R I C H A R D                 M.     W E A V E R

Ideas

Have

Consequences

T H E      U  N  I V  E R  S I T Y            O F     C H I C A G O          P R E S S

C H I C A G O               A N D        L O N D O N

T h i s b o o k is p rin te d on acid - free paper.

FOREWORD

WHEN Ideas Have Consequences was published in 1948, it met a response far beyond anything anticipated by the author. The book was written in the period immediately following the second World War, and it was in a way a reaction to that war— to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon ethical principles, and to the tensions it left in place of the peace and order that were professedly sought.

its rhetorical note may perhaps be explained by this, but many people have written me to say that they found their own thoughts expressed in the book. I have therefore tried to understand its appeal by asking myself whether it can really be considered a work of philosophy. It is a work of philosophy to the extent that it tries to analyze many fea­ tures of modern disintegration by referring them to a first cause. This was a change that overtook the dominant philo­ sophical thinking of the West in the fourteenth century, when the reality of transcendentais was first seriously chal­ lenged. To many readers this has been the most unsatisfac­ tory part of the reasoning; but to others it h.ns, seemingly, been the most convincing. I will merely say that something like this is necessary if one believes in the primacy of ideas.

1  was attempting a rigorous cause-and-cffect analysis of the decline of belief in standards and values, and there must be a starting point.

I have come to feel increasingly, however, that it is not primarily a work of philosophy; it is rather an intuition of a situation. The intuition is of a world which has lost its

Foreivord

center, which desires to believe again in value and obliga­ tion. But this world is not willing to realize how it has lost Its belief or to face what it must accept in order to re­ gain faith in an order of goods. The dilemma is very widely felt, and I image this accounts for the interest of the book to many persons who would not be at all happy with the political implications of some of the conclusions.

In a more general revision I would very probably change a few matters of emphasis and try to find less topical appli­ cations for some of the ideas. But I see no reason, after the lapse of more than a decade, to retreat from the general position of social criticism . It seems to me that the world is now more than ever dominated by the gods of mass and speed and that the worship of these can lead only to the lowering of standards, the adulteration of quality, and, in general, to the loss of those things which are essential to the life of civility and culture. The tendency to look with suspicion upon excellence, both intellectual and moral, as "undemocratic” shows no sign of diminishing.

The book was intended as a challenge to forces that threaten the foundations of civilization, and I am very happy to see it appear in a more accessible edition.

R I C H A R D       M. W E A V E R

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A  C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

1

18

35

52

70

92

113

129

148

170

189

INTRODUCTION

THIS is another book about the dissolution of the West. I attempt two things not commonly found in the growing literature of this subject. First, I present an account of that decline based not on analogy but on deduction. It is here the assumption that the world is intelligible and that man is free and that those consequences wc arc now expiating are the product not of biological or other necessity but of unin­ telligent choice. Second, I go so far as to propound, if not a whole solution, at least the beginning of one, in the belief that man should not follow a scientific analysis with a plea of moral impotence.

In considering the world to which these matters arc ad­ dressed, I have been chiefly impressed by the difficulty of gcrtingcertain initial facts admitted. This difficulty is due in part to the widely prevailing W hig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development, aided no doubt by theories of evolution which suggest to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex. Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, o f getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Arc people today pro­ vided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates with intelligence? There is ground for de­ claring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes o f admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now

1

Introduction

understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal. One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them; but what is he to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them, and they arc still powerless to mark a difference or to draw a lesson? For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

Surely we are justified in saying of our time: If you seek the monument to our folly, look about you. In our own day we have seen cities obliterated and ancient faiths stricken. We may well ask, in the words of M atthew, whether we are not faced with "great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the w orld ." Wc have for many years moved with a brash confidence that man had achieved a position of independence which rendered the ancient restraints needless. Now, in the first half of the twentieth century, at the height of modern progress, we behold unprecedented outbreaks of hatred and violence; we have seen whole nations desolated by war and turned into penal camps by their conquerors; we find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal. Everywhere occur symptoms of mass psychosis. Most portentous of all, there appear diverging bases of value, so that our single planetary globe IS mocked by worlds of different understanding. These signs of disintegration arouse fear, and fear leads to des­ perate unilateral efforts toward survival, which only for­ ward the process.

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause o f other evil decisions. Have wc forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if

2

hitroducùon

he would only abandon his belief tn the existence o f tran­ scendentais. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universais. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now m modern decadence.

One may be accused here of oversimplifying the historical process, but I take the view that the conscious policies of men and governments are not mere rationalizations o f what has been brought about by unaccountable forces. They arc rather deductions from our most basic ideas of human des­ tiny, and they have a great, though not unobstructed, pow­ er to determine our course.

For this reason I turn to William of Occam as the best representative o f a change which came over man’s concep­ tion of reality at this historic juncture. It was W illiam of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine o f nom inalhm , which denies that universais have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terras mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. W ith this change in the affirmation of what is real,, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we arc on the road to modern empiricism.

It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change be­ cause it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered chat world view is the most im­ portant thing about a man, as about the men composing a

3

introduction

culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universais carries with it the denial of everything transcend­ ing experience. The denial of everything transcending ex­ perience means inevitably— though ways are found to hedge on this— the denial of truth. W ith the denial of ob­ jective truth there is'no escape from the relativism o f "man the measure of all things." The witches spoke with the habitual equivocation of oracles when they told man that by this easy choice he might realize himself more fully, for they were actually initiating a course which cuts one off from reality. Thus began the "abom ination of desola­ tio n " appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth.

Because a change of belief so profound eventually influ­ ences every concept, there emerged before long a new doc­ trine of nature. Whereas nature had formerly been regarded as im itating a transcendent model and as constituting an imperfect reality, it was henceforth looked upon as con­ taining the principles of its own constitution and behavior. Such revision has had two important consequences for philosophical inquiry. First, it encouraged a careful study of nature, which has come to be known as science, on the supposition that by her acts she revealed her essence. Second, and by the same operation, it did away with the doctrine of forms imperfectly realized. Aristotle had recog­ nized an clement o f unintelligibility in the world, but the view o f nature as a rational mechanism expelled this ele­ ment. The expulsion o f the clement of unintelligibility in nature was followed by the abandonment of the doctrine of original sin. If physical nature is the totality and if man is of nature, it is impossible to think of him as suffering from constitutional evil; his defections must now be attributed to his simple ignorance or to some kind of social depriva-

4

Introduction

cion. One comes rhus by dear deduction to the corollary of the natural goodness of man,

And the end is not yet. If nature is a self-operating mechanism and man is a rational animal adequate to his needs, it is next in order to elevate rationalism to the rank o f a philosophy. Since man proposed now not to go beyond the world, it was proper that he should regard as his high­ est intellectual vocation methods of interpreting data sup­ plied by the senses. There followed the transition to Hobbes and Locke and the eighteenth-century rationalists, who taught that man needed only to reason correctly upon evi­ dence from nature. The question o f w hat the world was made for now becomes meaningless because the asking o f it presupposes something prior to nature in the order o f existents. Thus it is not the mysterious fact of the world's existence which interests the new man but explanations of how the world works. This is the rational basis for modem science, whose systemization of phenomena is, as Bacon declared in the New Atlantis, a means to dominion.

At this stage religion begins to assume an ambiguous dignity, and the question of whether it can endure at all in a world of rationalism and science has to be faced. One solu­ tion was deism, which makes God the outcome of a rational reading of nature. But this religion, like all those which deny antecedent truth, was powerless to bind; it merely left each man to make w hat he could of the world open to the senses. There followed references to “ nature and nature’s G o d ," and the anomaly of a "hum anized" religion.

Materialism loomed next on the horizon, for it was im ­ plicit in what had already been framed. Thus it soon became imperative to explain man by his environment, which was the work of Darwin and others in the nineteenth century (it is further significant of the pervasive character of these changes that several other students were arriving at similar

5

Introduction

explanations when Darwin published in 1859). If man came into this century trailing clouds of transcendental glory, he was now accounted for in a way that would satisfy the positivists.

W ith the human being thus firmly ensconced in nature, it at once became necessary to question the fundamental char­ acter of his motivation. Biological necessity, issuing in the survival o f the fittest, was offered as the causa causans, after the important question of human origin had been decided in favor o f scientific materialism.

After it has been granted that man is molded entirely by environmental pressures, one is obligated to extend the same theory of causality to his institutions. The social philoso­ phers of the nineteenth century found in Darwin powerful support for thcir thesis that human beings act always out o f economic incentives, and it was they who completed the abolishment of freedom of the w ill. The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors of individuals and classes; and elaborate prognoses were con­ structed on the theory of economic conflict and resolution, Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.

Finally came psychological behaviorism, which denied not only freedom of the w ill but even such elementary means of direction as instinct. Because the scandalous na­ ture of this theory is quickly apparent, it failed to win con­ verts in such numbers as the others; yet it is only a logical extension o f them and should in fairness be embraced by the upholders of material causation. Essentially, it is a re­ duction to absurdity of the line of reasoning which began when man bade a cheerful goodbye to the concept of tran­ scendence.

There  is no  term  proper  to  describe  the  condition  in

6

introduction

which he is now left unless it be ‘ abysraality." He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise himself. His life is practice without theory. As prob­ lems crowd upon him, he deepens confusion by meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with the thought that life should be ex­ perimental, He secs his institutions crumbling and ration­ alizes with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he revives the old ideals— ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless— and, by the machinery of state, forces them again to do scrvjcc. He struggles with the paradox that total immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems o f matter.

His decline can be represented as a Jong scries o f abdica­ tions. He has found less and Jess ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting hirasclt up as the cen­ ter of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in pro­ portion as he demonstrates that his independence entities him to power.

This story is eloquently reflected in changes that have come over education. The shift from the truth of the intel­ lect to the facts of experience followed hard upon the meet­ ing with the witches. A little sign appears, "a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand," in a change that came over the study of logic in the fourteenth century— the century of Occam. Logic became grammaticized, passing from a sci­ ence which taught men vtrt lequi to one which taught nett loqui or from an ontological division by categories to a study of signification, with the inevitable focus upon his­ torical meanings. Here begins the assault upon definition; if words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words. From

IntToduction

this point on, faith in language as a means of arriving at truth weakens, until our own age, filled with an acute sense of doubt, looks for a remedy in the new science of semantics.

So with the subject matter of education. The Renaissance increasingly adapted its course of study to produce a success­ ful man of the world, though it did not leave him without philosophy and the graces, for it was still, by heritage, at least, an ideational world and was therefore near enough transcendental conceptions to perceive the dehumanizing effects of specialization. In the seventeenth century physical discovery paved the way for the incorporation of the sci­ ences, although it was not until the nineteenth that these began to challenge the very continuance of the ancient iotelJectual disciplines. And in this period the change gained momentum, aided by two developments o f over­ whelming influence. The first was a patent increase in man's dominion over nature which dazzled all but the most thoughtful; and the second was the growing mandate for popular education. The latter might have proved a good in itself, but it was wrecked on equalitarian democracy’s un­ sol vable problem of authority: none was in a position to say what the hungering multitudes were to be fed. Finally, in an abject surrender to the situation, in an abdication of the authority of knowledge, came the elective system. This was followed by a carnival of specialism, professionalism, and vocacionalism, often fostered and protected by strange bureaucratic devices, so that on the honored name o f uni­ versity there traded a weird congeries of interests, not a few of which were anti-intellectual even in their pretensions. Institutions o f learning did not check but rather contributed to the decline by losing interest ¡n Homo sapiens to develop

Homo jahef.

Studies pass into habits, and it is easy to sec these changes reflected in the dominant type of leader from epoch

3

¡ntToduction

to epoch. In the seventeenth century it was, on the one side, the royalist and learned defender of the faith and, on the other, aristocratic intellectuals of the type of John M ilton and the Puritan thcocrats who settled New England. The next century saw the domination o f the Whigs in England and the rise o f encyclopedists and romanticists on the Conti­ nent, men who were not without intellectual background but who assiduously cut the mooring strings to reality as they succumbed to the delusion that man is by nature good. Frederick the G reat’s rebuke to a sentimentalist, "Ach, mtin liehtr Salger, tr ktnnt nicht ditst verdammte Kasst,"

epitomizes the difference between rhe two outlooks. The next period witnessed the rise of the popular leader and demagogue, the typical foe of privilege, who broadened the franchise in England, wrought revolution on the Continent, and in the United States replaced the social order which the Founding Fathers had contemplated with dcmagogism and the urban political machine. The twentieth century ushered in the leader o f the masses, though at this point there occurs a split whose deep significance wc shall have occasion to note. The new prophets of reform divide sharply into sentimental humanitarians and an elite group o f re­ morseless theorists who pride themselves on their freedom from sentimentality. Hating this world they never made, after its debauchery of centuries, the modern Communists— revolutionaries and logicians— move toward intellectual rigor. In their decision lies the sharpest reproach yet to the desertion of intellect by Renaissance man and his successors. Nothing is more disturbing to modern men of the West than the logical clarity with which the Communists face all problems. Who shall say that this feeling is not born of a deep apprehension that here are the first true realists in hundreds of years and that no dodging about in the excluded middle w ill save Western liberalism?

IntToduction

This story o f man’s passage from religious or philo­ sophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is ex­ tremely difficult today to get people in any number to sec contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of deca­ dence is the most pressing duty of our time because, until wc have dcrooostrated that cultural decline is a historical fact

— which can be established— and that modern man has about squandered his estate, wc cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.

Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensi­ bility which increases with their degradation. Loss is per­ ceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation o f apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval think­ ers were extremely agitated overqucstions which seem to us today without point or relevance. If one goes on, the moni­ tory voices fade out, and it is not impossible for him to reach a state in which his entire moral orientation is lost. Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age wc seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances show complacency in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity. Particularly since the great wars do wc observe this in sentience. We approach a condi­ tion in which wc shall be amoral without the capacity to per­ ceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.

That is why, when we reflect upon the cataclysms of the age, we are chiefly impressed with the failure of men to rise to the challenge o f them. In the past, great calamities have

10

Introduction

called forth, if not great virtues, at least heroic postures; but after the awful judgments pronounced against men and nations in recent decades, wc detect notes of triviality and travesty. A strange disparity has developed between the drama of these actions and the conduct of the protagonists, and we have the feeling of watching actors who do not comprehend their roles.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil, Hope o f restoration depends upon recovery of the "ceremony of innocence," of that clearness o f vision and knowledge o f form which enable us to sense w hat is alien or destructive, what docs not comport with our moral ambition. The time to seek this is now, before wc have acquired the perfect insouciance o f those who prefer perdi­ tion. For, as the course goes on, the movement turns centrif­ ugal; wc rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment aS when wc have struck some bul­ wark of our culture a deadly blow.

In view of these circumstances,,it is no matter for sur­ prise that, when wc ask people even to consider the possi­ bility of decadence, wc meet incredulity and resentment. We must consider that we arc in effect asking for a confession of guilt and an acceptance o f sterner obligation ; we are mak­ ing demands in the name of the ideal or the suprapcrsonal, and wc cannot expect a more cordial welcome than dis­ turbers o f complacency have received in any other age. On the contrary, our welcome w ill rather be less today, for a century and a half o f bourgeois ascendancy has produced a type of mind highly unrcceptive to unsettling thoughts. Added to this is the egotism of modern man, fed by many springs, which w ill scarcely permit the humility needed for self-criticism.

11

Introduction

The apostles o f modernism usually begin their retort with catalogues of modem achievement, not realizing that here they bear witness to thcir immersion in particulars, We must remind them that wc cannot begin to enumerate until wc have defined what is to be sought or proved. It will not suffice to point out the inventions and processes of our century unless it can be shown that they arc something other than a splendid efflorescence o f decay. Whoever de­ sires to praise some modem achievement should w ait until he has related it to the professed aims o f our civilization as rigorously as the Schoolmen related a corollary to their doctrine of the nature of God. A ll demonstrations lacking this are pointless.

If it can be agreed, however, that we are to talk about ends before means, we may begin by asking some perfectly commonplace questions about the condition of modem man. Let us, first o f all, inquire whether he knows more or is, on the whole, wiser than his predecessors.

This is a weighty consideration, and if the claim o f the modem to know more is correct, our criticism falls ro the ground, for it is hardly to be imagined that a people who have been gaining in knowledge over the centuries have chosen an evil course.

Naturally everything depends on what we mean by knowledge. I shall adhere to the classic proposition that there is no knowledge at the level o f sensation, that there­ fore knowledge is o f universais, and that whatever wc know as a truth enables us to predict. The process of learn­ ing involves interpretation, and the fewer particulars wc require in order to arrive at our generalization, the more apt pupils wc are in the school of wisdom.

