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Page 4
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but
another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of
every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life
becomes meaningless.
Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the
community almost automatic. It is as easy for most of us to keep from
stealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much
voluntary morality involved in one process as in the other. To steal
would be for us to fall sadly below the standard of habit and
expectation which makes virtue easy. In the same way we have been
carefully reared to a sense of family obligation, to be kindly and
considerate to the members of our own households, and to feel
responsible for their well-being. As the rules of conduct have become
established in regard to our self-development and our families, so they
have been in regard to limited circles of friends. If the fulfilment of
these claims were all that a righteous life required, the hunger and
thirst would be stilled for many good men and women, and the clew of
right living would lie easily in their hands.
But we all know that each generation has its own test, the
contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately
judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately
use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed
include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no
more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have
"arrived" when in reality we have not yet started.
To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to
pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands
social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.
It is perhaps significant that a German critic has of late reminded us
that the one test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal of
the Day of Judgment offers, is the social test. The stern questions are
not in regard to personal and family relations, but did ye visit the
poor, the criminal, the sick, and did ye feed the hungry?
All about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard to
their attitude toward the social order itself; toward the dreary round
of uninteresting work, the pleasures narrowed down to those of appetite,
the declining consciousness of brain power, and the lack of mental food
which characterizes the lot of the large proportion of their
fellow-citizens. These men and women have caught a moral challenge
raised by the exigencies of contemporaneous life; some are bewildered,
others who are denied the relief which sturdy action brings are even
seeking an escape, but all are increasingly anxious concerning their
actual relations to the basic organization of society.
The test which they would apply to their conduct is a social test. They
fail to be content with the fulfilment of their family and personal
obligations, and find themselves striving to respond to a new demand
involving a social obligation; they have become conscious of another
requirement, and the contribution they would make is toward a code of
social ethics. The conception of life which they hold has not yet
expressed itself in social changes or legal enactment, but rather in a
mental attitude of maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence between
their consciences and their conduct. They desire both a clearer
definition of the code of morality adapted to present day demands and a
part in its fulfilment, both a creed and a practice of social morality.
In the perplexity of this intricate situation at least one thing is
becoming clear: if the latter day moral ideal is in reality that of a
social morality, it is inevitable that those who desire it must be
brought in contact with the moral experiences of the many in order to
procure an adequate social motive.
These men and women have realized this and have disclosed the fact in
their eagerness for a wider acquaintance with and participation in the
life about them. They believe that experience gives the easy and
trustworthy impulse toward right action in the broad as well as in the
narrow relations. We may indeed imagine many of them saying: "Cast our
experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by the
larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, not
because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously, because
of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligation
naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepare
ourselves for the larger social duties." Such a demand is reasonable,
for by our daily experience we have discovered that we cannot
mechanically hold up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare moments
of exhilaration when we have the strength for it, but that even as the
ideal itself must be a rational development of life, so the strength to
attain it must be secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learn
that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may
come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from
selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of
Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all
men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and
equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well
as a test of faith.
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