Moral Dichotomies
Friday, June 16,
2006
Moral Dichotomies
Moral Dichotomy
In the philosophy of dualism, an examination of a moral position takes on a yin and yang configuration, and allows the observer to perceive the subject of inquiry from two points of view, not that there aren't more points, also. In the case of Moses, he was confronted with the choice of a Pharaoh Amen Hotep II, who honored his father, Thothmes II, the great conqueror with many temples inThebes Thebes Thebes fell into decay as happens
when Empires go on the wane, but with a single god, Amarna did not offer the
level of pilgrim traffic that had been sustaining Thebes Thebes
When Moses descended fromMount Sinai
with these stone tablets, he saw his people worshiping many gods, the chief of
which was Baal, which took the form of a golden calf. He chose to instruct his
flock with punishment and reward, for which he purported to credit Jehovah, the
monotheistic god of the Israelites. The laws of Moses were extended by such as
"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." In our times it has been
suggested that with modern implements of warfare, the population would soon
become toothless, and blind. The use of paper to codify laws,
from a scientific viewpoint, may have had a more lasting impact.
In the first year of the Great Books program the biographies of Lycurgus and Numa by Plutarch are examined. The two contrary systems of government are compared, and could be foreseen as precursors to today’s political parties. This would ignore a long history between adversaries in wars in which ability to wreak damage on the opponent sufficient to allow an oppressive victory to occur. My grandfather apparently favored the Spartan view as he gave his first, and only surviving son, Irvin, Lycurgus as a middle name. A member of the cavalry in the Mexican War, he claimed a quarter section of land from the government generosity to veterans. He was quite gifted, having had a credible education before leaving to become riverboatman, then soldier. AncientGreece
Come theRoman
Republic Rome
On the way to Western Civilization, a nasty turn came about with the Holy Roman Empire deciding that, with the loss ofSpain Iberian
Peninsula was regained. And it included Universities such as that
at Córdoba, where the lost Greek Civilization of Aristotle’ philosophy and
Arabic Numerals were being taught. The introduction of the Great University Roman Empire ”
was succeeded by its clerical counterpart.
In the newest Republic/Democracy, immigration from Europe created a great mass of uneducated citizens who, not only didn’t know the advantages of living in freedom, but hardly new the language, so a new moral dichotomy was erected, Public Education. The psychologist, John Dewey led the charge, and before long elementary schools covered the landscape inAmerica
A great amount of confusion over moral values began to creep in around civilized societies, questioning the credentials of those offering moral revelation, whether of secular or holy origin. Enter Sigmund Freud and the psychiatrists. Mental health became the crux of the moral issue, in the religion of relativists, sometimes called moral relativists. Absolutism remained what has been a standard around which holy people can feel secure that their values won’t change in spite of the world.
In keeping with Sturgeon’s revelation “Everything is 90% crap.” I intend to digress and present Chapter 4 of Dr. Harry Overstreet’s book “The Mature Mind” hoping that you can keep an open mind as he leads, kicks or drags you over the chasm of juvenile absurdities we are all blessed with. One thing we can comfort ourselves in, we do not have a pantheon of Egyptian (or Roman) Gods to pacify.
MATURE MIND CHAPTER FOUR - MATURE INSIGHTS LOST
C/R H. A. Overstreet - W. W. NORTON Co. 1949/Reprint 1959
I
As we become familiar with the maturity concept, we find ourselves confronted by an old perplexity. The sound life as now described by psychologists and psychiatrists bears a strong resemblance to the sound life as long described by the greatest of our human seers and statesmen.
The vocabulary is new. The clinical materials are new. The explanations of human misbehavior are, in many respects, new. Yet the type of relationship to life that is recommended by these modern scientists is surprisingly familiar: it has been recommended before. Time and again, throughout the centuries of human experience, it has been recommended by individuals who have seen more than those around them of how cause and effect work in the mental, emotional, and social affairs of men. Why, then, with these saving insights long since declared, do we continue to create misery for ourselves and others? All the necessary truths have been spoken. Many of them, in fact, are part of our daily speech; are said with reverence in our moments of worship; are, on great occasions, delivered as axioms of wisdom. Why have they been so relatively powerless to shape our daily behavior? Why have they not saved us?
One of our American poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson, has written:
. . . we know the truth has been
…..Told over to the world a thousand times;-
…..But we have had no ears to listen yet
…..For more than fragments of it; we have heard
…..A murmur now and then, an echo here
…..And there . . -1
1 From "Captain Craig," in Collected Poems, p. 116. Copyright, 1902, by EdwinArlington
This is what puzzles many of us: since we have long known the most inspired truths about human behavior and human relationships, why have we failed to put those truths into action?
Looked for in the light of our emergent psychological knowledge, the answer to our question stands clear: a mature truth told to immature minds ceases, in those minds, to be that same mature truth. Immature minds take from it only what immature minds can assimilate. In the end, even though they may give it lip-service and may raise institutions in its name, they turn the mature truth into an applied immaturity.
This fate of psychological depreciation has been the fate of all our greatest human truths.
Uttered by mature minds, and for the purpose of maturing minds, they have been received, for the most part, by less mature minds-and have thus been only partially comprehended. Being only partially comprehended, they have found expression in ways that have perpetuated as much misunderstanding as understanding, as much error as truth.
Every great insight, we have heard it said, loses much of its greatness when it is institutionalized. One reason for this- perhaps the chief reason- is that the original insight becomes channeled to the human race through less mature people than those who first uttered it.
The followers are less than the masters. The idea of human brotherhood, for example, which
Jesus of Nazareth expressed with a superb passion, has become channeled through a multitude of followers so much less mature than he was that they have not actually known what he was talking about even when they have repeated his words. Thus an insight that might have saved the world has become largely a verbalism.
Brooks Adams coined the phrase, "the degradation of the democratic dogma." We might, in similar fashion, describe what has happened to great insights throughout history as the degradation of truth by minds too immature to understand it and put it into mature practice.
It is no new discovery that children only partially grasp most of what their parents try to tell them. Not at the first hearing nor at the tenth hearing do they fully understand what is said to them about the reasons for a certain rule of behavior, about the meaning of fairness and honesty and kindness, about the way in which human beings are linked together in destiny. Their ears may take in the words, and their tongues may learn to repeat them; but only as they themselves mature can they know with their whole make-up what the words really signify.
The limitations of the child-mind in the child-body are an old story. But only as we have come to know something about the problems of psychological growth have we been in a position to realize that similar limits are set to the reception of truth where childish outlooks and emotions are housed in an adult body. If there never yet have been "enough mature people in the right places," one of the places where there have never been enough of them has been on the receiving end of great truths. Because there have never been enough mature people to hear truth where it has been spoken, even the greatest of our truths have been in large measure impotent.
Our insight into arrested development invites us, therefore, to a new appraisal of such significant insights as have come into human history. For now we have a way of doing justice to the greatness of what has been great, while, at the same time, we understand the failure of such greatness to effect our redemption from littleness.
II
A number of saving insights have been brought into the world without any of them saving the world. The first of them was the novel idea of One God. The psychological drama of this idea has been well suggested by Solomon Goldman, in his monumental study of the Old Testament:
[The Bible] had its beginnings in the tales of a bold skeptic of whom it was recounted that, having rejected the beliefs universally adhered to in his day, he set out to transform the face of the earth.
How he came by his skepticism or new faith is a question easier asked than answered ... Of this much we are certain: once, in the ancient world, there lived a Jew, or one whom the Jews came to regard and claim as their own, who, repelled by idolatrous creeds and pagan practices, groped his way to a glimpse of the One God, perfect in all perfection.2
2 Solomon Goldman, The Book of Books, p. ix.New York
Here was a first essential human insight. As long as the belief in many gods prevailed--which was tantamount to a belief in many conflicting sources of truth--man could never free his mind from confusion. He could find no basis for consistent thought, no criterion for ethical evaluation, no ground for unity of judgment. Confronted by a multitude of gods, each claiming supremacy, and each clashing with others, man would continue to live in a world of mental, moral, and spiritual chaos.
That bold skeptic, whoever he was, brought a liberating insight: Truth is one because the
Source of truth is one.
