Chapter IX: Part III: Yet Our Capacities Are in Bondage (2)

The struggle to control and guide any of our passions, or if need be to cause them to atrophy from disuse, must be directed chiefly to current assumptions, types of thought, social standards, and customary classifications. This is one reason why the world cannot be saved by rescuing individuals one by one from their evil ways. While we are rebuilding one individual in this way, social precedents are stamping themselves upon ten children. It follows that the reconstructive work of religion and of education must be done chiefly by discrediting currently accepted precedents and causing a rethinking of the alternatives.

XXIV

FREE MEN FEAR THEIR FREEDOM. WHY?

Our fathers gave their all that we might be free, but we are abashed by the bequest that they have left us. We are abashed, not by the moral grandeur, the holiness, of our inheritance, nor by the height of the obligations with which it endows us, but by apprehension that the inside of it may not be as fair as the outside. We decorate ourselves with the name and the glory of free men; they grace our historic records and our festal occasions; but in our daily conduct we accept the functions of free men with reservations. We are “judicious,” as we call it.

The paradox of liking and disliking freedom at the same time is not a superficial one; it is deep in our nature; it is an apparently inevitable seesaw in our motives. There is in our endowment something so grand that ordinary men accept any privation in preference to comfortable slavery. So majestic is the mind of man when it is aroused that no pain that our fellows can inflict counterbalances the value of uncoerced thinking and speaking. We know that this freedom, with all the risks and burdens that it entails, is fundamental to every great thing that humanity has done in the modern period. Milton’s _Areopagitica_ and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States are flags upon the mountain peaks of history. Nevertheless, the meaning of every achieved enfranchisement is in practice toned down by the enfranchised themselves, and in consequence even our old and taken-for-granted liberties have continually to be rewon.

The sincerity of this cautiousness is not to be questioned. For we are apprehensive not only that social classes other than our own, and other individuals (as, the young) will fail to “make a wise use of freedom,” but that we ourselves shall fail to do so. We are on guard against our own enjoyment of powers and prerogatives that nevertheless we highly esteem. Father and mother, instead of being eager to confer freedom upon their child as rapidly as possible, make it their policy to shield him as long as possible from the dangers of freedom; and in accord with this policy they measure the correctness of their own conduct in the presence of children by its restraints, not by its resistance of restraints. Teachers, likewise, from the elementary school to the college, are as a rule engaged in putting upon young spirits a yoke made by others instead of assisting pupils to make harnesses of their own. It is regarded as an achievement of good teaching when pupils are kept happy and active in the process of being yoked to precedents. And teachers themselves are an ensample to their flock. If there is anybody in the world who, under a régime of freedom, should be characterized by constant unfixing of precedents, it is the teacher, but it is safe to guess that not one person in a thousand could name an instance of it in any school.

If we were to judge religion by its great creative periods, we should perhaps say that the religious leader, even more than the teacher, should be a dyed-in-the-wool user of freedom. But, obviously, the fear of a flexible faith is greater, except at crisis-points in religious history, than the fear that faith may become stereotyped, mechanical, and dead. In nearly all ecclesiastical folds, if not in all of them, it is assumed that no clergyman “of good judgment” will use all the liberty that the constitution and the laws of his denomination permit. There is an unwritten law of repression within the written guarantees of liberty. Many years ago a Catholic professor was asked whether the advice of the Pope upon a certain point in education was an _ex cathedra_, officially authoritative, pronouncement. “No,” said the professor, “but we obey it just as if it were.” A passage from John Wesley concerning the Virgin Birth was submitted to a Methodist Episcopal bishop with the question whether this--the source not being named--was a view of the matter fit for a Methodist. The bishop’s reply was an emphatic negative. Upton Sinclair trapped a ministers’ meeting by reading a fresh translation of the denunciation of rich men in the Epistle of James and attributing the words to Emma Goldman. Most of the ministers thought that such utterances justified putting her into prison.

If we drew our presumptions from history, we should assume that, in every area of church life, what is now going on is partly valid and partly not; and believers in the _status quo_ and disbelievers in it would discuss each question upon a plane of friendly equality. But they do not meet as equals; the freedom to repeat our thoughts is, so to say, greater than the freedom to do fresh thinking. Note how many liberals strive, as far as honesty permits, to make it appear that they are not radical nor anything more than progressively orthodox. That is to say, it is taken for granted that something has the precedence of real freedom. Churchmen have no such fear of their past as the facts warrant; their fears always prick up ears towards anything that is in any significant way novel. Was ever a minister brought to trial for backwardness of mind, or for obstructing the freedom of others? And did the acceptance or rejection of any candidate for the ministry ever hinge upon whether he was sufficiently liberty-loving to guard the guarantees of freedom in the church constitution? The fears are on the other side, and there the defenders of the faith patrol their beat.

