Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychologyDewey, John
Philosophy
Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
Dewey, John
Habit; Social psychology
But no matter how much men in authority have turned moral rules into an
agency of class supremacy, any theory which attributes the origin of
rule to deliberate design is false. To take advantage of conditions
after they have come into existence is one thing; to create them for the
sake of an advantage to accrue is quite another thing. We must go back
to the bare fact of social division into superior and inferior. To say
that accident produced social conditions is to perceive they were not
produced by intelligence. Lack of understanding of human nature is the
primary cause of disregard for it. Lack of insight always ends in
despising or else unreasoned admiration. When men had no scientific
knowledge of physical nature they either passively submitted to it or
sought to control it magically. What cannot be understood cannot be
managed intelligently. It has to be forced into subjection from without.
The opaqueness of human nature to reason is equivalent to a belief in
its intrinsic irregularity. Hence a decline in the authority of social
oligarchy was accompanied by a rise of scientific interest in human
nature. This means that the make-up and working of human forces afford a
basis for moral ideas and ideals. Our science of human nature in
comparison with physical sciences is rudimentary, and morals which are
concerned with the health, efficiency and happiness of a development of
human nature are correspondingly elementary. These pages are a
discussion of some phases of the ethical change involved in positive
respect for human nature when the latter is associated with scientific
knowledge. We may anticipate the general nature of this change through
considering the evils which have resulted from severing morals from the
actualities of human physiology and psychology. There is a pathology of
goodness as well as of evil; that is, of that sort of goodness which is
nurtured by this separation. The badness of good people, for the most
part recorded only in fiction, is the revenge taken by human nature for
the injuries heaped upon it in the name of morality. In the first place,
morals cut off from positive roots in man's nature is bound to be mainly
negative. Practical emphasis falls upon avoidance, escape of evil, upon
not doing things, observing prohibitions. Negative morals assume as many
forms as there are types of temperament subject to it. Its commonest
form is the protective coloration of a neutral respectability, an
insipidity of character. For one man who thanks God that he is not as
other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other
men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention. Absence of social
blame is the usual mark of goodness for it shows that evil has been
avoided. Blame is most readily averted by being so much like everybody
else that one passes unnoticed. Conventional morality is a drab
morality, in which the only fatal thing is to be conspicuous. If there
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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