Moral Education; F. Manchester

2 Ibid., June 17, 1968, p. 68.

1968 .. MORAL EDUCATION: ENDS AND MEANS 653 establish the patterns, the mores, the standards, the moral fiber which is essential for free citi zens."3 Theologian, diplomat, aspirant to the Presidency of the United States: in the quoted words of each of these prominent men as regards one or another element in our current turmoil, there is included a call, specifically or in effect, for moral education. It seems probable, when more and more people trace to its source the ultimate cause of much of this turmoil, that this call will be increasingly heard and that it will have behind it increasing earnest ness and force. First, conviction of a need; then, consideration of how the need can best be met. Such would appear to be a natural sequence. In what follows, I assume that moral education is widely felt to be a major requirement of our time and venture some remarks on two topics relating to it: (1) What are we to understand by the phrase - what in short is the end that our moral education should have in view? and (2) What are the means by which we may en deavor to attain this end?

The end seemS plain and can be expressed in the simplest of words: it is to produce the man of char acter - the man whose actions can 3 Ibid., June 24, 1968, p. 53. be counted on, in any and all cir cumstances, to represent a high standard of conduct. Overcoming the Lower Self And the means? When we come to inquire into these, we soon realize that to get beyond vague generalities we must know the fundamental facts about man's moral nature. To the first thinkers onfhe subject the problem in volved must have seemed hope lessly complex and elusive - in deed well-nigh insoluble. Happily, the first thinkers did their work thousands of years ago, and what they and their many successors accomplished can, in its essentials, be readily summed up. The inner man is not one but two. There is the lower, the ordinary, self; and there is the higher, the extraor dinary, self. The lower self is the self of the elemental lusts, urges, instincts, passions, appetites, im pulses, desires-including all those we commonly associate with what we call the lower animals. Our reference to these animals, it may be noted, is sometimes both inac curate and unjust. "The beast that lies within us" - some such words I recall reading only the other day, where the allusion was probably to actions of a kind or degree that beasts never dreamed of. A beast has desires, but desires that are definite and limited; when these 654 THE FREEMAN November are satisfied he is content until they again demand satisfaction.

Man has not merely animal de sires but aninlal desires that can be multiplied a hundredfold - and often are so multiplied - by a boundless imagination. The higher self, on the other hand, is the self of the "noble cravings" as opposed to the "igno. ble cravings" of the lower self. (The quoted phrases are BuddHist.) Here is the seat of man's moral impulses, of all the self-denying virtues, of all aspiration to spirit ual excellence. Here sits the court which finally determines what con duct in given circumstances is just and right; and associated with it is its executive agent the conscience, whose responsibility it is to see, to the utmost extent of its power, that the decision arrived at is carried out, no matter how strong the opposition offered by the low er self. 4 When a man's higher self has complete dominion over his lower self, he is said to have achieved self-mastery. Achieving Self-Mastery We can now return to our man of character. It is he that we want our moral education to produce, 4 I should perhaps warn the reader that the preceding particularized and somewhat fanciful account of the role of conscience is the product, not of scholarship, but of introspection. He can test it in his own experience.

and now we are in a position to name specifically his primary quality. That is self-mastery - in at least a high degree. But why "in at least a high de gree"? Why not self-mastery ab solute? Is not self-mastery in all degrees an easy thing to attain? Most emphatically, it is not! What says the Christian Bible? - "He that is slow to anger is bet ter than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city" (Proverbs, 16 :32) ; and, in full corroboration of the saying, we read in the Buddhist Dhammapada (Chapter VIII Irving Babbitt translation): "If one man conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men, and if another conquers himself [that is to say, his lower self], he is the greatest of conquerors. One's own self conquered is better than the conquest of all other people; not even a god or a demigod or Mara with Brahma can change into defeat the victory of a man who has vanquished himself."

