Chapter VI: Part II: This Disillusionment Is Itself Illusory (2)

The remark was made, a little way back, that fellowship with children produces respect for their native qualities. Some evidence of the correctness or incorrectness of this statement ought to be discoverable in the attitudes of teachers and in the practices of schools. The teacher becomes acquainted with many children of different types; is less liable than a parent to be swayed by emotions that deflect the judgment; is in a situation that calls for professional study and attitudes in the matter. The trained teachers, then, and the schools that make the largest study of the problems of education may be expected to accumulate experience and views that have some significance. Now, it is safe to say that today no school that is modern or even intelligently managed is conducted upon the assumption that children at any age are merely instinctive creatures. Moreover, in the schools in which experimentation is most free and pervasive, you will find an abounding belief in children, and no spirit of disillusionment with respect to adults. You will find criticism of adult society, great dissatisfaction with it, to be sure; but on what ground? On the ground that the traditional, conventional treatment of the young represses, retards, covers up, and thus defeats the splendid capacities that are within us.

It is noteworthy that the schools and schoolmen who make this charge do thereby place themselves under obligation to make a concrete showing of what can be done by better education. What happens when schooling is guided by this glowing faith in man? Does the faith grow brighter and brighter, or does it check itself by its own failure to work? It is my opinion that the actualities of human nature are receiving more illumination at the present moment in the experimental schools than anywhere else. Let us take a glance or two, then, in this direction.

XIII

CAPACITIES REVEALED BY NEW TYPES OF EDUCATION

The same two decades that showered us with mental tests witnessed also the upspringing of many schools that are variously designated by such terms as “modern,” “experimental,” and “creative activity.” Creative activity, as a description of what pupils do when they are at school, is an arresting notion. It obviously assumes with respect to pupils’ capacities something different from popular thought about them, and different, too, from the traditions of the schoolmaster. The school policy that it connotes includes provision for an unprecedented degree of both negative freedom (absence of compulsion) and positive freedom (abundance of materials with which to work and natural situations to be met by the pupils’ own initiative). Observation of pupils placed in conditions thus favorable for the showing out of what is in them may be expected to throw light upon the motives and the capacities of human beings.

The testing movement has had the effect of stressing “nature” rather than “nurture” as the great determinant of conduct--over-stressing it, indeed. But the creative type of school-experience yields data that help towards a balanced understanding of the factors. In general, this experience tends to make both nature and nurture stand out; the old bipolarity of heredity-environment, nature-nurture, remains, but both poles are illuminated. This type of school makes obvious the differences in native gifts, but it shows likewise that conditions created by adults have prevented us from knowing what gifts are there.

Whenever a given sort of conduct is oft-repeated, our first, incautious impulse is to guess that the conduct in question is produced by some specific quality or bent of one’s original nature. The absence, or even the great infrequency of anything, is taken, similarly, as evidence that there is a vacant place in one’s nature. Thus a bad mental habit, a fallacious mode of judging, gets control of us. “It’s his nature,” we say, not stopping to consider whether the whole of his capacity or only a fraction of it has been displayed. What the experimental schools are doing is to bring into action capacities that commonly are under-exercised and therefore not recognized as existing.

These schools are proving that there is more in human nature than we had dreamed of in our philosophy. The method of the proof is, in principle, simple: Make conditions favorable for the maximum voluntary exercise of any and all worth-while capacities that may possibly be there. When this is done, behold, pupils “take an interest in” many things that have been regarded as beyond their range. We are finding out that teaching of the traditional sorts has habitually aimed under the heads rather than over the heads of pupils. An intellectual springiness that teachers and parents failed to discover or produce by the methods of prescription, spontaneously appears under the new conditions. Conduct now occurs that is better by far than old-type schools ever thought of requiring or even recommending.

All this throws light upon the motives of men. In brief, this is the trend of the facts: _First_, a surprising degree of rationality has appeared. That is, children and youth are showing remarkable capacity for the apprehension of problems, the weighing of facts, the holding of judgment in suspense, caution in generalizing, readiness to revise one’s own findings, and ability to resist suggestion and external authority. _Second_, equally surprising social capacities come to the surface. Pupils show not merely ability to run the machinery of a self-government scheme devised by teachers, but also readiness to feel situations and needs, to originate solutions, to carry responsibilities, to organize and cooperate, to appreciate both justice and generosity, and to make self-corrections. _Third_, to the originality that is involved in all this there is added amazing creativeness in literature, drawing, and painting.

If this were a discussion of educational method, we should now inquire, of course, into the specific procedures of the schools and the teachers that have these effects upon pupils. But the technic of teaching is not our present concern. What is directly to our purpose is the demonstration that schools and teachers of the older, customary sort did not bring out the whole nature of their pupils. Indeed, the schools of yesterday concealed, retarded, distorted, smothered some of the most valuable gifts, thereby unwittingly contributing to the forces that have produced the present sense of disillusionment with respect to human nature.

