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EDITOR's
NOTE:
With
this issue we celebrate the words and deeds of Jane Addams, social reformer,
peace activist, suffragist, sociologist, writer, and thinker.
Most
associate Jane Addams with Hull House in Chicago. It was at its founding a great work of
charity devoted to helping the poor of that city in 1889, and Addams was just 29. Although Hull House became a testament
to her activities as a social reformer, she was linked by heart and soul to many
other activities essential to the betterment of many lives.
During the rest of her life Addams worked
tirelessly to realize her vision of
a more equitable society by helping to educate the poor and avail them of new
opportunities for work, as well as build the
edifices of many other organizations, some of which still endure; she
founded previously unheard of entities, like the Juvenile
Protective Association, a precursor of Child Welfare; she was a
founding member of the NAACP ( National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People ); and an organizer of the National
American Woman Suffrage Association. For her efforts associated with the
founding of the Women’s Peace Party and the International Congress of
Women she was expelled as a member of the Daughters of the American
Revolution.
Jane
Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace
Prize.
Democracy and Social
Ethics
by
Jane Addams
It
is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another
word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation
have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes
meaningless.
Certain
forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community
almost automatic. It is as easy for most of us to keep from stealing our dinners
as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much voluntary morality involved
in one process as in the other. To steal would be for us to fall sadly below the
standard of habit and expectation which makes virtue easy. In the same way we
have been carefully reared to a sense of family obligation, to be kindly and
considerate to the members of our own households, and to feel responsible for
their well-being. As the rules of conduct have become established in regard to
our self-development and our families, so they have been in regard to limited
circles of friends. If the fulfilment of these claims were all that a righteous
life required, the hunger and thirst would be stilled for many good men and
women, and the clew of right living would lie easily in their
hands.
But
we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and
current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral
achievements, and that it may not legitimately use a previous and less vigorous
test. The advanced test must indeed include that which has already been
attained; but if it includes no more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking
complacently that we have "arrived" when in reality we have not yet
started.
To
attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's
self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment,
is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.
It
is perhaps significant that a German critic has of late reminded us that the one
test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal of the Day of Judgment
offers, is the social test. The stern questions are not in regard to personal
and family relations, but did ye visit the poor, the criminal, the sick, and did
ye feed the
hungry?
All
about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard to their attitude
toward the social order itself; toward the dreary round of uninteresting work,
the pleasures narrowed down to those of appetite, the declining consciousness of
brain power, and the lack of mental food which characterizes the lot of the
large proportion of their fellow-citizens. These men and women have caught a
moral challenge raised by the exigencies of contemporaneous life; some are
bewildered, others who are denied the relief which sturdy action brings are even
seeking an escape, but all are increasingly anxious concerning their actual
relations to the basic organization of
society.
The
test which they would apply to their conduct is a social test. They fail to be
content with the fulfilment of their family and personal obligations, and find
themselves striving to respond to a new demand involving a social obligation;
they have become conscious of another requirement, and the contribution they
would make is toward a code of social ethics. The conception of life which they
hold has not yet expressed itself in social changes or legal enactment, but
rather in a mental attitude of maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence
between their consciences and their conduct. They desire both a clearer
definition of the code of morality adapted to present day demands and a part in
its fulfilment, both a creed and a practice of social morality. In the
perplexity of this intricate situation at least one thing is becoming clear: if
the latter day moral ideal is in reality that of a social morality, it is
inevitable that those who desire it must be brought in contact with the moral
experiences of the many in order to procure an adequate social
motive.
These
men and women have realized this and have disclosed the fact in their eagerness
for a wider acquaintance with and participation in the life about them. They
believe that experience gives the easy and trustworthy impulse toward right
action in the broad as well as in the narrow relations. We may indeed imagine
many of them saying: "Cast our experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to
be animated by the larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family
life, not because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously,
because of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligation
naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepare ourselves for
the larger social duties." Such a demand is reasonable, for by our daily
experience we have discovered that we cannot mechanically hold up a moral
standard, then jump at it in rare moments of exhilaration when we have the
strength for it, but that even as the ideal itself must be a rational
development of life, so the strength to attain it must be secured from interest
in life itself. We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as
results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of
one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a
conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being
of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and
equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a
test of
faith.
We
are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a
sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must
turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens. To
follow the path of social morality results perforce in the temper if not the
practice of the democratic spirit, for it implies that diversified human
experience and resultant sympathy which are the foundation and guarantee of
Democracy.
There
are many indications that this conception of Democracy is growing among us. We
have come to have an enormous interest in human life as such, accompanied by
confidence in its essential soundness. We do not believe that genuine experience
can lead us astray any more than scientific data
can.
We
realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from
contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of
opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble,
for its improvement. Indeed, it is a consciousness of the illuminating and
dynamic value of this wider and more thorough human experience which explains in
no small degree that new curiosity regarding human life which has more of a
moral basis than an intellectual
one.
The
newspapers, in a frank reflection of popular demand, exhibit an omniverous
curiosity equally insistent upon the trivial and the important. They are perhaps
the most obvious manifestations of that desire to know, that "What is this?" and
"Why do you do that?" of the child. The first dawn of the social consciousness
takes this form, as the dawning intelligence of the child takes the form of
constant question and insatiate
curiosity.
Literature,
too, portrays an equally absorbing though better adjusted desire to know all
kinds of life. The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all
possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are
entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief
that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a
preparation for better social adjustment—for the remedying of social
ills.
Doubtless
one under the conviction of sin in regard to social ills finds a vague
consolation in reading about the lives of the poor, and derives a sense of
complicity in doing good. He likes to feel that he knows about social wrongs
even if he does not remedy them, and in a very genuine sense there is a
foundation for this
belief.
Partly
through this wide reading of human life, we find in ourselves a new affinity for
all men, which probably never existed in the world before. Evil itself does not
shock us as it once did, and we count only that man merciful in whom we
recognize an understanding of the criminal. We have learned as common knowledge
that much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of
imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.
Already there is a conviction that we are under a moral obligation in choosing
our experiences, since the result of those experiences must ultimately determine
our understanding of life. We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of
our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people
whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously
circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our
ethics.
We
can recall among the selfish people of our acquaintance at least one common
characteristic,—the conviction that they are different from other men and women,
that they need peculiar consideration because they are more sensitive or more
refined. Such people "refuse to be bound by any relation save the personally
luxurious ones of love and admiration, or the identity of political opinion, or
religious creed." We have learned to recognize them as selfish, although we
blame them not for the will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of
interest which deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and
we say that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow and
unprogressive
issues.
We
know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational and democratic
interest in life, and to give truth complete social expression is the endeavor
upon which we are entering. Thus the identification with the common lot which is
the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social
ethics. It is as though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human
experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not
carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and
jostle of the
crowd.
From
Democracy and Social Ethics, Ch 1
Norwood
Press, 1902.
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Posted March 17,
2008
URL:
www.thecitizenfsr.org
SM 2000-2011
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