What the carrying out of such a programme would mean to mankind at large,
how profoundly it would modify those ideas about life, those standards of
human dignity and human rights, which are so fundamental and so pervasive
that they are taken for granted without express thought in every act and
every feeling of all normal men and women--this does not seem ever to
trouble the mind of the devotee of universal regulation. He sees the
possibility of effecting a certain definite and measurable improvement;
that the means by which this is accomplished must fatally impair those
elemental conceptions of human life whose value transcends all
measurement, he has not the insight or the imagination to recognize. The
distinctions of social class, of wealth, of public honor, leave untouched
the equality of men in the fundamentals of human dignity. They do not go
to the vitals of self-respect; they do not interfere with a man's sense of
what is due to him, and what is due from him, in the primary relations of
life. If nature has been unkind to him in his physical or mental
endowments, he does not therefore feel in the least disqualified, as
regards his family, his friends, his neighbors, the stranger with whom he
chances to come into contact, from receiving the same kind of
consideration, in the essentials of human intercourse, that is accorded to
those who are more fortunate; nor does he feel in any respect absolved
from the duty of playing the full part of a man. Under the regime of
medical classification--and the "mental hygiene" programme can mean
nothing less than that--all this would disappear. Some men would be men,
others would be something less. It is true that, so far as regards the
imbecile, the insane, and the criminal, such a state of things obtains as
it is; but this stands wholly apart from the general life of the race, and
has no influence whatever on the habitual feelings and experiences of
human beings. The normal life of mankind is shot through and through with
the idea that a man's a man; all that is highest in feeling and conduct is
closely bound up with it. Lessen its sway over our feelings and thoughts
and instincts, and how much benefit in the shape of "preventing Czolgoszes
and Schranks" would be required to compensate for the loss in nobleness,
in depth, which human life would suffer?
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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