It is worthy of particular note that the “creative activity” schools are discovering capacities other than those usually classed as intellectual. It is much that the young take an interest in abstract and bookish knowledge; it is more that they take the attitudes and employ the processes of science with reference to natural events; but beyond this, and of greatest significance, is capacity to adjust human relations in thoughtful, high-minded, and sometimes original ways. Only a few years ago an incident like the following would have astonished any teacher, but today it seems only “natural.” A group of children, engaged in play-activities that involved construction-work, discovering that merely impulsive conduct interfered with their purposes, called a meeting, devised a government, and actually administered it effectively. Not the least instructive feature of this incident is that these children, when their own information did not suffice, voluntarily sought help from a teacher.

Such fresh and keen practicality in attacking the problems of social living in the school is often extended into the problems of the larger community also. Instances are multiplying in which community service of great value has been done by the young upon their own initiative (with the constant help of teachers, of course). Not only have children shown eager willingness to relieve immediate distress; they have penetrated to the causes of one or more common infectious diseases, and have mastered some of the methods of prevention; they have worked intelligently and devotedly at the problem of parks and playgrounds; they have cooperated with police departments and fire departments. And in and through the whole there are glints of creativeness. Genuine creativeness, not merely naïveté that happens now and then to make a happy hit.

The creativeness of the young adds to our knowledge of ourselves a touch more thrilling than that of romance, and it suggests fascinating outlooks for the future. The ruts that exist almost everywhere in our conduct have heretofore constituted the staple evidence concerning the nature of man. More than once already we have noticed how prone men are to take habitual performance as a measure of possible performance. Conventionality, it seems, always claims that it is more than conventionality; it makes itself out to be a forthright utterance of original, unchangeable human nature, or even a requirement of ethical obligation and the will of God. What a happy reversal of all this might occur if schools generally should cultivate in their pupils the ability to get out of ruts as well as to get into them. It is conceivable that society might ultimately include in its regular expectations a genuinely original, self-transcending, non-conformity and re-creation.

The most astounding piece of educational literature that has appeared in many a day is Mearns’s _Creative Youth_ (New York, 1925). It is an account of the teaching of literature to pupils of high-school age through the unified experience of appreciation and creation. Yes, creation of literature, not ‘exercises in composition.’ The evidence is here in a collection of real poems thus produced. The inventiveness displayed in them is almost unbelievable; the insight into life shown by several of the young poets is a mystery that calls for solution; but the poems are undeniably poems, undeniably original, some of them worthy (literary critics being judges) to stand alongside the best that the recognized poets of our day have produced.

What is the explanation of this wonder? Mr. Mearns answers that he merely made conditions favorable for full self-expression. There was free appreciation, favorable or unfavorable, of the literature of past and present, no one’s honest judgment being rebuked or authoritatively overridden. There was a cooperative spirit that enabled the pupils to profit from the judgments that they passed upon one another’s productions--criticism did not quench the flame. There was help from the teacher in the way of information about literary technic, and in the way of encouragement to self-respect and self-confidence as well as self-judgment. Individuality, rather than conformity of any kind, received constant applause. This class had its setting in a school that favors just these things. All this Mr. Mearns makes evident, but he insists that these conditions and methods merely clear the way for a creative urge that is present, he is sure, in children and youth generally. He finds that small children make attempts at original creation, but hide the product away, and fail to develop the self-confidence and the practice that alone can bring their original powers to fruitage. The point of all this is the naturalness of free creation of beauty. Man is by nature a creator of beauty!

Parallel with Mearns’s book may be placed, as further and possibly equal evidence of creative capacity in the young, the April-May-June, 1926 issue of _Progressive Education_ (Washington, D. C.). It contains many reproductions, mostly in colors, of original pictures made by children. In these child-productions there is vastly more than imitation. One’s breath is taken away again and again, indeed, by the seizure and vivid presentation of what is characteristic in a scene or in a person; or, one is thrilled by the child-artist’s subtle realization of just where lies the beauty of the object represented. As a consequence we have here something beyond mere representation, something more significant than technic learned from a teacher. We find here insight (the product of originality in observation), and self-expression that, being neither conventional nor merely generic but individual, is truly creative.[4]

These poems and pictures are, of course, not the average productions of their young authors, and the young authors themselves probably have native talent considerably above the average. We must not make haste to infer that children in general might reach this precise level of performance. Nevertheless, we must not dismiss these unusual productions by merely muttering “IQ.” They are not to be thought of as the work of children who are freaks, or (in the biological sense) sports. This is school work, produced in the ordinary routine of the day. Schools always have had in them pupils whose intelligence-quotient was high, but somehow the schools of yesterday had no such product to show.

It is clear, then, that generation after generation can come and go without discovering its own children. Without discovering, not only what its ablest are capable of, but the others also. For it is altogether probable--the newer sorts of school are accumulating evidence all the time--that conditions that raise the performance of gifted children raise the performance, also, of the rank and file.

