Chapter VIII: Part III: Yet Our Capacities Are in Bondage (1)

XIX

THE CYNIC INTERJECTS A QUESTION

Some cynic, my mind’s eye tells me, is smiling over the picture of human nature that emerges out of the preceding sections.

“You think you have shown that the feeling of disillusionment that is spreading among us is a mood and a fashion rather than a rational conviction; that the psychological evidence of our essential lowness is weak; that our motivation is not a composite of instincts; that in the evolutionary order, of which we are a part, desires as well as structures evolve, so that the unprecedented in motives occurs and is to be expected; that mind is marvellously plastic, and in unconventional childhood is beautiful; that, under favorable school conditions, creativeness bubbles up out of the commonplace; that after the hot crucible of historical criticism has brought to the surface all the dross of both great men and small, it reveals also precious gold; that even within our selfish economic order high and fine strains of desire can be seen, as if a god were struggling to create a superior species through our mastery of natural resources. You find that, in and through the complex that we call our motives there runs a demand of personal-selves-in-the-making, a demand for mutual self-realization in an order of reason, beauty, and good-will, in the creation of which they are participants.

“All very soothing,” continues the cynic, “provided that you keep your eyes straight ahead. But if you look to the right or the left of this reasoning, this is what you see: In form, the argument defends the dignity of life, but it does so only by picking out facts that shine by contrast with our everyday conduct. Practically everything that has been said includes or implies a protest against the ordinary run of human motives, valuations, and habits. Thus, the passage from childhood to adulthood is admitted to be a hardening process; it is admitted that the capacities for creation occasionally displayed by the young are generally thwarted, and that the very citadels of the spirit--the home, the church, the school--are infected with the unspirituality of our current economic standards and practices. It is made to appear, further, that the economic order, which might and should have a main part in the creation of man in cooperation with God, actually is an enormous mechanism that subordinates men--capitalists and workers alike--to a part, and the lower part, of their own motives, and these largely misunderstood.

“You have proved that human nature contains factors that the current disillusionment ignores or misrepresents, but you have shown also that the actual exercise of men’s wills thwarts and imprisons the superior motives that you are so concerned about.”

Thus the cynic; and he is right as to the facts provided that he does not exaggerate the extent of this thwarting and imprisoning of ourselves by ourselves. It does not necessarily follow, however, that basic cynicism towards life can be justified, however useful as a stimulus to inquiry the cynical comment may be. Men are inconsistent with themselves; they do obstruct their own steps, and they trip over themselves. What, then? Shall we acquiesce in our blunders? Shall we end our forward steps in pity or scorn of ourselves? Or, shall we endeavor to understand what has happened, hoping that we may find a way to master the obstructive self that is within ourself? It should be interesting, at least, to inquire into the nature of this checking and thwarting of man by himself, for, in spite of the obviousness and the disagreeableness of the fact, it is relatively neglected by the very institutions that assume as their function the making of men.

It is true that religionists, moralists, and educationists for many generations have talked about an inner conflict of forces. It is represented now as competition between instincts; then as a struggle of reason with impulse; again, as a strain between egoistic and social motives. Though there is obvious truth in these conceptions, they do not touch several questions that must be answered before we can secure firm control of our situation. These questions are: Why is our performance so much below our capacity all along the line? Where and how does the leakage of power occur? How have we become inured to our own inconsistencies of conduct and of motive? What is the technic for recognizing real alternatives for what they are? What is the method for keeping a continuously open road for our wiser selves?

As far as I can see, neither our churches nor our schools are handling with aggressive vigor these overwhelmingly pertinent questions. Exalted capacities are, indeed, ascribed to man, and lofty ideals of conduct are unceasingly mentioned, recommended, sung about, and prayed about; but who offers a technic for getting these capacities to do their proper work? and who really believes in the practicability of what he says?

This is a severe judgment, but it is a deliberate one, and if it is true it is not unfair, as it certainly is not unfriendly. My own life has been continuously identified with churches and educational institutions, and I would not have it otherwise; but I do not see how anyone who has intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with them can deny that they are suffering from a profound dualism that they know not how to heal. Of the general sincerity of their idealistic views of man there need be no doubt; that both church and school exercise a wholesome influence upon conduct in various respects is gladly conceded; it is their lack of plan and method for the organization of life, individual and collective, that is now in question. Now, this lack is about the worst possible; for it not only permits mint, anise, and cummin to get out of perspective; it not only foreshortens each institution’s picture of itself; it also encourages the positive evil of an illusory self-organization in the form of fair words and fair sentiments instead of adequate purposes.

Assent to ideals, and emotional identification of oneself with America, the church of all ages, or the will of God can be a species of self-love and self-sophistication. Sunday after Sunday the churchgoer says “Yes” in his heart to the prayer of confession; “Yes” to the Godward aspirations of Scripture, hymn, and supplication; “Yes” to the admonitions of the preacher and to every reference to love for man and consecration to the Kingdom of God; and, departing from the sanctuary, he has a comfortable self-feeling because he is a “Yes” man. He is on this side, is he not? In school and college another set of sentimental assents is evoked. Sportsmanship, patriotism, good citizenship, admiration for the honesty, honor, and unselfish devotion shown by our heroes--towards all these a “Yes,” a sincere glow, and “This is what we are.”

