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Page 5
We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by
travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common
road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size
of one another's burdens. To follow the path of social morality results
perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, for
it implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy
which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy.
There are many indications that this conception of Democracy is growing
among us. We have come to have an enormous interest in human life as
such, accompanied by confidence in its essential soundness. We do not
believe that genuine experience can lead us astray any more than
scientific data can.
We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come
only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the
surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and
concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is a
consciousness of the illuminating and dynamic value of this wider and
more thorough human experience which explains in no small degree that
new curiosity regarding human life which has more of a moral basis than
an intellectual one.
The newspapers, in a frank reflection of popular demand, exhibit an
omniverous curiosity equally insistent upon the trivial and the
important. They are perhaps the most obvious manifestations of that
desire to know, that "What is this?" and "Why do you do that?" of the
child. The first dawn of the social consciousness takes this form, as
the dawning intelligence of the child takes the form of constant
question and insatiate curiosity.
Literature, too, portrays an equally absorbing though better adjusted
desire to know all kinds of life. The popular books are the novels,
dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely
read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a
measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all
sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social
adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.
Doubtless one under the conviction of sin in regard to social ills finds
a vague consolation in reading about the lives of the poor, and derives
a sense of complicity in doing good. He likes to feel that he knows
about social wrongs even if he does not remedy them, and in a very
genuine sense there is a foundation for this belief.
Partly through this wide reading of human life, we find in ourselves a
new affinity for all men, which probably never existed in the world
before. Evil itself does not shock us as it once did, and we count only
that man merciful in whom we recognize an understanding of the criminal.
We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility and
hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a
realization of the experiences of other people. Already there is a
conviction that we are under a moral obligation in choosing our
experiences, since the result of those experiences must ultimately
determine our understanding of life. We know instinctively that if we
grow contemptuous of our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourse
to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect,
we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the
scope of our ethics.
We can recall among the selfish people of our acquaintance at least one
common characteristic,--the conviction that they are different from
other men and women, that they need peculiar consideration because they
are more sensitive or more refined. Such people "refuse to be bound by
any relation save the personally luxurious ones of love and admiration,
or the identity of political opinion, or religious creed." We have
learned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for the
will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest which
deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we say
that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow and
unprogressive issues.
We know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational and
democratic interest in life, and to give truth complete social
expression is the endeavor upon which we are entering. Thus the
identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of
Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is as
though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience,
because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not carry
us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and
jostle of the crowd.
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