Problems of the Age

Problems of the Age Dealing with Religious, Social and Economic Questions and their .Solution. A Study for the Quorums and Classes of the Melchizedek Priesthood

By Dr. Joseph M. Tanner

XXVIII— The Theater — License of the Stage. The theater is both a symptom and a cause. It reevals social influences and the trend of modern life in a manner that is not depicted and would not be tolerated elsewhere. Characters upon the stage are permitted, to say things and do things that society would not tol- erate in any other place. The very fact that the revelations of immoral con- duct are permitted on the stage accounts, in large part, for the vast num- — bers of its devotees. The stage is therefore symbolic a symbolism of in- dulgence, freedom from restraint, that are rapidly increasing, if we are com- pelled to believe as authors assert, that the stage is taking on license beyond all belief. It not only suggests and encourages immorality by the license it takes, but it is often the covert foe to religion and social moderation. It indulges in ridicule which is dangerous to sobriety by its cunning attacks on many of our soundest and sanest social institutions. It is particularly severe upon marriage; it destroys courtship, and often ridicules religion. Society has become indifferent to the stage, whose excesses are explained away if taken any notice of, by the statement that "we must take no notice — of it," because it is the stage. Its devotees are made up of all classes the rich and the poor, the high and the low, churchmen and laymen; and from all there comes the same hilarious laughter at indecent ridicule and immoral suggestion. The stage is also a cause: it excites feelings that would better remain dormant. It offers plausible excuses for the most tragic failures of life, and has its saving clauses in a philosophy that is as fatal to the welfare of society as it is to the promotion of happiness. It has become a part of our It is reflected more in our social intercourse than is present-day world life. the Church; and as an educator of public sentiment, it has perhaps no su- perior.

— Present Conditions. Is the war making us serious-minded? Does the presence of eternity on the battlefield incline men to a spirit of sacredness and devotion? War is a human institution, and carries men along in the trend of their past experiences. It emphasizes human life wherever it touches it: by it the religious may be made more religious, the indifferent more indifferent, the scoffer more scornful. The war in France had not been long under way until amusements, chiefly the recreation of the theater, was considered necessary for the encouragement and good cheer of the soldiers. The theater was therefore transferred from the large cities to the front. I

copy from the New York Sun of October 28, 1917: "The critics point out that while in the beginning things were dif- ferent, in the last few months salaciousness has increased tremend- ously, in these theatrical productions. This is not surprising. In Paris, when the theaters were first reopened after the beginning of the

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war, the plays were all on a high plane. It seemed as if only the classic repertory was to be played and the preference was for Cor- neille, and in Corneille's own theater they gave "Horace," where patriotic sentiment is so admirably expressed. "But when the war went on longer than the managers dreamed it — would longer than they wanted to prolong this truce of heroism and chastity, to which they were willing to devote months, even a whole — season their patience came to an end. "They began to revert to plays of the ante-war type. In a brief time Paris had the same theater as existed before the war; the same theater where the revues and many of the plays are filled with in- uendo and vulgarity. It is likely that the theater at the front has in some wise followed the example of the Paris stage. "M. Beaunier, commenting on these conditions, writes: "'I know the answer many people will make to this: that art beautifies everything it touches. But this is not true in any respect, and often art is spoiled by what it touches. A cleverer argument is: "It amuses them. Their life is not happy in the trenches and in the camps. Are you going to quibble about their pleasure?" But it — doesn't amuse them if I can believe my correspondents. You mis- judge them when you attribute so little delicacy to them. * * * " 'This confusing of pornography and gaiety is one of the most foolish errors of our day. It has done much to hurt the good reputa- tion of France. Besides the strangers who came to Paris sought for it with an unhealthy curiosity and then despised us when they returned home. This hypocrisy is well known. Real gayety is never nasty; it is a sign of health while pornography is a disease of the mind. ;

" 'We thought that the war had put an end to all these turpitudes. We expected a change in the public mind, and in its habits, in its frivolities — a tonifying of its imagination. There is still hope."

