Chapter III: Part I (1)

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO HIMSELF CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

II

OUR BELIEF IN MAN YESTERDAY AND TODAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

WHAT THE WAR DID TO OUR BELIEF IN MAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

THE IRRATIONALITY OF MAN AS A LITERARY MOTIF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

HAS PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINED OUR SELF-RESPECT

The Sphinx attends a meeting of the Psychological Sodality.

The Chairman of the Meeting:

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

The Sphinx:

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

A Practicing Psychologist:

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

The Sphinx:

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

Practicing Psychologist:

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

A Biological Psychologist:

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

The Sphinx:

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

An Analytical Psychologist:

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

A Single-Track Behaviorist: