HEAD OFFICE, MONTREAL, DECEMBER 1949

WHY FOLLOW PRECEDENT?

ADVENT of a New Year for some reason hasthe effect of throwing our minds backward intime. In a burst of making up for the sorrows

of the past and smothering the memories of its mis-takes we indulge in a brief orgy of fun. Then we getdown to the somewhat more grim business of lookingahead.

This Monthly Letter is frankly a plea that we strideinto 1950 with our faces forward, instead of backinginto it with our eyes on the way things were done inthe past.

Our inclination is (we might as well admit that weare lazy-minded people) to follow precedent, to dowhat’s been done before.

But lots of people in the past decided not to, andthat’s why living is so much better today than it was40, or 4,000 years ago. That’s why we have gadgetsand jigs to make work easier, books to make learningeasier, motorships and automobiles and planes tomake it easier to go places, and electric calculatingmachines to add up the cost and profit of it all.

The sad thing is that precedent often gets to workbefore its coming is recognized. There are parts ofour human makeup which lean toward habits; we arelazy about the reworking of a problem once solved,and we do our utmost to make an old solution fit a newproblem. We are fascinated by the prospect of savingtime and energy and thought by doing tasks in aroutine way. We like the "security" (as we call it) being able to predict from past precedent just whatwill be done next.

On Following Cow-paths

It is amazing to the observant person to see whatreverence we give a well-established precedent. Manyof our cities are snarled in traffic jams today becausewe are following crooked paths made by cows cen-turies ago.

As the result of too much precedent worship, stale-ness sets in. Repetition produces a gradual loweringof our vividness of appreciation. Life becomes dull.

Our spirit of adventure dies. We are willing to hearonly what we have always heard, so our thinkingprocesses wither. We bring old age upon ourselvesprematurely.

There remains, fortunately for the human race, atiny creative minority that refuses to turn aside fromthe task of building usefully. They are not particularlypopular, because they disturb the slumber of the greatmass of people.

The truth is, as was so well stated by Professor A. N.Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas: "No static main-tenance of perfection is possible. Advance or Decad-ence are the only choices offered to mankind."

The belief that things have been already settled forus on lines surviving from primitive civilizations is anenemy of true progress. People who try to decide aquestion today by trotting out a precedent from thelong-ago past are acting just about as sensibly as theman who, when trying to sell his house, carried abrick in his pocket as a sample.

Masters of our Fate

The Greeks and the Romans at their best periodwere taken by modern Europe as the standard ofcivilization and culture. It was a procedure that servedWestern races well, but the world has passed into anew stage of growth. New knowledge, and new tech-nologies have altered the proportions of things.

And (let us be forthright about this) the Greeksthemselves were not backward-looking people. Theywere, in their day, notoriously speculative, adven-turous, eager for novelty. They were not copyists.Why should we assume that progress stopped withthem, or at any other point in human history?

We need to reason upon today’s cases themselves,in today’s surroundings, and draw fully upon today’sknowledge and facilities. Take into consideration, ofcourse, cases in the past which seem similar, but takethem as helps only, not as laws.

As Cassius told Brutus in Shakespeare’s JuliusCaesar: "Men at some time are masters of their fates:the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our-selves, that we are underlings." Any man can becomemaster of his fate insofar as he is able to adapt himselfintelligently to the conditions which surround him andturn them to his advantage.

This will seem to some like harking back to theHoratio Alger tradition, but we are not laying down alaw that everyone who follows the Alger pattern willbecome a successful big business man. It is merelysuggested that the outlook is a more healthy one thanthe too-prevalent outlook of the satirist, the person inour midst who holds up to ridicule all our strivingsand hopes in which by his nature he can have no part.Satire, says Professor Whitehead, is the last flicker oforiginality in a passing epoch as it faces the onroad ofstaleness and boredom. Freshness has gone; bitternessremains.

Don’t Despise History

There is no intention to suggest in this forward-looking article that we should cut ourselves off fromhistory and enter upon a kind of collective amnesia.

Precedent-following can be a snare and a handicap,but--and this is an important but--precedents arenot to be ignored. Only use them as stepping-stones towalk on, not as mill stones to hang around your neck.