A large part of the economic power of the Western world is in the hands of men who worship the God of the prophets and of Jesus; yet we know that business and industry will proceed during the week upon principles other than those of love to God and man. The leaders of our civic life, and most of the followers, have come out of our own schools for generations, but neither our political parties, nor our officers of state, nor our accepted state policies clearly reflect the idealism of these schools. It is not hypocrisy that creates this gulf; rather, confused helplessness in the presence of mixed motives. There is even some awareness of this helplessness, but this awareness usually leads to little more than speeding up the “Yes, yes” experience.

What boots it, then, to have shown that the current disillusionment with respect to ourselves is illusory, if we don’t know how to give the control of our lives into the keeping of the better elements that are in us? In fact, our discussion thus far has done little more than clear the ground for a tussle with our main problem, which concerns, not the existence of high motives, but the bondage in which we find them. What we must ascertain, if possible, is the nature of this bondage and how we can release ourselves from it.

And first, the nature of our bondage. Let us frankly face the disagreeable facts, not being outdone by the cynic himself in the ferreting out of irrationalities. Only so can we hope to find the remedy for our condition.

XX

OUR “LOWER NATURE” DOES NOT EXPLAIN OUR BONDAGE

If we could refer human folly all in a lump to our “lower nature” it would be convenient in several ways. For one thing, like those who refer their every slip to the solicitations of Satan, we should be relieved from the laborious and often disagreeable task of tracing out the particular threads of influence that make our conduct bad. On the other hand, every accusation against our “lower nature” really flatters whatever we happen to regard as our “higher nature.” The Indian mystic says “Neti, neti” of the lower, finite, and merely apparent reality, while he identifies his true self with the infinite. Plato believes that, in his own person as philosopher, Reason, ever pure and uncontaminated, though it be associated with the passions, is manifested as a self-certifying and self-sufficient good. A parallel self-gratulation was provided by Christian theology through its doctrine that the Christian has a regenerated nature which participates in some measure in the infallibility of God. Similarly, our evolutionary relation to “the ape and tiger” is often used as a foil for displaying our true dignity.

But this attribution of our irrational conduct to our “lower nature” is altogether too convenient. It is like a child’s classification of human beings into “good people” and “bad people.” As “bad people” are partly good, so our “lower nature” is not altogether low; and, as “good people” are not perfectly satisfactory, so--at least possibly--our “higher nature” is not altogether high. In short, this whole theory of our bondage requires re-examination.

In countries that are familiar with the Christian tradition, the classical instance of the supposed clash of two natures is that of Paul, who testified to a veritable warfare in his members. The good that he would do, he did not, and the evil that he would not, that he did. The more he struggled to keep “the law” the deeper became his sense of guilt and helplessness. How shall we understand and evaluate this experience? Not by manipulating merely abstract ideas such as perfect righteousness (details unspecified and unspecifiable), nor the holiness of God (specifications again impossible), nor sin (in the sense of a generalized sinfulness); we could not judge Paul’s motives and desires without inspecting them in their relation to particular concrete situations, and this the record does not enable us to do. If, as seems not improbable, his chief entanglement was sexual, then the basic desire, as thinking Christians now agree, was not bad. As a sex-creature he was not bad _simpliciter_ but only _secundum quid_. Moreover, it is not possible to affirm that his condemnation of himself was altogether balanced; he may have had a morbid conscience.

Whenever we are able to untangle the threads of impulse and to take into account the circumstances of each, invariably the reference of our defective conduct to our “lower nature” turns out to be mistaken--if for no other reason, because it over-simplifies the facts. Always what we find is a mix-up, and usually confusion. Witness, for example, the gamut of motives involved, as we have seen, in the War and in our economic and industrial system. Therefore, whoever would understand our bondage must examine into the nature of this confusion; he must hunt for the specific conditions that give a bad turn to motives that are capable, under other circumstances, of building up instead of tearing down. The conclusion towards which these facts push us is that that which checks, thwarts, and imprisons our capacities is not a set of particular drives but neglect of some relation or relations within experience, or some twist in our methods of organizing ourselves.

If this inquiry tends to vacate the whole notion of a “lower nature” that acts as a drag upon us, it tumbles us into a problem with respect to the existence of a “higher nature.” Are any of our drives good _simpliciter_, or, is the clue to goodness as well as badness to be looked for in habits of organization rather than in particular and ineradicable impulses? It is, in fact, easy to show that even within our better conduct the same sorts of floundering occur as in our worst behavior, so that the same problem of the organization of a self and of selves is everywhere present. We have, as gifts of our nature, neither radically bad drives against which we should arm ourselves, nor yet radically good drives to which we can fly for effective protection. No _vis a tergo_ will either ruin us or save us. The thing upon which the issues of life depend is what I have called the motive that is in all and through all, the desire to be a self in a world of selves.

The real nature of our bondage can be illustrated by a chain of examples that reaches all the way from our handling of physiological good and evil to our prayers. All along the line we shall find that the good and the evil, the failures and the successes, depend upon the organization of life as personal, and specifically upon the degree in which, consciously and deliberately, we face situations, with their alternative values, as wholes. We shall see that we are missing on an enormous scale good things of life that are not beyond our reach--things unquestionably good, unquestionably within our reach, unquestionably more important than the things towards which we do stretch ourselves. And all this is true of our more idealistic as well as of our less idealistic interests. Now for the examples:

Let us begin with health and bodily vigor. We put up with physical
limitations that are entirely unnecessary--limitations that hygiene
and medical science can remove. It would be economical in the
financial sense to remove them, because our productive power would
thereby increase along with the joy of living. Why do we persist in
this conduct? We have everything to lose and nothing to gain by it.
We may phrase the answer in many ways, as inattention, distraction
by immediate stimuli, not connecting effects with causes, doing
as everybody else does; but all real explanations come down to
this, that we do not put enough of ourselves--our comprehending,
difference-perceiving, organizing selves--into the matter.

We permit thousands of distressing accidents to occur every year.
We permit them, for we could prevent them; we have sufficient
experience of the dangers, we have sufficient scientific knowledge,
and we have sufficient financial means. We could save thousands of
lives without even feeling a financial pinch, and most of the lives
saved would add to the financial resources of the country. But we
do not stop to think; that is, we do not put our whole selves into
our conduct.

We submit to a multitude of unnecessary discomforts--dirt, smoke,
noise, confusion, delays, undue fatigue, uncomfortable clothing,
senseless customs. Our intelligence concerning the conditions of
agreeable living, and our budgetary capacity for it, far outrun our
plans and policies.

We endure unsightly spots in cities and towns, and the despoiling
of natural beauty in the country. The persons who reap financial
advantage from our esthetic impoverishment do so, not by their own
inherent power, but by our acquiescence. Our trouble is lack of
head-work.

We read inferior stuff, not because it is more enjoyable than
literature, but because we wont take the trouble to enjoy
ourselves. Thus, because we are “not all there,” we let slip
opportunities for exciting adventures in imagination, thought, and
knowledge.

Our opinions are largely manufactured for us and imposed upon us,
or else we merely drift into them and afterwards, perhaps, search
for reasons in support of them. We permit ourselves to be treated
as herds--some writers even using this term with respect to us--not
because we are necessarily bovine but because we are unnecessarily
absent-minded. That is, the human in us acts fragmentarily instead
of integrally.

We are capable of having better government and better social
relations generally than we have. We could afford them without risk
of impoverishment and often to the benefit of our pocketbooks.
Our good precedents, our weakly professed convictions, our known
capacity for fruitful experimentation, all outrun our political and
social practice. Often we are pig-headed, not because there is a
porcine drive in our original nature, but because we get the habit
of over-fondness for our half-thoughts.

We are capable of providing far better schooling for our children
than we do provide. Even parental affection, which comes so near to
being unqualifiedly good, is a main support for mistaken education.
Moreover, education is a field in which most persons who have
not paused to investigate believe, nevertheless, that they are
competent to pass judgments. Thus, precisely where we think we are
using our heads, we fail to use them enough.

If there were such a thing as a “higher nature,” it should clearly
manifest itself in morals and religion. In the sphere of moral
conduct we should be able to discern particular drives that are
worthy of invariable and unqualified approval. Ethical philosophy
long endeavored to discover such pure springs of action, but
without success. It is true, likewise important, that some broadly
general types of policy, such as neighborliness, truthfulness,
and industry, are usually safe guides. Yet, when my improvident
neighbor asks me for a loan, or when an oppressor would use my
truthfulness as an instrument with which to reach an innocent
victim, or when I endeavor to apportion my time between work and
play, then not one of these policies suffices as a basis for
decision. “Love beauty” is good advice, but there are times when we
have to decide whether to rest our eyes upon the curves of beauty
or upon the harsh lines of actuality. “Pursue truth”; certainly,
but just when is the moment for action upon the basis of present
light, perhaps twilight? “Do as you would be done by”; of course,
but how, under some circumstances, would I be done by? That is to
say, in all such cases, the background-problem is, What sort of “I”
do I want my self and others to be?

Is it not true that good men are forever getting in the way of
the good? Consider any half dozen social changes that history has
proved to be wholesome, and then count over the men who opposed
them at the time they were made. You will perceive that the
mental clumsiness of bad men has an exact parallel in the moral
awkwardness of good men.

The case is not different with religion. Considered from the
standpoint of the drives that have made men pious, piety is by
no means an unmixed blessing. For history shows that any desire
whatever can receive the baptism of religious sanctity, with all
the reinforcement that results therefrom. On the one hand, it is
true, we see religion calling men to a life of righteousness;
on the other hand, there is no meanness nor narrowness that has
not somewhere at some time been a part of religion. For this
reason, religion is the most dangerous thing in the world. It can
promote either candor or prejudice, either self-will or sweet
reasonableness, either ruthlessness or the gentleness of a St.
Francis of Assisi. And no single religion can exempt itself from
the danger. In this country at the present moment--to take a single
case for illustration--there is a species of sincere Christianity
that seizes intellectual freedom by the throat in order to choke
it; that fans flames of hate; that commits deeds of lawless
violence. So impossible is it to find in religion the especial seat
of a higher nature! On the other hand, at various points in the
history of different faiths, religion has turned critically upon
itself, and by reorganizing itself upon unprecedented lines, it has
proved that, though we cannot rely upon a higher nature made up of
drives that everlastingly repeat themselves, nevertheless we have a
capacity for never-ending criticism and reconstruction of ourselves.