This ray of light, shining out of a few new-type schools, illuminates to some extent the whole problem of adult society, both its capacities and the way to bring them to fruition. There is no reason in the nature of things or in the nature of man why the creativeness that is fostered in schools should not be fostered also in the larger society. We need only make general the conditions that teachers are creating in schools. This would involve the reversal of a habit that custom transmits from age to age--a habit that I shall make bold to call the psychical inbreeding of adults. By this I mean that it is traditional for adults to segregate themselves as a supposedly self-sufficient portion of society and to draw their standards, their expectations, and their stimuli from among themselves. Through this inbreeding it comes to pass that each generation of grown-ups becomes the spiritual successor of the preceding generation of grown-ups, whereas it should be the spiritual successor and heir of its own childhood.

Perhaps the younger portion of society will yet release us from our disillusionment.

XIV

SMALLNESS IN GREAT MEN AND GREATNESS IN SMALL MEN

If your peace of mind depends upon your being able to bestow unmixed admiration upon the great men and the great deeds of our national or racial past, think twice before you read the present dominant types of history, biography, and character-delineation. For they are subjecting halos to spectrum-analysis! The result is that we are compelled, time after time, to qualify the approvals that are traditional with us, and to tone down our reverence. How “human,” after all, were these men and these deeds that we had supposed to be so far removed from mere us. How naïve or even gullible were many of our old attachments. We are tempted to become cynical and to feel ourselves disillusioned.

But it is possible, where feelings are so actively involved, to jump from the frying pan into the fire, exchanging an illusion of nothing but greatness in our heroes for an illusion of nothing but meanness. What the critical methods are showing is that motives are mixed in both the greatly good and the greatly bad, as well as in us who are neither the one nor the other. And the obverse of the discovery of smallness in great men is the clearer and clearer demonstration of greatness in small men. That is, the more objective and merciless our analysis of men is, the more do particular qualities stand out in their own light, and the more sharp become the contrasts. The lesson of the new biography is not, “All men are alike,” but “Look for the particulars.”

Until a few years ago, when researches began to be made into the psychology of “transfer of training,” we lacked means for understanding the coexistence of opposite qualities in the same personality. Worldly-wise observers knew that motives are mixed, but how they came to be mixed, how ethical contradictories can endure the presence of each other, and why the good influence of home, school, and church have such equivocal results--all this was a matter of guess-work.

Some of this guess-work, taking the form of theology, accounted for our contradictory selves by the theory that God and the devil, or the Divine Spirit and human depravity, are at war in each of us. But this did not explain the complacency with which a man can be good and bad, great and small, at the same time. The easy way for thought was to place each man in some broad category and then either ignore conduct that did not fall into it, or else find excuses or sophistical explanations. A man was either a Christian or a non-Christian _as a whole_, it was assumed. If he was a Christian, his un-Christlike conduct was assigned to a dim region of thought and then often conveniently forgotten; if he was a non-Christian, his Christlike conduct was the part assigned to this limbo and then forgotten.

Corresponding to this theology there was a naturalistic interpretation of man that ran to the effect that human nature is essentially low, or at least selfish and tricky, and that our virtues are either refined and far-seeing selfishness, or else a mere cloak of respectability. The dim region of thought in this instance, as in the theological judgment upon non-Christians, was that in which moral purity, strength, or greatness seemed spontaneously to spring from within the man.

Into this thought-situation came experimental psychology, taking to pieces these complex mental facts instead of interpreting them by broad concepts that are more or less speculative. Why, it asked, are the spelling papers of a given school pupil scrupulously neat, but his arithmetic-papers slovenly? The same pupil is actually both neat and not neat! How is it that a child humanely reared so that in his maturity he is sensitive to the pleasures and pains of his kin, his neighbors, and even the lower animals, exhibits also insensitiveness to the weal and woe of his competitors or his employes? The same man is kindly, yet cruel! How can one who has been trained to strict honesty of thought by mathematical study be evasive and untrustworthy? Nay, how is it that one can sincerely believe obviously contradictory doctrines, as that God is infinitely benevolent as well as infinitely wise and powerful, and yet sends into eternal torment persons whom He himself has created and sustained in existence up to the moment of their doom?

The upshot of research into this problem is--some technicalities omitted--the proof that training or experience can have a wider or narrower “spread” according to the components or the method of it. Training to neatness can be narrowly directed to spelling papers, or it can be so handled that some effect upon arithmetic papers also will appear. There is no general trait of neatness; there are, rather, neatnesses, though these may be brought into the unity of a common ideal and habit. Similarly, there is no general quality of kindliness or cruelty that presides over all one’s human relations. The man whom we index as humane can be hard as flint; the one whom we have set down as unfeeling can perform acts of delicate or heroic kindness. So with honesty. Pupils who habitually cheat in one subject resist temptation to cheat in other subjects or in games. What wonder, then, that sincere belief in obvious contradictories occurs? As there is no general trait of honesty, so there is no “faculty” of reason that spreads itself equally through all our intellectual activities. But more or less generalization does occur in both thought and conduct, and whether it shall be more or whether it shall be less is partly in our keeping. We can train ourselves to participate in broad issues and ideals, we can form a habit of noticing the elements in new situations so that we see what principle applies, and we can discipline ourselves into paying the price of an organized personality.

