What, for instance, was to be said for religious faith, after Darwin and science had toppled God from his throne in heaven and put nothing in his place but the gloomy angst of existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre? What is it in our nature that makes wars and conflict seemingly unavoidable? And what is the deeper meaning of life, love and happiness? What is the purpose of art? Of science? What education approach is best — and what makes man attracted to woman?
Vanity increases with age. Here I am, going on 95; by this time I should have learned the art of silence, and should realize that every educated reader has already heard all opinions and their opposites; yet here I set out, fearful and rash, to tell the world — or one hundred millionths of it — just what I think on everything. It is all the more ridiculous since, at my age, man is a deeply rooted in the ways of views of his youth, and is almost constitutionally incapable of understanding the changing world that assails him, and from which he tends to flee into the grooves of the past or the safety of his home.
So let us try, however vainly, to see human existence as a whole, from the moment when we are flung unasked into the world, until the wheel on which we are bound comes full circle in death.
Please do not expect any new system of philosophy, nor any world-shaking cogitations; these will be human confessions, not divine revelations; they are micro- or mini-essays whose only dignity lies in the subjects rather than in their profundity or their size. If you find anything original here it will be unintentional, and probably regrettable. Knowledge grows, but wisdom, though it can improve with years, does not progress with centuries. I cannot instruct Solomon.
So, brave reader, you have fair warning: proceed at your own risk. But I shall be warmed by your company.
We like children first of all because they are ours; prolongations of our luscious and unprecedented selves. However, we also like them because they are what we would but cannot be — coordinated animals, whose simplicity and unity of action are spontaneous, whereas in the philosopher they come only after struggle and suppression. We like them because of what in us is called selfishness — the naturalness and undisguised directness of their instincts. We like their unhypocritical candor; they do not smile to us when they long for our annihilation. “Children and fools speak the truth”; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.
See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle — growth. Can you conceive it — that this queer bundle of sound and pain will come to know love, anxiety, prayer, suffering, creation, metaphysics, death?
Nature protects him against this initial onslaught of the world by dressing him in a general insensitivity.
Curiosity consumes and develops him; he would touch and taste everything from his rattle to the moon. For the rest he learns by imitation, though his parent think he learns by sermons. They teach him gentleness, and beat him; they teach him mildness of speech, and shout at him; they teach him a Stoic apathy to finance, and quarrel before him about the division of their income; they teach him honesty, and answer his most profound questions with lies. Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are.
Youth is the transition from play to work, from dependence on the family to dependence on one’s self. It is a little anarchic and egoistic, because in the family its every whim and want was favored by unstinting parental love. Passing into the world, youth, petted for years and now for the first time free, drinks in the deep delight of liberty and advances to conquer and remold the universe.
Good oratory, said Demosthenes, is characterized by three points — action, action, and action, but the might have said it just as well of youth. Youth is as confident and improvident as a god. It loves excitement and adventure more than food. It loves the superlative, the exaggerated, the limitless, because it has abounding energy and frets to liberate its strength. It loves new and dangerous things; a man is as young as the risks he takes.
It bears law and order grudgingly. It is asked to be quiet when noise is the vital medium of youth; it is asked to be passive when it longs for action; it is asked to be sober and judicious when its very blood makes youth “a continuous intoxication.” It is the age of abandon, and its motto, undelphianly, is Panta agan — “Everything in excess.”
Happiness is the free play of the instincts, and so is youth. For the majority of us it is the only period of life in which we live; most men of forty are but a reminiscence, the burnt-out ashes of what was once a flame. The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait! — “If youth knew how, and old age could!”
Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.
And at the same time that youth examines itself, it examines the world. It stretches out numberless tentacles of questioning and theory to grasp the meaning of the world; it asks inescapably about evil, and origins, and evolution, and destiny, and soul, and God. Religious “conversion” may come now, or religious doubt; religion may strengthen itself by self-attachment to the new impulses of love; or it may fight against the widening stream of desire in the soul, and awaken a hostility that for a while may rant in revengeful atheism.
It is about this time that youth discovers philosophy, and turns it into logic-bouts. The full heart flowers into song and dance; the esthetic sense is nourished with the overflow of desire; music and art are born. Discovering the world, youth discovers evil, and is horrified to learn the nature of his species. The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong. Youth, shocked, rebels, and calls upon the world to make itself a family, and give to youth the welcome and protection and comradeship of the home: the age of socialism comes. And then slowly youth is drawn into the gamble of this individualistic life; the zest of the game creeps into the blood; acquisitiveness is aroused and stretches out both hands for gold and power. The rebellion ends; the game goes on.
Finally, youth discovers love. It has known “puppy love,” that ethereal prelude to the coming symphonies of flesh and soul; and it has know the lonely struggles of premature and uninformed desire. But these were only preliminaries that would deepen the spirit and make it ready for the self-abandonment of adoration.
See them in love, this boy in this girl; is there any evil this side of mortality that can balance the splendor of this good? Here is a fulfillment of long centuries of civilization and culture; here, in romantic love, more than in the triumphs of thoughts or the victories of power, is the topmost reach of human beings.
Desire is too strong to be dammed so unreasonably with moral prohibitions; its power has grown with every generation, for every generation is the result of its selected vigor; soon the flood of life will break through our insincerities and make new ways and morals for us while we shut our eyes.
Perhaps when it is too late we shall discover that we have sold the most precious thing in our civilization — the loyal love of a man for a woman — for the sake of the desolate security that cowards find in gold. Youth, if it were wise, would cherish love beyond all things else, keeping body and soul clean for its coming, lengthening its days with months of betrothal, sanctioning it with a marriage of solemn ritual, making all things subordinate to it resolutely. Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing it with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?
And so youth marries, and youth ends. A married man is already five years older the next day, and a married woman too. Biologically, middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.
As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget our radicalism then in a gentle liberalism — which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account. After forty we prefer that the world should stand still, that the moving picture of life should freeze into a tableau. Partly the increased conservatism of middle age is the result of wisdom, which perceives the complexity of institutions and the imperfections of desire; but partly it is the result of lowered energy, and corresponds to the immaculate morality of exhausted men. We perceive, at first incredulously and then with despair, that the reservoir of strength no longer fills itself after we draw upon it.
The discovery darkens life for some years; we begin to mourn the brevity of the human span, and the impossibility of wisdom of fulfillment within so limited a circle; we stand at the top of the hill, and without straining our eyes we can see, at its bottom, death. We work all the harder to forget that it is waiting for us; we turn our eyes back in memory to the days that were not darkened with its presence; we revel in the company of the young because they cast over us, transiently and completely, the divine carelessness or mortality. Hence it is in work and parentage that middle age finds its fulfillment and its happiness.
For by the time he has explored the depths of love, and has found the war that lurks in its gentle guise. Familiarity and fatigue have cooled the fever in his flesh. His wife does not dress for him.
But she is proud, too, and feels a new maturity; she is a woman now, and not an idle girl, not a domestic ornament or a sexual convenience anymore. She goes through her ordeal bravely; when she sees her child she weeps for a moment and then marvels at the child’s unprecedented beauty. Fondly she slaves for it, through busy days and fragmentary nights, never having time to look for “happiness,” and yet showing in her eyes a new radiance and delight. And now what is this new tenderness in the father’s eyes, this new gentleness in the touch of his hands, this unwonted sincerity in his embrace, this new willingness to labor and cherish and protect? Perhaps here in the child, where one never thought to seek it, is the center of life, and the secret of content?