These facts put the bondage of our capacities into correct perspective. We need not deny that untamed and partly tamed impulses tug at the bit, kick, sometimes run away with us; but they are not our jailers. They make difficulty for us, they wound and scar us, but they have within themselves no coherence, whereas types of coherence within a self make all the difference between freedom and bondage. If anyone insists that human nature is depraved, he should place the seat of depravity in the rational man, or the supposed higher nature that is expressed in religion, morals, customs, government, social organization, and deliberate purposes generally.

If we conceive the matter in the terms of evolution, then the problem of our bondage centers in the latest-evolved, not the most ancient, phases of human nature; not in raw impulses taken one by one, but in the elaboration of conduct by thought and purpose; not in what is wildest in us, but in what is most civilized and taken for granted.

Must we say, then, that within reason itself there is an irrational lag? If this should prove to be the case, the wisest thing to do would be to make allowance for it and by deliberate policy to counteract it, just as the astronomical observer calculates and counteracts his personal equation.

XXI

HOW REASON ITSELF BINDS US TO THE IRRATIONAL

Every progressive thinker is troubled by the following fact: In order to live rationally, we must organize and institutionalize our behavior, which implies giving a sort of mechanical or automatic power to yesterday’s thoughts. But as soon as any institution begins to be efficient, it resists rational inquiry with respect to itself. This is true of all institutions without exception. They resist--here is the heart of our difficulty--because they are not haphazard combinations but institutions, which is to say that they are a deposit of reason. Thus our necessary rational procedures imprison reason as naturally “as the sparks fly upward.”

For “institution” we can substitute any term for a job that is deliberately done, or for any devotion that is a day old, and the proposition that reason imprisons reason still holds. Whenever thought makes a nest for itself where it can incubate, it turns out to have mated with unreason, and it produces a mongrel offspring.

How the principle works can be seen in the relatively simple institution of the family. For example, a parent who, in the course of family government, makes a decision with respect to the children, immediately adopts this decision as a precedent that is binding upon himself also, he won’t budge from it; if it is questioned he finds reasons in support of it; or, if he is pushed into a corner, he reasserts it upon the ground of the inherent rationality of parental authority. That is, by a process of thought he identifies himself with what he has been, and he equates reason with one of its incidental products. Many a parent-child fellowship has been wrecked in this way.

Just so, when the idea of sex-equality appeared upon the horizon, many a person prepared to defend the family against dissolution! Many a potential conjugal fellowship has been blasted because of unreadiness to re-think the old assumption of sex-servitude. One is unready to re-think it, not because of any imperious natural drive of the male to sex-mastery, not because the female naturally prefers submission, but because one has bound one’s mind by a partial use and habit of intelligence; a has-been-so has been taken as inherently natural and reasonable.

The same sort of retardation of thought by itself appears, likewise, in our larger and more complicated institutions. For example, in the economic order at the present moment, in spite of its creakiness, there is enough that is humanly valuable to supply a basis for the reconstruction that is so sorely needed. Why, then, do we not delightedly hasten to build a fairer structure upon our present goodness? The usual reply that selfishness stands in the way, is a lazy explanation. “Innate selfishness” is perhaps the trickiest of all our merely plausible general ideas, for it applies to almost anything that we dislike in ourselves or anybody else, yet tells us nothing specific. The sticking-point in economic thinking is the point where particular drives or alternatives are adjusted to one another. This point, unfortunately often, is characterized by economic precedents taken as dictates of reason or nature. Self-imitation, that is to say, has generated an economic orthodoxy which is the true “original sin” of the system. And it is the sacredness of the orthodoxy that makes the gooseflesh rise upon us when we contemplate the possibility of reversing our ways. We have sufficient stamina to stand losses or to get along with less wealth, but the uncertainties of a reconstructive policy make us quail. Thus we trust yesterday’s thought more than we trust any fresh thinking.

Orthodoxy, which is the acceptance of yesterday’s agreed-upon conclusions as an assumption that must govern today’s thought, is not a sporadic or merely incidental occurrence; it insinuates itself everywhere; there are as many varieties of it as there are kinds of human association.

Political orthodoxies are, of course, rather obvious. The remark is commonplace that parties retain their coherence after the reason for their existence has faded away, and that, at last, lacking genuine meaning, they stand upon trumped-up platforms which often are a blind erected by hunters of office or by those whom they serve. The main support of bad politics is found in men who are not bad but only conventionally good. The difficulty with them is that they treat a petrified idea as if it were a living thought--they are politically orthodox.

Our laws, likewise, are streaked with anachronisms that at their best are clumsy and obstructive, but at their worst are instruments--well known as such!--whereby social obligation is evaded and injustice committed. The intellectual clarity of laws and courts is accompanied by an emotional haze, amounting at times to ethical obscurantism, that is taken as the light of a sanctuary, but is in reality the shrinking into itself of a mind that is unready for fresh thinking even in its own field.

