The great social movement of yesterday and to-day and to-morrow has hit us of the younger generation hard. Many of us were early converted to a belief in the possibilities of a regenerated social order, and to a passionate desire to do something in aid of that regeneration. The appeal is not only to our sympathy for the weak and exploited, but also to our delight in a healthy, free, social life, to an artistic longing for a society where the treasures of civilization may be open to all, and to our desire for an environment where we ourselves will be able to exercise our capacities, and exert the untrammeled influences which we believe might be ours and our fellows’. All these good things the social movement seems to demand and seems to offer, and its appeal is irresistible. Before the age of machinery was developed, or before the structure of our social system and the relations between classes and individuals was revealed, the appeal might have been merely sentimental. But it is no longer so. The aims of the social movement to-day seem to have all the tremendous power of a practicable ideal. To the satisfactions which its separate ideals give to all the finer instincts of men is added the overwhelming conviction that those satisfactions are most of them realizable here and now by concerted methods which are already partly in operation and partially successful. It is this union of the idealistic and the efficient that gives the movement its hold on the disinterested and serious youth of to-day.
With that conversion has necessarily come the transvaluation of many of our social values. No longer can we pay the conventional respect to success or join in the common opinions of men and causes. The mighty have been pulled down from their seats, and those of low degree exalted. We feel only contempt for college presidents, editors, and statesmen who stultify their talents and pervert their logical and historical knowledge in defending outworn political philosophies and economic codes. We can no longer wholly believe in the usefulness or significance of those teachers and writers who show themselves serenely oblivious to the social problems. We become keen analysts of the society around us; we put uncomfortable questions to our sleek and successful elders. We criticize the activities in which they engage, the hitherto sacred professions and businesses, and learn to distinguish carefully between actually productive work for society, work which makes for the material and spiritual well-being of the people for whom it is done, and parasitic or wasteful work, which simply extends the friction of competition, or lives on the labor or profits of others. We distinguish, too, between the instruction and writing that consists in handing down unexamined and uncriticized moral and political ideas, and ideas that let in the fresh air and sunlight to the thick prejudices of men. We come to test the papers we read, the teachers we learn from, the professional men we come into contact with, by these new standards. Various and surprising are the new interweavings we discover, and the contrasts and ironies of the modern intellectual life. The childlike innocence in which so many seem still to slumber is almost incredible to those whose vision is so clear. The mechanical way in which educated men tend to absorb and repeat whole systems of formulas is a constant surprise to those whose ideas hum and clash and react against each other. But the minds of so many of these men of position seem to run in automatic channels, such that, given one set of opinions, one could predict with accuracy their whole philosophy of life. Our distrust of their whole spiritual fabric thus becomes fundamental. We can no longer take most of them seriously. It is true that they are doing the serious work of the world, while we do nothing as yet except criticize, and perhaps are doomed to fail altogether when we try. To be sure, it is exactly their way of doing that serious work that we object to, but still we are the dreamers, they the doers; we are the theorists, they the practical achievers. Yet the precision of our view will not down; we can see in their boasted activity little but a resolute sitting on the lid, a sort of glorified routine of keeping the desk clear. And we would rather remain dreamers, we feel, than do much of their work. Other values we find are changed. We become hopelessly perverted by democracy. We no longer make the careful distinctions between the fit and the unfit, the successful and the unsuccessful, the effective and the ineffective, the presentable and the unpresentable. We are more interested in the influences that have produced these seeming differences than in the fact of the differences themselves. We classify people by new categories. We look for personality, for sincerity, for social sympathy, for democratic feeling, for social productiveness, and we interpret success in terms of these attainments.
The young radical, then, in such a situation and in possession of these new social values, stands on the verge of his career in a mood of great perplexity. Two questions he must answer,—“What is to be done?” and “What must I do?” If he has had an education and is given a real opportunity for the choice of a vocation, his position is crucial. For his education, if it has been in one of the advanced universities, will have only tended to confirm his radicalism and render more vivid the contrast between the new philosophy which is being crystallized there out of modern science and philosophy and the new interpretations of history and ethics, and the obscurantist attitude of so many of our intellectual guardians. The youth, ambitious and aggressive, desires an effective and serviceable career, yet every career open to him seems a compromise with the old order. If he has come to see the law as an attempt to fit immutable principles of social action on a dynamic and ever-growing society; if he has come to see the church as an organization working along the lines of greatest spiritual resistance, preaching a personal where the world is crying for a social gospel; if he has come to see higher education as an esoteric institution of savants, only casually reaching down to touch the mass of people with their knowledge and ideas; if he has come to see business as a clever way of distributing unearned wealth, and the levying of a refined tribute on the property-less workers; if he has come to see the press as devoted to bolstering up all these institutions in their inefficiency and inertia;—if he has caught this radical vision of the social institutions about him, he will find it hard to fit neatly into any of them and let it set its brand upon him. It would seem to be a treason not only to society but to his own best self. He would seem to have become one of the vast conspiracy to keep things as they are. He has spent his youth, perhaps, in studying things as they are in order to help in changing them into things as they ought to be, but he is now confronted with the question how the change can be accomplished, and how he can help in that accomplishment.
The attempt to answer these questions seems at first to bring him to a deadlock and to inhibit all his powers. He desires self-development and self-expression, and the only opportunities offered him seem to be ways of life and training that will only mock the best social ideals that he has. This is the dilemma of latter-day youth, and it is a dilemma which is new and original to our own age. Earnest men and women have always had before them the task of adjusting themselves to this world, of “overcoming the world,” but the proper method has always been found in withdrawing from it altogether, or in passing through it with as little spot and blemish as possible, not in plunging into its activity and attempting to subjugate it to one’s ideals. Yet this is the task that the young radical sets for himself. Subjugation without compromise! But so many young men and women feel that this is impossible. Confident of their sincerity, yet distrustful of their strength, eager yet timorous, they stand on the brink, longing to serve, but not knowing how, and too likely, through their distrust and fears, to make a wreck of their whole lives. They feel somehow that they have no right to seek their own welfare or the training of their own talents until they have paid that service to society which they have learned is its due.
It does not do to tell them that one of their best services will be that training. They demand some more direct way of influencing their fellows, some short road to radical activity. It would be good for them to know that they cannot hope to accomplish very much in radiating their ideals without the skill and personality which gives impetus to that radiation. Good-will alone has little efficacy. For centuries well-wishers of men have shown a touching faith in the power of pure ideals to propagate themselves. The tragic failures of the beginnings of the social movement itself were largely due to this belief. Great efforts ended only in sentimentality. But we have no intention now that the fund of intellectual and spiritual energy liberated by radical thought in the younger generation shall die away in such ineffective efforts. To radiate influence, one’s light must shine before men, and it must glow, moreover, with a steady and resolute flame, or men will neither see nor believe the good works that are being done.
It would be an easy way out of the dilemma if we could all adopt the solution of Kropotkin, the Russian radical writer, and engage in radical journalism. This seems to be the most direct means of bringing one’s ideals to the people, to be a real fighting on the firing line. It is well to remember, however, that a weak propagandist is a hindrance rather than an assistance, and that the social movement needs the best of talent, and the skill. This is a challenge to genius, but it is also a reminder that those who fight in other ranks than the front may do as valiant and worthy service. One of the first lessons the young radical has to learn is that influence can be indirect as well as direct, and will be strongest when backed by the most glowing personality. So that self-cultivation becomes almost a duty, if one wants to be effective towards the great end. And not only personality but prestige; for the prestige of the person from whom ideals come is one of the strongest factors in driving home those ideas to the mind of the hearer and making them a motive force in his life. Vested interests do not hesitate to make use of the services of college presidents and other men of intellectual prestige to give their practices a philosophic support; neither should radicals disdain, as many seem to disdain, the use of prestige as a vantage-ground from which to hurl their dogmas. Even though Kropotkin himself deprecated his useless learning, his scientific reputation has been a great factor in spreading his radical ideas.
It is the fashion among some radicals to despise the applause of the conventional, unthinking mass, and scorn any success which has that appreciation as an ingredient. But this is not the way to influence that same crass, unthinking mass or convert it to one’s doctrines. It is to alienate at the beginning the heathen to whom the gospel is being brought. And even the radical has the right to be wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. He must see merely that his distinctiveness is based on real merit and not, as many reputations are, on conformity to an established code. Scientific research, engineering, medicine, and any honest craft, are vocations where it is hard to win prestige without being socially productive; their only disadvantage lies in the fact that their activity does not give opportunity for the influence of the kind the radical wishes to exert. Art, literature, and teaching are perilous; the pressures to conform are deadly, but the triumphs of individuality splendid. For one’s daily work lies there directly in the line of impressing other minds. The genius can almost swing the lash over men’s spirits, and form their ideas for them; he combines enormous prestige with enormous direct influence. Law, the ministry, and business seem to be peculiarly deadly; it is hard to see how eminence can be attained in those professions except at the cost of many of one’s social ideals.
The radical can thus choose his career with full knowledge of the social possibilities. Where he is forced by economic necessity to engage in distasteful and unsocial work, he may still leave no doubt, in the small realm he does illuminate, as to his attitude and his purpose, his enthusiasm and his hope. For all his powers and talents can be found to contribute something; fusing together they form his personality and create his prestige, and it is these that give the real impetus and the vital impulse that drive one’s beliefs and ideals into the hearts of other men. If he speaks, he will be listened to, for it is faith and not doubt that men strain their ears to hear. It is the believing word that they are eager to hear. Let the social faith be in a youth, and it will leak out in every activity of his life, it will permeate his words and color his deeds. The belief and the vision are the essentials; these given, there is little need for him to worry how he may count in society. He will count in spite of himself. He may never know just how he is counting, he may never hear the reverberations of his own personality in others, but reverberate it will, and the timbre and resonance will be in proportion to the quality and power of that vision.
The first concrete duty of every youth to whom social idealism is more than a phrase is to see that he is giving back to society as much as or more than he receives, and, moreover, that he is a nourisher of the common life and not a drain upon its resources. This was Tolstoy’s problem, and his solution to the question—“What is to be done?”—was—“Get off the other fellow’s back!” His duty, he found, was to arrange his life so that the satisfaction of his needs did not involve the servitude or the servility of any of his fellow men; to do away with personal servants, and with the articles of useless luxury whose production meant the labor of thousands who might otherwise have been engaged in some productive and life-bringing work; to make his own living either directly from the soil, or by the coöperative exchange of services, in professional, intellectual, artistic, or handicraft labor. Splendidly sound as this solution is, both ethically and economically, the tragic fact remains that so inextricably are we woven into the social web that we cannot live except in some degree at the expense of somebody else, and that somebody is too often a man, woman, or even little child who gives grudgingly, painfully, a stint of labor that we may enjoy. We do not see the labor and the pain, and with easy hearts and quiet consciences we enjoy what we can of the good things of life; or, if we see the truth, as Tolstoy saw it, we still fancy, like him, that we have it in our power to escape the curse by simple living and our own labor. But the very food we eat, the clothes we wear, the simplest necessities of life with which we provide ourselves, have their roots somewhere, somehow, in exploitation and injustice. It is a cardinal necessity of the social system under which we live that this should be so, where the bulk of the work of the world is done, not for human use and happiness, but primarily and directly for the profits of masters and owners. We are all tainted with the original sin; we cannot escape our guilt. And we can be saved out of it only by the skill and enthusiasm which we show in our efforts to change things. We cannot help the poisonous soil from which our sustenance springs, but we can be laboring mightily at agitating that soil, ploughing it, turning it, and sweetening it, against the day when new seed will be planted and a fairer fruitage be produced.
The solution of these dilemmas of radical youth will, therefore, not come from a renunciation of the personality or a refusal to participate actively in life. Granted the indignation at our world as it is, and the vision of the world as it might and ought to be, both the heightening of all the powers of the personality and a firm grappling with some definite work-activity of life are necessary to make that indignation powerful and purging, and to transmute that vision into actual satisfaction for our own souls and those of our fellows. It is a fallacy of radical youth to demand all or nothing, and to view every partial activity as compromise. Either engage in something that will bring revolution and transformation all at one blow, or do nothing, it seems to say. But compromise is really only a desperate attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It is not compromise to study to understand the world in which one lives, to seek expression for one’s inner life, to work to harmonize it and make it an integer, nor is it compromise to work in some small sphere for the harmonization of social life and the relations between men who work together, a harmonization that will bring democracy into every sphere of life, industrial and social.