Now watch what happened to this great insight-again, as reported by Dr. Goldman:
The people responded readily and agreed to do and obey. It resolved never again to be like
unto the nations-but could not abandon their ways. It accepted the Eternal as God-but upon every hill and under every green tree it erected altars to wood and stone. It urged that man was God's image-but it would not abandon slavery ... It longed for justice . . . but, fond of bribes, it neither judged the orphan nor did it plead the cause of the widow. It looked forward to peace but periodically became enmeshed in the web of imperialistic ambitions ofEgypt , Assyria, or Babylon
This story of a people's noble belief and ignoble backslidings; of its inspiring faith and its failure to live up to that faith; of its spiritual triumph and unspiritual self-defeats is the story of immature men incapable of grasping the fullness of the truth that had been offered to them. It is the story that has been acted out in thousandfold ways through the ages and far beyond the limits of that small tribe.
Nothing is more obvious than the almost universal degradation of the idea of the One God. In many cases, the Eternal One-the source of all truth-has been made into a jealous God, competing with other gods for man's favor; a whimful creature made in man's image; an angry old man, irritable in all-power, rather than serene in all-wisdom. In other cases, the One God has been made, not into an example of what man should reasonably grow toward, as he fulfills his powers, but into a mystery beyond man's comprehension-a mystery to paralyze man's mind. In yet other cases, the One God has been made into a tribal or national possession-a rallying point for nations in their wars with other nations.
Almost never in the thousands of years since this insight first came into the world has its original splendor been comprehended: the splendor of a reality without self-contradiction, one that can be understood and that responds to understanding; the splendor of a world not whimful, not broken up into clashing oppositions, but one that waits to reveal itself whole to the searching mind.
What is of particular moment to us, here, is not simply that man has failed fully to understand and act out the concept of One God, but that he has failed in ways characteristic of immaturity.
His shortcomings in relation to this great insight do not so much mark him as a creature of evil, or of factual ignorance, as they suggest his being a creature who has habitually grown into adult stature and status without becoming mentally, emotionally, and socially mature.
In a home where children are getting their orientation toward life there may be one father in two entirely different senses of that term. There may be one father in the sense that there is a self-consistent directive influence - a person who himself does what he expects others to do; a person whose responses can be relied upon from day to day; a person who is the same person in relation to all the different children, not strict with one and indulgent of another. Or there may be one father in the sense that there is one person within the family group whose authority can never be questioned; whose whim is law; whose fluctuating moods create a kind of domestic weather to which all other individuals must adjust; who gives and withholds favors as he happens to feel like giving or withholding them; who plays favorites if he wants to do so, because he is above the law; and for whom the arch crime that a child could commit would be to grow into the kind of independence that would make him show a mind of his own and rebel against his father's authority.
Where there is one father in this latter sense, there is, we have come to know, almost a guarantee that the children will grow up without becoming fully mature. Even in their adulthood, they will have no genius for equality. Whether they become irrationally rebellious or irrationally submissive, the strongest force in their lives will be, not their own productive urge to life, but their relationship to authority. Most of them, in all likelihood, will become people who look up to those in power and, within their own limited areas of authority, try to imitate such power. They will be emotionally unstable, emotionally dependent, and, like children, inclined to alternate between a fear-ridden reverence in the presence of their chosen authority and a belligerent, false courage in the presence of other grown-up children: "My father can lick your father with one hand tied behind his back!"
Presented with the sublime, self-consistent idea of One God, men whose own experience had kept them largely immature in their relationship to authority proceeded to convert that One God into a whimful, tribal tyrant-a tyrant before whom they must tremble; whose word they must obey whether or not it comported with rationality; but whom, by way of compensation, they could call their own, thereby claiming part of his strength as theirs.
That the One God is today still many gods-many different gods in many different possessive minds-is a measure of our continued immaturity. That the One God, instead of being a source of peace, has been a source of fratricidal war, indicates how far short we have fallen of being fully developed in our human powers.
III
For a second insight we are indebted to this same people: man is a creature of moral law.
The picture of Moses descending fromMt.
Sinai
Because, in the days of the legendary Moses, men were still mostly immature, morality was first expressed as commands: Thou shalt not. But the moral insight of this legendary figure was so genuine that the commands he issued as from God came not as the whimful and arbitrary dictates of a tyrant, but rather as the voice of moral reason itself. The things that were commanded were right and necessary if men were to live together in peace and justice. To lie, steal, covet, commit adultery, dishonor the older members of the group, worship idols, and deny a day of rest-these things, practiced widely and with impunity, would make impossible the sort of social structure within which men could live with confidence. The "Thou shalt nots," in brief, were the revelation of what man, in his moral reason, would himself refuse to do if he truly knew himself.
The Decalogue remains for us the first great insight of our culture into man's moral nature.
There had been other "codes" before this one, but they had lacked the consistency of moral insight conveyed in the Decalogue. One and all, they had been class codes, making arbitrary discriminations between human beings; assigning more rights to some than to others. Thus, they were not yet moral because they failed of moral universality. They belonged to cultures that had not yet emerged from the stage of many gods and many different truths: one truth for the highborn, another for the lowborn. The Decalogue was the first statement of the oneness of all who are human: oneness in rights and oneness in obligations.
But here again the story repeats itself: the story of a great truth brought down to the level of immaturity. What immature minds have done to the Decalogue has been, first of all, to turn it from a series of universal principles into a series of taboos. This has notoriously happened in the case of Sabbath observance. The deep reason for a time of rest is obvious. The fact that this time of rest must be so regularly established that it cannot be denied to any one- even the humblest worker-is likewise obvious. But time and again, the admonition to observe the Sabbath has been turned into the prohibition of even the most necessary and life-preserving work. By the time of Christ, for example, taboo had so far concealed the original purpose of the law that the priests found it necessary to reprimand him for curing a man's illness on the Sabbath day. Again, the observance of the Sabbath has divided people into those who tenaciously hold that God had appointed one certain day of the week and those who as tenaciously hold that he had appointed another.
Again, "Thou shalt not bear false witness" has been turned, among other things, into a taboo-ceremony in courts of law. The implication is that God may strike you dead if you bear false witness with your hand on the Bible-the further implication being that if you merely lie, without swearing on the Bible that you are telling the truth, you will be in no such danger.
What immature minds have done to the Decalogue has been, in the second place, to give it so narrow and literal an interpretation that it has been largely robbed of its power to encourage man toward moral maturity. "Thou shalt not steal" has been chiefly interpreted to mean that you must not overtly take what obviously belongs to somebody else. Most of the subtler forms of stealing, however-through the adulteration of goods, for example; through financial manipulations of the market; through imperialism-have been given other names than stealing and have been largely ignored.
The same has been true in the case of the admonitions against lying, killing, committing adultery, coveting. Arthur Hugh Clough, in his new Decalogue, has pointedly suggested how the narrow, literal interpretation of these moral commands has failed to reach the full-scale immoralities that are part of the going concern we call civilization:
‘Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition;
Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.’3
3 Arthur Hugh Clough, "The Latest Decalogue," from Poems.New York
We do not know how deeply the man known as Moses may have penetrated to the core of these moral laws; but we do know that through subsequent history immature minds have taken from them little more than their surface meanings. It still remains for the world to learn what the Ten Commandments really report about the essentials of human nature. Until the time of our greater maturing, the Decalogue will remain an ambiguous presence in our midst: on the one hand, a liberating revelation of the means by which men may live together with mutual confidence; on the other a set of taboos that have the power to control behaviors only within the most narrow and literal definitions, and that divide men along the lines of fanatical interpretations rather, than unite them in a common insight.
IV
Amos, the peasant-prophet, spoke ringing words:
Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink.
The Lord God hath sworn by his holiness, that lo, the days shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks.
Here, in the words of an angry man, we read another of the world's great insights: that there must be an end to special privilege and to the exploitation of the weak by the strong; that social justice must come; that the demand for such justice is not an arbitrary human demand, but so inherent in the structure of man's relationship to man that to flout it is to invite disaster.
In most of the ancient world-Egypt, Assyria,Babylonia , and the oriental
despotisms-the plea for social justice had not only not yet been heard, but if
it had been spoken, it would have been met with instant punishment. The thought
that the ordinary human being had a right to humane treatment and a right to
just treatment was far removed from these empires of caprice and arbitrary
power. It remained for a few rare persons, socially mature beyond their time
and beyond their fellows, to pour out their indignation in behalf of the
dispossessed and the helpless. It remained for an Amos, a Micah, an Isaiah to
speak for civilization in a world of moral barbarism.
"Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow," cried Isaiah. And Micah summed up the whole duty of man when he said, "He hath
shewed thee, O man, what is good . . . what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Here, then, was another great insight: man, by virtue of his status as a human being in the universe, is under obligation to consider his fellow man and treat him well-the fellow man who is poor no less than the one who is rich; the helpless no less than the powerful.
