CHAPTER III

THE MANY MORAL WORLDS

§ 6. Orthodox morality and the moral standard. § 7. The moralities of race, class, and occupation. § 8. Differing moral tastes. § 9. The good men of the moral philosophies.

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HE orthodox moralist is commonly to be identified

in social intercourse by the extent to which he talks

about standards; in moral philosophy by his extended discussion of "the moral standard". He is the man, very frequently to be found among academic men, who refuses to listen to any moral observation of yours without first asking you, "What is your standard?" who insists that, as the primary condition of morality, "what we need is standards"; who deplores "the decay of standards"; and whose definitive moral condemnation is, "They have no standards". It is not always easy to make out whether this attitude is one of conviction or of scepticism, since at times it seems that any standard will do provided it be a standard. But the usual implication is that there is but one standard of morality for all right-thinking men, the nature of which will be obvious to all who sincerely look for it.

This attitude sat attractively enough upon the resident of a small community of a few generations ago, when most communities were small and travel was difficult. In that setting it may be regarded as picturesque. This old

fashioned citizen had little consciousness, or at least little comprehension, of any culture but his own; and from the point of view of his own experience of the world the distinction between the heathen and the people of God seemed obvious and rational; as deeply grounded in the nature of things as for Plato and Aristotle the superiority of Greek to barbarian, of man to woman, and of freeman to slave. The situation is different today. The confluence of peoples and of ideas may very well be a confusion of tongues. Even so we meet face to face, and thought to thought, too many different kinds of men to rest comfortably in the conviction that our own is the right kind. And too many standards are suggested for the integrity of "the moral standard". All, it seems, are moral standards. It is then no longer picturesque to assume a common standard for all "right-thinking men”.

What we learn, however, from the difference of standard, and precisely from each one's belief in the exclusive validity of his own, is that the differences are moral differences. This is very obviously true of the differences of nation and race. Instinctively we tend to look upon the foreigner as immoral. "An immoral foreigner" seems a natural conjunction of terms. It is not merely that he is strange; an important part of his strangeness is that, to us, he is lacking in moral perception. An elderly and kind-hearted English lady once said to me, quite without arrogance, that in her opinion God had created the British people for the special task of bringing Christianity and salvation to the world-this was said, by the way, in Germany many years before the War. Mr. Punch may

classify her with his other old lady who complained that daylight-saving deprived her begonias of the morning sun. But in point of fact few Englishmen, perhaps few Americans, can believe that a Frenchman is quite able to grasp the meaning of "sound morality". Few Anglo-Saxons can attribute full moral perception to a Jew-except as he is allowed to be different from other Jews. The AngloSaxon cultivates an ideal of dignity and reserve. To him the Jew seems ingratiating and expansive. The Jew, it might be said, seeks to be on terms of personal confidence with his fellows, and thus he desires to please. It hardly occurs to the Anglo-Saxon to ask whether this desire to please may not be the expression of a moral ideal; nor, on the other hand, does he very carefully examine the moral quality of his own cherished attitude of "reserve". He is content to attribute the Semitic attitude to the want of a proper in the last analysis, morally proper-dignity.

The Russians present a nice problem for right-thinking moralists. In a few generations past they have contributed most of what is great to European music and fiction. In the presence of Tschaikowsky, Tourgenieff, Tolstoi, and Dostoievsky, it is not easy to dismiss them as simple barbarians. Yet as depicted by their novelists, even excluding such as Dostoievsky, they are a strange people. At one moment they astonish us by the depth and tenderness of their spiritual insight; at the next by the profundity of their reflections upon life; in the next moment we find them in a whirl of violence and dissipation or else prostrate with a devastating cynicism. They seem to be both more sophisticated than we are and more naïve. Is there a key to their inconsequentiality? To any naturalistic moralist they present a fascinating problem. The orthodox moralist prefers

to set them down as sentimentalists and romanticists, i. e., as morally defective.

Yet the Russians present a problem because we are in contact with their literature. There are other races, such as the Chinese, which apparently present none. Their bland indifference to western ideals of progress is easily set down to ignorance and "backwardness". and "backwardness". We know indeed, vaguely and abstractly, that the Chinese is an ancient civilization, which is marked by a coherent social order, by a high development of the fine arts and a marvellous skill in the mechanical arts, and by an elaborate tradition of manners and morals. But only a few are in a position to know this concretely. Hence we cheerfully take up "the white man's burden" of teaching the Chinese our civilization, and possibly of enforcing it upon them. "The white man's burden” is perhaps the most naïve expression of orthodox morality and for that reason the most instructive. What it presupposes is a classification of all races and peoples as morally superior or inferior according to one conception of morality and one scheme of civilization, namely, our own.

Such of course are only the commonplaces of the traditional moralist. It is worth noting, by the way, that "the moralist" of the older tradition, as distinct from the more modern teacher of scientific ethics, was inclined to be mildly sceptical about the final rightness of any accepted standard. Yet I wonder if we have fully grasped the questions raised by his naturalistic survey. If the Chinese are to advance in civilization does it mean that they are to adopt western ideas? Has the Japanese adoption of western ideas been truly and purely an advance in civilization? It may be that we have much to teach the Chinese but would a China

man be better or worse if he became an Englishman or an American? And coming nearer home, if our American negro-laborer, or waiter, became a gentleman, and the cultural equal of the white gentleman whom he serves, would this mean that in becoming a gentleman (assuming that the ideal of the gentleman is a moral ideal) he also became white? If so it seems that we ought to commend him for "aping the whites".

Besides the race-moralities there are class-moralities. And these class-moralities, unobservant of the classelement, will then purport each to stand for morality as such. Our European moral code is supposed to be mainly Christian, but our moral philosophy—the traditional ethics of the schools-is clearly an inheritance from the Greeks, Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Ethics" constituting its most classical documents. Now the Greek ethics, of whatever school, was an aristocratic ethics. The Greek conception of the good man and the good life was derived from the point of view of a leisure class, the point of view of the working population remaining inarticulate. Plato, the best Greek representative, by the way, of the principle of rightness, treats his artisans as if they were hardly worth consulting. Aristotle tells us unhesitatingly that one cannot realize the moral ideal without an independent income and he also upholds slavery as a natural institution.

To modern ideas this limitation of virtue to a favored class is both repellent and absurd. Yet we are not ready to abandon the Greek conception of the best and most virtuous life. To us as to Aristotle it seems that the life of a gentleman, with its implications of leisure and culture, is the best life; only we should like to interpret it liberally, without the invidious class-distinction, and without ref