The whole tendency o f modem thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the individual busy with endless induction. Since the time of Bacon the world

12

Introduction

has been running away from, rather than toward, first principles, so that, on the verbal level, wc sec "fa c t" sub­ stituted for "tru th ,” and on the philosophic level, we w it­ ness attack upon abstract ideas and speculative inquiry. The unexpressed assumption of empiricism is that experience will tell us w hat wc arc experiencing. In the popular arena one can tell from certain newspaper columns and radio pro­ grams that the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an industrious acquisition of par­ ticulars w ill render him a man of knowledge. W ith w hat pathetic trust docs he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists o f a great many small things.

Thus the shift from speculative inquiry to investigation of experience has left modem man so swamped w ith multiplicities that he no longer sees his way. By this we understand Goethe's dictum that one may be said to know much only in the sense that he knows little. If our con­ temporary belongs to a profession, he may be able to de­ scribe some tiny bit of the world with minute fidelity, but still he lacks understanding. There can be no truth under a program of separate sciences, and his thinking will be invalidated as soon as ab extra relationships arc introduced.

The world of ‘‘modern’' knowledge is like the universe of Eddington, expanding by diffusion until it approaches the point of nullity.

W hat the defenders of present civilization usually mean when they say that modern man is better educated than his forebears is that he is literate inlargernumbcrs. The literacy can be demonstrated; yet one may question whether there has ever been a more deceptive panacea, and wc arc com­ pelled, after a hundred years of experience, to echo Nie­ tzsche’s bitter observation: "Everyone being allowed to learn to read, ruincth in the long run not only writing but

13

Introduction

also th inkin g ." It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imagi­ nable means, to learn from w hat they read, that determine the issue of this noble experiment. We have given them a technique of acquisition; how much comfort can we take in the way they employ it? In a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them and they arc continuously exposed to ma­ nipulation by controllers o f the printing machine— as I shall seek to make clear in a later passage. It may be doubted whether one person in three draws what may be correctly termed knowledge from his freely chosen reading matter. The staggering number of facts to which he today has access serves only to draw him away from consideration of first principles, so that his orientation becomes periph­ eral. And looming above all as a reminder of this fatuity is the tragedy of modem Germany, the one totally literate nation.

Now those who side w ith the Baconians in preferring shoes to philosophy w ill answer that this is an idle com ­ plaint, because the true glory of modern civilization is that mao has perfected his material estate to a point at which he is provided for. And probably it could be shown statisti­ cally that the average man today, in countries not desolated by war, has more things to consume than his forebears. On this, however, there arc two important comments to be made.

The first is that since modern man has not defined his way of life, he initiates him self into an endless series when he enters the struggle for an "adequate" living. One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today, Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of ' 'slow economic strangulation," his sense of never having enough

14

Introduction

to meet the requirements which his pattern of life imposes on him . Standards o f consumption which he cannot meet, and which he docs not need to meet, come virtually in the guise o f duties. As the abundance for simple living is re­ placed by the scarcity for complex living, it seems that in some way not yet explained wc have formalized prosperity until it is for most people only a figment of the imagination. Certainly the case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for want-icssness, of an ascending spiral of desires for a stable require­ ment of necessities, leads to the happier condition.

Suppose, however, wc ignore this feeling of frustration and turn our attention to the fact that, by comparison, mod­ ern man has more. This very circumstance sets up a conflict, for it is a constant law of human nature that the more a man has to indulge in, the less disposed he is to endure the discipline o f toil— that is to say, the less w illing he is to produce that which is to be consumed. Labor ceases to be functional in life; it becomes something that is grudgingly traded for that competence, or that superfluity, which everyone has a " r ig h t" to. A society spoiled in this manner may be compared to a drunkard: the more he imbibes the less is he able to work and acquire the means to indulge his habit. A great material establishment, by its very tempta­ tion to luxuriousncss, unfits the owner for the labor neces­ sary to maintain it, as has been observed countless times in the histories of individuais and of nations.

But let us waive all particular considerations of this sort and ask whether modern man, for reasons apparent or ob­ scure, feels an increased happiness. We must avoid super­ ficial conceptions of this state and look for something fun­ damental. I should be willing to accept A ristotle's "feeling of conscious v ita lity ," Docs he feel equal to life; does he look upon it as docs a strong man upon a race?

15

Introduction

First, one must take into account the Jeep psychic anxi­ ety, the extraordinary prevalence of neurosis, which make our age unique. The typical modern has the look of the hunted. He senses that wc have lost our grip upon reality. This, in turn, produces disintegration, and disintegration leaves impossible that kind of reasonable prediction by which men, in eras of sanity, are able to order thcir lives_ And the fear accompanying it unlooses the great disorganiz­ ing force of hatred, so that states arc threatened and wars ensue. Few men today feel certain that war w ill not wipe out thcir children’s inheritance; and, even if this evil is held in abeyance, the individual does not rest easy, for he knows that the Juggernaut technology may twist or destroy the pattern o f life he has made for himself. A creature designed to look before and after finds that to do the latter has gone out of fashion and that to do the former is becoming im­ possible.

Added to this is another deprivation. Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever be­ fore in history, but his daily experience is one of powcrlcss-ness. Look at him today somewhere in the warren of a great city If he is w ith a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every ocher kind o f independence in return for that dubious one known as financial, Modern social and corporate organization makes independence an expensive thing; in fact, it may make common integrity a prohibitive luxury for the ordinary man, as Stuart Chase has shown. Not only is this man likely to be a slavey at his place of daily toil, but he is cribbed, cabined, and confined in countless ways, many of which arc merely devices to make possible physically the living together of masses. Be­ cause these are deprivations o f what is rightful, the end is frustration, and hence the look, upon the faces of those whose souls have not already become minuscule, of hunger and unhappiness.

16

In trodtiction

These arc some questions that should be put to the eulogists of progress. It will certainly be objected that the decadence of a present age is one of the permanent illu­ sions of mankind; it w ill be said that each generation feels it with reference to the next in the same way chat parents can never quíte trust the competence of their children to deal with the great world. In reply we must affirm that, given the conditions described, each successive generation does show decline in the sense that it stands one step nearer the abysm. When change is in progress, every generation will average an extent of it, and that some cultures have passed from a high state of organization to dissolution can be demonstrated as objectively as anything in history. One has only to think of Greece, of Venice, of Germany. The assertion that changes from generation to generation are illusory and that there exist only cycles of biological repro­ duction is another form of that denial of standards, and ulti­ mately of knowledge, which lies at the source o f our deg­ radation.

Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth wc have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the in­ solence of material success. Many late societies have dis­ played a pyrotechnic brilliance and a capacity for refined sensation far beyond anything seen in their days of vigor. That such things may exist and yet work against that state of character concerned w ith choice, which is the anchor of society, is the great lesson to be learned.

In the final reach of analysis our problem is how to re­ cover that intellectual integrity which enables men to per­ ceive the order of goods. The opening chapter, therefore, attempts to set forth the ultimate source of our feeling and thinking about the world, which makes our judgments of life not shifting and casual but necessary and right.

17

C H A P T E R     I

THE UNSENTIMENTAL SENTIMENT

But the thing a man does practically believe Qand this is often enough w it h o u t asserting it even to hems elf, much less to others')', the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in a ll cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines a ll the m / , — C a r l y l e .

EV ER Y man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection; his specific ideas about things, his gen­ eral beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world-

The first of these are the thoughts he employs in the ac­ tivity of daily living; they direct his disposition of immedi­ ate matters and, so, constitute his worldliness. One can exist on this level alone for limited periods, though pure worJdliness must eventually bring disharmony and conflict.

Above this lies his body of beliefs, some of which may be heritages simply, but others of which he will have acquired in the ordinary course of his reflection. Even the simplest souls define a few rudimentary conceptions about the world, which they repeatedly apply as choices present themselves. These, too, however, rest on something more general.

Surmounting all is an intuitive feeling about the imma­ nent nature of reality, and this is the sanction to which both ideas and beliefs arc ultimately referred for verification. W ithout the metaphysical dream it is impossible to think of men living together harmoniously over an extent of time. The dream carries with it an evaluation, which is the bond of spiritual community.

IS

The Unsemimental Semiment

When wc affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, wc arc affirming in effect that sentiment is anterior to reason. Wc do not undertake to reason about anything until we have been drawn to it by an affective interest. In the cul­ tural life of man, therefore, the fact of paramount impor­ tance about anyone is his attitude toward the world. How frequently it is brought to our attention that nothing good can be done if the will is wrong! Reason alone fails to justify Itself. Not without cause has the devil been called the prince of lawyers, and not by accident are Shakespeare's vil­ lains good reasoners. If the disposition is wrong, reason in­ creases maleficence; if it is right, reason orders and furthers the good. We have no authority to argue anything of a so­ cial or political nature unless wc have shown by our primary volition that we approve some aspects of the existing world. The position is arbitrary in the sense that here is a proposition behind which there stands no prior. Wc begin our other affirmations after a categorical statement that life and the world are to be cherished.

It appears, then, that culture is originally a matter of yea-saying, and thus we can understand why its most splendid flourishing stands often in proximity with the primitive phase o f a people, in which there are powerful feelings of ‘‘oughtness" directed toward the world, and before the failure o f nerve has begun.

Simple approbation is the initial step only; a developed culture is a way of looking at the world through an aggre­ gation of symbols, so that empirical facts take on sig­ nificance and man feels that he is acting in a drama, in which the cruxes o f decision sustain interest and maintain the tone of his being. For this reason a true culture cannot be content with a sentiment which is sentimental with re­ gard to the world. There must be a source of clarification, of arrangement and hierarchy, which will provide grounds

19

T he Unsentimental Sentiment

for the employmcDC of the rational faculty. Now man first begins this clarification when he becomes m ythologist, and Aristotle has noted the close relationship between myth­ making and philosophy. This poetry of representation, de­ picting an ideal world, is a great cohesive force, binding whole peoples to the acceptance of a design and fusing their imaginative life. Afterward comes the philosopher, who points out the necessary connection between phenomena, yet who may, at the other end, leave the pedestrian level to talk about final destination.

Thus, in the reality of his existence, man is impelled from behind by the life-affirming sentiment and drawn forward by some conception of what he should be. The extent to which his life is shaped, in between these, by the conditions of the physical world is indeterminable, and so many sup­ posed lim itations have been transcended that wc must at least allow the possibility that volition has some influence upon them.

The most important goal for one to arrive at is this im ­ aginative picture o f what is otherwise a brute empirical fact, the donnée of the world. His rational faculty will then be in the service of a vision which can preserve his senti­ ment from sentimentality. There is no significance to the sound and fury of his life, as of a stage tragedy, unless some­ thing is being affirmed by the complete action. And we can say of one as of the other that the action must be within bounds of reason if our feeling toward it is to be informed and proportioned, which is a way o f saying, if it is to be just. The philosophically ignorant vitiate their own actions by failing to observe measure. This explains why precul-tural periods arc characterized by formlessness and post-cultural by the clashing of forms. The darkling plain, swept by alarms, which threatens to be the world of our future, is an arena in which conflicting ideas, numerous after

20

T he Unsentimental Seîinmem

the accuraIllation of centuries, are freed from the discipline earlier imposed by ultimate conceptions, The decline is to confusion; we arc agitated by sensation and look with won­ der upon the serene somnambulistic creations o f souls which had the metaphysical anchorage. Our ideas become con­ venient perceptions, and wc accept contradiction because wc no longer feel the necessity of relating thoughts to the metaphysical dream.

It must be apparent that logic depends upon the dream, and not the dream upon it. Wc must admit this when we realize that logical processes rest ultimately on classifica­ tion, that classification is by identification, and that iden­ tification is intuitive. It follows then that a waning of the dream results in confusion of counsel, such as we behold on all sides in our time. Whether we describe this as decay of religion or loss o f interest in metaphysics, the result is the same; for both are centers w ith power to integrate, and, if they give way, there begins a dispersion which never ends until the culture lies in fragments. There can be no doubt that the enormous exertions made by the Middle Ages to preserve a common world view— exertions which took forms incomprehensible to modem man because he does not understand what is always at stake under such circum­ stances— signified a greater awareness of realities than our leaders exhibit today. The Schoolmen understood that the question, universalia ante vom or univirsalia post rcm, or the question of how many angels can stand on the point o f a needle, so often cited as examples of Scholastic futility, had incalculable ramifications, so that, unless there was agreement upon these questions, unity in practical matters was impossible. For tbc answer supplied that.w ith which they bound up thcir world; the ground of this answer was the fount of understanding and of evaluation; it gave the heuristic principle by which societies and arts could be ap­

21

T he Unsentimental Sentiment

proved and regulated. It made one s sentiment toward the world rational, with the result that it could be applied to situations without plunging man into sentimentality on the one hand or brutality on the other.

The imposition of this ideational pattern upon conduct relieves us of rhe direful recourse to pragmatic justification. Here, indeed, lies the beginning of sclf-control, which is a victory of transcendence. When a man chooses to follow something which is arbitrary as far as the uses of the world go, he is performing a feat of abstraction; he is recognizing the noumcnal, and it is this, and not that sclf-flattcry which rakes the form of a study of his own achievements, that dig­ nifies him.

Such is the wisdom of many oracular sayings: man loses himself in order to find himself; he conceptualizes in order to avoid an immersion in nature. It is our destiny to be faced originally with the world as our primary datum but not to end our course with only a wealth of sense impres­ sions. In the same way that our cognition passes from a re­ port o f particular details to a knowledge of universais, so our sentiments pass from a welter of feeling to an illumined concept of what one ought to feel, This is what is known as refinement, Man is in the world to suffer his passion; but wisdom comes to his relief with an offer of conventions, which shape and elevate that passion. The task of the cre­ ators of culture is to furnish the molds and the frames to resist that "sinking in upon the moral being" which comes of accepting raw experience. W ithout the transcendental truth of mythology and metaphysics, that task is impos­ sible. One imagines that Jacob Butckhardt had a similar thought in mind when he said, "Y e t there remains with us the feeling that all poetry and all intellectual life were once the handmaids of the holy, and have passed through the tem ple."

22

T he Unsemimental Sentiment

The man of self-control ¡s he who can consistently per­ form the feat of abstraction. He is therefore trained to sec things under the aspect of eternity, because form is the en­ during part. Thus wc invariably find in the man of true cul­ ture a deep respect for forms. He approaches even those he does not understand with awareness that a deep thought lies in an old observance. Such respect distinguishes him from the barbarian, on the one hand, and the degenerate, on the other. The truth can be expressed in another way by say­ ing that the man of culture has a sense of style. Style re­ quires measure, whether in space or time, for measure im­ parts structure, and it is structtire which is essential to intel­ lectual apprehension.

That it does not matter what a man believes is a state­ ment heard on every side today. The statement carries a fearful implication. If a man is a philosopher in the sense with which we started, what he believes tells him what the world is for. How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily con­ duct? The statement really means that it docs not matter what a man believes so long as he docs not take his beliefs seriously. Anyone can observe that this is the status to which religious belief has been reduced for many years. But suppose he docs take his beliefs seriously? Then what he believes places a stamp upon his experience, and he be­ longs to a culture, which is a league founded on exclusive principles. To become eligible, one must be able to say the right words about the right things, which signifies in turn that one must be a man of correct sentiments. This phrase, so dear to the eighteenth century, carries us back to the last age that saw sentiment and reason in a proper partnership.

That culture is sentiment refined and measured by intel­ lect becomes clear as we turn our attention to a kind of bar­ barism appearing in our midst and carrying unmistakable

23

The Unsentimental Sentiment

power to disintegrate. This threat is best described as the desire of immediacy, for its aim is to dissolve the formal aspects of everything and to get at the supposititious reality behind them. It is characteristic of the barbarian, whether he appears in a precultural stage or emerges from below into the waning day of a civilization, to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is ." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing w ithout the intercession of imagination. Impatient of the veiling w ith which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, de­ mands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of ma­ teriality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint. There is no need to speak of Vandals and G oths; since our concern is with the "vertical invasion of the barbarians" in our own time, I shall cite an instance from the modern pe­ riod— and from the United States, so symbolical of the world of the future.

The American frontiersman was a type who emancipated himself from culture by abandoning the settled institutions of the seaboard and the European motherland. Reveling in the new absence of restraint, he associated all kinds of forms with the machinery of oppression which he had fled and was now preparing to oppose politically. His emancipation left him impatient of symbolism, of indirect methods, and even of those inclosures of privacy which all civilized com­ munities respect, Dc Tocqueville made the following ob­ servation of such frccdmcn: "A s it is on their own testi­ mony that they arc accustomed to rely, they like to discern the object which engages their attention with extreme clear­ ness; they therefore strip off as much as possible all that covers it, they rid themselves of whatever separates them

14

The Unsentimental Sentiment

from it, they remove whatever conceals it from sight, in order to view it more closely in the broad light of day. This disposition of mind soon leads them to contemn forms, which they regard as useless and inconvcnicnc veils placed between them and the tru th,"

The frontiersman was seeking a solvent of forms, and he found his spokesmen in such writers as Mark Twain, a large part of whose work is simply a satire upon the more formal European way of doing things. As the impulse moved east­ ward, it encouraged a belief that the formal was the out­ moded or at least the un-American. A plebeian distrust of forms, flowering in eulogies of plainness, became the char­ acteristic American mentality.

