By S. Parkes Cadman, D.D. of New York
THE responsibility for the widespread ethical disturbance in the United States rests primarily upon the older generation. If youth, as some educators assert, is in open rebellion against conventional standards of conduct, the revolt is due in large measure to the adult mental activities of the past forty years. The two chief sanctions of ethics religion and public opinion, exercised a muted and undisputed control until 1880. An unquestioned acceptance of the Bible as the literally inspired Word, and of its teachings as final for matters of faith and conduct was then universal. The social code of a feudal rather than an industrial age obtained; woman's place in Church and State had been stationary for a prolonged period. Since that era of innocence the ideals and codes regulating personal and social behaviour have been subjected to severe criticism.
The Churches are chiefly called upon to account for the social disintegration and to work out a readjustment between those codes and ideals and the twentieth century environment. Naturally the older groups resent these changes and deny their implications. But the younger groups demand them, and stress the need of a revaluation of moral standards. They have received academic training in enormously increased numbers, not all of which is in sympathy with the ruling ideas of their elders. Protestantism's insistence upon individual interpretation of Holy Scripture and freedom of thought concerning its teachings, hastened the decline of its rigid authority in morals.
The approach to religion through historic critical, and psychological methods, and the attention given to non-Christian faiths also impaired the Biblical sanction of Ethics.
EXPERIMENTING YOUTH
Anthropology has contributed to this impairment. High School and College students note the marked variations of ethical codes, and that these have been moulded by social and economic environments. The net result of numerous contributory causes is that a quotation from Holy Scripture, especially from the Old Testament, is no longer necessarily confirmatory of conduct for the youth of America. Sex relations, the family, parental governance, and kindred issues are affected by these changes. Philosophies which stress the lack of eternal ideas, and the constant flux of being, bring the lasting validity of any code within the zone of attack. Pragmatism is well to the fore in some applications its authors scarcely anticipated. The proposition that if a course of life works it is permissible is easily transmuted into the propriety of getting what seems desirable, if getting it is possible.
In any case, experimentalism is the favourite creed of youth. It is practised and catered for to a degree which would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Its chief exponent is Professor John Dewey of Columbia University, New York City, the first American thinker who clearly saw the bearing of the theory of evolution on morals, and has taken it with utter seriousness. His ethics are mundane. Their material is obtained from education, social, philosophy, and physchology. Thinking with Dr. Dewey is purely instrumental, and logic subordinate to ethics, as he understands them. He defines truth as that which we can achieve, and any process of thought as true only because it functions truly in obtaining what it sets out to obtain. Reason with him is a subsidiary gesture, since man in spite of all illusion of wounded desire, is only an animal; yet one capable of continuous development, and therefore, equally incapable of attaining a fixed ethic. Hence any law which prescribes duty or oughtness for life is false, because there is no such reality.
Transcendental ethics fall under this exclusion, and those who advocate them betray ignorance of things as they are. In brief, superior and changeless laws imposing indefeasible obligations upon humanity simply do not exist. Dr. Dewey admits that the generally accepted moral code may be valid in a particular instance. But he contends that it cannot apply in other instances. For him every moral situation is unique. It follows that all rival philosophies, the ruling concept of which is one great end for life and conduct, are founded on a fallacy.
REIGN OF SCIENCE
Plainly in this teaching science is the only technique for attaining good life, and its morals consist in using the means at our disposal for the satisfaction of its demands. The chief possible benefit for humanity is its expression of all its capacities in a world to he taken as it is found, and without setting up a final goal. Freedom, therefore, is the ability to do what one wants to do, and this ability must be developed by one's knowledge of the laws of nature and of the dispositions of one's fellow men. Two requirements only are needed in order to be a moral person: (1) Intelligence, by which is meant the power to forecast the results of scientific laws; (2) Sympathy to perceive ahead the effect of one's conduct on others. Dr. Dewey's philosophical and scientific ideas have been popularised by the remarkable sale of books such as Durant's Story of Philosophy and Dorsey's Why We Behave Like Human Beings, the majority of which are written from naturalistic level. They dwell upon the fluidity of life, and argue that by changing environment we can change human nature.