This insight required more of the individual than did the "Thou shalt nots" of the Decalogue.
It required a live imagination about other people: the sort of empathic imagination that is still only a potential in the child and that can come to its fullness only as the child matures. The power to feel another's hurt and to want to heal that hurt, to sense another's need and to want to satisfy that need-this is the root of social justice. Without it, not even the strictest law can cause justice or mercy to triumph as a social force over the will to self-advantage.
Later, the full implication of this thought was seen by another peasant-prophet, Jesus of
Nazareth, when in a flash of inspiration, he laid down the rule basic to all moral life: "Do unto others as ye would that others do unto you." Jesus was here asking of man something far removed from the child's ego-absorption. He was asking the mature power to see others with the same honest concern with which one sees oneself.
And now again came the story of defeat. These prophets did not wholly succeed even with their own people-much less with the whole world. Their years of prophesying were spent in passionate and perilous denunciation of oppressors who would not listen. "Let judgment run down as the waters," cried Amos, "and righteousness as a mighty stream." But judgment did not run down as the waters nor righteousness as a mighty stream. The big oppressors and the little oppressors continued largely as before.
"Then I said, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without men, and the land be utterly desolate."
Social justice still goes largely unfulfilled. Today, however, we can perhaps speak a new word about the reason for its long unfulfillment. The simple fact is that social justice requires of man a fuller growth out of the egocentricity of childhood than he has yet achieved. Immature life is life in which imagination has not yet stretched to take in the wants and needs of other people. It is therefore moved chiefly by the vivid urgency of its own self-concern: self-concern in the most Immediate and limited sense of the word, not in the great sense of self-fulfillment. While our proper destiny as individuals is to grow beyond the egocentricity of childhood into the inclusive sociocentricity of the mature, most of us-and most of our forebears throughout history-have largely failed thus to grow up.
Today, we might well ask with the prophet Isaiah, "Lord, how long?" And we might well believe that the only alternative answer to the grim words, "Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant," is the psychological insight, "Until man grows into emotional and social maturity."
V
In some respects, the most audacious of all the great insights that have come into the world was the apparently absurd conviction of Jesus of Nazareth that men must love one another. "A new commandment I give unto you that ye love one another." We can easily imagine the bewilderment-even the ribald laughter-of his hearers. A world that was still very far from reaching the level of universal justice could scarcely rise to the level of universal love.
In reality, this "new commandment" was not an absurd and arbitrary rule laid upon man from the outside. It was, rather, the most profound insight into man's nature that had yet been achieved. Today every psychiatrist would affirm its truth. Man is sound in psychological health to the degree that he relates himself affirmatively to his fellow men. To hate and to fear is to be psychologically ill.
This is an illness; however, that still widely afflicts us. It is, in fact, the consuming illness of our time. "The only real threat to man," writes G. B. Chisholm, ". . . is man himself . . . the difficulty man has with himself is that he cannot use his highly developed intellect effectively because of his neurotic fears, his prejudices, his fanaticisms, his unreasoning hates, and equally unreasoning devotions; in fact, his failure to reach emotional maturity, or mental health." 4
4 Survey Graphic, October 1947.
With the audacity of logic larger and deeper than they were prepared to understand, the
Nazarene spoke to his fellow men: "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despite-fully use you. And to him that smiteth thee on one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take the coat also." This must have sounded like utter nonsense. It still sounds like nonsense to those who have not entered the new dimension of life conceived by the speaker: the dimension in which man affirms his fellow man.
This is what love means, whether spoken by Jesus or by the most modern of psychiatrists.
The love of a person implies, not the possession of that person, but the affirmation of that person. It means granting him, gladly, the full right to his unique humanhood. One does not truly love a person and yet seek to enslave him-by law or by bonds of dependence and possessiveness.5
Whenever we experience a genuine love, we are moved by this transforming experience toward a capacity for good will. Or we might put the matter inversely: if what we call love in relation to one person or to a few people creates in us no added capacity for good will toward many, then we may doubt that we have actually experienced love. In all likelihood, what we have experienced is some form of immature ego-aggrandizement or some equally immature will to make security for ourselves in a dangerous world by clinging to the role of the dependent.
Most people-and this applies as much to those who call themselves Christians as to others-have grown to adulthood without developing a generous, spontaneous capacity to love: to affirm others. Instead, they have grown to adulthood carrying with them fears and hostilities born of childhood failures and intensified by a continued effort to effect a childish, not a responsible and mature, relationship to life. By and large, they have been unable to apply the insight of Jesus of Nazareth because what they have called love, even in their most intimate associations, has not been love.
Today, continues Chisholm the psychiatrist, with sharp urgency:
The psychiatrist, Eric Fromm, has developed this idea with evocable effectiveness in his book, Man for Himself.
In order that the human race may survive on this planet, it is necessary that there should be enough people in enough places in the world who do not have to fight each other, who are not the kinds of people who will fight each other, and who are the kinds of people who will take effective measures whenever it is necessary to prevent other people's fighting.
In short, smiting each other on the cheek, and smiting back, actually does not work-however highly an immature world may rate it, as "common sense." It is common nonsense. Therefore, "a new commandment I give unto you"-to develop enough emotional maturity to take the initiative in breaking the vicious circle of smiting and being smitten. This is the commandment-laid upon man by his own social nature- that has, more than any other, been given lip-service and then disobeyed in action. It has been disobeyed because those who have given it lip-service have too often been too immature to act it out or even to understand its deeper implications. They have thought that it required them to deny their own nature, or, by some divine grace, to transcend that nature; they have not realized that what it asked was a mature fulfillment of that nature.
VI
To the Greeks we owe another insight: that man is a rational animal and that his fulfillment calls for the exercise of his reason. Reasoning is the principle that brings order: that turns confusion into clarity, formlessness into form. It selects, relates, and organizes; out of chaos it creates a universe.
Reason, however, the Greek thinkers saw, is a capacity in man, not necessarily an achievement. In most men it lies largely dormant while something else, which is far from reason, takes over. Socrates spent a lifetime revealing to his fellow Athenians that what they thought was the exercise of reason was actually the exercise of unreason. Therefore--as though, perversely, to prove themselves as unreasonable as he said they were--they put him to death.
The tale of this insight follows the pattern of the others. What the Greek thinkers saw was true: man is at his best when he exercises the power of reason. To the extent that he is unreasonable-a creature of impulse, of prejudice, of rationalizations-he passes judgments and performs actions that do not comport with the realities of his environment. Therefore, in a multitude of ways, he does what he ought not to have done and leaves undone what he ought to have done- thereby compounding friction rather than harmony, error rather than truth. The person who lives by unreason, in brief, fails to utilize the one power by which man is enabled to effect a partial escape from sheer subjectivity and to enter into the same objective world that other people inhabit; the one power by which he is enabled to escape from the immediate and to enter into the longer time-span which embraces past, present, and future in an over-all design of cause and effect; the one power by which he is enabled to shake off the merely customary in favor of the ideal. The insight was true- but there were few inGreece
InGreece
So again, as in other cases, mature insight suffered the fate visited upon it by variously immature minds. The power to see what-follows-from-what is, as we have already noted, a power than an infant does not possess and that a child possesses only in very limited degree. It is, in brief, a mature power. It depends upon the mental accumulation of data that it takes time and experience for a human being to collect. It depends, also, upon a mental orderliness and discipline that are the fruits of more sustained effort and observation than any child has yet put forth.
The power of reason is the power to see logical implications: of similarity and difference, of cause and effect, of relationships in time and space, of quantity and quality, of the subjective and the objective, of importance and unimportance. The human mind has, as one of its most unique potentials, the capacity to see such logical implications. If it develops healthily from infancy through childhood, and on into adulthood, this inborn capacity becomes a more and more adequately developed tool for use. But, as we have observed, this growth toward mental maturity is not automatic. It may be checked by emotional road-blocks. ' The individual, for example, will not develop his powers of reason in all their fullness if, by so doing, he would be forced to relinquish a position of emotional dependence that has become indispensable to him. Neither will he develop such powers if, by so doing, he would be forced to see his own brand of prestige and success as a petty thing, his own ambition as a ruthless will to dominate others at whatever cost to their welfare. In such instances, the individual does not reason; he rationalizes -thereby pretending to himself that he obeys the dictates of his mind when, in actuality, he obeys the dictates of his unconscious and of the unresolved emotional problems lodged in that unconscious. Anyone who threatens to expose his self-deception-to reveal him as he is, in all his irrationality-becomes, to his mind, an archenemy: a Socrates whose disturbing voice must be silenced. As most people come to their adulthood bringing with them various unconscious reasons for not wanting to be mature, most people have had only a reluctant ear for the voice of reason; and the gift of insight offered to man by the greatest of the Greeks, and by similar minds throughout the centuries, has been more often rejected than received.
