A MAN’S LIFE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3783, 17 July 1936, Page 7

A MAN’S LIFE

THE PHRASE ANALYSED. WHY WE SHOULD BE MORAL. (Contributed.) In books and plays we often find a certain type of person announcing that he is determined to lead a man’s life. There are variations upon the phrase, and some ot them are evidently framed so as to include members of the gentler sex. “I am going to live my own life.” This kind ot decision is followed in some cases by deliberate romoval from the parental roof and parental control. The young man takes a bach or finds a place in a guest house, and there are many young women who follow the same course. Living “a man’s life” means, on the lins of many, that they propose to give full play to what they understand by manhood, to claim freedom from all restraints, follow their natural impulses, refuse to practice repression or suppression, and, in simpler language, to do as they like. The more subtle -minded ask, Why not? Why should he be moral? Why not follow nature? Is it not our duty to do so, to express the self? We are made with certain cravings and impulses why not gratify them?

The people who ask such questions are not alert enough to see that their very inquiry raises a suspicion that all is not well, that they are on the defensive and that they are in strange company, for the burglar claims the same right to live his own life, and every law-breaker in the community propounds the same justification. The outwardly respectable person who sneers at conventional society with its conventional morals does not observe that sunrise itself is conventional, that the lower animals follow their impulses, and the man who does so q>uts himself into strange company. He pleads that morals mean a code of conduct imposed by external authority, and he protests against any person or group of persons dictating to him. This misguided individual who claims to live according to nature has not asked what man’s nature is. He regards it as made up of a variety of impulses, a complex ot cravings which he calls the urge to do this or that. He does not pay himself a compliment by speaking in this fashion. His reading has been very limited, and he raises the suspicion that uis theory has been called in to bolster up his practice. The fundamental error he makes is that of assuming that man is merely a physical entity. He has not the wit to see that if man is essentially and solely a physical oeing, why is he looking round for justification ot his action in following his physical impulses? This argumentation ot his is not physical. It is a rational process, and plainly implies that in his nature there is something more than mere impulses. Mental energies are rot simply bodily processes. Calling oneself a man and ignoring the faculty of reason is a claim for irrationalism. He who is busy rationalising nis peculiar desires or setting his impulses down to conditioned physical reflexes is putting himself in a strange position. Logically nothing is left for him but to obey his impulses and abandon science and ethics and all that goes by the name of philosophy and religion. That he maintains some show of believing in science is clear proof that he does not carry out his own tenets in practice.

With all his faults he is better than his theory would suggest. It is merely stating a commonplace when one asserts that in our time morals mean sex morals, and intelligent persons regard sex in man as not an ordinary animal incident which provides certain sensations and emotions but has reactions which cannot be ignored. Because man is a rational being and a social being, the consequences of his actions never stop at himself. The world is neither a barnyard nor a jungle. Man is not a machine, but a reasoning and free agent. The foundation of morals is found in our own nature, in the fact of its being both rational and moral. A grave but not uninformed critic declares that the natural prompting of man is towards sexual promiscuity. The Behaviorist dictrine, if carried out logically, would have deadly consequences. If every man followed his impulses what kind of world would we create? If it is really true that man is to be considered solely a physical being and that living his own life is his right, then our notions of decency and happiness will need to be revolutionised. We contend that under such conditions life would be impossible. It would not be a man’ life, but a beast’s life. Historically, wild beasts have been tamed by man or are being blotted out by man. The analogy is suggestive. Man himself is making upward, “working out tlif beast” that is in himself.

The ancient story of the prodigal son has a pregnant phrase describing how at a certain point in uis career “he came to himself.’' Till that moment he was not "himself,” not his true self. He was deranged, out of himself, at the opposite po e from his essential nature. Mr H. G. Wells, in his “Outline of History,” assures us that the fundamental impulse of society will one day be the “impulse to loving devotion.” This impulse, lie says, will lead “to a complete escape from self which has been the common underlying force in all the gredt religions ot the last 25 centuries, tin impulse which ebbed so perceptibly during the prosperity, laxity, disillusionment and scepticism of the past 70 or 80 years.” “A man’s” life is that which results from recognition of his true nature as. including not only the physical, but also the rational, social and moral. Somebody once admitted that his life had been all wrong because he Lad never consulted his heart. Nobody is a man so long as he merely follows his impulses. He may develop into a man if he thinks a little more deeply, consults his heart, and becomes a little child.