Our Dissolving Ethics

NOVEMBER, 1926

BY JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS

I

THE scapegoat is one of the most venerable and widespread of human institutions. The victim may be literally a goat, as among the Children of Israel, or a rat or a monkey or other animal. Not infrequently it is a human being. For example, in Nigeria all persons who during the year have committed incendiarism, witchcraft, theft, adultery, or other crimes, chip in about ten dollars each and buy a young girl, who is then dragged to the river and drowned for the sins of the town. The sense of guilt requires some sort of expiation, and this ‘cash and carry’ system of expiating the sins of an entire community by attributing them to someone else has obvious advantages. It enables one to settle with one’s conscience and the social conventions with a minimum of personal inconvenience and mental anguish.

Here in these United States in this post-war period, realizing that all is not right with our world, we have found the scapegoat which permits us to go about our business with a free mind. The name on its collar is ‘The Younger Generation.’ The absurdity of believing that the older generation is not responsible for shaping the conditions which have surrounded the younger, and that a world of mature men and women is being set topsy-turvy by young persons but recently emancipated from the nursery, seems to occur to no one. The hen which hatches a duckling from the egg which some person has set under her unsuspecting wings may well disclaim responsibility for the thoroughly disreputable habits — from the standpoint of a hen—developed by her hatch, but can the older human generation so easily disclaim its responsibility? They may deny it individually and take refuge in the theory that the individual is powerless to counteract the social forces of his time, but this way of escape is as much open to the berated young as to the berating elders. As a matter of fact, whatever we may say of the individual of either generation, I think the responsibility of the older as a whole to the younger as a whole is — to use a liquid measure — just about in the ratio of dad’s quart bottle to son’s half-pint flask.

That youth is questioning the validity of our entire system of ethics to an extent that is perturbing to parents and, in a lesser degree, to grandparents may be admitted. But it cannot be so readily argued that the babies born between 1900 and 1910 all received a hypodermic injection of new original sin. The most distinguishing characteristic of modern thought is its use of the genetic method. We explain the present by the light of the past . We are most of us evolutionists, except when it comes to the supposed iniquity of youth. But in fact is there any break? Is not the present attitude of youth toward ethical questions the direct and inevitable outcome of what has been going on in our mental world for not one but many generations? That it is so seems true to the author, who also feels that the salvation for society lies in at least a questioning attitude on the part of the new generation.

When we speak of the attitude of youth toward ethics we mean by ethics those general ideas and rules that govern the individual in the practical conduct of his or her life. These have always, in the main, had two sanctions to assist in making them pass current without being questioned by most people. One of these sanctions has been religion and the other the public opinion of the particular class or group to which the individual belonged. Backed by these sanctions, ethical ideas and codes of conduct tend to become fixed, but they are in reality never absolutely fixed. The forms may for long remain the same, but in private conduct the individual, while still outwardly conforming, may cease to be governed by them. Like the dollar, they may remain the standard of value, but their own value — that is, their purchasing power in happiness and human good — may come to vary greatly. The form, however, will not be generally questioned so long as the sanctions behind it are not brought seriously into question.

In the youth of the older generation — that is, let us say, in the decade of the 1880’s — the sanctions of the established system of ethics, although being undermined, were still standing firm, to all appearance. These were the religious one of a belief in the Bible as the inspired word of God to be taken literally, and the social one of a code of conduct that belonged to the feudal rather than the industrial phase of society. It is true that Darwin had been writing for twenty years, but such a book as Mrs. Ward’s Robert Elsmere was considered too dangerous for young people to read, and, although the Industrial Revolution had occurred, woman’s sphere in the only classes that were supposed to count in those days was still the home. Very few girls went to college, and even for them the intellectual problems set were not particularly disquieting. The individual youth of either sex may not have been religious or consciously interested in the social sanction for ethical ideas, but on the other hand there was nothing in upbringing or education to make them seriously question the accepted code and standards. Theoretically, that the Bible said ‘thou shalt not’ or that one’s group frowned was pretty generally a sufficient guide to conduct. What, in practice, that conduct may have been only the memories of the older generation can reveal.