We have no reason, then, to suppose that a man who is great in one respect will be great or good in all respects, nor, conversely, to suppose that a man who is small in several ways will be small in all his ways. There is as yet no really all ’round education or all ’round experience; we do not yet know how much can be done by schools or homes to provide such education or experience.

This little excursion into the borders of psychology should enable us to render fair judgment upon current types of disillusioning biography. To the extent that a biographer burrows into weaknesses under the assumption that the worst in a man is the real clue to him--to this extent the supposedly enlightened writer reproduces the wholesale naturalism that endeavored to offset the equally wholesale theology. Such biography is pre-psychological. On the other hand, why should we object to the publication of any well-authenticated fact concerning any public character? We have every reason to expect that minute scrutiny will reveal some sort of smallness in any great man. What we should beware of is the obscuring of what is admirable by the dust that goes into the air when these smallnesses are dug out.

That hero-worship has had a setback is not a matter for regret, but rather for congratulation. For not only was it careless of historical truth, but it separated from us those who are of us, making us feel unduly inferior to good men, and (as the psychoanalyst would say with some show of reason) making a false compensation for our own defects by adulation of men who were supposed not to have them.

There are other reasons, too, for rejoicing at the growth of realistic methods in the appraisals of men. For it is not merely historical distance that creates illusion, but social distance also, and likewise interests that are served by making distances appear where they do not exist. Let me speak without reserve. The achievement of success in any commonly accepted sense of “success” ordinarily produces self-gratulation of an expansive sort. That is, one attributes to oneself admirable qualities other than those that produced the success. Jack Horner said “What a big boy am I!” Moreover, the successful man’s neighbors, too, admire the whole man instead of merely the particular acts and qualities that bring him into notice. Thus it is that practically any successful man is overestimated by both himself and his contemporaries.

In the same way, distinctions of birth, wealth, and official position automatically inflate themselves. Even in societies that count themselves democratic there is an astonishing amount of kow-towing to station. Yesterday Mr. X was nothing but a politician, a leader of a party or of a section of a party. His own maneuvers and those of his friends having secured for him nomination for a high office, he began now to be more remote from the common. Rumors that a great and wise man had been discovered blew over the land with every breeze. But even this campaign puffiness was a slight thing in comparison with the size that the man seemed to take on after he was seated in a chair of state. There was now not only deference to his office, but also breathless watching for his every next word or move, as though he were the arbiter of destiny; and this--let it be noted--was not chiefly fear of his power; it was belief in his true greatness, wisdom, and goodness. Though no act of outstanding ability or courage could be credited to him; though he had neither eloquence, nor wit, nor marked idiosyncrasy; though he lacked even the picturesqueness of the adventurer; yet was he, for the time being, taken to be one of the great characters of history. Two factors, of course, worked together to create this impression: On the one hand, politico-economic propaganda, which found it more useful to exalt a leader than to argue a policy; and on the other hand, on the part of the populace, inherited assumptions that there is a great distance between the ruler and the ruled, and that the greatness of one’s country somehow passes over to the leaders of its affairs.

What is needed here is realistic, analytic thinking upon authentic data as to the specific acts of a leader. Such thinking upon such data is bound to deflate some reputations. When we look for the particulars, thrones and bishoprics and large places in the sun lose their awesomeness. To the reasonably cautious mind, common acclaim is unimpressive; one has discovered the social assumptions and influences that too often are back of it.

Nevertheless, if we are not to fall into a disillusionment that is speculative or subjective; if we are not to make sweeping generalizations from picked facts, this critical mood must not forthwith reduce the greatly good personages of history or of the present to the mean and the commonplace. They will henceforth have less mythological and legendary set-apartness; they will be more like plain us (a mixture of qualities), but we shall not have a flat landscape. Yonder researcher in science or history may be not a whit wiser in a thousand respects than his next-door neighbor; even in his laboratory and his library lower and higher motives may jostle each other, but in sheer fairness and objectivity we must perceive that a high end that he labels “truth” lures him on, restrains contrary motives, and rewards him from within itself. The artist who believes in his art against the odds of conventionalized criticism; the medical man who, as practitioner or as researcher, never swerves from the main purpose of the utmost increase of health; the social worker who really “believes in people”--in the human as such--when social prejudices make this belief costly; the religious prophet who at the expense of persecution or crucifixion calls upon us to lift up our eyes from our pettiness to the coming Kingdom of God--these are true specimens of what the human can be and sometimes is in point of motivation.

