Truth, an essay in moral reconstruction

Front matter

BY

SIR CHARLES WALSTON

Glass .B.j J I 'If

Preface

This Essay (which is a supplement to my earlier book Aristodemocracy) was written during the autumn and winter of 1917-18. For various reasons, its publication has been delayed. Though the actual war has ended, this momentous change has not affected the purpose and the arguments of the book. In spite of the influence and supreme importance of economic causes which prepared for the inception and continuance of the war, as they affect the terms of peace and will dominate the civilised world for some time to come, I maintain now, as I expressed my opinions from the beginning, that the efficient cause of the war is to be found in the defective moral standards and moral education of the civilised world, and that Moral Reconstruction is at least as urgently needed as is industrial and financial re-adjustment.

The immediate influence of the war — in spite of all the heroism and self-sacrifice which it has evoked in millions of patriotic citizens — has been to lower the moral standards of the world, already defective and anachronistic before the war. To the previous inadequacies and defects of our ethical systems and education in pre-war times must now be added, among minor symptoms of degeneration, the lowering and coarsening of our sense of the value of human life, a necessary, almost logical sequence to all wars; the growth of thriftlessness and profligacy owing to the unsettling of economic and financial standards and the suspension of the laws and regulations governing contracts vi Preface

and, in many cases, the acquisition of surplus income to those not accustomed to such affluence ; and, above all, the lowering of the standards of Truth. This increase of untruthfulness is not only caused by the general derangement of social life and the unbalancing of nerves among the majority of the population, as well as by the growth of more or less justified suspiciousness against one's neighbours, when spying and illicit dealing with the enemy exist and must be forcibly counteracted; but it is, above all, encouraged, if not produced, by the recognised use of deception and trickery of all kinds as a legitimate method of warfare. The last and most distasteful outcome is the introduction into our vernacular of that hateful word " camoufla.ge/' used with nauseating frequency and gratification by even the most illiterate. Camouflage is the attempt at deception — lying — not by words, but by means of objects. It is an extension of untruthfulness which is a recognised and legitimate form of warfare.

Thus the delay in the publication of this book has served to present us with fresh conditions which demand even more urgently than before the need for reconstruction of our morals as regards truthfulness.

What concerns the life of the individual citizen applies equally, if not more so, to public morality. The numerous infringements of personal liberty and of higher spiritual morality, made necessary by the pressing expediency of war, have in innumerable cases, set expediency above morality. The enactment by what has popularly been summarised under the name of an interfering and not too scrupulous '^person" called "Dora," however justified by the exceptional necessities of war, has not infrequently led

Preface vii

to the suppression of truth and even to the direct encouragement of deception. The activity of the Censorship, private and pubHc, has tended in the same direction. Some time must elapse, even after the suspension of the censorship, for the tradition of scrupulous recognition of the sanctity of private information by word and in letters to be re-established among us, as well as the straightforward adherence to truth and nothing but the truth. The same applies emphatically to the great organ of publicity, the Press. Its power of suppressing facts and, positively, of producing ''stunts," which, to say the least, present facts or whole groups of facts out of all proportion, has grown inordinately and asserted itself as a fixed tradition during this time of war. The crying need for action to regulate this most powerful and most dangerous institution in modern life, to which I have devoted much of the space in this book, can hardly be overstated.

In view of the fact that (page ^j 1 single out one of the leading journalists of the world to illustrate one of the most glaring defects in our system of publicity and the absurdity of established traditions as regards the personal and, at the same time, irresponsible power of such journalists, I desire here to bear testimony to the patriotic intentions of Lord NorthcHffe and to the important work in many directions achieved by him during the war. It is possible that, in the future, history may confirm the claim which he may have estabhshed to the gratitude of the country. But the system itself remains wrong and a growing evil.