II

However unquestioningly the average boy or girl of the 1880’s may have accepted the traditional views of ethics in relation to the world, many forces of different sorts had long been operative which almost before a new generation should be born were going to blow the old world to bits and create a new one so different as to be almost unrecognizable. That the old ethics and the old sanctions should in all respects have fitted nicely in all the adjustments with that new world is surely too much to expect . And if they did not fit, the only thing to do was to face that fact and try to work out some new adjustment between ideals of conduct and the new environment. It is that need which the older generation has for the most part refused to recognize but which has been recognized by the younger, in many cases heedlessly, but in many more cases seriously, sanely, bravely.

That there may be need for a revaluation of our ethics is obvious to them. Why should it be to them and not to so many of their elders? For one thing, these youngsters have been fed on a different intellectual fare from that on which their parents were fed. It must not be lost to sight, however, that this fare has been prepared for them by their parents, or at least by their elders. It must also be noted that they are receiving instruction in enormously increased numbers. College is no longer for the exceptional man only, socially or intellectually. Young men of all grades, and, what is more important, young women also, are going to college by the tens of thousands annually. The responsibility for what happens to them there intellectually is squarely up to the older generation. The institutions are provided and run by that generation, the young are in great measure sent by it, and the instruction is wholly provided by it.

Let us consider briefly what a few of the ideas are which are familiar to the younger generation and which to a great extent were not so to the youth of the older one. For one thing, we may cite the comparative study of religion. There are only two methods of intellectual approach to any subject, whether religious or scientific. We may rely upon authority — that is, someone else’s judgment — or upon our own. From the time that Protestantism rejected the authority of the Catholic Church and insisted upon the right of personal searching and interpretation of the Scriptures the way was opened for the decline in the prestige of authority. (I may say that I am not a Catholic.) Of course particular sects could establish new creeds and try to set up new authority in the place of old; and because man is not wholly a logical creature, and because most men still believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible however they chose to interpret it, this served to maintain its authority until almost the present day. With the rise, however, of the higher criticism, and more particularly the study of comparative religion, the religious sanction for ethics received a severe blow. For one young person who bothers to read a textual criticism of any Biblical book, numbers are familiar with and delight in Frazer’s Golden Bough. Nothing serves more subtly to break down a belief in the theology of Christianity than to find, for example, that the idea of a dying god is common to many religions and many people, that likewise is the idea of an immaculate conception or a virgin birth, and that even the doctrine of transubstantiation and the eating of bread which somehow becomes the body of a god is widespread. The question naturally arises why, if we must reject these doctrines as taught by every religion except Christianity, should we be obliged to accept them as true in that? Religion and theology are very different things. The younger generation is not irreligious. In the truest sense they want a religion, but they do not want as a substitute the theology preached by many clergymen or the mere husk of social service given in so many churches in place of both theology and religion. It is my experience that many boys and girls who cannot be induced to go to church are more genuinely religious than the clergyman who bewails the fact that they will not come to hear him preach. But for them a mere sentence in the Bible can no longer be appealed to as affording a sufficient sanction for an ethical idea or a code of conduct that has no other apparent reason for being.

In another comparative study, that of anthropology, they also find much to make them question current ethics. By a study of the various tribes and races of the world in different times and places the student finds that they all, indeed, have codes and ethics, but that these all vary and have grown out of specific social or economic needs under particular conditions. The institution of the family, for example, and the relations of the sexes have assumed many forms. The whole question is thrown into the intellectual melting pot as one for discussion, and the sanction tends to become not some religious authority but the good of society and the individual. The older generation was taught that God gave certain commands, regarding sexual and other relations, engraved on a tablet of stone, to a Hebrew some thousands of years ago. It is useless to tell that to a young person today and expect it to settle the matter.