VII
Another insight into man's nature was variously expressed during the Renaissance. In those years, men were beginning to be restive under old authority. They had been tied long enough to theological dogmas. They had been pigeonholed long enough in the status-cubicles provided for them by feudalism. A liberating conviction was growing among men that man must discover his own destiny-not in a distant heaven, but on earth-and that his destiny must express what he is as an individual, not what he is as a member of a certain social or economic class.
The Renaissance was an affirmation of individuality. It bade the human find within himself
the creative sources of his own fulfillment. In this respect, the Renaissance was a necessary and
salutary revolt against medieval authoritarianism. It was, we might say, man the adolescent emerging out of the long dependence of infancy and childhood. But it was not yet man the mature adult.
The insight that invited the human being to become acquainted with his individual earthly self and to make independent creative use of the powers he discovered within himself was a mature insight. But, received largely by adolescent minds, it was given at most an adolescent interpretation. When we say that most of the minds that welcomed it were adolescent rather than mature, we mean that they were ready to assert their independence but that they were, as yet, inexperienced in the uses, the triumphs, and the hazards of independence. Having made good, as it were, their rebellion against parental authority, they found themselves free-and unsure. With outside barriers to their maturing largely removed, they were still confronted by barriers within themselves : habits and attitudes which they had carried over from the time when they were living within a dogma-system and a status-system and which left them ill-equipped to fill with mature content their brave new assertion of individuality.
This accounts, on the one hand, for most of the extravagances, false starts, instabilities, and caprices of Renaissance creativity-for to be creative without a sure, directive purpose is to be undisciplined from the inside. It is, all too often, to become fixated at an adolescent level of self-awareness.
The fact that the demand for freedom from did not carry with it a clear sense of freedom for accounts, also, for the promptness and the terrible dogmatism with which many of the minds released from medievalism hurried to take refuge in a new absolute. The Reformation, as the religious phase of the Renaissance, invited man to become just independent enough to take the step from one orthodoxy into another. It emphatically did not invite him to become genuinely mature in his spiritual independence. Here again we note the adolescent character of the period. The adolescent who breaks away from parental authority is by no means ready to make his own choices and decisions. He is, on the contrary, one of the most rigid conformists that we know anything about. He takes the one independent step that carries him out of the family value-system only to adopt the rigidly intolerant value-system of his own age group. Later, if he is to become mature, he must take the confident additional steps that lead to independence of judgment.
VIII
The most recent of the great insights that have invited man to maturity came with the development of science. The scientific method is not commonly regarded as an insight into human nature; but this, in its essence, is what it is. It is a systematized expression of the fact that man is a species capable of transcending his own limitations of sense and of subjectivity.
The scientific insight, like the other great insights we have examined, came into a world unprepared for it. The fate suffered by Roger Bacon is a vivid revelation of the state of mind that existed when science was making its first hesitant entrance. To remind us of that fate, I quote here from Andrew D. White, in his History of the Warfare of Science and Theology:
The first great thinker . . . who persevered in a truly scientific path was Roger Bacon . . . He
wrought with power in many sciences, and his knowledge was sound and exact ... In his writings are found formulae for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bismuth. It is even claimed, with much appearance of justice, that he investigated the power of steam, and he seems *" to have very nearly reached some of the principal doctrines of modern chemistry. But it should be borne in mind that his method of investigation was even greater than its results. In an age when theological subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of scholar, he insisted on real reasoning and the aid of natural science by mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks. Few greater men have lived.
On this man came the brunt of the battle. The most conscientious men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, and they fought him steadily and bitterly . . . He was attacked and condemned mainly because he did not believe that philosophy had become complete, and that nothing more was to be learned . . .But this was not the worst; another theological idea was arrayed against him-the idea of Satanic intervention in science . . .
The most powerful protectors availed him little. His friend, Guy of Foulques, having in 1265 been made Pope under the name of Clement IV, shielded him for a time; but the fury of the enemy was too strong, and when he made ready to perform a few experiments before a small audience, we are told that all Oxford was in an uproar. It was believed that Satan was about to be let loose. Everywhere priests, monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming in the wind, and everywhere rose the cry, "Down with the magician!" and this cry, "Down with the magician!" resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall.6
6 Andrew D. White, History of the Warfare of Science and Theology, vol. 1. p. 385. Copyright by Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.,New York
This story does more than report an event. It pictures the immaturity of most minds at the time when science was making its entry and developing its method. It shows those minds to have been terrified by the unfamiliar. It shows them also to have been ready to strike out in irrational fear-bred rage at that which seemed a threat to their own security and prestige. It shows them, most of all, to have been trapped within a set of beliefs and superstitions that forbade their becoming mature: that made it heresy for them to use their minds except within limits approved by the "parental authority" of the church.
Yet science eventually made its way into the world. Then the second thing happened to prevent its insight from working its full effects: the results of science were taken over by the many; but the method of science was left to the few, although it was in the application of the method, not in the mere using of the results, that there lay the richest promise of man's maturing. We know the story now. The veriest fool can use the most brilliant results of scientific experiment. The criminal can use them in his moral immaturity and perversity. To pull the lever, to push the button, to turn the dial, to shift the gears-these acts require no mature knowledge, no sense of responsibility, no empathy, no philosophic sense of the whole. They can be performed in the service of childish egocentricity and ego-aggrandizement no less than in the service of mature sociocentricity.
Thus, while the inventions of science magnify the power of the immature no less than the power of the mature-and magnify it to a point where a few childish minds can destroy the world-the insight of science remains unrealized. Man is a creature capable of so transcending his own limitations of sense and of subjectivity as to gain ever more knowledge about his world and about himself in that world. This is the insight that invites man to maturity. Also, it is an insight still un-comprehended, still largely ignored.
IX
In the second half of the eighteenth century two dramatic insights burst upon the horizon.
They were expressed in two notable phrases: "created equal" and "consent of the governed." The first repudiated the ancient assumption that man is born into the world wearing a badge of class. The second affirmed the right of all men to have a voice in determining the political structure under which they are to live.
Not surprisingly the two notions were laughed to scorn by those conditioned to the acceptance of class superiority and government by force. Yet they prevailed with a sufficient strength to bring into existence a new kind of government and a new order of legal rights: democratic government and civil rights.
There is every indication that both insights are true. Class-tags are man-made conventions.
The psychological differences that exist among men recommend their being given opportunities suited to their individual needs; those differences do not recommend the stratification of the human race along the ancient lines of privilege, power, and nationality. They do not indicate that some are born to be slaves, while others are born to be free; that some are born to be governed, while others are born to govern.
The announcement of the democratic insight did not, however, guarantee its being understood and acted upon with mature responsibility and imagination. Even the creation of a society to embody the insight and to give it legal standing did not so guarantee. Nothing is more clear than that the destiny of the democratic insight depends upon the mental, emotional, and social maturity of the people who make up the democracy. Thus far, every democracy on earth has been only a partial success because it has had only a partially mature citizenship through which to be realized. The happiest thing, in fact, that can be said about democracy, from a psychological angle, is that it is one of the few systems that has ever been willing to risk a long period of confusion and mixed purposes for the sake of giving man a chance to grow up in mind and in responsibility as well as in body. Because it has been willing to run this risk, it may yet produce enough mature people to insure its own continuity and further growth.
X
As we look back upon these major truths that have come into the world, we realize what maturity might have done with them. This, too, we realize: if we could only find a way of making ourselves mature, we could pick up these lost parts of ourselves and make them come alive. There is no other way; for immaturity has the inevitable power to make immature application of even the most mature insights. As long as so many of us continue to be immature in our linkages with life-arrested at the level of infancy, childhood, or adolescence-so long will the great insights be powerless to save the world.
Here is the clue-insight through which all the other insights may, in the end, be brought to their realization; the clue-insight without which all the others are lost: the psychological growth of man must keep pace with his physical powers; every increase in power must be matched by an increase in understanding.