In the Appendix I have reprinted extracts from previous books and articles by me dealing with some of the subjects viii Preface

treated in the book itself. I have done this because I beheve that it strengthens the argument to show that the same conclusions were arrived at in earlier years under essentially different conditions and from an independent point of view. But I should hke to draw especial attention to the fact that the praise which was in earlier years bestowed upon the scientific spirit prevailing in German universities and in their whole educational system, applied to the Germany of old and not to the Germany of modern Streberthum. The advent of the latter regime I endeavoured to indicate in my book Aristodemocracy. The older spirit of scientific thoroughness, we hope, is not wholly dead even now. Its dechne in more recent years has been pointed out on various occasions and quite recently by leading Germans of the "old school." This moral and intellectual degeneration began with Bismarck. I may claim to have recognised this process of degeneration in what I wrote about thirty years ago ; but most clearly in my little book. The Expansion of Western Ideals and the World's Peace, published in 1899, from which I may be allowed to quote the following passages (pp. 139 seq.) :

. . .But again there turned up a great man of action who, knowing his countrymen and the trend of the times, utilized all these currents to weld together the separate blocks, — smoothly poUshed and florid marbles of prince-ridden principalities and clumsy unhewn stones and rubble stones of independent cities or towns, — the huge edifice of the German Empire. The scientific spirit which was pervading the civiUzed world of Western Europe was recognised by Bismarck as a useful force which could be turned into practical advantage for the great purpose he had in view. He called upon the German professor — even the ethnologist, philologist and historian — and

Preface ix

they obeyed his commands with readiness and alacrity. The theoretical and scientific lever with which these huge building blocks were to be raised in order to construct the German Empire was to be the scientific establishment of the unity of the German people based upon the unity of Germanic races. An historical basis for German unity was not enough; an ethnological, racial unity had to be established. The historical and philological literature of German University professors belonging to the time of Bismarck's ascendancy, can almost be recognised and classified by their relation to the problem of establishing, fixing, and distinguishing from those of other races, the laws and customs, literature, languages and religions, the life and thought, the productions and aspirations of the Germanic race. ...The distinctive feature in this modem version of the old story of national lust of power is that it now assumed a more serious and stately garb of historical justice in the pedantic pretensions of its inaccurate ethnological theories. The absurdity of any application of such ethnological theories to the practical politics of modem nations at once becomes manifest when an attempt is made to classify inhabitants of any one of these western nations by means of such racial distinctions. What becomes of the racial unity of the present German Empire if we consider the Slavs of Prussia, the Wends in the North and the tangle of different racial occupations and interminglings during the last thousand years within every portion of the German country?. . .But the German professor with his political brief wrapped round the lecture notes within the oilcloth portfolio, pressed between his broadcloth sleeve and ribs, as he walks to his lecture-room, was forced further afield and deeper down in his "scientific" distinctions. The divisions he established for the purposes of national policy were but minor sub-divisions of broader ethnological distinctions. Here the philologist took the lead and established "beyond all doubt" the difference, nay, the antagonism, between the Arian and Semitic, which makes the Hindoo more closely related to the German and Saxon than these are to Spinoza, Mendelssohn and Heine, Carl Marx and Disraeli. . . .

w. T. b

X Preface

Since Bismarck's time the falsification of humanistic studies, especially History and the "Science of Politik" to uphold the German theory of the State, of Autocracy, Bureaucracy, Militarism, as well as the "Ethics of Might," has been amply demonstrated in recent publications.

But, with the growth of Real Politik since Bismarck, the predominance of the one aim, — to increase material prosperity, industrial and commercial, — has led to the lowering of the purely scientific spirit of natural and physical science which formerly ruled their Universities and, through them, their whole educational system down to the elementary Schools. The University has been affected by the Polytechnic and Technical High School. Modern German Streberthum has effectually lowered the standards of their scientific and educational system, and this has of late years been admitted by the best representatives of German thought, who have had the courage to oppose the current of political and mihtary domination responsible for this war. It is the older valuation of Theoretical Truth which formerly flourished in Germany from which we can learn. In the domain of Practical Truth, in political and social life, as developed by our political and social traditions and favoured by the spirit of fair-play in our national spOrts and pastimes, the Germans and all nations on the Continent of Europe can learn from us and from the people of the United States — in fact from all Enghsh-speaking nations.

