An examination of its presuppositions may transform an issue into a very different sort of problem. There is, for instance, the controversy now raging in parts of America between religion and science. Many educated persons say there is no conflict between religion and science. In their own thought there may be none, because they do not mean by either of these terms what the man on the street means by them. To him religion is a system of dogma based upon divine revelation. He cannot conceive of religion without belief in the stories related in the Bible or belief in the teachings of his church. By belief he means the firm conviction that alleged historical events and miracles happened just as related. He conceives of science also as a body of doctrine according to which the specific teachings of religion are held to be untrue. Stated in these terms conflict is inevitable, a person who has scientific knowledge cannot be religious, and the issue must be fought to the end.

For the thinking mind the problem becomes a quite different one. Science is a method, not primarily a system of doctrine. It is a way of discovering truth which must be followed wherever it leads, and it presents us with the problem of how we are to value and interpret its discoveries. The problem presents itself differently from an ascending series of points of view.

A student who has grown up under traditional religious influences and has probably given the matter little thought, begins the study of natural science, biology or geology, let us say, and learns something of the evidence for the theory of evolution. He begins to speculate upon its implications. He may, as many do, strive in some manner to reconcile evolution with the account of creation set forth in the Bible. After further thought and study this simple device for reconciling science and religion may not satisfy him. He sees that something more than the reinterpretation of a text is necessary. He finds himself striving to reconcile two entirely different world-views. As a rational explanation of the world and its origin, religion is wholly incompatible with science. The student, considering that this is the function of religion, and finding that as a method of giving an account of natural processes religion fails, may discard it, and become an apostle of science, and an opponent of religion, save as a system of ethics. Persons who hold this rationalistic view of religion commonly try in turn to make a gospel of science. Religion is darkness; science is light. Religion enslaves; science liberates. Religion holds progress in check; science is the Religion of Humanity, and the triumph of Reason is the promise of the salvation of the world. This view was widely prevalent in the nineteenth century. It is the stage at which the average person with some knowledge of science breaks off and considers the problem settled. It is an honestly taken position, which often requires no small courage. I hope no one will think me an apologist for religion if I suggest that this is a rather innocent and unsophisticated attempt to solve the problem. It assumes that it is the proper function of religion to explain nature and improve the life of humanity. What a simple and straightforward affair the human spirit appears to be from this point of view. No subtle twistings and turnings, no hidden pitfalls, no twilight regions, no dark secrets.

Suppose now one were to cease expecting religion to do the explanatory task of science, and were also to cease trying to make a new religion of science, is it not likely that the conflict, or contrast, between the two might appear in altered perspective? It is possible to regard both scientific and religious concepts as symbols--figures of speech, each expressive of its exclusive values. In another study, I likened the difference between science and religion to that which exists between the two recognized symbols of the United States of America--the map and the flag. The former is the scientific symbol; it has to do with position, movement, measurement of distance. Maps exist for the intellectual and practical interest. The flag stands for the emotional interest; it has to do with certain historical associations, but is itself no guarantee of the accuracy of any historical tradition. It is poetry.

Once we grant that religion is poetry, a new set of problems emerges. Is the poetry good or bad? What valuations of the possibilities--or impossibilities--of experience are here expressed in these symbols? Which of my ideas about the world are maps and which are flags? Much of the popular conflict of religion and science arises out of general confusion on this point. A super-patriot might conceivably be such a worshipper of the flag that he would resent the disclosure of certain geographical or historical facts which would lead to revaluation of some of his emotional attitudes. Doubtless many Americans have an exaggerated and emotionally determined idea of the history if not of the geography of their country, yet it is unthinkable that they should confuse the flag with the map. But existence as a whole is not so easily surveyed, and such maps as we have of it often extend beyond the comprehension of the average man. In all lower approaches to the problem of religion, the flags which symbolize certain emotional appreciations of the universe are confused with maps of it. In his religion the average man is still an idolator, psychologically similiar to the poor heathen who cannot distinguish between his god and his wooden image. On the popular level, the conflict of religion and science is an elaborately rationalized struggle for supremacy by a type of mind which has not yet grasped the true inwardness of its emotional attitudes. While the consideration of the problem remains on this level, nothing is gained for education. There is mental grasp of the situation when the problem is re-stated in terms of the inwardness of religion and the objectivity of science. And it then becomes possible to form hypotheses which inspire further pursuit of knowledge. New knowledge leads to the better organization of knowledge previously acquired.