As for individual ministers who believe in real freedom yet submit to the informal censorship of church opinion, it is by no means necessary to suppose that they sell their silence for place or salary, though the spiritual peril here is immeasureable. Some of them, without doubt, by their really large and just-permitted variations from the ordinary, are helping to keep alive the tradition of freedom. On the other hand, what shall be said of those who, though they believe in freedom in the abstract, are convinced that, if it is not actually a subordinate interest of the spirit, at least it can better afford postponement than other interests? It is fair to say that they lay it away in a napkin.

I should not like to have these remarks add force to the common opinion that religious institutions are inherently more repressive than others. This opinion is at least a grave exaggeration. It forgets the glorious chapters in religious history that record the identification of faith with the bursting of bonds--ecclesiastical, political, social, intellectual, ethical. It forgets, too, the character of our secular institutions. Let us look at a few of them.

Within the tradition of academic freedom, exactly as within ecclesiastical practice, there exists an unwritten law of abstention. It restrains professors and administrators alike, though at different points. Not all professors or all administrators, of course, but the great mass of them. Self-restriction expresses itself in solicitude for “the standing of the institution”; in the professor’s choice of his field for research and publication; in acute tenderness for the immature judgment of students (most of them either in possession of the ballot or about to reach their majority); in the censorship of student publications that criticize the social and educational _status quo_; in decisions as to what speakers may be heard upon the campus; in the use of the term “good judgment” or its opposite when variant professors are attacked; in the selection and promotion of members of the staff; in the budget; in consciousness of the legislature at state institutions, and in consciousness of the donor at others; finally, in the development of the present dominant type of college and university administration. If we compare state institutions with privately endowed ones in these matters, we do not discover any great difference. The same scale, from overt repression, through tacit abstention, to courageous championship of real freedom, is found filled up by both, and institutions representing the religious motive have no distinctive place of their own upon this scale. Fear to use academic freedom is not a mark of either religious or secular institutions; it is merely academic! In short, real freedom for the mind is as much a problem in our day as in that of Galileo. It is the subject-matter that has changed.

Not that hypocrisy is in the academic saddle. No; our trouble is the confusion that arises from sincerely believing in freedom but also sincerely fearing it. This is why technicalities of procedure play so large a rôle; this is the reason why so much depends upon judicious silence. It is because we are not quite at one with ourselves in our own souls that what might be the lusty exercise of our powers of variation becomes merely the absence of certain external restraints. Fear puts us on the defensive; whereupon, quietly reducing the points of possible attack appears to be a dictate of practical wisdom.

The handling of freedom in our legal system is not a whit more daring than in our ecclesiastical and educational institutions. It is not customary to construe particular laws in the spirit of an expanding liberty; nor do courts, as a rule, endeavor to get at the core of justice, ethically considered. The technical theory of their function is that they are umpires between litigants, responsible merely for seeing that contests are conducted according to prescribed rules.

In fact, and of course, courts are and must be more than this; they cannot be merely automatic appliers of laws and precedents. We do not impugn the integrity of judges if we say that they cannot help being influenced in their decisions by their understanding of the world in which they live, and also by their own appreciation of values in life, in society, in law and government. It was no statutory obligation, but his chosen use of the discretion allowed him that gave its noteworthy character to Judge Thayer’s conduct of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. In the celebrated contest over a sweat-shop law in the State of New York, it was a belated outlook upon industrial changes that dictated the first decision of the Court of Appeals, and a changed outlook that brought about the reversal of it. Appointments to the supreme bench of the United States are not made upon the basis of ability, probity, and experience alone; the appointing power has regard also to social attitudes. The subsequent votes of appointees cannot be accounted for without recognizing the influence of these attitudes.

All this has been pointed out again and again. The purpose of saying it once more is to raise the question why courts do not more often give the weight of their discretion to the expansive use of freedom? Why do not judges openly and frankly avow the principles that control them when they perform discretionary acts? Why minimize the fact that discretion is used and that thereby something new under the sun might be brought to birth? Consider the often-cited treatment of “freedom of contract.” Since coercion takes new forms in our changing society, it was inevitable that real freedom of contract should move its old line fences. But how timid the legal and judicial mind has been toward the plain fact, and how reluctant to draw the necessary inference. Timidity counsels, “Make no new precedents.” The short of it is that here is the same fear of freedom that we found in parents, clergymen, teachers, professors, and college administrators.