I have gratefully to acknowledge the help given me in advice and criticism by various friends. My colleagues. Professor J. B. Bury and Mr N. Wedd, Fellows of King's College, Cambridge, as well as Mr Sydney Brooks (especi-

Preface xi

ally as regards the part dealing with JournaHsm and Publicity) have made most valuable suggestions. The same applies to my wife and to my friend, Mr George Leveson Gower, who have again helped me in seeing the book through the press; while my step-daughter, Dorothy Seligman, has given efficient secretarial help. I must also thank the Editor of the Nineteenth Century and After for the kind permission to reprint the article "The Kaiser and the ' Will to ... ' The need for universal Moral Reconstruction" which appeared in the January number of that review.

C. W.

Newton Hall, Newton, Cambridge.

February, 191 9.

VIU.

Trustworthiness ....

Part II. Public Veracity

I. General Importance of Public Veracity

II. Truth in International Relationships

III. Truth in Domestic Politics .

IV. The Politician

V. The Millionaire

VI. The Professional Journalist

79 83 87 97 105 xiv Contents

CHAP. PAGE

VII. The Ideal Journalist 117

VIII. Critical Examination of this Ideal of

Journalism 122

IX. "Reconstruction" of Journalism by the

State 132

X. "Reconstruction" of Journalism from Within 151

Part III

appendix

I. The Ideal of a University . . . .167

II. Science and Empiricism, Theory and Practice 182

III. Educational Reform 194

IV. Modesty 199

V. The Kaiser and " the Will to. . ." . . 213

Introduction

The longer, and I may perhaps hope, the more enduring part of my book Aristodemocracy'^ is occupied with the attempted reconstruction of our ethical system. The essential and differentiating feature of this ethical system consists in the supreme demand which it puts forward for each period in the history of humanity — whether counted by decades or by centuries — to formulate anew and clearly, without bias and without being determined by existing religious dogmas and current social conventions, not only its own ethical codes, but also the summary ideal of man, the Ideal of the Gentleman. This is to ensure progress for humanity, i.e. normal moral, social and political evolution. But this evolution is not to be "fatalistic " i.e. entirely dependent upon forces of nature acting through the organism or the environment and leading to the survival of the fittest; but it is to be Conscious Evolution, i.e. guided by man's reason, his sense of truth and justice, his charity, even his sense of beauty — all these forces of the human mind permeating imagination, which is the motive, creative and progressive power in the human soul. This conscious ethical evolution is to be applied, not only to individual man, but also to social groups and to political organisations.

^ Avistodemocvacy, From the Great War back to Moses, Christ and Plato, London, 1916, New York, 1917.

z Introduction

^ If a definite name is to be given to this system

Pvactical

Idealism and of pliilosopliy it had best be termed Prachcal

Conscious Idealism, euided by Conscious Evolution and Involution. .

subordinated to the Philosophy of Harmonism.

Its essence and importance, as a guide to human conduct,

consist above all in the correct formulation and application

of the right ultimate ideals. We are convinced that if these

ultimate ideals (the final goal and beacon-light in man's

wandering through life) are wrong, the whole journey loses

its correct bearing and direction. Our ultimate ideals are

thus of supreme practical importance even in individual and

immediate action. But the recognition of this importance

does not in any way lead us at once and prematurely to

insist upon, or to expect, the realization of what is ultimate.

Having determined the true nature and clear recognisability

of his ideals, and fixed them as guiding stars for the distant

future, man must concentrate his attention and his effort on

the proximate ideals.

I might be allowed here to quote a passage from a previous

work^ where this same question is dealt with.

