The Motives of Men

PART I. Disillusionment With Respect to

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO HIMSELF CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

II Our Belief in Man Yesterday and Today 7 III What the War Did to Our Belief in Man 12 IV Has the Theory of Evolution Degraded Us in Our Own Eyes? 21 V The Irrationality of Man as a Literary Motif 27 VI Has Psychology Undermined Our Self-Respect? 36 VII According to Industrialism, “What Is Man?” 47 VIII The Dilemma of Christianity 56

PART II. This Disillusionment Is Itself Illusory

THIS DISILLUSIONMENT IS ITSELF ILLUSORY

IX The Precise Nature of the Issue 69 X “Human Nature Being What It Is” 73 XI Some Notes on the Psychology of Motivation 80 XII Childhood as a Revealer of Human Capacities 95 XIII Capacities Revealed by New Types of Education 104 XIV Smallness in Great Men and Greatness in Small Men 112 XV The Mixed Motives of Business 120 XVI Motives of the Workingman 129 XVII Economic Production as a Mode of Self-Realization 135 XVIII The Motive That Is in All and Through All 143

PART III. Yet Our Capacities Are in Bondage

YET OUR CAPACITIES ARE IN BONDAGE

XIX The Cynic Interjects a Question 151 XX Our “Lower” Nature Does Not Explain Our Bondage 156 XXI How Reason Itself Binds Us to the Irrational 164 XXII The Deep Depravity of Our Respectable Faults 170 XXIII Even Our Passions Are Precedent-Ridden 178 XXIV Free Men Fear Their Freedom. Why? 185 XXV The Motives of Youth Compared with Those of Age 196

PART IV. How Can They Be Released?

HOW CAN THEY BE RELEASED?

XXVI The Inescapable Task 209 XXVII The Function of Minorities 216 XXVIII Release Through Cooperative Thinking 230 XXIX My Intractable Self 242 XXX The Realm of Free Spirits 252

Index 261

INTRODUCTION

ON HAVING A GOOD SUPPLY OF WANTS

Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long.

So runs an old hymn. If it were true, we should be in a bad fix.

A savage, indeed, wants little; this is what makes him a savage. You cannot pry him loose from his savagery except by the lever of increased desires, whether for a rifle, or for a piece of calico, or for a house with windows.

Whatever keeps us going in any direction, together with whatever makes us select a new direction from time to time--in other words, our motivation--is what we are. Meagre wants, meagre manhood; enlarging wants, enlarging manhood. The man of heroic mold makes outreaching demands upon life, unabashed by the difficulty of supplying them.

Even the Stoics who, superficially considered, practised renunciation of wants, in reality withdrew from smaller wants into larger ones. They did not forego but cultivated the cravings of intellect; in human relations magnanimity was their standard, with dignified friendship as an experience fit for a philosopher. It was this expansiveness of their motives that made possible their serenity of spirit.

A generation that has a large supply of narrow-range wants, together with plenty of corresponding narrow-range goods, easily becomes self-deceived. Because it gets what it wants, it believes that it is efficient. It fancies that if one only enlarges one’s barns and fills them full one will live more largely, whereas, to live in the human way is to manipulate our wants, and to live largely is to expand, diversify, and re-create them.

The excuse for saying so obvious a thing is that, in spite of its obviousness, people do not believe it. If they did, the state of education and of religion, both of which have specifically to do with the ends of living, would be different from what it is. Churches and schools are peddling the wares that they already possess instead of stimulating a demand for better goods than we have in stock.

Dr. Faustus, in his meditative search for the foundation of existence, rejects the Johannine dictum, “In the beginning was the Word” (or universal Reason), substituting for it, “In the beginning was the Act.” He might well have said, “In the beginning was the Want.”

What then, are the motives of men? In particular, what are we capable of wanting, and what are we capable of doing with our wants? After moving some little distance from the wants of savages, must we pause and merely repeat our wantings henceforth? Or, indeed, are our desires in any significant way different from those of our savage ancestors? If we are able to manage our desires to any degree, what is the main problem of management, and how is it to be solved?