Even the specific guarantees of freedom that we have incorporated into our organic law do not get themselves enforced with the simple directness that should mark real faith in them. Liberty of speech, of press, of assemblage, and of domiciliary privacy, as liberty was understood and intended by the framers of our scheme of self-government, is boldly invaded in several of our states by the police, the executive arm, and the legislatures. And the courts comply, as they surely would not do if the mental climate were to change. Now, it is especially interesting to note that the police never stop a meeting of jingoes and fire-eaters even though they advocate illegal violence; that no legislature has attempted to put a check upon those who would subvert the constitution by suppression of freedom; that those who actually have interfered with the constitutional liberties of others go unpunished; and that a Department of Justice that keeps a wary eye upon pacifists is untroubled when beliefs and policies like the following are blazoned: That force is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs; that our government must act accordingly; that we should enforce our economic self-interest against our weaker neighbors regardless of their liberties; that there is an inevitable clash between our self-interest and that of other great powers (sometimes named), and that we must fight these powers, not relying upon conciliation, arbitration, or anything else that signifies that humanity is capable of growing towards rationality in its conduct.

The paradox of all this deepens towards the ridiculous or the tragic when one discovers that these men who despitefully use the constitutional guarantees are fervid worshippers of the Constitution, and firm believers that the founders, who based their policy upon trust in human nature, made the greatest political discovery of all ages, a discovery that is destined to bless the whole world! Here is intellectual hara-kiri. Asked to explain it, those who practice it tell us sincerely that they believe in freedom as an everyday method of getting along; it is only when we get into a pinch, when vital interests are at stake, or when freedom is abused, that suppression is required. What deep distrust is this! The freedom that cost our fathers so dearly precisely because it applied to the major and contested concerns of society now becomes a convenience in handling small affairs but is of no use in emergencies.

In all these mixings-up of faith and unfaith in our supposably achieved liberties one can discern a foundation-issue in our philosophy of life. The whole universe of our experience--the solid earth, the sea, the sky, the past and present of society, the achievements of science, the devices and desires of the heart, the inspiring faiths--all this confronts us with the question, What do you really want, and how much will you dare on behalf of it? Our answer involves our assessment of our own selfhood. Usually the alternatives for our enterprise are, on the one hand, increasing or stabilizing some conventional and comfortable function, or, on the other hand, reaching after an unconventional blessing that costs the pain of self-reconstruction. We cannot have brotherhood, democracy, industrial justice, world-peace, _or freedom_ at a lower cost than this. Shall we, then, experiment, explore, adventure in the area of selfhood as we are doing at the present moment in the sky? Can the mind, as well as the body, support itself in a less dense medium than that in which it has moved in the past?

The scientific movement has made us daring in the realm of ponderables but not with respect to ourselves. Pure science seeks only one value, that of knowing the connections of things; its one interest in personality is that scientific method should be employed; its one interest in freedom is this. In our academic institutions a spiritually delicate sensitivity at this point may be joined with indifference to freedom in the other essays of man. A kind of daring different from that of the laboratory or even of polar exploration is required if we are to cast off the moorings of an old selfhood and voyage forth in search of new spiritual continents.

Further, the scientific spirit can be and often is inattentive to the life-values or dis-values that are promoted by the application of its discoveries. The uncriticized purposes of the present, accordingly, have unobstructedly capitalized on their own static behalf our enormously increased power over nature. Indeed, these purposes, because they use new and shining machinery, have actually acquired something of the éclat of the sciences. A current writer, according to an announcement that has appeared since this chapter was begun, declares that science has actually been accepted as a sort of messiah, deliverer, or solver of life’s final problems--a rôle for which it is totally unqualified.[8] The obverse of this attitude toward science is inertia toward the values that science as such does not feel.

The weight of precedent is, indeed, on the side of force, not of cooperative thinking, as the arbiter of human relations; it is on the side of class privilege, not of democracy; of repression, not of liberty. But always the light shines in this darkness, though the darkness comprehend it not. For nobody wants sheer force, nobody approves all that class-selfishness implies, everybody believes (after a fashion) in liberty even though with contradictory restrictions. The picture is that of a world of personal selves in evolution. If, in any species that belongs to an evolutionary order, thought mixes with desire; if self-guidance arrives at all, these paradoxical inconsistencies are bound to occur. The present satisfaction, once thought about, is certain to resist any and every not-yet-experienced good. There always will be trepidation when the half-gods go.