If he turns to philosophy he comes in contact with a world, not of fixed ideas, of eternal verities, but a world where all is in a state of flux. It is not that certain ‘eternal truths’ are being attacked in order to substitute others in their places, but that the lasting validity of truths, any truths, is itself under fire. No teacher, perhaps, has been more popular or exerted greater influence than the late William James, and the pragmatism associated with his name is, in the form of its presentation at least, one of the original American contributions to philosophy. Now the essence of pragmatism is that the truth or validity of an idea depends on whether it works in practice. ‘The truest scientific hypothesis,’ he says in one of his most popular books, ‘is that which, as we say, “works best"; and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses.’ For the reader to add ‘ethical hypotheses’ is to take an obvious step. Again he says: ‘The true ... is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.’ It is true that he adds ‘expedient in the long run and on the whole,’ but if the true and the right can only be tested by their working it is evident that, as the world is made up of individuals, the only experimental tests possible must be made by individuals.

This philosophy is thoroughly consonant with the American temperament and natural outlook on life. We are not mentally a subtle or an abstract people. If a thing does not work, it is of no use. If it does, that is a sufficient answer to any attack, and it is this pragmatic sanction that, consciously or not, many a thoughtful young person of to-day is seeking for the new ethics. In the writings of the most influential living American philosopher, John Dewey, he again finds this sense of fluidity in life and thought. ‘The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts,’ says Dewey, in words which appeal to one of the finest sides of the young people. Dewey as an ardent evolutionist, and a disbeliever in any fixed forms or species, holds out as the hope for the future — and disagreement with him would seem to plunge us in hopeless pessimism — that human nature is not unchangeable, that there is possibility of unlimited alteration by change in the environment, and that this change may be brought about by taking conscious thought and not await - ing the slow alteration of nature. This again throws open the way for a serious consideration as to whether, if we can change the environment and human nature,—and both have been enormously changed, — we can keep unchanged codes of conduct.

Philosophical and scientific ideas are coming to affect the thinking of people, who may never read the books in which they are primarily expressed, with steadily increasing acceleration. It took many generations for the discovery by Copernicus that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but moved round the sun, to affect religious and other ideas. It look something more than a generation for Darwin’s theory of evolution to revolutionize all our thinking. Who knows what the influence, not merely in science, but in all social thinking, including ethics, may very soon be of Einstein’s theory of relativity? It has already had great influence, in spite of the fact that those of us who are not mathematicians cannot comprehend it. But to be told—to mention only one aspect of his theory — that there is no such thing as a ‘correct size’ of anything, but that for human knowledge the size of anything depends on the relative speed maintained by the observer and the thing observed, is, literally, appalling. This fact brings to us in startling fashion and in mathematical terms the realization that things are not permanent but relative. The theory of relativity is far more of a solvent for the eternal verities than either the Copernican or the Darwinian theory, and its effect, already being felt, is bound to be profound in realms of thought seemingly remote from physics.

III

In a few words, the young generation has a religion, but it is nebulous. It may to some extent serve, at moments when it is felt, as a source of strength, as an aid to being straight and decent. At many times it is not felt. In any case it issues no commands covering specific conduct. It has no decalogue, and the question of what is decent and straight is left open by it. The youngster’s ethics, therefore, have no religious sanction which points out any specific rules of conduct. On the other hand, through his anthropological and sociological studies he comes to realize that there are innumerable ways of living and choices of conduct, all of which have been or are thought right and moral by some people, sometime, somewhere. What constitutes right conduct depends, therefore, apparently on conditions and not on any eternal rules. The prevailing temperament of his nation and its most popular philosophy teach him that the only test of validity is ‘workability ’ — that if an idea has good results it is good, if it has not it is bad. The world has never been a very satisfactorily organized place, and nowadays, what with the results of the war, our socially developed conscience, and all the conditions of present life, it can hardly be said to look like an outstanding success. Those who have lived long have for the most part become either reconciled or hopeless over the situation. But for the young it is different, fortunately. They see the poverty, the social injustice, the frequent emotional maladjustment between the individual and society, and they do not see, and let us hope that they are right, that such things need always be.