Has America vulgarized Europe, or has Europe corrupted America? There is no answer to this question, for each has in its own way yielded to the same impulse. Europe long ago began the expenditure of its great inheritance of me­ dieval forms, so thac Burke, in the late eighteenth century, was sharply aware that the "unbought grace of life" was disappearing, America is responsible for the vulgarization o f the Old World only in the sense that, like a forcing house, it brought the impulses to fruition sooner. It enjoys the dubious honor o f a foremost place in the procession. Today over the entire world there arc dangerous signs chat culture, as such, is marked for attack because its formal requirements stand in the way of expression of the natural man.

Many cannot conceive why form should be allowed to impede the expression of honest hearts. The reason lies in one of the limitations imposed upon man : unformed expres­ sion is ever tending toward ignorance. Good intention is primary, but it is not enough ; that is the lesson of the exper­ iment of romanticism.

The member of a culture, on the other hand, purposely

25

T h e Unsentimental Sentiment

avoids the relationship o f immediacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionizcd, or, as Schopenhauer ex­ pressed it, he wants not the thing but the idea of the thing. He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlcssness of the man o f culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is h alf adornment, half concealment. He under­ stands what is being done, but he cannot convey the under­ standing because he cannot convey the idea of sacrilege. His cries of abejti profani arc not heard by those who in the ex­ hilaration of breaking some restraint feel that they are ex­ tending the boundaries of power or of knowledge.

Every group regarding itself as emancipated is convinced that its predecessors were fearful of reality. It looks upon euphemisms and all the veils of decency with which things were previously draped as obstructions which it, with su­ perior wisdom and praiseworthy courage, will now scrip away. Imagination and indirection it identifies with ob­ scurantism; the mediate is an enemy to freedom. One can sec this in even a brief lapse of time; how the man of today looks with derision upon the prohibitions of the 1890’s and supposes that the violation of them has been without penalty!

He would suffer poignant disillusion had he a clear enough pattern in his soul to be able to measure differences; but one consequence of this debauchery, as wc shall see, is that man loses discrimination. For, when these veils are stripped aside, wc find no reality behind them, or, at best, wc find a reality of such commonplaccness that we would willingly undo our little act of brashness. Those w ill real­ ize, who are capable o f reflection, that the reality which

26

The Unsentimental Sentiment

excites us is an idea, o f which the indirection, the veiling, the withholding, is part. It is our various supposais about a matter which give it meaning, and not some intrinsic prop­ erty which can be seized in the barehanded fashion of the barbarian. In a wonderfully prescient passage Burke fore­ told the results o f such positivism when it was first un­ leashed by the French Revolution; "A ll the pleasing illu ­ sions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the senti­ ments which beautify and soften private society, arc to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and rea­ son. AH the decent drapery of life is to be rudely tom off. All the supcradded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe o f a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the under­ standing ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects o f our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, arc to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion ."

Barbarism and Philistinism cannot sec that knowledge of material reality is a knowledge of death. The desire to get ever closer to the source of physical sensation— this is the downward pull which puts an end to ideational life No education is worthy of the name which fails to make the point that the world is best understood from a certain dis­ tance or thac the most elementary understanding requires a degree of abstraction. To insist on less is to merge ourselves with the exterior reality or to capitulate to the endless in­ duction o f empiricism.

Our age provides many examples of the ravages of im­ mediacy, the clearest o f which is the failure of the modern raind to recognize obscenity. This failure is not connected with the decay of puritantsm. The word is employed here m its original sense to describe that which should be enacted

27

The XJmentimental Sernimem

off-stage because it is unfit for public exhibition. Such ac­ tions, it must be emphasized, may have no relation to gross animal functions; they include intense suffering and humili­ ation, which the Greeks, with habitual perspicacity and humanity, banned from their theater. The Elizabethans, on the other hand, with their robust allusions to the animal conditions of man's existence, were none the less not ob­ scene. It IS all in the way one touches this subject.

This failure o f the concept of obscenity has been concur­ rent with the rise of the institution of publicity which, ever seeking to widen its field in accordance with the canon of progress, makes a virtue of desecration. In the nineteenth century this change came visibly over the world, bringing expressions of concern from people who had been brought up in the tradition of proper sentiment. Propriety, like other old-fashioned anchorages, was abandoned because it inhibited something. Proud of its shamelessness, the new journalism served up in swaggering style matter which heretofore had been veiled In decent taciturnity. It was nat­ ural that so true an apostle of culture as M atthew Arnold should have sensed the mortal enemy in this. After a tour of the United States in 1888, he recorded his conviction that " i f one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers." Is this why, two hundred years be­ fore, a governor of Virginia had thanked God, to the scan­ dal of succeeding generations, that there was not a news­ paper in the colony? Have we here another example of the evil discerned most clearly on its first appearance? What he beheld in germ has grown so immeasurably that today we have media of publicity which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant, and which the wisest of the ancients forbade,

28

The Unsentimental Sentiment

In any case, ic has been left to the world of science and rationalism to make a business of purveying of the pri­ vate and the offensive. Picture magazines and tabloid news­ papers place before the millions scenes and facts which violate every definition o f humanity. How common is it to­ day to see upon the front page o f some organ destined for a hundred thousand homes the agonized face of a child run over in the street, the dying expression of a woman crushed by a subway train, tableaux of execution, scenes o f intense private grief. These arc the obscenities. The rise of sensa­ tional journalism everywhere testifies to man's loss of points of reference, to his determination to enjoy the for­ bidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is being sacrificed to titillation . The extremes of passion and suffering arc served up to enliven the breakfast tabic or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home. The area of privacy has been abandoned because the definition of person has been lost, there is no longer a standard by which to judge what belongs to the individual man. Behind the offense lies the repudiation of sentiment in favor of immediacy.

There are arguments founded upon insidious plausibility which seem to vindicate this publicizing. It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of organs of public information to leave no one de­ ceived about the real nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all, The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. The sensa­ tions purveyed by the press arc admittedly for rhc demos, which is careless o f understanding but avid of thrills. We shall have occasion to observe in many connections that one of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civili­ zation, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just

29

T he Unsentimental Sentiment

this substitution of sensation for reflection. The machine cannot be a respecter of sentiment, and it was no accident that the great parade of obscenity followed hard upon the technification of our world.

It is inevitable that the decay of sentiment should be accompanied by a deterioration of human relationships, both those of the family and those o f friendly association, because the passion for immediacy concentrates upon the presently advantageous. After all, there is nothing but sentiment to bind us to the very old or to the very young, Burke saw this point when he said that those who have no concern for their ancestors w ill, by simple application of the same rule, have none for their descendants. The decision of modern man to live in the here and now is reflected in the neglect of aging parents, whom proper sentiment once kept in positions of honor and authority. There was a time when the elder generation was cherished because it represented the past; now it is avoided and thrust out o f sight for the same reason. Children are liabilities. As man becomes more immersed in time and material gratifications, belief in the continuum of race fades, and not all the tinkering of sociologists can put homes together again,

It is sometimes said when this point is brought up that urban living renders relationships of the older kind impos­ sible. There can be little doubt of the truth of the proposi­ tion, but the very fact that it is put forward as apologia is an evidence of perversity. For motive is the decisive thing, and had our view of the world remained just, congested urban living, harmful in many other ways too, would not have become the pattern. The objectification in sticks and stones of our conception of living can hardly be pleaded as cause of that conception. When people set the highest value on relationships to one another, it does not take them long to find material accommodations for these. One is dealing

30

T he Unsentimental Sentiment

here, as at every other point, with our estimate of the good life.

In Megalopolis the sentiment of friendship wastes away. Friends become, in the vulgarism of modem speech, "p a ls," who may be defined as persons whom your work compels you to associate with or, on a still more debased level, per­ sons who w ill allow you to use them to your advantage. The meeting of minds, the sympathy between personalities which all cultured communities have regarded as part of the good life, demand too much sentiment for a world of ma­ chines and a false egalitarianism, and one detects even a faint suspicion that friendship, because it rests upon selec­ tion, is undemocratic. It is this type of mentality which will study with perfect naïveté a work on how to win friends and influence people. To one brought up in a society spiritually fused— what I shall call the metaphysical com­ munity— the idea of a campaign to win friends must be in­ comprehensible. Friends are attracted by one’s personality, if it is of the right sort, and any conscious attempt is in­ separable from guile. And the art of manipulating personali­ ties obviously presumes a disrespect for personality. Only in a splintered community, where the spirit is starved to the point of atrophy, could such an imposture flourish.

When the primordial sentiments of a people weaken, there invariably follows a decline of belief in the hero. To see the significance of this, wc must realize that the hero can never be a relativist. Consider for a moment the tradi­ tional soldier (not one of the automatons that comprise modern armies) as hero. It may at first seem paradoxical to say that he is of all members o f the laity farthest removed from pragmatism; yet his is an absolute calling, Give him prudential motives, and he at once turns into a Falstaff. His service is to causes which arc formulated as ideals, and these he is taught to hold above both property and life, as

31

The Unsentimental Sentiment

ceremonies of military consecration make plain. One secs this truth well exemplified in the extreme formalization of the soldier’s conduct, a formalization which is carried into the chaos of battle; a well-drilled army moving into action is an imposition o f maximum order upon maximum dis­ order, Thus the historical soldier is by genus not the blind, unreasoning agent of destruction which some contemporary writers make him out to be. He is rather the defender of the ultima ratio, the last protector of reason. Any undertaking that entails sacrifice of life has implications of transcend­ ence, and the preference of death to other forms of defeat, to the "fate worse than death," is. on the secular level, the highest example of dedication. There seems little doubt that the ancient solidarity o f priest and soldier— a solidarity be­ coming impossible today, now that mechanized mass war­ fare has removed soldiering from the realm of ethical sig­ nificance— rests upon this foundation.

In addition, the disappearance of the heroic ideal is al­ ways accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relation here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the market place, and there is no surer way for him to fail chan to dogmatize and moralize about things. "Business and sentiment do not m ix" is an adage of utmost significance. It explains the tendency of all organic societies to exclude the trader from positions of influence and prestige; it accounts, I am sure, for Plato’s strictures on retail merchants in the Laws. The empirical character of British philosophy cannot be unrelated to the commercial habit of a great trading nation.

Some form of sentiment, deriving from our orientation toward the world, lies at the base of all congeniality. Van­ ishing, it leaves cities and nations mere empirical com­ munities, which are but people living together in one place,

32

T be Unsent'mental Sentiment

without friendship or common understanding, and without capacity, when the test comes, to pull together for survival. On the other side is the metaphysical community, suffused with a common feeling about the world which enables all vocations to meet without embarrassment and to enjoy the strength that comes of common tendency. Our plea then must be to have back our metaphysical dream that we may save ourselves from the sins of sentimentality and brutality. Docs not its absence explain why

T h e best lack all c o n victio n , w h ile the w o rs t A r c full o f passionate intensity?'

Without this grand source of ordering, our intensities turn to senseless affection and drain us, or to hatreds and con­ sume us. On the one hand is sentimentality, with its emo­ tion lavished upon the trivial and the absurd; on the other is brutality, which can make no distinctions in the applica­ tion of its violence Ages which have borne reputations for cruelty arc more to be regarded than those renowned, as ours is coming to be, for brutality, because cruelty is refined and, at least, discriminates its objects and intentions. The terrible brutalities of democratic war have demonstrated how little the mass mind is capable of seeing the virtue of selection and restraint. The refusal to sec distinction be­ tween babe and adult, between the sexes, between com ­ batant and noncombatant—'distinctions which lay at the core of chivalry— the determination to weld all into a form­ less unit of mass and weight— this is rhc destruction of society through brutality The roar of the m achinéis fol­ lowed by the chorus of violence; and the accumulation of riches, to which states dedicated themselves, is lost in a blind fanaticism of destruction. Those who based thcir

I . Fro m   T h t   C a l l u t t i   P tiim i  s f   VF,  B .  Y e a n .  By    perniission  o f     chr  M a c m j l k n

Compaoy, p u b l i s h e r s .

33

T he Unsentimental Sentiment

lives on the unintclligcncc o f sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintclligcncc of brutality.

The only redemption lies in restraint imposed by idea; but our ideas, if they are not to worsen the confusion, must be harmonized by some vision. Our task is much like finding the relationship between faith and reason for an age that does not know the meaning of faith.

34

C H A P T E R      I I

DISTINCTION AND HIERARCHY

For i f a ll things had come ¡nía being in this automatic fashion, instead of being the out­ come of mind, they would a ll be uniform and without distinction.— S t . A t h a n a s i u s ,

TH E most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society. Ra­ tional society is a mirror of the logos, and this means that it has a formal structure which enables apprehension. The preservation of society is therefore directly linked with the recovery of true knowledge. For the success of our restora­ tion it cannot be too often said that society and mass arc contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If so­ ciety is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

Perhaps the most painful experience of modem conscious­ ness is the felt loss of center; yet, this is the inevitable result of centuries of insistence that society yield its form. Anyone can observe that people today are eager to know who is really entitled to authority, that they arc looking wistfully for the sources of genuine value. In sura, they wish to know the truth, but they have been taught a perversion which makes their chance of obtaining it less every day. This perversion is that in a just society there arc no distinctions.

Our course has reached a point at which the question of whether man wishes to live in society at all or whether he wishes to live in a kind of animal relationship must be raised in all seriousness. For, if the proscription against

35

Distinction and Hierarchy

every kind of distinction continues, there !s no hope of in­ tegration except on the level of instinct.

After man evolves his metaphysical dream and becomes capable of rational sentiment, he recognizes two grounds of elevation, knowledge and virtue— if these arc not one, which problem need not be decided here. The good man, the man with proved allegiance to correct sentiment, has been the natural trustee of authority; the man of knowledge has been necessary for such duties as require system and fore­ sight, With these criteria it has been possible to erect a structure which mirrors our respect for value. In proportion to their contributions to the spiritual ideal which the crea­ tion expresses, men have found lodgment on the various levels, with the essential feeling that, since this structure is the logos, their stations were not arbitrary but natural and right, This is society, m which the human being has a sense ofdirection;literally, it might be said, he knows ‘'up" from "d ow n ," because he knows where the higher goods arc to be looked for. It is possible for him to live on the plane of spirit and intelligence because some points of reference arc fixed.

Obviously this is no: a social situation in which everyone is called jo e — that anonymous name so eloquent of modern man’s feeling about people. If sentiment endures, there wiU be real names and even honorifics. For the good of all, pre­ rogative will attach to higher functions, and this will mean hierarchy. But hierarchy requires a common assumption about ends, and that is why the competing ideologies of our age produce confusion.

The history of our social disintegration began with the unfixing of relationships in the fourteenth century, but the effort to do away with society entirely did not become pro­ grammatic until the nineteenth, when it appeared as a cul­ mination of the prevailing nature philosophy. Since both

36

Distinction and Hierarchy

knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards, and wc have seen how insistent was the im­ pulse to look to the lower levels for guidance. Into social thinking there now enters a statistical unit, the consumer, which has the power to destroy utterly that metaphysical structure supporting hierarchy. Let us remember that tra­ ditional society was organized around king and priest, sol­ dier and poet, peasant and artisan. Now distinctions of vocation fade out, and the new organization, if such it may be termed, is to be around capacities to consume. Under­ lying the shift is the theory of romanticism; if we attach more significance to feeling than to thinking, wc shall soon, by a simple extension, attach more to wanting than to deserving. Even institutions of learning have yielded to the utilitarian standard, and former President James B Conant of Harvard University declared in an address that the chief contribution of American universities had been the idea of equality of all useful labor.

This is the grand solution of socialism, which is itself the materialistic offspring of bourgeois capitalism.

It clarifies much to see that socialism is in origin a mid-dle-ciass and not a proletarian concept. The middle class owes to its social location an especial fondness for security and complacency. Protected on either side by classes which must absorb shocks, it would forget the hazards of exist­ ence. The lower class, close to the reality of need, develops a manly fortitude and is sometimes touched with nobility in the face of its precariousncss. The upper class bears responsi­ bility and cannot avoid leading a life of drama because much is put into its hands. Lightnings of favor or of dis­ content flash in its direction, and he at the top of the hierarchy, whether it rests on true values or not, knows that he is playing for his head. In between lies the besotted

37

Distinction and Hierarchy

middle class, grown enormous under the new orientation of Western man. Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, its aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency. It has conventions, not ideals; it is washed rather than clean. The plight o f Europe today is the direct result of the bourgeois ascendancy and its corrupted world view.

Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite. The state, ceasing to express man's inner qualifications, turns into a vast bureaucracy designed to promote economic activity. It is little wonder that traditional values, however much they may be eulogized on commemorative occasions, today must dodge about and find themselves nooks and crannies if they are to survive at all. Burke's remark that the state is not " a partnership in things subservient only to gross animal existence" now seems as antiquated as his tribute to chivalry.

Upholders of tradition habitually classify the forces men­ acing our institutions as "subversive a ctiv ity ." The de­ scription is just. There is often in the language of ordinary people a logic which, for want of philosophy, they cannot interpret; and so is there here, for it can be shown that "sub ­ versive activity" has an exact application. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more accurate phrase. The expression means plainly an inversion by which matter is placed over spirit or quantity placed over quality. Thus it describes per­ fectly what it is usually employed to describe— the various forms of collectivism which rest on a materialistic philoso­ phy, The dullest member of a conservative legislative com­ mittee, seeking the source o f threats to institutions, does not fail to sec that those doctrines which exalt material interests over spiritual, to the confounding of rational dis­ tinctions among men, are positively incompatible with the

38

Distinction and Hierarchy

society he is elected to represent. For expressing such views, he is likely to be condemned as ignorant or selfish, because normally he does not express them very well. Let us there­ fore find him a gifted spokesman. Here is Shakespeare on the subject of subversive activity;

O, when degree is shak'd.

Which is the ladder to ail high designs.

Then enterprise is sick! How could communities.

Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities.

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenity and due of birth.

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels.

But by degree stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string.

And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe;

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead; Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong (Between whose endless jar justice resides) Should lose thcir names, and so should justice too. Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf.

So doubly seconded with wilt and power.

Must make perforce an universal prey.

And last eat up himself.

And M ilton, despite his fierce republicanism, seems to have agreed that "orders and degrees jar not with liberty, but well consist." Our legislator may find support, too, in the first book of Corinthians, in which Paul defends "diversi­ ties of operations." Paul offers the metaphysical argument;

39

Distinction and Hierarchy

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.

And if they were all one member, where were the body?

The program of social democracy would take away this "ladder to ail high designs." It would do so because high design is an extremely unsettling conception; it may involve arduous effort, self-denial, sleepless nights, all of which are repugnant to the bourgeoisie,’ On the other hand, the goal of social democracy is scientific feeding, If one dares to visualize the millennium of the social democrats, he is forced to picture a “ healthy-m inded," naturally good man, pro­ vided for by a paternalistic state and seeking to save him ­ self from extinction by boredom through dabbling in some art. Is it any wonder that social democracy has never been able to motivate its programs? De Tocqueville was too shrewd to miss the connection; "Com fort becomes a goal when distinctions of rank arc abolished and privileges de­ stroyed."

Since subversive activity is the taking away of degree, it is logical that conservatives should treat as enemies all those who wish to abolish the sacred and secular grounds for distinctions among men. The proposal of the subvcrters I S , however, impossible in practice, and the quarrel turns out to be over principles of selection. History thus far indi­ cates tha'- when the reformers get their turn, they merely substitute a bureaucratic hierarchy— and this because they

means happiness in w ork and satisfaction in service. Prussianism means living and

dying  in h arn ess"  (fro m  Mrn o f C h aoi, co p y r ig h t, 1942,  by Herm ann  R au sc hn in g .

Courtesy of G .         P. P u tn a m 's S o n sJ,

40

Distinction and Hierarchy

discover that they do not wish society to collapse at all, but to continue under their conception of man's good,

The fight IS being waged on all fronts, and the most in­ sidious idea employed to break down society is an undefined cqualitarianism, That this concept docs not make sense even in the most elementary applications has proved no deterrent to its spread, and we shall have something to say later on about modern man's growing incapacity for logic. An American political writer of the last century, confronted with the statement that all men arc created free and equal, asked whether It would not be more accurate to say that no man was ever created free and no two men ever created equal. Such hardheadedness would today be mistaken for frivolity. Thomas Jefferson, after his long apostlcship to radicalism, made it the labor of his old age to create an edu­ cational system which would be a means of sorting out ac­ cording to gifts and attainments.

Such cqualitarianism is harmful because it always pre­ sents itself as a redress of injustice, whereas in truth it is the very opposite. I would mention here the fact, obvious to any candid observer, that "equ ality" is found most often in the mouths of those engaged in artful self-promotion. These secretly cherish the ladder to high designs but find thac they can mount the lower rungs more easily by making use of the catchword. We do not necessarily grudge them thcir rise, but the concept they foster is fatal to the harmony of the world.

The comity of peoples in groups large or small rests not upon this chimerical notion of equality but upon fraternity, a concept which long antedates it in history because it goes immeasurably deeper in human sentiment. The ancient feel­ ing of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood Is status in family, and family is by nature

41

Distinction and Hierarchy

hierarchical. It demands patience with little brother, and it may sternly exact duty of big brother. It places people in a network of sentiment, not of rights— that hortus siccus of modem vainglory.

It is eloquent of that loss of respect for logic to which we owe so many disasters that the French Revolution made equality and fraternity co-ordinates. In so doing, it offered a foretaste of the contemporary political campaign, which shamelessly promises everything.

Equality is a disorganizing concept in so far as human relationships mean order. It is order without a design; it attempts a meaningless and profitless regimentation of what has been ordered from time immemorial by the scheme of things. No society can rightly offer less than equality before the law; but there can be no equality of condition between youth and age or between the sexes; there cannot be equal­ ity even between friends. The rule is that each shall act where he is strong; tbe assignment of identical roles pro­ duces first confusion and then alienation, as wc have in­ creasing opportunity to observe, Not only is this dis­ organizing heresy busily confounding the most natural social groupings, it is also creating a reservoir of poisonous envy. How much of the frustration of the modern world proceeds from starting with the assumption that all arc equal, finding that this cannot be so, and then having to realize that one can no longer fall back on the bond of fraternity!

However paradoxical it may seem, fraternity has existed in the most hierarchical organizations; it exists, as we have just noted, in that archetype of hierarchy, the family. The essence of co-operation is congeniality, the feeling of having been "born together." Fraternity directs attention to others, equality to self; and the passion for equality is simultaneous with the growth of egotism. The frame of

42

Distinction and Hierarchy

duty which fraternity erects is itself the source of ideal con­ duct. Where men feel that society means station, the high­ est and the lowest see thcir endeavors contributing to a common end, and they are in harmony rather than in com­ petition. It w ill be found as a general rule that those parts of the world which have talked least of equality have in the solid fact of their social life exhibited the greatest frater­ nity. Such was true of feudal Europe before people suc­ cumbed to various forms of the proposal that every man should be king. Nothing is more manifest than that as this social distance has diminished and all groups have moved nearer equality, suspicion and hostility have increased. In the present world there is little of trust and less of loyalty. People do not know what to expect of one another. Leaders will not lead, and servants will not serve.

It is a matter of common observation, too, that people meet most easily when they know their position. If their work and authority are defined, they can proceed on fixed assumptions and conduct themselves without embarass-mcnt toward inferior and superior. When the rule of equal­ ity obtains, however, no one knows where he belongs. Because he has been assured that he is "ju st as good as any­ body else," he is likely to suspect that he is getting less than his deserts, Shakespeare concluded his wonderful discourse on degree with reference to "an envious fever.” And when M ark Twain, in the role o f Connecticut Yankee, undertook to destroy the hierarchy of Camelot, he was furious to find that serfs and others of the lower order were not resentful of their condition. He adopted then the typical Jacobin pro­ cedure of instilling hatred of all superiority. Resentment, as Richard Hertz has made plain, may well prove the dynamite which will finally wreck Western society.

The basis of an organic social order is fraternity uniting parts that are distinct. We must repeat, then, with reference

43

Distinction and Hierarchy

to our first principles, that rebellion against distinction is an aspect of that world-wide and centuries-long movement against knowledge whose beginning goes back to nominal­ ism. For it requires only a slight transference to say that, if our classifications of the world o f physical nature are ar­ bitrary, so, too, arc those of human society. In other words, after we grant that those generalizations about the world which we necessarily make— and this is a necessity no one can really deny— do not express an objective order but only afford convenient modes, the same must be granted about society. W ith this conceded, inherent pattern is gone; noth­ ing is justified that does not serve convenience, and there remains no court of appeal against subversion by pragma­ tism. Thus, repudiation of knowledge of what is destroys the basis of renewal. It is not fantastic but, rather, realistic to sec as an ultimate result of this process the end of civilization.

It is generally assumed that the erasing of all distinctions will usher in the reign of pure democracy. But the inability of pure democracy to stand for something intelligible leaves it merely a verbal deception. If it promises equality before the law, it docs no more than empires and monarchies have done and cannot use this as a ground to assert superiority. If it promises equality of condition, it promises injustice, because one law for the ox and the lion is tyranny. Pressure from the consumer instinct usually compels it to promise the latter. When it was found chat equality before the law has no effect on inequalities of ability and achievement, hu­ manitarians concluded that they had been tricked into ask­ ing only part o f their just claim. The claim to political equality was then supplemented by the demand for econom­ ic democracy, which was to give substance to the ideal of the Icvelcrs. Nothing but a despotism could enforce any­ thing so unrealistic, and this explains why modern govern-

44

Distinction aiid Hierarchy

mcnts dedicated to this program have become, under one guise and another, despotic.

There arc other aspects to the dilemma of radical egali­ tarianism, A defense often employed by the more sophisti­ cated IS that democratic equality allows each to develop his potentialities. This plausible argument involves grave ques­ tions about the nature of things. It is here implied that man is like a seed, having some immanent design of germination, so that for his flowering he needs that libertj' which is "freedom from ." If this is the whole account, it can only mean that our determination is naturalistic and that our growth is merely the unfolding of a plan estab­ lished purely by nature. One need hardly add tha: this con­ ception accepts orientation from below and assumes that man’s destiny is to be natural, to develop like a plant. This makes impossible any thought o f discipline, which would, under these circumstances, be a force constraining what nature had intended. But all teleology rejects "freedom from " in favor of "freedom to ." That men are a field of wild flowers, naturally good in their growing, is the romantic fallacy.

A kindred notion is that democracy means opportunity for advancement, or in the language of the day, "a chance to be a success." Obviously this contention presumes hier­ archy. The sort of advancement contemplated by these ad­ vocates is just the kind thai requires a condition of high social organization, with rewards, degrees, and everything that comes with a frank recognition of superiority. If de­ mocracy means a chance to get ahead, it means a chance co rise above the less worthy, to have station with reference to points above and below. The solution of the dilemma is that these people wish democracy not as an end but as a means. Confronted with the realities described, the demo­ crat may confess that his democracy is only a correction for

45

Distinction and Hierarchy

a distorted aristocracy; he does want order, but he wants the kind in which the best, the gifted and the industrious, get ahead. There must be a fence, but the wTongrail is on top.

Notwithstanding this claim that democracy is quicker to recognize native worth, every visitor to a democratic so­ ciety has been struck by its jealous demand for conformity. Such spirit is an outgrowth of competition and suspicion. The democrats well sense that, if they allow people to di­ vide according to abilities and preferences, soon structure w ill impose itself upon the mass. Hence the adulation of the regular fellow, the political seduction of the common man, and the deep distrust of intellectuals, whose grasp of prin­ ciple gives them superior insight. This society may even pay tribute to the exemplar of easy morals; for he is the "good fellow ," who has about him none of the uncom­ fortable angularities of the idealist.

It seems plain that the democrats are ignoring a contra­ diction. Had they the courage to be logical, they would do as their predecessors in ancient Greece and choose thcir governors by lot. An election, is after all, a highly undemo­ cratic proceeding; the very term means discrimination. How is it possible to choose the best man when by definition there is no best? If a society wishes to be its natural self, that is to say, if it wishes to flourish wild, unshaped by anything superior to itself, ic should make a perfectly random choice of administrators. Let youth and age, wisdom and folly, courage and cowardice, self-control and dissoluteness, sit together on the bench. This w ill be representative; this is a cross-section, and there seems no room to question that it would create that society "filled with wonderful variety and disorder" which Plato called democracy.

A footnote, however, must be added to the practice of the Greeks. There were certain officials of highest importance whom they saw fit to choose by election. These were, as

46

Distinction and Hierarchy

might be guessed, the strategoi, the military commanders. It was seen that since the very existence of the state depends on them and since a general must have skill, it is better here to take note of differences and admit that in time of emer­ gency authority goes to knowledge.

Democratic leadership thus always runs into anomaly. It has been argued that, whatever the aberrations of the demo­ cratic state, in periods of crisis such as civil war and the threat of invasion, the people instinctively choose a leader of more than average stature, who will guide them through. Even if this could be proved historically, which is doubtful, it would damage the theoretical foundation of democracy. For it affirms that in time of crisis the people, whether in­ stinctively or otherwise, defer to an elite group who know what to do; when they realize that only direction w ill save them, they accept it and care not who rails against dictator­ ship; when a high design becomes imperative, they delegate authority to the extent of placing it beyond their control.® In the periods between they are inclined to indulge in the comfort of relaxation and disorder, which is itself a com­ mentary on ideals. O f course, this question is inseparable from that of the end of the state, as that is, in turn, from the end of the individual being.

The writings of the Founding Fathers of the American Union indicate that these political architects approached democracy with a spirit of reservation. Though revolution­ aries by historic circumstance, they were capable enough of philosophy to see these dilemmas. The Federalist authors especially were aware that simple m ajority rule cannot suffice because it does everything without reference; it is an

47

DistinctiotJ and Hierarchy

expression of feeling about the moment at the moment, re­ strained neither by abstract idea nor by precedent. They therefore labored long and with considerable cunning to perfect an instrument which should transcend even the law­ making body. This was the Constitution, which in the American system stands for political truth. It is not an unchangeable truth, but the framers placed special obstacles in the way of change. It was hoped that the surmounting of these would prove so laborious and slow that errors would be exposed and the permanently true recognized. In this way they endeavored to protect the populace of a re­ public against itself. Thcir action is a rebuke to the ro­ mantic theory of human nature, and this will explain why the Constitution has proved so galling to Jacobins. They regard it as a kind of mortmain, and during the administra­ tion of Franklin Roosevelt its interpreters were scornfully termed, in an expression indicative of the modern temper, "nine old men."

Edmund Burke was forced to meet the same problem when the French Revolution drove him to examine the foundations of British constitutional liberty. In the ab­ sence of a wTittcn constitution he had the difficult task of establishing the fact that the English people arc bound by a transcending limitation, The long passages in the Reflec­ tions on succession of the crown has, 1 chink, been misinter­ preted; for Burke does not mean, as Thomas Paine asserted, thac a single British Parliament made itself a political Adam, by whose enactment all succeeding generations were bound. He rather argues that this acr was a precedent in conformity with other precedents, the sum of which binds the English people. If we arc to be guided by the experience o f the past, there is a perfectly real sense in which precedent is nonrepealable. And precedent was for Burke the principle o f continuity and reference. The inheritance of "rational liberty" was thus Britain’s protection against subversion,

48

Distinction and Hierarchy

It has been said countless times in this country that de­ mocracy cannot exist without education. The truth con­ cealed in this observation is that only education can be de­ pended on to bring men to see the hierarchy of values. That is another way of saying what has also been affirmed before, that democracy cannot exist without aristocracy. This aris­ tocracy is a leadership which, if it is to endure, must be constantly recruited from democracy; hence it is equally true that aristocracy cannot exist without democracy. But what we have failed to provide against is the corruption of the system of recruitment by equalitarian dogma and the allurements of materialism. There is no difficulty in securing enough agreement for action on the point that education should serve the needs of the people. But all hinges on the interpretation of needs; if the primary need of man is to per­ fect his spiritual being and prepare for immortality, then education of the mind and the passions will take precedence over all else. The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehen­ sible to the m ajority. Those who maintain that education should prepare one for living successfully in this world have won a practically complete victory. Now if it were possible to arrive at a sufficiently philosophical conception of suc­ cess, there would still remain room for idealistic goals, and attempts have been made to do something like it by defining in philosophical language what constitutes a free man. Y et the prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages re­ flection nor inspires a reverence for the good.