“There, but for the lack of time, go I,” and in his eyes the old man said, “I, too, was once young like you; hungry for knowledge, hopeful of achievement, eager for change. Now I spend my nights sleeplessly in remembering little things, and my days in poring over yellow newspapers that tell excitedly of the time when I was young.”
What is old age? Fundamentally, no doubt, it is a condition of the flesh, of protoplasm that finds inevitably the limit of its life. It is a physiological and psychological involution. It is a hardening of the arteries and categories, an arresting of thought and blood; a man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas. The ability to learn decreases with each decade of our lives, as if the association fibers of the brain were accumulated and overlaid in inflexible patterns. New material seems no longer to find room, and recent impressions fade as rapidly as a politician’s promises, or the public’s memory of them.
As sensation diminish in intensity, the sense of vitality fades; the desire for life gives way to indifference and patient waiting; the fear of death is strangely mingled with the longing for repose. Perhaps then, if one has lived well, if one has known the full term of love and all the juice and ripeness of experience, one can die with some measure of content, clearing the stage for a better play.
But what if the play is never better, always revolving about suffering and death, telling endlessly the same idiotic tale? There’s the rub, and there’s the doubt that gnaws at the heart of wisdom, and poisons age. Here is shameless adultery and brutal, calculating murder. Well, they have always been, and apparently they always will be. Here is a flood, sweeping before it a thousand lives and the labor of generations. Here are bereavements and broken hearts, and always the bitter brevity of love. Here still are the insolence of office and the law’s decay, corruption in the judgment seat, and incompetence on the throne. Here is slavery, stupefying toil that makes great muscles and little souls.
Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organism forever. Here is history, a futile circle of infinite repetition: these youths with eager eyes will make the same errors as we, they will be misled by the same dreams; they will suffer, and wonder, and surrender, and grow old.
Only one thing is certain in history, and that is decadence; only one thing is certain in life, and that is death. This can be the great tragedy of old age, that, looking back with inverted romantic eye, it may see only the suffering of mankind. It is hard to praise life when life abandons us, and if we speak well of it even then it is because we hope we shall find it again, of fairer form, in some realm of disembodied and deathless souls.
And yet what if it is for life’s sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled and youth would find no room on the earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous.
To this pass youth has come, after all its hope and trials, to this pass middle age, after all its torment and its toil. To this pass health and strength and joyous rivalry. To this pass knowledge, science, and wisdom. For 70 years this man with pain and effort gathered knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of a varied experience, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed; his heart though suffering learned gentleness as his mind learned understanding; 70 years he grew from an animal into a man capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him, choking him, congealing his blood, gripping his heart, bursting his brain, rattling in his throat. Death wins.
Outside on the green boughs birds twitter gaily, and Chantecler sings his hymn to the sun. Light stream across his fields; buds open, and stalks confidently lift his heads; the sap mounts in the trees. Here are children; what is it that makes them so joyous, running madly over the dew-wet grass, laughing, calling, pursuing, eluding, panting for breath, inexhaustible? What energy, what spirit and happiness! What do they care about death? They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, with paternal care that will make their children a little finer than themselves.
Life wins.
If consciousness had no effect upon action, if every response was a mechanical reaction to a mechanical stimulus, waking life would be but another dream; unconscious forces would determine every perception, feeling, and idea.
How many things have been “proved” by “logic” and then discarded by later logicians — Euclidian propositions by Gauss and Riemann, Newtonian physics by Einstein. Logic itself is a human creation, and may be ignored by the universe.
In humans, besides heredity, environment, and circumstance (the determinist trinity), there is the expansive, driving, “procreant urge” of the soul; growth would be unintelligible without it. In addition to mechanical forces operating in me there is me, no more machinery of sensation, memory, and response, but a force and will bearing the imprint and character of my self. I do not know what modest measure of freedom and origination I enjoy, but when I introspect I see no mechanism, but ambition, desire, will. Desire, not experience, is the essence of life; experience becomes the tool of desire in the enlightenment of mind and the pursuit of ends.
But which of us has ever seen, or can ever see, things in the perspective of eternity, or be ever sure that he knows the truth?
I am quite content with mortality; I should be appalled at the thought of living forever, in whatever paradise. As I move on into my nineties my ambitions moderate, my zest in life wanes; soon I shall echo Caesar’s Jam satis vixi — “I have already lived enough.” When death comes in due time, after a life fully lived, it is forgivable and good. If in my last gasps I say anything contrary to this bravado, pay no attention to me. We must make room for our children.
The supreme deities ran into hundreds, the minor deities into thousands. If past generations could return to earth they would be scandalized to learn that most of the gods they prayed to are today known only to anthropologists. Every people has in every epoch reinterpreted God after its own fashion, and has been willing to die, or at least to kill, in defense of that passing conception. So the historian is prepared to see the idea of God change again.
I cannot look at any green shoot sprouting from the soil without feeling that in that mystic present I am closer to the essence of reality than when my grandson tries in vain to explain to me the marvels of the atom.
This, then, is the God I worship: the persistent and creative Life that struggles up from the energy of the atom to make the earth green with growth, to stir the youth with ambition and the girl with tender longing, to mold the form of woman, to agitate geniuses, to guide the art of Phidias, and to justify itself in Spinoza and Christ. I know that there are other aspects of reality than this life; that Nature is rich in terrors as well as in beauty and development; all the more should I reverence and help all growing things. This is a very old philosophy; otherwise I would distrust it.
For by 1906 I had replaced my Christian creed with a dream of socialism as the hope of the world; so Utopia comes up as heaven goes down. By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy; I left the seminary, causing much grief to my parents, and years of mental chaos and loneliness to myself.
“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” for knowledge can destroy a happy innocence and many a comforting or inspiring delusion.
Today the soul of Western man knows a double disillusionment, for in the space of one lifetime it has lost the bright faith of its childhood and the hopeful utopias of its youth. Where shall we find again a belief to give us stimulus, a conscience to give us decency, a new devotion to give nobility to our little span?
We may, however, ask that a religion shall soften the heart of man, that it shall inspire courage, conscience, and charity, that it shall make the strong a little more generous to the weak, that it shall mitigate the rigor of competition and the brutality of war. Since the only real progress is moral development, a religion faithful to these aims would (other things being equal) be the best faith and antidote for this factious and warring world.
Perhaps Christ meant the full code only for his preaching disciples, not for the laity. For the rest of us we can only promise to do our best, obstinately to try to treat all men as brothers; this is all that Christianity demands. To exact of all men a saintly level of selflessness would be to condemn Christianity to everlasting hypocrisy.
Webster defines morality as “the quality of that which conforms to right ideals or principles of human conduct.” But who is to determine which ideals are right? The individual himself? Reckless souls have tried to define the right as any conduct which their conscience approves of; but in that case Casanova and the Marquis de Sade were moral, for they tried to live up to their proclaimed ideal, which was to seduce or beat as many women as other commitments would allow.
