|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 35
At times of social disturbance the law-abiding citizen is naturally so
anxious for peace and order, his sympathies are so justly and inevitably
on the side making for the restoration of law, that it is difficult for
him to see the situation fairly. He becomes insensible to the unselfish
impulse which may prompt a sympathetic strike in behalf of the workers
in a non-union shop, because he allows his mind to dwell exclusively on
the disorder which has become associated with the strike. He is
completely side-tracked by the ugly phases of a great moral movement. It
is always a temptation to assume that the side which has respectability,
authority, and superior intelligence, has therefore righteousness as
well, especially when the same side presents concrete results of
individual effort as over against the less tangible results of
associated effort.
It is as yet most difficult for us to free ourselves from the
individualistic point of view sufficiently to group events in their
social relations and to judge fairly those who are endeavoring to
produce a social result through all the difficulties of associated
action. The philanthropist still finds his path much easier than do
those who are attempting a social morality. In the first place, the
public, anxious to praise what it recognizes as an undoubted moral
effort often attended with real personal sacrifice, joyfully seizes upon
this manifestation and overpraises it, recognizing the philanthropist
as an old friend in the paths of righteousness, whereas the others are
strangers and possibly to be distrusted as aliens. It is easy to confuse
the response to an abnormal number of individual claims with the
response to the social claim. An exaggerated personal morality is often
mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a
social situation its total inadequacy is not discovered. To attempt to
attain a social morality without a basis of democratic experience
results in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide, and ends
in an exaggerated individual morality but not in social morality at all.
We see this from time to time in the care-worn and overworked
philanthropist, who has taxed his individual will beyond the normal
limits and has lost his clew to the situation among a bewildering number
of cases. A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and end
must also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constant
correction of his process. He must not only test and guide his
achievement by human experience, but he must succeed or fail in
proportion as he has incorporated that experience with his own.
Otherwise his own achievements become his stumbling-block, and he comes
to believe in his own goodness as something outside of himself. He makes
an exception of himself, and thinks that he is different from the rank
and file of his fellows. He forgets that it is necessary to know of the
lives of our contemporaries, not only in order to believe in their
integrity, which is after all but the first beginnings of social
morality, but in order to attain to any mental or moral integrity for
ourselves or any such hope for society.
CHAPTER VI
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the
value and function of each member of the community, however humble he
may be. We have come to believe that the most "brutish man" has a value
in our common life, a function to perform which can be fulfilled by no
one else. We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free
the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We ask
this not merely because it is the man's right to be thus connected, but
because we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford to
get along without his special contribution. Just as we have come to
resent all hindrances which keep us from untrammelled comradeship with
our fellows, and as we throw down unnatural divisions, not in the
spirit of the eighteenth-century reformers, but in the spirit of those
to whom social equality has become a necessity for further social
development, so we are impatient to use the dynamic power residing in
the mass of men, and demand that the educator free that power. We
believe that man's moral idealism is the constructive force of progress,
as it has always been; but because every human being is a creative agent
and a possible generator of fine enthusiasm, we are sceptical of the
moral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, that
there may be greater freedom, strength, and subtilty of intercourse and
hence an increase of dynamic power. We are not content to include all
men in our hopes, but have become conscious that all men are hoping and
are part of the same movement of which we are a part.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|