Fallacy of Art. —The trouble with the theater, as with all other sorts of amusements, is that it is almost wholly dissociated from religious life. When Brigham Young built the great theater in Salt Lake City (it was great indeed at the time it was constructed) he intended that it should be under the censorship of the Church. Dances and other forms of amuse- ment were provided under a directorship intended to shut out the evils and abuses to which all kinds of amusements are so easily subjected. Today our Church organizations devote much of their working programs to the betterment of our social life through safe and sane amusements. In the larger cities, where a cosmopolitan spirit prevails, it is more difficult to blend the pleasures and religious influences of life. To separate them is to increase the dangers of one at the expense of the other. We are now met by the flagrant demand that things must be accepted and approved, whatever immorality they may suggest, because they represent art, as though art stood apart from human feelings, suggestions, inclinations, and temptations. It is contended that the separation of real art, nude and other immoral art, from the moral, who1o «nme influences of life, is simple and easy to those who are strong-minded and have high powers of discrim- ination; that it is only the weak and the unworthy that debase real true art by any thought of vulgarity. Such advocates of art, like the advocates of platonic love, are guilty of shams and false pretense: there is no direct and precise cleavage in the thought, feelings, emotions, and temptations of human life. They are so interwoven that a violence to any one of them touches all of them.

Excesses. — "Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the

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eye and gladden the heart; yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul. "And it pleaseth God that he hath given these things unto man; for unto this end they were made to be used with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion." Revelation to Joseph Smith, 1831, Doc. and Cov. 59:18-20.

XXIX—Heredity — Its Spiritual Origin. Much time has been devoted in various social organizations throughout the Church to the discussion of heredity. It has been a subject of debate and scientific research for centuries. Around it all sorts of agreements and disagreements have been hurled, and there is today r.o definite science of heredity. The greatest announcement on this subject is to be found in the Book of Genesis, where it deals with the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. The language of the people was confounded and they were scattered abroad upon the earth. From that time on they represented groups of humanity, and in time races were formed out of these groups. This is the greatest law, and perhaps the only commonly recognized law of heredity in the world of thought today. Race heredity is well known; individual heredity has never been agreed upon. While men inherit certain great characteristics of their race, the same cannot be said of their inheritances individually. We believe in a spiritual existence which we enjoyed before the creation of this earth, and that when bodies are given to us they become simply the tabernacles of a prior living spirit, with certain essential qualities of thought, feeling, and possibilities. With our primeval existence as a start- ing point, our views of heredity must necessarily be very different from those who look upon this world as the beginning of life. All those who consider the body and spirit as contemporaneous, naturally trace the various qualities and characteristics of life to an earthly parental origin, with the result that thinkers and writers are in hopeless confusion about the law of heredity. We believe that the negroes constitute a group of inherited qualities, not merely qualities of their earthly parents, but qualities which existed in them before the earth was created. And so with the different races, which express distinct race peculiarities. The confusion of tongues, therefore, at the Tower of Babel was more than the disruption of a national life and the defeat of an ambition: it was the beginning of race distinction and race distribution upon the face of the earth, — a distribution that enabled each race to receive those spirits that were characteristic of that particular group. It is equally true that we as individuals represent qualities that have come to us through our primeval existence. The question, however, of these individual inheritances is not so evident as it is in the case of general race characteristics. From the same parents a child is often born with those qualities of life which make for higher and better manhood or womanhood, and later a child that has characteristics of an opposite tendency. That difference is not explained by merely temperamental changes in the parents or changes in environment as has been abundantly proved in a wide range of experiments and observa- tions.

Objections. — Any effort, therefore, to fix a rule of inheritance has been abortive. we had a primeval existence, our qualities of being must If depend to a large extent upon that existence, and the law of justice would seem to indicate that we were born into life with certain primeval inherit-

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ances which we were entitled to enjoy in a mortal state. Let us take a iase for the advocates of a strict law of heredity: a good man marries a good wife; they have good children, and their children's children are g^od; and by superior efforts and improved environments they continue, as gen- erations go on, to grow into perfect conditions. These people, having good children who create good environments, escape the burdens, cares, anxieties and sorrows of those who have born to them children who become way- ward. The good, who are able to carry a great burden, teach and practice in the highest degree the law of correct living, and have little responsibility as compared with those who are less qualified to assume the heavier bur- dens of life. We should thus be compelled to reverse the teachings of Christ, "Where much is given, much is expected," and we should fly in the face of all social progress.

— Illustrations.- The doctrine of our primeval existence is fundamentally one of religious belief. We believe that we were first created spiritually, that we were literally, in our spiritual creation, the "sons and daughters of — God," that among those sons and daughters were Jesus Christ and Lucifer, who were the very antipodes of each other. How would a believer in the law of heredity explain from the standpoint of a pre-spiritual existence, the differences between Christ and Satan? An eminent writer, Samuel George Smith, in his book on Social Pathology, says:

"Children born of the same parents, reared under precisely the same circumstances, differ very widely in character and conduct, so that heredity and environment combined seem unequal to the task of a complete explanation of the history of the individual. There is no doubt that heredity and environment is each influential in forming the individual, but in heredity there is as much room for variation as there are numbers in the group considered, and in environment there are' such changing elements that no two individuals ever have pre- cisely the same influences. There is a variant of organization which makes each individual of the human race absolutely unique, and without going into the metaphysics of personal choice or desire, there is an unmeasured and probably unmeasureable, variant in the attitude of every individual toward his opportunity. The problems are not easy of solution."

There is much force in the statement that "There is a variant of organi- zation which makes each individual of the human race absolutely unique." Such a statement goes far to support the doctrine we teach of our primeval existence. The attempted rule of heredity is baffling even to itself. Dr. Smith says:

"Every living individual who counts back ten generations may have over a thousand grandparents. In the direct line of descent all of them must be considered in the question of his inheritance, but the thousand grandparents of a few generations back are completely lost in the social group, and it is quite evident, apart from any special theories, that whatever the inheritance of an individual may be, it is pretty difficult to give it a scientific definition."

Some of the props upon which heredity is founded are knocked away by the cold facts of history. One of the chief of these is the so-called "law of environment." The Indians of the American continent have had perhaps the best environment in the world. Archaelogy and the Book of Mormon both confirm the fact that they have retrograded from a higher to a lower stage of civilization. Environments did not create in them any progressive advance to a civilized state.

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— Mendelism. Much discussion about heredity is based upon certain dis- coveries in the vegetable world,— the so-called laws of Mendel. Here, too, from our point of view, we are compelled to make a broad distinction. Even scientific writers are abandoning the argument that the same rules apply to life in the animal and vegetable kingdoms as apply to the life of man. It is true that all God created, if we take the account given in Gen- esis, was created first spiritually. Between that spiritual creation and our own, however, there is a wide difference. We are the direct creations of — God his children; he is our father, who is in Heaven. He is nowhere in Scripture designated as the Father of animals and plants. Whatever may have been the source of their spiritual creation, or the ultimate end of plant and animal life, there is from the beginning a very distinct difference between them and the human race. It is true that there are likenesses, but there are essential differences that have never yet been bridged over. The progress of animal and human life lie along essentially different courses of progress. Much has been said about Mendel's experiments on peas and on mice. He has shown that in them there is a certain dominance of qualities; that one parent or the other may be transmitted. Quoting from Smith again:

"Professor Bateson, one of the leading exponents of the doctrine of Mendel, says that there is little evidence of the transmission of abnormal characteristics, and he naively says that 'if in the simple matter of color our population and their descendants followed rules such as those which prevail in the color of the sweet pea, of the mouse, and of the cat, the essential facts of Mendelism must long ago have been part of the common property of human knowledge," This shows a dawning light upon the eyes of Professor Bateson, re- vealing to him that the complex human animal cannot be expounded in biological terms."

