And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to nature, only in a new form. Nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she protected and preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism." He lives and works for
himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! I will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it damages the health of my offspring; I will deny myself the amusement of sexual promiscuity for the same reason. I will devise imitations of the chase and of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized life is based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and spread it among my fellow men. Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms of exploitation of man by his fellows.
Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled "A Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the idea that men have loved war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts, has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks, May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men, I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage than it is able to endure.
CHAPTER VII
MAKING OUR MORALS
(Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.) Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will, guided by human intelligence. Man finds himself in the position of the crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he has discovered how the engines are run,
and how the ship is steered, and the meaning of the compass. So now he takes charge of the ship, and keeps it afloat amid many per-ils; and meantime, on the bridge of the vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.
It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the condi-
tions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with which he finds himself confronted. The moral and legal codes of mankind may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman of the vessel. Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard, then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. If he does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is going to some other part of the world. Next morning the passengers may wake up and find the ship on the rocks--because the helmsman persisted in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an ancient Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!
If life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. If man is free to work upon this changing environment,
he must be free to make new tools and devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws and customs and moral codes.
This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all religions. So far as I know there is no religion which does not teach that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules. It is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact, to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.
Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, for a test, the Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon
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stone tablets some four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since. "Thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men, provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war; and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.
And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason; and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you bully and beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your dungeons.
Or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. Surely this is a law about which we can agree! But presently we discover that unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more adultery than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and revise this divine law, and decide that it is
not adultery if a man takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved piece of paper permitting him to do so. But some of the followers of religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. The Catholic Church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as that; it allows the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. Other churches are content to accept the state law as it stands. Is it not manifest that all these groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?
Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can all agree upon that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing."