Either-Or
"The international crisis is a moral crisis."

(Editor's note: This column appeared in The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1939.)

"Above all, they emphasize that the international crisis is a moral crisis, and that the foundations of the world will be shaky until the moral props are restored."--Anne O'Hare McCormick in The New York Times, June 3, 1939.

"For any interpretation of human history there are two necessary assumptions. One is that there is such a thing as a moral order, and the other is that progress is possible. Without these two assumptions, human civilization could not exist. . . . That there is a moral order means that moral principles and moral ideals should take precedence of all else, and that there is progress means that man has had a certain measure of success in putting moral principles and moral ideals ahead of selfishness and gain-seeking motives to conduct."--President Nicholas Murray Butler's commencement address at Columbia University, June 6, 1939.

"Right is what serves the interests of the German nation and wrong is what harms the German people."--Reich Minister Frick at the Conference of German Lawyers at Leipzig in 1933.

"The will of the Fuehrer is the only valid law."--Under-Secretary of State Freisher in the Zeitschrift der Akademie fuer Deutsches Recht, October, 1935.

"There is no separate body of moral rules; no separate subject-matter of moral knowledge and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical science. If the business of morals is not to speculate upon an ultimate standard of right, it is to utilize physiology, anthropology and psychology to discover all that can be discovered of man, his organic powers and potentialities."--John Dewey, Creative Intelligence, 1917, pp. 65-69.

The interesting thing in the dispute is that it concerns the most important question that can be asked by mankind and a question that is susceptible of a plain "either-or" answer. Man is either a "moral" being or he is not; he must be one thing or the other; there is no middle status for him. He cannot be by nature partly moral, partly not. It is an all-or-nothing choice. Up to less than a century ago no one seriously raised the question in its ultimate form, and in definite terms. Even at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century conscience was for Kant the one tremendous indisputable fact of human nature in a world of phenomena, by means of which man knew that God exists. Today the modern philosophy of Naturalism denies both conscience and God. It may be noted in passing that in the index to the Third Year-book of the John Dewey Society (1939), entitled Democracy and the curriculum--the Life and Program of the American School, there are no references under "character," "morals," "religion" or "conscience."

Now leaving open for the moment the question whether man is a moral being or not, we are confronted by the obvious fact that the Western civilization is founded on the assumption that he is, and by the equally obvious fact that our American social structure is in a very special sense formally created on the same base. On this base have rested all the traditions, the mores, and the conventions of both. That base is now attacked in principle and in practice. If it goes the traditions and the mores go with it. What kind of social order can we expect to arise upon its ruins?

One thing we can safely predict of any social order that is erected upon a theory of human amoralism. It must, if it is to be "order," take the ant heap or the hive as its model. It cannot stop short of that; the dichotomy is absolute. There can be no "liberty" for anyone in an amoral social order, any more than there is liberty for an ant or a bee. It would have to be an order much as that of Egypt under the Pyramid-builders but almost infinitely tighter, because more complex, and it would not have at its command the one thing that cemented the Egyptian structure and gave it such unique stability--religion. There is nothing in the history of man to support the possibility of such an order; all history gives it the lie.

To those who believe that man is a moral creature, Mrs. McCormick's conclusion is convincing. We shall see the world's crisis beginning to resolve, when we see the law of right and wrong entering into the dispute--not before. To those who do not so believe, the crisis should be no crisis at all, but rather a step toward the order which their philosophy foresees and demands. That is, of course, supposing them to be logical--which, equally of course, they are not. For it is characteristic of all pragmatists, from William James down, that in building their Utopias they surreptitiously slip in through the back door the "absolutes" that they have ostentatiously kicked down the front stoop!

Mr. Woodlock, born in Ireland in 1866, was editor of The Wall Street Journal, 1902-05, and "Thinking It Over" columnist from 1930 until his death in 1945. Robert L. Bartley is away.

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