0 An American Looks at His World Comment on the Times by Glenn Frank FASHIONS IN BIGOTRY HE time is ripe for somebody to the thumbprints and Bertillon meas Twrite a really great book on bigotry. I do not mean a book that would simply burn over the old ground of free speech and censorship. I do not mean merely a fresh juggling with the issues of tolerance and intolerance. I mean a realistic and comprehensive study of the anatomy of bigotry, its varied sources, its varied methods of expression, its varied apostles. There are all sorts and conditions of bigotry. There must be something of the Gipsy in bigotry, for it turns up in the most unexpected places. We are likely to jump to the conclusion that theology is the main breeding-ground of bigotry, and that professional moralists are its chief practitioners. When bigotry is mentioned, we usually dismiss the subject by saying, “Oh, yes, I read 'A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology' years ago," adding, perhaps, a gesture of disgust toward the bleak and unlovely moralism of self-appointed reformers. But there are new bigotries on the make to-day which take their rise in fields that lie afar from theology and reform. There is a vast and varied gallery of bigots inviting analysis-bigots of theology, bigots of reform, bigots of patriotism, bigots of education, bigots of business, bigots of science. To get urements of all these is a job that somebody should undertake. Not that there is n't room and to spare just now for a score of books that would do no more than freshly to restate the simple logic of liberty! In New York, for instance, a certain judge has lately sounded the tom-tom of intolerance and called together the scattered battalions of professional moral guardians and exhorted them to a concerted drive on the legislature in the interests of stricter rulings and regulations regarding "obscene" literature. Offhand this sounds harmless and high-minded. No decent American holds a brief for obscenity in books, on the stage, or in motion pictures. But this New York drive for a more rigid censorship is n't as simple a matter as all that. If it succeeds, it will place the literature of the future at the mercy of swashbuckling patrioteers and intellectually anemic men to whom morality is a thing to be hedged about and quarantined from a too intimate contact with life rather than a thing to be won on the fields of life. The proposed moral mothering of literature aims at the safeguarding of moral virility, but it will inevitably make for intellectual sterility. As Milton put it, "those books, and those in great abundance, which Its in Barrels of ink have been used to float the current discussion of the fundamentalist movement in our churches. I have sought in vain for one redeeming feature in either the purpose or the plea of the religious fundamentalism. It represents a renaissance of the mania for persecution that marked the Inquisition. signia should be the creative mind dormant and the creed-making instinct rampant. Its leaders are attempting to draw a dead-line of doctrine around the church and to exclude from the service of either God or man any clergyman who does not agree with their particular creedal beliefs. My personal complaint against the fundamentalists is that they have left out of their program everything that seems to me to be fundamental to the religion of Jesus. The things they insist upon are, from first to last, things that Jesus either never referred to or mentioned only in the most incidental fashion. They seem more concerned with doctrines than with the life out of which doctrines spring. They seem more concerned in seeing to it that devils are cast out by their particular methods than that the real devils of modern life shall be cast out. They make Christianity a series of metaphysical propositions to be intellectually accepted rather than a series of personal and social policies to be carried out. The lay ranks of the fundamentalist movement are noticeably filled with the sort of men who consciously or unconsciously have seemed to think that orthodoxy in theology is an adequate substitute for Christianity in politics and in industry. The layman who likes to keep the world of devotion and the world of dividends in separate and hermetically sealed compartments is likely to be found supporting the fundamentalist movement and complaining bitterly against the clergyman who is not preaching the "old gospel," but indulging in impertinent reflections on Christianizing the social order. Were Jesus to return to earth, I should have fear for His safety were He to fall into the hands of the fundamentalists. Were He to enter their councils incognito, I am sure that His primary emphasis upon justice and mercy and brotherhood and His sublime indifference to the metaphysical doctrines which they regard as fundamental would bring down upon His head their wrathful excommunication. But fundamentalism is not exclusively confined to the churches. There is an emerging fundamentalist movement in education. On all hands it is being said that there are too many students going to college to-day; that an undue amount of teaching energy is wasted in dragging badly born and badly prepared children through courses from which they gain little or no good; that we are engaged in a gigantic and wasteful attempt to make statesmen out of boys who can never be more than stevedores; that we are trying to teach too many things; that when we departed from the simple and coherent curriculum of an earlier day, we set sail on an uncharted sea of knowledge, and that since that day every new body of knowledge that has been thrown up has been brought into the schools as just another "course," with little or no attention paid to its relation to the coherence and unity of the educational result. As the starting-point for an analysis of the educational situation this is, in large measure, sound. The danger lies in an excessive simplification