One of the more fascinating aspects of the essay is the mere contemplation of the title. Morality, in this context, is understood to be quite distinct from one’s personal integrity in distinguishing between right and wrong. Here morality carries with it the impact that it has on others rather than just ourselves. Take alcohol, for instance. In the privacy of one’s home, getting drunk is no one else’s business and people should be free to follow the dictates of their own personal beliefs when making that decision. Once a drunk person gets behind the wheel of a car, however, they have suddenly involved others and have a moral obligation to their fellow drivers not to be on the road. What, then, are the moral implications of being ignorant? Clearly it has to do with the impact of ignorance on the rest of society, especially in a democratic society. Thomas Jefferson’s oft cited quote, “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government” is usually left incomplete. His conclusion states, “that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.” Without intelligence, the people lack the ability to correct the wrongs in government and are thus unable to fix them, and the implication for others is clear. The moral obligation is in being well-informed and attracted by the wrongs that one sees. To neglect that obligation is to neglect other members of society, a moral wrong in the eyes of Erskine.
He begins his essay by posing the question of what a wise man would make of American cultural values, circa 1914, and if among them the wise man would list intelligence as being one. From there he begins a literary explanation of how intelligence in Anglo-Saxon history became something to be denigrated. What he leaves out is the impetus for this springing from the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages who were the keepers of knowledge and clearly intended to keep it that way. He tackles the subject through the Bible, in the book of Job, and through Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the Devil is the intellectual and God is an angry and jealous overlord. “Milton makes his Satan so thoughtful, so persistent, so liberty-loving, so magnanimous, and God so illogical, so heartless and repressive, that many perfectly moral readers fear lest Milton, like the modern novelists, may have known good and evil, but could not tell them apart.” It’s a valid point. What is the difference between good and evil? American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in his short story “Young Goodman Brown,” recognized this when the title character of his story has nearly completed his allegorical journey through the forest of knowledge and discovers his own impurity, crying out, “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.”
Knowledge, then, from the time of Adam and Eve, has been seen as the dominion of the wicked. And lest we think that we have outgrown our Anglo-Saxon prejudice against intellect, I offer a more recent example. In an interview with Bill Moyers, the great Noam Chomsky was asked if he believed in common sense. “Absolutely,” he replied. “I believe in Cartesian common sense. I think people have the capacity to see through the deceit in which they’re ensnared.” But then Moyers goes on to say how incongruous it is to hear a man from the ivory tower talking about common people with appreciation. The meaning is clear. Because Chomsky is an intellectual man, a scholar and a linguist, he couldn’t possibly have any relationship to the common man. Chomsky then makes an argument that Erskine would have appreciated. “I think that scholarship has the opposite consequences. My own studies in language and human cognition demonstrate what remarkable creativity ordinary people have.” In Erskine’s essay he substantiates his view through the use of characters in English literature back to the time of Shakespeare. The heroes are inevitably plain and simple, while the villains are clever, scheming, and highly intelligent. The French, at least, have enough sense to pity the innate goodness of heroes who are trapped by their own lack of intelligence.
Though Erskine fears we may balk at his portrayal of English literature as anti-intellectual, he states that it is the function of the reader to be aware of these tendencies. And if we are unable to do that, then “our admiration is not discriminating; and if we neither have discrimination nor are disturbed by our lack of it, then perhaps that wise man could not list intelligence among our virtues.” The real meat of the essay comes when he asks how we judge actions as good or bad, and that simply believing that a good man does good and a bad man does bad without examining the act itself is anti-intellectual. He supports this idea by the way we venerate the nobility of death, especially in wartime, without bothering to look at who gave the orders and the stupidity involved in many of those decision that ended in noble deaths. At the same time, his overt dig at the church is prescient for our day in reflecting the anti-intellectualism of the religious right. Speaking of the men graduation college he says they are easily divisible “into those who wish to be intelligent men, and those who prefer not to be intelligent, but to do the will of God.” He follows this line of reasoning with a seemingly unrelated analogy, but one that is really a criticism of religion in disguise.
The English belief in character above all, in moral courage and steadfastness, is not enough when faced with the modern problems of the day. He compares this to a man being in prison. What he needs most to escape is a key to open the lock. That key is what Erskine compares to intelligence. The only way courage and steadfastness benefit a man in prison is if he doesn’t have the key and must remain inside. Though he forges ahead in the essay, the implication is clear. Those who remain in a state of misery and suffering as proof of their religious faith are clearly stupid. It is only through questioning and scholarship that man raises himself from the problems of the day and escapes his prison, not by attempting to pray it away. Today we are lapsing into the same behaviors as the people of Erskine’s day, and making the same mistakes, “mak[ing] a moral issue of an economic or social issue, because it seems ignoble to admit it is simply a question of intelligence.” The religious right would rather not think about the consequences of their actions, for if they did they would see the moral perversion of their insistence that everyone abide by their ethical choices, and that using the state to coerce the ethics of other citizens is in itself a sin.
For Erskine, intelligence is its own moral virtue. “We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God.” And while he asks Americans to move beyond the denigration of intellect in British culture, what he is really asking is to move beyond the simplistic idea of faith over intellect espoused by the church, that in reality “sin and misery are the fruit of ignorance, and that to know is to achieve virtue.” Then, as today, Americans are inclined toward an instinctive, gut reaction, to social issues, but as Erskine once again points out, “filial love, hunger, and fear are still motives to conduct, but intelligence has directed them to other ends,” and that “its outward effect was to rob the altar of its sacrifice and the priest of his mysteries.” Finally, he makes the same contention as Chomsky, namely that intelligence is what really brings mankind together rather than being a dividing point. “Our affections divide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up. Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up.” And reflecting on Plato, he makes the same assessment as Young Goodman Brown, “that sin is but ignorance, and knowledge and virtue are one.”
Like so many other writers from the early twentieth century that I’ve been reading, John Erskine feels as if he’s speaking to us today. Morality is not just an individual pursuit. The purpose of morality is to enable people to live together in a way that respects the humanity of all. To have a moral obligation to be intelligent is to recognize that stupidity doesn’t just affect the individual, but affects everyone in a free society. In a recent television interview, intellectual writer Leon Wieseltier put it this way: “A democratic society, an open society, places an extraordinary intellectual responsibility on ordinary men and women . . . because the quality of the formation of our opinions determines the character of our society . . . A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy.” Unfortunately our society today has far too many thoughtless citizens, while the ability to rectify that thoughtlessness is higher than ever. There is no excuse for the kind of mindless citizenship that takes at face value the distortions and sensationalism of the media and politicians and refuses to do the critical thinking necessary to make wised decisions that are going to affect all of us. John Erskine knew that, and it’s time the rest of us know it too.
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