than our factory system of economic efficiency.And this waste is primarily due to the acceptance and survival of barbarian standards of culture, imperfectly adjusted to the modern conditions of life, and chiefly sustained by the desire to employ the mind for decorative and recreative, rather than for productive or creative purposes.Art, literature and science suffer immeasurable losses from this misgovernment of intellectual life.The net result is that the vast majority of the sons and daughters even of our well-to-do classes grow up with an exceedingly faulty equipment of useful knowledge, no trained ability to use their intellects or judgments freely and effectively, and with no strong desire to attempt to do so.They thus remain or become the dupes of shallow traditions, or equally shallow novelties, under the guise of scientific, philosophic, economic or political principles which they have neither the energy of mind nor the desire to test, but which they permit to direct their lives and conduct in matters of supreme importance to themselves and others.
As education is coming to take a larger place as an organised occupation, and more time, money and energy are claimed for it, the necessity of a revaluation of intellectual values on a sane basis of humanism becomes more exigent than ever.For there is a danger of a new bastard culture springing up, the product of a blending of the barbarian culture, descending by imitation of the upper classes, with a too narrowly utilitarian standard improvised to convert working-class children into cheap clerks and shopmen.
Our high-schools and local universities are already victims to this mésalliance between 'culture' and 'business', and the treatment of not a few studies, history and economics in particular, is subject to novel risks.
§5.Dilettantism is the intellectual equivalent of sport.What is the moral equivalent? The sporting-life has an ethics of its own, the essence of which lies in eschewing obligations with legal or other compulsory external sanctions, in favour of a voluntary code embodying the mutual feelings of members of a superior caste.In an aristocracy of true sportsmen honesty and sexual 'morality' are despised as bourgeois virtues, while justice is too compulsory and too equalitarian for acceptance.Honour takes the place of honesty, good form of morals, fair-play and charity of justice.
It is the code of the barbarian superman or chieftain, qualified, softened and complicated to suit the conditions of the modern play-life.Courage and endurance, fidelity, generosity and mercy are his virtues: temperance, modesty, humility, gratitude, have no proper place in such a code, which is indeed based upon a free exercise of the physical functions for personal pleasure and glory.
The hazard belonging to a sporting life makes for superstition.Nobody is more crudely superstitious than the gambler, and everybody to whom life is primarily a game conceives of it as proceeding by rules which may be evaded or tampered with.This aspect of the sporting character gave the priestly caste its chief opportunity to get power.So pietism was grafted on the sportsman and the fighting-man, and religion kept a hold on the ruling and possessing classes, adapting its moral teaching to his case.
The wide divergence of British Christianity from the teaching of the gospels finds its chief explanation in this necessity of adaptation.Its doctrines and its discipline had to be moulded so as to fit the character and conduct of powerful men, who not only would repudiate its inner spiritual teaching, but whose lust, pride, cruelty and treachery, the natural outcome of their animal life, were constantly leading them to violate the very code of honour they professed.As industry and property, peace and order, became more settled and wide-spread, there came up from below a powerful commercial class, whose economic and social requirements evolved a morality in which the so-called puritan virtues of industry, thrift, honesty, temperance, sexual purity, prevailed, and a Christianity designed primarily to evoke and to sustain them.Just as the intellectual culture of the aristocracy came to clash with the utilitarian education of the bourgeois and to produce the confusing compromise which at present prevails, so with the differing ethics of the same two classes.The incursion of the wealthy tradesman into 'high life' and of the landed gentry into the 'city' has visibly broken down the older standards both of morals and of manners.The prestige of the sporting virtues has played havoc with the simplicity and austerity of the puritan morals and creeds, though it may fairly be maintained that the saner utilities of the latter have tempered to a perceptible degree the morals and manners of the sportsman.Luxuries and frivolities of a more varied order have largely displaced the older sporting-life, introducing into it some elements of more intellectual skill and interest, though it remains primarily devoted to the pursuit of pleasurable sensuous futilities.
But, though the modes of the leisure life are shifting, the definitely parasitic attitude and career which it embodies remain unchanged.The sense of justice and of humanity among its members is as defective as ever.This truth is sometimes concealed by the change in social areas that is taking place.Class honour and comradeship have a somewhat wider scope as the range of effective intercourse expands, and classes which formerly were wide apart come partially to fuse with one another, or are brought within the range of sympathy, as regards their more sympathetic members.So intercourse upon a fairly equal basis can take place in such a country as England between most persons who have reached a certain level of refinement of living.
