Ethics · John Dewey
THE MODERN PERIOD
The moral life of the modern western world differs from both Hebrew and Greek morality in one respect. The Hebrews and Greeks were pioneers. Their leaders had to meet new situations and shape new conceptions of righteousness and wisdom. Modern civilization and morality, on the other hand, received certain ideals and standards already worked out and established. These came to it partly through the literature of Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins, partly through Greek art and Roman civilization, but chiefly, perhaps, through two institutions: (1) Roman government and law embodied Stoic conceptions of a natural law of reason and of a world state, a universal rational society. This not only gave the groundwork of government and rights to the modern world; it was a constant influence for guiding and shaping ideas of authority and justice. (2) The Christian Church in its cathedrals, its cloisters, its ceremonials, its orders, and its doctrines had a most impressive system of standards, valuations, motives, sanctions, and prescriptions for action. These were not of Hebrew origin solely. Greek and Roman philosophy and political conceptions were fused with more primitive teaching and conduct. When the Germans conquered the Empire they accepted in large measure its institutions and its religion. Modern morality, like modern civilization, shows the mingled streams of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and German or Celtic life.
It contains also conceptions due to the peculiar industrial, scientific, and political development of modern times. Thus we have to-day such inherited standards as that of "the honor of a gentleman" side by side with the modern class standard of business honesty, and the labor union ideal of class solidarity. We have the aristocratic ideals of chivalry and charity side by side with more democratic standards of domestic and social justice. We find the Christian equal standard for the two sexes side by side with another which sets a high value on woman's chastity, but a trivial value on man's. We find a certain ideal of self-sacrifice side by side with an ideal of "success" as the only good. We cannot hope to disentangle all the threads that enter this variegated pattern, or rather collection of patterns, but we can point out certain features that at the same time illustrate certain general lines of development. We state first the general attitude and ideals of the Middle Ages, and then the three lines along which individualism has proceeded to the moral consciousness of to-day. Sec. 1. THE MEDIAEVAL IDEALS The mediaeval attitude toward life was determined in part by the character of the Germanic tribes with their bold, barbaric strength and indomitable spirit, their clan and other group organizations, their customs or mores belonging to such a stock; and in part by the religious ideals presented in the church. The presence of these two factors was manifest in the strong contrasts everywhere present.
"Associated with mail-clad knights whose trade is war and whose delight is to combat are the men whose sacred vocation forbids the use of force altogether. Through lands overspread with deeds of violence, the lonely wayfarer with the staff and badge of a pilgrim passes unarmed and in safety. In sight of castles, about whose walls fierce battles rage, are the church and the monastery, within the precincts of which quiet reigns and all violence is branded as sacrilege."[84] The harsh clashes of the Venus music over against the solemn strains from the Pilgrim's Chorus in Tannhaeuser might well symbolize not only the specific collision of the opera but the broader range of passions opposed to the religious controls and values in this mediaeval society.
The "honor" of a gentleman was determined by what the class demanded. Above all else the gentleman must not show fear. He must be ready to fight at any instant to prove his courage. His word must not be doubted. This seems to have been on the ground that such doubt would be a refusal to take the man at his own estimate, rather than because of any superlative love of truth, for the approved way to prove the point at issue was by fighting, not by any investigation. But the class character appears in the provision that no insult from one of a lower class need be noticed. Homicide was not contrary to the character and honor of a gentleman. Nor did this require any such standard in sex relations as a "woman's honor" requires of a woman. In conduct toward others, the "courtesy" which expresses in ceremony and manner respect for personal dignity was a fine trait. It did not always prevent insolence toward inferiors, although there was in many cases the feeling, _noblesse oblige_. What was needed to make this ideal of gentleman a moral and not merely a class ideal, was that it should base treatment of others on personal worth rather than on birth, or wealth, or race, and that it should not rate reputation for courage above the value of human life. This has been in part effected, but many traits of the old conception live on to-day.