Forms of government and constitutions, too--living thoughts at the beginning--become mechanized thoughts after a time, and then they are a precarious asset. Precarious because, though they are properly only instruments to assist us in our adjustments to the conditions of life, they become the objects to which adjustment is made. The notion of sovereignty, for example--that ark of the covenant within the holy of holies of political principles--has become a mechanized thought and an obstacle to the establishment of any rule of reason in the world as a whole.

The professions and the other occupations, likewise, always run into the danger of introversion as soon as they begin to think about themselves. Each wants to fix its functions so that they will “stay put.” Traditions of many sorts now become, essentially, dogmas; divisions and subdivisions of function are established, and each functionary becomes a breathing precedent. Machinery unending is interjected between the needs of client or customer or employer and the satisfaction of these needs. Some business men, it is said, have undertaken to create a tribunal of their own that shall settle their legal difficulties without resort to the law. What a comment is this upon the legal profession! There is a considerable area of human need that calls for both spiritual and medical help, yet physicians and ministers can hardly get together upon the most obvious cases because professional precedents have not paved the road thereto. Just so, the dentist goes his way, and the physician his, to the detriment of the patient, all because one is dentist and the other physician.

The orthodoxies of religion, whether conservative or liberal, are natural enough, for they reflect a sense of the greater issues of life and a sense of the importance of any truth about them that we may be able to reach. Yet the endeavor of piety to think itself and to put itself into the form of propositions has become a bane to piety. For accepting pious declarations both deludes us into classifying ourselves as pious, and excuses us from looking straight into the eye of actuality, whether contemporary or ancient. Limiting the freedom of the mind is perhaps not the worst thing about orthodoxy, though it is bad enough. Rather, ecclesiastical custodianship of particular religions or particular types within a religion, tends to displace thought-activity from the greater issues of life to the minor ones. The great issues having been settled, as is supposed, ministers, church boards, and denominational leaders betake themselves to making the church, which already has the truth, get the men, get the means, build machinery, and make it go.

How do we account for the ecclesiastical situation that is revealed by the church announcements in the daily papers of any large city? I shall not stop to characterize either the sermon topics or the publicity methods that are here disclosed, for this has been done many times, and the facts speak too loudly for themselves. Many explanations have been offered, but the background reason usually remains unnoticed. It is that the church already _has_ religion. It has it, and therefore peddles it; it peddles it, and therefore all the devices of the advertiser, the hawker, and the auctioneer become appropriate; and because they are appropriate, the church that is most up-to-date in using them esteems itself the most enterprising. The ministerial and ecclesiastical jazz and piffle are direct results of having minds that are at rest upon the main issues. Reliance upon yesterday’s thought produces the vacant, noisy mind of today. Orthodoxy did it!

Every orthodoxy, whether it emphasizes a formula of thought, or loyalty to an institution, or the propriety of an habitual process--every orthodoxy, whether economic, political, social, professional, educational, scientific, or religious (and we have them all)--every one, though created by reason, is a drag upon reason.

Yet orthodoxy is only an organized or social expression of a necessary and inescapable factor in the exercise of intelligence. It is because we remember, form judgments, make inferences, and then use the products of this process as data both for immediate decisions where action is necessary and for new judgments--it is for this reason that we are humans at all and not brutes. Our fairest structures are built upon past thinking as well as through present thinking. There is no other way. Irrationalism or pure romanticism may be useful now and then as a protest or as a spur, but this is never the horse that carries the load. Here, then, is our paradoxical situation: We must guide thinking by thinking; we must trust reason; but reason itself, in this process, binds us to the irrational. What would be a reasonable policy in this situation?

XXII

THE DEEP DEPRAVITY OF OUR RESPECTABLE FAULTS

Men check their own growth by self-imitation. Now, inasmuch as each self exists in and through reciprocity with other selves, self-imitation becomes a criss-cross of copyings. This mutual imitation of one another is “respectability.”

Every healthy-minded person desires, of course, to have the approval of his fellows, and to be worthy of their approval. And this is no insignificant thing, for sharing, or universalizing, is of the essence of reason. But reason makes its characteristic slip; when individuals reciprocally approve one another, they forthwith generalize the basis of their judgment, whatever this basis is, and the generalization becomes a social fence with an inside and an outside. Our judgment may soundly represent a situation and a value, yet for this very reason we may fancy that we have reached the summit of a social mountain when we have merely come to a turn in the trail.

The momentum of a gyroscope can be given, in fact, to practically any way of accommodating ourselves to one another. The assent that “was” then becomes an assent that “ought to be.” Reciprocal approvals are now funded and they become a vested interest of the stockholders. The stockholders, in the fashion of our latest corporations, do not even vote their stock--they merely draw dividends.

Two results follow: First, the ethical perspective that is required by free and growing minds is lost. The trivialities of respectability, when we look at them from the outside (as in the satirical novel and drama), are amazing. I am reminded of an incident in a college. A member of a sorority, being asked why one of the students who had been “rushed” had not been initiated, replied, “Well, at our ‘rushing party’ we had squab on toast, and she ate the toast, evidently not knowing any better. So we didn’t elect her. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere, you know.”

The reverse side to respectability’s over-sensitiveness to trifles is frequent insensibility to master-values, as the work of creative thinkers, artists, saviors of mankind. Such work does not bestow respectability.

