HUMANISM AND DEMOCRACY

When our fathers formulated their program for democracy, and announced that its chief objective was to secure for the individual, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, contemporary records show that they generally believed that if these ends could be attained, a new golden age would be inaugurated among men, and that all the various ills would drop out of life. We have been disillusioned. Since the formulation of the Declaration of Independence we have learned the extreme antiquity of man upon the earth, and we have learned by what slow and tortuous paths the human family has zigzagged up to its present state of imperfection. To-day we do not hope that any form of government can assure us an immediate millennium, and we look with suspicion upon any prophet who promises an immediate utopia. Condemned as we are to look with straining eyes towards a distant land of promise, some remote perfection of our race, we are all the more jealous of our chance to do our bit in achieving that goal. The inalienable right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, has yielded place to the inalienable right to grow. Forms of government seem worthy to endure, in proportion as they minister to growth. We still cling to democracy, because it still seems to promise the largest chance for growth. It is a significant fact that along with the phrase “make the world safe for democracy,” there has sprung into existence the phrase “make democracy safe for the world,” as if to warn us that democracy like all forms of government, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and that end is humanism.

In conceiving this paper, my patriotic purpose was to prove how humanism helps democracy, but all the way along I have been conscious of being guilty of an enormous hysteron proteron, for the real issue is not how humanism helps democracy, but how much democracy helps humanism. And what is humanism? Something too large to be defined in a single sentence or paragraph. It is a number of things. In the first place humanism is humaneness; not exactly, however, the kind of humaneness that the editor of the New Republic believes in. Perhaps you remember how a year ago a distinguished professor of Greek hung a metaphorical millstone about the neck of Mr. Abraham Flexner and cast him into the midst of the sea, because he had attempted to poison the well-springs of knowledge for a whole generation of young people. On the millstone was inscribed the indictment: “Mr. Flexner is not the first man who has had the courage of his insensibilities.” At this the editor of the New Republic declared that the distinguished professor had been very inhumane, and was therefore an unfit exponent of the humanities. One wonders with what gentle and humane words Minos and Aeacus and Rhadamanthus will speak to Mr. Flexner when he comes to judgment in that long line of those who, having done irreparable harm in this world, present as their only excuse the fact that they were sincere in their good intentions. Humanism is humaneness based where Socrates and Plato based it, on knowledge, understanding and intelligence.

Humanism is a conservation of the highest achievements of the human spirit. It gives substance to the seemingly paradoxical belief that for the rank and file of men, nine-tenths of the future lies in the past,—that certain giant men long dead, still have power to lead the race to heights that the majority of us but dimly see. To put it negatively, humanism represents the belief that a majority of each generation go to their graves without having entered upon their inheritance, without even having suspected that they had an inheritance, having lived not so much in their sins, as in ignorance of the glory that humanity has already attained.

A true humanism will include and properly appraise the mental achievements of its own age. The danger always is that the newer achievements will be seen out of all proportion, and overrated because of their nearness. To-day we are dazzled and blinded by the stupendous achievements of a new materialism, a materialism far subtler than that which sprung up a century ago. In the first half of the Nineteenth Century some men of repute were saying that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,” and “life is but the action of the sun’s rays upon carbon.” Against this gross and crass materialism Emerson arose as our champion, a prophet who had lighted his torch at the altar of Prometheus in the Academy of Plato. By the light of that torch men again began to see things in true proportion, and to-day we can say of those earlier materialists “their knowledge is the wisdom of yesterday.” But the new materialism is far subtler, boasting far greater achievements. Two years ago the headlines in the papers announced that a man in Washington had talked by wireless telephony with a man in Hawaii. We were filled with pride at this new demonstration of the power of the human mind to master the laws of the external universe. And yet after all, the question is not how far you talk, but what you say. Did the man in Washington say to the man in Hawaii anything so important as the messages which Plato sent by wireless across the centuries to Emerson? When we read the prayer which Plato put into the mouth of Socrates at the close of the Phædrus: “Give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be as one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a wise and temperate man can bear and carry,” we are ready to strive to prepare ourselves to be torch-bearers in the great race.