Individual poverty--wealth of the church; individual meekness and submission--unlimited power and authority in the church; these antitheses reflect the fact that the church was the heir both of a kingdom of God and of a Roman Empire. The humility showed itself in extreme form in the ascetic type of monasticism with its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It was reflected in the art which took for its subjects the saints, conceived not individually, but typically and according to tradition and authority. Their thin attenuated figures showed the ideal prescribed. The same humility showed itself in the intellectual sphere in the preeminence given to faith as compared with reason, while the mystic losing himself in God showed yet another phase of individual renunciation. Even charity, with which the church sought to temper the hardship of the time, took a form which tended to maintain or even applaud the dependent attitude of the recipient. So far as life for the individual had a positive value, this lay not in living oneself out, but rather in the calm and the support afforded by the church: "A life in the church, for the church, through the church; a life which she blessed in mass at morning and sent to peaceful rest by the vesper hymn; a life which she supported by the constantly recurring stimulus of the sacraments, relieving it by confession, purifying it by penance, admonishing it by the presentation of visible objects for contemplation and worship--this was the life which they of the Middle Ages conceived of as the rightful life of man; it was the actual life of many, the ideal of all."[86]
On the other side, the church boldly asserted the right and duty of the divine to control the world,--the religious symbol of the modern proposition that conscience should dominate political and business affairs. "No institution is apart from the authority of the church," wrote Aegidius Colonna. "No one can legitimately possess field or vine except under its authority or by it. Heretics are not owners, but unjustly occupy." Canossa symbolized the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, and there is a sublime audacity, moral as well as political, in the famous Bull of Boniface VIII., "We declare that every human creature is subject to the Roman pontiff." The church as a corporate society expressed also the _community_ of its members. It was indeed no mere collection of individual believers. As a divine institution, the "body of Christ on earth," it gave to its members rather than received from them. It invested them with new worth, instead of getting its own worth from them. Nevertheless, it was not an absolute authority; it represented the union of all in a common fellowship, a common destiny, and a common cause against the powers of evil. The massive cathedrals which remain as the monuments of the ages of faith, are fitting symbols of these aspects of mediaeval life. They dominate their cities architecturally, as the church dominated the life of the ages which built them. They inspired within the worshipper, on the one hand, a sense of finiteness in the presence of the sublime; on the other, an elevation of soul as he became conscious of union with a power and presence not his own. They awed the worshiping assembly and united it in a common service.
Sec. 2. MAIN LINES OF MODERN DEVELOPMENT We have seen that the mediaeval life had two sets of standards and values: one set by the tribal codes and the instinct of a warlike people; the other set by a church which required renunciation while it asserted control. Changes may be traced in both ideals. The group morality becomes refined and broadened. The church standards are affected in four ways: (a) The goods of the secular life, art, family, power, wealth, claim a place in the system of values. (b) Human authority asserts itself, at first in sovereign states with monarchs, then in the growth of civil liberty and political democracy. (c) Instead of faith, reason asserts itself as the agency for discovering the laws of nature and of life. (d) As the result of the greater dignity and worth of the individual which is worked out in all these lines, social virtue tends to lay less value on charity and more on social justice.
It must not be supposed that the movements to be outlined have resulted in the displacement or loss of the positive values in the religious ideal. The morality of to-day does not ignore spiritual values; it aims rather to use them to give fuller meaning to all experience. It does not abandon law in seeking freedom, or ignore duty because it is discovered by reason. Above all, it is seeking to bring about in more intimate fashion that supremacy of the moral order in all human relations for which the church was theoretically contending. And in recent times we are appreciating more thoroughly that the individual cannot attain a full moral life by himself. Only as he is a member of a moral society can he find scope and support for full development of will. In concrete phrase, it is just as necessary to improve the general social environment in which men, women, and children are to live, in order to make better individuals, as it is to improve the individuals in order to get a better society. This was a truth which the religious conception of salvation through the church taught in other terms. To follow the development of the modern moral consciousness, we shall rely not so much on the formal writings of moral philosophers as on other sources. What men value most, and what they recognize as right, is shown in what they work for and fight for and in how they spend their leisure. This is reflected more immediately in their laws, their art and literature, their religion, and their educational institutions, although it finds ultimate expression in moral theories. The more concrete aspects are suggested in this chapter, the theories in Chapter XII.
Sec. 3. THE OLD AND NEW IN THE BEGINNINGS OF INDIVIDUALISM An interesting blending of the class ideal of the warrior and "gentleman" with the religious ideals of devotion to some spiritual service, and of protection to the weak, is afforded by _chivalry_. The knights show their faith by their deeds of heroism, not by renunciation. But they fight for the Holy Sepulcher, or for the weak and oppressed. Their investiture is almost as solemn as that of a priest. Honor and love appear as motives side by side with the quest of the Holy Grail. Chevalier Bayard is the gallant fighter for country, but he is also the passionate admirer of justice, the knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. Moreover, the literature which embodies the ideal exhibits not only feats of arms and religious symbolism. Parsifal is not a mere abstraction; he has life and character. "And who will deny," writes Francke,[87] "that in this character Wolfram has put before us, within the forms of chivalrous life, an immortal symbol of struggling, sinning, despairing, but finally redeemed, humanity?"
