The elements [of a dialogical relationship] are, first, a relation . . . between two persons, second, an event experienced by them in common, . . . and third, the fact that this one person, without forfeiting anything of the felt reality of his activity, at the same time lives through the common event from the standpoint of the other. 1. -- Martin Buber
The most satisfying and most complete example of ego transcendence, and certainly the most healthy from the point of view of avoiding illness of the character, is the throwing of oneself into a healthy love relationship. 2.
-- Abraham Maslow
The central task in both marriage enrichment and marriage growth counseling, is to help couples enhance their dialogical communication skills so they can nurture their love and resolve their conflicts constructively. What counts is the actual practice of new communication skills. And being coached by a counselor or group facilitator is the most efficient way to learn to use them.
What follows are communication and relationship-building tools which I have found useful in both couple counseling and marriage enrichment groups. The best way to learn to use them, and simultaneously to enhance your own communication skills, is to experience them. So, invite your spouse (or any close friend) to join you as you try them. There’s no "right" or "wrong" way of experiencing any of these methods. Your actual experience of them, however, affords your best opportunity to increase your ability to communicate. Improving communication with others begins by enhancing communication within ourselves. In the first two exercises have someone read the instructions, stopping as long as necessary at each slash (/) for you to do what has been suggested.
Strengthening Self-Awareness
Find a comfortable position; close your eyes to concentrate on your inner experience.!
Center down; become aware of your body in this moment.! Breathe deeply several times, letting your tension go out as you exhale./
Picture your inner space, your consciousness, as a room within your mind. What kind of room is it? How is it furnished? How does it feel inside your consciousness?!
If your room feels cramped, enlarge your inner space by pushing back the walls -- give your spirit more room.!
Stay with your awareness now as you experience the center from which you relate.!
Open your eyes and share your experience with your partner (or your group).!
Experiencing Inner Liberation
Developing a mutually liberating marriage depends, in part, on the degree to which we are free spirits. We project our feelings of trappedness or freedom onto our intimate relationships. This guided meditation focuses on inner liberation, and on our power to choose to be free within ourselves.
Get comfortable, close your eyes; center down, claiming your inner space.!
Picture yourself inside a closed box.!
Push on the sides to experience being boxed-in.!
Examine your box, looking for a way out.!
If you find a way, get out now.!
If you’re still in the box, invite whomever you need to help you out now.!
See yourself in .a beautiful spring meadow, enjoying its freedom and openness. Let yourself go!!
Be aware of differences between your feelings in the box and your feelings in the meadow.!
If you’re alone, invite someone to enjoy the meadow with you.!
What in your actual life is represented by the particular box and meadow which you created?!
Return in your thoughts to where you’re presently meeting, and share whatever you experienced with your spouse (or small group).!
What biblical themes come to your mind as you reflect on your box and meadow experience?!
Share these with each other.!
This meditation goes to the heart of growth counseling -- inner liberation leading to liberating relationships and ultimately to liberating institutions. I find I spend too much time in my box and not enough time in the inner freedom of my meadow. But this is my choice and I have the power to change it! How about you? Discuss this now.!
Listening Responsively
Learning to listen sensitively, staying on the other’s feeling wavelength, is a vital marital skill that can be strengthened by practice. Facing each other, one person simply states what he! she is feeling and experiencing right now. The partner listens carefully, and every few sentences, summarizes what was communicated both verbally and non-verbally, beginning with the words, "Do I hear you saying (or feeling). . . ?" Use no other questions or responses. Just try to understand the other’s inner world; let that person know you are trying to understand, and keep checking to see how accurate your understanding is. Do this now.!
Now reverse roles and let the other partner practice the responsive listening.!
In workshops, two couples can work together taking turns coaching each other in listening more effectively. In counseling, the procedure can be used like this: "John, would you tell your wife how you feel about this?" Then (after he does so):
"Mary, tell your husband what you heard him say, just to make sure you understand each other."
Affirming Our Strengths
Growth counseling helps couples become more aware of the assets in themselves and in their marriage. These methods are "hope-awakeners":
Affirming Our History
Think back and recall two of your happiest experiences together. Relive these briefly in your memory.!
Tell your spouse about your memory experiences. / Recall two difficult or bad times which you handled well; be aware of the strengths it took to cope constructively./
Share your memory trips, affirming your strengths from both the good times and the bad times.!
Giving Gifts
Be a gift giver -- tell your spouse all the things that you regard as his or her major assets, strengths, and attractive qualities./ The recipient should respond in terms of how those assets might be used more fully.!
Now, reverse the process. (In a small group each person takes a turn at receiving the "gifts" from the other members.) /
Sharing Strengths
Take turns (in couples or in small groups) sharing something that made you feel especially good about yourself during the past two weeks.!
Take turns sharing something that was heavy or painful to bear.!
Now discuss how you feel about sharing recent joys and pain with each other.!
Risking and Trusting
Here are some experiences for getting in touch with the trust/mistrust feelings so crucial in marriage:
Trust Jogging
Take turns leading each other for ten minutes each, with the one who is led being blindfolded; include at least two minutes of jogging.!
Discuss what you learned about trusting each other.!
Risking
Turn to your spouse and both talk gibberish (nonsense sounds) for one minute -- risk appearing foolish, stupid, not in control.!
Share your feelings about this.!
Tell your spouse two secrets that will make him/her feel good.!
Discuss why you had not risked telling these secrets before.!
Evaluating Our Working Values
Value conflicts often go unrecognized and create blocked growth and pain in many marriages! Understanding each other’s values, caring deeply about some of the same things and respecting the spouse’s right to differ on other things -- all help keep a marriage growing. Here are two exercises which can be used to help couples clarify and revise their values in two crucial areas in marriage:
Evaluating Our Time Priorities
Close your eyes and relax.!
Imagine you’ve just been told that you have a limited amount of time in your marriage before one of you dies. How do you feel about this?!
What changes will you make in your present schedule and life-style in order to use the remaining time for the most important things? After a few minutes, open your eyes and share your experience with your partner.!
If you experienced depressing or anxious feelings, these can be constructive pain -- the pain of facing your finitude. Facing the fact that all of us do have a limited amount of time can make our lives together more precious. This exercise has helped some couples decide to spend more time together and less on the treadmill.
Evaluating Our Money Priorities
Close your eyes. Imagine that you have received a windfall of $15,000, the only condition being that you must spend it within two weeks.!
Decide how you’ll spend it.!
Open your eyes and each of you jot down your list of expenditures, without comparing notes.!
Now, compare your list with that of your spouse, discussing your assumptions about what’s important -- the values which guided your decisions.!
Increasing Spiritual Intimacy
Continuing growth in the dimension of personal faith, in experiences of transcendence and in one’s sense of relatedness to God and creation, is important in both marriage counseling and enrichment. Spiritual enrichment can well be the integrating center of marriage enrichment programs. Here are some ways to help couples communicate and grow in this area:
Drawing Your Theology
Take a piece of paper and a box of crayons.!
Without planning what you’ll do, express your feelings about God (or the Bible, or religion, or the church). Do it quickly. Let your fingers express freely how you really feel about these matters.!
Share your drawing with your spouse, discussing its meaning.!
Paraphrasing Biblical Passages
Working as a couple, read 1 Corinthians 13 (or another passage) and write out a paraphrase (in your own words) in terms of your own marriage.!
Share your paraphrases with your group.!
Doing Theology
Our personal theology includes our guiding principles for living and relating. Each of you write out a list of insights from the Bible that you find realistic and meaningful in your marriage.!
See if you can combine your list and that of your spouse into a joint theology of your marriage.!
Celebrating the Gifts of Marriage
After struggle, pain, and growth together in a counseling session or enrichment event, it’s good to lift up, in a brief worship happening, the gifts of the Creator which have been experienced together. Celebrate now whatever you have experienced in using these growth tools: move beyond communicating about the experience to the deeper sharing which is communion.
Enhancing Sexual Enjoyment
Many couples can improve their sex life and rekindle romance by methods such as the following:
Creating a More Sensual Setting for Lovemaking
Devise and implement a plan to do this -- for example, by adding candlelight, mood music, a waterbed, a "childproof" lock on the bedroom door, or finding a secluded meadow or beach.
Cultivating the Art of Mutual, Non-demand Pleasuring
Give each other a leisurely, full-body massage, using warm body lotion. Just relax and enjoy it. Flow with the pleasure wherever it takes you. Don’t worry about "making it" or get caught in the "we try harder" syndrome. Enjoy receiving and giving sensual pleasure. Sex is one of God’s best gifts -- so enjoy it leisurely and lustily.
Telling Each Other Exactly What You Enjoy Most
While you’re pleasuring or "making love" try signaling by sounds, words, or gestures which words, caresses, smells, motions, positions, or love-play you find most stimulating, and when you’re ready to climax. It’s very much to each person’s advantage to guide the other in maximizing pleasuring!
Reconnecting Regularly
Sex is communication -- an intense form of communication! It improves as other communication bridges between you are strengthened. Spend some time together each day seeking to get reconnected through communicating, caring, affirming each other, and dealing with small hurts and frictions that otherwise may build into a cold wall that blocks the flow of loving, sensual feelings.
Letting Your "Child" Side Play Regularly
Try scheduling mini-vacations at least once a week -- times away from the things that keep your inner "Parent" (the responsible, work-oriented, "don’t enjoy" side) activated. Some couples swap baby-sitting to assure themselves time together away from their children. Letting your fun-loving side frolic regularly refills the inner springs and also enlivens sex. "Unless you become like a little child. . . "
Coping Constructively with Conflict
In marriage and premarriage enrichment events and in crisis counseling it’s important to help couples become more skillful in handling the conflict and anger that are normal in any close relationship. Here are some methods that help:
Scheduling Regular Times for Clearing the Air
Minor annoyances, hurt feelings, and conflicts can grow into major problems. At appointed intervals, at least weekly, bring them out and articulate them. We try to do this on Wednesdays at our house, so that we can enjoy our more relaxed weekend opportunities for intimacy. The biblical wisdom about not letting the sun go down on your anger (Eph. 4:26) is salutary for marriages.
Discovering Physical Ways to Release Pent-Up Frustration
Beat the pillow or pound the bed with fists or a tennis racket, or kick a cardboard carton, until the held-in feelings are released and drained off. Or, as a couple, a few rounds of harmless pillow-fighting or Indian arm wrestling -- with the stronger person using his/her weaker arm to equalize the struggle -- can help bring repressed negative feelings to the surface where they can be dealt with.
Negotiating No-Lose Compromise Solutions
Keep your inner Adult in control during negotiations. See to it that in such negotiations each person’s needs are met to some extent. The heart of any conflict is a collision between the needs/wants of the two persons. In a marriage, if one "wins" and the other "loses" both lose because the relationship is hurt. 3. The Intentional Marriage Method (see above pp. l0--17) is a method of positive conflict prevention and Adult-to-Adult conflict resolution. Couples who have learned how to use the Parent/Adult/Child aspect of Transactional Analysis (see p. 81, n. 23) have a tool for conflict resolution and for employing the IMM more effectively.
Other Sources of Marriage-Building Tools
Additional tools for enrichment groups and growth counseling are plentifully available. 4. However, I recommend that you develop your own repertoire or growth tools, learning from others, adapting and creating your own.
NOTES:
1. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 97
2. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), p. 251.
3. Bach and Wyden, Intimate Enemy, p. 53.
4. See, e.g., Nena and George O’Neill, The Open Marriage (New York: Lippincott, 1972),end of each chapter; also H. Clinebell, People Dynamic, pp. 46 -- 53; and Highlights of a Marriage Enrichment Workshop, in my Growth Counseling Cassettes series.
The elements [of a dialogical relationship] are, first, a relation . . . between two persons, second, an event experienced by them in common, . . . and third, the fact that this one person, without forfeiting anything of the felt reality of his activity, at the same time lives through the common event from the standpoint of the other. 1. -- Martin Buber
The most satisfying and most complete example of ego transcendence, and certainly the most healthy from the point of view of avoiding illness of the character, is the throwing of oneself into a healthy love relationship. 2.
-- Abraham Maslow
The central task in both marriage enrichment and marriage growth counseling, is to help couples enhance their dialogical communication skills so they can nurture their love and resolve their conflicts constructively. What counts is the actual practice of new communication skills. And being coached by a counselor or group facilitator is the most efficient way to learn to use them.
What follows are communication and relationship-building tools which I have found useful in both couple counseling and marriage enrichment groups. The best way to learn to use them, and simultaneously to enhance your own communication skills, is to experience them. So, invite your spouse (or any close friend) to join you as you try them. There’s no "right" or "wrong" way of experiencing any of these methods. Your actual experience of them, however, affords your best opportunity to increase your ability to communicate. Improving communication with others begins by enhancing communication within ourselves. In the first two exercises have someone read the instructions, stopping as long as necessary at each slash (/) for you to do what has been suggested.
Strengthening Self-Awareness
Find a comfortable position; close your eyes to concentrate on your inner experience.!
Center down; become aware of your body in this moment.! Breathe deeply several times, letting your tension go out as you exhale./
Picture your inner space, your consciousness, as a room within your mind. What kind of room is it? How is it furnished? How does it feel inside your consciousness?!
If your room feels cramped, enlarge your inner space by pushing back the walls -- give your spirit more room.!
Stay with your awareness now as you experience the center from which you relate.!
Open your eyes and share your experience with your partner (or your group).!
Experiencing Inner Liberation
Developing a mutually liberating marriage depends, in part, on the degree to which we are free spirits. We project our feelings of trappedness or freedom onto our intimate relationships. This guided meditation focuses on inner liberation, and on our power to choose to be free within ourselves.
Get comfortable, close your eyes; center down, claiming your inner space.!
Picture yourself inside a closed box.!
Push on the sides to experience being boxed-in.!
Examine your box, looking for a way out.!
If you find a way, get out now.!
If you’re still in the box, invite whomever you need to help you out now.!
See yourself in .a beautiful spring meadow, enjoying its freedom and openness. Let yourself go!!
Be aware of differences between your feelings in the box and your feelings in the meadow.!
If you’re alone, invite someone to enjoy the meadow with you.!
What in your actual life is represented by the particular box and meadow which you created?!
Return in your thoughts to where you’re presently meeting, and share whatever you experienced with your spouse (or small group).!
What biblical themes come to your mind as you reflect on your box and meadow experience?!
Share these with each other.!
This meditation goes to the heart of growth counseling -- inner liberation leading to liberating relationships and ultimately to liberating institutions. I find I spend too much time in my box and not enough time in the inner freedom of my meadow. But this is my choice and I have the power to change it! How about you? Discuss this now.!
Listening Responsively
Learning to listen sensitively, staying on the other’s feeling wavelength, is a vital marital skill that can be strengthened by practice. Facing each other, one person simply states what he! she is feeling and experiencing right now. The partner listens carefully, and every few sentences, summarizes what was communicated both verbally and non-verbally, beginning with the words, "Do I hear you saying (or feeling). . . ?" Use no other questions or responses. Just try to understand the other’s inner world; let that person know you are trying to understand, and keep checking to see how accurate your understanding is. Do this now.!
Now reverse roles and let the other partner practice the responsive listening.!
In workshops, two couples can work together taking turns coaching each other in listening more effectively. In counseling, the procedure can be used like this: "John, would you tell your wife how you feel about this?" Then (after he does so):
"Mary, tell your husband what you heard him say, just to make sure you understand each other."
Affirming Our Strengths
Growth counseling helps couples become more aware of the assets in themselves and in their marriage. These methods are "hope-awakeners":
Affirming Our History
Think back and recall two of your happiest experiences together. Relive these briefly in your memory.!
Tell your spouse about your memory experiences. / Recall two difficult or bad times which you handled well; be aware of the strengths it took to cope constructively./
Share your memory trips, affirming your strengths from both the good times and the bad times.!
Giving Gifts
Be a gift giver -- tell your spouse all the things that you regard as his or her major assets, strengths, and attractive qualities./ The recipient should respond in terms of how those assets might be used more fully.!
Now, reverse the process. (In a small group each person takes a turn at receiving the "gifts" from the other members.) /
Sharing Strengths
Take turns (in couples or in small groups) sharing something that made you feel especially good about yourself during the past two weeks.!
Take turns sharing something that was heavy or painful to bear.!
Now discuss how you feel about sharing recent joys and pain with each other.!
Risking and Trusting
Here are some experiences for getting in touch with the trust/mistrust feelings so crucial in marriage:
Trust Jogging
Take turns leading each other for ten minutes each, with the one who is led being blindfolded; include at least two minutes of jogging.!
Discuss what you learned about trusting each other.!
Risking
Turn to your spouse and both talk gibberish (nonsense sounds) for one minute -- risk appearing foolish, stupid, not in control.!
Share your feelings about this.!
Tell your spouse two secrets that will make him/her feel good.!
Discuss why you had not risked telling these secrets before.!
Evaluating Our Working Values
Value conflicts often go unrecognized and create blocked growth and pain in many marriages! Understanding each other’s values, caring deeply about some of the same things and respecting the spouse’s right to differ on other things -- all help keep a marriage growing. Here are two exercises which can be used to help couples clarify and revise their values in two crucial areas in marriage:
Evaluating Our Time Priorities
Close your eyes and relax.!
Imagine you’ve just been told that you have a limited amount of time in your marriage before one of you dies. How do you feel about this?!
What changes will you make in your present schedule and life-style in order to use the remaining time for the most important things? After a few minutes, open your eyes and share your experience with your partner.!
If you experienced depressing or anxious feelings, these can be constructive pain -- the pain of facing your finitude. Facing the fact that all of us do have a limited amount of time can make our lives together more precious. This exercise has helped some couples decide to spend more time together and less on the treadmill.
Evaluating Our Money Priorities
Close your eyes. Imagine that you have received a windfall of $15,000, the only condition being that you must spend it within two weeks.!
Decide how you’ll spend it.!
Open your eyes and each of you jot down your list of expenditures, without comparing notes.!
Now, compare your list with that of your spouse, discussing your assumptions about what’s important -- the values which guided your decisions.!
Increasing Spiritual Intimacy
Continuing growth in the dimension of personal faith, in experiences of transcendence and in one’s sense of relatedness to God and creation, is important in both marriage counseling and enrichment. Spiritual enrichment can well be the integrating center of marriage enrichment programs. Here are some ways to help couples communicate and grow in this area:
Drawing Your Theology
Take a piece of paper and a box of crayons.!
Without planning what you’ll do, express your feelings about God (or the Bible, or religion, or the church). Do it quickly. Let your fingers express freely how you really feel about these matters.!
Share your drawing with your spouse, discussing its meaning.!
Paraphrasing Biblical Passages
Working as a couple, read 1 Corinthians 13 (or another passage) and write out a paraphrase (in your own words) in terms of your own marriage.!
Share your paraphrases with your group.!
Doing Theology
Our personal theology includes our guiding principles for living and relating. Each of you write out a list of insights from the Bible that you find realistic and meaningful in your marriage.!
See if you can combine your list and that of your spouse into a joint theology of your marriage.!
Celebrating the Gifts of Marriage
After struggle, pain, and growth together in a counseling session or enrichment event, it’s good to lift up, in a brief worship happening, the gifts of the Creator which have been experienced together. Celebrate now whatever you have experienced in using these growth tools: move beyond communicating about the experience to the deeper sharing which is communion.
Enhancing Sexual Enjoyment
Many couples can improve their sex life and rekindle romance by methods such as the following:
Creating a More Sensual Setting for Lovemaking
Devise and implement a plan to do this -- for example, by adding candlelight, mood music, a waterbed, a "childproof" lock on the bedroom door, or finding a secluded meadow or beach.
Cultivating the Art of Mutual, Non-demand Pleasuring
Give each other a leisurely, full-body massage, using warm body lotion. Just relax and enjoy it. Flow with the pleasure wherever it takes you. Don’t worry about "making it" or get caught in the "we try harder" syndrome. Enjoy receiving and giving sensual pleasure. Sex is one of God’s best gifts -- so enjoy it leisurely and lustily.
Telling Each Other Exactly What You Enjoy Most
While you’re pleasuring or "making love" try signaling by sounds, words, or gestures which words, caresses, smells, motions, positions, or love-play you find most stimulating, and when you’re ready to climax. It’s very much to each person’s advantage to guide the other in maximizing pleasuring!
Reconnecting Regularly
Sex is communication -- an intense form of communication! It improves as other communication bridges between you are strengthened. Spend some time together each day seeking to get reconnected through communicating, caring, affirming each other, and dealing with small hurts and frictions that otherwise may build into a cold wall that blocks the flow of loving, sensual feelings.
Letting Your "Child" Side Play Regularly
Try scheduling mini-vacations at least once a week -- times away from the things that keep your inner "Parent" (the responsible, work-oriented, "don’t enjoy" side) activated. Some couples swap baby-sitting to assure themselves time together away from their children. Letting your fun-loving side frolic regularly refills the inner springs and also enlivens sex. "Unless you become like a little child. . . "
Coping Constructively with Conflict
In marriage and premarriage enrichment events and in crisis counseling it’s important to help couples become more skillful in handling the conflict and anger that are normal in any close relationship. Here are some methods that help:
Scheduling Regular Times for Clearing the Air
Minor annoyances, hurt feelings, and conflicts can grow into major problems. At appointed intervals, at least weekly, bring them out and articulate them. We try to do this on Wednesdays at our house, so that we can enjoy our more relaxed weekend opportunities for intimacy. The biblical wisdom about not letting the sun go down on your anger (Eph. 4:26) is salutary for marriages.
Discovering Physical Ways to Release Pent-Up Frustration
Beat the pillow or pound the bed with fists or a tennis racket, or kick a cardboard carton, until the held-in feelings are released and drained off. Or, as a couple, a few rounds of harmless pillow-fighting or Indian arm wrestling -- with the stronger person using his/her weaker arm to equalize the struggle -- can help bring repressed negative feelings to the surface where they can be dealt with.
Negotiating No-Lose Compromise Solutions
Keep your inner Adult in control during negotiations. See to it that in such negotiations each person’s needs are met to some extent. The heart of any conflict is a collision between the needs/wants of the two persons. In a marriage, if one "wins" and the other "loses" both lose because the relationship is hurt. 3. The Intentional Marriage Method (see above pp. l0--17) is a method of positive conflict prevention and Adult-to-Adult conflict resolution. Couples who have learned how to use the Parent/Adult/Child aspect of Transactional Analysis (see p. 81, n. 23) have a tool for conflict resolution and for employing the IMM more effectively.
Other Sources of Marriage-Building Tools
Additional tools for enrichment groups and growth counseling are plentifully available. 4. However, I recommend that you develop your own repertoire or growth tools, learning from others, adapting and creating your own.
NOTES:
1. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 97
2. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), p. 251.