of the issue. Already men of conventional learning and academic prestige are beginning to suggest very simple solutions. "If our schools are congested and masses of students are taking courses to which they are not adapted, the next step is plain," say certain educators. "Restrict registration in our colleges and turn the badly born and badly prepared students out of the schoolroom earlier, and work out a simpler curriculum that will stick to the fundamental things that will fit the great majority of students for the simple duties of mediocrity, developing a more comprehensive education in a few educational monasteries for the élite." Now, again, there is the germ of truth in all this. You cannot transform a congenital stevedore into a statesman by any mere educational legerdemain. It is the height of folly to throw half-wits and geniuses promiscuously into freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes, insisting that they proceed at a uniform pace and that all be graduated on the same day. The curriculum is to-day a hodgepodge of unrelated specialisms. We are the victims of educational drift; we should be the beneficiaries of educational design. But we shall inevitably run the nation on the rocks if we attempt to solve the problem of overcrowded schools by the formulation of a new fatalism that arbitrarily sentences millions of students to lifelong mediocrity and summarily denies to them the advantages of education beyond a simple training in "readin' and ritin' and 'rithmetic." And unless I am far afield in judgment, the road to unity and coherence in the curriculum does not lie backward toward the older "fundamentals" of the older curriculum, but forward toward a finer synthesis of the new knowledge, forward toward a more intelligent orientation of the student to the intellectual and social forces that are making this time what it is. It will pay us to be on our guard against the emerging fundamentalist movement in education. Let me now suggest the possibility of a fundamentalist movement in science. I am afraid that during the next twenty-five years we are likely to witness a neck-and-neck race between two bigotries-the old bigotry of theology and the new bigotry of science or, rather, of pseudo-science. There are two kinds of bigotry that are equally dangerous, although they are fathered by two distinct types of mind-the bigotry that arises from a doctrine that is too old and the bigotry that arises from a doctrine that is too young. The first is the besetting sin of theology, the second is the greatest temptation of science. The first carries the poison of decay, the second the poison of greenness. The really constructive contributions that modern biology and modern psychology, to name only two sciences, have made are being endangered by the way in which they are being manhandled by pseudo-scientists who are using them as the point of departure for a new bigotry of science which is just as dangerous as the old bigotry of theology. I have repeatedly said in these columns that I think the next great spiritual renaissance of the Western world will spring from the social application of the new ideas, the new idealisms, and the new spiritual values that have been thrown up by the sciences, philosophies, and adventures of the modern mind. The great difficulty is that before creative scientists and constructive statesmen verify and socially adapt these contributions of science, a crowd of ill equipped camp-followers of science erect upon the scientist's tentative generalizations new dogmatisms which are taken up by selfish and sinister interests and used as smoke-screens to cover all sorts of anti-social propagandas and pursuits. Let me illustrate. Modern biology Modern biology clarifies the laws of heredity. In so doing modern biology puts in the hands of parents, educators, and statesmen new truths that are absolutely essential to sound policies for the future of the family, the school, and the state. But long before the new biology has evolved a sound social technic, certain quack doctors of the intellect find in Darwinism a mandate for political and economic imperialism. This is the baldest perversion of Darwinism which is far more the ally of coöperation than of ruthlessness, but the damage is done before modern biology even begins its social ministry. Science does a great deal of important investigation of the inequality of the human races. But long before science can adapt its sound conclusions in this field to the great adventure of organizing a world of colorful variety and varied abilities, certain shysters of science, men who have never spent an hour in a laboratory, twist the scientific conclusions regarding the inequality of the races into a new Prussianism that is used to mask all sorts of sinister class and racial egotisms and to give a seemingly unassailable biological justification for all sorts of reactionary and intolerant movements. I have said enough, perhaps, to hint at what I have in mind when I refer to the threat of a new bigotry of science. I hope I have spoken so clearly that no one can even suspect that I am joining the current cry against modern biology's conclusions regarding heredity or psychology's socially important, if tentative, suggestions regarding the mental measurement and assessment of mankind. When the smoke of the current controversy has cleared, we shall see that the technic of mental measurement, for instance, is one of the most important social instruments to be used in the guidance of the future. The only purpose of this discussion is to urge, as I have urged before, the importance of a sound evangelism of scholarship, a rigidly honest effort to interpret to the public the social contributions of modern science as fast as they come from the laboratory, an effort that shall avoid both the hasty dogmatism of the camp-follower of science and the undue caution of the conventional scholar. THE RUMFORD PRESS CONCORD |