We have another familiar example of the educational value of displacing lower dilemmas by higher ones by examination of the presuppositions. For a generation and more many minds have been preoccupied with some aspect or other of the controversy between conservatism and radicalism. There have been so many varieties of opinion on both sides that it is impossible to make a clear-cut statement of the issue or to find any particular group or theory which is representative of either side. From the standpoint of the majority of the United States Senate, the followers of Mr. La Follette were dangerous radicals. From the standpoint of the communists these same La Follette men were conservatives, counter-revolutionaries. In general the conflict has been between those who are interested in preserving the present order of things intact together with its traditions, established institutions, privileges and inequalities, and those who favor some basic changes which they believe will remedy the situation. We will not discuss the merits of either side to this conflict. In some form or other it comes up repeatedly. It is a real issue, but the discussion of it may proceed on various levels of thought, and this fact has something to do with education. Intellectuals believe that their radicalism is the result of enlightenment, while their opponents believe that on the whole education makes for conservatism and that radicals are ignorant foreigners who have been misled by professional trouble makers. The present controversy is not conducive to education in any of its forms, or on either side. It tends to divert education from its true aims into partisan service, and to produce in both parties a fixed and unteachable type of mind. As the case is ordinarily presented, a stupid and panicky conservatism is faced by a superficial and equally intemperate radicalism.

The problem cannot be discussed intelligently, nor can the consideration of it lead to increase of knowledge, until its presuppositions are critically examined, and the whole matter is re-stated in more intelligible terms. It is these presuppositions to which I wish to call attention, for without them the controversy could not have arisen in its present forms. Although there is a great variety of these forms, the same presuppositions are common to all and are usually accepted without question by both sides. The disposition to go back and question the presuppositions is evidence that education is going on. We have some such evidence in recent years for many have modified their positions in regard to various aspects of the social problem.

More attention has been given to the changes of view among radicals than to those which have taken place among conservatives. Since events of recent years have greatly encouraged self-expression on the part of misinformed noisy extremists who appoint themselves spokesmen of the latter group, we sometimes get the impression that conservatives learn nothing. But I incline to the opinion that there has been perhaps an equal proportion of learning by the more thoughtful minority on both sides of the controversy.

Among radicals modification of views has occurred sufficiently to arouse general interest in the questions “What has become of the pre-war liberals?” “What has happened to radicalism?” A former member of the radical group some years ago wrote a book entitled “Tired Radicals,” in which he adopted the usual view that the change of outlook among radicals was the result of the loss of energy and enthusiasm which comes with middle age. But if radicalism were merely a form of youthful enthusiasm, I believe the movement would be more wide-spread than it has ever been in America. The suggestion is worth considering that in some cases the change of views might indicate that the individual has learned something. By learning I mean the better grasp of the subject which comes when one examines the presuppositions of both sides. Conversely, those who have not examined their presuppositions during the last twenty years have learned nothing. They continue talking, but they are addressing a generation that is past and gone. Anachronisms of this sort are common occurrences among conservatives. They occur with equal frequency among radicals. And when a man whose education has stopped leaves the radical movement and joins the opposition, he frequently shows himself to be not an aging prophet who has lost his enthusiasms, but the same intensely opinionated and militant person he was before.

When, therefore, I suggest that a change of attitude toward the social question may be indicative of learning, I do not mean to imply that it is the function of education to turn radicals into conservatives. Rather its function is to give the men on each side a different mental outlook. Back of the controversy as it has existed in our times there is a certain presupposed philosophy which is passing away as education increases, and its passing modifies the thinking of persons on both sides. Humanism in education is supplanting the older Humanitarianism. Interest in cultural values is supplanting the earlier naturalism. Rousseau and Bentham and Comte and D. F. Strauss and William Morris are making way for the coming social psychologists. Social philosophy becomes analytical. The sweeping generalizations of Marx and the day dreams of Bellamy begin to have interest chiefly for the historical student. Democratic dogma, little questioned in the nineteenth century, is now subjected to criticism. A different intellectual spirit is abroad which necessarily modifies the general outlook of those who share in it.