Psychology and psychiatry, as we have noted, are offering us a new standard by which we may come to a new self-awareness and, thereby, a new maturity. We have, so far in this book, tried to gain a working familiarity with that standard. In the chapters that follow we shall try to measure, by our psychological yardstick, the practices and institutions that play upon our lives and that encourage us to full development of our powers or to an arrested development.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
About twenty years later I read “I’m O.K., Your’re O.K.” One of the proofs of the Mature Mind is that it can keep on growing. From Wikipedia:
“I'm OK, You're OK (later republished as I'm OK- You're OK, ISBN 038000772X) by author Thomas Anthony Harris, is one of the most successful self-help books ever published. It was originally published in 1969 by Harper & Row, and gradually grew in popularity until it made the New York Times bestseller list in 1972, where it remained for almost two years. It is still in print, published by Harper-Collins, and is estimated to have sold over 15 million copies to date. It has been translated into over a dozen languages.
Dr. Harris was a long-time friend and associate of Dr. Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis, beginning when both men were among the few psychiatrists in theUS Berne 's San Francisco
Transactional Analysis Seminar, which met weekly for over a decade, and which
developed the core concepts of TA. A Teaching Member of the International
Transactional Analysis Association, Dr. Harris was an early advocate for group
therapy and TA over traditional psychoanalytic practice, which he trained for
under Harry Stack Sullivan.
In the philosophy of dualism, an examination of a moral position takes on a yin and yang configuration, and allows the observer to perceive the subject of inquiry from two points of view, not that there aren't more points, also. In the case of Moses, he was confronted with the choice of a Pharaoh Amen Hotep II, who honored his father, Thothmes II, the great conqueror with many temples in
When Moses descended from
In the first year of the Great Books program the biographies of Lycurgus and Numa by Plutarch are examined. The two contrary systems of government are compared, and could be foreseen as precursors to today’s political parties. This would ignore a long history between adversaries in wars in which ability to wreak damage on the opponent sufficient to allow an oppressive victory to occur. My grandfather apparently favored the Spartan view as he gave his first, and only surviving son, Irvin, Lycurgus as a middle name. A member of the cavalry in the Mexican War, he claimed a quarter section of land from the government generosity to veterans. He was quite gifted, having had a credible education before leaving to become riverboatman, then soldier. Ancient
Come the
On the way to Western Civilization, a nasty turn came about with the Holy Roman Empire deciding that, with the loss of
In the newest Republic/Democracy, immigration from Europe created a great mass of uneducated citizens who, not only didn’t know the advantages of living in freedom, but hardly new the language, so a new moral dichotomy was erected, Public Education. The psychologist, John Dewey led the charge, and before long elementary schools covered the landscape in
A great amount of confusion over moral values began to creep in around civilized societies, questioning the credentials of those offering moral revelation, whether of secular or holy origin. Enter Sigmund Freud and the psychiatrists. Mental health became the crux of the moral issue, in the religion of relativists, sometimes called moral relativists. Absolutism remained what has been a standard around which holy people can feel secure that their values won’t change in spite of the world.
In keeping with Sturgeon’s revelation “Everything is 90% crap.” I intend to digress and present Chapter 4 of Dr. Harry Overstreet’s book “The Mature Mind” hoping that you can keep an open mind as he leads, kicks or drags you over the chasm of juvenile absurdities we are all blessed with. One thing we can comfort ourselves in, we do not have a pantheon of Egyptian (or Roman) Gods to pacify.
MATURE MIND CHAPTER FOUR - MATURE INSIGHTS LOST
C/R H. A. Overstreet - W. W. NORTON Co. 1949/Reprint 1959
I
As we become familiar with the maturity concept, we find ourselves confronted by an old perplexity. The sound life as now described by psychologists and psychiatrists bears a strong resemblance to the sound life as long described by the greatest of our human seers and statesmen.
The vocabulary is new. The clinical materials are new. The explanations of human misbehavior are, in many respects, new. Yet the type of relationship to life that is recommended by these modern scientists is surprisingly familiar: it has been recommended before. Time and again, throughout the centuries of human experience, it has been recommended by individuals who have seen more than those around them of how cause and effect work in the mental, emotional, and social affairs of men. Why, then, with these saving insights long since declared, do we continue to create misery for ourselves and others? All the necessary truths have been spoken. Many of them, in fact, are part of our daily speech; are said with reverence in our moments of worship; are, on great occasions, delivered as axioms of wisdom. Why have they been so relatively powerless to shape our daily behavior? Why have they not saved us?
One of our American poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson, has written:
. . . we know the truth has been
…..Told over to the world a thousand times;-
…..But we have had no ears to listen yet
…..For more than fragments of it; we have heard
…..A murmur now and then, an echo here
…..And there . . -1
1 From "Captain Craig," in Collected Poems, p. 116. Copyright, 1902, by Edwin
This is what puzzles many of us: since we have long known the most inspired truths about human behavior and human relationships, why have we failed to put those truths into action?
Looked for in the light of our emergent psychological knowledge, the answer to our question stands clear: a mature truth told to immature minds ceases, in those minds, to be that same mature truth. Immature minds take from it only what immature minds can assimilate. In the end, even though they may give it lip-service and may raise institutions in its name, they turn the mature truth into an applied immaturity.
This fate of psychological depreciation has been the fate of all our greatest human truths.
Uttered by mature minds, and for the purpose of maturing minds, they have been received, for the most part, by less mature minds-and have thus been only partially comprehended. Being only partially comprehended, they have found expression in ways that have perpetuated as much misunderstanding as understanding, as much error as truth.
Every great insight, we have heard it said, loses much of its greatness when it is institutionalized. One reason for this- perhaps the chief reason- is that the original insight becomes channeled to the human race through less mature people than those who first uttered it.
The followers are less than the masters. The idea of human brotherhood, for example, which
Jesus of Nazareth expressed with a superb passion, has become channeled through a multitude of followers so much less mature than he was that they have not actually known what he was talking about even when they have repeated his words. Thus an insight that might have saved the world has become largely a verbalism.
Brooks Adams coined the phrase, "the degradation of the democratic dogma." We might, in similar fashion, describe what has happened to great insights throughout history as the degradation of truth by minds too immature to understand it and put it into mature practice.
It is no new discovery that children only partially grasp most of what their parents try to tell them. Not at the first hearing nor at the tenth hearing do they fully understand what is said to them about the reasons for a certain rule of behavior, about the meaning of fairness and honesty and kindness, about the way in which human beings are linked together in destiny. Their ears may take in the words, and their tongues may learn to repeat them; but only as they themselves mature can they know with their whole make-up what the words really signify.
The limitations of the child-mind in the child-body are an old story. But only as we have come to know something about the problems of psychological growth have we been in a position to realize that similar limits are set to the reception of truth where childish outlooks and emotions are housed in an adult body. If there never yet have been "enough mature people in the right places," one of the places where there have never been enough of them has been on the receiving end of great truths. Because there have never been enough mature people to hear truth where it has been spoken, even the greatest of our truths have been in large measure impotent.
Our insight into arrested development invites us, therefore, to a new appraisal of such significant insights as have come into human history. For now we have a way of doing justice to the greatness of what has been great, while, at the same time, we understand the failure of such greatness to effect our redemption from littleness.
II
A number of saving insights have been brought into the world without any of them saving the world. The first of them was the novel idea of One God. The psychological drama of this idea has been well suggested by Solomon Goldman, in his monumental study of the Old Testament:
[The Bible] had its beginnings in the tales of a bold skeptic of whom it was recounted that, having rejected the beliefs universally adhered to in his day, he set out to transform the face of the earth.
How he came by his skepticism or new faith is a question easier asked than answered ... Of this much we are certain: once, in the ancient world, there lived a Jew, or one whom the Jews came to regard and claim as their own, who, repelled by idolatrous creeds and pagan practices, groped his way to a glimpse of the One God, perfect in all perfection.2
2 Solomon Goldman, The Book of Books, p. ix.
Here was a first essential human insight. As long as the belief in many gods prevailed--which was tantamount to a belief in many conflicting sources of truth--man could never free his mind from confusion. He could find no basis for consistent thought, no criterion for ethical evaluation, no ground for unity of judgment. Confronted by a multitude of gods, each claiming supremacy, and each clashing with others, man would continue to live in a world of mental, moral, and spiritual chaos.
That bold skeptic, whoever he was, brought a liberating insight: Truth is one because the
Source of truth is one.
Now watch what happened to this great insight-again, as reported by Dr. Goldman:
The people responded readily and agreed to do and obey. It resolved never again to be like
unto the nations-but could not abandon their ways. It accepted the Eternal as God-but upon every hill and under every green tree it erected altars to wood and stone. It urged that man was God's image-but it would not abandon slavery ... It longed for justice . . . but, fond of bribes, it neither judged the orphan nor did it plead the cause of the widow. It looked forward to peace but periodically became enmeshed in the web of imperialistic ambitions of
This story of a people's noble belief and ignoble backslidings; of its inspiring faith and its failure to live up to that faith; of its spiritual triumph and unspiritual self-defeats is the story of immature men incapable of grasping the fullness of the truth that had been offered to them. It is the story that has been acted out in thousandfold ways through the ages and far beyond the limits of that small tribe.