3. Bach and Wyden, Intimate Enemy, p. 53.
4. See, e.g., Nena and George O’Neill, The Open Marriage (New York: Lippincott, 1972),end of each chapter; also H. Clinebell, People Dynamic, pp. 46 -- 53; and Highlights of a Marriage Enrichment Workshop, in my Growth Counseling Cassettes series.
There is genuine dialogue -- no matter whether spoken or silent -- where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation. 1. -- Martin Buber
Loving perception, whether as between sweethearts or as between parents and children, produced kinds of knowledge that were not available to nonlovers. 2. -- Abraham Maslow
In most marriages there’s a hidden marriage waiting to be discovered and liberated. This latent marriage is a better marriage -- more fulfilling, more intimate, more alive -- than the here-and-now relationship. The latent marriage may be well hidden -- buried under many layers of anger, mutual neglect, and hurting. Many couples aren’t aware of their latent marriage. They’re unaware that they’re using only a small part -- 15 to 25percent perhaps -- of their capacities for satisfying communication, sexual pleasure, and mutually fulfilling love. It’s the unlived life in our marriages that makes them so vulnerable in crises we otherwise could take in stride.
The growth perspective sees marriage as a changing, developing process -- a co-creation which the two partners continue to enrich (or gradually starve) by the ways they communicate and care for each other. A couple has the power to develop their latent marriage by nurturing each other’s heart hungers -- the hungers for affirming communication, warm caring, mutual esteem and trust, closeness and companionship, sexual and other enjoyment.
If couples have been deeply alienated or strangling each other’s creativity for years, their latent marriage can probably be developed -- if at all -- only by a process of marriage therapy or long-term marriage counseling. But for the vast majority of us whose marriages are a mixture of pain and joy, frustration and satisfaction, distance and closeness -- for us enrichment methods and short-term crisis methods can be effective in improving our relationships by developing our hidden marriage assets. To help couples learn to do this is one of the rich opportunities of any minister, counselor, or lay befriender.
The Crisis in Marriage
The institution of marriage is being challenged today in unprecedented ways. For every three couples that marry, one couple gets a divorce. Many youth and young adults are rejecting the validity or necessity of marriage in its traditional forms. The widespread changes in attitudes and practices, taken together, constitute a profound and accelerating social "revolution" in marriage. This fact calls for rethinking our approaches to marriage and redesigning our strategy to meet the new needs.
A survey of a cross-section of the U.S. adult population revealed these significant facts: 3.
1) Marriage is still very much "in"; 80 percent rank "a happy home life" at the top of their list of goals.
2) Marriage itself, rather than parenting, is central; three out of four persons felt it was all right for married couples to decide to have no children.
3) The majority approved changes in life-style such as leaving the work force temporarily, joining a new religion, moving to the country.
4) A slight majority of women (51percent) and a somewhat larger majority of men (58percent) support "woman’s liberation," and this support is rising rapidly.
Since this survey covered all adult ages, let’s look now at just the young adults. A study by Arlo Compaan of young adult couples in California reported: 4.
1) The husband-wife relationships tended to be emotionally intense and this relationship, rather than children, dominated the marriages.
2) Marriage was understood and valued mainly in terms of communication, personal growth, and satisfaction.
3) The couples preferred small families.
4) Play, including playful sex, was a stronger motif in marriage than production, the work ethic, or marriage as an aid to "success."
5) Religion was highly valued but the couples generally lacked interest in the church even though they were nominally "church related."
Let me add my observations concerning recent changes in marriage which affect all ages but are most prominent among young adults:
1) There’s a growing search for more flexible, creative marriage styles.
2) The strongest single trend is a rejection of rigidly defined sex roles and a movement toward increasingly egalitarian man-woman relationships.
3) There’s increasing willingness to consider options other than marriage and to be in much less hurry to marry.
4) "Just living together" without a marriage is becoming more common among couples who aren’t ready for marriage or don’t want legal commitments.
5) There’s increased openness to the possibility of terminating a marriage if it proves not to be mutually fulfilling, and less of the "'til death do us part" attitude.
6) There’s more divorce and more remarriage.
7) The pill, equality, and freedom of women have narrowed dramatically and may eliminate the male-female dual standards on sex; there is generally more sexual freedom and variety before and within marriage.
8) There is a continuing decrease in the nurture and emotional support available to couples from their extended family and neighborhoods, and increased searching for substitute support systems -- for example, in communes, family networks, and group marriages.
A New Strategy for a New Day
It’s obvious that it’s a whole new day for marriage -- particularly among many young adults! What should be the response of the church to this challenge? The deep changes in marriage practices and attitudes make it imperative to develop a more effective methodology and program to help couples find what they want and need. Any new approach must help couples learn how to keep on enriching their marriage, so they can create flexible, growing, intensified monogamy, with a more enjoyable and soul-satisfying bond of creative closeness. It is precisely at the point of developing such a program that the use of growth counseling is most helpful.
Such a program needs two complementary parts: (1) enrichment groups, including seminars, workshops, retreats, and classes for all couples who want them, and (2) growth-centered crisis counseling for couples going through periods of special stress. The goal of both parts is to make good marriages better. Couples with acutely and chronically disturbed marriages should of course be helped to find specialists in longer-term marriage therapy.
I suggest that you read the following list to get a grasp of the immense variety and range of possibilities for marriage enrichment groups. Don’t let the length of the list scare you. I’m not suggesting that your church should develop all or even most of these groups! That’s probably neither necessary nor feasible. But churches that are using a growth model of ministry do devote major leadership energies to developing a variety of time-limited groups, retreats, and training seminars to meet major concentrations of needs. The goal is to gradually create a smorgasbord of enrichment and counseling opportunities to meet the needs of the maximum number of persons at all stages of marriage. Read the list with your particular situation in mind. Ask yourself whether or not there are unmet needs to which you could address yourself in one or more of these areas.
Types of Marriage Enrichment and Growth Counseling Groups and Programs
Youth identity-formation or self-discovery groups; long-range preparation for marriage
Preparation-for-marriage retreats or growth groups several times a year
Growth-oriented pre-wedding preparation sessions with each couple
Newly-married's enrichment workshop or retreat or growth group
Post-wedding marriage enrichment sessions with each couple (at least two or three sessions)
Young parents enrichment group
Annual marriage enrichment retreats for couples clubs and classes
Preparation for baptism (or infant dedication) group for parents
Regular marriage enrichment retreats (for various ages and stages)
A creative sexuality seminar
A workshop on "Handling Conflict Creatively"
A Bible study -- marriage enrichment workshop or class
A couples spiritual-discovery group
Meaning-of-life groups for couples
A middle-married's enrichment retreat
A parents-teens communication workshop
An emptying nest marriage enrichment group
Women’s (or men’s or mixed) consciousness-raising retreat
Family clusters or networks as a context for family enrichment
A creative values group or retreat
Healthy family growth celebrations, to make good families better
Divorce growth groups
Creative singlehood groups
Single parents enrichment groups
Creative retirement couples group
Grief recovery groups (for widows and widowers)
Growth group leadership training workshop
Growth training for teachers, and for leaders of youth and adult groups
A growth-oriented program of crisis counseling for couples A growth group for couples after marriage counseling
The Goal
What is the goal of growth marriage counseling/ enrichment? It’s to provide the opportunity for each couple to create their own best marriage, a growing relationship that meets their needs. I’ll call this kind of relationship -- the kind that stimulates growth -- an intimate, open marriage with equality and positive fidelity. The goal is a liberating marriage, one which frees couples to use their maximum gifts as individuals in mutually enhancing ways. Each couple develops its own variations on this theme.
The characteristics of a liberating marriage (described in The Intimate Marriage5. and The Open Marriage6. include:
responsiveness to meeting each other’s needs; open and caring communication; closeness and respect for individual privacy needs; autonomy (each a person in his/her own right) and interdependence; genuine fairness and equality; commitment to each other’s growth; no rigid or satellite roles; continued change and growth through the years; the ability to use conflict to deepen intimacy and resolve differences by negotiation (rather than deadlocking or distancing); deepening sexual pleasure integrated with love; increasing intimacy in the areas of meanings and faith; strengthening of the marriage identity (the "two becoming one").
In contrast to the position expressed in The Open Marriage, it is my conviction that, for most couples, positive fidelity is essential if they are to achieve "deepening sexual pleasure integrated with love." This is the integration which makes possible the most satisfying sex. Negative fidelity is a sexual faithfulness based mainly on guilt and fear of consequences. This is the control and punishment effected by one’s internal "Parent," to use the PAC terms of Transactional Analysis.7. Positive fidelity, in contrast, flows from mutual respect and caring and from prizing what the couple already have "going for them" and what they expect to build together. Sexual fidelity stems from a more inclusive "Adult" fidelity -- from a valuing of, and commitment to, the relationship and from not wanting to damage what is experienced as precious. Negative fidelity, which feels like a moral straight jacket, is less and less prevalent or motivating, particularly among young adult couples.
Positive fidelity doesn’t preclude the possibility of having close friends of the opposite sex. As we learn to relate to each other first as persons and then as sex objects, rather than vice versa, this becomes increasingly possible. Positive fidelity doesn’t rule out the wandering eye or imagination, both of which seem to be normal, enjoyable aspects of our human sexuality. Positive fidelity is based on respecting a psychological reality -- namely, that the most body and soul satisfying sex isn’t possible apart from a quality of relationship which includes mutual respect, trust, tender caring, and continuity. It takes time and trust and commitment for love to flower. Affairs, rather than enhancing the quality of marriages, usually hurt them, often in irreparable ways. I’m all for an "open marriage" in terms of communication, equality, growth, and outside friendships. But if "open" means sexual affairs, the results are usually not openness or growth -- or really liberating sex!
The deepest intimacy and the best sex of which most couples are capable are not possible psychologically apart from genuine equality. The distance and anger (whether hot or frozen) that build up in a one-up/one-down marriage in which one or both persons feel "used," block depth communication and therefore impede liberated sex. The awareness that we men also are exploited -- by the present "success" system -- and that we’re also depriving ourselves of much of our person-hood (by the male rat race) makes it obvious that the basic issue is human liberation. The goal is to create relationships and institutions in which both women and men will have the greatest freedom and encouragement to use their full intelligence, creativity, and productive energies. We who are married can help to overcome sexism, the prejudice and discrimination against women most obviously, but also against men, which blocks human becoming on a massive scale. We can do this by struggling, and by bearing the pain it often requires, to create an equal and mutually-liberating relationship. In liberating our marriages we give our children a precious gift, the model of a mutually-fulfilling man-woman relationship, which is one of the best preparations for their future. The accelerating trend toward female-male equality opens up all sorts of new possibilities for both conflict and intimacy.
Sexism is a central cause of both diminished marriages and destructive marriages. Therefore, a church cannot fully nurture the growth of married persons until it actively encourages liberating, equal, intimate marriages. This will require deep changes in the institutional male chauvinism of most churches and religions. Until this happens, our effectiveness in marriage enrichment will be limited because of the spiritual destructiveness of the mutual exploitation which results from inequality. And not until this happens will we take seriously the insight of Paul that in Christ there is no male or female (Gal. 3:28), that one’s humanity, not one’s gender, is what matters most. The most important implication of all this is that marriage counselors and enrichers, whether ministers or lay persons, need to have increased awareness -- a raised consciousness in the area of women’s and men’s liberation!
The Widening Impact of Marriage Enrichment
A minister asked during a workshop: "With the moral morass of our society, the stinking injustice at home, and the poverty and hunger all over the world, how can we spend time enriching marriages?" Anyone with a sensitive social conscience must find an answer. Let’s face it -- the human family may not make it. It may do itself in, sooner than most of us think, by massive environmental pollution, and/or a nuclear holocaust. And even if we make it, the quality of life may be reduced severely. Is it ethically responsible then to spend time enriching marriages -- mainly among the affluent -- when millions live in dehumanizing squalor, hunger, and disease?
For me, the answer is no -- not if enrichment ends with individual marriages in a kind of mutual marital narcissism. Privatized, self-serving marriage enrichment, like privatized, self-serving religion and counseling, is immoral in our kind of world. It is an opiate which helps us ignore the massive social injustices and economic inequalities which block the fulfillment of the God-given potentialities of millions of our brothers and sisters on Spaceship Earth.
But, as pointed out earlier, to be genuinely liberating and person-creating, marriage enrichment should produce commitment to outreach beyond the marriage! Enrichment of individual marriages is potentially a powerful resource for enriching life in society. The impact can be like a pebble dropped in a pond. The first circle beyond the marriage pair is the immediate family. Parents are the architects and builders of a family; whatever makes their marriage better will strengthen the personality health of their children. The outreach of enriched couples can help build a network of mutual support among families. This gradually strengthens the wholeness-sustaining fabric of a congregation and community. Couples who have mutually-satisfying marriages have the inner resources to reach out to even wider circles. They can be challenged to work in projects to improve their community through political and social action, to help eradicate sexism, racism, ageism (discrimination against aging persons), and poverty, all of which damage marriages and families. As responsible members of the human family, we all should support governmental, United Nations, and church-sponsored efforts to help families in poor nations acquire the food, shelter, medical help, and education which will allow them to use their full God-given potentialities.
Leaders of marriage enrichment events need to hold up outreach as indispensable to personal growth. The life-style of "generativity" (Erik Erikson) -- investing self in others and the ongoingness of humankind -- is essential to having the best marriages at any stage.8.
All this has deep roots in the Christian heritage. As John Snow, a professor of pastoral theology, points out, the Christian family was seen in the New Testament as an agent of the coming community of love and justice, a new kind of "kingdom": "Its goal was not to make a house a home for a family but to make the world a home for humankind." 9.
The family was not simply a way for two people of different sexes to meet each other’s needs and the needs of their children. It was part of a community committed to meeting the deprivation of the world, spiritual and physical. As such, marriage had the rich spiritual and emotional support of the community in which it existed. 10.
Today, Snow declares, the local church should provide the community of caring which is essential for healthy marriages and families. The ultimate goal of Christian marriage enrichment is to liberate couples to claim and share the fruits of the spirit for which the human family longs -- love, faithfulness, integrity, reconciliation, healing, joy, and peace. When this happens, people discover the growth that comes only when one is captured by a commitment to helping others grow, and to creating a growth-supporting world community!
NOTES:
1. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon, 1955 p. 19.
2. Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 17.
3. Psychology Today, May 1974, p. 102
4. Arlo D. Compaan, A Study of Contemporary Young Adult Marital Styles (Th.D. diss., School of Theology, Claremont, Calif., 1973).
5. Clinebell and Clinebell, The Intimate Marriage
6. Nena and George O’Neill, The Open Marriage (New York: Lippincott, 1972).
7. For a succinct overview of Transactional Analysis theory see: Leonard Campos and Paul McCormick, Introduce Your Marriage to Transactional Analysis, and Introduce Yourself to Transactional Analysis (Berkeley, Calif.: Transactional Publications, 1972).
8. See Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society 2d. ed. rev. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), pp. 266 -- 68.
9. John Snow, "Christian Marriage and Family Life," Christianity and Crisis, 7 January 1974, p. 281.
Genuine responsibility exists only where there is real responding . . . to what is to be seen and heard and felt. 1.
-- Martin Buber
One important aspect of a good love relationship, is what may be called need identification, or the pooling of the hierarchies of basic needs in two persons into a single hierarchy. The effect of this is that one person feels another's needs as if they were his own and for that matter also feels his own needs to some extent as if they belonged to the other.2.
-- Abraham Maslow
How can we help couples -- ourselves and others -- learn to develop more liberating, mutually-fulfilling relationships? How can we apply the growth-counseling approach to marriage? Before discussing this on a level of theory, I'd like to invite you to experience the growth approach. Whether you're a pastor, a counselor, or a lay person, the best way to learn to use growth methods is to try them yourself.
At the close of a marriage enrichment workshop (co-led by Charlotte and myself) one woman wrote in her evaluation:
"The most helpful thing was to tell your spouse the things you like and appreciate in him. . . also to tell him your needs. We haven't done that in twenty-three years of marriage!" The experience to which she referred is the heart of our approach to both marriage enrichment and growth-centered marriage counseling. Over the last five years, a majority of those who have participated in our marriage workshops and groups have identified this as the "most helpful" part of the experience and the "most useful" tool they acquired. It's called the "Intentional Marriage Method," which we can call 1MM for short. It's a simple, four-step tool that a couple can use on their own to help their marriage grow in the directions they desire.
The 1MM sounds so simple, it's hard to believe it could work so well. But I hope you'll try it. If you're married, invite your spouse to join you in experiencing the 1MM. If you're single, invite a close friend (of either sex) to join you in learning the method. Enjoy yourselves while you learn!
The Growth Formula
Personal growth occurs whenever human beings experience two things in the same relationship -- an affirming love that we don't have to earn, and honest openness. This is the "growth formula": CARING -~- CONFRONTATION = GROWTH! The truth stated theologically is, of course, the same: grace (the love one doesn't have to earn, because it's there in the relationship) + judgment (confrontation with how one is hurting or limiting the growth of oneself or others) movement toward greater wholeness. The growth formula helps one understand why healing and creative change occur in some counseling, education, enrichment groups, marriages, and preaching, yet not in others.
Both parts of the formula are essential. In traditional Christian terms both law and gospel are necessary. Acceptance without honest confrontation is experienced as incomplete acceptance. Confrontation without caring and acceptance is experienced as judgmentalism and rejection. A relationship stimulates growth when persons can "speak the truth in love" (Eph. 4:15 NEB), as the New Testament describes the growth formula.
Growth counseling aims at implementing this formula in helping relationships. The 1MM uses the formula to let you build on whatever you have going for you in your marriage (or other close relationship). It can be useful to many couples
-- from those with chronic conflicts to those with "happy" marriages which include a mixture of pain and joy. The 1MM allows couples to reduce their pain and increase their mutual satisfaction.
The IMM in Four Steps
Identifying and Affirming the Strengths of Your Relationship
We usually introduce the 1MM in a group or retreat by saying to the couples:
Let's become aware of more of the positive strengths in our marriages as a basis for meeting more of our needs. Each couple please find a comfortable place to sit facing each other somewhere in the room, not too close to other couples. Sit on the floor if you like.! (I'll use this slash to mean that the task just described is now to be completed.)
OK. Begin the Intentional Marriage Method by one of you completing the sentence, "I appreciate in you . . . " as many times as you can. Tell the person all the things you really like. For example, I may say to my co-leader, "Honey, I appreciate your hair" (or) "I appreciate the ways you enjoy using your mind." The other person just listens, receiving these affirmations. As soon as one person finishes, the other does the same thing, completing the sentence, "I appreciate in you . . ."/
(In leading groups or retreats Charlotte and I usually take part in the structured couple experiences. We don't want to appear in the manipulative position of asking others to do what we seem unwilling to do ourselves. Besides, we find that it actually helps our marriage.)
Now discuss how you feel about what you have just done./
Write on a card all the things you can remember that your partner appreciated in you.!
Your communication skills can be improved by practice, so look at each other's lists and see how well you listened to each other.!
I hope this first step helped you get in touch with many of the strengths and assets in your marriage; these provide a foundation on which to build in the steps that follow.
Identifying Growth Areas -- Unmet Needs/Wants in Each Person
One way to improve your marriage is to state your needs and wants clearly and directly. In this second step complete the sentence, "I need from you . . ." Begin as in step one with
one person and then give the other equal opportunity to list his or her needs. For instance, I may say to my partner, "I need more time alone with you, time when just you and I can be together" (or) "I need for you to touch me more." It's important for each of you to get your separate list of needs out on the table before you discuss them.!
Now discuss how you feel about this part of the experience.! List on the reverse side of your own card all the needs expressed by your partner.!
Now check each other's lists and discuss how well you heard each other this time./
This next part may seem a bit tedious but it's important. Working together, pick out those needs which are the same or similar on both lists and put an A beside them./
Now put a C beside the needs on your two lists that conifict or collide -- for example, one of you needs or wants more frequent sex and the other less.!
Now put a B beside the needs that are left, those that don't contradict the other's but are simply different.!
Recontracting for Change -- Deciding to Meet More of Your Needs
Now you're ready to make things more mutually satisfying for yourselves. Discuss the A needs on your lists and decide on one shared need which seems both important and achievable to you both. It's important to experience success as you begin to improve things. After you have picked an A need as your marriage-growth goal, plan exactly how and when you'll take action to meet it.
To practice the skill of making a clear, workable change plan, write out a brief, joint description of the need and of your plan to meet it. Describe the changes you intend to make in terms of each person's behavior, that is, what you each plan to do. This written description will allow you to check back later and know when you've done it.!
Congratulations! You have just used the skill of writing a small but significant new clause in your marriage agreement or covenant!
Taking Action -- Checking Out the Plan, Implementing It, and Keeping Track of Progress
The final step in the 1MM is to meet your shared need by implementing your plan. It helps in doing this to use a growth-support couple or a small group of couples committed to encouraging each other's growth. So find another couple with whom to share your plan (or, in a retreat you might suggest:
join with three other couples with whom you'd like to get better acquainted).!
Now share your plans, giving each other feedback. Give each other encouragement and raise questions about anything that may need clarifying or strengthening to make the plans more workable.!
Discuss your experience in checking out your plans, including how you might continue to use a sharing group for mutual support and growth.!
In taking action to make your marriage more mutually fulfilling it helps to keep a record of your ongoing progress (or regress) in working out your plans. For instance, if you decided you both need a regular time each day to communicate, keep tab on yourself so you'll know how you're doing and can plan your next step accordingly. Some couples do this in a Marriage Growth Diary; in it they also make daily entries of their significant events, sharings, and insights.
How to Move Ahead
After you've had your first success using the 1MM, and feel the rewards of satisfying a mutual need, move on to another shared need and devise a plan to meet it. Repeat the "I appreciate . . ." step regularly in order to keep in touch with your positive feelings and strengths.
If you tried the 1MM and it didn't work, remember, it takes practice to master any new skill. In the complexities of being human and married, one can't "win 'em all." Don't waste valuable energy blaming each other or analyzing why you "blew it." Instead, use your energy to create a more workable change plan, or simply choose another need. Are you both committed to meeting the need you selected? If one of you is giving in to please the other, forget about that goal for now and pick one about which you're both enthusiastic. Use your support group to strengthen your plan and affirm your efforts, however minimal your initial success.
Satisfying More Difficult Needs
After you've learned to use the 1MM to satisfy several shared needs -- the easiest place to make a difference in your marriage -- move on to type B needs which don't contradict each other but also don't coincide. To use the 1MM here a new skill is required: You must learn to negotiate a mutual agreement which satisfies one need of each person.
Learning to satisfy type C needs -- those that are in conflict-- is the most difficult. It requires two skills: negotiation and compromfse to find the fair midpoint where both feel partially satisfied. (See the discussion of conflict resolution below, pp. 35-36.)
