CHAPTER VIII

THE APPRECIATION OF HUMAN WORTH

I have a number of neighbors whose sons and daughters are at present suffering the agony of preparation for college. What a nightmare it is possible to make of education! Three or four years of attendance at expensive private schools where the sole aim seems to be to get the student through his college entrance examinations with a passing grade. Students terrified, parents anxiously awaiting reports of work done or not done, teachers tired out, one student fails in his Latin, another in algebra, a third is sent home because of loss of interest in study, and there are tears, family conferences, special tutors, reviews and memory drills in vacation time, until finally the student “gets through” and drops the subject, his interest in it dead.

I am not one of those who believe that education may be achieved without effort. But study is not work only, it is also a form a enjoyment. There are many things which it is a delight to know, not because such knowledge is useful or is required for a passing grade, but because it is an aid to the appreciation of value. It is fun.

There are people who attend concerts from a sense of duty, striving thereby to improve their souls, but it is possible to listen to music with no other motive than the wish to enjoy it. It is the person who enjoys music who in the end becomes the discriminating listener. The same is true of the reading of books. William James once said the classics are necessary to education because knowledge of them makes us “connoisseurs of human excellence.” Literature has a charm which is often lost when it is made “required reading.”

An intelligent boy of seventeen who was having difficulty with his school work recently said to me, “I think it is because I really am not interested, and the things I wish to know they do not teach in our school because the colleges will not give credit for them.” When I asked him what study would interest him, he replied that he thought he would like to try philosophy and requested me to suggest a good book for a beginner, declaring that he intended to take up this study in addition to his school work.

I have no doubt that had he made this request of one of his instructors he would have been told that he had better spend his time preparing his lessons. But I took a chance that his interest might be genuine, and told him that I thought he would find Plato’s “Republic” a good introduction to Philosophy, and suggested that he read the first four books. During the previous semester he had been permitted to drop one of his courses because reading was “too great a strain upon his eyes.” When I next saw the boy I inquired how he had got on with the “Republic.” He said, “Why, I found it so exciting that I did not stop at the end of the first four books, but read all ten.” When I asked him what he found interesting in the dialogues, he said, “I do not understand many of the conclusions they reached, but I enjoyed listening in on those conversations. They are so logical, and I liked the way Socrates leads the others along, springs surprises on them, and makes them see what they mean by what they say. I begin to see what the difference is between thinking and just talking--and many passages were beautiful also.” For the first time in his life, he had realized that the pursuit of knowledge could be an interesting adventure. Moreover, his parents told me that he had shown improvement in his regular studies.

When the ancients said that knowledge is knowledge of the good, they meant in part that with the increase of knowledge comes better discrimination. If education is _for_ anything it is that we learn to choose the good. By the “good” I do not mean good in general, or good as an abstraction of philosophical discourse, nor the conventionally good. I mean any excellence whatsoever. In order to see and appreciate excellence, you must yourself have struggled for it. He who has never striven to surpass himself, surrounds himself with the shoddy, the second-rate, the cheap. In matters of taste, of sentiment, of good workmanship, he cannot distinguish between that which is genuine and that which is imitation. In matters of taste there is much that is purely arbitrary and conventional, so that what is good taste in one age may be bad taste in another. Nevertheless, there is a psychological soundness in our use of the word taste to designate certain judgments of worth. It implies some degree of self-restraint, a sensitiveness to subtle stimuli which comes with the habit of giving attention to minute differences of quality. In contrast, animals which gulp down their food hastily and in great quantities do not pause to taste it. Similarly, the mind which has not disciplined itself “swallows things whole,” as we say. It is not disturbed by the incongruous or the hideous. It is sensitive only to coarser stimuli: it prefers the hackneyed, the raucous, the loud and flashy.

I once knew a church in a small town which worshipped in a plain rectangular old building with colonial windows. When a rival denomination erected a monstrous building with a huge circular stained-glass window facing the street, the group which worshipped in the old structure became dissatisfied. After much difficulty in securing the money, a committee was sent to a near-by city and purchased a quantity of gaudily-colored translucent paper similar to that one used occasionally to see on the front door of a saloon. This paper the congregation proudly pasted on its colonial window panes.

