Chapter VII: Part II: This Disillusionment Is Itself Illusory (3)

This is the only coherent meaning that we can give to it. Therefore, whenever we find it turning out undeveloped, depressed, or distorted personalities, they must not be taken as by-products or incidents; they are the main concern, and therefore the system is here sick and self-defeating. To say that we are engaged in making goods and not men is in any case simply not so. We actually do make men of one sort or another in all our sowing and reaping, mining and smelting, manufacture, commerce, and finance. For better or for worse this is so; there is no escaping it.

But our modern world deludes itself on this point by endeavoring to maintain and cultivate a spiritual life _alongside_ the economic. By “spiritual” life I mean the only thing that it can signify to us moderns, namely, regard for personal selves, all selves within our purview. This concept of the spiritual includes a scale of attitudes long enough to reach all the way from comforting a frightened child to worshipping God. We are self-deceived in that we have turned over the making of selves to schools, homes, and churches as their specialty, for the making of selves takes place just as truly and not less effectively in and through the economic order. We have rather lazily assumed, too, that the superior personal relations experienced or talked about in home, school, and church will somehow--rarely does anyone even attempt to say just how--pass over into the field, the factory, the market, and the financial institution.

Undoubtedly considerable seepage into economic relations does occur. For, even where the system is most mechanized, it is not quite shameless, and the sporadic cases of concern for human values are neither few nor insignificant in quality. Nevertheless, on the whole, we undertake to base our economic conduct upon economic principles that are supposed (though mistakenly) to be self-sustaining or even self-evident, and our ethical and religious life upon a contrasting set of principles, supposed (though mistakenly) to be likewise self-sustaining. The result in multitudes of instances is a dual life; always it is confusion, blurring, and relative inefficiency in the human concerns that most count.

In fact, the seepage from our spiritual life into the economic is large or fully offset by a reverse penetration of depersonalized economic principles and practices into the very citadels of spirituality. Consider, for example, the prerogatives assumed by and commonly granted to “the man who pays the bill.” Does the entirely unspiritual fact of carrying the purse give one a preferred position with respect to spiritual relations within the family? Yes or no? Does economic power, or does it not, either intentionally or by mere drift, determine what shall be soft-pedaled in schools, colleges, and theological seminaries? No one takes the trouble to deny that laymen of means have influence in the churches altogether out of proportion both to their number and to their religious intelligence, and no one questions that this influence colors the teachings called religious.

The spiritual does not succeed in maintaining itself alongside the economic. In the nature of the case, it cannot do so; the economic experience is bound, for good or for ill, to be the area in which some of the chief character-forming forces are generated.

The present partition of ourselves into secular and religious, industrial and cultural, practical and idealistic is deceptive and ruinous. It results in half-conscious gropings, tangled purposes, self-defeating self-assertions, fallacious self-justifications, and diluted standards of spirituality. In consequence of it the economic order lacks definite meaning. It should mean production for use and for the enlargement of life all along the line, but instead it is not unambiguously directed towards any human good whatsoever. It feeds the hungry (some of them), but it also exploits their hunger. It indirectly supports education, science, art, philanthropies, and religion; but at the same time it promotes senseless luxury, conspicuous spending, a commercialized amusement fever, political corruption, and the kind of national economy that makes for war. If it has sharpened the wits of many, and opened to them wider vistas, it has likewise made multitudes of minds hard, materialistic, mechanical. It has produced class consciousness and class conflict so general and so acute that sober observers are wondering whether the system is not bound to destroy itself by its internal friction.

We shall not recover from this sickness by developing more spiritual life alongside an industrialism that treats persons as means rather than as ends, but only by spiritualizing the industrial system itself. The obvious necessity, the only way to spiritualize industrialism, is to develop through the entire range of its personnel the joy of being a producer, as distinguished from the satisfaction of receiving wages or making profits. When motives focus upon wages and profits, which are extraneous both to the thing produced and to the persons who use the product, the realization of one’s self in one’s work is squeezed out, and the realization of other selves as benefited by us is squelched. Moreover, when the motives for production become thus uncreative, the goods produced convey to the consumer little or no ethical meaning; he procures and uses them as mere things, ignoring the human life that has gone into them, and therefore realizing no spiritual relationship by means of them.

If men are to be religious in any deep sense _within_ the economic experience, the raw materials and the finished products that pass from hand to hand, and the machinery for manufacture and distribution, must acquire something of a sacramental character, becoming outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. To make a button, or to buy and sell one is, in reality, to participate in a great complex of personal relationships, whether high or low; right here we determine, in part, the level of our common life.