— Family Groups. This law of Mendel has led to the promulgation of a new theory or law, which is called Eugenics. Certain families of criminals and families of superior abilities have been studied to demonstrate the cor- rectness of Mendel's theory. I again quote from Dr. Smith:

"The first is the study of the Jukes by R. L. Dugdale. The family in seventy-five years numbered twelve thousand persons. They cost the state a million and a quarter of dollars in these seventy-five years. They are all descended from one dissolute woman, Belle Juke. Those who have not taken the trouble to read the book or to study the problem regard this classical case as a definite proof that crime, pauperism, and other evils are clearly of an hereditary nature. But one of the most significant statements of Mr. Dugdale is, 'The ten- dency of heredity is to produce an environment which perpetuates that heredity,' or, to put it plainly, the trouble with this family was that every generation of little Jukes was taken care of by depraved Jukes."

"Dr. Lange of Denmark had given an illustration of degeneration in families. He had found that 44 related families in twenty years had sent no less than 77 patients to the insane asylum. In the same families 358 serious neurophatic cases had appeared in one form or another in a few generations, from which he argued the evil effect of the first neurophatic woman, the founder of the breed. "Further investigations revealed some strange facts about these families, for in them there appeared besides the 77 insane persons, an unusual proportion of gifted men and women. There were two cabinet ministers, one foreign ambassador, three bishops, three gen-

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erals, university professors, and a large number of public nine and no less than forty-four poets and artists, most of whom officials, were known throughout Denmark. In twenty-eight of these families there were seventy-two individuals who secured very prominent posi- tions through special intellectual ability."

Some of these cases appear to support the theory, but the exceptions are too numerous to speak of the Mendel theory as a law.

— Transmitted Qualities. Is the study of heredity profitable? Within — — certain limits race qualities it has some justification. Scientific men, by their writings, have thrown students of the subject into interminable con- fusion. It is legitimate enough to approach the subject of heredity from a standpoint merely of investigation. There are about its study many curious — conditions of life; they invite wonderment, even study, but they are not so fixed or so agreed upon that we are justified in speaking of certain transmitted conditions and tendencies as a law. At an earlier period in our investigations on heredity, men undertook to explain the moral and social life of nations by the law of heredity. They considered the law sufficiently established to make it a satisfactory explanation of individual phenomena. The view here taken by Dr. Smith is now quite generally admitted: "It used to be taugnt that a number of diseases were transmitted from generation to generation. It is now generally agreed that there * * * * is no such thing as hereditary disease in any true sense. It is now agreed that certain diseases may be conveyed to the child in its prenatal condition, or at the time of birth, and that is the only fragment left of the doctrine of hereditary disease. On the other hand, it is a well-known fact that tuberculosis in the parents, because of its weakening effect, results frequently in an offspring that may become feeble-minded or insane. This is a further illustration of the general law that the chief bequest to the child of parenthood is strength or weakness. "As disease is not hereditary, so physical mutilations are not transmitted. The Chinese foot needs to be compressed generation after generation."

doubtful whether all that is known about laws of heredity can have It is any particular educational value, more than that of curiosity which comes from the study of related qualities in human life. There are two very distinct powers that come with the birth of human life: they are the powers of acquisition and the powers of desire. We have laid stress upon the importance of the former to the neglect of the latter. We have been forced, through a false system of education, into the belief and practice that happiness and future welfare are to be measured by our acquisitions. What would often be more helpful to us is the education of — our necessities, what it is proper to desire and what we ought to avoid.

— Operations of the Spirit of God. Of those who fear God the Lord in a vision to Joseph Smith said: "For by my Spirit I will enlighten them, and by my power I will make known unto them the secrets of my will; yea, even those things which the eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor yet en- tered into the heart of man" (Sec. 76:10, Doc. and Cov.). The dangers of attempting to fix rules for our guidance by the theory of heredity lies in the fact that as a matter of philosophy it can give us nothing tangible about the operations of the Spirit of God. We may even be born of the Spirit. In the nature of things much .of our speculations leave no room for the permanent influences which the Spirit of God has on our lives.