PART I. Disillusionment With Respect to Himself

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO HIMSELF CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

OUR BELIEF IN MAN YESTERDAY AND TODAY

A lumber-jack resolved that he would build himself a home, and settle down. Selecting a piece of timberland, he proceeded to clear it. Day after day, week after week, his great muscles worked with axe and saw, and with chain and reins until the trees were felled and burned, and the time for grubbing and planting had come. Then he looked at his cleared land, and behold, the ground was so rocky that it was not worth cultivating. For he was a specialist in subduing mighty forests, not in nurturing food-plants.

The western world, having found a key to the knowledge that is power--the key of scientific method--has been engaged for a few generations in unprecedented exploits in the mastery of nature. Her resources have been discovered and seized; processes of control have been devised; tools have been invented; hitherto intractable areas of the universe have been subdued; and power and possessions beyond all the dreams of our fathers are in our hands.

The result is, of course, a changed position of man in the physical universe; but it is not merely this. Man’s position in relation to man has changed likewise. For we have been at work upon mankind as well as upon wood and iron. The occupations of men, and their possessions also, have silently wrought within the mind, the servant fashioning his master as well as the master the servant. Our inlooks as well as our outlooks have undergone a metamorphosis. Here, in men’s attitudes toward one another, and in what they think of themselves, we come upon the most significant product of modern science, invention, and industry.

The chief output of mines is miners and mine operators; the chief product of factories is operatives, managers, and absentee shareholders; the goods mainly dealt in by department stores are salespeople and customers; the outstanding contribution of finance in the modern world does not appear in the profit-and-loss account of any bank, for it is the banker himself and his clients. If we would estimate the efficiencies of the industrial age, we must study the men, women and children all about us, and among other things we must take account of what they think of one another.

Some of the things that are happening to us can readily be discerned. This high-strung humanity of ours is awake on some sides of its mind if not on others; it is highly organized, industrially focalized, scientifically managed, psychologically analyzed; it is rich in things, but it is distracted and ethically upset. At the moment when enormous power to work our will is added to us, we become partly unsure as to what we want, but mostly a sense of disillusionment pervades our powers. Disillusionment, that is, with respect to the genuine worth of all our motives and all our straining and striving and organizing.

The signs of this depression are unmistakable. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century our youth were nurtured upon Tennyson’s smooth confidence that “Nothing walks with aimless feet”; upon Browning’s morning song, “All’s well with the world”; upon Emerson’s apothegm that when two neighbors converse across a fence, “Jove nods to Jove over the head of each.” A divinity within man seemed to be attested by his conquest of nature, by his place in the system of evolution, by the progress of knowledge, by the developmental character of religions, and by the growth of philanthropy. Under the widely-heralded doctrine of divine immanence all creation was meaningful, and the human mind, in particular, was taken to be the point at which the otherwise hidden meanings of the universe blossomed forth. Even in the strain of economic life there was a certain lushness of belief in human capacity. Corresponding to the feeling that our natural resources were exhaustless, there was a prevalent assumption that success was within the reach of anyone who chose to be industrious and enterprising. An enormous increase of immigration was welcomed. Having purged ourselves of slavery, we believed that the United States had reached its political maturity, and that it was destined to be the political light of the whole world. The capacity of men to govern themselves was taken for granted. Thus, in America, at least, human kind felt itself to be young, growing, destined to high achievement; and these were taken to be simply human qualities that manifest themselves wherever environmental conditions are favorable.

At none of these points does the old confidence in man remain unimpaired. We are not so sure that progress is inherently provided for in the nature of man; we are far more sure of something old, crude, and of pine-stump quality in our make-up. Tacitly, if not overtly, men assume that irrational desires are the dominant forces within us, and that conflict has precedence in human motives. There is a growing skepticism of the worth of the common man. It is becoming almost popular to sneer at democracy. We rely--increasingly, it appears--upon force and cunning, or upon the automatic working of social mechanisms, instead of trusting to open eyes and to reason. We are afraid to use our freedom, or to let others enjoy the liberties that we have guaranteed in our laws and constitutions. We are putting up walls of many kinds to protect ourselves from our fellows. A partly blatant, partly furtive nationalism has displaced the bland and expansive political consciousness of the last generation, and both at home and abroad our policies are governed by an ungenerous caution. In all our history were we ever moved by fears as much as now? Were forward-looking proposals ever so regularly confronted with “Human nature being what it is, you cannot do it”?

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