Ethics -- Fiction; Religion and sociology -- Fiction; Upper class families -- Fiction
It was unfortunate, he went on, but true, that the vast majority of
people of voting age in the United States to-day who thought they had
been educated were under the obligation to reeducate themselves. He
suggested, whimsically, a vacation school for Congress and all
legislative bodies as a starter. Until the fact of the utter inadequacy
of the old education were faced, there was little or no hope of solving
the problems that harassed us. One thing was certain--that they couldn't
be solved by a rule-of-thumb morality. Coincident with the appearance of
these new and mighty problems, perhaps in response to them, a new and
saner view of life itself was being developed by the world's thinkers,
new sciences were being evolved, correlated sciences; a psychology making
a truer analysis of human motives, impulses, of human possibilities; an
economics and a theory of government that took account of this
psychology, and of the vast changes applied science had made in
production and distribution. We lived in a new world, which we sought to
ignore; and the new education, the new viewpoint was in truth nothing but
religion made practical. It had never been thought practical before. The
motive that compelled men to work for humanity in science, in medicine,
in art--yes, and in business, if we took the right view of it, was the
religious motive. The application of religion was to-day extending from
the individual to society. No religion that did not fill the needs of
both was a true religion.
This meant the development of a new culture, one to be founded on the
American tradition of equality of opportunity. But culture was not a weed
that grew overnight; it was a leaven that spread slowly and painfully,
first inoculating a few who suffered and often died for it, that it might
gradually affect the many. The spread of culture implied the recognition
of leadership: democratic leadership, but still leadership. Leadership,
and the wisdom it implied, did not reside in the people, but in the
leaders who sprang from the people and interpreted their needs and
longings.... He went on to discuss a part of the programme of the
Citizens Union....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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