There are great fundamentals which shall stand forever: the foundations of religion, the facts in mathe-matics, and such abstract emotions as affection (thoughthis may differ in strength and mode of demonstrationfrom age to age, from nation to nation, and from per-son to person.)

Young people need to think of what they would belike if they had been through what their parents haveexperienced -- the economic vicissitudes, the dangers,sorrows and emotional surgings of wars, the anxietyabout their children. Young people are likely to endsuch thinking in a chastened mood.

Grownups can benefit by another kind of transpo-sition. Let them imagine themselves brought forwardfrom their youth to become part and parcel of today’syounger set, with today’s changed modes and amuse-ments and speeds. They are likely to come out of sucha session with less vinegar in their attitudes.

It is a duty to learn from those who have gone beforeus on a road which we too must travel, and to gatherthe store of experience their lives built up. Oldsters oftoday complain with some justice that the youngstershave not read the minutes of the last meeting; theyoungsters retort that they are going to conduct thismeeting their way. Both are right. Amidst the babbleof tongues and the clatter of printing presses today thetrick is to think things out for ourselves, using what-ever of precedent is useful and appropriate to theimprovements we are imagining.

In planning our lives, in conducting our businesses;in medicine, education, law, or ministering to the

souls of men, wherever our daily work lies, the acute-ness of our judgment and the worth of our effortdepend upon the width of our knowledge. The morecomparisons we are able to make, the more qualifiedare we to speak and to lead.

This is what makes history important, becausehistory is the base of knowledge. Not the history ofbattles as battles, or of kings as kings, but the historyof events and thoughts that affected the current ofhuman life. History is not a precedent to be followed,but a light to illuminate the present.

Union of Past and Present

Canada will preserve her vigour so long as sheencourages a real contact between her history and herpresent, and combines this wisdom with the nerve toadventure beyond the safeties of the past. Otherwisewe shall decay.

The union of past and present is illustrated in a wayby the colour film which won first honours in theCanadian Film Award for 1948. The Loon’s Necklacetakes ancient West Coast Indian masks from theNational Museum of Canada, subjects them to moderncolour photography technique, and turns out some-thing to stir 1949 Canadians as the originals stirredCanadian Indians of many years ago.

We talk of succeeding years and succeeding genera-tions as if they were separate waves. They are not.Nineteen forty nine flows into nineteen fifty as closelywoven as is the fortyninth foot of a ship’s anchor ropewith the fiftieth foot.

What is the philosophy that comes out of this dis-cussion of the union of past and present? "Philosophy"is a word far too little used in business life. A philoso-pher is not necessarily a man who sets himself up tobe wise, but one who is a lover of wisdom. Philosophydoes not refuse to gather knowledge, but is engagedin penetrating to the principles and meanings ofthings. And surely these are qualities useful to anyman in business. They do not live in a man who iseverlastingly sure that his way is the only right way,but they enlighten the life of the man who has learnedto doubt his cherished axioms and to question thewisdom of following his ancient precedents.

There are more points of view than one. Let us taketwo simple things, like soot and flour. Mix them, andyou obtain a grey powder. No human being will seeanything else excep, t grey, unless he uses a microscope.But put an insect into the mixture, an insect just thesize of one of the grains of soot or flour. For him thereis no grey powder, but a multitude of black and whiteboulders. From our point of view the thought ofboulders is absurd; from his point of view the thought"grey powder" does not exist.

It is our duty, whether we are men and women inbusiness or men and women trying to live sociablywith our neighbours, to see the other person’s point

of view. Those who are richest in wisdom will beprepared to abandon their position on a disputedpoint when evidence is produced to move theirreason.

A Better Way

If we are agreed that precedents are good things tohave as a base from which to work, so long as wedon’t let them hold us in thrall, it is time to suggestthat the New Year is a good occasion to ask: "Can’t Ifind a better way of doing this?" Let’s not judgeourselves, life, or the future by the way we dealt withtrouble and problems yesterday, but try a new way,selecting from the past what we believe will be help-ful, and keeping on toward betterment.

Our most important task at this moment is to buildcastles in the air, to decide to try the untried ways.If our airy plans for 1950 are made with the realitiesof our environment in mind, it will be easy enough toplace foundations under them.

