1927

Have just returned from the student conference at ——. A smart young professor told the students that all social customs are based upon irrational taboos. Our generation is the first with the opportunity to build a rational social order. The way to build a rational society, according to this savant, is to regard every relationship, custom, convention and law as irrational until it has proved itself rational by experience.

A sample of the kind of society he would build by his reason was given in his discussion of sex relations. He thinks the highest kind of family life would result from the love of one woman for one man while both indulged in promiscuous relations. Thus would the values of both freedom and love be maintained. The smart young man seems never to have heard that you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

If you want love and cooperation in any kind of society, and most of all in the family, it is necessary to sacrifice some freedom for its sake. What strange fanatics these moderns are! Imagining themselves dispassionate in their evaluation of all values, they are really bigoted protagonists of the one value of freedom. Every other value must be subordinated to it.

It is true that every convention, custom, law and usage contains an irrational element. Some were unreasonable from the beginning and others have become so by shifting circumstance. It is necessary, therefore, that we approach the facts of life experimentally and scientifically, rather than traditionally. However, it seems to me quite unreasonable to proceed upon the assumption that all traditions are wholly unreasonable. Most of the moderns who think so are significantly defective in the knowledge of history.

There is at the heart of almost every tradition an element of reasonableness and around its circumference a whole series of irrationalities. Our business must be to destroy the latter and restore the former by fitting it to contemporaneous circumstances and conditions.

I doubt whether it is wise for every person to be extremely critical of all traditions in every field of thought and life. I imagine we ought to specialize a little in this matter and let various people experiment in various areas. This seems to me a wise policy for the simple reason that it does not make for happiness for one person to do the experimenting in every field. At any rate most of the intellectuals I know who try to do it are miserable souls. I am always glad to escape their company and consort with folks who take some things for granted. There is an unnatural strain in their lives and, having made a virtue of the critical temper, they usually discount virtue and achievement even where it is indubitable.

Since there are many more traditionalists than experimentalists, all this may be bad advice. But I doubt whether the lethargy of the many justifies the few in spoiling their tempers and their judgment. Let every reformer find at least one field of interest and life where he can be happily conventional. If he is trying to remake the economic order, let him accept family life and be happy in it without too many scruples about its alleged imperfections. On second thought I don’t like this advice. At any rate it is inconsistent with my scorn for the liberal theologians who are so preoccupied with the task of reforming religion that they have no interest in the iniquities of society which ought to challenge their conscience.

Let us have reformers, then, who try to reform everything at the same time! But I am going to keep my distance from them.