The world moral, of course, is from the Latin mos, moris, meaning “custom”; we may agree that what at a given time or place is considered moral will depend upon the mores, customs, or standards prevailing in the group. Personally I should define morality as the consistency of private conduct with public interest as understood by the group. It implies a recognition by the individual that his life, liberty, and development depend upon social organization, and his willingness, in return, to adjust himself to the needs of the community.
You ignorant fools! When will you grow up enough to understand that your individual security and survival are the gifts of social order; that social order can be maintained only through the influence of the family, the school, and the Church; that no number of laws or policemen can replace the moral discipline inculcated by parents, teachers, and priests; that in attacking these formative and protective institutions you are sapping the dykes that have been raised through the labor and wisdom of centuries against the individualistic, disorderly, and savage impulses that lurk in the hearts of men? What will you do when parental authority has been rejected by “liberated” youth, when young ruffians make life a daily torture for the teachers in your schools, when your religious leaders are derided and defamed, when the life-sustaining structure of Christian doctrine has been weakened, when your public officials smile at their own corruption, when organized crime is more powerful than your police and your courts, when your literature and your theaters madden men with incitements to sex, when your daughters are raped, or seduced and abandoned by sex-crazed men, when you dare not walk the streets at night for fear of robbery, assault, or assassination? There is only one thing you can do: come back penitently to religion, and beg the Church to put into your children the love of Christ and the fear of a living, avenging God.
The lowly carpenter of Nazareth had been replaced by a pope more richly housed than most emperors, and controlling more wealth than most states.
The military class rises in prestige and influence, and its ways of thought, freed from moral considerations, affect the government and the people. Lying becomes a major industry of states. News and history are colored to inculcate hatred now of one enemy or competitor, now or another. Nationalism overrides morality, defers social reform, and becomes a religion stronger than any church.
I have been reading with pride and amusement the argument that I made, in a little book published in 1917, for Socrates’s view that intelligence is the highest virtue, and that education in intelligence can be made the basis of a natural morality. I must confess that I underestimated the role of sympathy — fellow feeling — in moral sentiments, as analyzed by David Hume and Adam Smith; and I realize that desire, instinct, and passion are the motive forces behind human behavior, even behind human reason. But I defined intelligence as the coordination of desires through a “forecasting of effects,” and as delayed reaction allowing fuller perception of the situation and a more adequate response. Intelligence does not claim to be the source of action; it is the harmonious and effective unification of the sources.
It does not seem impossible to make youth understand that the stability of a society, and the prevalence of moral restraint, are prerequisites to personal security, and that moral self-restraint is one of the surest guarantees of personal advancement and fulfillment.
They will never satisfy the moralist, for morality is unnatural, goes against the grain; we are equipped by nature for hunting life in woods and fields, rather than a mechanical life in cities, offices, and factories. But the problem of moral degeneration must be solved, for in the last analysis morality and civilization are one.
Before judging the revolt we should remind ourselves that it is the nature, function, and obligation of youth to rebel, as it is of old age to provide balancing resistance and checks, and of middle age to find some viable compromise between stability and liberty, stagnation and experiment. All things flow; the environment is always changing; old age, rooted in past conditions, is not equipped to meet external change with internal adjustments; youth, still incompletely formed, can add variation to heredity, innovation to imitation and tradition; and if it goes wrong it usually finds time to recover its footing. We older ones should be grateful that it is not our flesh and spirit that receive the blows and winds of change.
I flee from their music and art as relics of the chaos that preceded creation; and I wait impatiently for them to discover that Bohemianism, too, is a convention and a pose, that their proud deviations from accepted manners reveal a secret doubt of their own inner worth.
And I insist that a gentleman will refrain from coitus with any young lady whose social status and marital marketability would be injured by his passing triumph.
The modern exaltation of liberty has displaced parents from sharing in the choice of mates for their children. Lad and lass are left free to bind themselves till divorce or death, chiefly on the basis of the girl’s physical charms magnified by the boy’s erotic yearning (the girl contributes a touch of realism by considering the economic prospects of her suitor). As engagement in these days often involves sexual familiarity, and familiarity breeds indifference, many engagements are broken by youths free to seek new areas to explore.
Family limitation, of course, is unnatural, even through abstention, but so is any mode of locomotion except walking or running; civilization exists by checking nature at every turn. But don’t contracept yourself out of the stream of life. Next to sharing the joys and sorrows of your spouse, the profoundest experiences of your career are the tribulations and delights given us by our children and their children. I count it as an unforgettable date in my life (July 2, 1946) when my grandson Jim, then four and a half years old, sitting in my lap, face to face, and feeling the fond embracement of my arms, surprised me with the tender assurance: “Even when you’re dead you will remember how much you loved me.”
“Demonstrations” against war, economic abuses, and racial inequities are healthy; and it is a credit to both democracy and capitalism that no attempt has been made to suppress nonviolent critiques. However, I cannot admit the claim of many young enthusiasts that every person has a right to reject any law that his conscience finds unacceptable; no government could subsist on such a basis; the judgment of the community; as expressed by its elected legislators, rightly overrides the judgment of the individual. The individual may still carry legitimate protest to active disobedience, but he should take his punishment as due process of the law.
I mourn when brilliant writers like Andre Gide in his early works, and some unfaithful followers of Freud, tell us that we should yield to every impulse and desire, and “be ourselves”! What jejune nonsense! Civilization, as Freud recognized and proclaimed, is at almost every moment dependent upon the repression of instincts, and intelligence itself involves discrimination between desires that may be pursued and those that should be subdued. For generations, youngsters, especially in America, have been misled by such reheated but half-baked philosophy.
There is an anarchist in all of us that inclines us to sympathize with a felon who is desperately and cleverly eluding the police; nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.
Of course Meyer and I were innocent idealists, who had never looked into the depths of the racial caldron. We thought that an annual sermon and song would cool the heat that rises in our blood when we meet something strange and therefore dangerous. We saw many successful black physicians, lawyers, clergymen, and office holders, and rejoiced in their mounting number and rapid advancement, but we had never felt the horror of a lynching, the humiliating rejection from hotels and restaurants, the hopeless poverty of Harlem or Watts. We lost ourselves in our individual tasks, and subsided into the unconscious satisfaction of belonging to the locally dominant race.
The streets became unsafe. White citizens returned dislike for hate, and shrugged their shoulders at civil rights. Money voted for migrating poverty went into the pockets of politicians, and distant war consumed the gold that had once been marked for the improvement of American life.
I should be a ridiculous upstart if I pretended to have solutions for all these problems. They rose out of the nature of man, which I cannot change with words. We distrust the unfamiliar, for we have not learned to deal with it; and when, in some moods and places, it speaks of burning us, we do not warm to the prospect.
So I make no apology for resorting again to my panacea — extended and expanded education.
The cynic will smile at this old-fashioned, 18th-century trust in education. But what is the alternative? It is a police state. It is a hundred years of internal hatred, social disorder, uncontrollable violence, and urban decay, just when the breakdown of geographical and communicative barriers subjects America to mounting, multiplying challenges by growing states and alien ideas. Do we not owe it to conscience and justice that every person — irrespective of their race — has full and equal opportunity to enter into the promise of American life?