Radical youth is apt to long for some supreme sacrifice and feels that a lesser surrender is worth nothing. But better than sacrifice is efficiency! It is absurd to stand perplexedly waiting for the great occasion, unwilling to make the little efforts and test the little occasions, and unwilling to work at developing the power that would make those occasions great. Of all the roads of activity that lie before the youth at the threshold of life, one paramount road must be taken. This fear that one sees so often in young people, that, if they choose one of their talents or interests or opportunities of influence and make themselves in it “competent ones of their generation,” they must slaughter all the others, is irrational. It is true that the stern present demands singleness of purpose and attention. A worthy success is impossible to-day if the labor is divided among many interests. In a more leisurely time, the soul could encompass many fields, and even to-day the genius may conquer and hold at once many spiritual kingdoms. But this is simply a stern challenge to us all to make ourselves geniuses. For serious and sincere as the desire of radical youth may be to lead the many-sided life, a life without a permanent core of active and productive interest, of efficient work in the world, leads to dilettantism and triviality. Such efficient work, instead of killing the other interests of life, rather fertilizes them and makes them in turn enrich the central activity. Instead of feeding on their time, it actually creates time for the play of the other interests, which is all the sweeter for its preciousness.
Always trying to make sure that the work, apart from the inevitable taint of exploitation which is involved in modern work, is socially productive, that it actually in some way contributes to the material or spiritual welfare of the people for whom it is done, and does not simply reiterate old formulas, does not simply extend the friction of competition or consist simply in living on the labor and profits of others. Such work cannot be found by rule. The situation is a real dilemma for the idealistic youth of to-day, and its solution is to be worked out in the years to come. It is these crucial dilemmas that make this age so difficult to live in, that make life so hard to harmonize and integrate. The shock of the crassnesses and crudities of the modern social world thrown against the conventionally satisfying picture which that world has formed of itself makes any young life of purpose and sincerity a real peril and adventure. There are all sorts of spiritual disasters lying in wait for the youth who embarks on the perilous ocean of radicalism. The disapproval of those around him is likely to be the least of his dangers. It should rather fortify his soul than discourage him. Far more dangerous is it that he lose his way on the uncharted seas before him, or follow false guides to shipwreck. But the solution is not to stay at home, fearful and depressed. It is rather to cultivate deliberately the widest knowledge, the broadest sympathy, the keenest insight, the most superb skill, and then set sail, exulting in one’s resources, and crowding on every inch of sail.
For if the radical life has its perils, it also has its great rewards. The strength and beauty of the radical’s position is that he already to a large extent lives in that sort of world which he desires. Many people there are who would like to live in a world arranged in some sort of harmony with socialistic ideals, but who, believing they are impossible, dismiss the whole movement as an idle if delightful dream. They thus throw away all the opportunity to have a share in the extending of those ideals. They do not see that the gradual infiltration of those ideals into our world as it is does brighten and sweeten it enormously. They do not know the power and advantage of even their “little faith” which their inclinations might give them. But the faith of the radical has already transformed the world in which he lives. He sees the “muddle” around him, but what he actually feels and lives are the germs of the future. His mind selects out the living, growing ideas and activities of the socially fruitful that exist here and now, and it is with these that his soul keeps company; it is to their growth and cultivation that he is responsive. This is no illusion that he knows, no living in a pleasing but futile world of fancy. For this living the socialistic life as far as he is able, he believes has its efficient part in creating that communal life of the future. He feels himself, not as an idle spectator of evolution, but as an actual co-worker in the process. He does not wait timidly to jump until all the others are ready to jump; he jumps now, and anticipates that life which all desire, but which most, through inertia, prejudice, insufficient knowledge, and feeble sympathy, distrust or despair of. He knows that the world runs largely on a principle of imitation, and he launches boldly his personality into society, confident of its effect in polarizing the ideas and attitudes of the wistful. Towards himself he finds gravitating the sort of people that he would find in a regenerated social order. To him come instinctively out of his reading and his listening the ideas and events that give promise of the actual realization of his ideals. In unlooked-for spots he finds the seeds of regeneration already here. In the midst of the sternest practicalities he finds blossoming those activities and personalities which the unbelieving have told him were impossible in a human world. And he finds, moreover, that it is these activities and personalities that furnish all the real joy, the real creation, the real life of the present. The prophets and the teachers he finds are with him. In his camp he finds all those writers and leaders who sway men’s minds to-day and make their life, all unconscious as they are of the revolutionary character of the message, more rich and dynamic. To live this life of his vision practically here in the present is thus the exceeding great reward of radical youth. And this life, so potent and glowing amongst the crude malignity of modern life, fortifies and stimulates him, and gives him the surety, which is sturdier than any dream or hope, of the coming time when this life will permeate and pervade all society instead of only a part.