The architecture of the average church in this country and the hymns the people sing are much better indications of the level of their spiritual life than are the creeds they profess. The general cultural level of the population is revealed by the style of houses men build, the kind of furniture with which they surround themselves, the type of motion picture which becomes popular, the magazines on the news stands, the character of the journals which have the largest circulation, the “song hits” of the day, the programs which are broadcast for the radio. These things all have spiritual significance, they indicate a prevailing type of reaction toward all the values of experience.

The public is curiously indifferent to the lack of genuineness of sentiment; “hocum” and bathos; deliberate and obvious counterfeits of emotional reactions characterize practically every appeal to the general public. Think of the popularity of a play like “Abie’s Irish Rose,” or of that, a generation ago, of a song like “After the Ball,” or of a book like “The Man Nobody Knows.” Think of the typical Chautauqua lecture or political address. Think of the notorious insincerity of the motion pictures. People ask, “What is the matter with the movies?” The answer is, the audience. Half-educated people do not seem to be sensitive to the difference either between good and bad workmanship or between artistic sincerity and insincerity. Standards of value, in all the older forms of art, have been set by the knowing ones. The artist was obliged to submit his creation to the criticism of persons who had some background of tradition and general knowledge. With the quantity production methods of the motion pictures, it becomes possible for the first time to make the man on the street the critic, on whose judgment depends survival, and as the New Testament says, “By what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” In selecting our preferences we pass judgment on ourselves.

The multitude dupes itself with its desire to get something for nothing; hence its love of the miraculous. All appeals to it are thus over-capitalized, and made to appear grand and glorious. Shirking the effort necessary for real achievement leads to the preference of quackery. There is a story that a physician who had yielded to the temptation to make easy money by advertising himself as the discoverer of a magic remedy for disease, received a call from a former friend and colleague who disapproved of the practice. When the visitor sought to persuade him that such methods would not pay, the other stepped to the window and said, “Come now, look with me at the faces of the people passing along the street; how many of them do you think would become your patients and how many mine?” I am told by a professor of biology who gives a pre-medical course in a Western university that less than a third of the cases of sickness in the country are treated by reputable members of the medical profession.

I have been somewhat interested in the popularization of psychology. On the occasion of a visit to a great public library, I was assured by the librarian that there was a tremendous popular demand for books which deal with the subject of psychology. I was shown a section in which these books were kept so that they would be easily accessible. The greater number were written by persons who had no knowledge of the subject. They were utterly misleading. Psychology was commonly presented as a wonderful, easily practiced device for performing miracles, a system of secret formulae for curing disease, for getting into harmony with the divine source of all being, for manipulating the “subconscious” in ways that assured peace, prosperity, self-mastery, and power over others. I think it is a conservative statement to say that nine-tenths of the stuff that bears the name “Psychology” in popular magazines devoted to the subject, in widely advertised books, in lectures and correspondence courses in self-improvement, is pure charlatanism and sleight-of-hand arranged for those who wish to indulge themselves in systematic self-deception. It is not mere lack of information which causes people to prefer the cheap. With respect to the things of the mind, people have various standards of living.

A teacher of economics says that by a person’s standard of living we mean to designate those things which he insists upon having even if it is necessary to give up marriage and parenthood to possess them. However much people may desire and strive for comfort and abundance, from the standpoint of economics, those who marry and beget children in poverty have a low standard of living. Hence the standard is not directly a function of the amount of per capita wealth, but is psychologically determined. And the standard often applies to other things besides material possession. Persons who have a high standard are often poor. They might easily turn their efforts to the acquiring of wealth, but they will deprive themselves and postpone marriage for the sake of some cultural interest, education, a scholarly or literary career. They will go without a motor car in order to have money to buy books. It would be interesting to make a comparative study of the families of college professors and certain groups of artisans, who have about the same income as that of the average professor, in order to see which type had the greater number of children, and which sent the greater number of their young people to college, also which possessed the greater number of automobiles or radios. Thus the standard of living applies not to what one wishes to possess, but to what one is willing to pay for a certain kind of living. It has to do with quality, not mere quantity. This principle applies to intellectual standards of value. People are content with the second-rate because it is easier.