This is no small program that humanism undertakes:—to make a man thoroughly humane; to eradicate all the brutal instincts and all the cruel traits which two hundred thousand, perhaps two million years of savagery have implanted in his nature; to conserve for him and in him all the highest spiritual experiences of the race; to make him a worthy member of any celestial gathering however nobly conceived and constituted, this is a program requiring not merely the fifteen or twenty years usually allotted to formal education, but a lifetime, and perhaps a million years beyond. The million years beyond is too much for the practical man, and he holds up his hands in protest, declaring: “Such doctrine is too other-worldly for me. If you train the children to tune their harps for another world, who is going to kill the hogs, and dig the sewers, and mine the coal?” To such a question I would reply in the same tone: “You need not worry. There is a certain gentleman, a veritable colossus on the educational sky-line, who uses one foot to direct the schools at Gary, and the other foot to trample down an over-rampant idealism in New York City. He will see to it that the millennium is not ushered in too hastily.” In the last municipal election in the city of New York, we had a splendid example of Tammany’s political astuteness in temporarily aligning itself with the idealism of the proletariat on the east side. To the foreigner who comes to this country, America means one thing above all else, and that is the chance to emerge from the class in which he was born. The rebellion among the foreign population of New York against the Gary system, was not a rebellion against industrial education as such, but a rebellion against the idea that their children were to have industrial education and nothing more. Our practical man, even if he is unwilling to look forward a million years, must at any rate look back a million years. No one can hope to see our educational problem in its true perspective unless he is willing to take his stand at the entrance of a palæolithic cave, and look across the centuries at the toils of our race as it has attempted to differentiate the brutal from the human.

In every school house there are palæolithic children, neolithic children, bronze age children, iron age children, children of the golden age, children of a thousand different aptitudes and limitations. The mussed up condition of our educational program, the incoherent wrangling about educational theory, is largely due to our failure to keep this steadily in mind. Somehow we have not fully appreciated the fact that endowment is more than training, and we are still hoping that in some way we can perform the miracle and carry the neolithic child on our shoulders across the ten thousand, or possibly the fifty thousand, years that intervene between him and abstract thought. And because we have wished to do the greater miracle, we have failed to do the lesser one that makes for the slow but sure growth of the race. It is not strange that a cry has gone up for vocational training. It is strange, however, that we did not foresee this just demand, and meet it even before the demand was made. At the present moment there is danger that the interests of the more gifted child will be sacrificed to meet the need of the less gifted one, that our whole public school system will be Garyized, and that the proper foundation of our higher education will be impaired if not destroyed. In a neighboring state a year or two ago, the state superintendent of education sent out notes to the smaller high schools advising that courses in domestic science and agriculture be substituted for geometry and Virgil. It did not occur to him that he could establish a lower form of education without destroying a higher form. It did not occur to him that the state was rich enough to pay for both forms. Many years ago I lived near a rich stock-man who owned the finest herd of shorthorn cattle in the Middle West. He paid a man $2,000 a year to care for his cattle; he sent his children to a school where no teacher received more than five hundred dollars a year. I will not say that he cared four times as much for his cattle as for his children, but I will say that we have here the solution of our problem. If we would spend four times as much money on our elementary schools, vocational and industrial courses could be properly established, classes could be reduced from fifty to fifteen, the needs of each pupil could be carefully studied, the pupil of lesser gifts could be directed into industrial courses without humiliation, and the pupil of higher gifts would make his way normally and naturally to geometry and Virgil.

In one year of the war we are spending twenty billion dollars. The interest on this vast sum at four per cent. is eight hundred million dollars a year,—or just fifty millions more than we spent on all forms of education last year in the United States. We are willing to spend this amount of money to make the world safe for democracy. Are we willing to spend a similar sum to put real meaning and content into the word democracy? It is conceivable that during the war we may become so accustomed to giving and tax-paying that after the war we may be willing to make similar sacrifices that democracy may have a fair chance to bear its true and legitimate fruits. In the first year of the war Mr. Rockefeller has given to the Red Cross and other philanthropic causes $70,000,000. He has done this with immense satisfaction, and without serious inconvenience. It is to be hoped that during the war he and our twenty-two thousand other millionaires may become so accustomed to paying income taxes that it may degenerate into a habit, and that after the war, from this source our funds for education may be doubled or trebled. Mr. Rockefeller should be financing not merely Mr. Flexner’s experiment station in secondary education; he should be financing a hundred other secondary schools in an equally splendid way. But we can never hope to make our educational program really significant, merely by compelling the millionaires to pay their rightful share of the expense. We shall never succeed in this program, until we have become sufficiently interested in the matter to be willing to make sacrifices ourselves. It is with extreme regret that I am compelled to admit that the heart of this great problem is economic, and that the streets of the New Jerusalem we are striving to build, must be not metaphorically, but literally paved with gold.

If we can assume that after the war industrial education will be properly established and financed without diverting funds from the higher forms of education, if we can even assume that the funds available for the more humanistic training will be greatly increased, there still remain two potent forces in our educational world which seriously threaten to undermine and impair our democracy and the humanism which is its eventual goal. I refer to the corrupting influence of athletics in our high schools and colleges, and the attitude of the state towards the small college.