Nothing is more obvious than the almost universal degradation of the idea of the One God. In many cases, the Eternal One-the source of all truth-has been made into a jealous God, competing with other gods for man's favor; a whimful creature made in man's image; an angry old man, irritable in all-power, rather than serene in all-wisdom. In other cases, the One God has been made, not into an example of what man should reasonably grow toward, as he fulfills his powers, but into a mystery beyond man's comprehension-a mystery to paralyze man's mind. In yet other cases, the One God has been made into a tribal or national possession-a rallying point for nations in their wars with other nations.
Almost never in the thousands of years since this insight first came into the world has its original splendor been comprehended: the splendor of a reality without self-contradiction, one that can be understood and that responds to understanding; the splendor of a world not whimful, not broken up into clashing oppositions, but one that waits to reveal itself whole to the searching mind.
What is of particular moment to us, here, is not simply that man has failed fully to understand and act out the concept of One God, but that he has failed in ways characteristic of immaturity.
His shortcomings in relation to this great insight do not so much mark him as a creature of evil, or of factual ignorance, as they suggest his being a creature who has habitually grown into adult stature and status without becoming mentally, emotionally, and socially mature.
In a home where children are getting their orientation toward life there may be one father in two entirely different senses of that term. There may be one father in the sense that there is a self-consistent directive influence - a person who himself does what he expects others to do; a person whose responses can be relied upon from day to day; a person who is the same person in relation to all the different children, not strict with one and indulgent of another. Or there may be one father in the sense that there is one person within the family group whose authority can never be questioned; whose whim is law; whose fluctuating moods create a kind of domestic weather to which all other individuals must adjust; who gives and withholds favors as he happens to feel like giving or withholding them; who plays favorites if he wants to do so, because he is above the law; and for whom the arch crime that a child could commit would be to grow into the kind of independence that would make him show a mind of his own and rebel against his father's authority.
Where there is one father in this latter sense, there is, we have come to know, almost a guarantee that the children will grow up without becoming fully mature. Even in their adulthood, they will have no genius for equality. Whether they become irrationally rebellious or irrationally submissive, the strongest force in their lives will be, not their own productive urge to life, but their relationship to authority. Most of them, in all likelihood, will become people who look up to those in power and, within their own limited areas of authority, try to imitate such power. They will be emotionally unstable, emotionally dependent, and, like children, inclined to alternate between a fear-ridden reverence in the presence of their chosen authority and a belligerent, false courage in the presence of other grown-up children: "My father can lick your father with one hand tied behind his back!"
Presented with the sublime, self-consistent idea of One God, men whose own experience had kept them largely immature in their relationship to authority proceeded to convert that One God into a whimful, tribal tyrant-a tyrant before whom they must tremble; whose word they must obey whether or not it comported with rationality; but whom, by way of compensation, they could call their own, thereby claiming part of his strength as theirs.
That the One God is today still many gods-many different gods in many different possessive minds-is a measure of our continued immaturity. That the One God, instead of being a source of peace, has been a source of fratricidal war, indicates how far short we have fallen of being fully developed in our human powers.
III
For a second insight we are indebted to this same people: man is a creature of moral law.
The picture of Moses descending from
Because, in the days of the legendary Moses, men were still mostly immature, morality was first expressed as commands: Thou shalt not. But the moral insight of this legendary figure was so genuine that the commands he issued as from God came not as the whimful and arbitrary dictates of a tyrant, but rather as the voice of moral reason itself. The things that were commanded were right and necessary if men were to live together in peace and justice. To lie, steal, covet, commit adultery, dishonor the older members of the group, worship idols, and deny a day of rest-these things, practiced widely and with impunity, would make impossible the sort of social structure within which men could live with confidence. The "Thou shalt nots," in brief, were the revelation of what man, in his moral reason, would himself refuse to do if he truly knew himself.
The Decalogue remains for us the first great insight of our culture into man's moral nature.
There had been other "codes" before this one, but they had lacked the consistency of moral insight conveyed in the Decalogue. One and all, they had been class codes, making arbitrary discriminations between human beings; assigning more rights to some than to others. Thus, they were not yet moral because they failed of moral universality. They belonged to cultures that had not yet emerged from the stage of many gods and many different truths: one truth for the highborn, another for the lowborn. The Decalogue was the first statement of the oneness of all who are human: oneness in rights and oneness in obligations.
But here again the story repeats itself: the story of a great truth brought down to the level of immaturity. What immature minds have done to the Decalogue has been, first of all, to turn it from a series of universal principles into a series of taboos. This has notoriously happened in the case of Sabbath observance. The deep reason for a time of rest is obvious. The fact that this time of rest must be so regularly established that it cannot be denied to any one- even the humblest worker-is likewise obvious. But time and again, the admonition to observe the Sabbath has been turned into the prohibition of even the most necessary and life-preserving work. By the time of Christ, for example, taboo had so far concealed the original purpose of the law that the priests found it necessary to reprimand him for curing a man's illness on the Sabbath day. Again, the observance of the Sabbath has divided people into those who tenaciously hold that God had appointed one certain day of the week and those who as tenaciously hold that he had appointed another.
Again, "Thou shalt not bear false witness" has been turned, among other things, into a taboo-ceremony in courts of law. The implication is that God may strike you dead if you bear false witness with your hand on the Bible-the further implication being that if you merely lie, without swearing on the Bible that you are telling the truth, you will be in no such danger.
What immature minds have done to the Decalogue has been, in the second place, to give it so narrow and literal an interpretation that it has been largely robbed of its power to encourage man toward moral maturity. "Thou shalt not steal" has been chiefly interpreted to mean that you must not overtly take what obviously belongs to somebody else. Most of the subtler forms of stealing, however-through the adulteration of goods, for example; through financial manipulations of the market; through imperialism-have been given other names than stealing and have been largely ignored.
The same has been true in the case of the admonitions against lying, killing, committing adultery, coveting. Arthur Hugh Clough, in his new Decalogue, has pointedly suggested how the narrow, literal interpretation of these moral commands has failed to reach the full-scale immoralities that are part of the going concern we call civilization:
‘Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition;
Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.’3
3 Arthur Hugh Clough, "The Latest Decalogue," from Poems.
We do not know how deeply the man known as Moses may have penetrated to the core of these moral laws; but we do know that through subsequent history immature minds have taken from them little more than their surface meanings. It still remains for the world to learn what the Ten Commandments really report about the essentials of human nature. Until the time of our greater maturing, the Decalogue will remain an ambiguous presence in our midst: on the one hand, a liberating revelation of the means by which men may live together with mutual confidence; on the other a set of taboos that have the power to control behaviors only within the most narrow and literal definitions, and that divide men along the lines of fanatical interpretations rather, than unite them in a common insight.
IV
Amos, the peasant-prophet, spoke ringing words:
Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink.
The Lord God hath sworn by his holiness, that lo, the days shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks.
Here, in the words of an angry man, we read another of the world's great insights: that there must be an end to special privilege and to the exploitation of the weak by the strong; that social justice must come; that the demand for such justice is not an arbitrary human demand, but so inherent in the structure of man's relationship to man that to flout it is to invite disaster.
In most of the ancient world-Egypt, Assyria,
"Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow," cried Isaiah. And Micah summed up the whole duty of man when he said, "He hath
shewed thee, O man, what is good . . . what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Here, then, was another great insight: man, by virtue of his status as a human being in the universe, is under obligation to consider his fellow man and treat him well-the fellow man who is poor no less than the one who is rich; the helpless no less than the powerful.
This insight required more of the individual than did the "Thou shalt nots" of the Decalogue.
It required a live imagination about other people: the sort of empathic imagination that is still only a potential in the child and that can come to its fullness only as the child matures. The power to feel another's hurt and to want to heal that hurt, to sense another's need and to want to satisfy that need-this is the root of social justice. Without it, not even the strictest law can cause justice or mercy to triumph as a social force over the will to self-advantage.
Later, the full implication of this thought was seen by another peasant-prophet, Jesus of
Nazareth, when in a flash of inspiration, he laid down the rule basic to all moral life: "Do unto others as ye would that others do unto you." Jesus was here asking of man something far removed from the child's ego-absorption. He was asking the mature power to see others with the same honest concern with which one sees oneself.
