(We begin a new year next weekend. Many will say, “It’s good to get 2021 behind us.”  But changing the page of a calendar does not wipe out lingering fears and uncertainties. Nor does it erase lingering joy, lingering hope, lingering striving for truth.  Cruelty and inhumanity remain.  But so, says Dr. Frank Crane, remains ideals that can overcome that cruelty and inhumanity. We must, however, constantly be on our guard that our ideals do not become the cruelty and inhumanity they should overcome.)

THE HUMANITIES VERSUS THE IDEALS

The humanities are the ordinary universal feelings, such as family affection, aversion to cruelty, love of justice and of liberty.

The ideals are the so-called big enthusiasms, as religion, patriotism, reform, and the like.

The humanities are sometimes called the red passions; the ideals the white passions.

The great institutions of the race have been formed and kept alive by the white passions. These include churches, political parties, nations, and various societies and associations, secret and public.

The progress of mankind has been made through institutions, embodying ideals, which we may call the centrifugal force. The humanities have always pulled against this, and may be termed the centripetal force.

Thus, although great ideals present themselves to men as beneficial, yet in the carrying out of them men often become cruel, unjust, and tyrannical. So the greatest crimes of earth are committed under the influence of movements designed to do the greatest good.

Under the church we have seen persecution, a ruthless disregard of human feeling, families torn asunder, opinion coerced, bodies tortured.

The humanities in time destroyed the baleful power of the religious ideal, its dreams of dominance and its inhuman fanaticism. Plain pity and sympathy battered down the monstrous structure of iron idealism. The horrors of the medieval inquisition and the dark intolerance of puritanism had to yield to the humanities.

Most of the great tragedies have been the crushing out of human and natural feeling by some ideal which, once helpful, has become monstrous. Such were the Greek tragedies, where men were the victims of the gods.

War is the colossal force of an ideal, patriotism, where the check of the humanities has been entirely cut off.

It is supposed to ennoble men and states. It has always been the preferred occupation of the noble class, kings and courtiers, because the contempt of personal feelings and the merciless sacrifice of the humanities have seemed grand and royal.

But by and by war must yield to the eternal humanities. Sheer human sympathies will abolish it.

The humanities are peculiarly of the common people. Therefore they find expression and come into political effect quickly in democracies. In the United States, for instance, the rule of a religious party or the program of patriotic militarism is impossible. We have too much red passion to permit the ascendency of white passions.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book of red passion, sympathy for the Negro, overthrew the “white” ideals of the slave oligarchy.

The cry of a starving mother, the protest of wronged workmen, can defeat the apparently resistless power of massed capital.

One drop of blood outweighs the most splendid scheme of the theorist.

The history of the world is the unceasing struggle of the humanities against great ideals which, crystallized into institutions, have become inhuman.