These words from the scriptures of two of the world's most famous and most widespread religions are not extravagant or idle words: they may be taken to mean ex actly what they say. The Buddhist passage praises the man who has conquered him self. If conquest is here taken to signify conquest only - that is, 1968 MORAL EDUCATION: ENDS AND MEANS 655 the act of overcoming, rejecting, denying the evil· impulses of the lower self, and no more - there would appear to be a degree of self-mastery superior to even this. To this higher degree Confucius says he attained - but, it will be noticed, though he doubtless was of all men one of those most pre disposed by nature to practice the moral life, it took him seventy years to do it! "At fifteen," he tells us, "my mind was bent on learning, At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I was free from delusions. At fifty, I understood the laws of Provi dence. At sixty, my ears were at tentive to the truth. At seventy, I could follow the promptings of my heart without overstepping the mean."5 At seventy, in other words, he had achieved his moral ideal, which was to observe in all his conduct "the mean"; but at this age he not only observed it, he found that in so doing he was fol lowing the "promptings" of his "heart." His regeneration was thus complete.

Two Kinds of Indolence But why the prodigious diffi culty the quotations imply? Why is it so very, very hard to master one's lower self? 5 Lionel Giles, The Sayings of Con fucius, The Wisdom of the East Series, p.83. The reason is to be sought in man's deep-seated proneness to in dolence - though here a major distinction must be made. There are two kinds of indolence: or.;. dinary indolence, one might call it, and extraordinary indolence. The first, we all know, is con1mon - whence the saying "every man is as lazy as he dares to be" - and may readily become a knotty prob lem in statesmanship. Roughly speaking, it is physical. The sec ond, on the other hand, is spirit ual: it is the indolence that keeps a man from working on himself to the end of regulating, control ling, holding in check the expan sive sallies of his lower nature. The early Buddhists had a name for it - pamada. Of this all-im portant distinction probably no better illustration could possibly be found than in the character of Napoleon Bonaparte as this is viewed in Emerson's Representa ti've Men. I present two contrast ing groups of quotations: Napoleon "wrought for his crown. Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put out all his strength." - "He fought sixty bat tles. He had never enough." - "His achievement of business was im mense, and enlarges the known powers of man. There have been many working kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none 656 THE FREEMAN November who accomplished a tithe of this man's performance."

Napoleon "proposed to himself simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or scruple concern ing the means." - He "was sin gularly destitute of generous sen timents. The highest-placed indi vidual in the most cultivated age and population of the world, - he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. He is unj ust to his generals; egotistic and monopoliz ing; meanly stealing the credit of their great actions from Keller mann, from Bernadotte; intrigu ing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance from Paris, because the familiarity of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a boundless liar." - "To make a great noise is his favorite design." - "He would steal, slander , assassinate, drown and poison, as his interest dic tated. He had no generosity, but mere vulgar hatred; he was in tensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards ..."

But enough! In the first group, astonishing industry, initiative, drive - the very antithesis of or dinary indolence; in the second, an ego of egregious proportions, subject to no restraint - a spirit ual indolence, in short, that is monumental. Had Napoleon, in stead of conquering much of continental Europe, but conquered himself..- doubtless a gigantic un dertaking - how much better it would have been, not only for him and for countless other individ uals, but possibly also for all man kind! If, then, moral education is to produce the man of character, and the primary mark of such a man is self-mastery, it is clear that its task is indeed formidable and that all the means that can forward its accomplishment - every influence, every force, every power - should so far as possible be employed. Among the means available at least five can be distinguished: instruction, environment, example, discipline, habit. Though the five are distinguishable, they probably seldom, if ever, work separately; and all of them may, especially in the early period of life, work simultaneously and together.

Instruction Instruction, including counsel, warning, exhortation, persuasion, is, generally speaking, indispensa ble. People must sooner or later be told, and made to understand, what is right and what is wrong, what is just and what is unjust, and urged so to control their lower selves as to do the one and avoid doing the other. Obviously, such teaching should be given as early as possible to all children. (Are 1968 MORAL EDUCATION: ENDS AND MEANS 657 anything like all American chil dren getting it today? One won ders. May there not indeed be mil lions of them who have never re ceived it and who are therefore destitute of a mental basis for ac ceptable conduct?) But direct in culcation of morals is by no means for the young only. It has its place, or should have it, in all formal education, to the very end of a four-year college course; and impressive testimony to its im portance is a widespread practice of religion - the frequent expo sure of the devotee of nearly all ages to the reading of scriptures and the preaching of sermons.