In other words, it is precisely because we have lost our grasp of the nature of knowledge that we have nothing to educate with for the salvation of our order. Americans cer-

49

Distinction and Hierarchy

tainly cannot be reproached for failing to invest adequately in the hope that education would prove a rcdcmpcion. They have built numberless high schools, lavish in equipment, only to see them, under the prevailing scheme of values, turned into social centers and institutions for improving the personality, where teachers, living in fear of constituents, dare not enforce scholarship. They have built colleges on an equal scale, only to see them turned into playgrounds for grown-up children or centers of vocational ism and profes­ sionalism. Finally, they have seen pragmatists, as if in pe­ culiar spite against the very idea of hierarchy, endeavoring to turn classes into democratic forums, where the teacher is only a moderator, and no one offends by presuming to speak with superior knowledge.

The formula of popular education has failed democracy because democracy has rebelled at the thought of sacrifice, the sacrifice of time and material goods without which there is no training in intellectual discipline. The spoiled-child psychology, of which I shall say something later, has sought a royal road to learning. In this way, when even its institutions of learning serve primarily the ends of gross animal existence, its last recourse to order is destroyed by appetite.

Every attempt to find a way out of these dilemmas points to a single necessity; some source of authority must be found. The only source of authority whose title is unim­ peachable at all times is knowledge. But superiority in knowledge carries prerogative, which implies, of course, distinction and hierarchy, Wc have seen, too, that the pos­ sibility of liberty and the hope of personal improvement rest upon these, for liberty must always work in the name of right reason, which is itself a conception of the scheme of things. The conservatives of our day have a case which only thcir want of imagination keeps them from making use of

50

Distinction and Hierarchy

in the proposition that levciers arc foes of frcedoni. Where simple massncss exists, everyone is in everyone else’s way, and a certa in perilous 1i her ty has been traded for still tifica tion.

The average man of the present age has a roetaphysic in the form o f a conception known as "progress." It is cer­ tainly to his credit that he does not wish to be a sentimen­ talist in his endeavors; he wants some measure for purpose­ ful activity; he wants to feel that through the world some increasing purpose runs. And nothing is more common than to hear him discriminate people according to this meta-physic, his terra for the less worthy being "unprogressive." But since his raetaphysic calls only for magnitude and num­ ber, since it is becoming without a goal, it is not a source of distinctions in value. It is a system of quantitative com­ parison. Its effect therefore has been to collapse the tradi­ tional hierarchy and to produce economic man, whose destiny is mere activity.

The mere notion of infinite progress is destructive. If the goal recedes forever, one point is no nearer it than the last. All that we can do is compare meaninglessly yesterday, to ­ day, and tomorrow. Aristotle noted that the concept of infinity makes impossible the idea of the good. If a scries of things is hierarchically ordered, it is conditioned from top to bottom and so cannot be infinite. If it is infinite, it cannot be conditioned from top to bottom, and there is no higher and lower.

Now such a look at the nature of things is imperative, for our conception of metaphysical reality finally governs our conception of everything else, and, if wc feel that crea­ tion does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our lives. Indeed, the assertion of purpose in a world we felt to be purposeless would be a fonn of sentimentality.

51

C H A P T E R     I I I

FRAGMENTATION AND OBSESSION

A il ideas are tn God, and in se fa r as they have reference to God, they are true and ade­ quate; and therefore none are inadequate or con­ fu ted save in to fa r as they have reference to the individual mind of anyone.— S p i n o z a

W HOEVER argues for a restoration of values is sooner or later met with the objection that one cannot return, or as the phrase is likely to be, "you can't turn the clock back ." By thus assuming that we arc prisoners of the moment, the objection well reveals the philosophic position of modern­ ism. The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain thatthethings of highest value are not affected by thepassage of time; otherwise the very concept of truth becomes impossible. In declaring that we wish to recover lost ideals and values, we arc looking toward an ontological realm which is timeless. Only the sheerest relativism insists thac passing time renders unattainable one ideal while forcing upon us another. Therefore those chat say wc can have the integration wc wish, and those who say we cannot, differ in their ideas of ultimate reality, for the latter are positing the primacy of time and of matter. And this is the kind of division which prevents us from having one world.

Now the return which the idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They arc seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only de­ scribed as looking for the truth. They arc making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration

52

Fragmentation and Obsession

is a flight from this toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism. In pro­ portion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them. A recovery of certain view­ points associated with the past would be a recovery of understanding as such, and this, unless we admit ourselves to be helpless in the movement of a deterministic march, is possible at any time. In brief, one docs not require a particular standpoint to comprehend the timeless, I-ct us remember all the while that the very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper.

It will be useful to review here this flight toward pe­ riphery, or the centrifugal impulse of our culture. In the Middle Ages, when there obtained a comparatively clear perception of reality, the possessor of highest learning was the philosophic doctor. He stood at the center of things because he had mastered principles. On a level far lower were those who had acquired only facts and skills. It was the abandonment of metaphysics and theology which undermined the position of the philosophic doctor, a position remarkably like that prescribed by Plato for the philosophcr-king. For the philosophic doctor was in charge of the general synthesis. The assertion that phi­ losophy is queen of studies meant more to him than a figure of speech; knowledge of ultimate matters conferred a right to decide ultimate questions. This is why, for example, the faculty of theology at the Sorbonnc could be appealed to on matters of financial operation, which, in our era of fragmentation, would be regarded as exclusively the province of the banker. In the course of the evolution that we have traced the philosophic doctor was displaced; but a substitute had to be found, for synthesis requires the reconciling of all interests.

53

Fragmentation and Obsession

To take over his task, the dawning modernism chose the gentleman. There was logic in this choice, for the gentle­ man is a secularized expression of the same thing. Rulers any group must have; and, after repudiating the sanction of religion, the age turned to the product of a training w hich would approximate religion in breadth and depth. Consequently, there appears at this point a great interest in humanities and liberal arts, in Aristotle's program for the young ruler— Montaigne, Rabelais, Castiglione, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Elyoc, and others offered regimens to train men who should be broad enough to deal with the interests of society. M ilton’s ideal of the educated man, who was ready to perform "a ll duties, both public and private, of peace and of w ar," expressed the same thought.

The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist, though his idealism lacked the deepest foundations. He was bred up to a code of self-rcsrraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man o f sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement. One can see this in the convention that the gentleman was a man of his word and in the ritual that he observed toward fallen foes and the weaker. His acceptance of the rules of courtesy militated against egotism. In one thing was he deficient: he had lost sight of the spiritual origin of self-discipline This loss had, of course, grave consequences; yet it cannot be denied that the gentleman can at least partially fill the role o f philosophic doctor. He will serve as exemplar to a humanist secularized society as the other did to a religious.

As long as the Wcsteru world could maintain a gentle­ man class, whether by some principle of inheritance or by recruitment from generation to generation, it retained a measure of protection. For it had here a group not wholly

54

Fragmentation and Obsession

absorbed or obsessed, who held a general view of the re­ lationship of things. Though it was somewhat weakened by the difficulty of defining grounds for its authority— the problem of how any mao qua man is bertcr than any other

— still its presence meant balance, and people had some com­ fort in the thought that policy was being made by men of "broad view s"— for such are the inculcations of liberal education. Gentlemen did not always live up to their ideal, but the existence of an ideal is a matter of supreme importance.

In attenuated form the ideal survives until today, though the forces of modernism conspire to extinguish it. In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given its rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible w ith any kind of idealism. In the United

States the new and the old Europe came into conflict in 1861. The American South not only had cherished the ideal but had given it an infusion of fresh strength, partly through its social organization but largely through its education in rhetoric and law. The South’s tradition of learning was the Ciceronian tradition of eloquent wisdom, and this circumstance explains why the major creative political figures of America, from Jefferson through Lincoln to W ilson, have come from this section. But the Civil War brought defeat to Ciceronian humanism, and thereafter the South turned to commerce and technology in its eco­ nomic life and to the dialectic of New England and of Germany in Us educational endeavors. The gentleman was left to walk the stage an impecunious eccentric, protected by a certain sentimentality but no longer - understood. Europe, after rhe agony of the first World War, turned to the opposite type for leadership, to gangsters, who, though they are often good entrepreneurs, are without codes and

55

Fragmentation and Obsession

without inhibitions,* Such leaders in Europe have given us a preview of what the collapse of values and the rcign of specialization will produce.

By far the most significant phase of the theory of the gentleman is its distrust of specialization. It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been con­ sidered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler. The attitude is well ex­ pressed in King Philip's famous taunt to his son Alexander, who had learned to perform skilfully upon the flute i

"A re you not ashamed, son, to play so well?"  It  is con­

tained in the hierarchy of knowledge in Aristotle's Meta­ physics. k is explained by Plutarch with the observation that "he who busies himself with mean occupations pro­ duces in the very pains he takes about things of little use evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposi­ tion to what is really good ." The attitude is encountered in men of letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­ turies, They wished to be known as gentlemen first and as writers only incidentally. Finally, there is the story of the barber who congratulated Napoleon for not having a scholar's knowledge of the proper pronunciation of Alexandria. To regard these as exhibitions of priggishncss is to miss the point entirely; they are expressions of contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Speciali­ zation develops only part of a man; a man partially de­ veloped is deformed; and one deformed is the last person

56

Fragmentation and Obsession

Science is therefore not a pursuit for such a one. Because it demands an ever more minute inspection of the physical world, it makes an ideal of specialism, and one may recall Nietzsche's figure of the scientist who spends his life studying the brain structure of the leech. Is it necessary to press further the point that, when such matters come to be pursued as knowledge, the task o f synthesis approaches impossibility?

The position of the philosophic doctor and of his secular heir, the gentleman, was thus correct. For them the high­ est knowledge concerned, respectively, the relation of men to God and the relation of men to men. They did n ot expect to learn what they most needed to know by fleeing center, that is, by diving ever deeper into the mysteries of the physical world. Such is escape and moral defeatism. When Socrates declared in the Phatdrus that he learned not from the trees of the country but from the men of the city, he was exposing the fallacy of scientism.

At this point the student ceases to be doctor of phi­ losophy since he is no longer capable of philosophy. He has made himself an essentially ridiculous figure, and this would have been perceived had not the public, undergoing the same process of debasement, found a different ground on which to venerate him. Knowledge was power. The very character of the new researches lent them to ad hoc purposes. It was soon a banality that the scholar contributes to civilization by adding to its dominion over nature. It is just as if Plato's philosopher had left the city to look at the trees and then had abandoned speculative wisdom for dendrology. The people who would urge just this course are legion among us today. The facts on the periphery, they feel, are somehow more certain.

The modern knower may be compared to an inebriate who, as he senses his loss of balance, endeavors to save

57

FragTnentation and Obsession

himself by fixing tenaciously upon certain details and thus affords the familiar exhibition of positivencss and arbi­ trariness. W ith the world around him beginning to heave, he grasps at something that will come within a limited perception. So the scientist, having lost hold upon organic reality, clings the more firmly to his discovered facts, hoping that salvation lies in what can be objectively verified.

From this comes a most important symptom of our con­ dition, the astonishing vogue of factual information. It is naturally impossible for anyone to get along without some knowledge that he feels can be relied on. Having been told by the relativists that he cannot have truth, he now has "fa c ts ." One notes that even in everyday speech the word fact has taken the place of truth; " i t is a fact" is now the formula for a categorical assertion. Where fact is made the criterion, knowledge has been rendered un­ attainable. And the public is being taught systematically to make this fatal confusion of factual particulars with wisdom. On the radio and in magazines and newspapers appear countless games and quizzes designed to test one's stock of facts. The acquisition of unrelated details becomes an end in itself and cakes the place of the true ideal of education. So misleading is the program that one widely circulated column invites readers to test their "horse sense" by answering the factual queries it propounds. The same attention to peripheral matter long ago invaded the schools, at the topmost levels, it must be confessed, where it made nonsense o f literary study and almost ruined his­ tory. The supposition that facts will speak for themselves is of course another abdication of intellect. Like impres­ sionist artists, the objcctivists prostrate themselves be­ fore exterior reality on the assumption that the organizing work of the raind is deceptive,

58

Fragynentation and Obsession

Plato reminded us that at any stage of an inquiry it is important to realize whether wc arc moving toward, or away from, first principles. The significance of the move­ ment we arc here tracing is that the former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a dis­ trust of generalization. Not only has man become a special­ ist in practice, he is being taught that special facts repre­ sent the highest form of knowledge. M athematical logic, with its attempt to evade universal classification, is an excellent example of the tendency. The extreme of nominal­ ism appears when men fear, as many do today, to make even those general groupings which are requisite to ordi­ nary activities. We are developing a phobia toward simple predication. Sensing that even expository statement is a form of argument and that argument implies the existence of truth, we shrink back by dinging to our affirmation of particulars. They seem innocuous. Any extension beyond, toward center, may involve grave duties.

Since liberalism became a kind of official party line, wc have been cnioincd against saying things about races, re­ ligions, or national groups, for, after all, there is no categorical statement without its implication of value, and values begin divisions among men. We must not de­ fine, subsume, or judge; we must rather rest on the periphery and display "sensibility toward the cultural expression of all lands and peoples." This is a process of emasculation.

It should be plain from the foregoing that modern man is suffering from a severe fragmentation of his world picture. This fragmentation leads directly to an obsession with isolated parts.

Obsession, according to the canons of psychology, occurs when an innocuous idea is substituted for a painful one. The victim simply avoids recognizing the thing which will hurt. We have seen that the most painful confession

59

Fragmentation and Obsession

for rhe modern egotist to make is that there is a center of responsibility. He has escaped ic by taking his direction with reference to the smallest points. The theory of empiri­ cism is plausible because it assumes that accuracy about small matters prepares the way for valid judgment about large ones. What happens, however, is that the judgments arc never made. The pedantic empiricist, buried in his little province of phenomena, imagines that fidelity to it exempts him from concern with larger aspects of reality— in the case of science, from consideration of whether there is reality other than matter.

Such obsession with fragments has grave consequences for the individual psychology, not the least of which is fanaticism, Now fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one's aim has been for­ gotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done, it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very con­ cept of ends; indeed, even among those who make an effort at reflection, an idea grows that ends must wait upon the discovery of means. Hence proceeds a fanatical interest in the properties of matter which is psychopathic because it involves escape, substitution, and the under­ current of anxiety which comes of knowing that the real issue has not been met.

If, then, the substitution of means for ends is the essence of fanaticism, we can better recognize the peril in which science and technology have placed our souls. Sanity is a proportion with reference to purpose; there is no standard of sanity when the whole question of ends is omitted. The obsession, however, is a source of great comfort to the obsessed. It is a reprieve from the real ordeal. Let us not question the genuineness of the sigh of relief when

60

Frag?nentation and Obsession

people are allowed to go back to their test tubes and their facts.

A high degree o f instability is another aspect of this psychopathology. It is not to be anticipated that rational self-control w ill flourish in the presence of fixation upon parts. Workers confined to very small tasks have been found to show a special tendency toward emotional instability, and one sees cverj'whcrc in urban populations a volatility of temperament that contrasts with the steadi­ ness of the man living close to nature. It shows itself in fits of fickle admiration, in excitation over slight causes, in hypersuggestibilicy and proneness to panic, all of which render most unlikely chat sober estimate of men and things characterizing the philosopher. An observer coming into some modern metropolis from a province where traditional values are yet rooted is impressed by the way in which judgments are made without reference. He encounters arguments which are brilliant, perhaps, within a narrow scope, but which, when pushed a step in the direction of first principles, collapse for want of basic relevance. He finds movements, propagated with all the cleverness of sophisticated techniques, which appear absurd as soon as their presuppositions about human nature and human des­ tiny are laid bare. The fragmentary character of such think­ ing permits contradictions and sudden reversals, and these prevent emotional composure in the face of choice.

Wc have now observed some of the results of the evolu­ tion from philosophic doctor to gentleman to specialist. At this point we find that the specialist is inferior psychi­ cally to his predecessors. He is like some parvenu striving to cover up with self-assertion the guilty feeling that he is not qualified. For the truth is that fanaticism and emo­ tional instability, tension and flightiness, arc incompatible with that seasoned maturity which we expect in a leader.

61

Fragmentation and Obsession

The man who understands has reason to be sure of himself; he has the repose of mastery. He is the sane man, who car­ ries his center of gravity in himself; he has not succumbed to obsession which binds him to a fragment of reality. People tend to trust the judgments of an integrated per­ sonality and will prefer them even to the official opinions of experts. They rightly suspect that expertise conceals some abnormality of viewpoint.

Thus the specialist stands ever at the borderline of psychosis. It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of a psychopathic ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal per­ sonality in morbid exaggeration, so that it would be possible theoretically to put together a supcrmind by borrowing something from each. And as one passes through modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. Each would be admired for his little achievement of power and virtu­ osity; each is resentful of subordination because, for him, a specialty has become the world. The public, retaining a certain perspective by virtue of its naïve realism, calls them "lopsided .” There is no reason to quarrel with the meta­ phor. The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics, and hence the ob­ servation of Ortega y Gasset that the mere task of saving our civilization demands "incalculably subtle powers." Civilization must be saved from some who profess to be its chief lights and glories.

