Kitabı oku: «The home: its work and influence», sayfa 8
IX
DOMESTIC ETHICS
The relation of the home to ethics is so vital, so intimate, so extensive, as to call for the utmost care and patience in its study.
The "domestic virtues" are well known to us, and well loved. We have a general conviction that all our virtues as well as charity begin at home; that the ethical progress of man is a steady stream flowing out of the home, and as far as we compare one virtue with another, we assume the domestic virtues to be the best.
In half the race we ask nothing but the domestic virtues; in the other half we look for something further; but consider such civic and social virtues as appear to be offshoots of the domestic. We call the home "the cradle of all the virtues," and never imagine for a moment that it can cradle anything else – in the line of ethics.
Now let us make a careful examination of this field; first establishing a standard of human conduct and character, and then studying the relation of the home to that standard. The same consideration referred to in previous chapters is here most urgently pressed upon the reader: that all the qualities found in the home do not necessarily originate there. As a race rises and improves, its improvement appears in the home, as elsewhere. But that improvement is in itself due to varying conditions. The diffusion of intelligence following the discovery of the art of printing lifted the general average mind, and so lifted the home as well as other departments of life. But that increase of intelligence did not originate in home life, and is in no way due to its influence.
The sense of human liberty which spread rapidly among us in the early years of the settlement of this country, following, as it did, the splendid dash for religious liberty which brought so many of our ancestors here, has borne fruit in our home life. We have more freedom in the family relation than is found in older forms of government, but this larger freedom did not originate in the home and is in no way to be accredited to it.
Home-life, as such, does in itself tend to produce certain ethical qualities; qualities not produced, or not in any such degree, by other fields of life. Constant association with helpless infancy develops a generous care and kindness – that is, it does so when the helpless infants are one's own. The managers of foundling and orphan asylums do not seem always to be so affected. Constant association with the inevitable errors and mistakes of childhood develops patience and sympathy, or tends to do so. There are qualities brought out in home life which extend their influence into the life of the world. The young man or woman who has had good home influence shows that advantage all through life. But there are also qualities brought out in the world's life apart from the home; and the man or woman affected by these shows them in the home life. We find in our homes the gathered flowers of civilisation, of Christianity, of progress in general; and unconsciously accredit the homes with the production of these beautiful results – quite erroneously.
The influence of religion, as we all know when we stop to think of it, has done much more for us than the influence of the home. The Canaanites had homes – yet gave their children to Moloch. The demand of the idol had more power than the appeal of the child. The Hindoos have homes, yet give their babies to the water, their widows to the fire.
Besides religion there are many other influences which affect human character and conduct; the influences of our government, our education, our business. We are seeking here to point out precisely what ethical qualities are developed by home life, good or bad; and to show further that the present condition of the home is not final, nor vitally essential. We may so change the conditions of home life as to retain all that modifies character for good, and to discard all that modifies it for evil.
The home as a permanent institution in society, if rightly placed and understood, works for good. The home in its non-essential conditions, if wrongly placed in our scheme of thought, if misunderstood, if out of proportion and loaded with anachronisms, works evil. In the complex group of qualities which make up the human character to-day, for good and ill, many influences are traceable; and we wish here to disentangle from among them some lines of influence, and show what place is held by the home in making us what we are and what we wish to be.
What is the preferred type of excellence in humanity according to our social instincts and to the measure of history? We began as savages, and the savage standard of ethics is easily grasped; we have progressed a long way beyond that savage standard; but ours is still well within the reach of common understanding. Without seeking for careful sequence let us enumerate our principal human virtues:
Love; with derivatives of kindness, sympathy, courtesy, etc. Truth; with honesty, accuracy, etc. Courage; connects with strength and wisdom. Justice; with a right humility. Self-control; with endurance, patience, and again with courtesy; also with temperance and chastity. Honour; a high, inflexible standard of various virtues.
These are arbitrary general types, but do fairly enough for this study. A human being possessed of these in high degree we should call "good." They all combine well with one another, and have many derivatives, some of which are above noted. Their common opposites are as easily given:
Hate; unkindness, coldness, rudeness. Falsehood; lying, dishonesty, inaccuracy. Cowardice; connects with weakness and ignorance. Injustice; this allows pride – rests on ignorance. Self-indulgence; followed by intemperance, unchastity, impatience, and other vices. Dishonour; meaning a low standard of virtues in general.
Man the savage had of these courage, in some lines; endurance and patience, in some lines; civilised man surpasses him in these, and has developed all the others. What are the conditions which have brought forth this degree of virtue in us, and how does the home rank among those conditions?