If it be thought, by some who pride themselves upon possessing a sober and practical mind, that these Expansionist ideals a,re rather vague and remote as forces which directly move the interested action of a nation, and have no power to check its aggressive action when passionate interest strongly urges it on in the wrong direction; if they doubt whether these ideals are sufficiently proximate and tangible to enter into the conscious life of the individual and to affect his actions, I will sin against the dictates of good taste and will make a personal confession, confident as I am that there are thousands who feel as I do.

So far from being remote and ineffectual, I solemnly declare

^ The Expansion of Western Ideals and the World's Peace, London and New York, 1899, pp. 10 1 seq.

that these ideals with regard to the aims of Western civilisation form the foundation of my conscious existence even in the most practical aspects of my life. That, if I were not aware of their existence at the base of my consciousness, I could not pursue the vocation of life to which I have hitherto devoted myself, and by means of which I gain my subsistence. If I did not beUeve that ultimately all individual efforts culminate in the increase and strengthening, as well as in the diffusion, of Western civilisation and its highest and most subtle attainments, the best that man's intelligent effort has yet devised, — I should wish to spend my life in lotus-eating, if not to seek peace in Nirvana.

As I have arrived at this lofty sphere of aspiration, I will draw one last conclusion in the direction of ideals from the policy of Expansion as it ought to be followed by the United States; and I do this at the risk of being considered a "mere dreamer," But there are different kinds of dreamers; there are rational and irrational dreamers. Those who have succeeded in attaining the highest achievements in the w^orld's history might all be called, and generally were called, dreamers. No man — and for that matter no nation — can do great things unless his imagination can produce, and hold up both before the intense discriminating power of his intellect, and before the untiring and unflinching energy of his will, some great ultimate goal to lofty endeavour. In so far all great men are idealists. But the difference between these idealists and the mere dreamers is that the latter spend their lives in the contemplation of their ideals, whereas to the former the ideals illuminate their lives. The dreamer gazes upon the brilliant sun until his vision is dimmed, and his whole brain lapses into an hypnotic state. The world outside the immediate radius of this brilliant sun is one great darkness, and he expends the weakened energy which is left to his somnolent nature in railing at this darkness and despising it. He is even unable to detect the lighter shades and half-tones, the infinite gradations which lie between the brilliancy of his distant sun and the darkness before and behind his feet. The idealist, on the other hand, having raised high aloft on the pinnacles of existence his brilliant beacon-light.

does not spend his time in gazing immediately at it; but allows it to shed a lustre of illumination upon the whole roadway of life over which it shines; and instead of casting what is immediately at his feet into greater darkness, this distant light searches out every nook and cranny of existence, and enables him to pursue his path unfalteringly, to recognise the size and dimensions of each object in his path, its power of faciUtating or impeding progress, of yielding or resisting; and, finally, it gives him a clear notion of distance itself. And thus he is patient, and not petulant, as regards what lies immediately before him, knowing that he has beyond a clear, lofty goal which lights and warms.

We must therefore insist upon the real and practical importance of estabhshing these correct ultimate ideals. Were we to attempt to express this in the old familiar terms in which humanity has embodied its highest general concepts we should say that Duty, including Justice, is the fundamental guide for human conduct in man's relation to himself, to humanity and to nature. It must be tempered by love or Caritas in his relation to his fellow-man, as well as for the good of his own soul, in order to give emotional initiative and direction leading to passion and enthusiasm. Above these, reigns Truth, which is the foundation of thought and action, in his social relationships as well as in his dealings with the world of things and nature; while Beauty gives him the sense of proportion, tempers and modifies all his thoughts and activities into a harmonious whole and leads his imagination on to a world of ideal perfection.

What we felt in insisting upon the need of the codification of modern morals has been put in the following terms^ :

^ AHstodemocyacy , From the Great War hack to Moses, Christ and Plato, London and New York, 1916 and 1917, PP- 200 seq.

