Every healthy-minded person desires, of course, to have the approval of his fellows, and to be worthy of their approval. And this is no insignificant thing, for sharing, or universalizing, is of the essence of reason. But reason makes its characteristic slip; when individuals reciprocally approve one another, they forthwith generalize the basis of their judgment, whatever this basis is, and the generalization becomes a social fence with an inside and an outside. Our judgment may soundly represent a situation and a value, yet for this very reason we may fancy that we have reached the summit of a social mountain when we have merely come to a turn in the trail. The momentum of a gyroscope can be given, in fact, to practically any way of accommodating ourselves to one another. The assent that “was” then becomes an assent that “ought to be.” Reciprocal approvals are now funded and they become a vested interest of the stockholders. The stockholders, in the fashion of our latest corporations, do not even vote their stock--they merely draw dividends. Two results follow: First, the ethical perspective that is required by free and growing minds is lost. The trivialities of respectability, when we look at them from the outside (as in the satirical novel and drama), are amazing. I am reminded of an incident in a college. A member of a sorority, being asked why one of the students who had been “rushed” had not been initiated, replied, “Well, at our ‘rushing party’ we had squab on toast, and she ate the toast, evidently not knowing any better. So we didn’t elect her. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere, you know.” The reverse side to respectability’s over-sensitiveness to trifles is frequent insensibility to master-values, as the work of creative thinkers, artists, saviors of mankind. Such work does not bestow respectability. And not only is perspective lost; there supervenes a kind of blindness. Respectability means sanctioning conduct that is unfitted to new conditions that have now arrived, and condemning conduct that is. It means not seeing, or slurring over, or hushing up facts that could not stand the light of critical analysis. There is a self-excusing that produces a self-blinding that is worse for the world than straightforward badness. Respectability connotes the constricted mind, the involved and indirect mind, the self-deceived mind.