They give the race fewer geniuses than men do, but also fewer idiots. Intellect is sharpened in men by economic competition of political finagling; women do not need so much of it because they are normally destined to motherhood, in which instinct rules; and usually they win by instinct all that the male has acquired by intellect.
I put all the faults of woman aside because she is consumed and exalted in carrying on the race. Perhaps the race should not be carried on, but that is another question.
My heart goes out to her as her adolescence nears its end, and I see young males gathering around her, anxious for her favor, eager for the touch of her hand, her lips, and plus ultra.
And what a burden is laid upon her in our time — to choose a suitor who does not stupefy her with adoration but, by his stability, restraint, and economic sense, gives promise of being a faithful husband, a competent provider, a sound and sane father for their children.
Almost anything about an educated woman in her prime can make me maudlin. I marvel at the velvet smoothness of her skin, the creamy softness of her hands, the delicate touch with which she strokes your face and lightens your purse.
She becomes a mother. Now begin twenty or thirty years of worry and solicitude to make that child, and the next, and the next, healthy, decent, and intelligent. She bears the strain and stress of that process, in which she is a dei genitrix, a begetting, almost a goddess; if anywhere there is divinity it is here. No biologist could think of God except in feminine terms, for generally, in the world of life, the male is a tributary incident, usually subordinate, sometimes superfluous. Catholics have been right in praying chiefly to the mother of God. Many years ago, after watching Ariel’s pain in giving birth to Ethel Benvenuta, I left the room dazed with shame at my helplessness, and mumbling to myself: “I must always be kind to women.” Let the sins of woman lie gently on her head, for she is the forgiving mother of us all.
A mother does not have to ask if life has any meaning; when she sees her children growing in body and mind she knows that she is fulfilling her destiny, and that her destiny is fulfilling her. She will be rewarded when those children have matured through the ills of childhood and the whims of youth into men and women with offspring of their own. She will gather that swelling brood about her, quietly proud and wordlessly happy that they are the fruit of her body and soul; and only a botched mind, seeing her loving them and loved by them, would say that her life has no meaning. If life is lived honorably and fully it is its own reward, needing no significance outside itself.
At times it has seemed to me that the physical attraction was due to concealment. Would the female bosom be an erotic spur if, as in old Bali, it had been perpetually exposed to male view? Concealment makes every revelation a thrilling gift. We might imagine that women, with their superior knowledge of sexual psychology, would husband their resources by cautious secrecy, as in Victorian days; instead, they have reached the judicious conclusion that veiling is better than none or all.
Consequently those nations — America, England, Germany, France — that have come closest to solving the problem of hunger are also those in which sex is most rampantly and irresponsibly free.
Nature (i.e., here, the evolutionary process) is mad about reproduction, and makes the individual a tool and moment in the continuance of the species. She cares little about anything but eating and begetting; all our literature, art, and music mean nothing to her except as stimulation or ornament to sex and continuity. In this perspective even eating is subordinate, however primary; it comes first, and without it life could not be; but it, too, is servant to sex; the unconscious purpose of our eating is to preserve and develop us for biological maturity — i.e., the ability to reproduce. When we have fulfilled that function we eat in order to survive as caretakers for our progeny. When we have completed both of these functions nature has no further use or regard for us; normally we would soon thereafter die; if we go on living it is as dispensable bystanders in the procession of life.
I can give no convincing reason why that procession should go on, but it will. Sometimes I resent the power that the sexual instinct has over us; I see it ruining lives, disordering states, making agitated apes of would-be philosophers; and I can understand why past civilizations have labored, by might and myth, to build dams against that swelling surge.
I am not sure that I would want our sexual sensitivity to be reduced, for it is half the zest of life. Probably our sense of beauty is an offshoot of that sensibility; all other forms of beauty seem to be derived from the beauty of woman as the object of male admiration of virile strength. To condemn sexual sensitivity would be to outlaw esthetic feeling and response, and so to cut the richest root of art.
To find a pleasant medium between castration and erotic mania I must fall back upon my overburdened panacea — the development of intelligence. If we educate the body to health and the mind to a tempering harmony of instinct with reason, we shall retain the stimulus of sexual feeling while keeping it within bounds by a decent respect for public order, and a prudent foresight of our own good. It is quite possible to admire a hundred women or men while remaining resolutely faithful to one. In that way we may get the best of both boons — the transient ardor of sexual emotion and the quiet content of lasting love.
This, to our pessimistic moments, seem to be the main and bloody current of history, beside which all the achievements of civilization, all the illumination of literature and art, all the tenderness of women and the chivalry of men, are but graceful incidents on the bank, helpless to change the course or character of the stream.
Such a chronicle of conflict exaggerates, without doubt, the role of war in the record of our race. Strife is dramatic, and (to most of our historians) peaceful generations appear to have no history. So our chroniclers leap from battle to battle, and unwittingly deform the past into a shambles. In our saner moments we know that it is not so; that lucid intervals of peace far outweigh, in any nation’s story, the mad seizures of war; that the history of civilization — of law and morals, science and invention, religion and philosophy, letters and the arts — run like hidden gold in the river of time.
The causes of war are psychological, biological, economic, and political — that is, they lie in the nature impulses of men, in the competitions of groups, in the material needs of societies, and in the fluctuations of national ambition and power.
The basic causes are in ourselves, for the state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history. The major instincts of mankind — acquisition, mating, fighting, action, and association — are the ultimate sources of war. For thousands, perhaps millions, of years men were uncertain of their food supply; not knowing yet the bounty of husbanded soil, the depended upon the fortunes of the hunt. Having captured prey they tore or cut it into pieces, often on the spot, and gorged themselves to their cubic capacity with the raw flesh and the warm gore; how could they tell when they might eat again? Greed is eating, or hoarding, for the future; wealth is originally a hedge against starvation; war is at first a raid for food. Perhaps all vices were once virtues, indispensable in the struggle for existence; they became vices only in the degree to which social order and increasing security rendered them unnecessary for survival. Once men had to chase, to kill, to grasp, to overeat, to hoard; a hundred millenniums of insecurity bred into the race those acquisitive and possessive impulses which no laws or morals or ideals, but only centuries of security, can mitigate or destroy.
The fighting instinct enters more obviously into the analysis. Nature develops it vigorously as an aid in getting food or mates; it arms every animal with organs of offense and defense, and lends to the physically weaker species the advantages of cunning and association. Since, by and large, those groups survived that excelled in food-getting, mate-getting, and fighting, these instincts have been selected and intensified through the generations, and have budded into a hundred secondary forms of acquisition, venery, and strife.
As the quest for food has expanded into the amassing of great fortunes, so the fighting instinct has swelled into the lust for power and the waging of war. The lust for power is in most men a useful stimulus to ambition and creation, but in exceptional men it can become a dangerous disease, a cancer of the soul, which goads them on to fight a thousand battles, usually by proxy.