What modern man and modem society require above all things is a clear and distinct codification of the moral consciousness of civilised man, not merely in a theoretical disquisition or in vague and general terms, which evade immediate application to the more complex or subtle needs of our daily life; but one which, arising out of the clear and unbiassed study of the actual problems of life, is fitted to meet every definite difficulty and to direct all moral effort towards one great and universally accepted end. It is the absence of such an ethical code, truly expressive of the best in us and accepted by all, and the means of bringing such a code to the knowledge of men, penetrating our educative system in its most elementary form as it applies even to the youngest children and is continuously impressed upon all people in every age of their life — it is the absence of such an effective system of moral education which lies at the root of all that is bad and irrational, not only in individual life, but in national life, and that has made this great war — at once barbarous, pedantically cruel, and unspeakably stupid — possible in modern times.

The reason why such an adequate expression of moral consciousness has not existed among us, in spite of the eminently practical and urgent need, is that the constitution and the teaching of ethics have been relegated to the sphere of theoretical study of principles, historical or speculative, and have not directly been concerned with establishing a practical guide to conduct. No real attempt has been made to draw up a code of ethics to meet the actual problems of daily life. Or, when thus considered in its immediate and practical bearings, this task has been relegated to the churches and the priests.

I there endeavoured to show, while insisting upon the necessity of religion, that though reHgion and ethics should never be divorced from each other, they envisage quite different spheres and can never replace each other.

I maintained that ethics with its immediately practical aims requires for its codification to be directly in touch with the needs of actual daily life, and has to be expressed with the greatest clearness, tested by correct observation, accurate as well as comprehensive, and by strict logic. I then endeavoured to present an outlined scheme for such a codification, summarising the several aspects under which ethical questions are to be treated under the following heads ^r

1. Duty to the family;

2. Duty to the immediate community in which we live, and Social Duties;

3. Duty to the State;

4. Duty to Humanity;

5. Duty to self;

6. Duty to things and actions; and

7. Duty to God.

Broad and schematic as this outlined plan necessarily has been, it nevertheless aimed at covering the whole sphere of human duties.

But in revising the constructively ethical part of Aristodemocracy it has been strongly impressed upon me that two separate groups of duties, of the utmost importance in the regulation of human conduct, have not been dealt with adequately, or, at least, have not in the general proportion of the scheme received the prominence which is due to them. The first concerns the duty to Truth; the other, what might be called. Sex Morality. Though in several passages (notably on p. 222), the insufficiency of previous ethical systems dealing with Truth has been pointed out, and its importance implied, the crying need for a precise adaptation of the most general commandments against untruth to the modern requirements of a modern code of ethics, and the far greater

1 Aristodemocracy, From the Great War back to Moses, Christ and Plato, London and New York, 19 16 and 19 17, P- 259.

refinement of the sense of Truth, which our modern civilisation calls for, have not received adequate treatment, and have not had assigned to them the place which, in the proportion of a general scheme of duties, they ought to command. It is the object of this essay to remedy this defect.

As regards Sex Morahty, although I have already written the essay on that subject, I have, for cogent reasons, decided to defer publication. I may however be allowed to summarise its leading character and purpose in a few words.

Most of the duties which come under the head of Sex Morality can be, and ought to be, regulated by the several duties as enumerated on p. 259 of Aristodemocracy and as developed in the "Outline of the Principles of Contemporary Ethics," Part IV, of that book. The regulation of Sex Morality would specially refer to man's social duties and, still more specially, to the duties of man to woman and woman to man, as well as to man's duty to self. Their consideration would also bear upon his duty to the State and to Humanity.

Furthermore I am strongly convinced that, whatever innovations in the existing ethical laws, as regards sex — both in the married and the unmarried state — may have to be introduced (and these may be numerous and far-reaching), the family, including the home as well as the institution of marriage, will have to be preserved and even strengthened in its hold on society. For I maintain that the family and the home are social units of essential importance to the maintenance of civilised and progressive society. Marriage, the Family and the Home are the irreducible units of organised society. However much in the future the evolution and progression of the social and political organisation of social units may remove the conventional barriers of the past and widen out and intensify the relationships of man independently of consanguinity, the family will still remain of the utmost importance and value, and the home can never be dispensed with, in spite of the trend of modern life to overcome all limitations imposed by geographical, local and physical conditions.