On the other hand, when the massive walls, arches, and towers of a magnificent house of worship arise upon some lofty point in a great center of population, what spiritual significance can one see therein? You answer that multitudes will worship God inside this structure. But what of the structure itself as an _economic fact_? Human life, the life of persons to whom Jesus attributed value beyond measure, went into the quarrying of these stones, the smelting of this metal, the mixing of this mortar, the financing of a multitude of major and minor operations. What happened to this life of persons through its participation in the making of a sanctuary? Did men find God, and one another as sons of God, here? What is the spiritual significance, moreover, of the contribution that I make for the erection of this towering monument to our faith? How did this money come into my keeping? That is, what human relationships, what makings or marrings of personality, what wages of bitterness or hardenings of heart have gone thus indirectly into the edifice that is meant to signify divine fatherhood and human brotherhood?

Is our religious thinking so feeble that we actually expect to solve the problem of worship by saying and singing within the sanctuary sentiments that are contradicted by the very walls and roof that shelter the congregation? On the other hand, is our economic thinking to be so abstract as to go on assuming that the aspirations of the heart of man are for the inside of the sanctuary, and not equally for quarry, mine, mill, and banking house? The unstable state of both organized religion and the industrial and economic structure at the present time suggests that we are in the grip of an inevitable issue. It is not over-rash to surmise that we are going to have a spiritualized industrial and economic order, or else a pseudo-spiritual and actually degraded religion. Degraded, that is, by increasing subservience to an unspiritual system of dealing with the material resources of nature.

That there is any inescapable drag in the direction of such a fatal system does not appear from any broadly objective scrutiny of the motives of either capitalist or worker. On both sides mixed motives are the rule, and the two mixtures largely coincide. On either side one or another motive gains or loses influence by the shifting of conditions that are within our power. It is as if the ancient word had been spoken to our generation: “I have laid before you life and death; choose life.”

After three years’ experience as a worker in mines and factories, Whiting Williams declares that the mainspring of the worker--we have seen that this is true also of the employer--is the wish for worth, the wish to be a person, to realize that he counts and that others recognize the fact; and, Williams adds, “through our work, if anywhere in all the universe, we may hope to become a person, meaningful and valuable--aye, indispensable--to others.”[6]

XVIII

THE MOTIVE THAT IS IN ALL AND THROUGH ALL

The lines of our inquiry converge upon the following conception of the motives of men: Rooted in the conditions of individual and racial life are various “drives” that are related to nutrition, sex, avoidance of discomfort and danger, activity and repose, and the presence or conduct of other members of the species. But these are not elementary units that in their aggregate constitute human motivation. For, in and through them, using them, giving meaning to them, and creating new meanings through them, is the affirmation of a personal self, and the coordinate and equally inevitable affirmation of other selves. And this affirmation of selves does not consist in sucking at the breast of Nature, but in reconstructing the gifts of Nature, and in constructing and reconstructing ourselves and society to suit ourselves as our experiences, desires, and insights evolve.

There is an old distinction, which is both useful and necessary though it frequently is ignored, between two senses of the term “motive.” This term sometimes signifies psychic pressure in one direction or another without forethought or consideration of results--what one may call a _vis a tergo_ or “push from behind.” In this sense, thirst for water, or sex-hunger, or spontaneous liking or disliking counts as a motive. On the other hand, an end-in-view, something that awakens desire when we think about it, a “pull from in front,” likewise goes under the name of motive.

The difference between a psychic push and a psychic pull is not merely that between immediate and postponed fulfillment of action or of satisfaction, nor yet this plus the difference between simple and complicated drives. There is a further and even more important distinction to be made. Consider, for example, the following series of cases:

1--The reaction of a carnivore upon smelling raw flesh.

2--The conduct of an acquaintance of mine who, when sugar grew
scarce during the War, seized an opportunity to buy a barrel of it
for the use of his family.

3--In a canyon not far from where these words are being written, a
county is building a great and costly dam in order to control the
flood waters of the surrounding mountain slopes. Control of these
waters means safety for life and property, irrigation for orange
groves, and a supply of water for domestic use.

4--An acquaintance of mine worked hard and spent little in order
that a son, still a small boy, might have a college education.
Meantime the state in which they lived taxed itself heavily on
behalf of a system of education that reaches from the kindergarten
to the university.

An intimate history of the conduct of the individuals concerned in each of these cases would reveal primitive urges, as those for food, for escape from peril, for care of offspring; but in all instances except the first it would reveal also something more than just a summation of such rudimentary drives. Even in case 2 they are redirected, canalized, weighed against one another, dovetailed together, related to the whole significance of the family for its members. In cases 3 and 4 it is still more obvious that work has been done _upon_ the primitive drives, not merely by them, for there is organization of selves and organization of society that are not at all predictable from any scrutiny of raw drives; indeed, here power over conduct flows out of valuations that, a little way back in our history, could not have been felt or understood. We have reached a point where we are able to say what sort of selves we want to be; we have begun to have preferences concerning types of society; already, through law, education, religion, and eugenics we are upon the edge of deliberate control of the evolution of our species.