Some couples build up growth momentum by successfully meeting a series of shared and nonconflicting needs. This momentum makes it easier to negotiate a creative compromise of conflicting needs. When persons are feeling hungry emotionally, perhaps unloved or unappreciated, it's almost impossible to resolve conflicting needs. Also, accepting what one can't change in the area of conflicting needs in a marriage is easier if the satisfaction quotient is already rising.
The IMM: Recontracting
Some couples work out personal covenants or contracts -- often in writing so that there'll be no misunderstanding -- before the wedding or at regular intervals during a marriage. Items covered often include: (1) division of household chores; (2) the agreement concerning having, adopting, or not having children; (3) responsibility for child rearing; (4) career plans for both spouses; (5) obligations in various areas such as work, leisure, religion, community, and social life; (6) range of permissible relations beyond the marriage; (7) property, legal, and inheritance rights; (8) grounds for splitting; (9) frequency of renegotiating the agreement.
The 1MM is a workable model for renegotiating the marriage covenant or agreement. It can be used to work out such an understanding for the first time or to modify ineffective parts of a previously implicit covenant. The objection that recontracting is "too legalistic" is valid only if a couple has already achieved the kind of mutually acceptable level of fairness in the marriage that lets their love flower fully. Love flows from justice and mutual fulfillment in a marriage. Furthermore, our needs change at each stage in marriage; it's essential to update our working understanding regularly in order to satisfy emerging needs.
Broadening Your Growth Goals
The process begun in using the 1MM should not stop with simple quid pro quo agreements -- I'll meet your needs if you'll meet mine. As love and trust grow, each person's needs increasingly include the satisfying of the partner's needs. When this occurs, any apparent conifict between self-actualization and marriage-actualization (or enrichment) gives way to the awareness that self-other actualization is, in the long run, the only real self-actualization. As Buber makes clear, true actualization is living in a new creative unity in which both persons are enhanced and fulifiled in their uniqueness. Self-transcendence is essential for self-fulfillment. Self-transcendence doesn't mean self-negation. It means becoming a more fulfilled self through sharing in a fulfilling relationship.
If a couple's growth goals are entirely self-centered or marriage-centered, it is important to offer them an opportunity to broaden their goals. What they want may not coincide with what they need to develop their full marriage potential. After a couple has learned to use the 1MM, to satisfy their mutual heart hungers (deficiency needs), their understanding of what they need in order to continue to grow may be broadened in these ways: (1) Discussion in counseling, or in a group, of the various ways in which one's own marriage growth is enhanced by becoming a positive influence in the growth of others. (2) Confrontation by the example of other couples who have discovered the pay-off in their marriage which results from a "cause" that turns them on. (3) Values clarification exercises to confront the inadequacy of in-turning values. (4) A gentle but firm confrontation, by the leader or by group members, with the pay-off of enlarging their marital horizons by making their circles of concern more inclusive.
The Christian Life-Style and the 1MM
The 1MM (and the growth formula which it implements) expresses central, interdependent emphases in Jewish and Christian theology -- and in other religious and humanist traditions, of course -- the emphases on love, freedom, responsibility, and justice. It assumes that we have the power and the freedom to help create our own marriage futures by changing our relationship intentionally rather than drifting.
The Christian life-style is intentional but it is more. The direction of growth is crucial. The Christian understanding challenges us to self-investment in the needs of the world. We can't have dead-end marriages without becoming stagnant. Individual families can remain healthy, creative, and enriched only if they are involved in enriching others in the wider human family. To paraphrase a familiar New Testament insight: The marriage which tries to hoard (or save) its life will, in the end, lose its real vitality. Only by investing your marriage in the needs of humankind can you find the greatest depths of enrichment for yourselves.
NOTES:
1. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 16
2. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), pp. 248-49
"Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half. Perhaps this health psychology will give us more possibility for controlling and improving our lives and for making ourselves better people. Perhaps this will be more fruitful than asking ‘how to get unsick. 1."Abraham Maslow
"The future lies with those who believe salvation likelier to spring from the imagination of possibility than from the delineation of the historical. . . . Perhaps we all need to be reminded of the necessity of remaining open to new, or newly recovered ways of being." . 2 . -- Carolyn 0. Heilbrun
"Every age but ours has had its model, its ideal. All of these have been given up by our culture. . . . Perhaps we shall soon be able to use as our guide and model the fully growing and self-fulfilling human being, the one in whom all . . . potentialities are coming to full development." 3. -- Abraham Maslow
Gradually, over the last ten years or so, my counseling and caring ministry has shifted from a diagnostic, treatment approach (a pathology model) to a human development, positive-potentials approach (a growth model). I've changed from focusing on what's wrong with a person or relationship and now I place greater emphasis on what's right and what's possible; as this change has taken place better results have occurred in my ministry of counseling, teaching, and working with small groups. Furthermore, it has gradually become clear to me that the positive approach frees one in helping relationships to use more of the rich assets and resources which every church-related, religiously aware person has available. When I've discussed growth approaches in workshops for ministers and lay persons, most participants have responded with interest, many with enthusiasm. The same has happened in workshops for counselors from various secular professions. Many ministers and counselors seem ready, even eager, to diminish their emphasis on a repair-and-rescue approach and increase their emphasis on prevention through releasing the positive potentials of persons.
The Dual Nature of Growth Counseling
Growth counseling is a way of helping people to discover in themselves and in others what Buber called "the treasure of eternal possibility and the task of unearthing it."4. It involves two inter-related things -- a perspective on people and a set of methods.
First, there is the growth perspective, a liberating way of viewing persons (including yourself) in terms of (1) their present strengths and their rich unused capacities -- intellectually, spiritually, interpersonally, creatively; (2) their profound inner strivings to fulfill more of these good gifts of life; (3) the pull of a better future toward which they can move by the fuller use of their inner riches. Viewing people through this growth perspective is one of the most important things we can do to help them grow!
Second, growth counseling involves a variety of growth-stimulating methods to help people use more of their potentialities by (1) developing better communication with self, others, nature, and God -- the four basic relationships within which all growth occurs; (2) developing new skills of relating in mutually-affirming, mutually-fulfilling ways; (3) growing by making constructive decisions and taking responsible action; (4) using the growth possibilities inherent in each life stage; (5) learning to use the pain and problems of unexpected crises as growth opportunities; (6) learning better methods of spiritual growth -- the maturing of one's personal faith, working values, sense of purpose, peak experiences, and awareness of really belonging in the universe.
Growth marriage counseling is only one of many applications of this general approach to liberating the potential of people. But church-related counselors probably have more opportunities as growth enablers in marriage and family relationships than in any other area.
Hope-Centered Counseling
Growth counseling is hope-oriented counseling. Hope exerts a powerful pull toward constructive change. Conversely, hopelessness is a powerful block to such change. Therefore, these methods aim explicitly at mobilizing realistic hope in the lives of individuals or couples. I suspect that hope is the most neglected force for helping human beings change. Growth methods don't ignore pain, conflict, and problems -- the messy, grubby side of any marriage. To do so would paralyze growth by denying reality. This has been the weakness of the "positive thinking" approaches. Growth counseling methods help people deal with their pain in the context of reality-based hope. This not only makes the pain look very different but also releases remarkable energies for coping constructively with the pain!
Growth marriage counseling is a way of helping people cope constructively with problems and conflicts. It uses many of the methods of traditional couple marriage counseling, but it adds a vigorous, sustained emphasis on hope-creating awareness of the couple's past successes -- however limited -- their present strengths, and their ability to create a better future by using more of their assets.
Faith (in the sense of trust), hope, and love are, as the First Letter to the Corinthians says so beautifully, crucial and lasting dynamics in all good human relationships, especially intimate ones like marriage. But when things are going badly and all three have grown faint, hope is the power by which trust and love are revitalized, and with these three a marriage is reborn.
The same is true in monotonous marriages in which couples are resigned to flat, two-dimensional relationships. Only if the power of hope is released will they discover the latent marriage that is theirs, a marriage with more heights and depths, more aliveness and conflict, more zest, pain, and fulfillment than they had imagined. The growth approach aims at helping a couple actualize hope by learning new skills for nourishing rather than starving their love!
A Third-Force Approach
The "third force" in psychology and psychotherapy -- the human potentials, value-oriented approaches -- provides much of the theoretical foundation for growth counseling. (The first and second forces are psychoanalysis and behaviorism.) The towering figure in the third force, the late Abraham Maslow, distinguished between deficiency needs and growth needs. Traditional psychotherapy, he pointed out, concentrated mainly on persons suffering massive deficiencies of their basic psychological needs for security, love, and esteem. In studies of "self-actualizing" people he found that a new need emerges in persons who have learned to satisfy their basic needs. Their new need is to continue to grow by developing their creativity and their unused potentialities.
I find that an awareness of the persistent but often hidden growth strivings in people is immensely useful in counseling with those suffering from major basic need hungers -- for example, couples with deeply pained lives and troubled marriages. This awareness is indispensable in enriching normal marriages.
The distinction between deficiency and growth needs provides a guideline for keeping balance in one's helping activities. The distinction points to the two sides of the counseling and pastoral care coin -- counseling/healing and nurture/prevention. As every parish minister knows, marriage counseling is both unavoidable and a vital form of human help. But the church is also called to be a growth-nurture-training center for the vast majority of a congregation who do not need "counseling" at any given time. Unfortunately, in recent decades, counseling has tended to be the tail that wagged the pastoral care dog. It is more productive to make the nurturing of "normal" people throughout the life cycle normative. For me, this means investing at least three times as much caring time and leadership (ministerial and lay) in person-building, human enrichment activities (including short-term growth-oriented counseling) as in helping those with deep deficiency needs through longer-term pastoral counseling.
The growth counselor can use the human potentials and lifelong development perspectives as the hub of the wheel around which insights and methods from the newer growth oriented psychotherapies -- e.g., reality therapy, transactional analysis, gestalt therapy, action therapies -- can be integrated. The growth perspective also allows the integration into one's approach of growth-enhancing insights from the older psycotherapies -- Jungian, Adlerian, Rankian, and Freudian.
Growth counseling blends third-force thinking with what I call the "fourth force" in psychology and counseling -- relationship-building methods including couple marriage counseling, conjoint family therapy, couple group counseling, and multiple-family support groups. In contrast to intra-psychic and one-to one methods, these approaches seek to liberate directly an entire relationship system -- a marriage, family, or group -- so that everyone in that network will be freer to grow. These methods take seriously the fact that, for better or worse, we are inescapably "members one of another" (Eph. 4:25). Growth or stagnation results from the quality of our relationship!
Liberating the Power of the Pastoral
Growth counseling can help one strengthen an authentic theological and pastoral identity in caring and counseling work. And when I use the term "pastoral" I clearly do not mean to exclude, but precisely to include, the ministry of the laity. Growth counseling can help us church-related counselors use more of our seven unique resources:
Biblical Insights
Growth counseling enables us to rediscover and implement growth-centered, people-liberating insights that are deep in our biblical heritage. These insights, which have been restated beautifully in the relational and growth-oriented philosophy of Martin Buber, are energizers. When they touch the heart of an individual or a group or a church, they stimulate the flow of new creative energies. Human potentials thinkers such as Maslow affirm in modern psychological language deep, neglected dimensions in our spiritual heritage. Let's look at some growth oriented biblical insights.
The ancient insights that we human beings are children of God (Rom. 8:16) and that our spirits are formed in the divine image (Gen. 1:27) express the awareness that each of us has tremendous possibilities within us. The fulfillment of these possibilities is awaited "with eager longing" by the whole creation (Rom. 8:19). Think of it! All of life is on the side of growth and fulfillment.
The growth parables -- the leaven (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:21), the mustard seed (Matt. 13:31; Mark 4:31; Luke 13:19), the sower (Matt. 13:3; Mark 4:3; Luke 8:5), the talents (Matt. 25:14-15) -- all have new meaning for me since I've been turned on by the growth perspective. They refer to the way God's kingdom -- the new kind of world of love and justice -- is coming, by growing! And we all are invited to participate in this growth process.
Jesus' basic life-style was people-creating. This is seen most clearly in his remarkable skill of drawing forth extraordinary gifts from "ordinary people." He could "see" in a fisherman with obvious weaknesses an underlying potential for rocklike strength. And so he called Simon by a new name -- Peter, which means "rock." By looking at people in terms of their becoming, Jesus helped enable them to become! That was "good news" -- a new quality of relationships is possible and in these relationships a new quality of human consciousness can develop. That was good news in the first century; it is good news today -- news that is needed in our inner lives, our marriages, our churches, and our world. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus' purpose in coming is described as enabling people to find life "in all its fullness" (John 10:10 NEB). Life in all its fullness -- this is what growth counseling is about. What a beautiful theme for a growth-centered church and ministry!
Time-tested biblical insights about the resistance to growth provide a healthy corrective to the unrealistic optimism which sometimes appears in the human potentials movement. What's wrong with simple nature analogies -- for example, "We're all seeds becoming plants, becoming flowers"? The growth forces are in us, as in a seed. But there are also complex, persistent forces in human beings and in society which resist growth. The biblical awareness is that we often use our freedom to cut ourselves off from those very growth-empowering relationships for which our hearts long. This points to a reality which can't be ignored if we're going to be growth enablers. Whether called by the traditional religious word "sin" or by the traditional psychotherapeutic word "resistance," it must be dealt with. The biblical awareness is that a dying must precede every rebirth -- that our personal Easters cannot occur unless that which keeps us from experiencing the resurrection of awareness and caring dies. Thus, growth is often painful and anxiety-arousing as well as joyful and energizing. It hurts to let go of something, however constricting, that has at least made us feel protected. Growth involves risking. It requires the "leap of trust."
The biblical insights about resources for growth are also important. Like life itself, all growth is a gift and a mystery. Growth occurs through a process which releases energies from beyond ourselves as well as within ourselves. We can choose whether we will participate in this enlivening process or not, but we need not and cannot create the growth energies. The awareness that all growth is a gift of God, the creative Spirit, helps get us out of the center. The challenge we all face is to learn to facilitate the flow of the growth-enabling energies of the universe through our relationships.
A Fellowship of Persons -in-Relationship
Growth counseling enables us to use more fully the rich opportunities which are inherent in the fact (which we usually take for granted) that a church is a fellowship, a network of groups, individuals, and families. Relationships are both the place and the power of growth. Church-related counselors have direct, regular entree to a wide variety of relationships. Growth counseling can help persons "turn on to life through people." Having an ongoing relationship with a majority or near-majority of families in most communities creates a unique opportunity for churches that is shared by no other social institution. Growth groups, combining mutual nurturing and relationship training, provide better tools than ever before to utilize this opportunity. In responding to this opportunity, churches are discovering deeper meanings in the New Testament image of the church as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16; Eph. 4:12).
Personal Contacts Throughout the Life Cycle
Growth counseling enables us to help each other use the developmental crisis of each life stage as a growth opportunity. As the only institutions with ongoing face-to-face contact with "normal" people throughout the life cycle, churches have a unique opportunity to help people use the extended life-span given us by medical progress. To do this effectively, a church should become a lifelong learning and growth center.
Natural Contacts With Persons in Crises
The growth-counseling approach also enhances a counselor's ability to use his/her natural contacts with many persons going through unexpected crises such as sickness, bereavement, and divorce. Short-term, action-oriented crisis-counseling methods (one aspect of growth counseling) are a "natural" for a minister or lay befriender. Such methods often are effective in a few sessions, allowing persons in crises to rally inner strengths and learn better ways of coping.
Christian Life-Style as Responsible Action
Growth counseling, being decision-oriented and action-centered, draws on another strength in our tradition -- the fact that the Christian life-style is a way of living, not just a way of believing. Personal growth often occurs more quickly by helping a person make a decision and take responsible action than by focusing mainly on changing feelings and attitudes.
Ordinary People in Mutual Ministry
The growth approach helps to mobilize the power of ordinary people to help each other through mutual ministry. The individuals in every congregation who have the capacity for this ministry of growth are a gold mine of largely untapped helping resources. Their abilities can be released through a systematic training-for-caring program.
The Focus on Spiritual Development
Growth counseling, by recognizing that spiritual development is at the center of all truly human growth, allows us to use the unique resources of our religious heritage and theological training in our counseling and enrichment work. Today, with the collapse of the old "certainties," many people suffer from value-confusion, meaning-emptiness, childish consciences, and theological future shock. The ability to be a spiritual-growth enabler has never been more important.
Pastoral growth counseling moves beyond the third and fourth forces in counseling and therapy to the "fifth force" -- by which I mean insights and methods of spiritual counseling and growth. Recognizing that "the spiritual" is what is uniquely human, growth counseling brings the resources of one's religious heritage to the task of facilitating the maturing of one's faith, conscience, and relationship with God. The goal is a liberated and liberating spirit, open to experiencing the truth that makes us free (John 8:32) -- free to grow, free to love and care, free to make a constructive impact on society, free to become all that the Creator dreamed for us to become!
NOTES:
1. Maslow, Toward a Psychology ofBeing, p. 5
2. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), pp. x and xiii.
3. Maslow, Toward a Psychology ofBeing, p. 5.
4. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 84.
Having now treated the values of intelligence, creativity, and conscience, we come to reverence, the last of the four pivotal values by which civilization and education should be formed. This is a unitary and consummatory value, which comprehends and animates all the rest. On this account, a consideration of the grounds and relevance of reverence furnishes at once a summary and a fresh interpretation of the values already discussed.
Reverence is the most characteristic feature of the religious consciousness. Here the word "religious" is intended to signify the attitude and practice of sincere devotion to what is supremely worthful. This definition excludes much that commonly goes by the name of religion. We are reserving the name of religion in the present analysis for a reverential orientation to what is of ultimate value. Beliefs or practices that do not express devotion or that refer to objects of less than supreme worth are by this definition not religious.
Irreligion stands in diametric opposition to religion. It consists in self-seeking orientation. It is the denial of any object of supreme worth beyond the self. It is founded upon the conviction that man himself is the source of values, that human beings do not discover the worthful but themselves create and decide whatever is to be counted as good. Furthermore, since from this standpoint man is the measure of goodness, his wants, preferences, and interests become the criteria of value judgment. The irreligious life is directed toward the goals of satisfaction, acquisition, security, and power. It is founded on the premise that the proper end of man is to become independent and autonomous.
A third orientation, which may be called idolatry, stands intermediate between religion and irreligion. Idolatry is devotion toward that which is less than supremely worthful. It partakes of the nature of both religion and irreligion. It is like religion in being a form of devotion. The worshiper to some degree transcends his egocentric craving and offers himself in service to what he deems valuable. But idolatry is also like irreligion, because when the object of loyalty is less than ultimately worthful, dedication to it circumscribes, excludes, and impoverishes life in the same fashion as self-serving.
Idolatry is even found in what commonly goes by the name of religion. Whenever any persons, institutions, rituals, dogmas, or writings are regarded as worthy of ultimate loyalty, idolatry is present. Doctrinaire, exclusive, absolutist "religions" result from ascribing finality to what are in fact less than final goods. Authentic religion cannot exist without finite symbols to serve as channels for devotion to the infinite. Religion becomes idolatrous when the symbols of perfection are worshiped as though they were the ultimate itself: when founders, prophets, and seers are deified, when infallible authority is ascribed to certain organizations and books, and when the performance of rites is taken as a guarantee of salvation.
In religious fanaticism the drive for power and for self-justification is bolstered by attachment to what is believed to be divine. This is the explanation for the evils that have been committed in the name of religion throughout human history. Persecution, war, injustice, superstition -- many are the wrongs and great is the human misery caused by idolatrous religionists. The power to do evil is never greater than when it is fired by a conviction that God commands it. Hence, a fundamental religious virtue is humility, born of the persuasion that no man and no human institution can rightly claim the authority of God himself, but that all are under an authority toward which each may at best help to direct his fellow seekers after truth.
Much of what is called religion does not even have the objective reference and the active loyalty of idolatry. It is explicitly oriented toward satisfaction of selfish wants. In other words, it is essentially irreligious. For example, when people pray for success, prosperity, or victory in battle, they are indistinguishable from persons who are centrally concerned with promoting their own interests in other ways. The use of religion to bring "peace of mind" and physical health may also easily deteriorate into self-seeking. Mental and physical well-being are proper objects of petition, provided they are not sought simply for personal ease and comfort, rather than for the sake of God and for the better service of fellow men.
Much popular religion is a direct expression of the democracy of desire. In a hard and cruel world, with many competitors for earth’s honors, riches, and privileges, most people lose out. In fact, so insistent are human demands that nobody feels himself a complete and permanent winner. Furthermore, in the end everybody, rich and poor, of high station and low, is defeated by the last enemy, death. Under these conditions it is not surprising that every society should have developed systems of belief and practice which attempt to counteract and compensate for these partial and ultimate frustrations of human desire. The usual content of these faiths is that another world exists wherein all the disappointments and denials of the present world will be made good. Religion of this sort has the effects of sanctifying selfishness and of blunting concern for excellence here and now. For if everything will be made right in the future world, it is not really essential that full justice be done now.
The religion of reverence is opposed to these popular faiths. Religion as devotion to the highest overcomes the self-centeredness of desire and attachment. In authentic religious faith the direction of concern is shifted from the striving, seeking self to the valued other. The errors of idolatry are also corrected by the perpetual judgment rendered on every finite good as never exhausting the infinitude of goodness. The religious person is saved from fanaticism both by the humility that prevents him from identifying himself and the objects of his wants with the supremely worthful and by his recognition that every attained or any conceivable good falls short of absolute and final perfection. Thus, the objections made by thoughtful people to religion as it is commonly practiced properly apply to the perversions of religion and not to its pure and mature forms. In fact, the criticisms of corrupt religion made by secularists and humanists, as well as even more vigorously by prophets, saints, and reformers within the traditional religions, are themselves evidence of ultimate concerns for truth and right, which express the authentic spirit of the religion of reverence.
Undemocratic conditions in any sphere of human affairs are symptoms of irreligion or idolatry. Injustices, the demand for privileges, arbitrariness, prejudice, exclusiveness -- all of the forms of oppressive behavior in which individual freedom and worth are denied -- are a consequence either of deliberate self-seeking or of absolutizing limited goods, such as membership in a particular social class, nation, or family. Democratic movements, on the other hand, reflect a religious spirit, when in the name of truth, equity, and universal rights the idols of race, class, economic privilege, party, and nation are tumbled down. As we have already observed, however, democracy is not necessarily religious in motivation. It becomes corrupt when the democratic concern for worth degenerates into an acquisitive free-for-all, when the cry for justice turns to the demand for popular autonomy. The democracy of desire rests on the principle of human self-determination and self-sufficiency, which is the antithesis of the principle of reverence upon which democracy should be founded.