The instinct of action enters into the picture as a love of adventure, or escape from relatives or routine. A wider source is the instinct of association. Men fear solitude, and naturally seek the protection of numbers. Slowly a society develops within whose guarded frontiers men are free to live peaceably, to accumulate knowledge and goods, and to worship their gods. Since our self-love overflows, by an extension of the ego, into love of our parents and children, our homes and possessions, our habits and institutions, our wonted environment and transmitted faith, we form in time an emotional attachment for the nation and the civilization of which these are constituent parts; and when any of them is threatened, our instinct of pugnacity is aroused to the limit demanded by the natural cowardice of mankind. In a divided and lawless world such patriotism is reasonable and necessary, for without it the group could not survive, and the individual could not survive without the group. Prejudice is fatal to philosophy, but indispensable to a nation.
Put all these passions together — gather into one force the acquisitiveness, pugnacity, egoism, egotism, affection, and lust for power of a hundred million souls, and you have the psychological sources of war. Take them in their mass, and they become biological sources. The group, too, as well as the individual, can be hungry or angry, ambitious or proud; the group, too, must struggle for existence, and be eliminated or survive. The protective fertility of organisms soon multiplies mouths beyond the local food supply; the hunger of the parts, as in the body, becomes the hunger of the whole, and species war against species, group against group, for lands or waters that may give more support to abounding life. Euripides, 2,300 years ago, attributed the Trojan War to the rapid multiplication of the Greeks.
Add a few political causes of war. The first law of governments is self-preservation; their second law is self-extension; their appetite grows by what it feeds on, and they believe that when a state ceases to expand it begins to die. Furthermore, the distribution of power among nations is always changing through the discovery or development of new processes or resources, through the rise or decline of population, through the weakening of religion, morals, and character, or through some other material, biological, or psychological circumstance; and the nation that has become strong soon asserts itself over the nation that has become weak. Hence the difficulty of writing a peace pact that will perpetuate a present arrangement. Wonderful indeed is the treaty that does not generate a war. Peace is war by other means.
If the foregoing analysis is substantially correct, we must not expect too much from those who seek to end or mitigate war.
Vague appeals to the conscience of mankind to put an end to war have had little effect throughout history, for there is no conscience of mankind. Morality is a habit of order generated by centuries of compulsion; international morality awaits international order; international order awaits international force; conscience follows the policeman. A wise people will love peace and keep its powder dry.
An effective approach to the problem of war will proceed, not by large and generous emotions, but by the specific study and patient adjustment of specific clauses and disputes. Peace must be planned and organized as realistically as war — with provision for every factor, and prevision for every detail. This cannot be done in an occasional moment stolen by statesmen from internal affairs; it requires the full-time attention of first-rate minds. The incentives to war are so numerous and powerful that each of them should be the major concern of an international commission specifically appointed for its consideration and adjustments.
In the end we must steel ourselves against utopias and be content, as Aristotle recommended, with a slightly better state. We must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves. Perhaps, if we can broaden our borders with intelligent study, impartial histories, modest travel, and honest thought — if we can become conscious of the needs and views and hopes of other peoples, and sensitive to the diverse values and beauties of diverse cultures and lands, we shall not so readily plunge into competitive homicide, but shall find room in our hearts for a wider understanding and an almost universal sympathy. We shall find in all nations qualities and accomplishments from which we may learn and refresh ourselves, and by which we may enrich our inheritance and our posterity. Someday, let us hope, it will be permitted us to love our country without betraying mankind.
It is one distinction of the 20th century that while protests against war have mounted, war has become more frequent and extensive, more destructive of life and property, than ever before. Poets, philosophers, and mothers mourn, but our instincts continue to divide mankind into jealous or hostile races, nations, classes, and creeds. The possession of power tempts to its use; the definition of national interest widens to cover any aim; the demand for security suggests and excuses the acquisition and arming of ever more distant frontiers. Men above military age are readily moved by calls to patriotism; pleaders for peace are scorned as cowards, and arguments for mutual understanding and adjustments are branded as appeasement — as if to appease a quarrel were to sin against the Holy Ghost. The organs of public opinion are conscripted to expound and exalt the generals; a soldier’s uniform transfigures a civilian, intoxicates a maiden, and almost reconciles a mother to the killing of her son. Governments find it easir to begin a war than to win an election.
We are not asserting the inherent superiority of the white man to men of different races; it happens that we are white, and feel an obligation to defend our like, even though they may have made mistakes and committed sins in the past. We need not stress the fact that through such an extension of Chinese power Western Europe and America would lose their Oriental allies, markets, supplies, commercial facilities, and trade routes. Western Europe would be thrown back upon its own natural resources for materials and fuels, which are already inadequate. Communist parties would be strengthened in Italy and France, perhaps to the point of capturing the government. Latin America would be flooded with Communist agents organizing one revolution after another. Finally, shorn of its allies, the US would be enveloped in a Communist sea.
Granting that these fears may be exaggerated, is it not wiser for America to meet the danger at the outset, and to fight it out on foreign soil, rather than wait for the problem to be doubled and trebled by delay, while we sit supine until the enemy is at our door? We know the natural reluctance of our people to send their sons to distant battlefields for a purpose visible only to farseeing minds; but what would our grandchildren think of us if they found themselves encircled and commanded by alien powers because of our short sight, procrastination, and cowardice? We must think in terms of generations and centuries.
It is a powerful argument, and I can in some degree appreciate the spiritual loneliness and angry resolution of the president who has determined to follow it to the bloody end though it may cost him the love of his people, and the failure of his grand design to abolish poverty and racial injustice in America. I resent the hysterical and indecent abuse heaped upon him by those who reject his policies without facing his problems and responsibilities. I know that he has given his life to understanding political affairs whose arcana are concealed from an ivory-tower recluse like me. But though I have lost much of my religious faith, I remain (even after reading a dozen volumes of Nietzsche) unconvertibly an anima naturaliter Christiana and I treasure the words of a lovable Galilean who wished “to preach glad tidings to the poor,… to preach deliverance to captives,… to set the downtrodden free.”
Instead we have passionate enemies, for generations to come, of the most populous nation — soon to be one of the most powerful nations — in the world. We have left to our children this legacy of hate, presaging world conflicts involving a billion men.
I admit that a government which, in its dealings with other states, observed the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, would run great risk of having these rules ignored by its enemies; and that in such a case the would be no effective superior power to appeal to, as an injured and innocent citizen may appeal to his country’s laws. I admit that the UN, through the vetoes allowed in the Security Council, and the unrealistic numerical organization of its General Assembly, offers no practical machinery for deciding issues between Great Powers; and that in no major state is public opinion ready to abandon national sovereignty.
I know that the welfare state is distrusted by many sincere conservatives as biologically unsound; men, they believe, are naturally averse to labor, and need the fear of hunger or want as a prod to work. Some critics would add that poverty is mostly due to native inferiority in body, mind, or character rather than to inequities in the relations between employers and employees; a few would secretly agree with Nietzsche that the poor are the social organism’s natural waste, and we must stoutly resign ourselves to it unseemly necessity.
When, by their foolish thirst for reputation, they [popular leaders] have created among the masses an appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished, and changes into a rule of force and violence… For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others,… degenerate int perfect savages, and find once more a master and a monarch.
So the Greek historian, following Plato, thought that democracy would by its own excesses pass into dictatorship.