But, wherever thought and desire do mix, there occurs the process of emancipation from authority; freedom is the very soul of moral evolution. We see why it is feared; but need it be? Is it not possible to devise a technic for freedom whereby we shall be somewhat less inconsistent, somewhat less distrustful of one another, somewhat more wisely venturesome in the realm of selfhood?

XXV

THE MOTIVES OF YOUTH COMPARED WITH THOSE OF AGE

The problem of freedom and restraint, of impulse and reason, of the real nature of human motive forces, comes far to the fore today in world-wide perplexity over the present restlessness of youth. Our young people won’t “stay put.” Many of them refuse to postpone life’s satisfactions--“they want theirs now.” A few are asking the critical questions, wherein life’s greater satisfactions consist, and whether our present ways of life lead toward them. On all hands there is a loosening of the bonds that tie the present to the past; the face of youth is towards the future, whether the next evening or the next century. Here, accordingly, is an unparalleled opportunity to “see the wheels go ’round” in human conduct. Here is life only a step removed from naïveté; and here is a display, side by side, of inexperienced youth and experienced age.

Perhaps it would not be misleading to say inexperienced youth with “the lid off,” and experienced age with “the lid on.” What, then, are the main differences between them in point of motivation? The usual answer is simplicity itself--that is, the answer usually given by experienced age. These youngsters are carried away, we are told, by “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life”--to use an ancient phrase for pleasure-seeking instincts; whereas--so the assumption runs--we oldsters are guided by a rationality that governs our instincts and keeps them in their place. Most persons of maturity are sure that, in the by and large, experience brings wisdom, that the rules and precedents that the mature observe are dictates of practiced reason, and therefore that youths who do not follow substantially in our footsteps act irrationally, and thereby subject themselves to the penalties of rashness.

This view of the matter contains a grain of truth, of course, but only a grain. A burnt child does dread the fire, but a child with a stomachache does not dread the unwholesome food that produced it. “Experience” at the dining-room table often results in wrong dietary habits that even maturity regards as right. “Experience” as a parent can fix upon the mind the most futile and injurious conceptions of parental authority--it has done so in multitudes of cases. “Experience” as a teacher fastened upon us a kind of school-teaching that we are now struggling, with enormous effort, to free ourselves from. So, in statecraft, in churchcraft, in industrial and economic relations, in social customs, we oldsters are dragging about with us a terrible weight of unnecessary and injurious habit and precedent. In fact, experience has brought us, along with some wisdom, a lot of unwisdom which it has baptized with the sanctity of our years.

Accumulation of experience or of years is not of great inherent significance; neither is the lack of years. What is important is the way in which we deal with experiences as they arise. This is the problem for age and youth alike, and here is the basis for the most useful approach to the youth-question. It is not enough to say that in childhood and adolescence instinctive impulses are more varied and more clamorous; nor have we said enough when we add to this that in our day there is an unusually wide cleft between the ways of the young and the ways of the old. The really important comparison is that between the characteristic technic of the young and of the old in the making and the unmaking of approved precedents.

When we make this comparison, what do we find? On the side of age we find man measuring himself by his own past, mechanizing the wisdom of yesterday so that it cannot grow through today’s experiences, making his own imperfections into virtues. We behold, consequently, accumulations of property, of personal and institutional influence, and even of scientific knowledge bolstering customs and standards after they have become plainly questionable. If we of the older generation had the grit to be historically, psychologically, and ethically realistic towards ourselves, we should see the irony of our position. We have a timid wisdom, a self-restricting wisdom, a pseudo-wisdom, for we have no adequate technic for getting out of new experiences what they could teach us, nor for graduating from precedents whose teaching is already completed.

When the Disciples asked, “Who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus set a small child in the midst, saying, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

On the other hand--what a paradox! who is more unwilling than an adolescent to become as a little child? Are modern youths very ready to learn? This is the test for them, and when they prove that they are in the attitude of learning, they must next show whether they will take the trouble to acquire a technic for learning. We say that youth is forward-reaching; it thinks in terms of the future. But in what sense is this true? Most commonly in the sense of aspiration to be classified with adults and to enjoy their prerogatives. It does not usually mean a stretching towards any unprecedented good. Youth sheds the precedents of its own childhood only to adopt the precedents of those a little older than itself! The “flapper” of fourteen gets herself up and conducts herself as if she were eighteen at least; the boy of sixteen wants to be “a man of the world” right now; almost any youth of twenty can be relied upon to conform scrupulously to the customs of some group, set, or type that, in his estimation, has “arrived.”