Even if our present seems broken, there are frag-ments which can be worked into our new plans. Andplans are important. Dr. Ewen Cameron reminds usthat it is fairy tale plans about magic ways of spanningdistance and time, of making things, of plenty and ofhealth, that we work at and make come true when wegrow up. Perhaps not in the exact way that appearedin our fairy tales. When Columbus sailed he wasdreaming of the Far East; instead, he found America.

We all desire to express ourselves. There is no self-expression in using hand-me-down procedures justbecause they conform to precedent. Instead, we needimaginative thinking, and that often starts as "anunshaped kind of something" that just appears.

The most degrading poverty in a human being, andthe greatest hold-back of a business man, is poverty ofthe imagination. No man of feeble imaginanon everachieved real success in business or in any otherhuman effort. It is imagination that uses the past prop-erly, to recall sensations, emotions, feelings, facts andexperiences, and to apply them to the present, and tocombine them in infinite variety to suit the future mor, indeed, to make the future.

There is a delightful fantasy in Maurice Maeter-linck’s fairy play The Blue Bird. A little visitor to theKingdom of the Future finds himself in the midst ofall the children who are not yet born. He sees a crowdof children sleeping, and he asks his guide: "Do theydo nothing?" The guide says: "They are th,!nking ofsomething." "Of what?" asks the visitor. They donot know yet; but they must take something with themto earth; we are not allowed to go from here empty-handed."

That is a splendid aim for Canadians entering a NewYear: not to do so empty-handed. Guided by what weknow, we can enter it searching for what we know not.We can add truth to truth as we find it. We can workto make life in Canada emerge into ever fairer andnobler forms.

Let’s Praise Ourselves

We in Canada are too smilingly tolerant of otherpeople’s claims to fame, and too critical of our ownpeople. And critics, as Alec Waugh reminds us in hisbook Hot Countries, "are never happy till they havequalified their testimonial."

Canadian genius may be held back seriously bywhat may almost be termed a national inclination todeprecate anything that is at once imaginative andCanadian. Examples will make this clear.

After praising the film referred to earlier, The Loon’sNecklace, for its "brilliant presentation of an oldIndian legend" a Canadian magazine published underdirection of a board on which the National Gallery ofCanada is represented proceeds to demolish thecredit by directing attention to "a few passages wherepainted backgrounds, rather too obviously manneredin style, of wilderness landscapes, have been intro-duced."

On the next page is a particularly exasperatingexample. The very first animated film using puppetfigures and paper cut-outs for its entire action (whichis an achievement, even if only medium success werereached) is knocked down in a second breath criticismthat it "was full of too unrelated a variety of graphicdevices to be called excellent throughout." A full-length fictional film, "thoroughly Canadian in atmos-phere, scenery, acting and story" is found to be erraticin pace, and "it does have some tedious moments."

These examples are taken from the art world becauseartists, poets and prose writers find it hard to winattention in Canada. Is it any wonder, when theirefforts mreal achievements for a youthful countrylike this ~ are met with such half-hearted praise andsuch whole-souled deprecation in comparisons thatare made with attainments in other countries? It isridiculous, but there it is.

As the General Manager of this Bank said in hisAnnual Address early this year: "I would go so far asto say that we Canadians might appraise ourselves andour possibilities a little higher than we are inclinedto do." And, it might be added, we might spread ourpraise of Canadians’ achievements, or even of theirefforts, much more liberally.

Boldness is Needed

Besides having imagination within us to make thebest success of a new year, we need boldness. Manwould never have stood erect had he not shattered theshackles of precedent in a great experiment.

The stream of experience has changed its courseagain and again when men stood like rocks, steadfastto ideals and ambitions. Speaking of rocks remindsus of a fine lesson from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady oJthe Lake. Everyone will recall the scene in the wildhighland glen when in response to the outlaw’swhistle there arose from every clump of heather aHighlander with pointed spear or drawn claymore.The King, who was travelling as a humble knight, puthis back against a great rock and threw his challengein their faces: "Come one, come all, this rock shallfly from its firm base as soon as I."

He was exemplifying the kind of spirit a man needsto enter a new year in conquering mood: self-reliance,action, principles, courage in the face of overwhelmingodds, and (a good thing psychologically) a bit swagger.