Let us first do it full justice. Mother-love is the foundation and permanent force of home life; and, mother-love is, indeed, the parent of all the love we know. Altruism was born of babyhood. The continued existence of the child – of a succession of children; the permanent presence of helplessness and its irresistible demands for care; this forced us into a widening of the sympathies, a deepening of sensitiveness to others' needs; this laid the foundations of human love. In this sense, the home is the cradle of one of our very greatest virtues. Love began with the mother; but it should not stop with her. "Mother-love" is precisely limited to its own children.
Few, indeed, are the mothers who love other women's children. As "mother" is a synonym for all kindness, so "stepmother" is a synonym for all unkindness. Folklore and fairy-tale indicate old fact. Infant helplessness and orphan need are not only what appeals to the mother – it is most the blood-tie, the physical relation.
Civilisation and Christianity teach us to care for "the child," motherhood stops at "my child."
Still, in the home we do find the nursery of all the lines of family affection, parental, filial, fraternal, and these are good. Hearts able to love ten could more easily take in twenty; the love of one's own parents spread to our present care for the aged; the power of loving grew, and, as soon as it overstepped the limits of the home, it grew more rapidly. We have learned to love our neighbours – if not as ourselves, at least, better than strangers. We have learned to love our fellow-citizens, fellow-craftsmen, fellow-countrymen. To-day the first thrills of international good-will are stealing across the world – and we are extending our sympathy even to the animals.
All this beautiful growth of love began at home; but the influence of the home, as it now exists upon the growth, is not so wholly gratifying. The love that we call human, the love of one another, the love Christ teaches us, is extra-domestic. We are not told, "Inasmuch as you have done it to your own families you have done it unto me." We are not exhorted to an ever-increasing intensity of devotion to our own blood-relations.
Both the teaching of our religion and the tendency of social progress call for a larger love, and the home, in its position of arrested development, primitive industry, and crippled womanhood, tends rather to check that growth than to help it. The man's love for his family finds expression in his labour for other people – he serves society, and society provides for him and his dear ones; so good will spreads and knits; comradeship and fellow-feeling appear, friendship brings its pure height of affection; this is the natural line of development in the great social virtue, love.
But the woman, still expressing her love for her family in direct personal service, misses all that. The primitive father, to feed the child, went forth himself and killed some rabbit – and the primitive mother cooked it: love, in grade A. The modern father, to feed his child, takes his thousandth part in some complex industry, and receives his thousand-fold share of the complex products of others' industry, and so provides for the child far more richly than could the savage: love, in grade Z. But the modern mother – if we can call her so by courtesy – to feed her child still does nothing but cook for it, still loves in grade A; and the effect of that persistence of grade A is to retard the development of grade Z. Mother-love is the fountain of all our human affection; but mother-love, as limited by the home, does not have the range and efficacy proper to our time. The home, as at present maintained, checks the growth of love.
As to Truth. This is a distinctly modern virtue. It comes in slowly, following power and freedom. The weak lie, a small beast hides; the lion does not hide. The slave lies – and the courtier; the king does not lie – he does not need to.
The most truthful nations are the most powerful. The most truthful class is the most powerful. The more truthful sex is the more powerful. Weakness, helplessness, ignorance, dependence, these breed falsehood and evasion; and, in child, servant, and woman, the denizens of the home, we have to combat these tendencies. The standard of sincerity of the father may be taught the son; but the home is not the originator of that standard. In this, as in other virtues, gain made in quite other fields of growth is necessarily transmitted to the home; but fair analysis must discriminate between the effect of religion, of education, of new social demands, and the effect of the home as such.
Courage comes along two main lines – by exposure to danger, and by increase of strength. The home, in its very nature, is intended to shield from danger; it is in origin a hiding place, a shelter for the defenceless. Staying in it is in no way conducive to the growth of courage. Constant shelter, protection, and defence may breed gratitude – must breed cowardice. We expect timidity of "women and children" – the housemates. Yet courage is by no means a sex attribute. Every species of animal that shows courage shows it equally in male and female – or even more in mother than in father. "It is better to meet a she-bear robbed of her whelps than a fool in his folly." This dominant terror – the fool – is contrasted with the female bear – not the male. Belligerence, mere combativeness, is a masculine attribute; but courage is not.