Irreligious and idolatrous cultures may take many forms, from the pure self-seeking of irresponsible individualism, through the various types of more or less organized pursuit of advantage, to the collectivistic autonomy of a totalitarian "people’s democracy." The communist societies, for example, afford a clear contemporary illustration of fanatical idolatry. That doctrinaire communists are dedicated to what they believe to be of supreme worth is evident. Their willingness to labor and to sacrifice for the Cause, and their devotion to what they are convinced is absolutely and irrevocably true, are also beyond question. In these respects the communist faith appears to be religious in nature. That it is in fact idolatrous is evident from the finitude of its ultimate goals, the closedness of its rigid and exclusive membership and belief system, and its ruthless denial of many of the elemental rights of man in the struggle to reach its goals. Not only does communism but utopian social systems generally tend to be idolatrous. Any scheme that is taken as a final and complete blueprint for human felicity functions as an idol, for no such plan can possibly encompass the fullness of excellence, and no humanly contrived pattern or program can embody the ultimate meaning of human existence.
Genuinely religious cultures, too, may take many forms. Devotion to the supremely worthful can be expressed in ways without number. No single doctrinal formula can fully capture and contain infinitude. No system of ritual uniquely and exclusively qualifies as a vehicle for affirming devotion through symbolic acts. No one code of conduct contains the last word on the holy life. No religious institution can rightly claim exclusive and final divine authority. The worship of the most high takes place through countless channels. The object of supreme devotion has many names -- or, perhaps better still, no name at all, for to name is to limit and confine and thus to negate the very ultimacy one seeks to affirm. There is a boundless wealth of habitual acts that may be used individually or corporately to express religious faith. The holy life, too, can be lived according to many different patterns, and any number of institutional forms may be devised to give body, structure, and continuity to religious conviction.
A religious person is one who in intention and in deed is devoted to the supreme, the infinite, the perfect, the true, the completely excellent, regardless of the words, acts, or institutions through which he expresses his dedication. This is not to say that all doctrines, rites, and social organizations are equally true or serve equally well as channels for the ultimate. Some forms are more easily turned to idolatrous and irreligious purposes than others. Actually, many ideas and practices that purport to be religious contradict the fundamental requirement of every religious symbol that it at one and the same time reflect the ultimate and affirm its own finitude. The best religious creeds, rituals, codes, and institutions are those that both powerfully evoke sustained loyalty to the most high and at the same time repel attempts by the faithful who fall into idolatry to make the symbols themselves into objects of worship.
Just as no religious forms are fully adequate to the supreme object of devotion, so also do all persons fall short of complete religious dedication. Everyone has the propensity to live for his own advantage, and everyone succumbs to some extent and at some times to the temptations of idolatry. These acts of disloyalty to what is of ultimate worth constitute what in the religions of the West is called "sin." Perfect reverence is an ideal that no one wholly attains. By weakness, ignorance, and fear all are prone to live for self and to snatch after such satisfactions as come within their grasp.
It is mainly because of this self-centeredness that the social forms of democracy are necessary. Since every person tends to ascribe to himself more importance than he accords to others, some scheme of balance and limitation is required. Since each looks upon his relationships from the standpoint of his own interests, it is important, for the good of all, to devise measures that will insure a degree of universality and equity. If all people were by nature completely disposed toward the good, it would be necessary only to inform them of it, and the good society would be assured. This view overlooks the universality and gravity of self-centeredness. When democracy is founded on faith in the natural innocence of man and when human wants are taken as the measure of what is good, the ground is prepared for anarchy, conflict, and mass tyranny. A realistic appraisal of human nature leads to a view of democracy as a dyke against the flood of self-interest, as a means of approaching basic justice in relationships between people who are by nature inclined toward injustice because they look first to their own advantage.
It follows that a democracy of desire strengthens and encourages irreligion and thus undermines the only foundations upon which any democracy can rest -- namely, those of objective, impartial, and universal justice. A democracy of worth, on the other hand, is founded on the religious premise of the primacy and reality of right. Yet it is not presupposed in a democracy of worth that everyone is fully devoted to what is good and true. On the contrary, it is assumed that because every person to some extent seeks first to satisfy his own wants, democratic principles, commitments, symbols, and structures are needed to remind one of the universal good he ought to serve.
The foregoing analysis invites the conclusion that the central task of education is religious conversion. This is not to be understood in the conventional sense, as securing commitment to a specific organized church or acceptance of one of the traditional creeds. What is meant is the inner transformation of purpose and motive from self-regarding irreligion and the idolatrous service of limited goods to reverent service of the most high. Such conversion may well lead one to institutional affiliation with others of similar intention and to the use of certain verbal formulations of faith, since the inward reorientation needs some social and symbolic embodiment. Many outward expressions are suitable, the appropriate one in any given case depending on personality type and on the person’s social and cultural situation.
Whatever its visible forms, the important goal is the redirecting of life from finite attachment and acquisitiveness to the active love of the good. To accomplish this change is the supreme end of all teaching and learning. All increase in knowledge and skill that confirm one in his lust for autonomy is loss, not gain. From this standpoint much of what is taught and learned in present-day education misses the mark. Studies that increase the power to exploit the earth and other people, that arm one for the struggle for privilege, that prepare one to pursue his advantage more successfully, destroy rather than edify a person. The sovereign test of all education is whether or not it is religious -- that is, whether or not it tends toward conversion of the person to unconditional commitment to truth and right.
This central religious task is inherent in all teaching, regardless of the field of study. It is the end that should govern instruction in mathematics and in literature, in mechanical arts and in modern dance, in biochemistry and in law. Every study, theoretical and applied, elementary and advanced, formal and informal, is an appropriate vehicle for teaching the fundamental lesson of loyalty to what is true, excellent, and just. Every institution of education -- the home, the school, the church or temple, the industrial shop or laboratory, the museum or library, the mass media -- can be and ought to be an agency of religious instruction, engaged in the one saving work of emancipating persons from bondage to selfish desires and idolatrous attachments and of directing them toward the life of devotion to that in which their being and well-being are grounded.
Thus "religion" is not to be regarded primarily as a special subject of study, parallel to geography and physics, but as a life orientation to be effected in and through all special studies. To be sure, religion is also a field of intellectual inquiry and practical skill, and it is possible and desirable to give instruction in religious history, philosophy, beliefs, and institutions as well as to arrange for practical experience in religious affairs. But valuable as these lessons may be, it should not be thought that such explicit religious education exhausts the obligation to teach religion or is even the principal part of it. Religious faith is relevant to every aspect of education and to every subject of study, and is to be mediated through the whole life of teaching and learning.
The situation is somewhat parallel to the teaching of logic and rhetoric. While these are properly regarded as special subjects of study and are taught as separate disciplines, skill in reasoning and in the use of language is also a necessary aspect of every other intellectual discipline. For example, a teacher of physics necessarily teaches logic and rhetoric, while one who teaches logic or rhetoric as a special discipline does not necessarily teach physics. Right ordering and expression of ideas is a task for both specialists and everybody, especially for everybody. So it is with religious instruction. "Religion" is an important and legitimate special study, but more important still is the fact that instruction in every field promotes either autonomy or reverence. The present book is a case in point. This chapter deals with religion as a particular facet of education in a democracy, but more significant is the fact that all of the preceding chapters set forth a religious point of view by demonstrating what the life of ultimate devotion means in a wide range of human concerns.
In our pluralistic society, constituted of people with all kinds and shades of religious belief and disbelief, the advocacy of religiously oriented education presents serious difficulties. One obvious way out is to place education under the auspices of organized religious institutions. This way has the advantage that the ideas and practices of religion can be infused throughout the instructional program without the confusions and restrictions imposed by having to take account of diverse religious traditions. Against this approach two principal objections must be lodged. First, religious schools tend to breed idolatry, by identifying a particular tradition with the ultimate. Young people come to accept the religious forms and structures which they are taught as the substance of religion itself. In the second place, sectarian schools lose the religious values implicit in the confrontation and interplay of different ways of faith. Their students and teachers are not driven to the deeper levels of devotion which bridge (but do not obliterate) the differences between traditions. They are likely to neglect the fundamental lesson of democratic faith -- that, prior to all other commitments and uniting people of many forms of belief and practice, is our common vocation to love and serve truth, excellence, and justice.
What, then, of teaching religion in public schools? Surely, no official state religion ought to be taught. This is clear from the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution, in which the Congress is denied the power to make any "laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Such a regulation is necessary if the ultimacy of religion is to be preserved. Since government is necessarily finite and fallible, it cannot define the object of ultimate loyalty. The state must be "under God"-- that is, subject to the higher judgment of righteousness-in-itself; the state is never itself the true standard of perfection. Freedom of religion is an essential feature of democracy, since the state is not an end but a means.
Since matters of faith cannot and should not be legislated, irreligion and idolatry as well as all forms of religion have a right to exist in democratic society. No one should be penalized or coerced because he holds any particular view about the ultimate. Of course no citizen is completely at liberty to act in any way he pleases, even though his religious convictions require it. Some lines must be drawn, at the points where public safety and welfare are endangered. Thus, persons fanatically committed to doctrines of class warfare and subversion of free institutions (communists, fascists, racists) would have to be prevented by the police power of the democratic state from putting their ultimate commitments into practice. So also would religious opponents of medical treatment normally have to be overruled when the public health was endangered by neglect of treatment.
On the other hand, it is a mark of mature democracy when provisions are made for exempting conscientious objectors from military conscription. Having in view the question of national security, this contribution to the practice of freedom of conscience can be made only because the great majority of citizens are willing to bear arms in defense of their country. Conscience sometimes drives citizens to certain actions -- for example, nonpayment of taxes -- which cannot be condoned and against which sanctions must be brought. Even in such cases there may be lessons to be learned from the nonconformists, and these may in later times be embodied in new social regulations. It belongs to the open society not only to give the widest practicable freedom to its members’ consciences, but also to be sensitive to the social message that may be contained in the deeds of prophets, seers, and reformers who now are caused to suffer for their radical nonconformity.
The duty of the democratic state and its agencies, including the public schools, is, then, to recognize and promote freedom of religion. Government is not the arbiter of faith. Yet neither can the state be neutral with respect to religion. While it is not within the province of government to determine who is religious and who is not, nor to discriminate between the different forms of religion, irreligion, and idolatry, except where public security is at stake, it is the function of the democratic state to persuade and encourage its citizens toward religious faith and away from irreligion and idolatry. They are not to be coerced or penalized for failure to be religious, because it is given to no man to judge the faith of another and because compulsion is incompatible with reverence. But the duty of the state to promote religion (in the fundamental sense) remains. This is not an obligation to support religious organizations as such, but to encourage in the citizens a life of loyalty to what is supremely worthful.
It is thus not right to conclude from the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty that the public schools have no business dealing with religion. The question of fundamental life orientation cannot be avoided. At issue are the ruling presuppositions which affect everything which is taught and learned. It is not a purely private affair whether or not a person is religious. Religion as ultimate loyalty is profoundly relevant to public life, and the institutions of public education ought to promote it actively and explicitly. From the standpoint of the democracy of worth, the basic aim of public education is to inculcate reverence, propagate true faith, and expose and oppose irreligion and idolatry. This is the one crucial objective of instruction, in comparison with which all accumulation of knowledge and acquisition of skill are insignificant, and through which alone these special accomplishments may be made meaningful. The goal of education is the formation of good character, whose measure is the habit and attitude of devotion.
Public education can be religious in this sense without violating religious liberty and without teaching sectarian doctrines as official public dogma. The content of such public religious instruction should be twofold. First, in every domain of teaching the following essentials of religious faith should be emphasized and demonstrated in the teacher’s own outlook: That the world, man, and his culture are neither self-sufficient nor self-explanatory but are derived from given sources of being, meaning, and value. That the supremely worthful is not finite or limited but transcends all human comprehension and every human achievement. That the life of selfish ambition, the struggle for autonomy, acquisition, and success, and attachment to finite goods lead in the end to misery, conflict, guilt, despair, boredom, and frustration. That every individual has a personal calling to turn from following after desire to a life of loving and grateful dedication to what is of ultimate worth.
Second, these fundamentals of faith should be brought into relation to the historical patterns of faith in the civilized tradition. The many ways in which religious faith has been expressed should be recognized. But, first, each student should be taught to understand and appreciate the religious tradition in which he was reared, and to see how it may be used maturely and responsibly as a vehicle for ultimate devotion. Included among these religious traditions should be ones of protest as well as of affirmation. Thus, many critics of religion -- self-styled atheists and freethinkers -- are frequently more devoted to ultimate truth and righteousness than are the nominal adherents of the more traditional religions. In public education, then, the initial aim of instruction in the religious heritage is to help adherents of each tradition -- Christians, Jews, Muslims, Ethical Culturists, Religious Naturalists, and all the others -- to realize to the full the resources for the embodiment of religious faith available in their tradition at its best.
Along with this deepening of faith through each student’s own heritage should go a broadening of perspective through continuing conversations with persons of other traditions. It should never be assumed that all of the historical religions are equally good or that a person should always remain within the tradition to which he was born. Religions differ greatly in the power and purity of the devotion they evoke. It is within the province of public schools not only to see that students are correctly informed about religious matters, but also to provide a setting in which older young people may learn to recognize and sift out irreligious and idolatrous tendencies and perversions in the various religious systems of mankind. They should be encouraged so to grow in knowledge and power of discriminative judgment that each person will at length be competent to choose for himself the forms of belief, celebration, and conduct that best express and sustain the dedicated life.
Religion is not a matter for uncritical acquiescence, nor are religious traditions simply to be accepted or rejected. Of all the concerns of life, religion is the one that supremely calls for active inquiry, growing insight, and continual redefinition and decision. If out of fear or ignorance any real consideration of religion is excluded from the school curriculum, the educational program is thereby trivialized and the school fails in its central educative mission. Worse than that, religiously sterilized schools actively spread the virus of autonomy and irreverence, for the absence of any reference to the claims of faith or to its historic expressions communicates the idea that they are unimportant or at least irrelevant to whatever is studied in school. By removing the wide segments of knowledge and skill with which the school ordinarily deals from all explicit relation to religion, the meaning of religion is falsified; by being made a specialized concern, it is robbed of its essential comprehensiveness, and the school studies become occasions for propagating the gospel of autonomy and self-sufficiency.
It is easy to understand how zeal for public harmony in a religiously plural society has led to the secularization of American public schools. Since it is not possible -- or perhaps even desirable -- for everyone to agree on the forms of religion, it is concluded that the common schools must exclude religion altogether. In support of this position the famous Jeffersonian doctrine of the "wall of separation" between church and state is regularly invoked. While this approach eliminates some difficulties, it does so at the expense of fundamental educational and democratic values. The secularization of public education has done serious damage to the cause of basic religion -- though perhaps not to that of conventional or nominal religion, which prospers well enough -- and has encouraged a philosophy of life that undermines the moral basis of democratic civilization. An enduring and progressive democracy rests on common loyalty to a law of truth and right which is found and given, not constructed by human decision; and for the propagation and health of such democracy an educational system centered around this religious principle is required.
The state and its agencies, including the public schools and colleges, can be true to the principle of religious liberty without giving up their primary obligation to promote the religious life, in the fundamental sense of reverent devotion. Freedom of religion is itself a religious principle, since it rests on the conviction that no man, group of men, or institution can claim final and authoritative knowledge, perfection, or righteousness. If a wall of separation is erected between religion and the state (and its schools), that wall will prove to be a tomb in which church, state, and schools will decay with a civilization that has lost its soul. Schools that are purged of all religious concerns become agencies for the propagation of irreligion or idolatry -- for the feeding of selfish ambitions or training for subservience to secular utopias. If religion is understood in its elemental sense, and not merely in its sectarian expressions, it is entirely practicable for the public schools to educate religiously without violating any ideals of religious freedom, without partisanship for any historical tradition, and without transgressing the principle of persuasion, not compulsion, in all matters of faith.
If the institutions of public education fail to teach for religious commitment and thereby both make education personally superficial and effectually promote irreligion or idolatry, it will be necessary, for the well-being of society, to have the instruction of the young carried on in nonpublic schools under the auspices of religious organizations. Although such schools doubtless have certain merits even under ideal conditions, they are neither religiously nor democratically desirable as an alternative to a public school system. Public schools, with young people from a variety of religious backgrounds, provide the optimum setting for growth in mutual understanding and for that continuing disciplined dialogue in which differences deepen insights and correct errors, instead of confirming prejudices and sharpening divisions.
For public schools to be able to deal responsibly with religion, two conditions must be met. First, teachers must be properly selected and prepared. No teacher can communicate reverence if he does not have it himself. The character of the teacher is of prime importance. Knowledge and skill are necessary, too, but they are subordinate to the fundamental requirement of personal devotion to the good. In addition to religiously oriented character (whether or not it is expressed in conventional religious terms), every teacher should have a working knowledge of the major religious traditions of mankind as well as of the principal idolatries. This requirement is no more unreasonable than expecting every teacher to know in broad outline the major forms of political and economic organization and the principal types of personality structure. No teacher should be or need be at a loss to deal intelligently and fairly with most religious issues that might arise in public schools in a pluralistic society, and every teacher can be and ought to be prepared to grasp the religious dimensions in any subject of study and to use sectarian differences to clarify issues and enrich the learning of all.
The second prerequisite for responsible religious instruction in public education is a strong teaching profession, which can withstand the pressures of organized religion outside the schools and colleges. Religion is everybody’s concern; official "religious" bodies have no monopoly of it. The greatest present bar to a mature religious orientation in public education is the assumption that the church and the synagogue are the only appropriate channels for religion, and that anything done about religion in the schools must be accomplished through these channels or at least with the official approval and sanction of the recognized religious officials.
Thus, religion is regarded as a delicate subject, like sex, politics, economics, and all other important matters about which people differ sharply and feel strongly, and which for those reasons are in greatest need of careful study and cooperative inquiry. Students’ questions about religion are usually handled with the utmost caution and are referred back to parents and ministers for answering, for fear of reactions by representatives of organized religion to any treatment of religious matters by teachers of another affiliation. The only cure for this crippling influence is a strong and independent organized teaching profession, whose members are protected against outside interference in the performance of their professional functions and who recognize and accept their responsibility for dealing knowledgeably and impartially not only with the proximate issues of life but also with the ultimate concerns of faith through which the particulars of life gain their deeper significance.
That education is for reverence has been the common theme of all the chapters in this book. Each element in the curriculum for a democracy of worth exemplifies the religious aim and furnishes occasions for fulfilling it. In intellectual matters, religious faith means devotion to truth, keeping inquiry open, foregoing the demand for absolute certitude yet not despairing of progress, striving for universality, publicity, and objectivity in knowledge, and being thankfully obedient to the disciplines of reason and of empirical evidence. In the use of the mass media of communication, reverence is manifest in the aim of creating a blessed community, bound together in the truth, through media of public education devoted to the common good rather than to propaganda and profit for the advancement of selfish interests. In esthetic education, religious faith is revealed in persistent dissatisfaction with the second-rate and in the constant yearning for creative perfection. Good manners, too, have a religious foundation; considerateness, respect for others, a sense of fitness, grace, humility, gentleness, and dignity all grow when reverence displaces self-assertion. Work performed with a sense of calling is religious in quality, and reverence informs education for any occupation that creatively incarnates excellence. One who learns the disciplined joy and self-forgetfulness of play therein also learns the power of worship to make old things new by acts of re-creation.
Without religious devotion to the right, no secure basis can be laid for proper regard for nature and responsible control of procreation, so that the earth may be a secure dwelling place for all the generations to come. Education for health is ultimately religious also, for health is wholeness, and one cannot be whole while he lives in autonomous alienation from the sources of his being. True love and enduring marriage are rooted in a faithful covenant which transcends the ebb and flow of feeling, considerations of advantage, and the contingencies of fortune. Similarly, only a transcendent devotion can surely dissolve the barriers of class and race by teaching men to know themselves equals and brothers in the sight of God and for his sake. Finally, religious faith is present whenever material goods are regarded as a trust to be administered for the right rather than as a treasure to be grasped, and whenever the affairs of politics within the nation and between the nations are seen as occasions for discovering and obeying the universal law of right to which all are subject and in which the ends of life are fulfilled.
This is the one supreme purpose which unites all the lesser purposes of education: to engender reverence. Reverence is the mark of perfection in character. Devotion to what is supremely worthful is the one aim of the curriculum, to be worked out in all of the special areas of instruction. The quality of life which springs from this ultimate commitment is the soul of democracy and the consummation of education for the common good.
It is not enough, in the present age, to promote justice in the local community and in state and nation. Events and peoples beyond our borders can no longer be regarded simply as subjects for inquiry by the adventurous and the curious. The world has become a neighborhood.
Thus, the idea of one world, of the family of mankind, is today not merely a prophet’s vision. In one sense it is an accomplished reality. But it is a fact forced upon us by technology, rather than a moral achievement. Morally we still live in many separate worlds. We are fearfully unprepared from a personal standpoint for the technical unity which the progress of modern knowledge has presented to us. As in so many other realms, our knowledge has outrun our virtue.
This unification of the world through science has been accompanied by a diffusion of democratic ideas among peoples of every land. Men everywhere are demanding equality and independence. The old assumption that one nation may hold sway over another is now universally challenged. "Colonialism" and "imperialism" today have unqualifiedly evil connotations, particularly in countries struggling for national self-determination.
The spread of the idea of freedom throughout the world is essentially a consequence of education. Through the diffusion of information by modern methods of travel and communication, democratic ideals are transmitted from one people to another. When people in one nation are given knowledge of better ways of life in other nations, they have a basis for aspiring toward equal benefits and opportunities for themselves. The subjugation of a people can be maintained in the long run only by keeping them in ignorance of their rights, potentialities, and means of emancipation. Now that enlightenment is within reach of everyone everywhere, the demand and expectation of freedom and opportunity are also universal.
The results of these world-wide movements toward independence are nevertheless ambiguous. On the one hand, new hope and vigor are in evidence over wide areas of the earth. The long sleep and silence of oppressed and exploited peoples are at an end. Within a generation, cultures are being transformed from the level of the stone age to that of the atomic age. People who only recently were nobody are now treated with the greatest seriousness. The attention of the whole world is fastened upon the struggles of new republics to be born, to survive, and to grow to some degree of political maturity. Such events provide an atmosphere of expectation and exhilaration for the many peoples who see their own fortunes in the ascendancy.
On the other hand, these revolutionary changes have been accompanied by unprecedented fear and violence. The precipitous plunging of people from the life of nomads, peasants, and forest dwellers to that of urban industrial workers has had catastrophic effects on morale. The rapid assumption of prominent positions in international affairs by politically immature people has made for a high degree of instability in relations among the nations. The meeting and the mixing of cultures have caused the dissolution of traditional values without any satisfying framework of meaning to take their place. Thus, hope and enthusiasm in wide segments of the earth’s population are compounded with anxiety, confusion, conflict, and suffering probably without parallel in the history of man.
