John Erskine, in his essay on The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent , has pointed out a most significant error in our stock moral ideals. Anglo-Saxon traditions have always tended to idealize moral courage, strength of will and of character, and to manifest a certain distrust of intelligence. In English literature the hero is so frequently portrayed as the courageous blunderer and the villain as the clever artificer. Witness Milton's Paradise Lost , Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and other works, Tennyson's "The ...
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John Erskine, in his essay on The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent , has pointed out a most significant error in our stock moral ideals. Anglo-Saxon traditions have always tended to idealize moral courage, strength of will and of character, and to manifest a certain distrust of intelligence. In English literature the hero is so frequently portrayed as the courageous blunderer and the villain as the clever artificer. Witness Milton's Paradise Lost , Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and other works, Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and the writings of Dickens and Thackeray. All this seems to be a product of the long struggle of our ancestors against nature in a rather severe climate, which necessitated largely self-reliance and will. This separation of goodness from intelligence is seen in our tendency to make a moral issue out of social evils because, as Erskine suggests, it seems humiliating to confess them a problem for intelligence. This in many respects resembles the Hebrew morality, which emphasized the "heart" in contrast with the Greek stress upon intellect. Erskine sees a hope in our assimilating the culture of other races, of which we should be more tolerant. We need to move our ethics away from the Hebrew and toward the Greek ideal . -- The American Journal of Sociology , Vol. 23
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