The danger is real. I admit that thousands of people use pensions, relief checks, and unemployment benefits to finance long periods of indolence; that many employees live apart from their wives and children in order that these may be eligible for relief; and that voluntary idleness at public expense has become a drain on municipal, state, and national treasuries, which are maintained by ever-rising taxation. Nevertheless, the welfare state must be preserved and extended, not only as a dictate of decency but as a measure of insurance against class conflict at home and foreign competition for the suffrages of mankind.
In my youth the Italians in America were digging ditches; today Italians control the largest bank in the US. Consider the progress made by American Jews in the last half-century: in my youth I knew them as the harassed and impoverished peple of the Lower East Side in New York; now I know their descendants as forming one of the numerous, affluent, and respected elements in Los Angeles. History does not forbid us to hope for a similar rise of our darker-skinned brothers and sisters. The melting pot still melts, though not so much by mingling bloods as by raising the level of education and the standard of life.
But I see the best as well as the worst, and I will not apologize for my country. If the Founding Fathers could come back they would be amazed at the degree to which we have reduced poverty, drudgery, illiteracy, and governmental tyranny. A large part of the utopias has been materially realized, along with the universal education, adult suffrage, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion which were among the hopes and dreams of the 18th-century philosophers.
Let us continue to complain, to demand, and to rebel; this, too, is part of our virtue. But as for me, favored and fortunate (and countless Americans might say the same), I should be the worst ingrate if I did not thank the fates that deposited me here between these seas, and within these liberties.
Why do we become more conservative as we age? Is it because we have found a place in the existing system, have risen to a larger income, and have invested our savings in an economy, which any significant revolt might alter to our loss? I believe this is the primary cause. But we should admit a secondary cause, which conservatives hold to be fundamental: a growing knowledge of human nature, and of the limits that human behavior puts upon the attainment of ideals. Presumably there is also a physiological cause — a lessening of vital forces as the years advance.
My own passage from devout radicalism to cautious liberalism may illustrate the transition, and may allow the reader to discount my conclusions.
Russia in 1917-32 was a nation at war, surrounded and besieged, threatened with conquest and disintegration. It did what any nation so situated would have to do: put it democracy aside as a luxury of order, security, and peace, and set up a dictatorial regime as the sole alternative to disaster. Communism in those years was a war economy, such as we ourselves may have to resort to in the next world war; and perhaps its continuance depended upon the persistent threat and fear of war.
Meanwhile that once merciless dictatorship startled the world with its accomplishments. In fifty years it had made Russia one of the strongest nations on earth. Despite droughts, starvation, revolts, purges, and concentration camps, and a thousand mistakes of economic or political policy, the Russian government brought its people out of the devastation to a level of prosperity unknown to them in Czarist days, and perhaps a level that might have equaled that of Western Europe had not Russia been compelled to spend so much of its resources and its manpower upon military reorganization and armament. Though Russia was attacked in 1941 by the strongest, best-trained, best-equipped, and best-led army then in existence, although its defenders were driven across the breadth of European Russia to Stalingrad, its soldiers and people fought with heroic courage and perseverance, beat the invaders back across Russia, back to Berlin, and there put an end to the Second World War. It was American materials that made this historic recovery possible, but it was Russian flesh and blood that made it real.
It was to meet the challenge of communism, as well as to end a critical depression, that FDR, in the most brilliant statesmanship of the 20th century, devised the welfare state. President Truman carried this peaceful revolution forward; President Johnson extended it to a scope exceeded only in Great Britain. These Democratic administrations did not enact socialism, but they achieved such a Hegelian synthesis of capitalism and socialism that lifelong socialists like Norman Thomas could feel that they had not lived in vain.
The architects of the welfare state recognized the virtues of capitalism: they perceived the creative stimulus that had been given to invention, enterprise, production, and commerce by the freedom that the laissez-faire government, after 1789, had allowed to the acquisitive and competitive instincts of mankind. But they also saw that unchecked liberty permitted the natural inequality of economic ability to develop an extreme concentration of wealth, and that most of this wealth was reinvested in accelerating production, and that this caused periodic depressions dangerous to the survival of the system. Of what use was it that invention, mechanization, and able management multiplied production if the purchasing power of the people did not grow commensurately?
So an increasing number of capitalists, under the tutelage of Democratic presidents, learned that they might save — perhaps enrich — themselves by accepting unions, paying higher wages, and surrendering more of their profits and salaries to the government. A rising rate of taxation enabled federal and local administrations to spread money in relief, pensions, social services, education, medical aid, hospital care, and public works. Some of the concentrated wealth was distributed; the purchasing power of the people came closer to their ever-expanding productive capacity; the system worked and spread abundance, until wealth was again concentrated and necessitated another distribution.
Year by year the government took and disseminated more of the wealth, managed or controlled more of the economy. Socialism inserted itself into capitalism without destroying it; enterprise, competition, and the pursuit of profit still enjoyed a stimulating freedom; great fortunes were still made, some of these were squandered in luxury, revelry, or display — debutante parties costing $50K; some, to avoid taxation, were transformed into “foundations” generally helpful to education, science, medicine, and religion; but the greater part of the new fortunes fell forfeit to the state. The consequent extension of welfare services by the government, added to the automated production and rationalized distribution, reduced poverty to a point lower than any hitherto known to history, though still alarmingly real. Now the rival systems — communism plus dictatorship vs. capitalism plus the welfare state — stand face-to-face in competition of the allegiance of mankind.
Usually internal freedom varies inversely with external danger: the greater the danger the less the freedom. Liberty has diminished in the US because airplanes and missiles have reduced the power of the oceans to protect us from us from external attack. As improved communications and transport override frontiers, all major states are caught in a web of perils that erode liberty and make for compulsory order. In the next world war all participating governments will be dictatorships, and all involved economics will be socialist.
Each of the rival systems has drawbacks that their rivalry has helped to reduce. Capitalism still suffers from a periodic imbalance between production and consumption; from dishonesty in advertising, labeling, and trade; from the efforts of large corporations to crush competition; from involuntary unemployment due to the replacement of labor — even of skilled labor — by machinery; and from abnormally swollen fortunes generating resentment in the enclaves of poverty. Communism suffers from the difficulty of substituting governmental prevision of what the consuming public will need or demand for the capitalist way of letting public demand determine what shall be produced and supplied; it suffers from restraints on competition, from inadequate incentives to invention, and from reluctance to appeal to the profit motive in individuals and companies.
The communist and capitalist systems already resembled each other in many basic ways. Each has subordinated its internal economy to the needs of actual potential war. Each aims at world hegemony, though one disguises its aim in terms of “wars of liberation,” the other with the plea that it must serve as the policeman or oder in a dangerously chaotic world.
Human nature as now constituted seems to favor a system of relatively free enterprise. Every economy, to succeed, must appeal to the acquisitive instinct — the desire for food, goods, and powers, and never in historic times was that impulse so unchecked as under capitalism. The itch for profit may not be overwhelming in the common man, but it is strong in men who are above the average in economic ability; and it is this half of the nation that will sooner or later mold the economy and the laws. We can understand, then, why communism had to make increasing concessions to this instinct. Only slightly less powerful is the urge to sexual union and play; this has obviously more freedom in America and Western Europe than it does in Communist countries, which struggle to preserve the puritan code associated with their agricultural past. Third among the instincts is the impulse to fight and to compete; this, too, has enjoyed a heady release under capitalism.