And not only is perspective lost; there supervenes a kind of blindness. Respectability means sanctioning conduct that is unfitted to new conditions that have now arrived, and condemning conduct that is. It means not seeing, or slurring over, or hushing up facts that could not stand the light of critical analysis. There is a self-excusing that produces a self-blinding that is worse for the world than straightforward badness. Respectability connotes the constricted mind, the involved and indirect mind, the self-deceived mind.

These are the reasons why dramatists can so easily make unconventional badness seem superior to conventional goodness. The recipe is simple: Place upon one side of the stage a typical conformist whose respectability is as easily read as a wayside billboard; a man who is orthodox in business, in politics, and in religion, and in excellent standing among his associates; whose virtues are stereotyped and stamped with the appreciation of his set, and whose faults are ignored, or camouflaged, or possibly praised in the restricted circle in which he moves. Over against him place a person without social standing, a creature of strong and unconcealed natural impulses who is free from scruples, over-caution, and self-deception; one who is just his natural, uncalculating self. This turns the trick, and the audience applauds. Why does it applaud? Few of its members could tell you, and the psychoanalyst has only a fraction of the truth when he explains that our repressed instincts have release and go on a picnic through subtle self-identification with the character upon the stage. There is also gladness in having the way cleared for re-thinking, the acceptance of an invitation to judge basically, a feeling of liberation, not into unbridled instinct, but into a fresh effort at rational objectivity.

A woman who had been reared in a “protected” and conventional way, never guessing that she might think for herself, experienced in mature life an intellectual awakening that took the direction of extreme revolt against all orthodoxies, moral axioms included. She declared that she did not feel a need for God; was happier without any belief in him; and that she had rejected the whole notion of moral laws. “But,” she added, “I believe in being decent!” She had not reverted to irrational impulse; she was endeavoring to let reason retrieve errors that arose through reason.

That membership in a circle of the respectable sometimes assists in hiding evil so gross that respectability itself would be shocked by it need not be urged, for it is merely incidental. The more important faults are the commonplace ones--the ones that are common because they spring directly from the process that founds respectable society. Here they are:

1--Respectability is the standardization of compromises by using them as precedents. Compromising is, of course, not the same as discovering either truth or righteousness; it is at best a detour over a temporary and perishable bridge. Its service lies in keeping us peaceable or cooperative in spite of disagreements; its goal is not to repeat itself endlessly, but to fade into a no-compromise because we have come out into clear light. When we make compromise the standard procedure, then we sanctify our defects and bestow upon them capacity for unlimited progeny.

2--Respectability measures conduct in terms of the average performance, the average praise and blame, or the average acquiescent silence, of a limited society, instead of directly evaluating the consequences of an act for all the persons concerned. Conventional standards are not useless, of course, but they lack full ethical objectivity, and for this reason they can conceal as well as reveal. I can be “honest” in a transaction that is cruel; I can obey all the ten commandments and yet lack the one essential thing. Because the standards of respectability are not derived from the consequences of conduct to all persons concerned, but only some, it comes about that, without losing self-respect or forfeiting caste, respectable men as a fact do share in acts that result in nearly every form of inhumanity.

3--Respectability, fixing an artificial horizon-line for social fellowship, prevents us from knowing either ourselves or human nature in the large. We cannot know ourselves or others by merely noting how we respond to one another in a club or clique. Many a hitherto conventional individual has found liberation and enlargement by fishing with an illiterate guide, riding with a cow-puncher, attending a meeting of radicals, doing social work in the slums, or getting acquainted with criminals or harlots. Between Jesus and such persons there was no barrier of respectability, as, on the opposite side, he had no prejudice towards persons of wealth, power, or culture. When church membership connotes respectability, let the church beware! Its Master did not belong to the respectable classes. The deep danger here is retardation of spiritual growth followed by fixation, self-complacency, and the use of one’s power against the influences that make for a broader, more humane life.

4--Coordinate with this encysting of our ethical capacities is the habit, almost universal in respectable circles, of shunting the blame for the evils of the world to other classes of society. Even in America, where we have made so large a beginning of trust in the common man, it has been customary to assume that the main danger to the republic inheres in the “lower classes,” which term denotes now the uneducated, now the unpropertied, now the hand-workers, now the immigrants, now the discontented.

The fact is that every major peril that we have encountered has had its seat “above” the “lower classes.” Sectionalism, slavery, political partizanship, corrupt politics, a depraved civil service, dominance of government by the money power--these do not spring from the less privileged classes, however much these classes may have been used by leaders. If, as common opinion has it, civil government reaches its lowest level in our cities, the reason is found, not in the character of the masses of city dwellers, but in the forces that organize them, use them, and exploit them for profit or for the advancement of a political party and the financial interests back of it.

There are just two ways in which those designated as the “lower classes” might become the means of our undoing: Some of “the interests” which have respectable standing might persuade, deceive, wheedle, or inflame them into the support of some evil that they could not originate; or, long-continued injustice and repression might lead to an explosion. No significant explosion of the classes in question will be brought about in any other way. In other words, what makes the “lower classes” dangerous, as far as they are dangerous, is the respectable classes.