The cowardice of women is a distinctly home product. It is born of weakness and ignorance; a weakness and an ignorance by no means essential feminine attributes, but strictly domestic attributes. Keep a man from birth wrapped in much cloth, shut away from sky and sun, wind and rain, continually exhausting his nervous energy by incessant activity in monotonous little things, and never developing his muscular strength and skill by suitable exercise of a large and varied nature, and he would be weak. Savage women are not weak. Peasant women are not weak. Fishwives are not weak. The home-bound woman is weak, as would be a home-bound man. Also, she is ignorant. Not, at least not nowadays, ignorant necessarily of books, but ignorant of general life.
It is this ignorance and this weakness which makes women cowards; cowards frank and unashamed; cowards accustomed to be petted and praised, to be called "true woman" because they scream at that arch-terror of the home – a mouse. This home-bred cowardice, so admired in women, is of necessity transmitted to their sons as well as daughters. It is laughed out of them and knocked out of them, but it is born into them, relentlessly, with every generation. As black mothers must alter the complexion of a race, so must coward mothers alter its character. Apart from fighting – where the natural combative sex-tendency often counts as courage – our men are not as brave as they would be if their mothers were braver. We need courage to-day as much as we ever needed it in our lives. Courage to think and speak the truth; courage to face convention and prejudice, ridicule and opposition. We need courage in men and women equally, to face the problems of the times; and we do not get that courage from the home.
The sense of Justice is one of the highest human attributes; one of the latest in appearance, one of the rarest and most precious. We love and honour justice; we seek in some main lines of life to enforce it, after a fashion; but many of our arrangements are still so palpably unjust that one would think the virtue was but dreamed of, as yet unborn. Justice follows equality and freedom. To apprehend it at all the mind must first perceive the equal, and then resent the unequal. We must get a sense of level, of balance, and then we notice a deflection. As a matter of social evolution our system of legal justice springs from the primitive market place, the disputes of equals, the calling in of a third party to adjudicate. The disputants know instinctively that an outsider can see the difficulty better than an insider. Slowly the arbiter was given more power, more scope; out of much experience came the crystallisation of law. "Justice!" was the cry of the lowest before the highest; and the greatest kings were honoured most for this great virtue.
The field for justice has widened as the state widened; it has reached out to all classes; its high exercise distinguishes the foremost nations of our times. Yet even in the teeth of the law-courts injustice is still common; in everyday life it is most patent.
We have made great progress in the sense of justice and fair play; yet we are still greatly lacking in it. What is the contribution of domestic ethics to this mighty virtue? In the home is neither freedom nor equality. There is ownership throughout; the dominant father, the more or less subservient mother, the utterly dependent child; and sometimes that still lower grade – the servant. Love is possible, love deep and reciprocal; loyalty is possible; gratitude is possible; kindness, to ruinous favouritism, is possible; unkindness, to all conspiracy, hate, and rebellion is possible; justice is not possible.
Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has never even been adopted there.
Justice is wholly social in its nature – extra-domestic – even anti-domestic. Just men may seek to do justly in their homes, but it is hard work. Intense, personal feeling, close ties of blood, are inimical to the exercise of justice. Do we expect the judge upon the bench to do justice, dispassionate, unswerving, on his own child – his own wife – in the dock? If he does, we hail him as more than mortal. Do we expect a common man – not a judge with all the training and experience of his place, but a plain man – to do justice to his own wife and his own child in the constant intimacy of the home? Do we expect the mother to do justice to the child when the child is the offender and the mother the offended? Where plaintiff, judge, and executioner are lodged in one person; where there is no third party – no spectators even – only absolute irresponsible power, why should we – how could we – expect justice! We don't. We do not even think of it. No child cries for "Justice!" to the deaf walls of the home – he never heard of it.
He gets love – endless love and indulgence. He gets anger and punishment with no court of appeal. He gets care – neglect – discourtesy – affection – indifference – cruelty – and sometimes wise and lovely training – but none of these are justice. The home, as such, in no way promotes justice; but, in its disproportionate and unbalanced position to-day, palpably perverts and prevents it.
Allied to justice, following upon large equality and recognition of others, comes that true estimate of one's self and one's own powers which is an unnamed virtue. "Humility" is not it – to undervalue and depreciate one's self may be the opposite of pride, but it is not a virtue. A just estimate is not humility. But call it humility for convenience' sake; and see how ill it flourishes at home. In that circumscribed horizon small things look large. There is no general measuring point, no healthy standard of comparison.
The passionate love of the wife, the mother, and equally of the husband, the father, makes all geese swans. The parents idealise their children; and the children, even more restricted by the home atmosphere —for they know no other– idealise the parents. This is sometimes to their advantage – often the other way. Constant study of near objects, with no distant horizon to rest and change the focus, makes us short-sighted; and, as we all know, the smallest object is large if you hold it near enough. Constant association with one's nearest and dearest necessarily tends to a disproportionate estimate of their values.
