Where Are We Going?

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THE idea of building up a symmetrical human character is very pretty. It is just possible, however, that American educators are in danger of saying too much on the subject.

Symmetry is perfection, perfection in the individual implies uniformity in the multitude, and uniformity is not a pleasant thing to look forward to as the goal of human nature. Is the American type of character varied enough to bear safely the assimilative process which is now going on at a rapid rate ? Owing to the beneficent defects of educational methods in the past, there was always room for the incipient man and woman to do a large part in their own training. But the world is getting beyond that. The professional teaching force of the country has already taken the place of the army of parents to an extent only rivaled by the clerical body of the Middle Ages. The parents are simply providing the raw material, the American abecedarian, and the teachers are converting this into the finished product, the American adult person, with little aid or interference except from the laws of growth. The processes by which this work is done become more uniform throughout the nation from year to year. If the total result of our combined efforts is perfect and splendid, we share the glory of it. But the glory of the individual man lies in his achievement of some task which nobody else can do. It is his particular variation from ideal manhood that makes him valuable, not his likeness to his fellows or to a common model.

The only obstacle in the way of the present tendency toward uniformity is the inborn uniqueness of each living creature. But nobody knows how much of an obstacle that really is. No serious universal effort has ever before been made to surmount it. There have indeed been efforts to minimize individuality for the sake of some social, religious, or political ideal. Yet these all failed, unless, by way of exception, China is to be considered a social, political, and religious success. Now the unique quality of separate minds is to be attacked systematically. By this new method millions of living creatures are to be subjected to a single evolutionary process. The coming generation will necessarily be more uniform than the one which now exists. The next must be more uniform still, with the added condition that then all the agents of development, the teachers, will have been subjected to the same treatment. In five or six generations everything that can be done to defeat individual variation will be done.

The affair will then wear a very different aspect from any it has shown in the past. Hitherto the experience of human life has tended to widen the minute variation which evolution presupposes in the realm of nature. But the coming experiment is to take away every artificial enhancement of the germinal difference between man and man. If, as we understand Darwin’s hypothesis, this minute variability is a necessary condition of life, there will still remain something, like the little bone of rabbinical lore, which uniformity cannot destroy. With that, humanity may begin over again the process of differentiation which it is now trying to reverse. If Weismann is right, and variability is itself a result of evolution, then it can be done away with, and humanity may reach an incoherent homogeneity such as Herbert Spencer never anticipated. Suppose, in addition to this, that we impress our ideas on the rest of the world with such force that all civilization becomes American, and our pluperfect system of education, so immensely more thoroughgoing than Patrick’s machine for taking in old witches and grinding out young fairies, should become universal.

Is it not evident that in the course of a century or two nature will be defeated ? Every citizen of the United States of the Earth will be just like every other citizen, and all will be so monotonously satisfactory that even the beatified saints will regret their predicted millennium. Then ho for Diogenes and his lantern to look for a man, a fallible, defective, imperfectly developed, one-sided man !