Out of this complex of aspiration and desperation has arisen the greatest of all enemies to human welfare, total war. War is nothing new in man’s history. Men have perennially battled with one another, whether for sheer love of contest or for lust of conquest. But modern total war is something new under the sun. War is no longer a limited engagement at arms between selected members of the population. Today war between nations involves everybody, soldiers and civilians alike. It is a comprehensive effort to destroy the enemy by any and all practicable means. Every available resource of materials and manpower is poured into the struggle, and all of the treasures and traditions of civilization are sacrificed for the one supreme goal of military victory.
The crushing burdens of war must be carried not only during the actual armed conflict but also when there is no open combat. Preparation for war is essential to success in it, and the intervening times must be used to make ready for engagements to follow. Thus, it is no longer customary to speak of alternating war and peace, but of "hot" wars and "cold" wars. "Peace" is, then, merely the preparatory phase of war, a phase that makes the ensuing struggle all the more deadly because of the greater power accumulated during it.
Modern war is total in three respects: in involving everyone and everything in waging it and in suffering from it; in absorbing the energies and concern of the nations perpetually; and in the destructiveness of modern weapons. Technical discoveries have also made available the means to effect the speedy annihilation of humanity and civilization. Atomic bombs, now stockpiled in abundance by the major contending powers, can desolate cities within a few moments and blanket the earth with radioactive dust which would make it completely uninhabitable. Biological weapons could quickly destroy whole populations by spreading fatal infections across the land. Or the enemy could use certain gases to destroy the people’s will to resist and so could take his victim without a struggle.
Included among the resources marshaled for the conduct of total war are those of education. When civilization is clouded over by the threat of armed conflict, everything that is done to prepare the young for the future tends to have some reference to the needs of national defense. Science and engineering are emphasized at the expense of the humanities. Control of education is centralized in order to enable the national government to meet the continuing emergencies of full or partial military mobilization. In the totalitarian nations every agency of instruction and communication is enlisted in the government’s service, to educate the people in the requirements of national security. Under conditions of international military rivalry, the free nations, too, become more and more regimented, and liberty in teaching and learning are suppressed in the national interest. Thus, war and the threat of war make education in all nations subordinate to considerations of military strength.
The desperate world situation which modern warfare has now created makes the pursuit of peace mankind’s number one objective. Since war has at last become an all-consuming evil, no human achievement of any kind is possible unless war is prevented. Knowledge, art, and social invention -- all of the works of civilization -- depend for their realization upon the elemental securities of existence. Human life and its products cannot endure without a hospitable environment. Total war creates a totally inhospitable environment for man and all his works. None of the other values -- of intelligence, creativity, conscience, or reverence -- that education ought to promote has any meaning at all apart from the basal fact of human survival. Modern war makes all judgments of better or worse pointless in comparison with the primordial "to be or not to be" which determines whether there shall be anything at all to appraise. The questions of autocracy and democracy, of desire and worth, of mediocrity and excellence in education -- all of the matters that have concerned us in these pages -- have significance only on the assumption that war does not consume us all. It is in this sense that world peace is today the value of values.
How has our present international predicament come to pass? The most obvious factor has already been noted -- namely, the progress of science and invention, by which the world has been contracted and united and weapons have been made totally destructive. But such knowledge and skill are not in themselves evil. Our perilous condition is due to the conjunction of these technical factors with the moral and personal factor of self-centeredness. The present fearful state of the world is a result of combining the human tendency to strive for autonomy with the vast powers now at man’s disposal through science and technology. In other words, what today threatens to extinguish the light of civilization altogether is a union of the democracy of desire with vast technical capability.
The upsurge of nationalism all over the world is not simply a struggle for justice. It is not only an attempt to redress the wrongs of colonialism and imperialism. It is also a clamor for autonomy, a demand for absolute liberty, for full self-determination. So insistent are the pressures that even peoples who are not yet prepared to assume the responsibilities of self-government claim their independence and then pay a heavy price in internal chaos and strife, with the likelihood of having to settle for order by dictatorial power rather than by consent. Thus, the irresponsible demand for independence characteristic of the democracy of desire tends at length to autocracy and police coercion, which actually diminish the people’s freedom.
The widespread revolutionary movements of the time are also due to the popular demand for a larger share of material goods. The "have nots" are rising to challenge the "haves," usually with scarcely any conception of the necessary economic, political, and demographic conditions required to produce a high standard of living. Impoverished people in underdeveloped agrarian societies, newly aware of the abundance enjoyed by the people of advanced industrial societies with a long history of civilized development, are demanding at once the benefits of civilization without creating the instruments necessary to produce them.
These insistent demands for more power and possessions contain the roots of war. Nations fight for markets, for territory, and for prestige as well as to defend themselves against other countries which seek such things at the expense of their neighbors. The explosive insecurities of our time follow from the general acceptance of the principles of the democracy of desire -- namely, that the goal of life is to have maximum liberty and to acquire as much power and as many things as possible.
No lasting solution to world problems can be achieved apart from widespread conversion from the life of acquisition to that of devotion. Yet under modern conditions of weapons capability, even the acquisitive philosophy is incompatible with war, for in total war nobody can win. On purely practical and prudential grounds, apart from any considerations of justice or excellence, armed conflict no longer pays, for anybody. War is not now, as it once may sometimes have been, a way of gaining desired ends. In a nuclear holocaust the difference between victor and vanquished would disappear in the abyss of universal destruction and suffering which would ensue. A clear assessment of the facts of modern warfare makes it evident that armed conflict is no longer defensible on any view except that of nihilism.
A primary objective of education today, in homes, in schools, and through the mass media of communication, should be the full and forceful dissemination of knowledge about the extreme destructiveness of modern weapons of war and about the awful consequences for everybody which would result from their use in any large-scale conflict. The false sense of security in the possession of a stockpile of powerful weapons must be dispelled, and a proper fear must be engendered of the heightened danger to which all the nations of the world are exposed through the arms race. Even from the standpoint of national advantage, the citizens must be encouraged to work for a reduction in arms. An atomic build-up cannot be risked, because of the ease with which a nuclear war could be initiated by accident if not by design. At present there is a balance of terror through the possession by each of the world’s major antagonists of the means to inflict mortal damage on the other. Such a balance is dangerous and precarious. The minds and wills of all the people must be prepared by education to find some way, not yet apparent, out of the collective insanity into which our compounded knowledge, fear, and hostility have led us.
Wars will not cease from the earth until the universal demand for autonomy is subordinated to the search for truth and justice -- that is, until democracy is founded more in devotion than in desire. What, then, are some of the ideals for a democracy of worth in the sphere of international relations? What are some of the goals of education for world responsibility?
A first objective is the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. This position must now be taken even on strictly practical and prudential grounds. It ought also to be supported on an ethical basis. The mass extermination, in warfare, of persons and of the means of livelihood is a moral enormity. War violates every canon of right. It contradicts the ideal of human worth. It silences the voices of reason and of conscience. For the slow and patient work of creation it exchanges swift annihilation. In place of civilized persuasion it exalts barbaric force. Instead of sensitivity it promotes indiscriminate callousness. It displaces love and understanding concern by hatred and indifference. Every strategy of trickery and deception is allowed in war. Truth is subordinated to success in battle, and honor is regarded as merely one of the conditions of mutual assistance.
In earlier times warfare may have had its noble aspects. It sometimes engendered courage, loyalty, and endurance. It provided a field for the exercise of skill and imagination. It was a training ground for leaders and a powerful impetus to patriotism, national unity, and civic cooperation. But recent technical developments have so transformed the ways of warfare that whatever nobility it may have had in the past no longer maintains. While it is true that the necessities of national defense still provide a powerful stimulus in a variety of technical and educational fields and still serve to unite citizens in a common struggle against enemies within and without, the end toward which these efforts point is so evil that their virtue is negated. Thus, in our present predicament perhaps the most fundamental of all moral tasks is the abolition of war.
The renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy can be effected only if nations also abandon their claim to absolute national sovereignty. The idea of full national sovereignty belongs to the philosophy in which autonomy is the highest good. National sovereignty means unrestricted national self-determination. It means that the nation is believed to be subject to nothing beyond the pursuit of its own interests. When interests conflict, it is natural to resort to force, since it is assumed that there is no higher authority to which appeal can be made for settlement of differences. If, on the other hand, the controlling principle of national life is doing what is right, then the nation is no longer autonomous and self-sufficient; its policies are determined and judged by reference to the superior authority of what is right. The nation is regarded not as the source and criterion of all good, not in itself as an object of unconditional loyalty ("my country, right or wrong, my country"), but as an instrument and channel for goodness.
To relinquish complete national sovereignty is not to eliminate the nation as such. It is frequently urged that the existence of nations is the cause of wars, or in any event that the creation of a single world political community, without separate independent nations, would insure world peace. Such a scheme is not practicable in the foreseeable future, nor would it appear desirable from a democratic standpoint. Just as the democratic nation should be comprised of free and diverse individuals, with maximum personal and local responsibility, so a democratic world community should be made up of independent and distinctive nations, severally and regionally responsible for the universal good. Every nation has its own special history, traditions, culture, and purposes. The citizens of each country have their unique capabilities, national characteristics, and styles of life. These differences in nature, custom, and outlook from country to country enrich the life of mankind.
Nations organized in independence and freedom are as essential to world democracy as free and independent persons are to a democratic community. But such a world of free nations presupposes the subordination of national will to the sovereignty of justice. If nations continue to assert their independence of all higher authority, the end will be either war to the death (for all) or the emergence of a single dominant world power which will maintain by force the minimal order necessary to insure the survival of civilization. National integrity and independence in a democratic world community are contingent upon acceptance and practice of national responsibility for the pursuit of justice and the relinquishment of the principle that the nation is a law unto itself. Vigorous nationalism and devoted patriotism are thus not incompatible with world democracy. The progress of mankind does not lie in the destruction of national identity and the denial of patriotic pride and devotion -- any more than civic virtue would be improved by undermining family loyalties. The best citizens of the world are those who are also conscientious individuals, devoted members of families, responsible citizens of the community, and loyal patriots.
If war is to be eliminated as an instrument of national policy and if absolute national sovereignty is to be abrogated, matters in dispute among the nations must be dealt with by persistent and patient negotiation. If, as here contended, there is an underlying assumption of rightness to be discovered, negotiation becomes a means of cooperative exploration. The search for an acceptable solution to disputes is not simply a contest for maximum advantage. It is rather an attempt through discussion and persuasion to satisfy the requirements of justice. Negotiation between democracies of worth is a quest for mutuality founded on common loyalty to the right.
Implicit in the negotiation of disputes according to principles of justice is the acceptance of international law. It is by this law that the sovereignty of nations is limited. This is the higher authority to which they ought to be subject. This law is the criterion of judgment between nations in conflict with one another. By this rule the procedures for equitable relationships and for meaningful persuasion are established. Such international law must be regarded as an approximation to the right, since laws that are held to be only convenient conventions will be ignored when important national interests require it. Force is the only resort in disputes over vital interests when the principles of justice are believed to be solely man-made agreements for purposes of mutual accommodation.
International law comprises the basic rules for ordering the relations between nations. It covers such basic national rights as security against invasion, the control of entrance and exit of persons, the ownership of property, the extradition of criminals, and honorable treatment of ambassadors. Ideally, international law should also extend far beyond these traditional provisions for preserving the integrity and independence of sovereign states, into the domain of universal human rights. Just as there are laws within a nation that forbid a person to misuse his liberty, so there should be laws under which the irresponsible use of a nation’s powers over its own citizens could be judged; that is to say, the rights of self-determination by the nation should be subordinate to the fundamental rights of man. For example, under extended international law no nation should be allowed to maintain a system of slavery or to cause its citizens to suffer loss of life, health, or property without just cause. Eventually a universal bill of rights should emerge, containing the basic principles of justice with which all law, both within and between the nations, should be compatible.
A meaningful system of international and universal law requires organized machinery for adjudication -- an international court system. It further presupposes some sort of world legislative and executive bodies by which procedures could be formulated and authority exercised. An international police power is also needed to keep order and insure compliance with fundamental world law. Such a force should eventually take the place of the huge military establishments now maintained by the separate nations, under a world order in which war and preparation for it would be abandoned as intolerably burdensome, impractical, immoral, and suicidal.
World courts, legislatures, executives, and police forces constitute a world government. Universal law cannot operate effectively among the nations without concrete instrumentalities in which certain of the powers now held by sovereign nations are surrendered to a world governing agency. But for the sake of national freedom, the powers assigned to the world authorities ought to be clearly defined and strictly limited. A world state with comprehensive powers would weaken or altogether destroy the nations and would raise the threat of a world tyranny more absolute and destructive of liberty than any of the imperial tyrannies of history. The democratic principle of limitation of powers is therefore even more essential in world government than in the political organization of the individual nations. Some sort of world commonwealth there must be, if mankind is to continue to live in a single world of radical interdependence. Some visible instrumentalities are necessary if a common allegiance to certain elemental principles of universal justice is to be more than a pious sentiment. But the vast preponderance of governing power belongs within the free nations of the world community, and not to any world body. International political organization should have jurisdiction only in matters essential to basic peace and justice among the nations and to the preservation of certain universal human rights everywhere.
Much progress can be made toward a world commonwealth, apart from the actual ceding of certain national powers to a world government, by the strengthening of voluntary international cooperation. For example, the United Nations provides a forum for continuing discussions of world problems and even for cooperative police action as a substitute for traditional warfare. Postal services, telephone, telegraph, and broadcasting facilities, monetary exchange, and the regulation of trade all require administrative cooperation across national boundaries. In such activities a kind of world government exists de facto, and in these practical ways a basis is provided for the eventual formation of a limited world government de jure.
World democracy may also be furthered by the more advanced and prosperous nations providing economic and technical assistance to underdeveloped nations. The inequities of national privilege due to historical and geographical circumstances should be removed by assisting the less fortunate peoples to develop their own material and cultural potentialities. This cannot be done by making indiscriminate gifts of money, nor by seeking to remake other nations according to the details of the governing pattern of the would-be benefactor nation. The United States, for example, cannot effectively help other nations simply by pouring out dollars and by persuading other people to adopt American institutions and culture. It can best serve the cause of world democracy by helping supply the means for the less developed nations to fulfill their own unique aspirations, without attaching to the aid any conditions of military, economic, or political alliance, conformity, or dependency. To insure equity and freedom in aid programs it is desirable to utilize such cooperative international agencies as the World Bank, instead of one nation’s contributing directly to other nations. The establishment of a world government with well-defined and strictly limited powers would further facilitate the just and impartial allocation of economic and technical assistance.
Finally, for a world established in liberty and universal equality of opportunity, free exchange of goods, persons, and culture is essential. In a world-wide federation of free nations there is no place for protective tariffs and other forms of trade restriction, which subsidize inefficiency and prevent the people of certain nations from reaping the benefits of their special skills. Every nation should be encouraged to use its resources and the capabilities of its citizens most efficiently, and this requires open channels for the exchange of goods and services. Temporary hardships caused in certain industries by competition from foreign producers should be alleviated by direct economic assistance and by helping in plant modernization or the retraining and reallocation of displaced workers, and not by the imposition of import duties which prevent able and industrious people from reaping the rewards of their efforts.
Free movement of persons is another goal for a democratic world. At the present time, because of the great economic and political disparity among the nations of the world, complete freedom of immigration is not practicable or desirable. The economic and political structures of a nation are hard-won achievements of responsible citizens who have fashioned their careers in relation to these structures. Large numbers of people from other nations cannot then be brought into any country without placing great strains on its own people and institutions. The difficulties of quickly accommodating substantial numbers of new citizens are great. Ultimately, however, as the cooperation of the interdependent nations of the world brings about more complete equality of privileges, and particularly as measures are taken to bring population growth under control and in balance with available natural resources, it should be possible to permit persons to live and work under whatever flag they may choose and to fulfill their human vocations as loyal citizens of whatever nation most fully commands their devotion.
A practical and productive approach toward a democratic world can be made through cultural exchange. Travel and residence in other lands (apart from transfer of citizenship) is one important means of intercultural association. Regular exchanges of teachers and students should be arranged, so that direct personal experience of other peoples may be an integral part of the organized program of education. Seasoned and well-informed interpreters of the world’s cultures should be employed to make of foreign travel something more significant than a pleasure tour, and persons who travel abroad should be encouraged to regard themselves as responsible representatives of their country to other nations and to behave accordingly.
International conferences in every field of human endeavor including business, sports, the arts, and science are helpful in keeping open the channels of communication between the peoples of the world. Books and periodicals should be regularly exchanged, both in the original languages and in translation, in order that the widest possible reading may be assured. Care should also be taken to insure that cultural products sent abroad are reasonably representative of the sending nation and are not a caricature of it, as has unfortunately too largely been the case with American motion pictures circulated in other countries. Serious efforts should likewise be made to secure for foreign service in government and commerce men and women who are capable and dedicated, who will inspire confidence, respect, and affection in the people among whom they sojourn, and who will identify sympathetically with these people in attitudes and way of life rather than create little outposts of the home country in a foreign land.
None of the major human purposes can any longer be fulfilled apart from a world perspective. All of the values discussed in this book clearly presuppose universality and world outlook. Truth knows no national boundaries, nor does esthetic excellence. Scientific knowledge is not validated without the concurrence of inquirers everywhere, and the fund of human knowledge, skill, and beauty needs replenishment from men of genius in every land. We shall not have learned true civility in manners until we have passed beyond conformity to local and national custom and learned through our actions to symbolize our respect for every person everywhere. Work can be no true vocation while it is turned directly or indirectly to the forging of instruments of destruction, -- or can play be more than momentary escape from the abiding fear of violence so long as the nations are related to each other in hostility or uneasy alliance.
As it is with the values of intelligence and creativity, so is it with conscience. Conservation is a world problem. Since supplies of essential raw materials are usually highly localized geographically, international trade is necessary for their proper distribution. Moreover, the ways and rates of use of scarce materials are matters for international decision and control. The population explosion is likewise a problem for everybody and can be solved only by world-wide education. There is no hope for peace and civilization unless the pressures for the earth’s limited resources are relieved by responsible social planning; and, conversely, there is no hope for dealing constructively with resources and population as long as war and the fear of war govern the decisions of nations. Public health is another world concern. Disease is no respecter of nations, and the talents and resources of all nations are needed to eradicate it, coordinated through such agencies as the World Health Organization. World tensions and anxieties are certainly harmful to mental health, and the physical ravages of war spread sickness, injury, and death everywhere. In short, for wholeness of mind and body in its inhabitants, a whole world -- that is, a world healed of its mortal disease of war -- is necessary.
Even right relations in the family are correlated to world understanding. The exigencies of war disperse and dislocate families. Young people are exposed to loneliness, stress, and compulsion, which are not conducive to healthy love and marriage relationships, and the attitudes of hostility and habits of violence which war breeds ill prepare them for secure and stable sex and family life. In like manner, hostilities between the nations intensify estrangement between social classes and racial groups within the nation, especially where some of the groups are of foreign origin. An open, cooperative, peaceful association among the nations, on the other hand, makes for corresponding constructive relationships in families and between class and racial groups. Of special importance for world democracy at the present time is the decisive rejection of the white man’s dominance of the world, as people of every shade of skin assume places of leadership in the councils of the nations. The new democratic world-mindedness, despite pockets of bitter resistance, is bringing a sense of the worth of all people and exploding the racist illusions that long supported arbitrary privilege and unjust subjugation.
Finally, in this interdependent world it is evident that economic and political democracy cannot be achieved in isolation. When one nation suffers material hardship, other countries are affected also. When certain people in a nation prosper at the expense of others, the people of all countries are impoverished. The equitable distribution of labor and materials is not a task for each nation alone, but one for the whole family of nations, working cooperatively to administer justly man’s natural estate, which is entrusted to all men for the right use and service of all. Political democracy, too, must transcend individual nations. Tyrannies abroad beget defensive reactions at home, which threaten liberty. The necessities of war and of defense make political democracy difficult, since the great power that must be mobilized and directed by centralized authority against enemies abroad is easily turned to the suppression of inconvenient freedoms at home. The rule of law under which free men live is not a matter only of national tradition and preference. It is a universal principle, an objective right which should order the lives of men in every country.
For education, the inculcation of a world outlook is a clear imperative. A prime objective of the study of modern history should be to make vivid the story of the emergence of one world and the spread of the hunger and hope for freedom to people everywhere. Scientific and technical studies should also be presented in the light of their essential contribution to the creation of a single world, in the annihilation of space and time effected by machines for transporting and communicating. Through study units in regular courses and through special lectures, discussions, conferences, and seminars people of all ages should be given full and frank instruction in the causes, character, and consequences of modern warfare. Especially important in supplying such information are books, magazines, newspapers, radio, and television, through which the public can best be kept continually abreast of developments and possibilities both in weapons technology and in efforts toward armament reduction and control, and can be made aware of the nature and scope of the peril in which the world stands so long as war remains the ultimate resort in the settlement of international differences.
In schools and colleges every subject of study should be treated with regard to its world basis and implications. All fields of knowledge, from archeology to zoology, can claim distinguished contributors from many lands, and all studies have important applications to world understanding, whether it be an inquiry into the archeology of the Middle East, once the cradle of civilization and now a focus of cultural and industrial renaissance, or an analysis of the zoology of malarial infection, which has sapped the energies and influenced the destinies of millions in tropical areas around the globe. Today there is no justification for teaching any subject from a purely national or regional standpoint -- not even American history, which can be rightly comprehended only as a phase within world history. Neither man nor nation is an island, isolated and self-explanatory. A country’s very essence, the meaning of its national character and destiny, are defined in part by its interconnections with other countries.
World responsibility in education further entails serious attention to the teaching of foreign languages, beginning in the early years of school, when children can quickly and naturally learn another tongue in the same fashion as they learned their native language. The backwardness of Americans in giving attention to foreign languages is nothing less than a national disgrace. In most other countries the educated people have been instructed in at least one language other than their own, and many of them have attained a considerable fluency in it. If Americans are to play their parts as world citizens with full responsibility, they must speedily extend and intensify the program of foreign language instruction, not only in the traditional fields of Latin, French, German, and Spanish but also, for large numbers of citizens, in Russian, Chinese,Japanese, Arabic, and other non-European languages.
With more thorough preparation in foreign language, both written and spoken, American students will be in a better position to learn effectively from travel and residence abroad as part of their educational preparation. Such foreign study, under a broad program of regular international exchange of teachers and students, should increasingly become a normal feature of formal education for mature young people.