The Past Year

We never do anything consciously for the last timewithout regret, even though we are looking forwardto something more pleasant. The man going onretirement- what a pang it is for him to put hispencils into his desk drawer, and close the drawer.

The end of a year catches us all like that. We areretiring. The year is done, with all its opportunitiesof good neglected, its hours squandered upon trifles, itsgreat plans unattempted and its great attempts un-finished.

What we are going to do is, properly, of much moreimportance than what we left undone. There are, ofcourse, some people who find satisfaction in makingthe worst of a bad job. If their first twenty or forty orsixty years of life have provided them with things tocomplain about, they would be irritated if 1950 shouldturn out to be a sunshiny, pleasant kind of year. Thisarticle is not intended for them.

We believe in the simple things. We believe thatmen and women will lead more healthy lives, physic-ally and mentally and spiritually, if they approach theNew Year in hopeful mood, like the little crinkledhands of children held out for mother’s gift.

H. G. Wells wrote a memorable line: "Man lives inthe dawn forever." Our past had no other mission thanto equip us for the present and the future. It and itsprecedents should not be allowed to divert, at thismoment, one particle of our energy that could bedevoted to constructive advance.

On Making Resolutions

The part of us that generates and encourages hopesand fears is still pretty much of a child, and it respondsbest to dramatic methods. That is why it is a good ideato make resolutions.

We suggest a few which may appear strange andnew. That is as they should be. What profit is there infiddling around with little resolves, such as to cut downsmoking, drinking, driving fast, staying up late, andsuch things which should be relegated to the care ofour plain common sense? Let’s tackle instead therealities of the spirit and philosophy of life.

After having swept the debris of past mistakes intothe fire with appropriate ceremony, our first resolveshould be to think only constructive thoughts. Onebusiness man we know has as a paper weight the threelittle monkeys, one with its hands over its eyes, themiddle one has its hands over its ears, and the other

has its mouth covered. This, we are told, is a reminderto see no evil and hear no evil and speak no evilabout people.

In making plans we should consider the factorstaken into account by the architect who is designing abuilding: site, purpose, environment, cost. If we coverthese four points our plans will very likely succeed ifwe proceed with them, or the dangers will be revealedbefore we commit ourselves. Just a little imaginationis needed to translate the architect’s points of judgmentinto criteria for our own diversified projects.

Let’s resolve to choose our precedents and adaptthem to suit our needs, while we leave the mossbacksto carry their own load of outworn precedents. Thereis always a better way of doing things, and the personwho forms the habit of changing to better ways has fun.

We need practice in the art of daring; to win withpleasure and lose with a smile. We need what allgreat men, even the most adventuresome, have had:the art of self governance, that mind management ofwhich we wrote a few months ago.

And leave room in your planning for spiritual mo-ments. Time given to meditation is well-invested.Thought spent on deciding where you are going willreturn peace of mind a hundredfold. Time devoted tojust thinking whether your thoughts are true thoughtsand your goal the highest to which you might aspire isthe finest kind of tonic. Resolve, above all, "I will notbecome blas~, but will keep my capacity to wonder."

The New Year

The future is as mysterious as unopened mail, butcome to think of it, so is the past. As the poet-airmanSaint-Exup6ry wrote: "What a mysterious ascensionlFrom a little bubbling lava, from the vague pulp of astar, from a living cell miraculously fertilized, we haveissued forth and have bit by bit raised ourselves to thewriting of cantatas and the weighing of nebulae."

In the face of what has been, we need not fear thefuture. We can enter upon it believing that our presentepoch is a period of change to a new direction ofcivilization, bringing new blessings both material andspiritual to human kind. By contact with what iseternal, by devoting ourselves to bringing somethingof the divine into this troubled world, we add ourcontribution toward driving out the cruelty and strifethat surround us.

None of us should enter with audacity upon the taskof predicting what measure of success lies ahead. Itwould be a good thing for writers of essays like thisto have an extra key on their typewriters. When wedon’t know what to predict we would hit that key, andit would make a blur that might mean anything. Thiswould be one place to use it.

After all is said, the way to win success in the NewYear was put as clearly as need be by a little boy.When he was asked how he learned to skate, hereplied: "Oh, by getting up every time I fell down."

PRINTED IN CANADAby The Royal Bank of Canada.