With learning there comes a new reverence. Perhaps I might speak of it as the educated man’s faith. Respect for the excellent is possible only to a mind which has learned to recognize distinctions of worth. An undiscriminating multitude clings to its idols or substitutes new idolatries for old precisely because it is blind to those differences of value which constitute the meaning of existence for mankind. People seek something “given” to believe in, some universal formula of salvation, because they are unable to distinguish the relative worth of concrete experiences actual or possible. Those who shrink from the responsibility of their own yes or no take refuge in an imaginary _cosmic_ yes and no. But ground your faith in the difference between the better and the worse, and you have a faith which grows stronger with the increase of knowledge. All other “faiths” grow weaker because they are substitutes and evasions, futile attempts to possess value without the exercise of discrimination.

If existence as a whole has a purpose or a universal meaning, I do not see how our minds could know it, or what use it could ever be to the mind that grasped it. I have tried to show that our thoughts and beliefs are _human ways_, that our thinking is partial. As James said, all meanings depend upon the fact that we are “interested spectators” and prefer some things to others. Aside from our human interests and preferences, everything being so far as we can see equally inevitable, has the same degree of existence, or right to be, and all is equally important. Nothing then has any special importance. And if nothing is important, nothing has any meaning. It might be said that each thing has meaning for the whole. But since the whole lies beyond our ken, such a statement does not help us much. The world of meanings and of truths therefore does not have an independent existence but is related to our preferences and is a human creation. I am not, however, at present concerned with the problem of the meaning of truth. Truth is itself a value. I am trying to state a simple creed by which a man may best order his life and discover that which an intelligent mind may reverence. It is, “I believe in the distinction of worth.”

The loss of belief in distinction turns both society and the world of values upside down. It is symptomatic of the dominance of mediocrity. With the degradation of power there is a corresponding degradation of value. The power which rules the modern world is the power of numbers. Many will say it is the power of money. This too is a numerical force, having nothing to do with quality or the discrimination of value: the possession of money does not as such lift the possessor out of the mass. There is much talk about the conflict of the masses with the capitalists, but since on both sides the struggle is one for economic advantage rather than for spiritual value, it may be regarded merely as the conflict between successful and unsuccessful mass units over a common interest. Money power and the power of numbers are not really a confrontation of contrasting valuations of the possibilities of experience. On both sides the conflict is waged on about the same level and for identical ends. Capitalism is not really the foe of democracy, it is democracy’s first-born child. The self-made successful business man is the “success” in democratic society, its ideal. He is what the mass as a whole strives to become. Some people think this is individualism. Infrequently it is, usually it is not. Dollars still are numbered, and money power is the power of numbers. Its power is the same as concentrated mass power, since it is of this same order. We speak of “amassing” money. The mass idea and the ideals of the mass prevail all round. Capitalism holds sway by virtue of its mass appeal, and by virtue of the fact that the capitalist is the realization of the average man’s ambition. The mass because it is powerful and can grant or withold favors, lords it over the realm of values. Emphasis is laid upon that which produces an identical type of reaction in a maximum number of people. The commonplace is rated high because it is the average.

The rare, the unique, the excellent, cannot be syndicated and drops out of consideration. The standards which prevail are those of undifferentiated men. Mass appeal asserts the equal importance of all individuals, as if a man’s worth consisted in his mere “number-oneness.” This is the democratic dogma of equality. Critics of the dogma frequently say that it represents the foolish attempt to declare all men equal in all respects. I doubt this. It seems to me that this dogma is perfectly correct so far as it goes. It declares all men to be equal _before the law_. And law is no respecter of persons, hence all men are equal before that which does not respect their personalities. Which is to say that all men are equal in one respect--that each is a numerical unit when he is considered as a member of the mass. It is not denied that men may be unequal in other respects. The point is that these “other respects” do not get a hearing. But the only recognition of the individual that amounts to anything is that which recognizes the differences of one from another.

When we emphasize excellence, good workmanship, sincerity, ability, virtue, wisdom, we have in mind matters concerning which the differences among men are the differences between superiority and inferiority. Hence discrimination of value is recognition of distinctions of worth among men. Lose sight of distinctions of worth--of the very desirability of distinction as a social good--and all values decline to the level of mediocrity.

In the supremacy of man as mass the mediocre man, he who in all things corresponds to type, and is most reducible to average, is King. For him books and journals are published; clergymen and editors speak for him and say what they think he believes; laws are made in his interest. Programs for the radio and motion pictures are made to please him. His dilemmas are held up as the dilemmas of every one. His goods become the standards to which all are expected to conform. He has purchasing power and he has votes. He can make and unmake heroes. He determines the direction of the course of events in his day and generation. Society moves in the direction of the type of man about whom there is most general concern, the man whose preferences set the pace.

