IOLD TYRANNIES(A Fragment, written in 1918.)
(A Fragment, written in 1918.)
Whenyou come as an inhabitant to this earth, you do not have the pleasure of choosing your dwelling, or your career. You do not even have the privilege like those poor little shivering souls in “The Blue Bird,” of sitting about, all aware and wondering, while you are chosen, one by one to take up your toilsome way on earth. You are a helpless victim of your parents’ coming together. There is denied you even the satisfaction of knowing that they created you, in their own bungling fashion, after some manner of a work of art, or of what they imagined an adequate child should be. On the contrary, you may be merely an accident, unintentioned, a species of catastrophe in the life of your mother, a drain upon the resources thatwere none too great already. And your parents have not only not conceived you as a work of art, but they are wholly incapable after you are born of bringing you up like a work of art.
The last indignity perhaps is that of being born unconscious, like a drugged girl who wakes up naked in a bed, not knowing how she got there. For by the time you do dimly begin to apprehend your relation to things and an intelligible world begins to clarify out of the buzz and the darting lights and dull sensations, you are lost, a prisoner of your surroundings inextricably tangled up with your mother’s soul and all the intimate things around you. Your affections have gotten away from your control and attached themselves to things that you in later life discover you never intended them to touch. You depend for comfort on attitudes of your mother or father or nurse or brothers and sisters, that may be taken away from you, leaving you shivering and forlorn. Your impulses have had no intuition of reality. They have leaped forth blindly and have recoiled against or been satisfied with things of which you did not have the choosing, and which only verypartially seem to concern themselves with your desires. For a few years, with infinite tribulation, you have to dodge and butt and back your way through the little world of other people and things that surround you, until you are a little worn down to its shape and are able to predict its reactions.
Everything about you is given, ready, constituted, rigid, set up when you arrive. You always think that some day you are going to catch up to this givenness, that you will dominate instead of falling in line. Fortunate you are if you ever come to dominate! Usually as your world broadens out more and more around you, you merely find a tougher resistance to your desires. Your world at home is simple, personal, appealed to by all sorts of personal manifestations. You can express intense resentment and affect it, or you can express intense joy and affect it. Mother and father have an invincible strength over your feebleness, but your very feebleness is a weapon to break their harsh domination. Their defenses melt against your scream or your chuckle. As you grow older you becomestronger to manipulate the world. But just in proportion does the world become stronger to manipulate you. It is no longer susceptible to your scream or your smile. You must use less personal instruments. But that requires subtlety and knowledge. You have still painfully to ferret out the ways of this world, and learn how to use all sorts of unsuspected tools to gain your ends.
For there stands your old world, wary, wily, parrying easily all your childish blows, and beating you down to your knees, so that you must go back and learn your long apprenticeship. By the time you have learned it, and have become master, behold! your life is inextricably knotted into it. As you learned your apprenticeship, you did as the world did, you learned the tricks in order that you might get your revenge on this world and dominate it as it has tantalizingly held you off and subjugated you. But by the time you have learned, are you not yourself firmly established as a part of the world yourself, so that you dominate nothing. Rather are you now a part of that very flaming rampart against which newyouth advances. You cannot help being a part of that very rampart without extinguishing your own existence.
So you have never overtaken the given. Actually you have fallen farther and farther behind it. You have not affected the world you live in; you have been molded and shaped by it yourself. Your moral responsibility has been a myth, for you were never really free enough to have any responsibility. While you thought you were making headway, you were really being devoured. And your children are as casually begotten as you were, and born into a world as tight and inelastic as was yours. You have a picture of great things achieved, but Time laughs his ironical laugh and rolls you in the dust.
You would perhaps the more easily become free and strong if you could choose your qualities, or regulate the strength of your impulses. But you cannot even do that. Your ancestors have implanted in you impulses which very seriously inhibit you and impede you in your grappling with the world. There is anger which makes you misinterpret people’s attitudes towards you, andmakes you resist when you often should accept. There is fear, which makes you misinterpret the unfamiliar and haunts you with its freezing power all through life. There is love, which ties you irrationally and too strongly first to your mother and your father, and then to people who have no real part with you. And there is the swift revulsion into hatred, when the loved one resists or refuses you. These impulses, which are yours just because you are an animal, soon become your masters, and further tie your hands in your response to the bewildering world into which you have come.