Thus far, for the sake of convenience in dealing with a complicated matter, I have spoken of primitive or raw drives or pushes, for the most part, as though they were so many separate and distinct actualities. In fact, however, hunger, sex-attraction, and all the rest are generalizations. In the human species at least each actual instance of hunger is less simple than mere hunger; each instance of sex-attraction requires, if we are to describe it completely, something more than an isolated instinct. With man, an instinctive satisfaction is not the terminus of a railroad but an intermediate station through which as well as to which he moves. The whole truth is that, though the raw material of our personal selves is given to or thrust upon us, just as sap is given to or thrust upon a tree, nevertheless it is from the beginning human material; within it from the beginning personal selves are in process of forming themselves, and society is in process of forming itself. This motive is in all and through all the dynamics of human conduct.

You can stop mere hunger by filling the stomach, but by no stuffing process can you appease the life-urge that is human. Much of the devastating irony that Plato’s Socrates directs against the Sophists is based upon this truth. Gautama saw the merely negative aspect of it, but he did not perceive, as Jesus did, that creative self-activity--ethical love, for example--contains a satisfaction of its own--a satisfaction, too, that is by no means to be equated with other satisfactions, since it bestows value upon them or withholds it from them. Self-discipline is a fact; so is voluntary acceptance of work, and even of pain and loss and obloquy. If men revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, still you are blessed or happy if this experience comes because you are loyal to “the ever-coming Kingdom of God.” It is partly by this transvaluation of values, this conversion of our native drives, that men now and then transmute both their environment and themselves into forms that yield unprecedented beauty, and truth, and fellowship. In human experience, I repeat, the motive of being a personal self among personal selves is in all and through all. It may be weak or retarded, or it may become distorted, yet even in conditions most unpropitious we find the spark not quite extinguished.

A few years ago, a one-act play, a curtain-raiser, entitled “A Morality Play for the Leisured Class,”[7] was given at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. There were two characters, a modern man who had just been killed in an automobile smash-up, and an experienced inhabitant of the other world. The deceased, gradually coming to himself, and wondering where he is, calls out in the misty twilight that surrounds him,

“Is anybody there?”

The mist clears away, revealing a shining Presence with wings. The Presence asks,

“Can I do anything for you, Sir?”

The deceased wants to know what’s to be had here.

“Anything you like,” is the reply. “Anticipating your desires, I have already taken thirty years from your age.”

“Perpetual youth, eh?” exclaims the newcomer. “It looks as if I’d come to the good place, after all. But what about the golden crown?”

“You can have one if you like,” comes the answer, and presto! a starry golden crown encircles the stranger’s brow.

“Exactly according to the specifications,” says he. “And now, what else have you got here?”

“Anything you like,” replies the angel.

“I can have everything I desire? Absolutely everything?” asks the soul excitedly.

“Subject only to certain restrictions imposed by the nature of the place,” is the reply. “There is neither pain, nor suffering, nor struggle here. Anything else that you desire I will procure for you.”

There follows a succession of requests and realizations: The best of things to eat and drink; luxurious living quarters; “period” furniture and decorations; masterpieces of painting and statuary; the society of beauteous women (Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and others). But each of these exalted experiences proves to be insufficient and finally cloying, and the experimenter demands a change. “This everlasting perfection palls,” he says. “The sights are too uniformly beautiful, the ladies too uniformly clever, charming, and obliging.... I know what I want! I want some work.” But he discovers that, since work implies wanting something that one cannot have by merely wanting it, whereas here one gets a thing by merely asking for it, the satisfaction of work is out of the question.

He and his obliging attendant ransack their minds to think of something that might possibly relieve the tedium. The attendant, at his wits’ end and discouraged, turns to go, saying, “I don’t know what to propose, Sir. But if anything occurs to you,” ...

“Hold on!” cries the seeker; “I’ve got it! I want some pain; that’s it.”

“I’m sorry, Sir,” comes the polite answer, “but no one is allowed to have any pain in this place. You’ll get used to the restriction after you’ve been here a few thousand years. They all feel as you do at first, but they all get accustomed, after a while, to this mode of existence.”

“But,” ejaculates the neophyte, “I can’t stand this damned everlasting bliss! I’d rather be in hell.”

The Presence, stepping back and looking at him in astonishment, asks, “And wherever do you think you _are_, Sir?”