3.26. THE WEAKNESS OF IMMATURITY.
One is apt to write and talk of strong and weak as though some were
always strong, some always weak. But that is quite a misleading version
of life. Apart from the fact that everyone is fluctuatingly strong and
fluctuatingly weak, and weak and strong according to the quality we
judge them by, we have to remember that we are all developing and
learning and changing, gaining strength and at last losing it, from the
cradle to the grave. We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term,
pupil-teachers of Life; the term is none the less appropriate because
the pupil-teacher taught badly and learnt under difficulties.
It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude to write that "we have to
remember" this, but it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social
and economic literature. Those extraordinary imaginary cases as between
a man A and a man B who start level, on a desert island or elsewhere,
and work or do not work, or save or do not save, become the basis of
immense schemes of just arrangement which soar up confidently and
serenely regardless of the fact that never did anything like that equal
start occur; that from the beginning there were family groups and old
heads and young heads, help, guidance and sacrifice, and those who had
learnt and those who had still to learn, jumbled together in confused
transactions. Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely secondary
aspects of these primaries, and the attempt to get an idea of abstract
relationship by beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal pervading
fallacy in all these regions of thought. At the present moment the
average age of the world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal death
somewhen about 44 or 45, that is to say nearly half the world is "under
age," green, inexperienced, demanding help, easily misled and put in the
wrong and betrayed. Yet the younger moiety, if we do indeed assume
life's object is a collective synthesis, is more important than the
older, and every older person bound to be something of a guardian to the
younger. It follows directly from the fundamental beliefs I have assumed
that we are missing the most important aspects of life if we are not
directly or indirectly serving the young, helping them individually or
collectively. Just in the measure that one's living falls away from
that, do we fall away from life into a mere futility of existence, and
approach the state, the extraordinary and wonderful middle state of (for
example) those extinct and entirely damned old gentlemen one sees and
hears eating and sleeping in every comfortable London club.
That constructive synthetic purpose which I have made the ruling idea in
my scheme of conduct may be indeed completely restated in another form,
a form I adopted for a book I wrote some years ago called "Mankind in
the Making." In this I pointed out that "Life is a tissue of births";
"and if the whole of life is an evolving succession of births, then not
only must a man in his individual capacity (physically as parent,
doctor, food dealer, food carrier, home builder, protector; or mentally
as teacher, news dealer, author, preacher) contribute to births and
growths and the fine future of mankind, but the collective aspects of
man, his social and political organizations must also be, in the
essence, organizations that more or less profitably and more or less
intentionally set themselves towards this end. They are finally
concerned with the birth, and with the sound development towards still
better births, of human lives, just as every implement in the toolshed
of a seedsman's nursery, even the hoe and the roller, is concerned
finally with the seeding and with the sound development towards still
better seeding of plants. The private and personal motive of the
seedsman in procuring and using these tools may be avarice, ambition, a
religious belief in the saving efficacy of nursery keeping or a simple
passion for bettering flowers, that does not affect the definite final
purpose of his outfit of tools.
And just as we might judge completely and criticize and improve that
outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants, and with an
entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human
births and development. ANY COLLECTIVE HUMAN ENTERPRISE, INSTITUTION,
MOVEMENT, PARTY OR STATE, IS TO BE JUDGED AS A WHOLE AND COMPLETELY, AS
IT CONDUCES MORE OR LESS TO WHOLESOME AND HOPEFUL BIRTHS, AND ACCORDING
TO THE QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE ADVANCE DUE TO ITS INFLUENCE MADE BY
EACH GENERATION OF CITIZENS BORN UNDER ITS INFLUENCE TOWARDS A HIGHER
AND AMPLER STANDARD OF LIFE."
And individual conduct, quite as much as collective affairs, comes under
the same test. We are guides and school builders, helpers and influences
every hour of our lives, and by that standard we can and must judge all
our ways of living.