The depravity of our respectable thinking upon social and political interests shows itself, thus, in the actual (though, of course, unintended) meanness of blaming others where we ourselves deserve the blame, and even of attributing to others the evils that we cause through them when we use them for our own ends.

5--Nothing is more characteristic of respectability than its habit of finding exalted reasons for justifying conventional conduct, whatever it is. High ground for our conventional domestic conduct is found in the unalterable nature of the sexes, or in a trust committed by society, or in some ancient scripture. Reason for unlimited profit-getting is found by manufacturing psychology to order (the pseudo-psychology of the motives for enterprise), and in the old, comfortable middle-class self-sophistication that asserts that private selfishness is the best way to serve the common good. In ecclesiastical matters we have been much pushed in later years to find divinely good reasons for our customary conformities, such as saying in worship what we do not mean; keeping straight faces in the presence of small men arrayed in large historical and institutional dignities; supporting a denominationalism that we say we deplore, and excusing an evangelism that obviously needs an explanation. We are put to it to place all these things within a system of rational thought, but we manage to do it, though it takes some culture to accomplish the feat. In education--I speak from the inside--it is positively funny how many old and creaky things, and how few new things can be justified by mere guesses.

This respectable habit of finding that we always are in every respect respectable makes it next to impossible for us to repent for even the deeper wrongs of conventional social practice. Even the harlots, Jesus declared, enter the Kingdom of Heaven before those who could give twenty reasons why harlots cannot get in at all.

All this separatism, evasion, and self-sophistication leads on with entire naturalness to the habit of reliance upon authority and finally upon force. Respectability never quite commits the adjudication of its interests to open ethical thinking. It regards its case as already closed. In other words, it claims for itself a privileged position for which the only remaining defence is force in one form or another--economic force, partizan laws, ostracism, defamation, blacklisting, the denial of freedom of speech, war. All these are, in fact, appropriate once the main assumption has been accepted, and consistency is a virtue, is it not? Hence it is that these acts, some of which are positively base and not merely muddle-headed, do not produce self-condemnation among good people. So depraved can our respectable faults finally become! This is not the hardness, of course, of minds that see themselves as they are and yet do not blush; it is still worse than this, for it is the hardness of the paralyzed nerve, the hardness of the eye that sends no light to the intelligence, the hardness of a blocked intelligence that closes the heart to its proper world.

Socrates maintained that to do wrong knowingly is not as bad as to do it ignorantly.

XXIII

EVEN OUR PASSIONS ARE PRECEDENT-RIDDEN

The problem with which we are wrestling is, How account for the low average performance of beings as highly endowed as ourselves? The usual explanation--that we are made up of two natures, a higher and rational one, and a lower and irrational one--turns out not to explain, for neither an unmixed lower nature nor an unmixed higher nature can be anywhere discerned.

A wide vista into the sources of our trouble opened, however, when we inspected reason, the discriminating and thinking function, not in abstraction or as an ideal, but in operation as a guide to behavior. We behold it saving us, indeed, from utter rawness and brutish fixity by analysis that indefinitely enlarges the range of selection within experience; but at the same time we discovered that it customarily stumbles over its own products, checks its own progress, and becomes an instrument of the very rawness that it should leave behind. This difficulty we found to be inherent in reason as such because thinking depends upon memory, and thought-guided conduct upon precedents. Precedents are necessary to thought-guided action, but they imprison us, especially through the social process, wholesome and necessary as this is.

It must not be supposed that we are handicapped by a down-pulling lower nature plus a lag in our higher nature. What we have found is a hesitation that spreads through the whole range of functions as far as they are human at all. This truth is two-edged. It means not only that our reason is never, in practice, completely pure, but also that the instinctive or impulsively raw “factors” in behavior never can be isolated, and therefore never are factors in the strict sense but only abstracted aspects. They are as abstract as “pure reason.” A few examples will show that even our passions are precedent-ridden, and that the control of them has to be effected by manipulating this thought-factor. Even in the region of ourselves that is commonly called lower, both the down-drag and the up-push inhere in the rationality that we regard as our distinguishing mark. If this truth conduces to modesty, it justifies also hope, for it means that even in our passions we discriminate occasions and reach after rational selection.

That precedents guide even our passions is not quite the same as saying that all emotional responses become “conditioned” after the first instance of them in infancy. Precedents arise through analysis, discrimination, and comparison, not automatically, and they can be changed and dethroned by the same process that creates them.

Let us turn, now, to a few illuminating examples. By the “passions” we are to understand such emotional eagernesses as anger, malice, revenge, jealousy, greed, lust; and we are to take the most volcanic of them, anger and lust, as objects of our especial scrutiny. The question is, Is there a thought-determined selection of the occasions upon which each shall dominate the individual’s conduct, of the object towards which action shall be directed, of the form that action shall take, and of the distance it shall go? Are there fashions here as well as in our appreciations of art and of religion?