If chivalry represented in some degree a moralizing of the warrior class, the mendicant orders represented an effort to bring religion into secular life. The followers of St. Dominic and St. Francis were indeed ascetic, but instead of maintaining the separate life of the cloister they aimed to awaken a personal experience among the whole people. Further, the Dominicans adopted the methods and conceptions of Greek philosophy to support the doctrines of the church, instead of relying solely on faith. The Franciscans on their part devoted an ecstatic type of piety to deeds of charity and beneficence. They aimed to overcome the world rather than to withdraw from it. A bolder appeal to the individual, still within the sphere of religion, was made when Wyclif asserted the right of every instructed man to search the Bible for himself, and a strong demand for social justice found expression in Wyclif's teaching as well as in the vision of Piers Plowman. In the political world the growing strength of the empire sought likewise a religious sanction in its claim of a divine right, independent of the church. The claims of the civic life find also increasing recognition with the spiritual teachers. The State had been regarded by Augustine as a consequence of the fall of man, but it now comes to claim and receive a moral value: first, with Thomas Aquinas, as the institution in which man perfects his earthly nature and prepares for his higher destiny in the realm of grace; then, with Dante, as no longer subordinate to the church, but coordinate with it.
They have thus made appeal to a moral standard, and in so far as they have sincerely sought to assert rights, they have been recognizing in some sense a social and rational standard; they have been building up a moral personality. Sometimes indeed the rights have been claimed as a matter of "possession" or of tradition. This is to place them on the basis of customary morality. But in such great crises as the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, or the French and American Revolutions of the eighteenth, some deeper basis has been sought. A Milton, a Locke, a Rousseau, a Jefferson, has but voiced the sentiments of a people in formulating an explicitly moral principle. Sometimes this has taken the form of an appeal to God-given rights. All men are equal before God; why should one man assume to command another because of birth? In this sense the Puritans stood for liberty and democracy as part of their creed of life. But often the appeal to a moral principle borrowed the conceptions of Greek philosophy and Roman law, and spoke of "natural rights" or a "law of nature."[88]
By one of the paradoxes of history, the principle is now most often invoked in favor of "vested interests." "Natural" easily loses the force of an appeal to reason and to social good, and becomes merely an assertion of ancient usage, or precedent, or even a shelter for mere selfish interests. Natural rights in property may be invoked to thwart efforts to protect life and health. Individualism has been so successful in asserting rights that it is now apt to forget that there are no rights morally except such as express the will of a good _member of society_. But in recognizing possible excesses we need not forget the value of the idea of rights as a weapon in the struggle in which the moral personality has gradually won its way. The other side of the story has been the growth of responsibility. The gain in freedom has not meant an increase in disorder; it has been marked rather by gain in peace and security, by an increasing respect for law, and an increasing stability of government. The external control of force has been replaced by the moral control of duty. Sec. 5. INDIVIDUALISM AS AFFECTED BY THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDUSTRY, COMMERCE, AND ART The development of industry, commerce, and art affects the moral life in a variety of ways, of which three are of especial importance for our purpose.
(1) It gives new interests, and new opportunities for individual activity. (2) This raises the question of _values_. Are all the activities good, and shall one satisfy whatever interest appeals to him, or are some better than others?--the old question of "kinds of happiness." (3) It raises further the question of sharing and distribution. How far may one enjoy the goods of life in an exclusive way and how far is it his duty to share with others? Do society's present methods of industry, commerce, art, and education distribute these goods in a just manner? The examination of these questions will be made in Part III. It is our purpose at this point merely to indicate the trend of the moral consciousness with regard to them.
In the case of industry the church ideal has prevailed. The class ideal of gentleman was distinctly opposed to industry, particularly manual labor. "Arms" or the Court was the proper profession. This was more or less bound up with the fact that in primitive conditions labor was mainly performed by women or by slaves. It was the business, the "virtue" of men to fight. So far as this class ideal was affected by the models of ancient culture, the prejudice was strengthened. The classic civilization rested on slave labor. The ideal of the gentleman of Athens was the free employment of leisure, not active enterprise. The church, on the other hand, maintained both the dignity and the moral value of labor. Not only the example of the Founder of Christianity and his early disciples, who were for the most part manual laborers, but the intrinsic moral value of work, already referred to, entered into the appraisal.[90] The Puritans, who have had a wide-reaching influence upon the standards of the middle and lower classes of England, and upon the northern and western portions of America, were insistent upon industry, not merely for the sake of its products,--they were frugal in their consumption,--but as expressing a type of character. Idleness and "shiftlessness" were not merely ineffective, they were sinful.