Heedlessness of precedents is not characteristic of youth. Youth is avid for them. If satisfactory ones are not found in the generation that is just ahead, any pleasant thing that happens twice is seized upon and stereotyped. Placed in as free an environment as the modern college campus, young people form rigidly conventional groupings and adopt rigid campus customs. The average college student cannot stand alone; he is a very bond-slave to social precedents; and he is one of the most intolerant critics of those who are more individual than himself. Even at the points where modern youths flout adult conventions, other conventions quickly form. The very follies of youth are conventionalized. Why the hip flask at dancing parties? Why the present wave in the ancient stream of “petting” and “necking”? Why is “jazz” for the time being the only music that is interesting? Why Valentinitis? Doubtless the starting-point of each of them is a particular situation that involves a stimulus or a deficiency, but the rapid spread occurs through imitation and mutual suggestion; and the self-accepted excuse or justification lies, not in the nature and results of the act or the experience, but in the fact that it is the conventional or expected thing.

The similarity between the ways of youth and the ways of age is remarkable. Think of the money and the time that adults have spent in the last ten years in order to listen to radio trash. Compare the silly social compulsions of the college campus with the force that compels everybody to stand whenever “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung or played. Or compare, in point of mental process, young women’s adulation of Valentino with mature men’s adulation of Coolidge. Does any fever of modern youth reach a higher temperature than automobilitis among the parents?

Moreover, just as it would be unfair to the present generation of mature men and women to characterize it solely by such flightiness, so we should do injustice to the young people of today if we judged them by these shallow performances and conventionalities. For the opening of eyes and the enlargement of horizons is as marked a fact as the other. The new freedom assumed by the youth of today, the increase in spending money, the widened range of activities made possible by machinery, and the multiplication of attractive objects or experiences that can be had for a money consideration--all these, taken together, stimulate thought as well as instinct. They present alternatives, awaken conflicting motives, make uncertainties vivid; all of which is favorable to reflection. It is probable that even “jazzy” young people are doing more thinking upon life’s alternatives than was done by the average youths of yesterday. Many who appear to be blown hither or thither by popular folly are really experimenting, watching, putting limits to their indulgences, endeavoring to be ethically realistic; all of which should be reassuring to those of us who are able to trust the human mind when it is awake and at work.

Furthermore, from a minority of youths, very modern youths, there flash forth upon our distraught world some of the most hopeful signs. I refer not so much to the impulsive idealism of some, so strongly contrasting with the frivolity of others, as to the union of critical thinking with sober idealism that appears in spots all over the world. Let the conventional self-flattery of maturity take heed to itself, for “a chiel’s amang ye, takin’ notes” upon our efficiencies and inefficiencies. The most effective critics of modern life are not Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, but younger spirits who possess both a scientific attitude of inquiry and an idealism that is not tired or sour. In the colleges such youngsters are engaged not only in “de-bunking” the customs of both faculties and students but also in thinking out something better.

To the credit of the older generation be it here recorded that various presidents and faculties are welcoming this critical scrutiny by much younger heads. Before me, for example, lies an official college bulletin that consists of a report by a student committee upon the curriculum, the teaching, and other official affairs of the institution. Similarly, there is a stirring in the churches. Young people are holding conventions in which they ask such questions and propose such measures as have not proceeded from youth at any time within the memory of men now living, if ever. And again it is remarkable to see how much of their freshness is welcomed by the older generation.

There is danger, indeed, that the hospitality of adult minds will divert these younger minds from their journey of exploration. Palliatives will be sought for in situations that require a drastic study of causes. Cooperation in a respectable good will postpone appraisement of the limitations of it. The lack of experience on the part of thinking young people, together with their sense of being at official disadvantage as compared with their elders, makes them too thankful for half-loaves where whole loaves are needed.