Between the more creative, or the more favorably placed, of these persons and the common run of men there is no gap or partition in the matter of motives. When we achieve a deep acquaintance with men, though we realize as never before the extent of their foibles, we come upon a residuum that evokes our respect. But deep acquaintance means something far more intimate and therefore insightful than our classifying devices. Of course, no one who exercises coercion understands those whom he coerces, and whoever exploits men is blinded by his point of view. A mere observer, moreover, an outsider standing aloof, may perceive more clearly than others do a part of what is going on in his fellows, yet his very aloofness, because it places inhibitions upon those whom he inspects, defeats his quest. Hence it is that the generalizations of the “hard-boiled” are never quite convincing to persons who live in friendly, cooperative relations with one another. The greater authorities upon what the common man is capable of wanting are those enlightened souls whose un-self-seeking unreserve and participation in the neighbor’s hopes and fears, and ups and downs, thaw out the ordinary barriers between man and man. Now, almost universally those who have had the widest experience in dealing with men on this basis of intimacy have the firmest faith in humanity. I do not mean sentimentalists who indulge humanitarian emotions at a distance, nor yet lovers who may--or may not--deceive themselves by over-idealization, but persons like some social workers whom anyone could name who unite a cool head with a warm heart. They, if anybody, should be disillusioned, for they, more often than the rest of us, witness frailty and frustration close at hand, yet they are most unshakenly respectful of the common man.

XV

THE MIXED MOTIVES OF BUSINESS

It is necessary to distinguish between the qualities of the industrial system and the qualities of the men who run it. It is true that they have created it, that they endeavor to express themselves in it, and that they interpret themselves by their own creation; but it does not follow that they have succeeded particularly well in expressing themselves, or that their interpretation of themselves is adequate.

There was a time when our ancestors expressed themselves in idols, the work of their own hands and imaginations, and interpreted themselves thereby, even offering human sacrifice as a normal part of the system. But we know that the wants of these worshippers outran the prayers that, for the time being, they were able to frame. The man was better than his religion.

May it not be that industrial man is better than industrialism? And if so, is it not conceivable that the mechanism of business that now tyrannizes over us as ancient religions tyrannized over their worshippers may yet go through transformations as profound as those that separate the Druid from the believer in ethical monotheism?

The gravitation of the _system_, we have seen, is towards a depressing view of human nature, and unquestionably the system is to some extent forming men in its own image. But even as they yield to economic custom, they make excuses for yielding, and they hunt up excuses for the system that coerces them just as the idols of old coerced our ancestors. Such a system is as imperfect an index of the nature of man as would be a motor car running away down a hill because the brakes have been allowed to get out of order. In such a car human nature is both represented and misrepresented.

If, under such terms as “love of money,” “desire for gain,” “profit motive,” or “economic motive,” we think to explain the “go” of business, we shall be caught in an abstraction or over-simplification. It is as if one were to say that the reason why any man buys an automobile is that he desires to ride rather than walk. This is not misleading, but it is abstract and inadequate. The experience of riding, it is true, may beget a desire simply to ride and ride, and similarly the experience of making money may become a source of direct satisfaction; but any concrete situation is almost certain to be far less simple than this. The motives of business--later we shall see whether the same is true of the worker--are decidedly mixed. Let us see.

The vast majority of those who employ capital for the making of profits mingle their own daily labor in an intimate way with their capital. A truck-driver who owns his own truck; a small grocer who lives at the back of his grocery; a fisherman who owns his own nets and a “one-lunger” motorboat--what is the economic motive in their case? It is scarcely distinguishable from the motives of a skilled workman who makes no profits, but receives wages only. Enough for the family to eat; a comfortable home; opportunities for the children; recognition by one’s fellows as amounting to something; a chance at amusements and recreations (to own a radio-set and a motor-car, of course), and--very important--security against sickness and old age--these are the meanings of prosperity for such small capitalists, at least the fundamental and primary meanings.

One of these meanings, as desire for security, may become dominant; or secondary meanings may arise, as wanting to outdistance a particular competitor; and the individual may so identify himself with the mechanism of his occupation that his establishment becomes practically an end in itself. So complicated, and so modifiable, is the economic drive in its more simple and human aspects.

At the higher points in the scale of possessions and of power we see the same fundamental motives at work, but in changed proportions and with different proliferations. Some drives decrease or disappear simply because there is now a regular and abundant supply for the wants involved. When wealth comes, one no longer bothers much about mere necessities; instead, one reaches out for luxuries, for variety, or for intangible goods such as “standing” in “society” or in financial circles.

The desire for security, rather paradoxically, appears to grow rather than become quiescent when insecurity of the primary type recedes. The reason is that the possessor tends to identify himself and his family with his “pile,” so that whenever the “pile” increases, not only is there more to protect against shrinkage, but there is also a bigger-seeming self to feel the loss. It is said that perhaps no other single motive plays as large a part in the minds of the financially already-strong as longing to get safely above the buffets of circumstance--to be utterly secure. But how much must one accumulate if one is to be superior to the vicissitudes of fortune? In the words of Harry Lauder, “When is a man fu’? Eh? Eh?” I protect what I have by adding a financial outpost; then this requires protection. Thus the motive of security transforms itself into the policy of increasing possessions without limit.

Oddly enough, one of the motives of religion also is desire to be safe in a changing and largely unpredictable world.

I have been young, and now am I old;
Yet have I never seen the righteous man forsaken,
Nor his children begging bread.

The Lord is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear
Even though the earth be removed
And the mountains be cast into the sea.

Be not anxious ... for your Heavenly Father understands that
ye have need of these things.

All things are yours.