"If any will not work, neither let him eat," commended itself thoroughly to this moral ideal. That the laborer brought something to the common weal, while the idler had to be supported, was a reenforcement to the motives drawn from the relation of work to character. As the middle and lower classes became increasingly influential, the very fact that they were laborers and traders strengthened the religious ideal by a class motive. It was natural that a laboring class should regard labor as "honest," though from the history of the word such a collocation of terms as "honest labor" would once have been as absurd as "honest villain."[91] A further influence effective in America has been the fluidity of class distinctions in a new country. The "influence of the frontier" has been all on the side of the value of work and the reprobation of idleness. At least this is true for men. A certain tendency has been manifest to exempt women of the well-to-do classes from the necessity of labor, and even by training and social pressure to exclude them from the opportunity of work, and make of them a "leisure class," but this is not likely to establish itself as a permanent moral attitude. The woman will not be content to live in "The Doll's House" while the man is in the real work of the world.
The old class morality was not disturbed by such contrasts. Even the religious morality was apt to consider the distinction between rich and poor as divinely ordered, or else as insignificant compared with eternal destiny of weal or woe. But the individualistic movements have made it less easy to accept either the class morality or the religious interpretation. The latter lends itself equally well to a justification of disease because it is providentially permitted. Moreover, the old group morality and religious ideal had this in their favor: they recognized an obligation of the strong to the weak, of the group for every member, of master for servant. The cash basis seemed to banish all responsibility, and to assert the law of "each for himself" as the supreme law of life--except so far as individuals might mitigate suffering by voluntary kindness. Economic theory seemed to show that wages must always tend toward a starvation level.
In contrast with these plans for a return to earlier conditions, the two most conspicuous tendencies in the thought of the past century have claimed to be advancing toward freedom and justice along the lines which we have just traced. The one, which we may call "individualistic" reform, has sought justice by giving free play to individual action. The other, socialism, has aimed to use the power of the State to secure more adequate justice and, as it believes, a more genuine freedom. The great reform movement in Great Britain during the nineteenth century emphasized free trade and free contracts. It sought the causes of injustice in the survival of some privilege or vested interest which prevents the full working of the principles of free contract and competition. Let every man "count as one"; make laws for "the greatest good of the greatest number." The trouble is not that there is too much individualism, but that there is too little. Tax reformers like Henry George have urged the same principle. If land is monopolized by a few who can levy a toll upon all the rest of society, how can justice obtain? The remedy for injustice is to be found in promoting greater freedom of industry and trade.
Socialism on the other hand claims that individualism defeats itself; it results in tyranny, not freedom. The only way to secure freedom is through united action. The merits of some of these programs for social justice will be examined in Part III. They signify that the age is finding its moral problem set anew by the collision between material interests and social good. Greek civilization used the industry of the many to set free the higher life--art, government, science--of a few. The mediaeval ideal recognized the moral value of industry in relation to character. The modern conscience, resting back upon a higher appreciation of human dignity and worth, is seeking to work out a social and economic order that shall combine both the Greek and the mediaeval ideas. It will require work and secure freedom. These are necessary for the individual person. But it is beginning to be seen that these values cannot be divided so that one social class shall perform the labor and the other enjoy the freedom. The growth of democracy means that all members of society should share in the value and the service of work. It means that all should share according to capacity in the values of free life, of intelligence and culture. Can material goods be so produced and distributed as to promote this democratic ideal?
Sec. 6. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE The development of intelligence in the modern world, as in Greece, has two sides: on the one hand, a working-free from the restrictions which theology or the State or other social authorities imposed; on the other hand, positive progress in knowledge of nature and of human life. Under its first aspect it is known as the growth of rationalism; under its second aspect, as the growth of science and education. We cannot separate the development into two periods, the one negative, the other positive, as was convenient in the case of Greece. The negative and the positive in the modern world have gone on contemporaneously, although the emphasis has sometimes been on one side and sometimes upon the other. We may, however, indicate three periods as standing out with clearly defined characteristics. (1) The Renaissance, in which the Greek spirit of scientific inquiry found a new birth; in which the discovery of new continents stimulated the imagination; and in which new and more fruitful methods of investigation were devised in mathematics and the natural sciences. (2) The period of the Enlightenment, in which the negative aspect of the process reached its sharpest definition. The doctrines of revealed religion and natural religion were criticised from the standpoint of reason. Mysteries and superstition were alike rejected. General intelligence made rapid progress. It was the "Age of Reason."
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.