The goal set by “modern ideas” would seem to be not the attainment of a higher level of values, not greater personal worth among men, but the more complete supremacy of man as mass. Recognition of personal worth is discouraged, for it necessitates the admission that some persons are by nature, or as a result of effort, superior to others. Such an admission is contrary to the idealization of the mass, which is the worship of the power of numbers. Personal distinction is frowned upon and discounted. Differences of superiority or inferiority are, if grudgingly admitted, said to be the result not of difference in native endowment or of individual achievement, but mere products of environment. Hence human excellence is an accident.

There is a wide-spread tendency to minimize and deny the significance of personality. An advanced school of psychology holds that belief in the existence of personality is a superstition. Personality is simply the way the nervous organization works and is similar to the running of a gas engine. Any hereditary differences of capacity or of teachableness are negligible. All individual traits are reducible to conditioned reflexes which are what they are because of the coincidence of certain stimuli. I am what I am because somebody co-operating with the environment conditioned me in this way. I have absolutely nothing to do with the matter. Consciousness, interest, attention, will, have no place in this psychology. The same may be said of all attempts to explain the phenomena of life in mechanistic terms. Historic movements are explained as if individuals had nothing to do with them. Social change is said to be the product of impersonal economic forces, and progress the result of mass action. Thus the Great Man at best only represents the mass tendencies of his times. Even for discoveries in science and creative achievement in the arts, the mass is given credit although it may have resisted these things when they were new.

I believe that such attempts to _depersonalize_ humanity are consciously or unconsciously motivated by the wish to avoid the recognition of the possibility of superiority in an age when the values of civilization are largely committed to the tender custody of man acting as mass in the struggle for power. Whether distinctions of worth are recognized or not, deny that they may exist, deny that men may have greater or less worth in themselves, and human achievement becomes merely the attainment of bodily comfort, or social power, or satisfaction of egoistic desires. There are many who would hold that such is the case. But our existence is not measured by what we can get or what we can do, but by what with our getting and doing we may _become_. Mankind differs from other animals not merely in getting and doing, man is himself different, and is more than they. It is in this that his evolution is seen. The same is true of the individuals in the mass; some are more in themselves than others. So obvious a truth would never require statement except in a standardized, crowd-manipulating age in which there is much that encourages the inferior to abound.

I am not suggesting that we devise some plan for picking out all the superior individuals for preferment and honor, or that we weed out the inferior ones by some process of elimination, or that the educated man should or could pose as a superior person. He who must make an effort to exhibit any excellence has attained little of it. If the world is spiritually right side up, people will be selected by the standards of value that prevail. When you buy a newspaper, vote a party ticket, go to a theatre, listen to a lecture, read a book, express a moral sentiment or show any preference whatever, you are doing more than just that thing. Our daily choices determine what we ourselves become, and they do something else also; the total of them has survival value for some particular type of man. We are thus daily deciding whose dilemmas shall determine the quality of living, and what kind of human life is to be lived on this planet, and who shall thrive and who shall perish.

Human progress is not something we achieve directly by joining a movement and forcing our convictions upon others. It is something we help determine every day in the choices we make. The elements of it come like the variations which appear in the structure of plants and animals. And as Darwin said it is the function of the environment, in causing modifications of species, to select certain variants for survival and to eliminate others; so also in the progress of civilization do our daily preferences operate. Natural selection and primitive custom operate blindly and automatically and without reason. It is because education improves judgment and the appreciation of value that Thomas Davidson spoke of it as “conscious evolution.”

The education of a people at any time is its answer to the riddle of life. This answer is more than giving an account of the processes of nature; it is the opening and closing of doors upon the possibilities of experience--and upon various human types. Thus education is selective. It is the sifting out of the relative worth of men. It finds the significance of living to be the struggle for excellence. Its goal is a higher type of living man and woman. Its great task therefore, in the modern world, is the reassertion of the _inequalities_ which mass appeal ignores, the rediscovery for the modern spirit of the distinction between superiority and inferiority. It is impossible to lift any mind from a lower to a higher plane when that which distinguishes one plane from another is obliterated by placing all on a level. Appreciation of distinctions of worth is an essential of a liberal education, as it is of the whole spiritual life of man.