Environment Environment unquestionably is a powerful force, and, in the ab stract at least, is no doubt gen erally recognized to be so, though it seems less certain that in prac tice the measures it suggests re ceive adequate attention. It is our environment that inevitably deter mines in large part the kinds of influence, including moral influ ence, to which we are daily sub jected. If a man is to be educated to self-mastery, it is therefore ob vious that he should be surrounded by social forces consistent with such an aim, not by social forces inimical to it. Unfortunately, in the practical world a man's en vironment may sometimes be beyond his own or anyone else's con trol. Where a favorable environ ment is not obtainable, it is plain that more than ordinary reliance must be placed on other means of moral education. Example Example, with the exception of habit, is probably the strongest and most effective of the five means I have listed. Precept, how ever eloquent, is no match for it.

"Example," Edmund Burke is quoted as saying, "is the school of mankind; it will learn at no other." Its importance scarcely needs elaboration, though I cannot resist mention of what is, so far as I know, the most imposing ap plication of the principle involved that has ever been made. The hu man tendency to imitate what it looks up to and admires is the very core of the Confucian phi losophy of the state. A single quo tation from one of the Five Class ics will suffice byway of illustra tion: A ruler "questioned Confucius on a point of government, saying: Ought not I to cut off the lawless in order to establish la,v and or der? What do you think? - Con fucius replied: Sir, what need is there of the death penalty in your system of government? If you showed a sincere desire to be good, your people would likewise be 658 THE FREEMAN November good. The virtue of the prince is like unto wind; that of the people, like unto grass. For it is the na ture of grass to bend when the wind blows upon it."G Example, though it can operate independently of environment - as when a "deprived" boy of the ghetto happens by chance to at tract the interest of a man of character who becomes for him a model - is closely related to it, and is likely to be the factor in any milieu that exerts the great est influence.

Discipline Discipline - the use of external pressure, physical if necessary, to mold conduct - is a means having to do chiefly, in the present con text, with the training of chil dren. That, within proper limits, it has its place in the moral edu cation of the young will be denied only, I think, by those to whom the doctrine of supine permissive ness has become less a mere doc trine than a saving gospel. It is surely desirable, even at the ex pense if need be of some slight disagreeableness, that children should be brought up "with some sense of the moral imperatives that they will confront in life, and with the sense that a real author ity does exist in the world." The gist of the matter is expressed 6 Ibid., p. 42. curtly - some might think a bit barbarously - in once familiar words: "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Habit Habit-for a reason that will la ter be apparent - I take up last of my five means. The topic is one fa miliar to us all ("That's a habit I must break myself of" ; "The young ster has frightfully bad habits"; "Unhappily, endless telephone conversations have become for her a daily habit") - and no wonder, if the Duke of Wellington was right in saying that "habit is ten times nature." Some twenty-three hundred years ago its importance was already fully recognized by Aristotle, who made it the very cause or condition of virtue. Moral excellence, he said, "is the result of habit or custom": "by doing just acts we become just, and by doing acts of temperance and courage we become temperate and courageous" ; "acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind."7 With the young he would take no chances: it "is clear," he said, "that in education habit must go before reason ..."8 In other words, to give the re mark a moral application, we should not wait till children are 7 The Nicomachean Ethics (Peters translation), Book II.

8 Politics (Jowett translation), 1338b.

1968 MORAL EDUCATION: ENDS AND MEANS 659 old enough to exercise their inde pendent judgment before instil ling in them good habits, since in the interim they may have become the victims of bad ones. If anyone cares to realize (or realize afresh), in terms of his physical brain, what it means to be the unfortunate victim of a bad habit (a possibly more or less terrifying experience) , or the fortunate beneficiary of a good one, he perhaps could not do bet ter than to consult Chapter IV of William James's The Principles of Psychology. If he did so, he would read that the phrase "our nervous system grows to the modes in wh'ich it has been exercised ex presses the philosophy of habit in a nutshell"; also "that any se quence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like cir cumstances, without any conscious ly formed purpose, or anticipa tion of results"; also that "It scarcely, indeed, admits of doubt that every state of ideational con sciousness which is either very strong or is habitually repeated leaves an organic impression on the cerebrum; in virtue of which that same state maybe reproduced at any future time, in respondence to a suggestion fitted to ex cite it."9 J ames begins the concluding paragraph of the chapter with these words of warning: The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which the ology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our charac ters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of hab its, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. Weare spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in J efferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the mole cules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Habit, we may now observe, bears a special relation, a kind of supplemental or terminal relation, 9 The second and third of the preced ing quotations are from an authority cited by James; and the italicized words in the first he attributes to the same source.