The instinct of aggregation favors the Communist system: most men are content, and many are pleased, to follow a leader or join a crowd. We have crowds in America, too, but they are hiding places for lonely individuals, rather than cooperating groups animated by collective actions, pride, and ideals. The reverse of the gregarious instinct — the desire for privacy, for freedom to move about, and to differ from the norm — gets wider play in Western Europe and America than it ever did in Russia, where everyone seemed to live in a confining web of public surveillance, conformity, and control. All in all, the average American seems happier, laughs more, venture more gaily, sins more freely, than his Communist analogue.
What are the needs and impulses that make a man spend years of preparation, and then months of labor, to produce a work of art? Presumably because he wishes to express himself, his ideas, and his moods; because he longs for distinction and reward; because he has a keener sense of beauty than most of us; because he aspires to combine the partial beauties and veiled meanings of actual but transitory forms in a vision of clearer significance or more lasting loveliness. Usually he sees more than we see, in fuller intensity or detail; he wishes to remove some of these perceived aspects in order to leave the essence and import of the scene more movingly visible to our eyes and souls.
Philosophers have shown more hesitation in defining beauty than in describing God. Aristotle considered the basic elements of beauty to be symmetry, proportion, and an organic order of parts in a united whole. This conception, like the “Aristotelian unities” in drama, is the classic ideal in literature and art, but it drives Romantic spirits to rebellion and scorn; to them excess is the secret os success, and feeling, not reason, is the source and message of art. Many Japanese artists, tired of symmetry, proportion, and order, found beauty or satisfaction in surprising deviations from regularity of form.
The varying subjective factors in the sense of beauty make an objective definition impossible except in the broadest biological terms. On factor, however, is practically universal: most of the higher animals, and all tries of mankind, agree in finding beauty in the opposite sex. The esthetic sense is probably a derivative of sexual desire, display, and selection, and it tends to lose keenest as desire and potency wane. To a normal man, basic beauty lies in the figure, features, and appurtenances of woman. Round forms seem more beautiful than squares because woman is externally a synthesis of curves; no music is so acceptable to the healthy male as that “gentle voice” which Shakespeare thought “an excellent thing in woman”; and no orchestra can rival a prima donna in her prime.
From this biological origin the sense of beauty spreads to secondary sources in objects consciously or unconsciously reminding us of woman by their smooth surfaces, graceful proportions, bright colors, fragrant odors, or melodious sounds, in clothing, decoration, statuary, painting, or music. Finally the esthetic sense — especially in times of courtship or mating — may overflow to tertiary sources in the softer forms of nature — peaceful landscapes, rounded hills, and babbling streams. By contrast, woman’s admiration of strength and security in men may evolve into a sense of sublimity evoked by massive building, towering mountains, and majestic or aggressive seas.
“If there is no God,” mused Ivan Karamazov, “everything is permitted”; if there are no rules, standards, or models, says the unmoored artist, I can offer anything as art, however formless it may be; I need to study drawing, since shapeless colors suffice to impress the common eye and bilk the millionaires. In art, as in morals, the Bolsheviks have won.
But the rebels carry their revolt against tradition and imitation to a riot innovation for its own sake; like many tourists they mistake novelty for beauty; they reduce all forms to cubes, or all painting to points, or all reality to “surrealist” dreams, or all sculpture to collages of prosaic hardware or clumsy masses of mental or stone. The most popular of the painters spend their colors upon abstractions that shun every form, follow no logic or theme, communicate no meaning, and dismay a soul that has found order and significance in all the honored art of Europe and Asia.
The progress of science has long since outstripped my understanding, and I must take the pronouncements of scientists with the same humility with which I received the dictates of priests and nuns in my youth. I leave it to my grandchildren to break the molecule into its atoms, the atom into its electrons, and these into forces as mystical as the angels that never stood on the point of a pin.
Indeed, a new priesthood is forming above us. Its ordained members speak a language beyond the ken of their worshippers; they censor one another with aromatic praise, and censor one another with professional jealousy; they carry a split atom before them like a consecrated Host; we trust them because they alone have direct access to God — i.e., to mass time the square the velocity of light. They differ from priests in allowing heresies among the initiated, but let them find an infallible leader, and they would be a church. Already they are as useful and necessary to statesmen as the priests and bishops who surrounded, anointed, and exploited kings.
The age of great cities would end, and a rural Dark Ages would begin, as after the triumph of the barbarians over decadent Rome. Religion would revive as the consolation of desperate souls, and men would curse the science that had given them powers beyond their intelligence.
We need more knowledge, and must submit to a heavy stress upon science in education and government, for we are subject to international challenges that force us to keep pace with every technological advance. But we need something more than knowledge; we need the wisdom and character to use our knowledge with foresight and caution, with both resolution and restraint. What is character? It is a rational harmony and hierarchy of desires in coordination with capacity. What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to the present problems, a view of the part in light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.
I do not despair. Man has committed a million blunders evident to our hindsight, but has done great and noble things.
From an animal to a into a man, from a savage into a citizen. Perhaps, if his digestion is good, he is transformed from a simpleton to a sage. Education is the perfecting of life — the enrichment of the individual by the heritage of the race. Let this vital process of transformation and absorption be interrupted for half a century, and civilization would end; our grandchildren would be more primitive than savages.
But these are dull generalities, not unheard before in the halls of education and philosophy. What kind of education, in particular personal, should I wish our children to receive? First of all, all within the limits of nature and circumstance, I should want them to acquire some control over the conditions of their lives. Since the primary condition of life, and the strongest root of happiness, is health, I should like to see them abundantly instructed int eh knowledge and care of their bodies. The body is the visible form and organ of the soul; perhaps, in some wondrous Lamarckian way, it is, through eons of desire and effort, the creation of the soul — form follows function, function follows desire, and desire is the essence of life.
Morals and manners cannot easily be taught, but they can be formed; and the presence of a gentleman — that is, a person continuously considerate of all — acts like some mystic magnet upon the growing soul.
Perhaps the basic skill that we should ask a teacher to impart to his pupil is the ability to discipline himself; for in this stormy age every individual, like every people, has in the long run only two choices — effective self-government, or practical subjection; somewhere there must be will. In the art of self-discipline intelligence merges with character and becomes the third element in that technique of control, which is the first goal of education. Socrates thought that intelligence was the only real virtue; and if one makes sure to distinguish intelligence from intellect, we may find much virtue and intelligence in his view. Intellect is the capacity for acquiring and accumulating ideas; intelligence is the ability to use experience — even the experience of others — for the clarification and attainment of one’s end. A man may have a million ideas and yet be a criminal or a fool; it is difficult for an intelligent person to be either.
Health, character, and intelligence help us to control ourselves and our lives, and therefore constitute the bases of a free personality, and the primary goals of education. But the same Goethe who held that, in the end, personality is everything, warned us that limits are everywhere. The circle within which we may guide our own lives is a narrow one; surrounding it are the biological, economic, and political compulsions of our state; and beyond these is the spacious realm of accident and incalculable destiny. Education should teach us not only the technique but also the limits of control, and the art of accepting those limits graciously. Everything natural is forgivable.
