Each one of us must find and work out for himself the ways in 4vhich

he must modify his life, so as to achieve balance and self-direction,

make the fullest use of his potentialities, and so contribute to the gen-
eral renewal of life. There is no single formula for achieving this
transformation; for the intellectual, so far from needing a balanced
diet of the “hundred best books,” often needs rather a stiff turn at
manual toil or the assumption of active political responsibilities in his
community, or in thought itself intensive study in some neglected
domain.

Similarly the manual worker needs to push his mind far harder
than he has yet learned: to devote himself to ideas as determinedly as
that mid-Victorian British worker who, not being able to buy Ruskin’s
works, copied them out by hand in order to have them in his own pos-
session. “We went down to the mine,” an old miner in England ob-
served to an acquaintance of mine, “with a book of Carlyle’s or Mill’s
in our pocket to read whilst we ate; but the boys today go down with
a newspaper and at night they don’t wrestle with a book, but go to
sleep over the wireless.” No one can doubt that the physical conditions
among miners have vastly improved in recent years; but their mental
attitude has perhaps deteriorated; for they lack the purpose and self-
discipline of the older generation. Seebohm Rowntree’s second Survey
of York confirms this supposition.

The first rule for autonomous development, toward which all edu-
cation should tend, is to be able in normal health to provide for one’s
own wants and regulate one’s own life, without undue dependence upon
others. However ingrained the habits of co-operation in a family, the
ideal person should be schooled to self-reliance. To have the habit of
making one’s own bed, cleaning one’s own room, to be able to take
turns at cooking meals for oneself or others, and performing whatever
other operations are necessary for the maintenance of a household,
including care of the sick and minding children, are essential for the
development of both sexes; if only because this is the main way of
freeing ourselves from claims to service which come down from days
of imiversal slavery.

In this respect, a great advance has been made in many modern

communities: not least in the United States where the frontier tradi-
tion of self-reliance and self-sufficiency has given the males in par-
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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

ticular an unusual willingness to look after themselves and to take

on some of the menial burdens of the household. An Italian, self-
exiled from Fascism, told me once that he did not know the real mean-
ing of" freedom until he was established in a little apartment in New
York, and found that since there was no servant to look after him
he was expected to make his own breakfast — and actually accom-
plished this feat. That was both a symbolic and a practical act of lib-
eration. These autonomous activities, bed-making, cooking, dish-wash-
ing, cleaning, provide a certain amount of manual labor, bread labor,
as Tolstoy called it, essential for a balanced life. Such daily work
largely does away with the necessity for special gymnastic exercises.
If in addition one cares for a garden, no further routine exercise is
necessary to keep the adult body in condition: what one may do by
way of walking, swimming, climbing, playing games, will be for re-
laxation and delight.

Part of the discipline of daily life is to organize one’s activities so

as to be able to devote a good share of one’s time and energy to public
service in the community. That service cannot begin too early or be
carried on too consistently; for the resorption of government by the
citizens of a democratic community is the only safeguard against those
bureaucratic interventions that tend to arise in every state through the
negligence, irresponsibility, and indifference of its citizens. Many
services that are now performed inadequately either because the
budget does not provide for them or because they are in the hands
of a remote officialdom, should be performed mainly on a voluntary
basis by the people of a local community. This includes not merely
administrative services too often dodged in a democracy, like service
on school boards, library boards, and the like: it should also include
other kinds of active public work, like the planting of roadside trees,
the care of public gardens and parks, even some of the functions of
the police. Through such work, each citizen would not merely become
at home in every part of his city and region; he would take over the
institutional life of his community as a personal responsibility.