The influence of relativity is felt in their pet idea that group opinion makes morality. What we deem the eternal verities of right and wrong are thus pronounced vulnerable. The younger generation has a religion, but it is nebulous. It issues no specific commands covering conduct. Right apparently depends on conditions, and not on eternal law. When the older generation forbids a thing as wrong, youth is apt to ask why it is wrong. The first sufficient answer is to convince the questioner that certain lines of conduct are, or are not, conductive to individual or social good.
We are here confronted by a condition and not a theory. Christian men and women are asking why this decay of belief in Biblical teaching, this loss of religion sanction for ethics, this popularity of Freudian sex psychology? They complain that the new knowledge has shaken traditional family morality. The economic independence of women, their dress and demeanour, the free use of the motor car, the passing of the chaperone and the practice of contraception would seem to need salutary superintendence. Youth also reads our past in the light of the World War, and accuses us of not being true to our loftiest professions. Its attitude is one of doubt and disillusionment.
Its peril is that too many young people are the victims of a confusion of values for which their predecessors are in part responsible. American parents have been too deeply engaged in money-making and social pleasure to administer domestic discipline in wisdom. What is called education frequently omits the hard and the high. It is selfishly flabby, a poor substitute for the extensive breakdown of home training. Indeed, the background of the American home patterned on the English and Dutch model has been heavily obscured in recent years, especially in cities flushed with temporal pursuits and profits.
The authors I have named are not of equal merit. Some are no more than echoes of one or two prevailing voices. But all assumes a self-regulated concrete universe for which secularism is the living air. The spiritual element in morals is either denied or passed over as an insoluble enigma. Prevalent ethical formulas are traced to primitive thinking in which romanticism predominates. We are warned that the time is near when individuals who have to make decisions about conduct will desert priests, parsons, and melodramatic revivalists for scientific experts whose directions are based upon ascertained facts and not imaginary concepts and whose trinity of ethics is centred in Freedom, Responsibility, and Knowledge.
GERM PLASM AND THE ETERNAL
True, we are consoled by the reminder that theological dogmas may reduce the strife between the flesh and spirit for the moment, and so render first aid to a bedevilled world. But the censure at once follows that they are ultimately productive of childish experiments which benumb brain and conscience. A second category of opinions resorts to chemical affinity for the solution of the problem, and regards the human mind as nothing more than an agent in the biological adjustments which that affinity affects. The powers of eager upward living, it is said, are not due to Deity, but to the germ plasm. The further release and use of atomic energy is at least co-ordinate in rank with conventional ethical and religious beliefs.
These assumptions are rejected by other scientific thinkers as altogether unwarranted. Their onslaughts upon normal morality have not touched the heart of the nation, which is still sufficiently Puritan to enact Prohibition, and put an actress in an indecent play in jail. They will what they call the actual but too often achieve the fantastic, or the unclean. Some of these leaders of the forces of anti-Christian morality are the prisoners of their own culture, and cannot conceive of any other. They freeze the enthusiasm of the youth which heeds them, and make it cynical rather than candid. The ironic complacency with which they condemn the Church and the Gospel as injurious to morals is ludicrous in view of the fact that however indifferent the masses may be to Biblical religion, they are practically unanimous in their support of its historic standards of conduct.
Fortunately, the American people have a lively sense of humour. Their laughter frequently unifies society better than the scholar's logic or the politician's plans. They still steadfastly believe that faith in an eternal and an objective morality is the solely sufficient barrier against sex anarchy and its destruction. The germ plasm has its mission, so has the evolutionary theory, and much else that goes with them. But my fellow citizens cannot be convinced that these things transfer man from the perishable to the imperishable, or account for his higher self and wisest preferences.
Nevertheless, the homelife of the nation has to be reconsidered and protected. Within its unit, as Aristotle said, social order, affection, and obedience were first generated. To it we look with an intensity born of recent experience for the social integrity and conservation underlying the general welfare. For these reasons the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America has appointed a large and representative Committee to investigate the entire question of marriage and divorce.
Their review will include everything obtainable which is relative to the problem. Its bearing upon the child life is to be emphasied. As perhaps you know, the United States has an unenviable notoriety in this matter, and now leads the world in the number of needless divorces. A uniform marriage law is probably the outstanding statutory reform needed by the nation; nor can it, in my judgment, be much longer postponed without grave risk to the national morality.