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XXX —Eugenics — Experiments. We are just now forming eugenic clubs throughout the country with the wise and beneficent purpose of elevating society and establishing correct principles of parentage. In some places the advocacy of eugenics is most enthusiastic and it is spoken of as the new and coming science. Most extreme advantages are predicted for it and by many it is regarded as a sort of salvation for many afflictions which torment human society at the present time. It is sometimes known as Mendelism from the fact that Mendel made certain experiments with sweet peas, with mice, and with cats. He traced out certain laws of breeding which were repre- sented by diagrams and from these discoveries of animal relationships the question was propounded for human society and at once the question arose, if the mating in the vegetable and animal world may produce such exact results, why may it not have the same effect upon human beings?

— Men and Mice. It may be easy in the same breath to speak of men and mice, and the question would be much more simple perhaps if the laws regulating mice were also applicable to men; but unfortunately they are not, and whatever may be the difference in the physical development of the two it is certain that the inborn differences between men and animals does not permit us to bring both classes under the same laws of regeneration. It should be stated at the outset that the fundamental difference in matters of progeny between man and animal is to be found in the exercise of a free agency, an important human law. This law does not prevail with respect to animals and plants. They are still under a defined tutelage and governed by laws that are universal, simple, direct. It is said that we may proceed to the improvement in the breeding of human beings as we do in the breeding of animals. We have developed in the science of animal industry superior breeds which through Government control we may register and call pure breeds. We have our pure bred horses, hogs, sheep, chickens. Shall we have a pure bred man? The trouble is we are not permitted to exercise any control over man in the matter of mating. True, in certain governments of Europe there is a law of Royalty which compels those of royal blood to marry within certain families. Of that, however, later. The free agency of man is nowhere considered more sacred than in the matter of the selection of companionship. He is a being of multiplied motives. He is governed by social surroundings, by ambition, by a variety of characteristics, and these are governing features with him. He is moved by the influence of beauty, wealth, social advantages, parental influences, sometimes by the superior persuasive powers of the woman who would exercise control over him. If we are to have a science out of eugenics that is anything more than good advice, there must be some abridgment of the free agency of man.

— Religion Fundamental. One of the perhaps insurmountable troubles in the way of extreme advocates of eugenics is the fact that religion, and not intelligence and wealth, is fundamental in human life, and the basis of a sound and lasting social life. As men grow in social advantages, in wealth and intelligence, they are beset by increasing temptations,—temptations that lead them to such excesses as undermine their physical powers, and when these give way the whole superstructure of economic and intellectual life gives way. Thus we see nations rising and falling. We see social life in its exalted and deepest conditions. If history is pronounced in one thing it

is the swing of the pendulum between the extremes of morality and im- morality. . . .

Spirituality, or if you please, real goodness, is not so self advertising as intelligence or material wealth. By its very nature it is modest and

a

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retiring. It is a quality that may be operated through many generations for the uplift of human society. Those who advocate eugenics find it extremely difficult to go back to those modest beginnings in order to find the proper starting point. Indeed, how can they know? The heart of man belongs to the revelations of God. The Lord said to Samuel, who was seeking among the sons of Jesse for a king, that he did not look upon men with the eyes of man. He knew their hearts. But how can finite beings know these hidden conditions? The uplift of the human* race through proper mating must grow there- fore from obscure, often hidden beginnings, through generations to a sound and substantial life. Such changes are too microscopic for the men of science. They cover too long a period for man's patient work. Indeed, all of the investigators of eugenics show that they are concerned with two — extremes, the extremely intelligent and those who are extremely criminal; and their investigations, even in these two classes, as I have shown else- where, are not satisfactory. Movements are now afoot to begin the investigation of the development of genius in certain families. Investigators go back a few generations. They cannot go far. They are tabulating their data and trying to demonstrate to us as far as possible the infallibility of their doctrine. What families are these? They are families often of genius, which science has proved is not hereditary. Some are men of wealth, who are merely a part of a new made rich. The advocates of this doctrine are extremely enthusiastic. Their motives are all right, but extremists always carry with them the danger of excess, and their conclusions should be received with many reservations. If the extreme advocates of this science are permitted to exercise a very general and a very strong influence over our social and political life, they may endanger society as well as government.

