IIPROTEUS AND ETHICS
I have just come across a passage from Huxley’s famousRomanes Lecture, read thirty years ago and long since forgotten; and which has brought home to me all our elusive Proteus has been doing in the domain of ethics; moreover the share of Intelligence in confirming those changes. Huxley is pointing out a fact which he finds disconcerting, namely, “that ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent.†The allusion to the harmony reigning in Victorian families may make one smile, like some well-bred Du Maurier illustration. But how those words bring back what some of us are old enough to have suffered in days whenFree Thought drew a terrifying line between religious dogmas and moral ones, clinging to these to steady itself after jettisoning the others! One’s youthful deistic anguish (as cruel, perhaps, as any believer’s sense of God’s forsaking him) at discarding God for insufficient morality, was merely transferred to one’s terms with Huxley’s ogre Cosmos, devouring the moral instincts itself had begotten. Occupied as my studies then were with art-history, I can remember wrestling with the horrid inconsistency of the art of Michael Angelo and Rafael having arisen in a civilization described by Taine as partaking of the brothel and the cut-throat’s den. And I remember the heavenly relief of hitting on the notion that, since such art is not born in a day, it must have been begotten and incubated during the Franciscan Age, immune from all Borgian infections. Of course, the generation immediately younger than mine was taught by Nietzsche that MichaelAngelo’s greatness was, on the contrary, due to presiding Renaissance villainy; but that pseudo-Nietzschian generation is, in its turn, superannuated, and the cult ofimmoralismalong with it. Not only because paradoxes do not bear repetition, but for another reason which that quotation from Huxley has made me realize. Namely, that we have left off thinking of art as either moral or immoral, simply because morality no longer holds the same place in our thoughts as, say, in those of Ruskin, George Eliot, or, as that quotation shows, even in those of Huxley. Not the same (if one may say so,ubiquitous) place; a place more clearly defined, but only the more important, ever since Intelligence, ferreting about amongGolden Boughs,Religion of the Semites, and similar books, has quietly stripped from our moral valuations that half-supernatural, half-æsthetic halo which is but the shrunken religious involucrum wherein they came into the world. The “problem of evil†hasalready become the problem not of its toleration by God, but of its diminution by Man.Thatis the great change we are still witnessing; a change, I cannot but think, greater than any brought about by the material applications of science, and implying a deliverance from individual suffering not less than that we owe to Pasteur and to Lister.
Whether we notice it or not, Morality is already taking a new status, independent alike of an absentee (or absent) Deity, and of an indifferent Cosmos. But its new domain, narrow and self-governing, essentiallysui generis, has sanctions and imperatives only the stronger for being man-made and man-regarding. And, one may add, only the more austerely binding on the present that we shall recognize them as different from those of the Past and different, no doubt, from those into which the Future will transform them.
Thus we are already conceiving of punishment only as a mechanism, successful or not, for social defence.And we scarcely ever hear more than the last echo of those incentives to virtue and deterrents from vice of theSandford and Mertontype of my own childhood’s copybooks. Still less of the Stoical, and (alas!) Platonic mendacities about remorse torturing evil-doers, and the unhappy life of Browning’sInstans Tyrannuswith his “ThenIwas afraid.†Neither do we talk any longer of the virtuous glows which (failing the increase of flocks and herds!) used to reward the virtuous acts of the generation adorned by Butler’s Mr. Pontifex. We are getting to think of our own virtues, supposing we have any, as conducive not to our own advantage but to that of other folk.
Consonantly with the psychologist’s recognition that, of the two polar feelings determining human action, the (positive) attraction of pleasure is far less potent than the (negative) repulsion of pain, it seems as if our future ethics would emphasize not good actions butbad ones. That will be following up the rule-of-thumb wisdom of the Commandments, of which the surviving ones are all “thoushalt notâ€; the positive ones about loving God and honouring Father and Mother having become either difficult to enforce or optional. I am glad of that wordoptional, because it leads to the remark that Intelligence is surely abolishing that neutral territory whence “good actions†can issue at “good†people’s good pleasure and as an expression of their goodness, but which no one has a right to insist upon; indeed, which they have a perfect right to withhold, since they are patted on the back for doing them, or have their hands kissed, as children were taught to kiss those of the “revered author of their being.†I expect that before so very long Intelligence may bluntly suggest that if the action, whatever it happen to be, isreally good, that must mean that it isreally needed; and if it is really needed, your fellow men can claim it and obligeyou to claim it from your unwilling self. And to dishonour that claim may become in their eyes (mirrored in your own), mean, disgraceful, dirty. In the language of contemporary youth, it will not bedecent.[1]That substitution of the worddecencyfor the wordvirtuegives, methinks, the clue to the future revaluation of our moral standards. It implies, as I have suggested, a more intelligent and, in some ways, more indulgent, morality; but a morality on the whole more austere, a stark notion of duty armed with the relentless imperative which nowadays makes us abashed at the revelation in ourself of physical cowardice or bodily dirtiness. A morality, I venture to add, eventually able to do without the adornments coming under the head of “Moral Beauty.â€
[1]“No, we may not be as moral as they (i.e.the older generation) are, but we are fifty times decenter.â€â€”G. B. Stern,Tents of Israel, 1924; p. 244.