And now again came the story of defeat. These prophets did not wholly succeed even with their own people-much less with the whole world. Their years of prophesying were spent in passionate and perilous denunciation of oppressors who would not listen. "Let judgment run down as the waters," cried Amos, "and righteousness as a mighty stream." But judgment did not run down as the waters nor righteousness as a mighty stream. The big oppressors and the little oppressors continued largely as before.
"Then I said, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without men, and the land be utterly desolate."
Social justice still goes largely unfulfilled. Today, however, we can perhaps speak a new word about the reason for its long unfulfillment. The simple fact is that social justice requires of man a fuller growth out of the egocentricity of childhood than he has yet achieved. Immature life is life in which imagination has not yet stretched to take in the wants and needs of other people. It is therefore moved chiefly by the vivid urgency of its own self-concern: self-concern in the most Immediate and limited sense of the word, not in the great sense of self-fulfillment. While our proper destiny as individuals is to grow beyond the egocentricity of childhood into the inclusive sociocentricity of the mature, most of us-and most of our forebears throughout history-have largely failed thus to grow up.
Today, we might well ask with the prophet Isaiah, "Lord, how long?" And we might well believe that the only alternative answer to the grim words, "Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant," is the psychological insight, "Until man grows into emotional and social maturity."
V
In some respects, the most audacious of all the great insights that have come into the world was the apparently absurd conviction of Jesus of Nazareth that men must love one another. "A new commandment I give unto you that ye love one another." We can easily imagine the bewilderment-even the ribald laughter-of his hearers. A world that was still very far from reaching the level of universal justice could scarcely rise to the level of universal love.
In reality, this "new commandment" was not an absurd and arbitrary rule laid upon man from the outside. It was, rather, the most profound insight into man's nature that had yet been achieved. Today every psychiatrist would affirm its truth. Man is sound in psychological health to the degree that he relates himself affirmatively to his fellow men. To hate and to fear is to be psychologically ill.
This is an illness; however, that still widely afflicts us. It is, in fact, the consuming illness of our time. "The only real threat to man," writes G. B. Chisholm, ". . . is man himself . . . the difficulty man has with himself is that he cannot use his highly developed intellect effectively because of his neurotic fears, his prejudices, his fanaticisms, his unreasoning hates, and equally unreasoning devotions; in fact, his failure to reach emotional maturity, or mental health." 4
4 Survey Graphic, October 1947.
With the audacity of logic larger and deeper than they were prepared to understand, the
Nazarene spoke to his fellow men: "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despite-fully use you. And to him that smiteth thee on one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take the coat also." This must have sounded like utter nonsense. It still sounds like nonsense to those who have not entered the new dimension of life conceived by the speaker: the dimension in which man affirms his fellow man.
This is what love means, whether spoken by Jesus or by the most modern of psychiatrists.
The love of a person implies, not the possession of that person, but the affirmation of that person. It means granting him, gladly, the full right to his unique humanhood. One does not truly love a person and yet seek to enslave him-by law or by bonds of dependence and possessiveness.5
Whenever we experience a genuine love, we are moved by this transforming experience toward a capacity for good will. Or we might put the matter inversely: if what we call love in relation to one person or to a few people creates in us no added capacity for good will toward many, then we may doubt that we have actually experienced love. In all likelihood, what we have experienced is some form of immature ego-aggrandizement or some equally immature will to make security for ourselves in a dangerous world by clinging to the role of the dependent.
Most people-and this applies as much to those who call themselves Christians as to others-have grown to adulthood without developing a generous, spontaneous capacity to love: to affirm others. Instead, they have grown to adulthood carrying with them fears and hostilities born of childhood failures and intensified by a continued effort to effect a childish, not a responsible and mature, relationship to life. By and large, they have been unable to apply the insight of Jesus of Nazareth because what they have called love, even in their most intimate associations, has not been love.
Today, continues Chisholm the psychiatrist, with sharp urgency:
The psychiatrist, Eric Fromm, has developed this idea with evocable effectiveness in his book, Man for Himself.
In order that the human race may survive on this planet, it is necessary that there should be enough people in enough places in the world who do not have to fight each other, who are not the kinds of people who will fight each other, and who are the kinds of people who will take effective measures whenever it is necessary to prevent other people's fighting.
In short, smiting each other on the cheek, and smiting back, actually does not work-however highly an immature world may rate it, as "common sense." It is common nonsense. Therefore, "a new commandment I give unto you"-to develop enough emotional maturity to take the initiative in breaking the vicious circle of smiting and being smitten. This is the commandment-laid upon man by his own social nature- that has, more than any other, been given lip-service and then disobeyed in action. It has been disobeyed because those who have given it lip-service have too often been too immature to act it out or even to understand its deeper implications. They have thought that it required them to deny their own nature, or, by some divine grace, to transcend that nature; they have not realized that what it asked was a mature fulfillment of that nature.
VI
To the Greeks we owe another insight: that man is a rational animal and that his fulfillment calls for the exercise of his reason. Reasoning is the principle that brings order: that turns confusion into clarity, formlessness into form. It selects, relates, and organizes; out of chaos it creates a universe.
Reason, however, the Greek thinkers saw, is a capacity in man, not necessarily an achievement. In most men it lies largely dormant while something else, which is far from reason, takes over. Socrates spent a lifetime revealing to his fellow Athenians that what they thought was the exercise of reason was actually the exercise of unreason. Therefore--as though, perversely, to prove themselves as unreasonable as he said they were--they put him to death.
The tale of this insight follows the pattern of the others. What the Greek thinkers saw was true: man is at his best when he exercises the power of reason. To the extent that he is unreasonable-a creature of impulse, of prejudice, of rationalizations-he passes judgments and performs actions that do not comport with the realities of his environment. Therefore, in a multitude of ways, he does what he ought not to have done and leaves undone what he ought to have done- thereby compounding friction rather than harmony, error rather than truth. The person who lives by unreason, in brief, fails to utilize the one power by which man is enabled to effect a partial escape from sheer subjectivity and to enter into the same objective world that other people inhabit; the one power by which he is enabled to escape from the immediate and to enter into the longer time-span which embraces past, present, and future in an over-all design of cause and effect; the one power by which he is enabled to shake off the merely customary in favor of the ideal. The insight was true- but there were few in
In
So again, as in other cases, mature insight suffered the fate visited upon it by variously immature minds. The power to see what-follows-from-what is, as we have already noted, a power than an infant does not possess and that a child possesses only in very limited degree. It is, in brief, a mature power. It depends upon the mental accumulation of data that it takes time and experience for a human being to collect. It depends, also, upon a mental orderliness and discipline that are the fruits of more sustained effort and observation than any child has yet put forth.
The power of reason is the power to see logical implications: of similarity and difference, of cause and effect, of relationships in time and space, of quantity and quality, of the subjective and the objective, of importance and unimportance. The human mind has, as one of its most unique potentials, the capacity to see such logical implications. If it develops healthily from infancy through childhood, and on into adulthood, this inborn capacity becomes a more and more adequately developed tool for use. But, as we have observed, this growth toward mental maturity is not automatic. It may be checked by emotional road-blocks. ' The individual, for example, will not develop his powers of reason in all their fullness if, by so doing, he would be forced to relinquish a position of emotional dependence that has become indispensable to him. Neither will he develop such powers if, by so doing, he would be forced to see his own brand of prestige and success as a petty thing, his own ambition as a ruthless will to dominate others at whatever cost to their welfare. In such instances, the individual does not reason; he rationalizes -thereby pretending to himself that he obeys the dictates of his mind when, in actuality, he obeys the dictates of his unconscious and of the unresolved emotional problems lodged in that unconscious. Anyone who threatens to expose his self-deception-to reveal him as he is, in all his irrationality-becomes, to his mind, an archenemy: a Socrates whose disturbing voice must be silenced. As most people come to their adulthood bringing with them various unconscious reasons for not wanting to be mature, most people have had only a reluctant ear for the voice of reason; and the gift of insight offered to man by the greatest of the Greeks, and by similar minds throughout the centuries, has been more often rejected than received.
VII
Another insight into man's nature was variously expressed during the Renaissance. In those years, men were beginning to be restive under old authority. They had been tied long enough to theological dogmas. They had been pigeonholed long enough in the status-cubicles provided for them by feudalism. A liberating conviction was growing among men that man must discover his own destiny-not in a distant heaven, but on earth-and that his destiny must express what he is as an individual, not what he is as a member of a certain social or economic class.
