Thank you for your query. The Code Of Honor for modern man was first published in Durant's book, "A Program For America" in 1931. Indeed, the "Hippocratic Oath for modern youth" (as Dr. Durant described it) was part of the essay from which the book derived its title. The book is long out of print, although I am presently editing a volume that contains all of Dr. Durant's writings on his homeland that will subsume the contents of this book in addition to other essays he wrote on America.
"A Program For America" was the first and only book that Durant wrote on the topic of America and contained some tremendous essays that represented some of the good doctor's best prose (in my humble opinion). To answer your second question, yes, Dr. Durant is the author of the Code. The best answer I can provide for your third query is to provide you with the excerpt in which the Code is cited (which I have affixed below). I hope you find it as enjoyable to read and contemplate as I do and would welcome your thoughts after you've had a chance to read it through.
Thanks again for your query.
Yours sincerely,
John Little
Will Durant On-Line
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FROM "A PROGRAM FOR AMERICA" (pages 137-143)
Moral
The final reform is the most distasteful of all, for it is the reform of ourselves; in the last resort reform begins at home. Scratch any problem, and you find the nature of man; our institutions are what they are because we are what we are. In this matter the religions have been right, and the philosophies have been wrong; you may fill the mind to bursting with all the science in the world, and yet produce only clever villains if you have not at the same time molded the spirit to honor and decency.
How can we solve by laws the problems of the strong exploiting the weak, when it is the strong that make, interpret and administer the laws? Only by capturing the strong in the very citadel of their hearts can we mitigate exploitation and put an end to poverty. Without a moral sense all politics is theft, and all industry is war. Therefore, though we shall have to accept the new morality which our city life is building for us; though we shall have to forget some of the old virtues (humility, for example, and blind faith), and learn some new ones (cooperation, for example, and a eugenic conscience); yet we shall have to go back, in the end, to the old concept of morality as consideration by the individual for the group, the loyalty of the part to the whole. We shall have to entrust to our educational system, and to our liberalized churches, the task of reconstructing and transmitting the moral conscience of the race. One imagines, for instance, a Second Ten Commandments, to be added to those of “Moses” as reminders of our better selves; or -- better than commandments from without -- high resolves within, which might be tentatively formulated as follows as a Code of Honor for the modern man, a Hippocratic Oath for modern youth:
1. I will do unto others as I would have them do unto me.
2. I will honor myself by self-development and growth; I will honor my family more than myself, my country more than my family, and humanity more than my country.
3. I will honor my body as well as my soul, and will mold it by knowledge and temperance into a temple of cleanliness and health.
4. I will grow in wisdom and understanding, in justice and courtesy.
5. I will marry with foresight as well as with love.
6. I will surpass -- not duplicate myself -- in my children.
7. I will speak no evil of any man.
8. I will compete in the creation of beauty rather than in the acquisition of wealth.
9. I will cooperate willingly, and never exploit.
10. I will do my job, and be of good cheer.
Perhaps with such a code, instilled into our heirs by precept and occasional example, we might stir them to nobility again, and lofty enterprise. Perhaps we could arouse communities to tar and feather, and run out of the town, not those simple idealists who preach to us perfect states, but those fat impresarios of filth who mold our children by showing them, on stage and screen, exaggerated pictures of licentiousness and crime. Perhaps we could stimulate more of the strong to help -- rather than to exploit -- the weak, to take upon their shoulders the task of making a better world; to found hospitals whose function it would be to keep men well, to endow the quest of mechanical substitutes for slavery, to spread through the press and the air such education as might put an end to our crazes and fads, lift up our tastes, and make us fit for geniuses.
Then, after a generation of rebuilding the moral habits of the race, we might cease to renounce crime in the abstract while admiring and advertising it in the concrete, and making a “bootlegger” one of the heroes of our literature and our press. We would not be content to remain the most criminal of all semi-civilized peoples. We would remove the police force, except the traffic corps, from municipal control, place it, as a unified arm of the state, under the direction and responsibility of the governor, make its staff permanent, and pay every officer a remuneration commensurate with the dangers of his occupation. We would improve our methods of tracing crime if only by offering high rewards for the apprehension of major offenders. We would reduce the legal technicalities that once protected the individual, and now chiefly protect the criminal; we would accelerate the work of our courts, raise the bail required in cases of violence, center the power of parole, and the responsibility for it, in our governors, and replace capital punishment with adjustable sentences to model state farms where the daily routine of work in the fields would rebuild health and character, and transform an urban murderer into a skilled agriculturist, no longer a peril but an asset to society.
We might stop forbidding, and begin to educate. We might put an end to the parasitic woman, childless and jobless, and render marriage healthy again by making it once more a biological and economic advantage to the male. Finally -- if we may indulge our imaginations so -- we might persuade our leaders to deal with foreign nations as they do with their neighbors; to show them every courtesy and cooperation even while competing with them; and to apply to them every item in the code of a gentleman. For if morality is the loyalty of the part to the whole, it cannot stop with our families or our states; it must go on until it embraces all humanity. Just as men are slowly but visibly transforming society by applying to social relations the ethics that were once applied only to the family, so our children, or our children’s children, may transform international relations by extending to all countries the code of cooperation that we are learning to apply among ourselves.
It is barely conceivable -- though we shall find no proof of it in Darwin -- for in biology struggle is the law of life; big fishes eat little fishes, the more conveniently to feed men; business men eat working people, and feed financiers. In biology poverty seems to be the necessary wastage of social selection, and war the final test of national selection; without them how could selection, survival and development be? In biology there is no cooperation except for better competition; no cohesion of the family except for hunting food and fighting enemies; no unity of a group except against danger and competition without. Only when we solve the problem of interstellar communication, and thereby pave the way for a planetary war, will all the men of the four seas, as Confucius phrased it, be brothers; when Mars attacks the earth, then, perhaps, mankind will become one.
Therefore, there are limits to morality, which is only a means to life, and an element in it; just as there are limits to struggle, which is only a means to life and an element in it. After all, the highest good (if we are not tired) is life itself; and what we seek is not mere goodness, nor mere victory, but abounding life, full of living in every moment, full of the tang and sting of danger and experience, full of events that break us or make us. We do not ask that struggle should disappear; we only want to ennoble it, to raise it from the level of food and mates to the plane of creation and achievement. We are willing to be overcome, if by finer men. We are willing to die and be food for worms if so we make room for those who will be better than ourselves.
(c) 2002 John Little and the Estate of Will Durant