From facts like these some persons have drawn the conclusion that unquenchable thirst for possessions is in reality “thirst for the Infinite” mistaking its own nature.

Another factor or phase of the motivation of business is thirst for power. But this, in turn, is not a single or uniform thing; it is complex and variable. What is it to experience power and to rejoice in it? It is to be able to express oneself; to have the experience of being a cause; to exercise some specific talent; to be noticed of men, or followed by them; to construct or create something, or to cause something to grow, and to have it to contemplate and to show to others (whether as farmer, breeder, artizan, author, artist, builder of a business or of a fortune); to feel stimulated instead of depressed in the face of obstacles; to feel that what one is doing is a game, a “sporting proposition”; to be fascinated by the everlasting “beyond”; to be thrilled by such an onward pull as a mountain climber feels who cannot be satisfied with any attained peak as long as a higher one is visible. Economic power may mean any of these; it may mean, too, possessing the means to do some desired thing outside the business, as patronizing art or learning, or carrying out a pet philanthropy.

When the economic motive takes the form of thirst for power, how like some of the motives of religion it becomes!

They that trust in the Lord shall renew their strength.
They shall mount up with wings as eagles;
They shall run and not be weary:
They shall walk and not faint.

I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.

On the other hand, the power-motive can include, often does include, desire for mastery over the personality of others, and pugnacity or even destructive fury when they resist or stand in the way. Desire for selfhood and for mastering and creatively reconstructing the conditions of life, taken socially (_our_ selves, _our_ world), is the heart of ethical living; but, taken egoistically, it nurtures conceit, self-will, ruthlessness, and the illusion that achieved strength can satisfy by inbreeding with itself without creating beauty, or discovering truth, or promoting fellowship.

The motivation of the economic order is related, likewise, to our consciousness of the shortness of life. I am fleeting, but my property will be here after I have disappeared; can I not put the stamp of myself upon it? A college president repeatedly remarked to a man of wealth, “Mr. M, if I were in your place, I should build myself a monument.” This, and nothing more, time and again, until the man of wealth remarked one day, “Doctor, I have decided to build myself a monument, namely a building upon your campus.” To identify myself with something that will speak in my name when I am gone, something that will act upon men so that I still count with them--this, in some cases at least, is a constituent of the desire for gain. It may take the form of ambition merely to build up a great estate that shall bear my name; to perpetuate this estate in its integrity as long as the law permits; not only to endow my children and grandchildren with wealth, but also to prevent them from dissipating it; by my beneficence to be really good for something in the long future; to cause my name to be gratefully spoken of by future generations, forever, if possible.

Again, how like religion, with its interest in survival after death!

All things are yours, whether ... life or death.

Make to yourself friends of unrighteous Mammon (said Jesus
derisively) so that they may receive you into everlasting
habitations!

Clearly, then, we shall only partly understand the driving power of the economic system if we fail to perceive that, like science, art, and religion, it contains aspirations to be free, to be recognized by others, to fulfil the impulses of family affection, to enthrone personality above circumstance, to be a creator, and to baffle the grim Reaper.

The industrial revolution wrought havoc within this garden of motives. Factory production separates the experience of producing from the experience of consuming, thereby concealing something of the meaning of both. Moreover, in place of face-to-face dealings between men, which keep the human factor in the foreground, we now have mass or group relations between persons who never meet one another, and these relations are mediated on the side of capital by laws, rules, standards, and officials that represent a somewhat-less-than-human interest. The dominant assumption is one that can be expressed in a balance-sheet, which is merely a summary of the non-human aspects of a business--a summary, that is to say, of that to which no _meanings_ are as yet assigned. Was there ever anything more abstract than a balance sheet? The business man, his family and friends, his employes, his country, his church, the whole human race might be blest or injured to any extent by his business, but the balance-sheet would not yield the slightest hint of the fact. Yet the balance-sheet--this abstraction--is taken as the main guide of business conduct!

The moral tragedy of industrialism lies not in the fact that we are so bent upon mastering the material resources of the world, but in the abstraction of this mastery from the motives that started it going and that give it its only meaning. But we have not quite smothered ourselves with the works of our hands; the man within the business man, fortunately, is commonly inconsistent with business philosophy. Prosperity is not the measure of his satisfactions and desires. Though surrounded by plenty, he is restless; though efficient, he has not yet expressed himself. Something greater than industrialism is struggling to be born.

The evidence of this inner struggle can be seen in Rotary clubs and similar organizations, with their effort to promote friendliness among competitors, their interest in some forms of public welfare, and their emphasis upon “service” as the test of good business management. This talk about “service” does not yet mean, of course, that Jesus’ principle has been adopted and selfish ends abandoned; it certainly means that I make the largest profits by consulting my customer’s interests as well as my own; but even so, it contains a glimmering recognition that our real interests are mutual interests. Through this recognition some warmth and enlargement are coming to the business consciousness.

But there is another side to this consciousness--a side that likewise speaks of satisfactions not yet found. When men become nervously concerned for orthodoxy, assuming that an issue is already closed and that they have the key to it, we may be sure that there is a lurking skepticism within. Orthodoxy is organized distrust not only of unbelievers but also of believers, oneself included. And business orthodoxy grows apace!