Does anger arise from the same provocations and run the same course in a club, upon a college campus, among workmen in a factory, between “society people,” between an employer and his employe, a teacher and a pupil, close friends, business competitors? Evidently not. If my friend craftily grabs the good things in sight and leaves me in the lurch, I am affronted; but not if my business competitor does the same thing. When a teacher corrects a pupil’s error, all remains serene, but when a pupil corrects a teacher’s error we cannot be so sure of calm weather. If one of my society acquaintances spills hot tea upon me, I am more likely to pity him than to be angry with him; but suppose that a waiter in a restaurant spills anything on me! What would be an insult in a club or on the golf links is only bluff geniality among workmen, or coltishness among college students. One of the most astonishing instances of the control of primitive feelings by a social precedent, preliminary practice being entirely lacking, may be seen in hazings and initiations among collegians.

So sensitive is anger to its setting within a system of ideas. Moreover, the particular expressions of it, when it does arise, are almost purely conventional. Whether one shall stiffen up in haughty silence and stare at the offender; speak a frigid word; utter a hot epithet; swear; or deliver a fisticuff, or a challenge to a duel depends upon already accepted notions as to what is appropriate in the given social setting. The object towards which it is directed, also, is often thought-selected. If I get “hot” when a dining-car waiter serves my roast and potato cold I may “roast” either the waiter, the cook, the steward, or the railroad company. It appears to have been a custom of ancient potentates to punish messengers who brought bad news, but we esteem ourselves fortunate if our newsgatherers tell the truth whether or not it pains us. If some Chinese, out of patience at our delay in the revocation of the unequal treaties, insult and abuse or kill some of our nationals, our resentment will flame, according to our thought-habits, against the Chinese who did the act, against the Chinese people, or against our own officials who were dilatory about removing an irritation.

How far anger shall go, once it gets started, is likewise largely a matter of social tradition. In some circles of society, physical chastisement for provoking conduct is entirely proper, and it is administered then and there; in other circles, this so far offends good form that it scarcely occurs at all. Though knocking a man down for an insulting word may be applauded, kicking a man when he is down is the act of a “mucker.” “Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” That is, though a sudden and temporary burst of this passion be excusable, the nursing of wrath is not. Yet there are populations in which the nursing of wrath until revenge can be had is the mark of a man.

Even lust is guided by thought-out distinctions. With one individual it acts within wedlock and stops there; with another it acts towards courtesans, but despises seduction; with still others it permits seduction of girls of other races or of a different social class, but not girls of one’s own class and race; and all these differences between men depend very largely upon the male company one keeps. That is, lust acts by code. Moreover, every permission that any of these codes grants is accompanied by prohibitions also; at every level distinctions are made between better and worse, and customs of regard for the better actually prevail.

The passions that sway men in masses are similarly obedient to precedents. You cannot account for lynchings by naming human instincts, nor by this plus a description of the crimes that lynchers seek to avenge, nor yet by adding a color-contrast between lynchers and lynched. Who is to be lynched, by whom, upon what provocation, and by what method depends upon a set of discriminated ideas already present when the provocation occurs. An acquaintance of mine tells me that, being in the vicinity of a town where this summary procedure was threatened, he took means to ascertain just what was done. In this instance--it is doubtless an extreme one, but it is none the less instructive--the populace assembled at a prearranged hour and without tumult; prayer was offered; the victim was calmly hanged from a bridge, and his body was riddled with bullets; after which, this business being attended to, the crowd went about its other business. If most lynchings are less orderly, they nevertheless are ruled by the same sort of traditions; see how alike these crimes are, and how unruffled the surrounding populace can remain.

It should scarcely be necessary to say how conventionalized are the passions that make nations fight one another. Like the personal-honor code of the duelist is diplomacy’s schedule of the degrees of possible offensiveness in the conduct of other nations and their representatives, with a parallel column for appropriate ways of resenting each sort of disagreeableness. And the extreme mode of resentment, war, has a definite place in this code. Nations do not wait to be hurtled into war by explosions of popular wrath. The matter is much more in the control of reason than this. War-making is one of the legally recognized functions of the state, and all the necessary machinery--from secretaries of war to a supply of gas-masks--is kept constantly on hand. How odd it is that the people as a rule think of wars, even modern wars, as calamities that, like a tornado or a tidal wave, just happen, or as a horror that “bad” nations thrust upon “good” ones. Wars occur, just as fisticuffs or shootings occur among a frontier populace, and just as measured words of resentment are spoken where culture prevails, namely, as an expression of the recognized system for dealing with situations of certain sorts. There is nothing inevitable about any of them.

When an individual follows the social code of resentment from a sense of duty rather than from hot passion, we find the situation amusing. But when a people that does not desire to fight is governed by officials that do, then occurs the most remarkable, as it is also the most tragic, example of the actual relation between passion and precedent. The populace must now be worked up into a mood that will impel them to kill and to do it with a clear conscience. And how is the war-passion, in fact, aroused? By bringing the proposed or already-declared war under some appropriate precedent or precedents. Farmers and grocers, say, have not kept up with international events sufficiently to know what the friction is all about, or which side is right if either side is, or what probability there is that war will set things right; but they won’t submit to a foreign invader or oppressor, they love their country and its traditions, and they hate the ruthlessness that ravishes women, and starves and mutilates children and wounded soldiers. So, it is

“Fight for your altars and your fires;
Fight for the green graves of your sires,
God and your native land!”

The whole scheme of war-propaganda consists in inducing people to classify another country, or a foreign leader, or events under appropriate headings. So precedent-ridden is the passion that has rent the world asunder and now threatens to destroy it.