In the new discipline for the daily life, then, public work must re-
ceive, along with one’s vocation and one’s domestic life, its due share
of energy, interest, loving care. War tends to over-concentrate such
claims, divorcing a soldier from his family, forcing him to abandon
completely his vocation: making the claims of the community over-
ride all personal desires and preferences. But no form of integration
that leaves out the constant need for public service will be capable

THE WAY AND THE LIFE

283

of redressing the radical unbalance that exists in present-day so-

ciety. The leisure that has now become possible in advanced socie-
ties for workers of all grades must be largely devoted to the tasks
of citizenship; for the more world-embracing become the spheres of
co-operation, the more essential it is that the local units of govern-
ment and administration and industrial organization be vigilantly ad-
ministered, through wide participation in criticism, and through the
exercise of democratic initiative: a matter of giving suggestons and
making demands from the bottom up, not merely a matter of taking
orders from the top down. At the level of the intimate, face-to-face
group politics should, as Michael Graham wisely suggests, be a mat-
ter for weekly, not quadrennial, consultations.

Finally, the re-building of the family, the assumption of one’s role

as lover and parent, as son or daughter, is vital to a balanced life.
During the last decade, even in countries where little thought has been
devoted to the subject, there has been a spontaneous recovery of paren-
tal and family values, on the part of childrerx whose parents had taken
a more narrowly egotistic attitude toward sex and its domestic responsi-
bilities: in this realm, there have been more spontaneous acts of renewal,
perhaps, than in any other department. The violence and evil of our
time have been, when viewed collectively, the work of loveless men:
impotent men who lust after sadistic power to conceal their failure
as lovers: repressed and frustrated men, lamed by unloving parents
and seeking revenge by taking refuge in a system of thought or a
mode of life into which love cannot intrude: at best, people whose
erotic impulses have been cut off from the normal rhythms of life,
self -enclosed atoms of erotic exploit, incapable of assuming the mani-
fold responsibilities of lovers and parents through all the stages of life,
unwilling to accept the breaks and abstentions of pregnancy, making
sexual union itself an obstacle to the other forms of social union that
flow out of family life.

Here the way of growth is twofold; for one thing, it consists in giv-
ing back to marriage the erotic depth and effulgence that a too-docile
bovine acceptance of continuous parenthood, without pause or relief,
had once brought with it. To this end, the introduction of relatively
safe, though still esthetically unsatisfactory, contraceptives has served
a good purpose. But in addition the parental side of marriage needs
far greater fostering than it has yet received. With rising national in-
comes homes must become more generous in space to give full play
to family life; social measures must be taken to help families of four

284

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

or five children from being undue economic burdens to those who

choose to have them: more of the functions that have slid into the
province of the school must go back to the home, once the domestic
environment of house and neighborhood is designed deliberately for
the play and education of children under the tutelage of their parents,
^he loving observation of children’s growth, even some systematic
habit of observing and recording these transformations, in family
books and collections of papers and photographs, brings one of life’s
most precious rewards: yet in our impoverished urban environments,
people devote to bridge or television, to soap operas or to other forms
of sodden play, much of the time that they might spend, with far
greater reward, in intercourse and play with their young.*

The denial of love here arrests the development of love in every

other part of life; whereas the expression of love, through the various
stages of attachment and detachment, from infancy through adoles-
cence, is what contributes to human maturity, all the more because
the last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved: the
willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a
state of emotional dependence. At that point in the parents’ growth,
their love must widen sufficiently to embrace other children besides
their own: otherwise they face desolation and bitterness. Meanwhile
those who fail to achieve love in marriage and parenthood must be
thrice vigilant to compensate that loss in every other relationship by
placing it as far as possible within the pattern of the family.

In short, the sharing of work experiences, the sharing of citizen re-,

sponsibilities, and the sharing of the full cycle of family life, in
homes and communities that are themselves re-dedicated to these val-
ues — ^this is part of the constant discipline of daily life for those who
seek to transform our civilization. Without this balance in our daily
activities, we shall not bring to our larger task the emotional energy
and the undistortedTove — ^not crippled by covert hatred and compensa-
tory fanaticism — ^that it demands.