To the same degree, I am convinced, must and will the institution of marriage remain in its essential features, though modified, as it will also be strengthened by these modifications. Voltaire's words, ''that if God did not exist .we should have to invent Him, " most fully apply to the institution of marriage. The destructive wave of criticism, which, from the middle of the nineteenth century to our own days, has battered against this stronghold of organised society, has not been able to weaken its foundations or to destroy the essential benefit which it confers upon civiHsation. It has shaken, and may carry away, some of the more antiquated conventional outbuildings which have obscured the artistic beauty of the main edifice as well as its capacity for affording security and comfort to men and women; but it has left the central building all the stronger and more beautiful.

. No doubt still greater and more radical innovations in our ethical system will have to be introduced for the regulation of Sex Morality of men and women in the unmarried state. Here the problems are as numerous and as complicated as they are pressing in their demands for solution.

Many who in the past have dealt with marriage and the sex relation among the unmarried and many who are dealing with these vital problems now are men and women of undoubted moral and intellectual sincerity, while some of them are to no small degree representative of higher philosophic thought. But, in most, if not in all, these "revolutionary" writers, I find two blots upon the escutcheon of veracity, or at least two methods of attack which rob their warfare of lasting victory and effectiveness. The first is a danger, to which unconsciously so many of these writers succumb, springing from the ever pervasive personal equation to which even the most thoughtful and self-detached are prone. The peculiar form it takes is that of finding justification or condonation for the satisfaction of their own personal desires in the form of philosophic generalisation, which claims to be — and on the face of it appears to be — emphatically impersonal. Even a Tolstoy regarded these fundamental factors of life very differently in the days of his ebullient and passionate youth when he wrote Anna Karenina, Katia and other masterpieces, and in the days when vitahty was diminished by age and when he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and his religiously moral essays.

A further disqualification which, rightly or wrongly, I can trace in most of these "revolutionary" writers, even — and perhaps especially — in the pure philosophers, is the patent absence of any claim to the widest and most searching experience of life itself in all stratifications of human society and groupings of individuals. I mean the kind of experience such as, for instance, a practising physician, who at the same time is an acute philosopher and a versatile and sympathetic man of the world, might possess — one who has not only received the most complete and intimate confidence from his young and unmarried patients, besides being fully familiar with the social irregularities and misfortunes of the lower strata of society and its outcasts, but who has also had opportunities, within all the unfavourable outcrops of married life, to famiharise himself with all that marriage really means in the normal life of the home or in the ministrations by the sick-bed and the awful solemnity of the horn* of death. Were most of the writers, who would lightty sweep aside all the traditions that have grouped round the Sex Morality of the past, possessed of such experience, I venture to doubt whether they would cast out upon the world the crude theories with which their writings abound.

Chapter I

" Dites done, maman! En Angleterre c'est bien chic de dire la verite." {" I say, mother ! In England it is quite the thing [or 'very good form' or 'smart'] to tell the truth.") This remark was made by the young scion of a distinguished French house upon returning to his home after his first term at one of the great pubHc schools of England. There can be no doubt that this testimony to England's moral tone, spontaneously made by a boy, is highly flattering to the Enghsh nation and is highly significant in the hght it throws both on practical ethics and national psychology. It may, on the one hand, indirectly imply, and bear some testimony to, our national deficiency in manners, our proneness to positive rudeness, and our disregard of other people's feeUngs, even among those who by tradition and circumstance are the leaders of fashion and strike the keynote of tone in the social life of a country. On the other hand, however, it undoubtedly is a testimony to the prevalence of a sense and a practice of truth throughout all layers of society. A nation, which as a nation, has recognised truth, not only as a moral duty, but has made its practice highly fashionable^, has