Another sign that defence mechanisms are forming in the business mind is flight into generalizations and abstractions. I have spoken already of the element of insincerity in the perennial claim that public benefits flow from any and every scheme out of which I secure private gain. But this is more than mere tactics; it is more than an economic theory now outworn; it is also a flight into generalizations and abstractions. It has become so much a habit that it has secreted from itself a sense of sincerity. The business of coal-mining is ceasing to be to the owners the particular facts of this mine and these miners; it is something larger, more general and public. I do not think we can otherwise explain the tolerance of mine-owners towards the facts revealed to a Senate committee that recently investigated the human conditions at mines in Western Pennsylvania. It is true that the stock-and-bond method of capitalizing an enterprise makes it difficult for the absentee owners, whether of a mine, a factory, or a power plant, to know what is going on. But it is not merely the absentees who escape the force of facts; managers who are close to the works do it too. In short, there is more or less shrinking on the part of business men from the literal actualities of business and industry; the motives thereof are not at peace among themselves, and the manhood of these men has not yet found the way of adequate self-expression. What the business man “really wants” he has still largely to find out.

XVI

MOTIVES OF THE WORKINGMAN

If you want to know the inside of the worker’s mind, do not ask him any generalized questions about it, for, like the capitalist, the employe has his attention fixed upon the mechanisms of industry and upon the particular things that, at the moment, he thinks will better his condition. A generalized answer from him may throw no more light upon his complex springs of action than “love of money” throws upon the conduct of captains of industry. Do not ask his employer, either, what the worker really desires, for the employer will apply to others some over-simple explanation that parallels the one that he applies to himself.

Our best sources of general information are men and women who have lived and labored side by side with the workers in an endeavor to understand and help them--persons like Carleton Parker, Helen Marot, and Whiting Williams.[5] The return from such studies is not simple. You cannot compress the soul of the workingman or of anybody else into a simple formula, nor can you explain him by naming the social or economic class to which he belongs. The pigeonholing of men, by the way, is one of the major immoralities!

What the workingman wants, first of all, is work; he wants to be sure of a job. This means, for him, his foothold upon this earth. He wants to know where the next meal is coming from, and the more thoughtful individual determines that sickness and old age must not find the cupboard empty if he can prevent it. How like his employer, who likewise is struggling to rise above the vicissitudes of existence!

The workingman wants a job that gives him standing among his fellows. High pay can give him such standing; or an occupation that requires skill, or judgment, or daring; or even connection with a renowned or admired enterprise. Thus again, employer and employe meet in a common desire for social recognition.

The worker is bent upon amusements and recreations. They occupy his mind even at his labor, especially where high subdivision of labor permits the hands to be employed almost mechanically. Moreover, with the increasing mechanization of industrial processes, which implies ever decreasing spontaneity and self-expression, and ever-deepening dulness in the routine, thought turns with ever greater insistence to amusements that promise contrasting experiences of freedom, variety, strong stimulation or excitement, and social contacts. Not so unlike the experience of the employer, for he too, as his business becomes mechanized, builds up for himself a second world in which real living is contrasted with work.

Family interests affect the worker about as they affect other persons, but with this important difference in the application: Whereas the capitalist seeks to make the future secure for his children by endowing them with property, the workingman endeavors, largely through the education of his children, to get them out of his economic status into a higher one, such as that of a “white-collar job” for the son and clerical work or school-teaching for the daughter.

Widespread, too, is “land-hunger,” particularly among agricultural workers, though not exclusively among them by any means. To have “a place that one can call one’s own”; to put thought and muscle upon a garden or a house, feeling that the results will not at once slip away out of one’s hands and sight; to express one’s very own taste without let or hindrance; to have one’s personality identified in the community with something stable, like real estate--here is one focus of the ambition of many and many a worker.

Closely related to this attachment for the land is an impulse--alas, how often thwarted--to express one’s individuality in and through one’s work. You can witness the joy of creation in a child who for the first time makes a whistle that really whistles; in a housewife who achieves a new flavor in her pickles or luxuriant blossoms upon her window-plants; in a blacksmith when he fits and tempers a piece of iron just right; in anybody who performs the whole process of creation from raw material to finished product. Even in factories which, by subdivision of tasks, make this impossible, there appears now and then a partial compensation in that workmen identify themselves imaginatively with the establishment or its products. Notice the pride in the machine that one superintends, or in a piano or a locomotive that one has helped build.

The worker wants a large wage, but it is not true that this is his sole or all-dominant concern. Time and again opportunity for larger wages is rejected in favor of opportunity for self-expression, or pride of workmanship, or social recognition. Nor is the desire for maximum wages an altogether simple motive. Increase of income may mean saving or insurance; it may mean education for the children; or more family excursions into open spaces; or a radio set in the home, or what not? The other day a gentleman remarked, “I have been amazed at the intelligence of my chauffeur who, as far as schools are concerned, is an uneducated man. The secret of it is that he has procured a radio set wherewith he listens to lectures and sermons. Every Sunday, he says, he hears a sermon by an eminent clergyman.”