One can hardly “see life steadily and see it whole” without recognizing the fact that it is necessary to house a sound mind in a sound body; but after all, the supreme thing is the sound mind. If our school and college athletics had been willing to make this its chief objective, little or nothing could be said in arraignment of athletic contests. But the present athletic situation makes one ready to cry aloud that ancient indictment found in a fragment of the Autolycus of Euripides: “Of all the countless ills that prey on Hellas, there is none that can be compared with this tribe of athletes.”

Since athletics have been introduced into the public high schools of the Middle West, there is no question that a somewhat larger number of boys have continued in the high schools. There is also no question that there has been a very marked lowering of intellectual standards. And what is worse, our high school students and whole communities have been imbued with a false sense of proportion. To run half as fast as a greyhound, to jump one-fifth as far as a kangaroo, to kick one-tenth as hard as a Missouri mule, these are the principal things, these are the weightier matters of the law. These contests with the brute world, in which we are always defeated, have taken the place of the higher intellectual contests of humanism. The school superintendent or principal who can turn out a winning team, he is the man, the new patriot in our democracy. Let me illustrate. Three years ago in one of the small towns of Iowa, the superintendent of schools received a considerable increase in salary because he had turned out a basket ball team that had defeated all the teams in the neighboring high schools. The next fall four members of the winning team entered the State University of Iowa as freshmen. Before the end of the year they had all been sent home because they could not do their intellectual tasks.

But to turn to a second menace to humanism—the attitude of the state towards the small college, or perhaps it would be truer to say the attitude of the administrative officials of our state institutions towards the small college. A conversation which I had last summer with the dean of the college of liberal arts in one of our state universities, will illustrate what I mean. In this conversation the dean expressed the opinion that the great majority of small colleges in the Middle West would be reduced to junior colleges (i. e. their work would be limited to the freshman and sophomore years), or meet with entire extinction. He was even more specific in his prophecy, saying that five per cent. of the colleges of the type of College X would die or become junior colleges during the war (if the war lasted three years) because of the reduced income from tuition, and reduced financial assistance from private gifts. He made this prophecy with a smile, as one heralding a blessing. For the moment he forgot that a majority of the students in his graduate school came from colleges of the same class as College X, and he failed to foresee that if his prophecy were fulfilled, large sections of the state would be left in educational darkness. Now College X has had an honorable history of forty-five years. It has done much to make democracy safe for the world. It has sent out hundreds of graduates and ex-students fit to participate in self-government, and with some notion of what is meant by an international mind. At the present moment it counts among its alumni one hundred and forty-two who are engaged in teaching, including one university president who administers $18,000,000 for educational purposes, and twenty-five college professors in such institutions as Beloit, Drury, Dupauw, Lawrence, Grinnell. Many others of its alumni, on their way to law, medicine, theology, have served the state effectively as teachers. And yet the dean would brush aside this work with a smile, would allow this college and similar colleges to die or be reduced to junior colleges, without a word of protest, perhaps in the thought that his own college of liberal arts would minister adequately to the educational needs of the state. In that state at the present moment privately endowed institutions are caring for more than twenty thousand students, and are making an annual gift to the state of more than three million dollars. These institutions are well scattered, and reach localities untouched by the university. Higher education must be carried to the various communities. The number of young people that can be sent to college is increased fivefold, if those young people can be housed and boarded at home, and if there is no railroad fare to pay. To illustrate: the county in which the state university in question is located, sends seven hundred and eighty-nine students to the university, more than the total number sent by sixty-three counties in remote corners of the state. Out of five hundred degrees conferred by the university in one year, one-fifth go to students residing in the county in which the university is situated. It is obvious that the university is bringing higher education to one county, and failing to bring it to sixty-three counties. The work however is being done by the small colleges. But the dean was right when he intimated that many of these small colleges are fighting for their lives. Twenty-five years ago the professors in College X were receiving $1,500 a year,—a home missionary’s salary even in those days; but to-day they are still getting $1,500. Last year a deficit made a considerable inroad on the endowment fund. This year the deficit will be larger, because seventy of her advanced students have gone into the army. And the state stands by in indifference, watching an institution die that has served it well for forty-five years—an institution that it must replace at public expense, or leave a corner of the state in educational darkness. I think that the real hope of the dean was that such colleges might be reduced to junior colleges, and that the available funds might be spent in improving the instruction in the freshmen and sophomore years. But he could hardly say this, for last year the students in his own university were loudly protesting that they were being neglected, and that teaching had been sacrificed on the altar of research. But even if the dean could not say it, why is it not a reasonable suggestion? Why not cut off the last two years of the college course and improve the instruction in the earlier years? For the simple reason that the state is too rich to permit of any curtailment of the opportunity of intellectual growth for its young people. It is gratuitous assumption that the students who had done two years’ work in the small college would complete their work in the university. The small minority who are going into professional work would do this, but the large majority would end their training with the sophomore year, and democracy and humanism would suffer simultaneously an irremediable blow. Let us hope that the historians of later times will not be compelled to write: “In 1917 the Kaiser not only blew up the cathedrals in France, but he also helped to dynamite our American colleges.”