There is no perspective – cannot be – in these close quarters. The infant prodigy of talent, praised and petted, brings his production into the cold light of the market, under the myriad facets of the public eye, to the measurement of professional standards – and no most swift return to the home atmosphere can counterbalance the effect of that judgment day. A just estimate of one's self and one's work can only be attained by the widest and most impersonal comparison. The home estimate is essentially personal, essentially narrow. It sometimes errs in underrating a world-talent; but nine times out of ten it errs the other way – overrating a home-talent. Humility, in the sense of an honest and accurate estimate of one's self, is not a home-made product. A morbid modesty or an unfounded pride often is. The intense self-consciousness, the prominent and sensitive personality developed by home life, we are all familiar with in women.
The woman who has always been in close personal relation with someone, – daughter, sister, wife, mother, – and so loved, valued, held close, feels herself neglected and chilly when she comes into business relations. She feels personal neglect in the broad indifference of office or shop; and instantly seeks to establish personal relations with all about her. As a business woman she outgrows it in time. It is not a sex-quality, it is a home-quality; found in a boy brought up entirely at home as well as in a girl. It tends to a disproportionate estimate of self; it is a primitive quality, common to children and savages; it is not conducive to justice and true social adjustment.
Closely allied to this branch of character is the power of self-control. As an initial human virtue none lies deeper than this; and here the home has credit for much help in developing some of the earlier stages of this great faculty. Primitive man brought to his dawning human relation a long-descended, highly-developed Ego. He had been an individual animal "always and always," he had now to begin to be a social animal, a collective animal, to develop the social instincts and the social conduct in which lay further progress.
The training of the child shows us in little what history shows us in the large. What the well-bred child has to learn to make him a pleasing member of the family is self-control. To restrain and adjust one's self to one's society – that is the line of courtesy – the line of Christianity – the line of social evolution. The home life does indeed teach the beginning of self-control; but no more. As compared with the world, it represents unbridled license. "In company" one must wear so and so, talk so and so, do so and so, look so and so. To "feel at home" means relaxation of all this.
This is as it should be. The home is the place for personal relief and rest from the higher plane of social contact. But social contact is needed to develop social qualities, constant staying at home does not do it.
The man, accustomed to meet all sorts of people in many ways, has a far larger and easier adjustment. The woman, used only to the close contact of a few people in a few relations, as child, parent, servant, tradesman; or to the set code of "company manners," has no such healthy human plane of contact.
"I never was so treated in my life!" she complains – and she never was – at home. This limits the range of life, cuts off the widest channels of growth, overdevelops the few deep ones; and does not develop self-control. The dressing-gown-and-slippers home attitude is temporarily changed for that of "shopping," or "visiting," but the childish sensitiveness, the disproportionate personality, remain dominant.
A too continuous home atmosphere checks in the woman the valuable social faculties. It checks it in the man more insidiously, through his position of easy mastery over these dependents, wife, children, servants; and through the constant catering of the whole ménage to his special tastes. If each man had a private tailor shop in his back yard he would be far more whimsical and exacting in his personal taste in clothes. Every natural tendency to self-indulgence is steadily increased by the life service of an entire wife. This having one whole woman devoted to one's direct personal service is about as far from the cultivation of self-control as any process that could be devised.
The man loves the woman and serves her – but he serves her through his service of the world– and she serves him direct. He can fuss and dictate as to details, he can develop all manner of notions as to bacon, or toast, or griddle cakes; the whole cuisine is his, he supports it, it is meant to please him, and under its encompassing temptation he increases in girth and weight; but not in self-control. He may be a wise, temperate, judicious man, but the home, with its disproportionate attention to personal desires, does not make him so.
No clearer instance could be given of the effect of domestic ethics. In this one field may be shown the beneficent effects of the early home upon early man, the continued beneficent effects of what is essential in the home upon modern man; and the most evil effects of the domestic rudiments upon modern man. The differing ages and sexes held together by love, yet respecting one another's privacy, demand of one another precisely this power of self-control. Children together, with no adults, become boisterous and unruly; adults together, with no children, become out of sympathy with childhood; the sexes, separated, tend to injurious excesses; but the true home life checks excess, develops what is lacking, harmonises all.
What does the morbid, disproportioned, overgrown home life do? It tends to develop a domineering selfishness in man and a degrading abnegation in woman – or sometimes reverses this effect. The smooth, unconscious, all-absorbing greed which the unnaturally developed home of to-day produces in some women, is as evil a thing as life shows. Here is a human creature who has all her life been loved and cared for, sheltered, protected, defended; everything provided for her and nothing demanded of her except the exercise of her natural feminine functions, and some proficiency in the playground regulations of "society."