It is folly to look upon the labor movement as simply organized grabbing. It may become this, of course, precisely as a corporation may become a depersonalized snatching-tool for capital. But the demand for reasonable hours of labor, for decent working conditions, for a living wage, for collective bargaining, and recently for a share in the management of industries represents a wide and deep motivation. Everything that “my family” means to a man, or social recognition, or security, or desire for individual selfhood is included in the movement.

Yet it is not possible to take a roseate view of the pressure of industrialism upon the spirit of either employe or employers and financiers. A man who was subsisting upon the borderline between worker and employer had opportunity for gain by a shady transaction. It consisted in taking surreptitious advantage of a municipality in such a way that permanent gain would accrue to a corporation with which he was “in cahoots.” He laughed at scruples, saying, “I’m going to get mine while the getting is good. They’re all doing it.” Of course it isn’t true that all are doing it, but will anyone deny that the system in which both worker and capitalist have become enmeshed exercises upon both of them a gravitational pull away from the wholesome motives that have been named in this and the preceding sections, and towards a narrow-minded policy of _getting_ simply as such?

Industrialism in its present form unquestionably pushes into the background the motives of concrete well-living, and brings into the foreground a desire for “efficiency” or “results” as measured by a mechanical or abstract standard. Both employer and employe feel impelled to get the most possible out of each other, for the system as such (and its leaders insist that its “as-suchness” is both natural and reasonable) has no inherent reference to a possible mutuality in well-living for all concerned. Well-living is not the job of business or of industry, least of all mutual well-living; instead, conflict of interests is assumed to be basic and permanent.

In this assumed conflict of interests, possession is the objective. Hence the employer, since he already has possessions, which mean power, has an advantage which the worker sees no way to offset except by arbitrary action or inaction. Hence effort to “get by” with the least exertion; mechanized listlessness; loss of heart (“I’m not going to strain myself in order to increase his profits”); the warlike strategy of the union; resentment when defeated in this game of “get”; and, when conflict reaches a climax, resort to force. And, in and through all, the Tempter whispering that class-interest is a finality in our organized life, and that force is the final arbiter of everything.

This on the side of labor; and, on the side of capital, parallel abstraction from the more vital enjoyments, parallel drying and hardening of the mental tissue, and final resort to cunning and force. There is scarcely a mean motive, apart from brutal lust, that does not now come into play upon both sides. And yet, the same men, both employers and employes, are partly actuated in their economic activities by motives that culminate in religion!

XVII

ECONOMIC PRODUCTION AS A MODE OF SELF-REALIZATION

Within the evolution of economic production one can read a story of the gradual molding of the human clay by human hands. Yes, _the_ story of it, for the range of the interests that enter into the day’s work is without limit, and the same interests, modified by the day’s work, radiate outward into all phases of culture.

Hunting makes a hunter; fishing makes a fisherman; when man achieved the domestication of animals, he achieved likewise some taming of himself. When seeds began to be planted, and fixed dwellings to be built, then seed-thoughts were sown in the mind, and he who erected a roof “built better than he knew,” for an advance took place in the structure of domestic society. In our own country we have seen the frontier produce the frontiersman, and industrialism a vastly different type of personality. Slave labor in the south created one sort of capitalist, free labor in the north another sort. The economic process and its economic product--whether weapon, tool, commodity of any sort--makes the man as truly as the man makes the product. The story of the day’s work is the story of man, discovering himself, changing and diversifying himself, sometimes maiming his mind as well as his members with tools, weapons, and machines of his own devising, but again recovering himself and going forward.

In this sense an economic interpretation of history is possible; but it means, not that the whole of culture is controlled by “desire for gain” or any other narrow (and indeed abstract) spring of action, but that what we do with natural resources influences all sides of human nature and capacity. The new history, employing the polarizing lenses of psychology, reveals everywhere and at all periods unbroken continuity between, on the one hand, men’s daily occupation of transforming raw materials, of getting and spending, of buying and selling, of employing and being employed, and, on the other hand, the substance of the social life and of the political order, literature and the fine arts, religion, science, and philosophy.

The economic order, that is to say, is not a thing _per se_. If church worship, or the goings-on at an amusement park make a strong appeal because they are different from the daily grind, even here we see the continuity. It is the man, the personal self, that has gone into the grind and that has come out of it seeking something specifically different. The personal self, though it has remarkable capacity for inconsistency and forgetfulness, contains no really watertight compartments. A point of view, or an attitude, that has become habitual in any sphere of life can control us in subtle as well as overt ways. For example, the laymen who most strenuously insist that ministers should attend to “spiritual” affairs, letting business alone, represent in their own persons, and that vividly, the impossibility of a real separation of religious experience from economic experience.

Production and distribution of economic goods at its best--nay, why should we not say at its normal point--is, then, a working together with God in the creation, not so much of plants and fruits and domestic animals and structures of wood, stone, and steel, as man himself. The economic order is a chief sphere, if not the chief one, for the realization of personal selves.