Thoughtful people today are sometimes moved to wonder why the world no longer has use for a liberally educated class. Surely the answer lies in this abandonment of gcncral-

62

Fragmentation and Obsession

ization for specialization, which is the very process of frag­ mentation. The world has wilfully narrowed responsibility. Now the question of whether it is possible for everyone to be a philosopher, if we arc willing to go back to essentials, is a part of the larger question of whether everyone can participate in the aristocratic virtues. This is the problem of wisdom and self-control, and there have existed societies in which a far larger proportion of the people had access to general responsibility, which acted as a counterpoise to these psychopathic tendencies. Let us look, for example, at preindustrial America. The feature of that society which contrasts most strongly with our own was the distribution of centers o f influence and authority. We might take as a single instance a Vermont farmer of the lS50's, certainly not one to give himself airs, yet a vessel of some responsi­ bility and, to that extent, an aristocrat by calling. He has been properly admired for his independence, by which is meant not isolation from community life— on the con­ trary, he appears to have been active in town meeting and at the poll— but opportunity and disposition to decide for himself according to a rational and enduring code of values. His acres may have been rocky, but he appraised his situa­ tion and assumed direction. He rose early because the re­ lationship between effort and reward was clear to him. There was a rhythm to his task which humanized it, each day bringing a certain round of duties, and the seasons themselves imposing a larger pattern, as when haying time arrived, At the end of a day he might remain up until nine o'clock with the weekly newspaper, not flipping through comics and sporting news but reading its political dis­ quisitions to weigh and consider as carefully as Bacon could have desired. He observed the Fourth of July, Thanks­ giving, and Christmas with some recollection of what they

63

Fragmentation and Obsession

signified. He remained poor, but he was not unmanned; he had enough character to say No.

W ith the advance of industrialism this type of individual is exploited and then, because he is exploited, contemned. Native dignity becomes an old fashion, and character is often an obstruction to the wheels of economic progress. Indeed, the sort of social hierarchy we have described as reflecting knowledge of value is abolished, and there is substituted a structure consisting of a mass of workers below and a small group of elite, who are themselves technicians, at the top. The workers are likely not to know what they are producing, and the managers are likely not to care. Division of labor may become so minute that it is impassible for the individual to grasp the ethical implications of his task, even if he were disposed to try. And when we harness this industrial organization to modern political bureaucracy, we get a monster of frightful aspect. Under such arrangement the state not only unmans its citizens but makes criminals o f them in addition.

There could be no better example of this than rhe atomic-bomb project of the United States In the second World War. At Oak Rtdge, Tennessee, a force of seventy thousand persons labored at an undertaking whose nature they knew little or nothing about; in fact, wartime propa­ ganda had been so cflccrive that they rook pride in their ignorance and boasted of it as a badge of honor or as a sign of co-operation— in what? It is just possible that a few’, and I should he w illing to say a very few, had they’ known that their efforts were being directed to the slaughter of noncombatants on a scale never before contemplated, or to a perfection of brutality as we have defined the term, might have refused complicity. Perhaps they would have had some concept of war as an institution which forbids aimless killing; perhaps they would have had a secret

64

Fraginemaúov atid Obsession

feeling that the world is morally designed and that offenses of this kind, under whatever auspices committed, bring retribution; in any case, it is just possible that a few of these anonymous toilers would have given a thought to the larger responsibility. It was rumored chat among the world's elite concerned with atomic research there were a few who declined to participate in an operation so con­ trary to the canons of civilization. Their names have re­ mained unsung. It is ro their credit that they rose above specialization, but to do this they had to contemplate ends. The laborers in the vast enterprise were in no such position, but few tears have been shed for them . Imagine the modern state considering a referendum to conscience! The bomb was an unparalleled means; was this not enough? Just so does modern industrial and political organization, which is irrational hierarchy, make the citizen an ethical eunuch. If Thoreau felt, in his time, that it was a disgrace even to be associated with the government, what would he have felt in this? These corrupt bureaucracies are con­ temptuous of the people, in whose name they so piously speak.

Thus atomic energy, the final discovery of Prometheus, should compel all to see the imperative nature of the ques­ tion of who shall control. It is, of course, a question that should have been asked long ago about the potential represented by machinery. And our conception of the problem seems to be yet in an extremely elementar;- stage, for we are arguing whether one nation, or a group of nations, or a federation of all nations should be custodian. Eventually the question of who within the group, national or international, can be trusted with such means will have to be faced. The conclusion, so vexatious to democracy, chat wisdom and not popularity qualifies for rule may be forced upon us by the peril in atomic energy. Wisdom does not lie on the periphery,

65

FTagmentation and Obsession

Granting that the bomb project was an extreme case, though it may be the typical case of the future, wc can discern elsewhere the steady trend toward fragmentation and irresponsibility. As a system of production becomes "functionally rationalized," the worker is made to sur­ render both freedom and initiative. As long as the political order remains stable, he may maintain a robot-like exist­ ence. But when it breaks down and he is thrown back upon his own resources, it becomes apparent that these resources have been allowed to diminish. Unaccustomed to determin­ ing anything about the purpose and the relationships of his work, he cannot even think in terms large enough to embrace the total situation. The enforced irresponsibility has itself become a factor in pathology, for a burden of responsibility is, after all, the best means of getting anyone to think straight. If he is made to feel that he is account­ able for results, he looks steadily at the situation and endeavors to discover what is really true in it. This is a discipline. But when he has long been absolved of the duty of thinking, he may be seized with a sense of helplessness and panic when the necessity of it is thrust upon him. In such circumstances k is quite natural for him to turn to some member of the managerial elite, who in the industrial age of society is himself a specialist.

By losing sight of what the good life demands, he has allowed himself to be maneuvered into a position in which he is not permitted to be a whole man. There is every indication that he retains the same capacity for loyalty, but what has he to be loyal to? The highly unstable char­ acter of our political world must be ascribed at least in part to repressions. If tidal waves of feeling move beneath the surface and find no outlet save in obsession, we cannot be surprised at monstrous perversions. The separation which the German was able to make between his fragment

66

Fragmentation and Obsession

of a technology and the political program into which he poured his feeling offers a clue to much. Visitors to Ger­ many after the collapse of the Third Reich reported hearing scientists say, "W hat have I to do with politics? I am a technician ." It is impossible that such people should feel a sense of guilt. To give these or any modern people a sense of guilt, it would be necessary to go back and explain the sin of Prometheus. Similar pleas no doubt would have been made by the toilers at Oak Ridge had the decision gone against their side. The fact that as the war went on the Germans put more and more faith in technology, launching rocket bombs at a time when they could serve no purpose but the creation of a spirit of vengeance, illus­ trates how blind to total reality one may become through absorption in means.

We have confined ourselves thus far to the kind of ob­ session which results from attention to peripheral matter and to specialization of labor, but there is another way in which science and its metaphysical handmaiden, progress, discourage sanity. This is its exaltation of "becom ing" over "b ein g ." In effect, the domination of becoming produces another sort of fragmentation, which may be called "presentisra," Allen Tate has made the point that many modern people to whom the word "provincial" is anathema are themselves provincials in time to an extreme degree, Indeed, modernism is in essence a provincialism, since it declines to look beyond the horizon of the moment, just as the countryman may view with suspicion what­ ever lies beyond his county. There is a strong reason to group this with psychopathic phenomena because it in­ volves impairment of memory, which is known to be one of the commonest accompaniments of mental pathology. It is apparent, moreover, that those who are in rebellion against memory arc the ones who wish to live without

67

Fragmentation and Obsession

knowledge; and we can, in fact, tell from their conduct that they act more than others on instinct and sensation. A frank facing of the past is unpleasant to the render-minded, teaching as it docs sharp lessons of limitation and retribution, Yet, the painful lessons we would like to forget are precisely the ones which should be kept for reference. Santayana has reminded us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and not without reason did Plato declare that a philosopher must have a good memory.

An interesting commentary on presentism is that people close to the soil appear to have longer memories than have the urban masses. Traditions there live for genera­ tions; what their grandfathers did is real to them. Con­ sequently they may be said to assimilate lessons. The provincial in time sees that interpretation of the past requires reflection and generalization, which take him beyond the moment. He clutches at the temporal fragment. More fundamentally, he is opposing timelessness, though the timeless cannot be permanently obscured or evaded; it keeps up with us like a monitory shadow. The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a re­ proach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. It is entirely likely, therefore, that concentration upon the moment is another outlet through obsession.

In this way ideas which have their reference to the pe­ riphery or the individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration. But to those who believe in transcendentais, progress is without relation to time and space. It is possible, therefore, to think of a metaphysical course toward center, which will be nei­ ther a going-backward nor a going-forward in the current sense of these phrases. After such thinking we findoursclves

68

Fragmentation and Obsession

looking upon the specialist as a man possessed of an evil spirit. Next wc might find ourselves admiring the internal aplomb of the gentleman, though this would be but another stage of the way. And then, as we begin to inquire what makes the gentleman, wc should soon be looking in the direction of the philosophic doctor for a yet profounder integration of character. To Philistines and apostles of the Whig theory of history, this would be retrogression, and wc will agree that it calls for sacrifice of many things they regard as indispensable. Like peace, regeneration carries a price which those who think of it idly will balk at. But I propose to tell this part o f the story in the last three chapters.

69

C H A F T E K     I V

EGOTISM IN WORK AND ART

A l l persons chrankally diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mtnd or the body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some tndiess pain, or m ischief among she cords of mortal life . Such individuals are made acutely conscious of self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an abject with them that they Cannot but present it to the face of every casual passer-by.— H a w -

T H O I L N E .

AS ONE views modern man in his innumerable exhibitions of irresponsibility and defiance, one may discern, if he has the courage to see what he sees— which, as Charles Péguy reminded us, is the higher couragc~a prodigious egotism. This egotism, which is another form of fragmentation, is a consequence of that fatal decision to make a separate self the measure of value. A figure from Neo-Platonism is suggested, and one may picture the original spirit mani­ festing itself in many particulars, which lose sight of their original source and decide to set up godheads in their own right. Since under conditions of modern freedom the individual thinks only of his rights, he does not refer his action to the external frame of obligation. His wish is enough. He cannot be disciplined on the theoretical level, and on the practical level he is disciplined only by some hypostatizcd social whole whose methods become brutal as its authority turns out to be, on investigation, merely human.

The sin o f egotism always takes the form of withdrawal. When personal advantage becomes paramount, the indi-

70

Egotism in Work and Art

vidual passes out of the community. We do not mean the state, with its apparatus of coercion, but the spiritual community, where men are related on the plane of senti­ ment and sympathy and where, conscious of their oneness, they maintain a unity not always commensurable with their external unification.

Such withdrawal, which has been given the disarming name of enlightened selfishness and which more often than not is inspired by the desire to be ' ‘equal," is pulverizing modern society. And there is no precept in modern ideol­ ogy with which to rebuke it; for, is not this equal man a kind of king, superior to the trappings of royalty, and cannot such a one do what he w ill with his life? The various declarations of independence have given him freedom from all the bondages. Yet the blight which has fallen today on all sorts of human relationship must be ascribed to this psychological and even physical withdrawal from sym­ pathy.

Inevitably there follows an increase of selfishness. It is the simple nature of egotism to view things out of pro­ portion, the " I " becoming dominant and the entire world suffering a distortion. Once more we are face to face with the fact of alienation from reality. No man who knows himself in his ah extra relationships can be egotistic. But he who is cognizant mainly of self suffers an actual derange­ ment; as Plato saw: "th e excessive love of self is in reality the source to each man of all offenses; for the lover is blinded about the beloved, so that he judges wrongly of the just, the good, and the honorable, and thinks that he ought always prefer his own interest to the tru th ."

Accordingly, sclf-absorption is a process of cutting one’s self off from the "real” reality and therefore from social harmony. 1 think it is worth noting, too, that Na­ thaniel Hawthorne, an earnest student of erring souls,

71

Egotism in Work and Art

concluded, after a lifetime of introspection and reflection, that egotism is the unpardonable sin. He exposed through allegory what "social-mindedness" endeavors to combat in contemporary society. Its causes must now be described.

The split in the theory of knowledge which took place at the time of the Renaissance is enough to account for that form of ignorance which is egotism. Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path to self-depreciation, and the philoscphiae doctor was one who had at length seen a rational ground for humilitas. Study and meditation led him to a proper per­ spective on self, which then, instead of caricaturing the world with the urgency of its existence and the vehemence of its desires, found a place in the hierarchy of reality, Dante's In la sua vohntade é riostra pace is the final dis­ covery. Thus knowledge for rhe medieval idealist pre­ pared rhe way for self-effacement.

An opposing conception comes in with Bacon’s ’’knowl-edge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; they seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-considera­ tion. Sucli is a brief history of how knowledge passes from a means of spiritual redemption to a basis for intel­ lectual pride,

In Greek fable, as in Christian, it is asserted that there is a forbidden knowledge which brings nothing into the world but w^oe. Our generation has had ample demonstra­ tion of what that knowledge is. It is knowledge of the use­ ful rather than of the true and the good, of techniques rather than of ends. If we insist that our problems are philosophi­ cal, we cannot expect a return to selflessness without an

72

Egotism in Work and Art

epistcmological revision which will elevate the study of es­ sences above that of particulars and so put in their proper modest place those skills needed to manipulate the world. Nothing can be done until we have decided whether we are primarily interested in truth.

In the absence of truth there is no necessity, and this observation may serve as an index to the position of the modern egotist. Having become incapable of knowing, he becomes incapable of working, in the sense that all work IS a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality. We perceive this simply when his egotism prevents realiza­ tion that he is an obligated creature, bound to rational employment. The modern worker does not, save in rare instances, respond to the ideal in the task.

Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success. To the extent that the con­ cept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this Ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for con­ scientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity, The craftsman of old did not hurry, because the perfect cakes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-con­ trol, which docs not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.

When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline. How many times have we heard exclamations of wonder at the care which went into some article of ancient craftsmanship before modern organiza­

73

Egotism in Work and Art

tion drove a "wedge bctrvecn the worker and his prod­ uct! There is the difference between expressing one’s self in form and producing quantity for a market w ith an eye to speculation. Péguy wished to know what had be­ come of the honor of work. It has succumbed to the same forces as have all other expressions of honor.

It is a normal thing for any class to adopt the ideas of a class above it (and here is another argument for the im ­ portance of rational hierarchy), even when those ideas happen to be about itself, That series of subversive events which raised the middle class to a position of dominance allowed it not only to prescribe the conditions o f labor but also to frame the world of discourse of economics. Here begins modern labor's history; in conflict with an exploiting and irresponsible bourgeoisie, it found no alternative but to avail itself of the bourgeois philosophy and strike back. Accordingly, workers’ organizations accepted in their practice the idea that labor is a commodity when they began the capitalist technique of restricting production in the interest of price. Labor which is bought and sold by anonymous traders cannot feel a consecration to task. Its interest becomes that of commercialism gen­ erally : how ranch can be had for how little? Today workers seek to diminish their commodity in order to receive a larger return within the price framework. Controlled and artificial scarcity becomes a means of class promotion, or even of class survival. Thotstein Veblen saw financiers restricting the production which engineers were eager to realize; now we see, in addition, labor organizations re­ stricting output in the interest of group advantage.

The object is not to say that labor is more or less to blame than other groups of society; it is rather to show that when egotism becomes dominant and men are ap­ plauded for looking to their owm interest first, statesman­

74

Egotism in Work and Art

ship aod philosophy must leave the picture. The evidence shows that the middle classes spread the infection. However that may be, the consequence is a fragmentation of society which cannot stop short of complete chaos.

When the egotist thinks of himself first and the task second, he is, like the oncologist mentioned at the be­ ginning, denying the reality of forms imperfectly realized The reality then is merely the actuality which his desire or whim cares to produce. He thinks not of subordinating self to end but of subordinating end ro self. Such reversal of role makes rational distribution impossible, for only when labor is seen in the context of its performance can a rational estimate of reward be made. We know how to reward the carpenter qua carpenter; we do not know how to reward the egotist who comes with assertions of how much he is worth. That payment to labor which merely reflects the outcome of a tug of war is removed from philosophical determination.