The ethics of the older person do not change. He too may have, as he probably has, lost the religious sanction, but as the twig is bent the tree has grown. He was taught so and so and he sticks to it, and anything else seems wrong. Moreover, he has learned that one cannot meet every moral emergency by thinking it out as a unique case. Life is short, emergencies come suddenly, and one must have some general rules to guide. He is accustomed to the old rules, it is his habit to obey them, and he simplifies his life by continuing to do so. The youngster, however, has no ready-made adjustments and is intensely interested in life, and willing to take time and risks. His entire education has taught him to take a scientific view of life, and to reject mere authority. It is not enough for a parent to point out that something is ' right’ or ‘ wrong.’ The youth asks ‘Why?’ The only satisfactory answer is one that will convince him that a certain line of conduct will or will not conduce to his own good or that of society.

With the education which we give to youth, I do not see how we could expect any other result. The fact is that the younger generation is simply carrying forward where we leave off. The decay in belief in the Christian theology, the loss of religious sanction for ethics, the development of such comparative studies as religion and anthropology, the pragmatic philosophy, the Freudian psychology of inhibitions and complexes, and the various scientific and mechanical discoveries which have transformed the world, have all been the work of the older generation. The youth who are coming forward to-day receive the full force of all this straight in the face and all at once. And the changes are coming faster and faster.

Personally I do not see how we can quarrel with the general ideas that the younger generation has as to its ethical problem—that is, that there is no indubitable religious or other authoritarian sanction for any specific rules of conduct; that different ethical codes have best suited different peoples, times, and conditions; that the best test of any hypothesis is whether it will work; and that in a world in flux there is no reason for positing and insisting upon an eternally fixed code of ethics. We do know that such Codes will gradually alter in any case. The question is whether it is possible to use intelligence in altering them or whether we have to trust to the slow process of an unintelligent alteration. If they do gradually get adjusted to new social conditions and structures, then it is reasonable to suppose that such an adjustment should bear some time relation to the rapidity of change in society. With the increasing speeding up both of thought and of scientific discovery, the rate of change in society is also speeding up enormously. Unless we can assist intelligently the process of adjusting ethical ideas and codes to the social change, the amount of injustice and individual maladjustments, emotional, economic, and other, may increase so rapidly as to endanger the social structure itself.

The economic independence of the younger generation of women has already profoundly altered the whole family relation and that of the two sexes. The motor car, whether one likes it or not, has almost equally altered the whole question of the supervision of the two sexes at an earlier stage. Again, whether one likes it or not, the scientific investigations now being carried on in several parts of the world into the question of methods of birth control may have still more profound effects within the lifetime of the coming generation. The changes which have come already since the Industrial Revolution and the harnessing of steam are probably nothing to what we may expect within the next generation if the present rate of discovery and alteration continues. To say that rules of personal conduct established under sanctions which no longer exist for most people, and for conditions which have already been changed almost beyond recognition, must last unaltered forever is simply to refuse to see the facts and to court disaster, individual or social.

Our ethics and their old sanctions are already in dissolution. That has been accomplished by the older, not the younger, generation. What the younger generation and their children may be called upon to do may be to make the most rapid, far-reaching, and consciously intelligent readjustment of ethical ideas to altered social structure that the race has ever been called upon to make. We of the older generation have played with ideas and let loose forces the power of which we little dreamed of. We have, indeed, sowed the wind, and it will be those of the younger generation who will reap the whirlwind unless they can control it. Individually we may feel guiltless. We may merely have been busy with our intellectual hobbies, our money-getting, our loving and striving, but we surely cannot lay the blame for the intellectual or moral conditions upon the scapegoat of the ‘Younger Generation.’ To condemn them and regard ourselves complacently is as unjust as it is unwarranted. They have inherited, perhaps, the biggest mess and biggest problem that was ever bequeathed by one generation to another. Never has the road been wilder or the signposts fewer.

I might apply to the present situation the words of Leslie Stephen: ‘Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If all stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right road. What must we do? “Be strong and of good courage.” Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. If death ends all, we cannot well do better.’