Within those limits there is so rich a possibility of enjoyment that no lifetime can exhaust it. It should be a second function of education to train us in the art of exploiting these possibilities. First of all, there are human beings around us. They will be gadflies, many of them, and we shall learn to love our privacy as the inner citadel of our content; but many of them will be potential friends, and some of them may be our lovers. I should like my children to be instructed in the give-and-take of human association, in the tolerance that alone can preserve a friendship through growing diversity of interests and views, and in the mutual solitude that perpetually nourishes the fragile plant of love. I should want them to learn something of the origin and development of love, so that they might approach this vital and sometimes destructive experience with a modest measure of understanding. I envision vaguely some leisurely course in human relations, running for perhaps an hour a week through fifteen years, and culminating in a study of what the wisest of men and women, the most delicate of scientists and the most forgiving of philosophers, have said about marriage.
Next to human beings around us, the greatest source of our pleasures and pains will be Nature herself. I should like our children to recognize the terror as well as the beauty in Nature, and to accept the naturalness of struggle, suffering, danger, and death; but I should wish them to be sensitive to all those aspects of earth and sky that can move the soul with loveliness or sublimity.
Psychology is largely a theory of human behavior, philosophy is too often an ideal of human behavior, and history is occasionally a record of human behavior. We cannot trust all the historians, but no man is educated, or fit for statesmanship, who cannot see his time in the perspective of the past. Every lad and lass should begin, in high school, an orderly recapitulation of the pageant of history; not, as we used to do, with Greece and Rome, which were the old age of the ancient world, but with Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete, from which civilization flowed over into Greece and Rome, and through them to Northern Europe and ourselves.
In such a course Plato’s Republic could be a sufficient text; let the student realize how old our current problems are, and for how many centuries the nature of men has played havoc with the ideals of philosophers and saints.
It is evident that education cannot be completed in school or college or university; these offer us only the tools and maps for those farther-ranging studies that lead to the control, the enjoyment, and the understanding of life. I have said nothing of travel, which, if it is too varied and hurried, makes the mind more superficial and confirms it in its prejudices, but which, if it implies a receptive residence in foreign scenes, may reveal to the soul some image of that total perspective which is the ever-alluring mirage of philosophy.
If is the function and high destiny of education to pour this civilizing heritage into this vigorous stock, that the gifts of the earth may be more intelligently exploited than before, that our prosperity may be more widely distributed, and that our riches may flow into the finer manners and morals, profounder literature and saner art. I do not doubt that on this broader basis os educational opportunity and material possibilities ever known, we shall build a society and a civilization comparable with the best, and capable of adding some measure of wisdom and beauty to the inheritance of mankind.
But there is another way in which to view history; history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization — history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills — history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religions, literature, science, and government — history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future — that kind of history is not “bunk”; it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, “the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.” Other studies may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us how we have behaved for six thousand years. One who knows that record is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his times. He has learned the limitations of human nature, and bears with equanimity the faults of his neighbors and the imperfections of states. He shares hopefully in the reforming enterprises of his age and people; but his heart does not break, nor his faith in life fade out, when he perceives how modest are the results, and how persistently man remains what he has been for sixty centuries, perhaps for a thousand generations.
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. And so it is with a city, a country, a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it. It is the present, not the past, that dies; this present moment, to which we give so much attention, is forever flitting from our eyes and fingers into that pedestal and matrix of our lives which we call the past. It is only the past that lives.
Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, and athletic teams — but how, without history, can we understand these events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes?
“History is philosophy teaching by examples.” And so it is. It is a vast laboratory, using the world for its workshop, man for its material, and records for its experience. A wise man can learn from other men’s experience; a fool cannot learn from his own. History is other men’s experience, in countless number through many centuries. By adding some particles of that moving picture to our vision we may multiply our lives and double our understanding. I propose now to look at man in the successive stages of life and the major phases of our activity, and to ask if history has any light to shed upon the issues of our time.
Man, to become civilized, must be subjected to a system of national law possessing superior force, just as states, to be civilized, must be subjected to a system of international law possessing superior force. So we must relinquish the childish dreams of unfettered liberty that inspired many of us in our youth, and that still enthrall some college students in America and abroad. And though we acknowledge that poverty is a spur to crime, we perceive that the root of crime, in all classes, nations, and ages, is the basically lawless nature of man, formed by a million years of hunting, fighting, killing, and greed.
History finds that human nature is essentially the same in ancient and in modern civilizations, in the poor as in the rich, in radicals as in conservatives, in underprivileged peoples as in affluent states. If anything is clear in the experience of mankind it is that successful revolutionists soon behave like the men they have overthrown: Robespierre imitates the Bourbons, and Stalin imitates the czars. Hence history smiles at revolutions as understandable reactions but unprofitable and transient; they may give vent to just resentment, but they produce only surface change; under the new names and phrases the old realities survive.
So the family, which for thousands of years served as the fount and bastion of disciplined character and social order, lost its economic functions and it moral force. The individual, freed from the family, idolized liberty and did not learn till too late that liberty is a child of order and may be the mother of chaos. He looked down upon his parents as belonging to an ignorant past, and proudly announced an unbridgeable gap between the generations.
From these changes in the economics and theology of the last one hundred years has come the moral dissolution of our time. The new freedom spread and released sexual behavior from old restraints. Psychology seemed to condemn every inhibition, and to justify every desire. Literature, in the hands of some of its most skilled practitioners, has become a paramour of pornography. The dissemination of wealth has opened a hundred doors that used to be called sins. Dishonesty among adults — in business, advertising, politics, the practice and administration of the law — weakens the preachments of the old.
I leave aside the aimless and disheveled minority that seem to have no higher purpose than to note what their elders do and then do the opposite in order to flaunt their egos in the face of the world. These are the lost. However, when our young students talk of revolution I wonder have they compared their light-armed infantry with the heavy weaponry of a modern state? And when we ask how, if they won, they could reorganize industry and government before chaos universalized destitution, they have no answers but faith, hope, and love ending in dictatorship.
Such a denounement of democracy would not be new to history. Almost four centuries before Christ, Plato, in The Republic, reduced the transit of governments to a regular and repetitious cycle: from chaos to dictatorship and monarchy, from monarchy to aristocracy, from aristocracy to democracy, from democracy to chaos, from chaos to dictatorship…
I know of no way of avoiding the toboggan of democracy in revolutionary chaos and authoritarian dictatorship except through the welfare state checked by birth control.
War is the Darwinism or natural selection of states, and not all our tears will wash it out of history until the people and governments of the world agree, or are forced, to yield their sovereignties to some superstate; and then there will be revolutions and civil wars. For a while we hoped that our progress from TNT to the hydrogen bomb would deter men from waging war, but then history asked, “Did the progress from bows and arrows to Big Berthas and lethal rockets diminish war or extend and intensify it?” Apparently our generation will be spared that holocaust; but who can tell if statesmanship will overcome hatred when Americans tired of war face eight hundred million Chinese remembering a century of while oppression and a decade of American hostility and scorn?