We grow up in the home that society has shaped or coerced our parents into accepting, we adopt the customs and language and utensils that have established themselves for our present through a long process of survival and invention and change. We take the education that is given us, and finally the jobs that are handed out to us by society. As adults, we act in the way that society expects us to act; we submit to whatever regulations and coercions society imposes on us. We live almost entirely a social life, that is, a life as a constitutedunit in society, rather than a free and personal one. Most people live a life which is little more than a series of quasi-official acts. Their conduct is a network of representations of the various codes and institutions of society. They act in such a way in order that some institutional or moral scripture may be fulfilled, rather than that some deep personal direction of growth should be realized. They may be half aware that they are not arrived at the place towards which their ardors pointed. They may dimly realize that their outward lives are largely a compulsion of social habit, performed, even after so many years, with a slight grudgingness. This divorce between social compulsion and personal desire, however, rarely rises to consciousness. Their conscious life is divided between the mechanical performance of their task, the attainment of their pleasures, and the wholly uncriticized acceptance and promulgation of the opinions and attitudes which society provides them with.
The normal, or the common, relation between society and the individual in any society that we know of is that the individual scarcely exists.Those persons who refuse to act as symbols of society’s folk-ways, as counters in the game of society’s ordainings, are outlawed, and there exists an elaborate machinery for dealing with such people. Artists, philosophers, geniuses, tramps, criminals, eccentrics, aliens, free-lovers and free-thinkers, and persons who challenge the most sacred taboos, are treated with great concern by society, and in the hue and cry after them all, respectable and responsible men unanimously and universally join. Some are merely made uncomfortable, the light of society’s countenance being drawn from them; others are deprived of their liberty, placed for years in foul dungeons, or even executed. The heaviest penalties in modern society fall upon those who violate any of the three sacred taboos of property, sex and the State. Religion, which was for so many centuries the most exigent and ubiquitous symbol of society’s demand for conformity, has lapsed in these later days and bequeathed most of its virus to the State. Society no longer demands conformity of opinion in religion, even in those countries where nominal adherence is still required.
There is nothing fixed about the objects to which society demands conformity. It is only the quantity that seems to be constant. So much conformity, like the conservation of physical energy in the universe, but the manners in which people shall think alike, or behave, or what objects they shall consider sacred, differ in myriad ways throughout different social groupings and in different eras. Diametrically opposite ideas are held in two social groups with the same vigor and fury; diametrically opposite conduct is considered equally praiseworthy and necessary; two social groups will visit with the same punishment two diametrically opposite actions. To any student of primitive societies or of the history of Western civilization, these facts are commonplaces. But the moral is not a commonplace as yet. Yet it must be evident that most of the customs and attitudes of these societies were almost wholly irrational, that is, they were social habits which persisted solely through inertia and the satisfaction they gave the gregarious impulse. The latter had to be satisfied, so that anything which cost the least in invention or reasoning or effort woulddo. The customs, therefore, of primitive tribes seem to practically everybody in a modern Western society outlandish and foolish. What evidence is there that our codes and conformities which perform exactly the same rôle, and are mostly traditional survivals, are any the less outlandish and irrational? May they not be tainted with the same purposelessness? Is not the inference irresistible that they are? They seem to us to be intelligent and necessary not because we have derived them or invented them for a clearly imagined and desired end, but because they satisfy our need for acting in a herd, just as the primitive savage is satisfied.
The most important fact we can realize about society is that to every one of us that comes into the world it is something given, irreducible. We are as little responsible for it as we are for our own birth. From our point of view it is just as much a non-premeditated, non-created, irrational portion of our environment, as is the weather. Entering it in the closing years of the Nineteenth century, we find it as it exists and as it has developed through the centuries of human change.We had nothing whatever to do with its being as it is, and by the time we have reached such years of discretion as dimly to understand the complex of institutions around us, we are implicated in it and compromised by it as to be little able to effect any change in its irresistible bulk. No man who ever lived found himself in a different relation to society from what we find ourselves. We all enter as individuals into an organized herd-whole in which we are as significant as a drop of water in the ocean, and against which we can about as much prevail. Whether we shall act in the interests of ourselves or of society is, therefore, an entirely academic question. For entering as we do a society which is all prepared for us, so toughly grounded and immalleable that even if we came equipped with weapons to assail it and make good some individual preference, we could not in our puny strength achieve anything against it. But we come entirely helpless.