Finally, in homes, schools, and community affairs a new emphasis should be placed on patriotism, no longer as exclusive loyalty to the sovereign nation, but as devotion to country as the organized agency of articulate relationship with all mankind. The central symbols through which love of country is expressed should cease to be those of military might and should more and more come to celebrate those distinctive national aspirations and traditions that prefigure the reign of freedom and justice everywhere.
We have thus far considered the meaning of democracy as a broad concept having relevance to every field of human interest and endeavor. We now turn to politics, the field in which the idea of democracy had its birth and in which it is still most naturally and commonly applied. Politics has to do with the way in which a society as a whole is organized and operates. It is concerned with the governance of all the people, with the structure of the public realm.
In matters political, democracy means -- in Lincoln’s words -- government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It means self-government of a given body of people, as contrasted with non-democratic political systems in which rule is in the hands of a hereditary monarch, of a dictator, of an aristocracy (noblemen or intellectuals), of a class (rich people, the proletariat, or priests), or of a limited party.
Political democracy is based on the principle of political equality. The contrast between rulers and ruled, between sovereign and subject, is obliterated. The rulers and the ruled are one and the same people. The people are sovereign and subject to no other persons but themselves. In a democracy every man is a king.
But should the people govern themselves? Should not the best people govern, as the advocates of aristocracy propose? Why should the welfare of all the people be endangered by placing their destinies in their own hands, in view of the relative incompetence of the average man in comparison with the most able people? Can the general educational level ever be high enough to make the common people wise enough to rule themselves?
In the abstract it can be granted that the best people should govern. But who are the best people, and in what sense are they best? If "best" refers to high intellectual ability, personal dynamism, rhetorical eloquence, and the like, and if people with such powers are permitted to rule autonomously, they are likely soon to become tyrants. Democracy rests on the insight that no one -- not even the "best" people -- can in the long run and on the whole be entrusted with an unconditional grant of power over other people. Democracy did not come into being as a means of improving the quality of leadership by installing the common man as sovereign in place of the aristocrats. Democratic reformers have been under no illusions that the common man possesses any special wisdom which is superior to that of the exceptional man. Their insistence has rather been on the untrustworthiness of any person -- "common" or exceptional -- to exercise sovereignty over others without limitations and checks.
Popular rule may become as corrupt as autocratic rule. When self-interest dominates a society, the rule of the people becomes the tyranny of the mass, exercised through persons who hold authority in the name of the people. Such popular rule requires the suppression of minorities whom the majority do not consider consistent with their own best interest. Democracies based on the accommodation of competing interests are inherently unstable. As the pressures from dissatisfied elements within build up, and as the dangers of assault from without multiply, such a democracy is subject to weakness, frustration, and loss of morale, and ultimately to disintegration from within or conquest from without. There is widespread suffering due to the loss of social order, and the eventual result is an autocratic regime in which personal liberties are exchanged for the benefits of dependable authority.
Such are the consequences of building a political system on the principle of interest-satisfaction. The theory that human beings in pursuit of their own interests will automatically establish a harmonious society, provided everyone has an equal voice in political affairs, is no more true than the corresponding thesis in economic affairs. Furthermore, raising the educational level of the people offers no sure remedy for the corruption of a mass democracy. Education designed to further individual ambitions in fact intensifies the forces that make for the inefficiency and instability of popular democracy.
Democracy can be firmly established only on moral foundations. The democracy of desire contains the seeds of its own destruction. Only a democracy of worth possesses the resources for permanent growth and regeneration. The proper goal of democratic political life is the discovery and accomplishment of what is right. It is a great error to conceive of democracy in Utilitarian terms, as that form of government that affords "the greatest good to the greatest number," where "good" means pleasure, happiness, and the fulfilling of desires. The original democratic challenge to autocracy was mainly for the increase of freedom in justice and fraternal relations; this is still the proper goal.
Democracy is commonly thought of as a system for making effective the "will of the people." This idea assumes the democracy of desire, in which human autonomy is the governing principle. The proper principle of democratic responsibility is not the "will" of the people, but the fulfilling by them of truth and justice, regardless of what any person or group may will. Virtue is not guaranteed by majority vote. Real excellence is usually perceived and willed by the few rather than by the many. Then, should we abandon the democratic idea? By no means. Civic responsibility belongs to all the people because the people as a whole are the best custodians of the right, the safest guardians against the perversion of justice by the powerful few who would rule over others for their own advantage.
This subordination of the people’s will is symbolized by the official American motto, "In God we trust." This motto is not an expression of an official national theism, for such a view would contradict the well-established principle of state neutrality in matters of religious belief and would imply that people who do not believe in God are not fully citizens. The motto should rather be understood as affirming that the nation stands under a judgment superior to any or all of the people -- namely, that of the right itself. It means that the state is not supreme, nor are the people themselves the final standard by which everything is to be measured. The ultimate criteria are truth, goodness, justice, freedom -- ideals of worth which may be approximated but never fully embodied in actual existence.
The nature of democratic authority is further clarified by considering the place of law in government. One of the cornerstones of democracy is that government is not of men but of law. The rule of law overcomes the anarchy of unbridled freedom and inhibits arbitrary action by persons in power. Political life must be conducted according to established rules and traditions which condition the liberty of all citizens, including government officials, for the sake of the common welfare. Indeed, laws are necessary in any society if the people are to have confidence and security and if public affairs are to be conducted with orderliness and predictability. Autocracies require laws as well as do democracies, and a democracy of desire as well as a democracy of worth. The differences between governments turn on the matter of the sources and sanctions of law. In autocracy, laws are made by the ruler and express his will. He can truthfully say, "I am the law," although for prudential reasons he usually suppresses this boast. In a democracy of desire, laws are made by the people and express their will. The people are then the law. They make laws to establish and conserve order and to maximize the satisfaction of special interests.
Under autocracy and the democracy of desire, government is really of men, not of laws. The laws are only tools through which men govern. In such societies the laws are constantly under challenge by subjected persons and by those who seek to improve their own position relative to others. Laws made by men are respected no more than are the men who make them, and laws that express the will of men will be broken without compunction by other men whose will, in the contest of interests, is opposed to that of the lawmakers. When laws have their source and sanction solely in human beings, therefore, resistance and defiance by those with opposite interests are to be expected. The only guilt is getting caught in the infraction of regulations. In fact, since success is considered the criterion of the good, taking advantage of the law without being apprehended is regarded as a mark of virtue. Thus, a thorough belief that laws are made solely by men engenders disrespect, disorder, and lawlessness.
Government by law rather than by men presupposes a sanction for law rising above human will. To be sure, all law is necessarily formulated by men; it comes through human channels. But if it is to inspire respect and obedience, there must be a belief that the law is an expression (albeit partial and imperfect) of what is good and right.
Respect for law as an approximation to the right must be carefully distinguished from legalistic absolutism. Legalists regard laws as unchanging, unchallengeable rules of conduct, as final, authoritative standards for human life. But nobody knows fully what is right, and no actual pattern of social life is a perfect exemplification of justice. The rule of law, then, does not mean that the people should follow only the established codes, remaining respectfully obedient to them and never criticizing or changing them. For authentic democracy the people must have respect for law, but not a slavish subservience to any existing code of laws. They should be alive to the need for improving existing codes and for making changes in them in the light of altered circumstances and wiser counsels. The young should be taught to obey the rules established by persons in authority and to have a respectful regard for the principles of conscience that those rules are meant to embody. They should at the same time be led to inquire into the justification for rules and instructed in the appropriate ways of bringing about changes in social regulations to make them more just.
In a democracy of worth, then, since law is viewed as an expression of the good, it is not only respected but it is also loved. The citizens do not obey the law only because they must, and they do not try to break it if their own advantage would be served thereby. They rather think of just laws as a source of human well-being, for which every citizen should be grateful. Laws are seen not as restricting life, but as means of promoting the good life for all.
Moreover, the connection between law and objective right is critically important in the adjustment of social conflict. If laws are believed to be entirely man-made, then power is the only criterion of right; differences between persons and groups can be adjusted only by domination and submission or by compromise agreement. It makes no sense to discuss the differences from a moral standpoint, for in theory the differences are solely a result of human will and preference. On the other hand, when laws are linked to the ideal of a universal moral order, a foundation for discussion is provided. Since the right may not be fully or certainly known, there is no assurance that conflicts can he successfully resolved. Nevertheless, cooperative exploration of differences is now a reasonable pursuit. Just as in scientific discussion, which makes no sense without a presupposed truth, moral inquiry has no point apart from a presupposed objective right. Thus, in the democracy of worth the grounds are provided for dealing with differences through a continuing dialogue rather than through contests of power which alienate disputants, instead of uniting them in a common search.
For the United States, the general structure of political life is set forth in the Federal Constitution. All acts of government and all decisions in law are ultimately referable to the Constitution. It is the Constitution that contains the law by which the people rule themselves. This is the instrument that saves the nation from the tyranny of individuals or of the mass. It is the gyroscope of the ship of state. The people do not feel free to assert their autonomous will; they consider first what the Constitution permits, and they make policy accordingly. Thus, the Constitution is the great conservator of civic wisdom, the preserver of the values of democratic polity.
The people may, of course, change the Constitution, and in this sense their will appears to take precedence over the supreme law of the land. But such amendments must be made in accordance with procedures set forth in the Constitution itself. Furthermore, such changes are made only after the most searching public deliberation and for the most weighty reasons.
This reverent regard for the Constitution, this willing submission to its provisions, this extreme caution in modifying it, and then only in obedience to its amendment regulations -- these attitudes are not due to sentimental attachment or to absolutist legalism. A better explanation would be the assumption that the Constitution is a good approximation to the principles of justice to which the will of the people should be subordinate. When the people decide to amend the nation’s charter, they do so because they believe the changes will make their Constitution an even more perfect instrument of the right, rather than because they think it will better serve them and their interests.
The political structure defined in the Constitution has three main components: legislative, executive, and judicial, each with explicitly defined functions. These three branches operate in parallel rather than in hierarchical fashion, according to the basic principle of the separation of powers. This separation makes possible the system of "checks and balances," in which the deliberative decisions of the Congress are checked by the President; the actions of the President and his officers are in turn tested, challenged, and confirmed by the Congress; and the constitutionality of the acts of both the legislative and the executive branches is checked by the judiciary. The legislative branch has a further check-and-balance mechanism of its own, by its separation into independent House of Representatives and Senate, both of which must pass every measure that is to become law.
This system of separation of powers has two purposes: the negative one, through the checks and balances, of preventing the usurpation of power by any person or group of persons; and the positive one of affording independent approaches to what is for the good of all the people. In its negative function it minimizes the consequences of the power play that comes from construing democracy as the pursuit of autonomy. In its positive function it enhances the possibilities for knowing and doing the right. For effective government it is essential that the negative checking activity should not destroy the positive one. This is particularly important with respect to the executive power, which must be free for decisive leadership, without being frustrated at every step by an opposing legislature. A complex modern democracy is at a serious disadvantage in dealing with autocratic states as well as in expeditiously conducting its own internal affairs, unless it possesses strong executive powers which are not hedged about in matters of detailed policy and administration by legislative and judicial agencies. It is imperative that the executive be allowed to lead the people and to act quickly and flexibly in their behalf, within his defined sphere of responsibility, and that he be checked and balanced by the other powers of government mainly through regular review of his accomplishments and through the setting of long-term policy.
Besides the separation of powers, for the sake of freedom and individuality, the Constitution ordains a government with limited powers. In the American commonwealth the government is not omnicompetent. The spheres of political authority are explicitly set forth, and beyond these spheres the citizens are at liberty to decide for themselves. The individual’s life is not to be controlled in all things by the collective power. Government is given sufficient authority only to accomplish necessary matters of public concern, leaving a wide range of decisions for the private sphere.
The most explicit statement of these limitations is in the Constitution’s first ten amendments -- the Bill of Rights -- which guarantee freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition, the right to bear arms, protection against the obligatory quartering of soldiers, security from unwarranted search and seizure, the right to a grand jury, protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, the right of due process, just compensation for private property taken for public use, and speedy public trial by jury without excessive fines or bail. Finally, it is explicitly stated that rights and powers not delegated to the Federal Government by the Constitution are reserved to the several states and to the people.
By this limitation of powers a democracy committed to the right -- that is, with a bill of "rights," not "conveniences" or "privileges"-- is distinguished from a "people’s democracy," in which the people rule. In a democracy of worth there is no majority rule, in the sense that the majority completely determine how life will be lived in the society. The majority is subject to the law of right, which includes the rights of minorities and the liberties of individuals.
The definition and limitation of powers also supports a policy of maximum local responsibility. The United States Constitution establishes a federal union, not a single monolithic nation-state. The nation as a whole is compacted of parts which retain their own proper governmental powers. The several states have their constitutions, executives, legislatures, and courts, generally modeled after the Federal system and in any event not inconsistent with the Federal Constitution. The states further delegate authority to local governments, thus keeping the responsibility for civic affairs as fully as possible in the people’s hands. The several levels of government also check and balance one another, as do the separate branches of authority considered horizontally.
The most important constitutional principle for maintaining democratic civic responsibility is that of representation. The great problem for democracy in a complex society is to make the voice of each citizen count in the determination of public policy. The chief mechanism for solving this problem is the popular election of major government officials. These officials represent the people in guiding the affairs of state. In what sense do they "represent" the people? The answer depends upon the nature of the democracy in question. Under a democracy of desire, the elected officers represent the interests of their constituents, and the voters expect their representatives -- whether in the legislative or executive branches -- to help them secure what they want. Government then becomes an arena in which the champions of various interests in the society vie with one another for precedence, and the successful politician is one who can win the greatest benefits for his supporters.
Representation has an entirely different meaning in a democracy of worth. Here the elected official represents the people in the pursuit of civic excellence. He is not a politician whose only thought is to gain and hold political power, but a statesman whose central concern is for the right conduct of public affairs. He is a "representative man," in the sense that in his person he exemplifies some of the ideals toward which mankind aims. He is not a symbol of the average man -- of commonplace mediocrity--but of what the average man in his better moments aspires to be.
In ideal democracy the statesman is a leader of the people, not their lackey. His task is not to get for them what they want, but to help them to do what is right. He is a servant of the people, and responsible to them, not for the satisfaction of their demands, but for guiding them more surely toward the goals that they have glimpsed in their finest hours. Statesmen should, therefore, be chosen from among the best of men and women, as persons of unusual wisdom, integrity, and vision. They should not be the common man writ large or people with whom the mediocre in character and ability feel comfortably equal. They should be persons to look up to, exemplars of the ideals of civility. The representative should be selected more for his difference from his constituents than for his likeness to them. He should be chosen more for his ability to transform the people than for his ability to confirm them, more to elevate them than to please them.
One other feature of American politics -- namely, the party system -- is worthy of mention as part of the mechanism for securing individual responsibility. Political parties provide a concrete basis for individual civic participation and decision on candidates and issues. In a time of de-personalization of life in the large community, they make a place for face-to-face associations between citizens in the discussion of affairs of state. Moreover, the two major American parties are not primarily competitive interest groups, with one, for example, representing capital and the other labor, or one reflecting rural interests and the other the interests of urban people. This contrasts with the multiparty system of many other countries, where the parties represent particular competing geographical, economic, or religious groups within the nation. The two main parties in the United States, on the other hand, constitute alternative coalitions for effective government.
This two-party system is consonant with the democracy of worth, in which both parties aim to serve the welfare of all the people, not to gain special advantage for a segment of the population. From this point of view party politics should be regarded not as a battle between opposing groups for precedence and power, but as a common pursuit, along somewhat different paths, for the common good. Both parties are in principle dedicated to the same goals -- namely, justice in the nation and the welfare of all the people -- but they have somewhat different convictions about what justice and welfare concretely mean and about how these benefits may best be secured. These differences make for deeper understanding and for more certain progress toward the right. They stimulate the continuing dialogue which is the sine qua non of wisdom and vitality in the community of free men. The point for emphasis is that these values may be realized only when the party system is predicated upon the objective reality of the good and loyalty to it, and not when parties are committed to a struggle for their own members’ advantage.
The system of political organization in the United States is, of course, not the embodiment of civic perfection. It is not the only polity consistent with loyalty to the good. Its features are a consequence of the special history and conditions of the American Experiment, and hence cannot be taken uncritically as the ideal for nations with quite different traditions and circumstances. Nevertheless, in its general features the American political system is a marvelous achievement, exemplifying some of the fundamental characteristics of the democratic ideal. The main point in the present analysis is to show how the laws and polity of a society may exemplify the ideals of the democracy of worth, to indicate the dangers of a degraded conception of democracy, and to suggest the basis for the recovery of sound principles of government.
We turn now to a specific consideration of the bearing of political democracy on education. Democracy clearly requires educated citizens if it is to survive and prosper. It is for this reason that the state has, and should have, compulsory education laws. The right to ignorance is not recognized as one of the rights of man in a democracy, because ignorance is a form of slavery. A person cannot be free in his own person, nor can he contribute to the freedom of others, if he is at liberty not to learn what he needs to know to be a responsible and participating member of society. Hence, it is a matter of public law -- not of private choice -- that everyone shall receive education up to a specified age. To insure that this will be done satisfactorily, the state also should and does see to it that schools are provided for everyone, and that no one is deprived of an education for want of money or for any other reason. Free schools are one of the essential instruments of the general welfare which the Constitution aims to promote.
On the other hand, education belongs primarily to the family and not to the state. Public educational services are for the use and welfare of the people but are not obligatory upon them. If parents do not wish to have their children instructed in public schools, they may send them to nonpublic schools. This right was upheld by the United States Supreme Court, on constitutional grounds, in the celebrated "Oregon case" (Pierce v. Society of Sisters) in 1925. The government has no monopoly of education. It must make facilities available to all the children of all the people, and it must make sure that minimum standards are maintained in all schools, public and nonpublic, so that no one uses his freedom irresponsibly. Beyond this the proper authority of government over education does not extend.
The general principles of limited governmental powers and of local responsibility are clearly reflected in the relation of the several levels of government to education in the United States. As education is not among the matters specifically assigned by the Constitution to the Federal Government, it is by implication delegated to the states. While the states are thus officially charged with the public supervision of education, it has been the general pattern in the United States for the states to delegate detailed responsibility for the public schools to the local communities themselves. In this way the control and support of public education have been made an immediate and visible responsibility of all the people. This localism has been preserved in the interests of freedom and variety in a pluralistic society distrustful of high centralization of power, particularly in a field such as education, where individual persuasion is paramount.
Still, the predominance of state and local responsibility for education does not exclude the Federal Government entirely from the sphere of education. Certain phases of education, such as the conduct of programs connected with the military establishment or with diplomatic missions, are a direct Federal responsibility. Furthermore, under the general welfare provision of the Constitution, the Federal Government offers financial assistance to states and local communities for a variety of educational purposes, ranging from subsidies for school lunch programs to salaries for teachers of agriculture and loans for school building construction. The Federal Government by substantial financial aid also can help to counteract the differences in the ability of the states to supply educational facilities for their citizens. In this way the ideal of equality of opportunity may be furthered, the more favored sections of the nation helping to lift the heavier educational burden of the less affluent sections. The same functions of educational equalization are also served by a system of state financial apportionment among the local communities.
Local control of education is always subject to state supervision. School boards are not free to conduct their affairs autonomously; they can act only within the limitations and in accordance with the standards and requirements set forth by the state. In matters of education the states in turn are subject to Federal law in relation to constitutional rights. The most celebrated example of Federal intervention in state and local school affairs is the 1954 racial desegregation decision of the United States Supreme Court. Since the Court found that state and local educational policy were in conflict with fundamental democratic rights as expressed in the Constitution, it ruled that local self-determination in respect to segregated schools must be overruled by national policy.
The school desegregation story illustrates the general principle that to the degree that control of education is not exercised with a sense of responsibility for justice, Federal control will be introduced. Local autonomy is not an absolute right. It is a grant of freedom which may be enjoyed only so long as it is not abused. On the other hand, the Federal Government is not necessarily just either; we may not assume that centralization of educational control would make school policy right in all respects. The genius of a balanced system of limited, reserved, and delegated governmental powers and of defined civil rights is that the connection between freedom and responsibility is kept constantly in view. Furthermore, in the continuing tension between levels and branches of political authority, the distrust of unrestricted autonomy is expressed, and the need for common loyalty based on objective principles of justice is made plain.
Freedom is important in a democracy so that in the long run the citizens may more nearly approach what is right. For the perfecting of freedom, government must as far as possible be persuasive rather than coercive. But persuasion is the work of education. From this it follows that education is the foundation of democratic freedom. Because the institutions of education are the prime agencies of persuasion in society, they should as far as possible be separate and independent of the ordinary channels of political power. If the schools, colleges, and universities are to serve as the mind and conscience of society, if they are to be sources of criticism, creativity, and guidance, it is imperative that they not be embedded in the regular administrative structure of government. Politics is the realm of collective action; it is the art of the practicable; and the practicable is never the ideal. Education is the realm of individual exploration and creation; it is the transformation of practicality in the light of ideal possibilities. Accordingly, academic freedom, supported by a high degree of administrative and fiscal independence, helps to sustain democratic liberty.
One useful method of separating the educative function from the other administrative functions of government is to have special school districts organized without direct reference to other political subdivisions, separate special elections for school boards, and provision for raising capital funds and operating expenses by special school bond issues and earmarked tax revenues, so that educational statesmanship may not be compromised by direct involvement in the struggle for political power. Furthermore, when appropriations for education are made directly from the public treasury, they should be granted to politically independent agencies so that government financial support does not become a means for political domination of education.
The ultimate safeguard for the integrity and freedom of education is in the conscientious assumption of responsibility by professional educators. If they prove themselves worthy of public confidence by maintaining high standards of competence, if through professional associations and voluntary accrediting agencies they discipline themselves in matters of knowledge, skill, and character, independence of political control can be assured, and unwarranted interference and coercion can be successfully resisted.
The grant of a high degree of freedom in education is, of course, for the sake of political democracy itself. Teachers are not at liberty to teach in a manner that undermines the very foundations of the free society. It is for this reason that teachers and other school officials who actively oppose the principles of free democracy as expressed in the Constitution (especially the Bill of Rights) should be excluded from positions in education. This is not to say that a loyalty oath should be required of all educators; such a procedure does not in fact separate the loyal from the disloyal and has the effect of driving some sensitive and conscientious persons out of teaching. There are other ways of detecting people who openly promote and labor for the subversion of the free society, and these people should be excluded by action of the teaching profession itself from work in education.