There is an old proverb to the effect that the streets of Jerusalem were kept clean by every man sweeping that part which lay before his own door. On one side of our domain runs the Lincoln Highway, on the other side the road which began before the altar of Prometheus in the groves of Academe. Both of these roads later converge in that straight and narrow path that leads unto life. It is our high function to keep these roads free and unobstructed—to walk a few parasangs with gifted young people; to fit them to be effective ambassadors of Truth, by persuading them to thumb a Latin lexicon until they have attained a reasonable precision of speech; to help them attain the refinement of diction that shall eventually result in a greater refinement of character; to teach them to appreciate the beauty of a Greek temple or of a fragment of Greek sculpture, furnishing them with a basis of æsthetic judgment, that will serve them well until they meet Plato’s archetypes face to face; to feed their imagination with the radiant buoyant life of Homer; to show them how Horace fashioned a livable life philosophy out of the aurea mediocritas of Aristotle; to initiate them into the Socratic doctrine that Knowledge is the mother of all the virtues; to crown them with a universal sympathy by interpreting with them the “Lachryma rerum” of Virgil. Can anyone conceive a life in which pleasure and duty are more inextricably intermingled?

This is the humanism that is the fairest fruit of democracy, and which in turn makes democracy possible. Two years ago I heard one of our most eminent political economists say in a public address that the chance of success for a democratic form of government was in direct proportion to the number of citizens who were capable of abstract thought. We do our abstract thinking in the main through the help of Greek and Latin derivatives. Let us not underestimate, and let us not permit anyone else to underestimate, the importance of our contribution to the success of democracy, when we train our students to a certain precision in the use of Greek and Latin derivatives, by long years of patient drill in careful translation. It is our privilege to help develop their latent powers of abstract thought by furnishing them with the tools with which they may do their thinking. This is the largest single contribution we can make to human life, the largest single offering we can lay on the altar of Truth.

Our success in holding ourselves and our students to this great task will be determined largely by the set of life values we carry into the class room, and by our ability to differentiate that which is important in Greek and Roman civilization from that which is negligible and unessential. I sometimes fear that we have forgotten that only the higher elements of any civilization are worthy to be transmitted to posterity, and that forgetting this we have permitted many of our courses to be denaturized, dehumanized, and Germanized.

In seven out of ten of the text-books of the classics edited for college use, the notes are written, not for freshmen and sophomores, but for those who have already attained or are going to attain the degree of doctor of philosophy, a degree that was first made in Germany. This blight of the doctor’s degree has invaded not only our courses in the classics, but every course in the university curriculum that can in any sense be called a humanistic course. It is high time that we form a solemn procession and make an offering on the altar of Robigo, god or goddess of the rust.

In the natural and physical sciences we do not resent or criticize futile experimentation. We are willing that that six hundred and five futile experiments may be made that the six hundred and sixth may be successful. We expect this work of experimentation to be more or less dehumanizing, in its drudgery, that in the end the fruit of the successful experiment may confer some blessing upon the human family. We do not protest against a doctor’s dissertation in science in which the results are wholly negative. But we do protest against a doctor’s dissertation in literature or history, which has compelled the doctor designatus to spend months of his time on some inconsequential subject, giving him a false perspective and a false sense of proportion that it will take him years to get rid of in his teaching.

Let it be understood that this protest against the doctor’s degree is not a protest against the length of time that is given to graduate studies in preparation for teaching. This should be increased rather than diminished. It is a protest against some of the objects to which years of graduate study have been devoted under the shadow of the doctor’s degree. It is “a place in the sun” that we are demanding. In using this phrase “a place in the sun,” I am not plagiarizing that one whom Henry Van Dyke has christened “the damned vulture of Potsdam,” but a far better man, Diogenes of Sinope, who once requested Alexander the Great to get out of his daylight and give him his place in the sun.

In conclusion let me cite an incident from the life of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. It is related that Zeno once asked the oracle what he ought to do to live in the most excellent way. The reply came back that he ought to become of the same complexion as the dead. Whereupon he immediately inferred that he ought to apply himself to reading the books of the ancients. This is the Zeno who promulgated the doctrines of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, who fashioned the molds in which the Roman Law and Roman Christianity were cast, who conceived of a world democracy in which friendship should be the guiding principle, and in which Greek and barbarian alike should have equal privileges and equal opportunities for growth.