In this way disintegration has placed labor in a position in which it must compete against other groups in a manner which cannot bring ultimate advantage to any of those involved. What we get at length is the institutionalization of the unilateral settlement. Every group is given freedom and even inducement to help itself at the expense of other groups, and it has been found that the most effective means is simple extortion—a withdrawal from communal effort until self-inspired demands are met. This is, of course, the egocentric solution. The bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance, and now labor betrays it by embracing a scheme of things which sees profit only, not duty and honor, in work, This view will seem hojse-lessly unrealistic to those who do not admit that senti­ ment toward the wEole is the only ultimate means of measuring value. Yet it will eventually appear that the

73

Egotism in Work and Art

greatest disservice done to our age— and it has been done by sentimental humanitarianism-—was this denial of neces­ sary connection between effort and reward. The reign of sophists, economists, and calculators has ushered in the era of egotistic competition, which makes sabotage an approved instrumentality. The laborer feels justified in putting a stop to the whole productive process if his own appraisal of his service is not accepted; and this appraisal is not made with reference to what society exists for— this, we repeat, is a matter for enJightencd sentiment— but with reference to his own gratification.

It would be an unpopular man who should suggest to the present generation that work is a divine ordinance. The idea has been grouped with the widely misinterpreted divine right of kings, and, if we examine the matter closely, wc find that the two are indeed related. For whether one is a worker or a ruler, the question becomes at once; What is the real source of his authority to act? That Governor John Winthrop found a solution for this problem is worth knowing. In a statement to the General Court of Massa­ chusetts in 1645 he said: “The questions that have troubled the country have been about the authority of the magis­ tracy, and the liberty of the people. It is you who have called us unto this office; but being called, we have our au­ thority from God; it is the ordinance o f God, and it hath the image of God stamped upon it; and the contempt of it has been vindicated by God with terrible examples of his vengeance.” In other words, the leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, wc may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task.

Now when men cease to believe that labor is a divine ordinance, their attitude toward it becomes like their

76

Egotism in Work and Art

attitude toward the secularized state. The state is then wholly man’s contrivance; but egotistic men arc com-petitors— they are seeking to get the better of one another and to evade demands made on them by their theoretical equals. Much of the effort of modern politicians is de­ voted CO convincing us that men serve best when they are serving one another. But the one consideration which would make this true is left out; service to others is the best service when the effort of all is subsumed under a transcendental conception. Material gratification does not provide this, and here one has the reason why a secularized state finally breeds an intense hatred of politicians, who are trying to get men to accept one another as taskmasters. Work is not to be performed "as ever in my great Task­ master’s eye," but for my neighbor, whom I despise.

The situation deteriorates because the idea that work is something apportioned out by men leaves people discon­ tent with their portion and dubious about whether work is a good thing at all. How technology reinforces the latter feeling will be discussed later; it is sufficient to note here that the ancient moral injunction to labor fades when we regard our work as cut out for us by men, who, by present dogma, are no better than ourselves. That curious modern hypostatization "service" is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation, It tries to secure subordination by hypothezising something larger than self, whicii turns out, however, to be only a multitude of selfish selves. The familiar change from quality to quantity may again be noted; one serves not the higher part of the self (this entails hierarchy too, pointing finally to commission from above) bur merely consumer demand. And who admires those at the top of a hierarchy of consumption? Man as consuming animal is thus seen to be not enough.

77

Egotism in Work and Art

Like other theories of individualism and materialism, the right of man to be an egotist finds support in various plausibilities. Is not man the first thing to be considered? it w ill be asked. Is he not to be given preference over abstract rights, privileges, and so forth? W hat this question fails to see is that man's egotism renders impossible that kind of organization which would allow him to prosper to a degree. When he puts himself first in this sense, the victory is Pyrrhic, The only way to give him anything that w ill last is to place him in a structure where opportunity and ability may meet. This cannot be done by considering egotistic demands first; such shortsightedness destroys the supporting structure. Thus sentimental humanitarian­ ism, ignorant of fundamental realities but ever attentive to desires, wrecks society.

The egotism of work increasingly poses the problem of what source will procure sufficient discipline to hold men to production. When each becomes his own taskmaster and regards work as a curse which he endures only to gain means of subsistence, will he not constantly seek to avoid it? An employer was recently heard to remark that wc have plenty of persons today who can tell us why a machine w ill not work but none will tell us why men will not work. The new socialist governments of Europe, finding production falling oil, have already begun to use the incentive of piecework. Elsewhere open use has been made of war and the fear of war to hold workers to their jobs, and President Truman's proposal on a certain occasion to confront recalcitrant labor with military induction is the clearest proof that a nation which egotism has paralyzed w ill, in an emergency, have recourse to its most rigorous form of discipline, the services trained for armed combat It thus appears that the spirit of self, which has made the worker lose sight of the calling of his task and to think only

78

Egotism in Work and Art

of aggrandizement, is the plainest invitation yet offered by the Western world to the tyranny of force.

Such, then, arc the consequences when egotism begins to influence that daily service which is labor. But there is a yet more sensitive register of this influence in that special­ ized activity known as art, and here the testimony is as concurrent as it is overwhelming. It is illuminating to trace the ravages of egotism in aesthetic expression.

There is a significant saying that nature imitates art, and it is often pointed out that in the great epochs of expression nature and art seem faithful to one another, so that what art creates does not fade. But what are we to say of epochs like our own in which arc appears unnatural, grotesque, and irresponsible, so that we feel it to be the product of some dangerous subjectivism? Is not this the parting of the ways which occurs when man leaves the truth of reality and expresses himself in isolation? Nature does not follow where art becomes not truer than history, not ideally true, but false to the higher reality.

It is egotism which enforces the separation between nature— by which is meant here the enduring reality— and art.

A historical survey of this aspect of the descent may well begin with a glance at literature. The great changes affecting the literature of our time began with those sub­ terranean forces which erupted in the French Revolution. Though much of the eighteenth century was a period of competing tendencies, it was the romantic revolt which finally carried the day. This revolt would seem to have made its first appearance in the doctrine of ethical optimism propounded by the Earl of Shaftesbury. In opposition to the orthodox view of human nature, which acknowledged orig­ inal sin and preached the necessity of education and re­ straint, it taught that man has a natural moral sense which

79

Egotism in Work and Art

can be relied on not only to recognize virtue hut to delight in it. The important consequence for literature was the sanctioning of impulse, which now became the subject of endless and varied exploitation.

The first proof that this was to be a serious influence on literature emerged with the poetry and fiction of sensibility. Poets such as Joseph Wharton, William Collins, Edward Young, and, later, Oliver Goldsmith, professing a contempt for the formal life of cities and the conventions of pre­ vailing literary fashion, uncovered their senses, so to speak, to the beauty and strangeness of nature and talked of the simple occurrences of life. Then followed the novel­ ist of sensibility— Thomas Amory, Laurence Sterne, and others— who put their heroes through a sort of sentimental vagabondage and held them up to admiration as men of feeling, Sterne's remark that the pen governed him and not he it is a revealing commentary upon the mood of re­ volt against intellect.

Implied in the premises which Shaftesbury set forth was sentimental comedy. Previously comedy had been satirical, and satire, it is important to note, always bespeaks an age which recognizes good and evil and makes distinctions among human beings accordingly. In a world where all men arc naturally good, the erring one is merely misled; confront him with the consequence of his ways and he reforms, as did the hero in the sentimental comedy.

These ideas together imply that man is good, that ex­ perience is good, and that therefore the career of any individual may he worth following in the fulness of its unique detail. When Rousseau wrote at the beginning of the Coiijessions: " I am different from all men I have seen. If I am not better, at least I am dilfcrent,'' he expressed directly the note of egotistic sensibility.

The Romantic deluge followed at the beginning of the

80

Egoih?n in Work and Art

nincteench century. There appeared at this point a group of great expressionists, men of resourcefulness and enormous activity, v'hose influence on literature has been second, per­ haps, only to that of the Elizabethans. Tiicy sounded with greater insistence the ideas of the prc-Romantics which we have just reviewed. Foremost was the impulse of revolt against conventions and institutions. Whether it was Wordsworth cultivating the speech of ordinary men and endeavoring to read "th e common face of nature," or Byron decLaiming upon the rums of Rome, or Shelley denouncing "bloody faith, the foulest birth of tim e," a them.e of eman­ cipation from the sentiments and forms which had brought in European culture persists.

This motif was likely to be accompanied by intensive ex­ plorations of the individual consciousness, w ith self­ laceration and self-pity. The sensitive individual turned inward and there discovered an appalling well of melan­ choly and unhappiness, which was atrributed to the per­ verse circumstances of the world. Thus we behold in spec­ tacular form the new familiar act of withdrawal as the individual fosters self-awareness. The young romantic Goethe in IVerther, and Shelley crying, " I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed," continue the indulgence in ego­ centric sensibility.

During the whole of the century this flood rushed on, but it later assumed c.vpressions which are to be grasped, it seems, only upon the level of complex significance. Some of the Romantics, despite the delight in disorder dictated by Romanticism, turned into the most meticulous crafts­ men in literary history. This anomalous development was owing to a realization by the more perceptive that raw experience, exaggerated sensibility, and large moral and political enthusiasms alone mean artistic bankruptcy. Some therefore sought in form a means of salvation, but it

81

Egotism in Work and Art

was with a Romantic's interest in form. The French have a phrase which seems to describe this exactly. It was a maladie du scrupule which drove Flaubert and the Dc Goncourts and, later, Henry James and numerous poets to suppose that unremitting attention to form would save the subject matter of Romantic arc. Hence we have prodigies of faith­ ful observation, le mot juste, and a fineness of texture in poetry; but somehow another fragmentation has taken place. Form has become obsessive. Confinement to form is one means of evading those heavier responsibilities which must be related to one's total awareness or his view of man's destiny.

Concurrent with this attempt to escape bankruptcy through brilliance of form was another which sought to escape it through imagination. In one respect, the Ro­ manticists who became Symbolists were not faithful to the premises of the movement,' in another, they were con­ spicuously faithful. Symbolism is a reaction against the deification of the material world, because the symbol is always a sign of things that arc not corapresent in time and space. The symbol by its nature transcends and thus points to the world beyond the world. So the Symbolists were reaching for the outer reality, which to the simple early Romantics was but a vague presence. They found that experience did not interpret itself, and they were driven to difficult feats of intellection and representation in their effort to convey the significant reality.

But the Symbolists retained a Romantic’s interest in the intimate and in the individual, with the result that their symbols came not from some ideology universally accepted but from experiences almost private. Possibly the libertarian mood survives here: the artist still wishes to have free range and to soar, and a normal medium of communication would hold him too close to the social

82

Egotism in Work and Art

context We roust certainly acknowledge that it was the vulgarization of language through journalism and kindred activities which impelled many literary artists, including some workers in prose, to seek out fresh media. One may honor them for their heroism, even though the result was not from all points of view fortunate. At any rate, writers increasingly employed the fleeting metaphor and the faintly evocative symbol. And, while it is unjust to talk, as some have, of "th e cult of unintelligibility” and of “ po­ ets calking to themselves," it seems fair to say that the Symbolists put themselves under very special handi­ caps and limitations, which grievously widened the gap between poetry and the public.

Let us now turn to the story of music, a medium which, as Schopenhauer observed, is uniquely related to the will. Here we discover a decline which extends from the fugues of Bach to the cacophonous arrangements of modern jazz.

The degenerative influences upon music parallel closely those upon literature, with the difference of a slight time lag. The eighteenth century remained a strongly classical period wherein music expressed the aristocratic and inter­ national qualities of the social order, Mozart, its most perfect exponent, accepted “without a suspicion of dis­ comfort” the traditional forms, furnishing an example of freedom and restraint, of balance and resiliency. Here is one of the happiest illuscrations, occurring just prior to the Romantic deluge, of what is possible with freedom and law. The portents of change came with Beethoven, whose sympathy with the French Revolution must not be over­ looked. A great architect in music, Beethoven, neverthe­ less, through the introduction of dynamism and of strains of individualism pointed the way which the succeeding century was to take. The thirties and forties mark the specifically Romantic period in music. This interval cx-

83

Egotism in Work and Art

hibited a pronounced change in form and subject matter, in which all rhe affinities of Romanticism are to be seen; composers sought effects, designed contrasts and imitations, strove for climaxes, as, like their literary contemporaries, they turned to the expression of bizarre or perverse feeling. All the while, music was taking on a decidedly public character, which manifested itself in the growth of opera and concert. As one student has put it, the nineteenth cen­ tury brought in the journalist of music, who has served this art in the same way in which he served literature. Music was now fully secular and ready to follow the di­ vergent tendencies of the time.

Especially significant was the steady decay of symphonic form, which effectually mirrored the progressive dissolu­ tion of the class system. A modern critic has remarked that "th e whole framework of society, whose relation to the individual symbolizes the cadences and codas that gently restrain the flow of M ozart’s passionate line, is crumbling away if not already completely desiccated ."“ We are even told that the symphonic form was repellent to Moussorgsky because its first-movement predominance signified to him aristocratic domination.

Music had its Impressionist movement. W ith Liszt and Debussy, especially, it turned to the exploitation of color and atmosphere and even to the conjuring-up of visual images. This phase was technically a flight from the construction and balance of classical form; in effect it was a concentration upon the "emotive fragments" with which the painters had been occupying themselves.“

Thus  three  broad  stages  may be recognized  in the  de­

cline of music in the West. In its highest form this music

1. C o n s t a n r  L a m b e r t ,  M m k  H o'  p,      179 .

2    In    R a v e l ,   m u s ic  oiTt-rs     a p a r a l l e l  t o   C u i a n n e , w h o m    I   s h a l l  d iscu ss  a t  t h e

end o f t h e c h a p t e r , f o r R a v e l , a f t e r a p erio d o f a b s o r p t t o n , s o t o s p e a k , in s u b j e c t m a t t e r , tu r n ed b a c k t o w a r d " c l a r i t v o f t h o u g h t and s o b r i e t y o f f o r m , "

84

Egotimi in Work anã Art

was architectural; it then became thematic; and, finally, before the incidence of certain present-day reactions, tex­ tural. It hardly needs pointing oiit that this is a movement away from the autonomous and integrated ideal toward a collection of fragments which afford maximum opportunity for subjective and egotistic expression,

I have deferred until last the discussion of jazz, which seems the clearest of all signs of our age's deep-seated pre­ dilection for barbarism, The mere fact of its rapid conquest of the world indicates some vast extent of inward ravage, so that there were no real barriers against the disintegra­ tion it represents.

Jazz was horn in the dives of New Orleans, where the word appears first to have signified an elementary animal function. It was initially a music of primitivism; and we have the word of one of its defenders chat "jazz has no need of intelligence; it needs only feeling,''* But jazz did not remain primitive; something in the Negro's spontane­ ous manifestation of feeling linked up with Western man's declining faith in the value of culture. The same vritcr admits that ” if one examines the fields of activity which have been reserved for art, one perceives that the crea­ tive work of our ancestors was under the impulse of a harmonious equilibrium between reason and sentim ent.''* Jazz, by formally repudiating restraint by intellect, and by expressing contempt and hostility toward our tradi­ tional society and mores, has destroyed this equilibrium. That destruction is a triumph of grotesque, even hysterical, emotion over propriety and reasonableness. Jazz often sounds as if in a rage to divest itself of anything that sug­ gests structure or confinement,

It is understandable,  therefore,  that jazz should have a

3   R o b e r t  G o lf in , / « î î ,    p. 4 2 ,

4-  I t n J . ,  p.  5.

85

Egotism in Work and Art

great appeal to civilization's fifth column, to the barbarians within the gates. These people found it a useful instrument for the further obliteration of distinctions and the dis­ crediting of all that bears the mark of restraint. Accord­ ingly, it was taken up in a professional way and was sophisticated by artists of technical virtuosity so that it became undeniably a medium of resourcefulness and power. That is all the more reason for recognizing its essential tendency.

The driving impulse behind jazz is best grasped through its syncopation. What this can achieve technically we need not go into here; what it indicates spiritually is a restlessness, a desire to get on, to realize without going through the aesthetic ritual. Forward to the climax, it seems to say; let us dispense with the labor of earning effects. Do we not read in this another form of contempt for labor? Is it not again the modern fatuity of insisting upon the reward without the effort? Form and ritual are outmoded piety, and work is a sacrifice. The primitive and the bored sophisticate are alike impatient for titillarion.

As dissent breeds further dissidence, so the emancipation which is jazz gives rise to yet greater vagaries. In "sw ing" one hears a species of music in which the performer is at fullest liberty to express himself as an egotist. Playing now becomes personal; the musician seizes a theme and improvises as he goes; he develops perhaps a personal idiom, for which he is admired. Instead of that strictness of form which had made the musician like the celebrant of a cere­ mony, we now have Individualization; we hear a variable into which the musician pours his feeling and whimsy more freely than the Romantic poets laid bare their bleed­ ing hearts.

Jazz has been compared to "an indecent story synco­ pated and counterpointed." There can be no question that,

86

Egotism in  Work and A n

like journalism in literature, it has helped to destroy the concept of obscenity.