The degree of sublimated selfishness thus produced by home life is quite beyond the selfishness we so deplore in men. A man may be – often is – deplorably selfish in his home life; but he does not expect all the world to treat him with the same indulgence. He has to give as well as take in the broad, healthy, growing life of the world.
The woman has her home-life to make her selfish, and has no world life to offset it. Men are polite to her on account of her sex – not on account of any power, any achievement, any distinctive human value, but simply because she is a woman. Her guests are necessarily polite to her. Her hosts are necessarily polite to her, and so are her fellow-guests. Her servants are necessarily polite to her. Her children also; if they are not she feels herself abused, denied a right.
The home and its social tributaries steadily work to develop a limitless personal selfishness in which the healthy power of self-control is all unknown. One way or the other swings the pendulum; here the woman pours out her life in devotion to her husband and children; in which case she is developing selfishness in them with as much speed and efficacy as if she were their worst enemy; and here again the woman sits, plump and fair, in her padded cage, bedizening its walls with every decoration; covering her own body with costly and beautiful things; feeding herself, her family, her guests; running from meal to meal as if eating were really the main business of a human being. This is the extreme.
Our primitive scheme requires that the entire time of the woman-who-does-her-own-work shall be spent in ministering to the physical needs of her family; and in the small minority who have other women to do it for them, that she shall still have this ministry her main care – and shall have no others. It is this inordinate demand for the life and time of a whole woman to keep half a dozen people fed, cleaned, and waited on, which keeps up in us a degree of self-indulgence we should, by every step of social development, have long since outgrown.
The personal preparation of food by a loving wife and mother does not ensure right nourishment – that we have shown at length; but it does ensure that every human soul thus provided for shall give far too much thought to what it eats and drinks and wherewithal it shall be clothed. The yielding up of a woman's life to the service of these physical needs of mankind does not develop self-control, nor its noble line of ensuing virtues – temperance, chastity, courtesy, patience, endurance.
See the child growing up under this disproportionate attention; fussy, critical, capricious, always thinking of what he wants and how he wants it. The more his mother waits on him, the more she has to do so; he knows no better than to help himself to the offered life. See the husband, criticising the coffee and the steak; or so enjoying and praising them that the happy wife eagerly spends more hours in preparing more dishes that John will like. It is a pleasant, roseate atmosphere. All are happy in it. Why is it not good? Because it is a hotbed of self-indulgence. Because it constantly maintains a degree of personal devotion to one's appetites which would disappear under a system of living suited to our age.
Self-control is developed by true home life; by true family love. Family, love, unmodified by social relation, gives also the family feud; the unconscionably narrow pride of the clansman; the home life of the first century, arbitrarily maintained in the twentieth, gives us its constant contribution of first-century ethics.
As to honour – that delicate, deep-rooted, instinctive ethical sense; applied so rigidly to this, so little to that; showing so variously; "business honour," "military honour," "professional honour," "the honour of a gentleman" – what is the standard of honour in the home?
The only "honour" asked of the woman is chastity; quite a special sex-distinction, not as yet demanded in any great degree of the man.
If the home develops chastity, it seems to discriminate sharply in its preferred exponent. But apart from that virtue, what sense of honour do we find in the home-bound woman? Is it to keep her word inflexibly? A woman's privilege is to change her mind. Is it to spare the weaker? Would that some dream of this high grace could stand between the angry woman and the defenceless child. Is it to respect privacy, to scorn eavesdropping, to regard the letter of another person as inviolate?
The standard of honour in the home is not that of "an officer and a gentleman." The things a decent and well-educated woman will sometimes do to her own children, do cheerfully and unblushingly, are flatly dishonourable; but she does not even know it. And the things she does outside the home, with only her home-bred sense of honour to guide her, are equally significant. To slip in front of others who are standing in line; to make engagements and break them; to even engage rooms and board, and then change her plans without letting the other party know; thus entailing absolute money loss to a perfectly innocent person, without a qualm; this is frequently done by women with a high standard of chastity; but no other sense of honour whatever.
The home is the cradle of all the virtues, but we are in a stage of social development where we need virtues beyond the cradle size. The virtues begun at home need to come out and grow in the world as men need to do – and as woman need to do, but do not know it. The ethics of the home are good in degree. The ethics of human life are far larger and more complex.
Our moral growth is to-day limited most seriously by the persistent maintenance in half the world of a primitive standard of domestic ethics.