[1]“No, we may not be as moral as they (i.e.the older generation) are, but we are fifty times decenter.â€â€”G. B. Stern,Tents of Israel, 1924; p. 244.
And, speaking of a future standard of “decency,†there will necessarily comesundry revaluations quite intolerable to our present morality. I will not speak (since far too much is nowadays being spoken concerning what, after all, is but a small part of conduct) about such revaluations of sexual morals asDædalusprognosticates from transplantation of ovaries.That, and coming facilitations for changing one’s sex, cannot, indeed, fail to modify family arrangements; although I have greater belief in the effects of future methods of producing and exchanging, not offspring, but other commodities, and the consequent alteration in our tenure and conception of property. Indissoluble marriage, which already strikes some of us as scarcely decent, will lose its practical utility once inheritance is more or less abolished, and the subsistence and education of children no longer a charge on parents. Nor is this all: a more restricted practice and therefore habitual notion of ownership may at some distant day educate men and women, parents and children,lovers and friends, nay, masters and disciples, to admit Proteus even into the impregnable stronghold and inviolable sanctuary of human selfishness calledLove. The “marriage of true minds†may, like the other one, come to be supplemented by honourable divorce. Exclusive reciprocal attachment, surely of all spiritual essences the most delicate, if not most volatile, may cease to be regarded as an inalienable piece of property, guaranteed by honour more terrible than law; and which, while all else (and ourselves most!) alters and shifts, cannot be altered and shifted without guilt of theft. There may come an end to the ideal of such fidelity as implies the claim of him or her once preferred to be preferred for ever; the duty also of continuing to prefer once having begun. Like much of the morality of a more intelligent age, “decent†behaviour in matters of sentiment will be based less upon anoughtthan anis. And I can conceivethat such a change may make love’s tenure less insecure and less routinish and perfunctory. It will, at least, save one of the finest kinds of happiness (and the multiplying factor of many other ones) not indeed from the passing misery of change, but from the ignominy of claimed or accepted sacrifice, and the cruel pollution of jealousy, not between lovers only, but between all who love. And when there shall be applied to love the solemn saying “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away†we may learn to temper our loss by the intenser gratitude for whatever, even if only for a time, has been ours.
As with fidelity in love, so also with “loyalty†to persons, even to causes and ideas. But such, too often degrading, loyalty will, I imagine, be more than compensated for by the condemnation of a new sin against the Holy Ghost, and by insistence on a minimum (at least!) of consistency in one’s own ideas and a minimum of conformity between one’s judgment ofothers and one’s judgment of oneself: the mote in one’s brother’s eye awakening the suspicion of the beam in one’s own.
At the same time (which is not our time!), and as Intelligence takes on a leading part in morals, there will come the indulgent recognition that such a “decency†as we may exact (or try to exact) from ourselves, cannot, any more than personal cleanliness in our own day, be exacted from all our neighbours. It may take a good many transformations of Proteus before the mote can always be removed from our brother’s eye, even supposing the beam to have been taken away from our own. It is no easy matter to be always clean inside and out, especially when, like the little boy in Stevenson’s rhyme, “your dear Papa is poor,†poor in spirit, perchance one of a long line of moral paupers. Neither is “decency†always attainable where there has been no past charwoman to prepare your easy tidiness at expense of previousdirty hands. Still less when, as nowadays, wallowing in excess or in cruelty is the only excitement many people can get out of life. Hence it may be a long while yet before the bare decencies of the spirit, even if recognized for such, can lose the value of rarity and the status of virtues. For, let us remember that, the fouler mankind’s surroundings and sores, the greater the need for incense and myrrh and even for the questionable odour of sanctity. Is not early Christianity’s, say St. Paul’s, insistence on chastity and mansuetude the expression of the otherwise inexpressible bestiality, cruelty, and vaingloriousness of decadent Rome? And what is the foolish Franciscan laudation of beggary save the measure of mediæval rapine and simony?
So, for the time being and the world as it may, alas! long continue, mankind will need something besides a taste for moral decency, to wit, an admiration for generous, nay, quixotic impulses and for tender sensibilities. TheseIntelligence, respectful towards the need for them, can neither create, nor, except by negative measures, even increase. But it can do something as necessary. Intelligence, and only Intelligence, can see to it that, even to-day, such rare and precious impulses and sensibilities be not diverted to evil results, wasted in barren self-sacrifice, or the fostering of hide-bound selfishness. Wasted, above all, in hecatombs to the Molochs of collective superstition, like the one which is only just over, and may begin again to-morrow.