The Renaissance was an affirmation of individuality. It bade the human find within himself
the creative sources of his own fulfillment. In this respect, the Renaissance was a necessary and
salutary revolt against medieval authoritarianism. It was, we might say, man the adolescent emerging out of the long dependence of infancy and childhood. But it was not yet man the mature adult.
The insight that invited the human being to become acquainted with his individual earthly self and to make independent creative use of the powers he discovered within himself was a mature insight. But, received largely by adolescent minds, it was given at most an adolescent interpretation. When we say that most of the minds that welcomed it were adolescent rather than mature, we mean that they were ready to assert their independence but that they were, as yet, inexperienced in the uses, the triumphs, and the hazards of independence. Having made good, as it were, their rebellion against parental authority, they found themselves free-and unsure. With outside barriers to their maturing largely removed, they were still confronted by barriers within themselves : habits and attitudes which they had carried over from the time when they were living within a dogma-system and a status-system and which left them ill-equipped to fill with mature content their brave new assertion of individuality.
This accounts, on the one hand, for most of the extravagances, false starts, instabilities, and caprices of Renaissance creativity-for to be creative without a sure, directive purpose is to be undisciplined from the inside. It is, all too often, to become fixated at an adolescent level of self-awareness.
The fact that the demand for freedom from did not carry with it a clear sense of freedom for accounts, also, for the promptness and the terrible dogmatism with which many of the minds released from medievalism hurried to take refuge in a new absolute. The Reformation, as the religious phase of the Renaissance, invited man to become just independent enough to take the step from one orthodoxy into another. It emphatically did not invite him to become genuinely mature in his spiritual independence. Here again we note the adolescent character of the period. The adolescent who breaks away from parental authority is by no means ready to make his own choices and decisions. He is, on the contrary, one of the most rigid conformists that we know anything about. He takes the one independent step that carries him out of the family value-system only to adopt the rigidly intolerant value-system of his own age group. Later, if he is to become mature, he must take the confident additional steps that lead to independence of judgment.
VIII
The most recent of the great insights that have invited man to maturity came with the development of science. The scientific method is not commonly regarded as an insight into human nature; but this, in its essence, is what it is. It is a systematized expression of the fact that man is a species capable of transcending his own limitations of sense and of subjectivity.
The scientific insight, like the other great insights we have examined, came into a world unprepared for it. The fate suffered by Roger Bacon is a vivid revelation of the state of mind that existed when science was making its first hesitant entrance. To remind us of that fate, I quote here from Andrew D. White, in his History of the Warfare of Science and Theology:
The first great thinker . . . who persevered in a truly scientific path was Roger Bacon . . . He
wrought with power in many sciences, and his knowledge was sound and exact ... In his writings are found formulae for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bismuth. It is even claimed, with much appearance of justice, that he investigated the power of steam, and he seems *" to have very nearly reached some of the principal doctrines of modern chemistry. But it should be borne in mind that his method of investigation was even greater than its results. In an age when theological subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of scholar, he insisted on real reasoning and the aid of natural science by mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks. Few greater men have lived.
On this man came the brunt of the battle. The most conscientious men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, and they fought him steadily and bitterly . . . He was attacked and condemned mainly because he did not believe that philosophy had become complete, and that nothing more was to be learned . . .But this was not the worst; another theological idea was arrayed against him-the idea of Satanic intervention in science . . .
The most powerful protectors availed him little. His friend, Guy of Foulques, having in 1265 been made Pope under the name of Clement IV, shielded him for a time; but the fury of the enemy was too strong, and when he made ready to perform a few experiments before a small audience, we are told that all Oxford was in an uproar. It was believed that Satan was about to be let loose. Everywhere priests, monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming in the wind, and everywhere rose the cry, "Down with the magician!" and this cry, "Down with the magician!" resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall.6
6 Andrew D. White, History of the Warfare of Science and Theology, vol. 1. p. 385. Copyright by Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.,
This story does more than report an event. It pictures the immaturity of most minds at the time when science was making its entry and developing its method. It shows those minds to have been terrified by the unfamiliar. It shows them also to have been ready to strike out in irrational fear-bred rage at that which seemed a threat to their own security and prestige. It shows them, most of all, to have been trapped within a set of beliefs and superstitions that forbade their becoming mature: that made it heresy for them to use their minds except within limits approved by the "parental authority" of the church.
Yet science eventually made its way into the world. Then the second thing happened to prevent its insight from working its full effects: the results of science were taken over by the many; but the method of science was left to the few, although it was in the application of the method, not in the mere using of the results, that there lay the richest promise of man's maturing. We know the story now. The veriest fool can use the most brilliant results of scientific experiment. The criminal can use them in his moral immaturity and perversity. To pull the lever, to push the button, to turn the dial, to shift the gears-these acts require no mature knowledge, no sense of responsibility, no empathy, no philosophic sense of the whole. They can be performed in the service of childish egocentricity and ego-aggrandizement no less than in the service of mature sociocentricity.
Thus, while the inventions of science magnify the power of the immature no less than the power of the mature-and magnify it to a point where a few childish minds can destroy the world-the insight of science remains unrealized. Man is a creature capable of so transcending his own limitations of sense and of subjectivity as to gain ever more knowledge about his world and about himself in that world. This is the insight that invites man to maturity. Also, it is an insight still un-comprehended, still largely ignored.
IX
In the second half of the eighteenth century two dramatic insights burst upon the horizon.
They were expressed in two notable phrases: "created equal" and "consent of the governed." The first repudiated the ancient assumption that man is born into the world wearing a badge of class. The second affirmed the right of all men to have a voice in determining the political structure under which they are to live.
Not surprisingly the two notions were laughed to scorn by those conditioned to the acceptance of class superiority and government by force. Yet they prevailed with a sufficient strength to bring into existence a new kind of government and a new order of legal rights: democratic government and civil rights.
There is every indication that both insights are true. Class-tags are man-made conventions.
The psychological differences that exist among men recommend their being given opportunities suited to their individual needs; those differences do not recommend the stratification of the human race along the ancient lines of privilege, power, and nationality. They do not indicate that some are born to be slaves, while others are born to be free; that some are born to be governed, while others are born to govern.
The announcement of the democratic insight did not, however, guarantee its being understood and acted upon with mature responsibility and imagination. Even the creation of a society to embody the insight and to give it legal standing did not so guarantee. Nothing is more clear than that the destiny of the democratic insight depends upon the mental, emotional, and social maturity of the people who make up the democracy. Thus far, every democracy on earth has been only a partial success because it has had only a partially mature citizenship through which to be realized. The happiest thing, in fact, that can be said about democracy, from a psychological angle, is that it is one of the few systems that has ever been willing to risk a long period of confusion and mixed purposes for the sake of giving man a chance to grow up in mind and in responsibility as well as in body. Because it has been willing to run this risk, it may yet produce enough mature people to insure its own continuity and further growth.
X
As we look back upon these major truths that have come into the world, we realize what maturity might have done with them. This, too, we realize: if we could only find a way of making ourselves mature, we could pick up these lost parts of ourselves and make them come alive. There is no other way; for immaturity has the inevitable power to make immature application of even the most mature insights. As long as so many of us continue to be immature in our linkages with life-arrested at the level of infancy, childhood, or adolescence-so long will the great insights be powerless to save the world.
Here is the clue-insight through which all the other insights may, in the end, be brought to their realization; the clue-insight without which all the others are lost: the psychological growth of man must keep pace with his physical powers; every increase in power must be matched by an increase in understanding.
Psychology and psychiatry, as we have noted, are offering us a new standard by which we may come to a new self-awareness and, thereby, a new maturity. We have, so far in this book, tried to gain a working familiarity with that standard. In the chapters that follow we shall try to measure, by our psychological yardstick, the practices and institutions that play upon our lives and that encourage us to full development of our powers or to an arrested development.
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About twenty years later I read “I’m O.K., Your’re O.K.” One of the proofs of the Mature Mind is that it can keep on growing. From Wikipedia:
“I'm OK, You're OK (later republished as I'm OK- You're OK, ISBN 038000772X) by author Thomas Anthony Harris, is one of the most successful self-help books ever published. It was originally published in 1969 by Harper & Row, and gradually grew in popularity until it made the New York Times bestseller list in 1972, where it remained for almost two years. It is still in print, published by Harper-Collins, and is estimated to have sold over 15 million copies to date. It has been translated into over a dozen languages.
Dr. Harris was a long-time friend and associate of Dr. Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis, beginning when both men were among the few psychiatrists in the
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