Youth’s rashness, and the perils that it involves, require closer analysis than they ordinarily receive. The fault of the great majority is precipitate acceptance of adult standards and ways of life. This is youth’s most characteristic rashness. Here is a young workingman who says that the “powers that be” are so strongly intrenched in the state and in industry that his vote can make no difference; hence, he pursues a policy of merely wriggling within his immediate environment so as to get out of it what he can. Here is a high-school senior who declares outright that the professed standards of adults do not represent the forces whereby things get done; money and power _are_ the things that count; the strong _do_ exploit the weak; this _is_ the road to success, and he intends to walk in it. Here are multitudes of young men and young women who are so rash as to accept the class-consciousness of their parents as though it were self-evidently correct. And here are myriads of members of church young-people’s societies who actually regard the conventional religion about them as a fulfilment of Jesus’ double law of love. The great and deadly rashness of youth takes the form of hasty acquiescence in things as they are or seem to be.

Of those who do not acquiesce, by far the larger number will be found in the following classes: Those who make an idealistic spurt, but grow tired, or become discouraged because of the inertness or the antagonism of others; those who talk but do not act; those who act but are too thankful for “small favors,” too gratified by minor improvements, to do anything really fundamental; and those who, seeing this lag in things fundamental, “give it up.” All these become swallowed up, in the end, by the insatiable respectability of the _status quo_.

Radicalism, whether that of the mere skeptic, or that which discards the good for the better and the better for the best, is not characteristic of the young. There is only a small minority of thinking youths who make any sustained effort to go to the bottom of things. Of these there are three main types: The attackers, the appliers, and the investigators.

The attackers turn life inside out in order to show how irrational or futile the accepted order of things is. The working hypothesis appears to be that whatever enjoys official power or general acceptance is either misled or misleading. The results are, of course, one sided, but they are not useless. Until our institutions provide for self-criticism, they are bound to be victims of self-deception; therefore they must be “shown up” again and again. Probably attack is good, in the end, even for our valid convictions, because they get tangled with what is temporary and merely specious. It is true, of course, that these young attackers are, to a considerable extent, imitators of the mature writers, mentioned in an earlier section, who exploit our irrationality as a literary gold mine. There is, therefore, a touch of conventionality and dependence in these would-be emancipated youngsters. They should be listened to, however, because they are on track of aspects of truth that are commonly overlooked.

The appliers are those who endeavor to go the whole length with some approved principle, as, for example, Jesus’ injunction to treat all men as brothers. This sort of endeavor, in turn, leads to a critique of life not less drastic than that of the attackers, but more likely to be patient and considerate towards our weaknesses. Moreover, the appliers exhibit various attempts to govern their present conduct by exalted standards for which the society about them is not ready. The service of such youths is various. It reveals to us the disparity between the pious phrases of our lips and our daily conduct in church, state, and occupation. It presents many a living example of fidelity to an ideal. It spreads the contagion of faith, making better things practicable because we believe that they are so.

The third, or investigator, type of non-conventional youth goes behind the appearance of things by intellectual processes that sometimes have all the coolness of science. He must be “shown”; neither _ipse dixit_ nor general acquiescence satisfies him. What does the curriculum of this college include and what does it omit, and why? What are the most effective methods of teaching, and do our professors use them? What are the real values of our extra-curricular activities? How are our teachers chosen and promoted, and how much are they paid? Why do we have religious denominations, creeds, missions, worship? What is the truth about our international relations? What is the life of the industrial worker like? How is “hiring and firing” done? I’ll get a job and find out. What really is happening in Germany or Russia? Why shouldn’t I go over there to see for myself? This sort of questioning is growing, and it is bound to spread in colleges and high schools. It is one of the most solidly hope-giving aspects of the entire youth situation.

These three types of aggressive non-conformity overlap and blend, of course. As a rule students of the investigator type are moved by dissatisfaction with the _status quo_; they investigate in order to find the road towards some ideal. Not seldom the applier type discovers the fascination of social statistics and even of history. The attacker, in turn, will usually be found working for specific reforms. All three types make freedom their common cause--freedom to think without fear of consequences; freedom to speak with sincerity upon great issues; freedom to listen to speakers who represent disagreeable minority positions; freedom to participate in the determination of the conditions under which they shall live.

In these youths who really transcend conventions we have a hint of what might be, what ought to be, the normal place of young people in society. Yes--let me answer your doubt before you state it--there is danger that, taking advantage of the questioning mood, the dissenting mood, or the consciousness of freedom, wayward impulse will make the worse appear the better reason. There is danger in asking questions, but God took this risk when he created man; and by far the greater danger is that we shall not ask questions enough, nor questions that go deep enough. By far the greatest evil in the youth-life of today is that so few young men and women find any antidote to the way men imitate themselves and one another--any antidote, that is to say, to the pseudo-wisdom of age.