BEAUTY AND MORALITY
It has been suggested that a positive programme for the strengthening of moral standards will ally them with beauty. The dullness, drabness, and aesthetic stupidity, too often associated with the "safe" ways of living has made them flat and insipid to millions of young people. It is proposed to substitute what is lovely, courteous, and attractive for what is ugly, rude and repellent in the old right-and-wrong division. The hedonism which simply hardens with years into prudence, we are told, is unendurably boring. Since our age is analogous to the Greek period in its love of physical development, of physical frankness, and its freedom from sentimentalism, it seems reasonable to some that the love of beauty which animated the Greeks might do much for us.
Small beginnings are being made in this direction. There are gratifying improvements in art, architecture, interior decoration, and a keen relish for spiritual adventure in matters of taste and form. Better still, the city slum, the cogwheel in the machinery of immorality, is on the decline. Beauty in conduct is suggested by hatred of cheapness and love of good, sportsmanship. Theft, covetousness, and wanton violations of another's personality are ugly things which do not belong to the grace and charms by which life must be shaped.
Certainly the Puritanism of the future will not stress ugliness as an accompaniment of holiness, nor be content with the doctrinal correctness of mundane minds whose moral squalor defiles life. Acts which are appropriate, appreciations which are magnanimous, pleasures which are free from the grossness must be made the norm.
While custom may not be the essence of morality, or the opinion of the group the sole criterion of right and wrong, they are powerful factors for determining in what directions to what ends, by what rules of behaviour and standards of judgment the individual's native impulses shall be shaped. Gregarious suggestiveness and imitativeness must be examined afresh by Christian teachers who would enforce the New Testament ethic. The advantages and disadvantages of custom in relation to that ethic are likewise important. For custom not only conserves co-operation and past social experience; it stimulates individual loyalty through the group conscience. Doubtless many customs are foolish, or harmful, or alien to progress. They do not provide for the solution of new moral problems, nor are they a sufficient stag against the uprush of strong passions. But they are to be used for the furtherance of those principles which experience demonstrates are indispensable to moral welfare.
Four great forces will have to be studied in our reorganisation of ethical teaching under the authority of the New Testament. (1) Scientific Rationalism, which reflects the claim of any institution to circumscribe the limits within which human mind may operate. We are bound to show that Christianity's supernatural system of ethics is not only religion but reason, and the highest reason, transcending man's capacity for the good, and his strength to attain it apart from the virtue which is in Christ. (2) The New Humanism, which inculcates the idea that a good life consists in the development, and enjoyment of human powers in the material world, and in perfecting of man's capacities here on earth through intellectual culture. (3) The distinction between secular and sacred occupations, which was broken when the Protestant Reformation substituted the democratic community for the hierarchy, and industrialism was introduced as a service rendered to God and man. (4) The relation of industrialism to plutocratic feudalism, and the resultant organisations of labour. These movements carry with them grave moral dangers, some loss of the sense of personal responsibility and initiative, and the increasing despotism of class feeling and mass prejudice.
BASES OF AMERICAN MORALITY
I venture the affirmation that despite the antagonisms I have mentioned, the prevailing estimate of morality by educated Americans is found in the prophets of Israel and the teachings of our Lord. The test of goodness for them is in the true self-realisation which contributes to the larger and enduring life of the individual and of society. In other words, they follow consciously or unconsciously the doctrine of idealists like Thomas Hill Green, Profesor Bradley, Seth, Sorley, and other thinkers. Professor Royce's excellent volume on Loyalty expresses the basic sentiments of the nation as a commonwealth of moral persons in which every member co-operates to realise the true ideal of humanity. This is not attainable; when severed from the spiritual realities which are the vital sources of moral action.
These realities involve the service of all human institutions and human culture as means for the fuller fruition of spiritual life in human beings present and to come. It is well for us to know that the social heritage in regard to conduct cannot be trifled with, and that social control will not only continue but increase as society grows more complex. It is also well for us to know that organised supervision of ethical standards is destined to remain, and that it is utterly futile for each individual to attempt to work out his own sex life and general behaviour through mere sense data supplied, by his limited experience.
But in the long last, the satiate condition and weariness which transgressions of moral law engender, and the spiritual hunger of human beings for a Higher Power which can subdue the baser to the nobler self, will drive men and women to the God of all righteousness revealed in Jesus Christ.
Observer (Adelaide, 1930,) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article164810169
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