Let us note more specifically some of the presuppositions behind the Radical-Conservative dilemma. There is the Humanitarian doctrine that man is naturally good and daily growing better. All that is needed for his perfection is freedom or opportunity. This assumption is common to both parties, one holding that such opportunity is under the present system granted to all who wish to take advantage of it, the other that under the present system opportunity is granted only to the privileged few and denied to the toiling masses, who are kept down in wage slavery. All the evils of human life are attributed to the present system. Remove the evil system and everybody will be good and happy. There is much talk about “the emancipation of labor.” Both sides assume that social justice is possible, each maintaining that its own triumph is the triumph of justice. And both sides are disposed to estimate the values of civilization and the meaning of personal success in terms of material possession. The good life is the life of the man with plenty of money. We hear much of the materialism and the dominance of business interests today. Everyone is urged to get ahead. A man measures his worth by the amount of his income. Conservatives can see no ground for dissatisfaction with a system which makes for unusual prosperity. Radicals deny that prosperity is universal, say that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, interpret all history in terms of the struggle for wealth, and spread before the masses the promise of abundance with a minimum of toil. On both sides we find that easy optimism which is said to be characteristic of half-educated minds. It is assumed that the evils of the world are only superficial, that they are contingent upon purely environmental factors, and can be removed by legislation or by mass action. Progress is assured. No one doubts that a prosperous and happy life is possible to all if only wealth were properly distributed. As the control of affairs passes more and more completely into plebeian hands and as the tastes and dilemmas of mediocrity come to set standards of value, the world is supposed to be getting better.

This questionable assumption leads to distortion of fact by both parties, and must continue to do so as long as the controversy is kept on this level. I wonder what would happen if instead of merely drawing hasty inferences from these naïve assumptions, it should become the practice to examine them. Perhaps the issue might be re-stated in more significant terms. But what concerns us at present is not the social problem as such, but the fact that the attempt to clear up the intellectual muddle about it means that education is going on.

A glance at the nature of the presuppositions we have been discussing will help us to understand why it is that they are so seldom examined. They flatter. Apart from their radical or conservative implications, such ideas are congenial to the average man. They pat him on the back. It is no small satisfaction to believe that the environment is responsible for all human ills, that evil may easily be removed by mass action; that given material abundance, the good life follows automatically; that distinctions among men are reducible to economic factors; that the supremacy of our own type is the goal of progress. I believe that the level at which one’s education stops, the particular set of dilemmas in which one’s mind becomes fixed is usually determined by some self-satisfying assumption. If my ego can remain elated over the possession of an automobile, or the right to vote, or the belief that I and my kind are or ought to be socially superior, or because I can play the saxophone, or am able to resist the temptation to pick pockets, the problems which have live interest for me will be the problems which lie on these levels. I recently talked with a man who was quite pleased with himself because for some years he had not been in jail. He frequently compared the advantages and disadvantages of life “on the inside” and “on the outside.” To his mind all days and all people were thought of as “inside” or “outside,” a point of view which I imagine few people linger over or find personally gratifying. But the virtues men pride themselves on are as a rule those which compensate them for the particular vices to which they are tempted.

The house I live in had for a number of years been rented to an elderly Scotch woman who kept it as a “rooming house.” When she moved out she said to me, “I hear you are going to do this house over and make it your own home. Some day you may be sitting here and thinking, ‘What use to go on in this house of mine?’ It’ll be a satisfaction to you to know that you are in a respectable place. Never once in all the years that I rented out furnished rooms did the patrol wagon have to back up to this door at midnight.”

The things which people find consoling both reveal and determine the plane on which their thinking takes place. I have heard a young man say with a note of defiance, “Yes, sir, I’m a single-taxer and I’m proud of it.” So involved is the ego in our dilemmas that we often require the assistance of a specialist in getting over them. Psychoanalysts whose task is chiefly that of helping people face certain facts about themselves, speak of their work as re-education. In a sense all education is re-education, the untying of the knots in which our self esteem in its defense has entangled itself. Perhaps nothing is so effective a bar to education as intellectual immodesty. A man’s education stops at the point where he becomes incapable of self-criticism. And because egotism is always a bit ridiculous, the conceited mind protects itself from criticism by making its interests sublime. In the presence of the sublime, laughter is taboo. The subject concerning which man has lost his sense of humor is just the subject concerning which criticism leads to self-criticism. There are persons who cannot take a joke about “The Grand Old Party,” or the Government at Washington, or the teachings of Karl Marx. Recently a group of church men publicly denounced the New York newspapers because of their humorous remarks about prohibition. Once when I was asked for a definition of a radical I seriously offended a prominent socialist with the innocent remark that a radical is a man who loves Labor and hates work.

Lack of humor is always evidence of unteachableness. Ignorance is pompous. The holy tone with which people proclaim their convictions is uncivilized. When the American people are better educated, there will be less solemn pantomime in the land. We could not with straight faces indulge ourselves in the hysterical reforms, the bitter partisanships, religious fanaticism and race prejudice which at present show how seriously we take ourselves. Education should help people make an art of living, and the art of living, like all arts, is play. Learn to play with your ideals, even with your sublimities, and you will break the hold upon you of many a crude and hampering dilemma.