In a closed society, typified by communist and fascist countries and by states in which the agencies of government are in the hands of absolutist ecclesiastical authorities, the preservation of the social order requires that the schools be under political control, in order that the official dogmas may be taught and the will of the controlling parties may be implanted in the minds of the young. In a free society, on the other hand, the ideal of education is persuasion through dialogue -- through open and continuing discussion of issues -- on the assumption that there is truth to be known and right to be done, but that since no one can claim full and final possession of these objects, inquiry must go on. In any kind of society, only those persons can be accepted as teachers who abide by the fundamental premises of the society. In the closed society the authorities will see to it that only persons loyal to the official doctrine may teach. In a free society the same is true, but the official doctrine is one of responsible freedom rather than of unquestioning compliance to fixed orders. Only persons who adhere to that doctrine, of the duty to seek truth and do justice through unrestricted disciplined investigation of the same, are fit to teach in an authentic democracy.
Democratic political values may be taught in many ways. The academic study of government is one approach. Every American student, by reading, discussion, and observation, should be thoroughly acquainted with the fundamentals of the political system of his country. Through a study of the history of our political institutions he should become aware of the price at which liberty has been bought, and gain insight into the continuing faithfulness and vigilance required to preserve it. Some knowledge of the history and forms of political organization of other nations is also desirable, as a source of suggestions for improving American governmental processes and of warnings about tendencies to be avoided, and as a basis for understanding the different ways of people with other traditions, resources, and problems. Of special importance in democratic education is thorough and fair-minded instruction in the politics of nondemocratic nations, including the communist autocracies ( for example, the U.S.S.R.) and the fascist dictatorships (such as Spain).
But far more effective than such academic civics teaching are the political lessons learned by actual participation in the life of the home, school, and community. Verbal instruction in democracy is not convincing within a social context that contradicts the principles taught. Home, school, and community life should be organized democratically, with respect for every person and with a grant of freedom in proportion to social maturity. Regulations in family and classroom can be used as a basis for developing a high concept of law, when they are presented as approximations to right -- not as arbitrary impositions, not as expressions of superior power, not as absolute rules which can never be questioned or modified. Parents and teachers can teach the democratic principle of the limitation of powers by carefully defining the areas of adult responsibility for the young and by making plain the widening dimensions of liberty for those who learn to accept the disciplines of responsible freedom.
School life affords excellent opportunities for gaining practical executive, legislative, and judicial experience through student government organizations. Students can learn the meaning of leadership by seeing that the proper criteria for selecting their representatives are not popularity, eloquence, social status, or influential connections, but ability to serve the common good and to embody the common aspiration for the ideal. Special care should be taken to discourage young people, who in their search for personal identity tend to be conformists, from interpreting and practicing democracy as majority rule, in disregard of individual and minority rights and careless of the proper subordination of the will of the group to the principles of justice. To this end, the regular practice of minority criticism should be encouraged, and constructive, thoughtful nonconformity should be welcomed.
Teachers and parents can reinforce the lessons of democracy by their own example of civic responsibility. The principles of academic freedom and of relative independence for education within the political structure do not exclude or excuse those who teach from active participation in political life. If their elders remain aloof from civic affairs, at most engaging in detached observation and criticism of the politicians, it is hardly cause for wonder that the young should learn to leave the decisions of state to others and thus prepare the way for the loss of their liberties. Educators are often repelled from politics because compromise and concession are necessary; the neat perfection of contemplated ideals cannot be achieved, and so the teacher may seek refuge in ideas and feel he is doing his duty by decrying the greed, corruption, and ignorance of the politicians.
A democratic teacher’s calling is rather to seek to bring the ideal into vital relation to the actualities of political life, by encouraging young people to consider the high and honorable vocation of statesmanship and by faithfully and visibly engaging himself in civic affairs. In a democracy politics is everybody’s business, and from this assignment the educator especially is not exempt.
Finally, the organization and the administration of the schools have an influence on what pupils learn about democracy. Talk about freedom does not carry much conviction when school personnel have to work within an autocratic system. The rule of law, rather than of men, ought to hold good for schools as well as for communities and nations. School boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers ought also to be related to one another in a scheme of authority and subordination with carefully articulated limitation and separation of powers, checks and balances, means of representation, individual and minority rights, and maximum delegation of responsibility. The principles of true political democracy do not only belong to governmental organizations. They are principles of universal human relevance, applicable to all social institutions, including homes and schools. In short, effective teaching of democratic values requires the practice of democracy by those who teach and a democratic structure in the institutions of education.
Some of the most urgent yet perennial problems for human conscience arise from the fact that the supply of most of the goods that people need or want is limited. It is therefore necessary to devise schemes for apportioning these limited goods among the people. Such allocation systems constitute the economic order of society.
In a plutocratic society the use and distribution of material goods, money, and labor is controlled by a special class of wealthy people. These privileged persons generally allocate a large share of the limited supply of goods to themselves, reserving for the much larger class of subordinate poor only enough goods to keep the latter in condition to perform services and to produce things for their overlords. In contrast to this type of social system, economic democracy aims at extending the control of goods and services to all the people. In a democracy the idea that a privileged class should determine the economic fate of all is rejected in favor of the principle that every person should have a voice in the allocation of the limited supply of goods.
In general, economic democracy is conceived on the basis of the desire motive. The fundamental assumption is made that each person wants to maximize his own share of the available goods -- that everyone pursues his own economic interest, seeking the largest possible gain to himself.
There are three principal types of system according to which the acquisitive game in the democracy of desire can be played. The first is the system of individual free enterprise. Under it every person is regarded as free to pursue his own profit and advantage without interference. Each competes with all others in an open market, where material goods, money, and labor are bought and sold at prices determined by the balance of supply and demand. The highest rewards go to those who are most able and most diligent in the pursuit of gain. The mechanism of the market automatically determines the distribution of goods and services in a manner that is presumed by its advocates to fulfill the demands of justice. One of the great appeals of the free enterprise system is this conviction that the free market in consumer commodities, capital goods, money, and labor as it were, miraculously harmonizes the pursuit of gain and the pursuit of justice; that is to say, in the economic realm it is assumed that the democracy of desire and the democracy of worth are one and the same. This is why champions of free enterprise regard the profit motive as a command of conscience and seek for economic advantage with moral zeal.
Free enterprise accords with the democratic ideal of equality in the sense that everyone is subject to the law of the marketplace. No one is given any special privilege over another; each must win his own way in competition with everyone else. Other than this, there is no equality, for persons differ in their abilities and in their industry, and these differences are reflected in economic rewards. Thus, free enterprise promotes individuality within the broad principle of equality of opportunity.
An important feature of the free enterprise system is the institution of private property. The goods that one acquires and holds through labor, foresight, skill, and saving (renunciation of present enjoyments for the sake of future satisfaction) are for one’s own use and disposition; no one else has a claim on them. Private property is the basis for one’s personal security and autonomy, the guarantee that what has been won by the worker will be his to use and to enjoy. Property rights include the rights of gift and bequest, which introduce special privileges and inequalities into the free enterprise system, in that rewards are no longer in proportion to ability and effort alone but are also determined by the accidents of birth. In this way unrestricted private property rights tend to generate undemocratic hereditary economic inequities. On the other hand, private property serves the essential social function of permitting the accumulation of capital, which is applied to productive use, so that all goods will not be consumed at once.
Under the individual free enterprise system there are always some persons who because of illness or other incompetence are unable to compete successfully in the market. It is assumed that these unfortunates will be cared for chiefly by the voluntary benevolence of those who do succeed in the competitive struggle. However, proponents of this position would warn against allowing philanthropy to blunt the incentives for work in those who receive it, and thus would maintain charitable contributions at a subsistence level and require regular proof of need.
Supporters of the free enterprise system are also in favor of keeping government at a minimum, particularly in the economic sphere. Police power and military defense are doubtless necessary governmental functions, they hold, and for their support some compulsory tax assessment is required. The only function of government in economic life is to police the market to maintain free competition and exchange. This requires action against monopolies, price fixing, and other impediments to free trading.
The second type of economic system in the acquisitive society may be called associated free enterprise. This system is a logical development in the free market economy. Individual property owners generally lack sufficient personal capital to establish really large-scale enterprises, in which maximum profits may be made. Hence they associate with others to provide the required resources. In this way partnerships and corporations come into being. Individuals invest savings in stocks and bonds, in return either for dividends based on profits made by the company or for a fixed rate of interest. These companies may further unite in trade associations and combines in order to secure a better competitive position in the market. Such combinations may have the effect of destroying weaker competitors and thus of undermining the free market.
The movement toward association is also evident among those who sell their labor. Worker associations are, in fact, necessary even when productive facilities are individually owned, because of the disparity between the bargaining powers of the individual worker and the owner. Labor unions are even more imperative when corporations are organized, if the assumption of a free market is to hold. Such a market presupposes substantial equality of bargaining position, in which personal skill and diligence count, rather than initial preponderance of power. If the workers are not satisfied with the wages offered, the owners can refrain from hiring them, thus curtailing production. In such a case the owners can live on accumulated wealth, but the workers have no such choice. Since they must work or become destitute, they are at a great disadvantage compared with the owners. To equalize the bargaining position of workers and owners, workers find it necessary to combine forces so as to match the associated strength of the owners and thus to re-establish to some extent the conditions of a free market.
A similar associative effort is sometimes made by consumers, in order to protect their interests against either or both of the other two groups (owners and workers). The consumer may be victimized by excessive prices or by inferior products, in a situation where the complexity of the economic system, the technical problems of quality evaluation, and the preoccupation of the average individual consumer with his own pursuits make the price and product controls of the free market system ineffective. Consumer cooperatives, like the other two forms of association, help to restore some measure of equality of bargaining power in the market, thus re-establishing the conditions presupposed by the free enterprise system.
The third type of system is the controlled economy, in which the theory of automatic economic regulation by the free market is abandoned in favor of deliberate social control of economic processes. The purpose of the controlled economy is to distribute goods and services more equally than under the free market system. In actual operation the free market turns out to be an unstable system, because it tends to magnify inequalities. The rich and powerful have an advantage over the poor and weak in bargaining and thus are able to increase their relative strength still further. Freedom then becomes license for exploitation. The rich become richer and the poor become poorer. Economic classes develop, and groups of owners, workers, and consumers each unite in battle against the other interests. In reaction to these consequences of the free market system, the powers of government are invoked to mediate conflicts and to counteract the inherent instability of the system of competitive bargaining.
Furthermore, a controlled economy makes it possible to care for persons who through the accidents of fortune are unable to compete successfully, without requiring them to depend on the charity of others. Besides these social welfare benefits, in a complicated modern society many public services and facilities are best provided by government rather than by private enterprisers, who would normally make them available only to persons who could purchase them.
Deliberate social control of economic processes is possible only by the modification or abrogation of private property rights. Even under the associated free enterprise system the management of property comes to be more important than the fact of ownership. Under a controlled economy, government takes the place of voluntary associations in the management of property, and both privacy and free enterprise decline or disappear. In a socialist or a communist state private ownership of the major means of production is abolished. In state capitalism ownership may still be nominally private, but the uses of productive property are determined by government. The really important question in the economic sphere is who has the power to decide how property will be used. To the degree that decisions are made by government, either directly or indirectly, the property is public rather than private.
The economy may be controlled in many different ways. The government may directly eliminate market control by fixing prices, wages, and rates of interest. It may exercise control through buying and selling commodities in the market or through limiting the sale and purchase of certain commodities and services under a rationing system. Worker mobility may be limited, and outright labor conscription may even be adopted. The purchase and sale of goods may further be influenced greatly by regulation of the credit system. The most important of all means of economic control is taxation. A tax is an obvious and direct abrogation of private ownership in property. Once the general principle of taxation is granted, the right of private property in effect disappears, since even the property that is not collected for public uses remains with the owner only by courtesy of the state. Thus, the complexion of economic life is in principle determined by the system of taxation. Any desired pattern of distribution of goods and services can be achieved by levying appropriate taxes and allocating their revenues in a particular way.
The American economy never has been and is not now purely any one of the three systems described above. It is a mixture of all three. To some extent the free market and private property prevail. Associated free enterprise also flourishes, within limits, and to an increasing extent government control is being exercised. Moreover, our economic system continues to be the subject of wide disagreement, acrimonious discussion, and vigorous contests of strength. These conflicts are reflected in education, as partisans for the several economic philosophies vie with one another for the minds and allegiances of the young.
Most participants in the struggle over an American economic ideology assume the standpoint of the democracy of desire. Advocates of free enterprise and proponents of government control both affirm the democratic ideal of economic opportunity and self-determination for all the people. They also agree in the belief that the aim of economic organization is to satisfy the demand for material gain. They differ only in their convictions about the nature of the social system which will assure the maximum profit to all. In addition, the pursuit of material gain has become so predominant and unquestioned a motive in our culture that the acquisitive spirit has become suffused throughout the whole of life, entering spheres that are not intrinsically or properly economic at all.
This implicit elevation of economic motives to the position of ultimate principles aligns the exponents of the democracy of desire with the communists, for whom the economic determination of history is a fundamental tenet. The communists frankly assert that the drive for material satisfaction is the basic motive of life, and they endeavor to reconstruct all of civilization in accordance with that belief. They do this by adopting the controlled economy in its most extreme form, with all production and distribution of goods and services strictly governed by the state. In aim they are in full agreement with the most ardent free enterprise capitalists, for whom economic considerations are also ultimate. The communists and the capitalists differ, however, in their beliefs about how the maximum production can be achieved and how the resulting material goods should be distributed.
Under existing conditions in the modern world -- with increasing populations, diminishing natural resources, and mounting specialization of function and complexity of social organization -- it appears likely that if maximum material satisfaction remains the goal of economic life, the communist system or some similar system of socialization by force will win out over free systems. The free play of acquisitive motives, without subordination to the demands of moral conscience, leads by its own inexorable logic to social conflict, to the sharpening of class lines, and to the steady intensification of government controls. When the struggle for economic advantage finally becomes too intense for a free democratic government to control, the free political system is displaced by an absolutist regime, and social order is maintained by dictators backed up by the police power. In an increasingly crowded world of acquisitive people competing for limited supplies of goods, the police state with completely centralized control of economic life appears to be the only basis for social peace and order, without which life is not tolerable nor cultural progress possible.
Must we, then, accept the ultimate fate of communization? Is political and economic absolutism the final answer to the problems of production and distribution? If men insist on being autonomous and on seeking their own profit, they will eventually have to surrender their freedom altogether to powerful men who can keep them from destroying one another in their greed. The alternative to such unhappy servitude is to turn from the way of desire to the life of devotion. Eventual subjugation to tyrants is the price that must be paid for persistent neglect of the leadings of conscience. In the final analysis the necessary conditions for freedom are respect for the right and willing obedience to it.
The fundamental moral principle in the economic realm is that material goods and personal services are instrumentalities for the good life. Their possession, use, and distribution should therefore be determined by their contribution to excellence. The acquisitive outlook is dominated by quantitative standards; success is measured by the amount of wealth one has amassed. In its place we require a qualitative approach to economic life, in which material goods are sought in response to the demands of conscience and for the service of the right and the common good.
What kind of economic system would best serve the good of the human community? The ideal would appear to be a mixed economy, with different bases of ownership and control corresponding to the various uses of property. Individual private ownership should apply to: goods of a personal nature (such as clothing, books, and appliances), residential property used by the owner, small business property directly and personally operated by the owner ("small" could be defined by setting an upper limit on the number of auxiliary employees and on gross sales), portable tools used in the performance of an occupation, and personal savings. A sphere of individual privacy in property is important to provide a material basis for personal individuality and freedom. Such property should be limited to what the individual can actually use. Since its only purpose is to insure the person’s own efficiency, it should not be allowed to expand into a means of controlling other people’s economic lives. It is for this reason that individual private ownership should not be extended to large business enterprises.
Beyond this limited sphere of individual productivity, business should be conducted by cooperative private enterprises capitalized by invested private savings drawing a moderate fixed rate of interest. The work of these cooperatives would be done by professional managers and skilled workers, and policy would be determined by boards including representation from the investors, supervisory and production personnel, and the consuming public. These cooperatives would differ fundamentally from the typical corporation of the present time, in that control would be vested not entirely in the owners but in a broadly representative body, and in that profits would go not to the enlargement of owners’ dividends but to capital improvements, higher quality products, and lower prices. Among the cooperatives would be every sort of enterprise, including retail stores, manufacturing establishments, professional consultants’ firms, and even private schools and colleges. The general adoption of such a cooperative enterprise system would amount essentially to the extension to all business and commerce of the principles governing existing nonprofit organizations which have vested control in widely representative boards.
One of the major purposes of the cooperative system would be to eliminate the split between labor and owners or managers by uniting them in a common undertaking for the general welfare. The motive of gain would be replaced by the professional pride in workmanship and the consciousness of being useful. Labor unions would no longer be necessary as a countervailing force against the concentrated economic resources of the owners, since the conditions of work would no longer be determined by an owner-controlled management with an eye to maximizing investors’ profits. Thus, the social energies that are now dissipated in destructive competition for group and class advantage would be turned to concerted efforts for the well-being of all.
In addition to the individual and cooperative private ownership and use of property, there should be provision for public ownership and operation of property which is for the welfare of all the people. Included in the basic public services would be at least the following:
1. A defense establishment to protect the security of the nation against external aggression.
2. Agencies for constructive political, economic, and cultural cooperation with other nations.
3. A police force to maintain domestic peace and order, and a system of courts to administer justice.
4. Facilities for transportation, communication, sanitation, and utilities (light, heat, power, and water). These public facilities might be supplemented by individually or cooperatively owned facilities, but such essential properties for serving all the people as railroads, telephone networks, and power plants ought to be owned and controlled by all the people, since upon them depends the very survival of the community; their failure would bring speedy social disaster.
5. Basic medical services, including diagnosis, treatment by physicians and dentists, hospitalization, and prescribed drugs. Here also the public provision might be supplemented by private medical services. The public medical care should be so administered as to preserve the maximum freedom in choice of doctors. The essential point is that no person should be deprived of essential medical care for economic reasons.
6. Ample public recreation facilities, including national, state, and local parks, forest preserves, and wildlife reservations, together with the requisite personnel and program to make them interesting and effective.
7. A comprehensive social security program to insure at least subsistence support for the unemployed or unemployable, widows and orphans, retired people, and persons with physical or mental disabilities -- these benefits to be available by right and not by charity. This broad program of social insurance might well be complemented by a wide variety of private individual and group insurance plans.
8. A public education system, with no tuition or with nominal tuition supplemented by scholarships for the needy students, extending from the nursery school through graduate school and even postdoctoral institutes, and including provision for education throughout life. These institutions of public education should be complemented by nonpublic schools of many kinds and at every level, to insure the freedom and variety of thought required for cultural vigor.
As mentioned earlier, a most important key to economic organization is the tax system. In a democracy built on the primacy of justice over profit, the following threefold tax structure would appear most equitable: (1) a progressive individual income tax; (2) a progressive tax on the net income of the cooperatives described above (which would be responsible for the major part of the society’s business and industry); (3) very high estate and gift taxes. The income taxes would be progressive in order to reduce economic inequalities and to secure a larger proportion of necessary government revenue from those better able to pay. The rates should be high enough to sustain a strong system of essential public services, yet low enough to permit ample private capital and savings accumulations. Extremely heavy taxes, which would leave individuals and cooperatives only enough income to pay current bills, would quickly undermine the growth of productive enterprises, and this would necessitate further government intervention in economic affairs, probably including even the take-over of industries by government. Democratic freedom and variety are better served by limiting the sphere of direct government ownership and control to those critical services essential to all the people; for this limitation to be sustained, tax rates must not be allowed to increase to crippling levels. The imposition of high estate and gift taxes would equalize economic opportunity and prevent the establishment of hereditary privileged classes, on the principle that no person has a right to great economic power simply as a result of the chances of birth and relationship.
A single income tax on individuals and cooperatives should replace the complex system now used. Income taxes can be administered so as to take account of the actual abilities and obligations of every person and organization. Property taxes, general sales taxes, and special excise taxes, on the other hand, have only the advantage that they are relatively easy to collect. In general, they are not levied in accordance with principles of justice: ability to pay depends on income from property, not on ownership of property in itself. In any case property assessments are notoriously difficult to make and maintain equitably. Sales and excise taxes are also unrelated to ability to pay and tend to impose the greatest proportionate burden upon the lower income groups. Furthermore, it would be far more efficient, more honest, and more consistent with dedication to the right if taxes were collected in one open assessment and through one channel rather than in many different and often concealed ways. The people ought to know exactly what they are asked to pay for their public services, and they should willingly and directly pay it, instead of confusing and deceiving themselves by tolerating or even inviting a system of multiple and hidden levies.
A final essential feature of the type of economic organization here advocated would be agencies for both private and governmental maintenance of ethical standards in economic affairs. For example, a cooperative should not be permitted to acquire capital through the sale of securities without approval by an independent body of experts capable of appraising the soundness and probable prospects of the enterprise. Business and financial organizations should be subject to periodic independent audits and should be required to publish intelligible reports, to help insure the honest conduct of their affairs. Advertising and other representations of goods and services should be guarded against falsification, both through voluntary and governmental watchdog agencies.
The rationale for the economic scheme described above is the subordination of economic advantage to considerations of justice, by relating the ownership and control of property to its proper use. There is no inherent natural right in property. Material goods should be regarded as a trust to be faithfully administered in accordance with equity for all. The extent to which the disposition of labor and materiel can be left to the free determination of individuals or associations through the institution of private property depends upon the degree of private responsibility taken for their right use. If the motive of gain predominates, the sphere of privacy has to be limited, and the distribution of labor and property needs to be effected through direct political determination. On the other hand, if loyalty to the right is the rule in a society, a large degree of privacy in property is desirable. Private property and the free market are self-defeating in an acquisitive society. In a democracy of worth they serve the admirable purpose of providing for the continuous registration of the values of society.
One of the crucial economic problems of contemporary society is to determine how large a proportion of our available manpower and materiel should be spent for formal educational purposes. Limited goods and services, including those of formal education, should be allocated according to principles of truth, creative excellence, and good conscience. That is to say, economics is rectified only by reference to standards of worth that transcend (but also include) economic considerations. Schools, therefore, should be devoted not to the economic advantage of educators, nor to the efficiency of the economic enterprise generally, but to goodness alone. From this vantage point the educational community may supply criticism, inspiration, and leadership in society.
The basic principle of subordinating economic interests to criteria of worth has a variety of applications in educational policy and practice. Ideals of economic equity certainly make it clear that schooling should be available to everyone without regard to financial status. Educational leaders should also resist and counteract economic pressures on the curriculum, by keeping matters of detailed curriculum planning in the hands of teachers and by working for broad representation on boards of control. Educational policy should not be fixed by boards weighted in favor of one economic group in society (usually persons in the higher economic classes), nor should control boards be guided in their planning mainly by budgetary considerations. Educational leaders can show the way toward a more ideal economic program for society as a whole by organizing their own institutions along democratic lines, with boards of control including representatives of taxpayers (in the case of public institutions) or private benefactors (in the case of private institutions), parents, alumni, teachers, administrators, and possibly even students.
