Another reason for our confusion is that we are afraid that we are leaderless. We have cut away from authority and have substituted for it the will of the people. We are a democracy. In democracies majorities take the lead and everyone knows that majorities are not always right. Modern America has no recognized leaders. There are a few who speak out in no uncertain fashion, but there are millions to howl down their every utterance, no matter what it is.
The educational world is full of theories and experiments. Our supposedly wisest do not seem at all sure what is proper training for our boys and girls. Certain of our colleges have remained conventional, but others are experimenting wildly; and quantity rather than quality production seems to be the watchword. It is a little terrifying to talk with recent college graduates and see how dazed and unprepared and dissatisfied they are. We ought to be able to look to them for leadership, but they seem, often, to have been more confused and upset than enlightened and stabilized by their study.
One does not have to look beyond his own neighborhood, perhaps even his own household, to be aware of the fact that something is wrong in the economic realm. The world around, men and women are in deep distress and in grievous need. Vaults are full of gold but people are poverty stricken. Our plains and fields bring forth abundant harvests, yet hundreds of thousands are hungry and cold. Dinner pails are not so full as they once were, and discontent marches toward despair. We may have our captains of industry but they have been strangely powerless to lead the peoples of the world to the plenty of which they have dreamed and for which they have toiled.
The lack of leadership, the lack of men and women of vision and of power sufficient to make their visions compelling is one of the marks of our time. Our confusion will continue until the modern democratic world shall learn to produce leaders and also the mass intelligence to recognize and follow them. We lack "men who can live above the fogs in public duty and in private thinking."
Now, may I in conclusion touch very briefly upon one phase of our confused modern life that really deserves an entire chapter. I refer to the confusion prevailing in the realm of morals.
One reason for this confusion is that our moral codes have heretofore been based upon the codes and conceptions and practices of countries and centuries and civilizations vastly different from our own. We are now engaged in trying to evolve our own moral codes and evolution is not a smooth process. Our morals have largely been built upon "Bible models." We have been greatly influenced by by ancient precepts and procedures laid down for Hebrew nomads living in Egypt and Arabia and Palestine. Why should we expect that what served an agricultural people three thousand years ago in the deserts of the East should serve us in twentieth-century America? Indeed, why should we wonder that grave adjustments are necessary when we remember that we are dealing not even with a Puritan stock living in quite New England villages and on hillside farms but with people drawn from every quarter of the globe, jammed by the hundred thousand in the tenements and apartment houses of our great cities?
Then, too, the moralists, largely priests and preachers, have sought to direct and impose by a use of their own or divine authority, and as we have already seen the modern mind does not bend easily to or respect greatly the thunder of professional leaders.
Certain schools of psychology -- groping, to be sure, but easy to listen to -- have told us that codes and principles and standards are of little worth anyway. We are told that we cannot help doing what we do. Sex and hunger and herd habits force us into certain predetermined acts and there is, so they say, no use in trying to control, let alone change, human nature.
Machinery has affected morals more than we dream. There is no time to tell the story; merely let me hint that it has brought men out of the country to live crowed in the cities. It has utterly changed the complexion of family life. It has given the masses an infinite amount of leisure time that they have not yet learned to use. It has placed a premium on youth and an accent on speed. It has so stressed the factor of efficiency that we are coming to regard human beings not as sacred personalities but as mere cogs in the great enginery of production and progress.
Is it any wonder that with these things, together with the emancipation of women and the heretofore unparalleled contact between nations, we are confused? Add to this the hysteria of and reaction from the greatest war in history, and no thinking person will wonder that our social order is upset, that our moral codes are called in question and our confusion is great.
Such in part is the setting of our modern stage. But there is no necessity whatever for us to be stampeded or frightened or depressed. "The deep permanence's of the world" are untouched. Nothing that I have said and nothing that has transpired really cuts at the root of religion. "Chance and decay in all around we see," but if history writes any lesson firmly and largely, it has written that such periods are but the forerunners of golden days to come.
Quoted "From Confusion to Certainty" by Boynton Merrill, D.D. copyright 1931
Used without permission.
Greg
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