Laws for the Unfit. — The tide of eugenic science ran high in 1913. In that year, North Dakota, Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan, passed c rtain eugenic laws for the sterilization of the unfit. The unfit in the — beginning was to include the insane and the habitual criminal, especially the rapist. It is undesirable, of course, that they perpetuate their class, but will the advocates of eugenics stop there? What they want to do is to eliminate those who are unfit; but who are unfit? It is a serious question, — so serious that Oregon repealed her eugenic law on referendum. The pioneers of Legislation in this law were the states of Washington, Iowa, Nevada and New York. Such advocates assume too much. They assume that there is a distinct and well-defined science or law of heredity, — science that has so many exceptions 'that great writers have come to re- pudiate it as a fixed science whose investigations have no practical value.

— Ambitions of U omen. The women of our country are perhaps the most enthusiastic advocates of eugenics. They are ambitious in parentage. With them child life has a closer and deeper meaning than it has with men. They insist often that it is their right to choose the future fathers of their chil- dren, but how? What sort of regulation could be devised that would permit any important class to make such selections? Of course, they would be ambitious, but the comparatively few properly fit to meet that ambition would practically exclude the masses. There is, as some writers point out, a greater uniformity in high quality female life than there is among the males. In the animal industry world, males for breeding purposes are se- lected with great care and with such numerous limitations as to produce only a few that are physically fit. France, in the matter of horses, has car- ried this selection to a very high degree. In the female animal world the rejections are much fewer, showing that in that class there is a distinct and superior uniformity. How about the human world? In matters of mating the high grade of uniformity shows a higher percentage of the females than

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exists in the animal world. In other words the number of women fit for superior womanhood is vastly in excess of the number of men. We need not consider the reasons assigned from a physical point of view for this superior and general uniformity. The proofs of the difference are apparent to all among the most striking illustrations of social life. One of the greatest causes for this difference lies perhaps in the so-called double — standadrs, standards which separate the physical, spiritual, and ultimately intellectual lives of the two classes. The difference is vital. The condi- tions that make for the double standard are ultimately destructive to the aims that the advocates of eugenics have in view. In addition, we should have in the end pronounced class distinctions. There would soon be the super-man and the super-woman, the high class or the high-brow, and intellectuals of all sorts of classical distinctions, which would bring in their train social disorder. We have had some strik- ing illustrations. Royalty throughout Europe has asserted its claim to superiority. Princes and princesses are brought up to be kings, queens, empresses and other sorts of royalty. They have had the advantages of wealth, of opportunity, of training. Has the Royal class made good? Is the genius of the world inherited from among them? Are they the actual rulers, and what generally do we think of the royal personages of Europe in these trying and distressing hours? Some investigation of that class has been made and in conclusion I quote from the writings of Fahlbeck, who has what is considered an authoritative work upon Swedish nobility. Of that class he says: "It has been shown how caste marriages prevailing among them produce a progressive degeneration, which manifests itself by frequent celibacy, much delayed marriage of the male sex, the large and in- creasing portion of sterile marriages, the small and decreasing fecund- ity (now 15.4 per cent) always less than the death rate, the increasing number of female births, the increasing mortality of youths under 20 years of age, the deaths of the children before that of the parents, which gradually tends to cause the extinction of the stock. As a con- sequence of that, 70 per cent of the original noble families are now extinct, and notwithstanding the continual ennobling of bourgeois fam- ilies, the number of noble families does not increase or very often de- clines." And Fahlbeck takes care to add that all this applies precisely to the whole wealthy class, of which the nobility is only a fragment.