In school instruction, free discussion of economic issues should be encouraged. Students should be required to analyze critically contemporary or historical economic ideas and practices, in order that they may not simply reflect unthinkingly the positions of their own families. In order to assure freedom both to analyze these important issues and to consider without fear alternatives to the economic status quo, it is essential that the employment and tenure of teachers not be subject to the will and caprice of individuals or groups representing particular economic interests or convictions. Teachers must be held accountable for professional competence, not for conformity with the economic beliefs of influential persons or groups within the community. Professional organizations must be strong enough to guard this academic integrity against those who would threaten or injure teachers who do not accept their economic doctrine. Young people will be ill-prepared to cope with the momentous challenges of the contemporary world if their teachers are prevented, by fear of reprisal, from raising questions about the justification for various economic beliefs and practices.
Teachers, guidance counselors, and officers for admissions and placement should work to counteract the acquisitive motive by placing emphasis on the intrinsic values in learning, on preparation for the good life, and on the opportunities to engage in useful and interesting work rather than on the cash value of more education. Figures are commonly quoted to show how much more money a person may expect, on the average, to make over a lifetime by continuing his education through high school or through college; and it is estimated that each additional year of schooling actually yields a substantial additional life income. Such propaganda intensifies the tendency to make financial gain the ruling principle of life. It is the duty of all professional educators and especially of parents, who have such decisive influence in these matters, by their word and example to turn the young away from the prime concern for gain toward the cultivation of a worthy life in which economic matters will be seen in proper perspective.
Finally, school curriculums should not be organized as they now largely are -- primarily with a vocational orientation, thus importing into the whole educational system the patterns of prestige and power that characterize the acquisitive culture. The course of study should be aimed at the nurture of loyalty to truth and goodness and should include specific occupational preparation only within this framework of growth in human excellence. The central core of education should be liberal humane studies, in which the student discovers his universal calling to be a man through knowing and serving the good. Occupational specialization can then be rightly ordered in a contributory fashion around the general studies in which the fundamental values of life are taught.
Questions of racial justice belong to the general subject of social class and may be understood in the light of the analysis of classes and classification just presented. Some of the basic principles about class already developed will now be applied to the important special case of racial grouping. Problems of race deserve emphasis for two main reasons. One is the world-wide revolutionary situation, in which subject peoples of Asia and Africa are rising to claim their independence and their right to a fair share in the opportunities of life, and in which nonwhite peoples are challenging the exclusive privilege and world dominance of the white man. If democracy is to have any relevance and influence in such a time, the people of the United States and other democratic nations must demonstrate their understanding and practice of democratic ideals in the field of race relations. The second reason is the critical significance of the race question in American civic affairs at the present time, particularly in the field of public education. The historic Supreme Court decision of 1954 outlawing racial segregation in public schools and the subsequent, cautious, painful steps taken toward compliance with this ruling have forced a searching re-examination of conscience in the matter of racial justice in democratic education.
We begin by inquiring what is meant by race. In answering this question a distinction has to be made between popular lay conceptions of race and scientifically defined ideas on the subject. It is the former, non-scientific views which are socially influential and which must therefore constitute the starting point for our inquiry. Race is a mode of classifying people on the basis of certain features that are assumed to be biologically inherited and thus present from birth. It is also assumed that they cannot be changed by education or by any other act or experience of life. Racial divisions thus constitute a caste organization of society, with no possibility of mobility from one race to another.
The most common nonscientific basis for racial classification is skin color. People are sorted into "black," "brown," "red," "white," and "yellow." Skin color is the favorite distinguishing feature because it is so easy to identify. When an entire social system is permeated with racial distinctions, it is important to be able to recognize at a glance the race to which a person belongs, so as to leave no doubt about the behavior appropriate in relation to him. Two other popular types of racial designation are based on religious affiliation and national origin -- for example, "Jewish," "Italian," or "Armenian."
Whatever the primary index of race may be -- skin color, religion, or nationality -- this unscientific view of race presupposes certain inherited characteristics that all members of a given racial group have in common. These characteristics include at least the following three kinds -- physical features, psychological or personality traits, and cultural patterns -- and they combine to make a racial stereotype, a standardized picture of the typical member of a particular racial group. For example, as to physical features, black-skinned people are often stereotyped as having short, kinky hair and thick lips, Jews as having hooked noses, and Scandinavians as being blond and blue-eyed. Psychological or personality stereotypes may represent black people as happy-go-lucky, Jews as highly competitive, and Germans as domineering. In the cultural sphere, blacks may be stereotyped as musical, Jews as financially astute, and the French as good cooks and expert lovers.
Racial stereotypes are invented in order to make possible standard responses to members of supposed races, and thus to help maintain established social traditions and distinctions. They authorize one to deduce a wide range of conclusions, without argument or evidence, from the single premise that a person is a member of a particular race. With stereotype reactions it does not matter if the presumed racial qualities do not in fact exist in specific individuals. The discrepancies are overlooked, and the atypical individuals are treated exactly as if they fulfilled the a priori judgments about them. Action in relation to all members of a so-called race is determined wholly by expectations and not by actualities. In this fashion, racial designation forces its victims into the stereotype role and makes their life the same as if they possessed the stereotype traits, whether or not they really do.
Racist attitudes of this kind are not instinctive, automatic responses to human differences. They are learned. They are taught by the older members of each self-conscious human group to its younger members. They are not generalizations from observation, inductions from the experiences of associating with other people. Popular race perspectives are part of the cultural pattern of a society; they are one of the products of "civilized" existence.
Clearly, such racist views are undemocratic, and the education that perpetuates them is undemocratic. Race stereotyping denies the universal qualities of humanity by separating them into distinct breeds. It imposes unnatural barriers to personal freedom, and it inhibits the development of individuality by standardizing expectations and responses. Racial divisions narrow the range of each person’s permissible activities, condemning him to patterns of life prescribed by race customs.
One of the key objectives of democratic education should be to counteract racist education, thus liberating persons to be and become themselves instead of living in bondage to racial stereotypes. In effecting this it makes a great difference whether the guiding principles are those of desire or of worth. In the democracy of desire, in which the emphasis is on securing benefits, the less privileged races use education as one means of gaining power to challenge the more privileged groups. The result is the intensification of intergroup conflict and, paradoxically, the hardening of the prejudice that needs to be dispelled. The dominant races feel threatened by the attempt of the subordinate ones to gain equality, and hence are driven to seek still further grounds for discriminating against them.
The other basis for a democratic attack on racism is through concern for right, rather than for interests. This approach tends to dissolve racial distinctions through the growth of dispassionate understanding and serves to diminish racial conflict through appeal to what is universal. As in the democracy of desire, education may be used in the democracy of worth to gain social, economic, and political power for the sake of challenging the privileged position of the dominant races. But the primary intent of such challenge is for the sake of justice and to redress injustice, and not to secure benefits for the disadvantaged groups. The appeal is to principles of right that transcend intergroup rivalries and provide an objective standard of reference for the disinterested adjudication of competing claims.
The foundation of racial justice is a deep conviction of the unity of humanity and respect for the worth of every person. It is not enough to affirm these as abstract general principles; they must be controlling directives. Education for democratic race relations must go beyond factual instruction; it requires a change of motive, from that of promoting the prerogatives of one’s own group to that of serving the right without calculation of personal advantage. This calls for a comprehensive reorientation, a total reversal of outlook which affects one’s entire system of values. In effecting such a change of motives, factual understanding can be of considerable help. This is particularly true in teaching ethical conduct in regard to race. If one has a commitment to know the truth and to live by it, knowledge of the facts about race can help in the cure of nonrational race prejudices. While we cannot expect rational persuasion alone to eliminate race bias, it may be of considerable assistance in the following ways: it can expose the falsehoods upon which most racial prejudice rests, it can demonstrate the evil social and psychological consequences of racial discrimination, it can show the incompatibility of discriminatory policies with the known facts of human inheritance and development, and it can suggest means for eliminating the sources and effects of racial bias.
A number of rational considerations upon which democratic race attitudes should be founded will now be set forth. These are facts that must be taken into account in determining what constitutes racial justice. They should be included in the instruction of all young people in a democratic society.
First, no person can reliably or fairly be characterized simply by membership in a group, including a racial group. In whatever manner they are made, race classifications are, like all other modes of classification, abstractions, which cannot faithfully represent persons in their wholeness. Race designations at the most could have limited practical utility, by indicating certain common properties with specified functional significance. It is not right to put a race tag on a person and to consider it a meaningful indication of his personality. The complexity of the individual self, the infinite variety of personal differences, forbid any such categorizing of human beings.
Second, the race stereotypes actually used are for the most part built on false assumptions about the correlation of traits. Thus, it is not true that all Scandinavians are blond and blue-eyed, that all Germans are domineering, and that all Frenchmen are great lovers. Skin color has no necessary relation to other physical features nor to psychological and cultural characteristics. For any given shade of skin, persons may be found who have any of a wide range of other traits. The same trait variability applies to any other index of race, such as religion or nationality. Type patterns are maintained against the patent evidence because they permit the easy standardization of reactions and keep up the pressure for the preservation of separate racial subcultures which justify discriminatory practices.
Third, the usual racial indicators are inconstant, indefinite, and unreliable as means of classifying people. Skin color is not an enduring distinctive mark. It may change substantially as a result of exposure to the elements or because of health conditions. Yet no racist would claim that sunbathing or jaundice could bring about a change of race. A person born into a Christian or a Buddhist family may become a Jew, and a Jew may become a full-fledged Christian or Muslim. Furthermore, a whole spectrum of Jewishness may be found, all the way from complete and explicit identification with the people of Israel to the most remote and attenuated connection with Hebrew life and tradition. Similarly, while a person cannot change the country of his birth, he can adopt a new country and become so thoroughly identified with its people and ways that no one could possibly detect his foreign origin.
The most serious trouble with racial specification comes in connection with the offspring of mixed marriages. In the first generation the product is a "halfbreed," but further marriages complicate the picture. Generally the children bear the racial designation of the less favored of the parents’ races, in order that the dominance of the "superior" group may not be threatened by those who cross race lines in sex relations. The point here is that the mixing of races, which has always taken place, makes nonsense out of racist theories, which presuppose the possibility of some simple racial identification. Consideration of the way in which people have actually come into being makes it clear that there are no "pure" races, that every person and the members of every group derive from a great variety of earlier peoples. Hence, it is not possible to assign people to sharply defined racial groups.
Fourth, the most common racial mark, skin color, is superficial and insignificant. It is superficial in that it refers to surface appearances only and not to anything pertinent to the person as such. It is insignificant in that nothing is signified by it, except the meanings that have been read into it by the prejudiced imagination and intention. From the fact that a person has a given shade of skin pigmentation no other fact of any consequence can bee inferred, except that he will be accorded a certain kind of treatment by people in a race-conscious society. It is not possible, in general, to infer anything important about other physical qualities, character, emotional traits, personal habits, knowledge, or skills. Reflection on the obvious irrationality of continuing race prejudice may help to make clear our central theme that the first aim of education should be the awakening of devotion to what is good, in order that growth in knowledge and skill may serve some valuable purpose. Prejudiced people are not necessarily unintelligent; they have simply been prevented by self-interest from using their reason as a guide to just behavior.
It would be possible to define races by reference to traits that have some functional significance. For example, an important physical feature for medical purposes is the blood type. It is essential to discriminate between blood-type groups in giving and receiving blood for transfusions. Any inherited trait that actually makes a difference in what a person can do is significant within, but not beyond, the scope of the functions it affects. Such functional differentiation of people, however, is far removed from arbitrary racial separation based on nonfunctional traits.
Fifth, racism rests upon a confusion between inherited and acquired characteristics. Personal qualities that are due to environmental influences are wrongly ascribed to inherited racial patterns. For example, white supremacists have argued that Negroes are intellectually inferior to whites, and have submitted as evidence the lower average achievement of American Negro children in intelligence tests. What such comparisons fail to take into consideration is the effect of the Negroes’ inferior average social, economic, and educational position upon their intellectual development. There is no evidence that skin color by itself has any correlation with intelligence. Intellectual ability does seem to be in part dependent upon inherited factors, but it is also greatly influenced by environment. It is a demonstrated fact, plain for anyone who is willing to see, that a person’s knowledge, character, and skill are largely determined by his education in home, school, and community. Given the right conditions for growth, people of any shade of skin, any religion, or any nationality can develop into capable, cultivated, and civilized human beings. Racists have to deceive themselves about the significance of education in the fashioning of personality. By the same token, concern for education and recognition of its power to effect changes in human personality are incompatible with racial prejudice and help to diminish bias. The efficacy of education in the fashioning of character and the clear evidence of the plasticity of human nature through directed learning demonstrate the untenability of racial stereotypes, which presuppose the inheritance of fixed modes of conduct.
A sixth fact, already stated in reference to social classification generally, is that racial stereotyping tends to be self-confirming. People are forced by social arrangements and expectations based on prejudice into situations that make the intrinsically irrational and arbitrary racial distinctions to some degree justified. What inheritance cannot in fact bring to pass in regard to race characteristics, social influences may. While white supremacists who hold that Negroes by nature are incapable of exercising responsible political leadership cannot empirically defend that position, they can make it appear plausible by creating a society where Negroes are by custom excluded from public office and hence cannot by practice learn the arts of governing. Similarly, Jews have sometimes been forced by majority prejudice into defensive reactions that appear to confirm such anti-Semitic stereotypes as Jewish competitiveness and clannishness. Again, a prejudiced society which expects American Indians to be lazy and dishonest, Mexicans or Puerto Ricans to be vicious and delinquent, and Orientals to be subversive -- in every case as a natural racial trait -- is likely to adopt attitudes and policies toward these people which will lead them to some extent to respond accordingly.
People tend to live up (or down) to what others expect of them, because the image of oneself is developed in large part from the appraisals of others. The educative (or mis-educative) effect of a racially biased social order is to help actualize the images of man found in the prejudiced minds of its members. So powerful is the force of social influence that unjust racial appraisals infect the consciousness both of those who are discriminated against and of those who discriminate. Even in the bitterness and violence of their protests against racism, its victims sometimes betray their own fear that what the others believe about them might be true. Race discrimination is a vicious circle, the only means of deliverance from which is a steadfast devotion to truth and right.
Finally, racist attitudes are built upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the process of inheritance. The usual racist conception is that the blood is the carrier of inherited traits, and that a person’s race is a function of the species of blood which he possesses. This theory of racial blood kinds makes it plausible to impute a common cluster of traits to all members of a given race. As every schoolchild who has been instructed in the rudiments of science now knows, or should know, modern genetics has provided a completely different account of the mechanism of inheritance, making untenable the blood theory upon which traditional race lore rested. It is now known that biological inheritance takes place through the genes. Each inherited trait is determined by one or more genes and is not a feature of a single type-pattern as required by the blood theory. Skin color is determined by certain genes, facial features by others, intellectual potentialities by still others. Moreover, in the reproductive process the various genes are to a considerable degree independently assorted. Skin color genes pursue a genetic history of their own, without reference to the path taken by genes that have charge of facial features and intellectual potentialities. This independence can be directly demonstrated by an analysis of the mechanism of cell division and combination in sexual reproduction. The law of independent assortment constitutes the scientific basis for refuting the idea of racial stereotypes. The standardized trait patterns of racist belief do not and can not exist because the genetic factors that determine inherited traits are in most cases physically separate from each other and thus can be arranged in a wide variety of different combinations.
Moreover, the science of biology also affords better understanding of the relation between heredity and environment in the determination of personality. Study of how organisms develop reveals that no trait is wholly fixed by either heredity or environment, but that every feature of a person is a product of a long series of interactions between the growing individual and his surrounding world. Every quality of a person is what it is by virtue of a genetic potential operating within appropriate environmental conditions. Some traits are affected relatively little by environmental changes. Eye color is one example. Other traits, such as intellectual competence, are greatly influenced by the conditions of life. Racist theories put the emphasis almost exclusively on inheritance (which is incorrectly interpreted), neglecting the essential role of environment. The modern sciences of genetics and ecology have clearly provided empirical grounds for rejecting these traditional race concepts and for recognizing the fundamental role of education in the creation of human personality -- especially in respect to qualities that are so manifestly reflections of cultural patterns.
A factual analysis of race along the foregoing lines indicates the strong support that scientific inquiry can give to democracy. At the very least it shows the irrational nature of race prejudice and suggests the lengths of intellectual irresponsibility to which one must go to maintain the racist position. Critical scrutiny shows beyond all doubt the untenability of the entire network of assumptions upon which racial discrimination rests, and reveals the true character of racial bias as a device for rationalizing injustices. Modern scientific genetics offers an admirable empirical and conceptual base for affirming both human individuality and the essential unity of mankind. People of every nation, color, language, belief, and condition are now known to possess in their body cells trait factors drawn by an inconceivably complex sequence of intercombinations from a common "gene pool." The incontrovertible evidence of the cells is against all the racial divisions that prejudiced men have constructed and have sought to actualize by social regulation. At the same time, the gene story also shows how the virtually infinite number of possible chance combinations of the many factors that constitute a person’s biological inheritance explain and support the idea of personal individuality and uniqueness. ‘Thus, devotion to the truth about man, regardless of the consequences for traditional preconceptions about the races, leads the scientific inquirer to facts that sustain the grand democratic vision of a ground for fundamental human unity which is simultaneously the source of personal variety and singularity.
A clear understanding of the genetic history of mankind is important in coming to terms with the ultimate issue in race relations -- namely, miscegenation. The supreme offense in the eyes of the racist is to marry a person of another race. All of the lesser taboos against associating with members of other races are justified as preliminary defenses against this final calamity. In a race-conscious society one can hardly overestimate the intensity of negative feeling generated in parents at the thought of their child’s marrying a person of another race.
What is the cause of this horror of miscegenation among racists? Clearly, it is not an innate, inevitable psychological reaction, for there are many nations and societies where the mixing of the races is accepted without any question. For example, in Brazil and in France today racial intermarriages are considered proper and normal. Furthermore, breeding across race lines has been practiced throughout human history; that is how we came to have such a motley assembly of peoples on the earth today. Nor can any factual warrant be claimed for asserting the biological harmfulness of miscegenation -- the alleged "contamination" of "superior" racial stock by crossing it with "inferior." On the contrary, there is evidence that close inbreeding brings out genetic defects in the progeny, and that outbreeding on the average is conducive to health and vigor of offspring.
The repugnance to racial intermarriage in a race-conscious society is a consequence of existing social divisions, which impose severe penalties upon persons who fail to respect them. Marrying a person of another race undermines the whole race system. It weakens and confuses the distinctions between races and thus renders insecure the entire structure of prerogatives, privileges, and priorities built upon these differences. The punitive effect on the partners in a mixed union is severe enough, but not as serious as the consequences for the children born to them. The parents choose to defy prejudiced custom and are presumably prepared to pay the price; their children have no choice in the matter and are not immune to the cruelties of biased men. When parents in a society with race lines look with apprehension upon the marriage of their child to a person of a different race, they have in view the indignities and disabilities which the unjust society will visit upon the couple and upon their children and their children’s children. They also know that ordinary living imposes strain enough on a marriage, without inviting the additional difficulties occasioned by trying to bridge two subcultures which the majority of society are determined to keep separate. As a result, existing race divisions tend to be confirmed by the pressures against inter-marriage, and the fiction of race purity is maintained by social forces opposing the free choice of mates, which would bring the whole arbitrary structure of race distinctions and discriminations tumbling to the ground.
The method of progress from injustice toward justice in intergroup relations is through persistent efforts at desegregation` in all phases of cultural life. Segregation sustains racial stereotypes, facilitates identification by race, preserves traditional arbitrary racial taboos, and aids the suppression of those who would challenge the inequities of the existing system. While desegregation must proceed on many fronts simultaneously, in no segment of life is it more crucial than in education. Educational opportunity in a democracy should be the same for everyone, without regard to skin color, religious affiliation, national origin, or any other allegedly "racial" factor. These superficial and accidental traits which are taken as marks of race are in themselves educationally irrelevant and should be so treated in the allocation and conduct of schooling. As a result of prior injustices, members of disadvantaged racial groups may differ from the more privileged ones in ways that are educationally significant -- for example, in health, manners, and intellectual competence. When this is the case, it may be unsound policy to effect complete indiscriminate desegregation in the schools at once; to do so might seriously impair the quality of education available to children of the more favored groups and might result in major social dislocations as the parents of the better-prepared children sought to forestall such impairment. The solution is to introduce minimal health standards, applicable to all, and a certain amount of ability grouping (without regard to race) to insure reasonable efficiency of instruction. In other words, during the transition from a racially segregated to a desegregated school system, it may be desirable to substitute for the previous racial groupings new kinds of educationally pertinent groupings, in which any deficiencies of the less favored race can be taken into account automatically, without reference to race as such.
Moreover, special efforts should be made in the schools to compensate for the effects of race prejudice. Often the child from a low prestige family receives little encouragement at home for doing well at school. In such cases teachers and guidance counselors have a special responsibility for helping the child use his abilities fully. It is the business of the schools to act as a countervailing force in a prejudiced society. If educators rate pupils according to the prestige scales used in the community generally and apportion opportunities correspondingly, racial bias will only be strengthened and perpetuated. Loyalty to the right requires that the educational pattern invert the measures of the unjust society and give special consideration and a larger proportion of resources to those who, because of neglect and frustration outside of school, need them most. The schools can and should be a principal agency for breaking the vicious circle of racial prejudice.
Racial desegregation in the schools cannot take place in isolation but must be part of a broad attack on bias in many directions. Since the assignment of pupils to schools is determined largely by place of residence, segregated housing conditions perpetuate school segregation. Separate schooling, in turn, prevents the establishment of common interests and sympathies which make residential integration normal and attractive. Racial discrimination in work opportunities tends to be reflected in schools, which carry so large a share of the task of vocational preparation. Parents in favored groups can give unusual educational advantages to their children and thus continue the privilege pattern from generation to generation. Desegregation in education helps to break this unjust system by preparing young people for positions on the basis of social need and personal ability alone, exclusive of racial considerations.
Since public education is controlled through agencies of government, racial justice in education depends upon equal political rights and responsibilities for all citizens regardless of color, religion, or national origin. Conversely, equal educational opportunity makes it possible for all citizens to exercise their civic duties intelligently. In the United States many Negroes have been prevented from voting by devices, such as literacy tests, which better education would have rendered ineffective. On the other hand, the excellent progress since World War II toward the conquest of civil disabilities for the Negro has been due in considerable measure to the emergence of a sizable group of well-educated Negro leaders.
