Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Our Appalling Consciousness
Harper’s Weekly (March 22, 1913) : 25
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Those people who deplore the general worthlessness of modernity always give an impression of crotchety detachment. They must speak so much more from temperament than from observation. There is a wilful despair about them that arouses in one the same silent, respectful amusement which we used to feel as children when our grandparents demanded the name of the person who had taken their spectacles while their spectacles graced the crown of their dear heads. We feel the same assurance that those earnest folk who think the virtue of the world has reached the dregs, run the same immediate risk of discovering unexpectedly the thing they seek. They demand to know what the world is coming to, and it is a mere matter of seconds before they are bound to collide sharply with modernity’s chief characteristic, its over-powering conscientiousness.
The extent to which we mean well is almost depressing. Good intentions of a wide-reaching and scientific kind have become a profession... The extent to which we mean well is almost depressing. Good intentions of a wide-reaching and scientific kind have become a profession, and one which threatens to be shortly overcrowded. The eradication of some kind of evil is the only thing in which any one feels justified in being interested. University courses have had to be started to deal with the crowds of people who have such good intentions that something has to be done about it, and who drolly realized the danger of good intentions in an untrained state. One or two of the more advanced cities have established, at the expense of the taxpayers, a chair for teaching social reform. When a city pays to be taught how to make itself better a peak of morality has been reached that should gain the attention of every one, even those abstracted souls who think the world hardly worth continuing. Brilliant young politicians, too real for the red tape that ties in sleepy bondage the orthodox party politician, go in for social reform as their fathers went in for law. Young women in that embarrassing predicament of having a thorough education on their hands and nothing to do with it, go in, without a moment’s hesitation, for social reform. The fact that they receive no remuneration for their arduous tasks reassures their parents, who view it as almost the wholly natural thing about their surprising daughters. It helps them to class social reform among feminine accomplishments and takes the sting from the strange sight of the most charming of the younger generation spending their time in Settlement Houses instead of at home.
The married women who do not like to face the fact that being a woman, though amusing, is not enough to keep one fully employed, work so hard and so extremely capably at the task of civic betterment that their income, though not precisely the result of their work, is more nearly apportioned to their output than it has ever been before. Even the most frivolous people pretend they are not, and worldly old gentlemen, in their effort to be correct, attend public dinners and nobly risk indigestion so that countenance may be given to the many speakers who long to enunciate the words, “Something must be done!”
It is a rush that carries some of us off our feet, and, protesting piteously at such precipitation, we demand to know what is to be the end of it. If every worker has a minimum wage, and all his children are well nourished and well clothed and well educated, and if vocation bureaus help him to choose his work, and labor exchanges help him to get it, and efficiency engineers make his work so agreeable and profitable that he becomes a substantial consumer, and if one society makes him moral and another makes his heredity of the best, and if legislation removes criminals and imbeciles from among us and lifts the penalization of being strong, and if public opinion makes the terms “man” and “woman” merely terms of differentiation and not terms of opprobrium used with mutual heat by both parties, and if economic pressure having ceased to press makes all its corollaries vanish with it — why, then, in a hundred years’ time, what will there be left for any of us to do?
and — but how could we have forgotten? — there will still be us. We will each be as bad as ever. What a complete solace! Reform need no longer frighten any one. If all the reforms are finished and all the bad times are over, won’t we be rather, as it were, bored? Of course we will have to study earnestly the art of spending our money according to the high standards that will then exist. That will be something of a nuisance; and there will still be the weather, and with so much leisure on our hands we will have the very genuine perplexity of wondering what to do with it. Relatives? They will still remain: no one has thought of doing away with relatives, though there has been a faint movement toward suppressing them, and — but how could we have forgotten? — there will still be us. We will each be as bad as ever. What a complete solace! Reform need no longer frighten any one.
When everything is as it should be, we will still each have ourselves to battle with. The rich, inexhaustible fund of our own stupidities, and failures and futilities, the strikes and labor troubles, and graft and immoralities, of which we each privately know ourselves to be constituted, they will always furnish for us that turgid quality which we spend our days in trying to eliminate. If we eradicate war between countries we can still experience it in the nursery, and if we banish poverty we will continue to find it warping our enthusiasms and spirits. When the world is of a beautiful orderliness, we will each retain as a souvenir of its past ourselves, and while we are secretly imbibing at the private cupboard of our incorrigible human perversity we will chuckle to think we are the ones who created the perfection existing outside.
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