In view of such considerations it comes as no surprise to hear a statement that jnzz is the music of equality and that I t has made important contributions to the hght for freedom. As far as the negative idea of freedom goes, the idea of "freedom from ," the case is too clear to need arguing. By dissolving forms, it has left man free to move without reference, expressing dithyrambically whatever surges up from below. It is a music not of dreams— certainly not of our metaphysical dream -bu t of drunkenness. The higher centers have been proscribed so that the lower may be uninhibited from executing their reeling dance. Here, indeed, is a music to go with empiricism, and it is only natural that the chief devotees of jazz should be the primi­ tive, the young, and those persons, fairly numerous, it would seem, who take pleasure in the thought of bringing down our civilization. The fact that the subjects of jazz, in so far as it may be said to have subjects, are grossly sexual or farcical— subjects of love without aesthetic dis­ tance and subjects of comedy without law of proportion— shows how the soul of modern man craves orgiastic dis­ order. And it is admitted chat what man expresses in music dear to him he will most certainly express in his social practices.

Painting too offers us story of what happened to the human psyche in the course of this descent.

If one looks thoughtfully at a gallery of pictures of the modern school, he is likely to notice a peculiar weakness; the theme is not adequate to the craftsmanship. He is observing in another sphere of endeavor the predominance of means over ends. To say that the greatest art must be sustained by story does not mean that u must be "ab ou t" something. It would be more accurate to say that topicality

87

Egotisjn in Work and Art

occurs after story has been lost. The endless expression of mythology in art which was the achievement of Greece objectifies the metaphysical dream of Greek civilization; its artistic purpose was not to acquaint with story but to utilize story m the creation of significant form. So was it with Christian art. If the proper sentiments are present, there is no need to confuse our appreciation of the topic with our aesthetic appreciation— the mentality which divides over topics and fights battles is symptomatic of disintegration. When a culture is unified on the imaginative level, the unity effects an abridgment of egotism among the members.

The trend toward modernism got under way with the rise of portrait-painting in the fifteenth century. This was followed by the significant development of interest in landscape, which in itself expresses a shift from use of story to interest in technique. The early Renaissance painters had no interest in landscape as such; it was for them mere background, to be formalized and scanted Be­ cause man had not then lost his attribute of divinity, he was for them the center of the wwld. A thing like "scene," which for the ordinary man of today is likely to stand for the whole of art, they did not even recognize. As painters turned toward landscape and still life, the prevail­ ing interest in the physical world became reflected in art. This trend reached a culmination in the nineteenth cen­ tury with Impressionism.

The movement of Impressionism, which is the revolu­ tionary event of modern painting, has been attributed to a variety of causes. Clive Bell is inclined to sec it simply as a rediscovery of paganism. This meant the acceptance of life as good and satisfying in itself, with a consequent resolution to revel in the here and now. The world of pure sensation thus became the world of art. R, H. Wilenski

88

Egotism in IVork and Art

secs Impressionism as a result of the introduction of the camera and hence, one might say, of the Industriai Revolu­ tion. In his view the attempt of the artists to imitate the achievements of a mechanical device degraded perception to mere ‘'seeing." They tried to register vibrations of light as does the camera, and nothing more, though limitations forced upon them one or another kind of architectural synthesis, it has even been suggested char Impressionism served the ends of equalitarian soci.ilism since, if a picture is only the result of exposure to light waves, one treeor field or seascape will be the same for all.

My interpretation is that Impressionism brings nominal­ ism into painting. One of the cardinal tenets of the doctrine is that outline does not exist in nature. Consequently, the main object was "th e ultimate divorce of the picture from any convention, whether of arrangement, of drawing, or of a fixed palette."* At this point, then, we find the artists, too, applying the doctrine of universalia post rem, with which our story' first began. If form does not exist prior to things, naturally it is realism to paint things.

In the work that stemmed from this position one sees two important signs of disintegration. The first is this re­ pudiation of form; in their practice the Impressionist painters sought to avoid it by making substance or color perform the whole role. A second and a related sign was the acceptation of ephemerality. It will be found alw.iys that chose who immerse themselves in substance must also immerse themselves in time. The artists of this school con­ centrated upon "catching upon canvas the fugitive accents of nature." So Monet, studying changes of light, painted the haystack at nine, at ten-thirty, and again at twelve. Such procedure explains well enough the remark of Baude­ laire that art was losing respect for itself as it prostrated

5 - W ill.ird  H u n i i n g t û n     W  r i j j i u , M a itrn  P a m u n i, p .  8 4 .

89

Egotism in Work and Art

before exteriors. The symbolizing of perception through representation was being dropped in favor of an immedi­ ate contact with the flux of reality,

It could be asked whether the thesis of this passage is not refuted by the presence of Cézanne in the period under discussion. Now it is true that Cézanne was a great artist and that he consorted w ith and learned from the Impres­ sionists, but it is not true that finally he was one of them. On the contrary, Cézanne was the first to raise the ques­ tion of whether sensational truth is the end of art. And the answer to this in the painting of his late period— an answer that dealt with the world through abstraction and simplification— was such that his work has been termed

" a pure metaphysical monument." Cezanne is thus an important instance of a phenomenon already observed in literature, wherein the sensitive artist, after brilliant per­ formance within the lim its of a vogue, perceives those limits and seeks to transcend them. Such was his course when he professed a hope of making Impressionism as rigorously classical as the Parthenon.

It should cause no astonishment that artists are the first to see that subjectivism and egotism form a cul-de-sac. They are, in the highest sense, the seers; other victims o f these maladies stumble along on instinct or seek to ra­ tionalize their great errors.

The broad character o f the movements we have been following represents a psychic urge to collapse all order, a technical effort to get something without tolerating a medium, which is but another exhibition of the passion for immediacy. Whether we regard the excesses of literary Romanticism, or the syncopation of jazz, or Impressionism in painting, the story is the same. We witness attempts, often ingenious and powerful, to get form without con­ senting to form, and then we see the beginnings of reac­ tion in symbolism aod abstract art.

90

Egotism in Work and Art

Egotisin in work and art is the flowering, after long growth, of a heresy about human destiny. Its abhorrence of discipline and form is usually grouped with the signs of "progress," It is progress for chose who neither have a sense of direction nor want responsibility. The heresy is that man’s destiny in the world is not to perfect himself but to lean back in sensual enjoyment. Indeed, there is something expressive of both the philosophy and the technique of artistic Impressionism in the lines from Whitman's Song of Myself.'

I lo a f and in vite m y soul,

I lean and  lo af at m y case ob servin g a spear

o f sum m er grass.

The choice was first made in the late Middle Ages, when its fateful nature could be appreciated because cognition still proceeded w ith reference to ultiraates. Progressively it has become a matter of indifference.

When masses of men reach a point at which egOtfsm reigns so blandly, can their political damnation be far distant? They have rejected their only guaranty against external control, which is self-discipline, taught and prac­ ticed. If they no longer respect community and direct their efforts according to a common understanding, they fall out. Programs like the Four Freedoms, with their vague political unrealism, instead of helping the situation, serve only to codify error. It is the presumption of egotism which renders people unfit for the philosophic anarchy they appear to think of. An ancient axiom of politics teaches that a spoiled people invite despotic control. Their failure to maintain internal discipline is followed by some rational­ ized organization in the service of a single powerful will, In this particular, at least, history, with all her volumes vast, has but one page.

91

C H A P T E R        V

THE GREAT STEREOPTICON

Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a news paper.— X I Z I Z .'&C H E .

THE disappearance of the primordial synthesis has pro­ found consequences which are felt even by those below the level o f philosophy; and it is they, ironically, who make the first effort to repair the damage. It scarcely needs adding that their lack o f penetration renders the effort abortive, for what they do, when fragmentation has reached the point of danger, is to attempt a restoration by physical means.

The problem which disintegration places in the lap of practical men, those in charge of states, of institutions, of businesses, is how to persuade to communal activity people who no longer have the same ideas about the most funda­ mental things. In an age of shared belief, this problem does not exist, for there is a wide area of basic agreement, and dissent is viewed not as a claim to egotistic distinction but as a sort of excommunication. The entire group is con­ scious of the tendency, which furnishes standards for value judgments. When the goal of life becomes self-realization, however, this vanishes. It vanishes right at that point where the ego asserts its independence; thereafter what reconciliation can there be between authority and indi­ vidual will? The politicians and businessmen arc not interested in saving souls, but they are interested in pre­ serving a minimum of organization, for upon that depend their posts and their incomes.

These leaders adopted the liberal's solution to their prob­ lem. That was to let religion go but to replace it w ith cdu-

92

The Great Stereopticon

cation, which supposedly would exercise the same efficacy. The separation of education from religion, one of the proud­ est achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics. And the educa­ tion thus separated can provide their kind of indoctrina­ tion. We include here, of course, the education of the classroom, for all such institutionalized instruction pro­ ceeds on the assumptions of the state. But the education which best accomplishes their purpose is the systematic indoctrination from day to day of the whole citizenry through channels of information and entertainment.

The vested interests of our age, which, from all kinds of motives, desire to maintain traditional values or to get new values set up in their place, have constructed a wonderful machine, which we shall call the Great Stereopticon. It is the function of this machine to project selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated. All of us of the West who arc within the long reach of technology are sitting in the audience. We arc told the time to laugh and the time to cry, and signs arc not wanting that the audience grows ever more responsive to its cues,

A great point is sometimes made of the fact that modern man no longer secs above his head a revolving dome with fixed stars and glimpses of the prtmum mobile. True enough, but he secs something similar when he looks at his daily newspaper. He sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forebear of the thirteenth century— whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness— think of questioning the cosmology. This mod-

93

T h e G r^Ji Stereopticon

cm man, too, lives under a dome, whose theoretical aspect has been made to harmonize with a materialistic concep­ tion of the world. And he employs its conjunctions and oppositions to explain the occurrences of his time with all the confidence of the now supplanted disciple of astrology.

The Great Stereopticon, like most gadgets, has been progressively improved and added to until today it is a machine of three parts; the press, the motion picture, and the radio. Together they present a version of life quite as controlled as that taught by medieval religionists, though feeble in moral inspiration, as we shall see. It is now our object to look at the effects of each in turn.

No one is prepared to understand the influence of journal­ ism on the public mind until he appreciates the fact that the newspaper is a spawn of the machine. A mechanism itself, it has ever been closely linked with the kind of exploita­ tion, financial and political, which accompanies indus­ trialism, The press is the great scribe, possessed of that preponderance of means which technology always provides. The ease with which it multiplies stereotypes makes it the ideal servant o f progress. It thrives on an endlessness of dis­ semination, Its progeny, like the frogs of Egypt, come up into our very kneading troughs. But, just because the me­ chanical victory of the press is so complete, we are likely to ignore the conditions on which its work proceeds.

I serve notice, therefore, that we here approach a ques­ tion of blasphemous nature, a question whose mere asking disturbs the deepest complacency of the age. And that is; Has the art of writing proved an unmixed blessing? The thought challenges so many assumptions that to consider it requires almost a fresh orientation in philosophy; but we must recall that it occurred to Plato, who answered the question in the negative. W ith him it concerned the issue of whether philosophy should be written down, and his con-

94

T be Great Stereopticon

elusion was that philosophy exists best in discourse be­ tween persons, the truth leaping up between them "lik e a flame."

In explanation of this important point he makes Socrates relate a myth about the Egyptian god Thcuth, a mighty inventor, who carried his inventions before King Thamus, desiring that they be made available to the people Some of the inventions the King praised; but he stood firmly against chat of writing, declaring that it could be only a means of propagating false knowledge and an encourage­ ment to forgetfulness, Socrates adds the view that anyone who leaves writing behind on the supposition that it will be "intelligible or certain" or who believes that writing is better than knowledge present to the mind is badly mistaken.

Now Plato was disturbed by written discourse because it has "no reticences or proprieties toward different classes of persons" and because, if an individual goes to it with a question in his mind, it "alw ays gives one unvarying an­ sw er," And we find him making in the seventh Epistle the extraordinary statement that "no intelligent man w ill ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated, especially not into a form that is unalterable,— which must be the case with what is ex­ pressed in written sym bols." Obviously, here is a paradox, and the present writer is aware of risking another in a book which calls attention to the sin of writing. The answer to the problem seems to be that written discourse is under a limitation and that whether wc wish to accept that limitation to secure other advantages must be de­ cided after due reference to purposes and circumstances. In the Good Society it is quite possible that man will not be so dependent on the written word.

In any case, for Plato,  truth was a living thing, never

95

T he Great Stereopticon

wholly captured by men even in animated discourse and in its purest form, certainly, never brought to paper. In our day it would seem that a contrary presumption has growm up. The more firmly an utterance is stereotyped, the more likely it is to win credit. It is assumed that engines as expensive and as powerful as the modern printing press will naturally be placed in the hands of men of knowledge. Faith in the printed word has raised journalists to the rank of oracles; yet could there be a better description of them than these lines from the Fhaedrus: ‘They will ap­ pear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome, having the reputation of knowledge without therealiry"?

If the realization of truth is the product of a meeting of minds, wc may be skeptical of the physical ability of the mechanism to propagate it as long as that propagation is limited to the printing and distribution of stories which give "one unvarying answer," And this circumstance brings up at once the question of the intention of the rulers of the press. There is much to indicate that modern publi­ cation wishes to minimize discussion. Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic matters. Instead, it encourages men to read in the hope chat they will absorb. For one thing, there is the technique of display, with its implied evaluations. This does more of the average man’s thinking for him than he suspects. For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases. These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable, like refusal to salute the flag. Especially do the journals of mass circulation exploit the automatic re­

96

T he Great Stereopticon

sponse. So journalism becomes a monstrous discourse of Protagoras, which charms by hypnotizing and thwarts that participation without which one is not a thinking man. If our newspaper reader were trained to look for assump­ tions, if he were conscious of the rhetoric in lively re­ porting, we might not fear this product of the printer's art; but that would be to grant that he is educated. As the modern world is organized, the ordinary reader seems to lose means of private judgment, and the decay of con­ versation has about destroyed the practice of dialectic. Consequently the habit of credulity grows.

There is yet another circumstance which raises grave doubts about the contribution of journalism to rhe public weal. Newspapers are under strong pressure to distort in the interest of holding attention. I think we might well afford CO overlook the pressure of advertisers upon news and editorial policy. This source of distortion has been fully described and is perhaps sufficiently discounted; but there is at work a far more insidious urge to exaggerate and to color beyond necessity. It is an inescapable fact that newspapers thrive on friction and conflict. One has only to survey the headlines of some popular journal, often presented symbolically in red, to note the kind of thing which is considered news. Behind the big story there nearly always lies a battle of some sort. Conflict, after all, is the essence of drama, and it is a truism that newspapers deliberately start and prolong quarrels; by allegation, by artful quotation, by the accentuation of unimportant differences, they create antagonism where none was felt to exist before. And this is profitable practically, for the opportunity to dramatize a figlit is an opportunity for news. Journalism, on the whole, is glad to see a quarrel start and sorry to see it end. in rhe more sensational pub­ lications this spirit of passion and violence, manifested in

97

T he Great Stereopticon

a certain recklessness of diction, with vivid verbs and for­ tissimo adjectives, creeps into the very language. By the attention it gives thcir misdeeds it makes criminals heroic and politicians larger than life. I have felt that the way in which newspapers raked over every aspect of Adolf Hitler's life and personality since the end of the war shows that they really have missed him; they now have no one to play anti-Christ against the bourgeois righteousness they represent.

In reviewing the persistent tendency of the newspaper to corrupt, I shall cite a passage from James Fenimore Cooper. Though Cooper lived before the advent of yel­ low journalism, he seems to have stated the essential situ­ ation with a truth and eloquence impossible to improve

on when he said in The American Democrat: "A s  the press

of this country now exists,  it would seem to be expressly

devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and de­ stroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation. The little truth chat is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by per­ sonalities; while chose who live by falsehoods, fallacies, enmities, partialities and the schemes of the designing, find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs." A hundred years later Huey Long made a statement of impolitic truth when he called his tax on newspapers a "He ta x ."

How, in the light of these facts, can one hesitate to conclude that wc would live m greater peace and enjoy sounder moral health if the institution of the newspaper were abolished entirely? Jefferson observed at one time that it would be better to have newspapers and lack a govern­ ment than to have a government and be without news­ papers. Yet we find him in his seventieth year writing to John Adams: " I have given up newspapers in exchange

98

T be Great Stereopticon

for Tacirus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find raysdf much the happier."

The Russians, with their customary logical realism, which ought to come as a solemn admonition to the West­ ern mind, have concluded that freedom to initiate con­ flicts is nor one of the legitimate freedoms. They have therefore established state control of journalism. If news­ papers can do nothing but lie, they will at least He in the interest of the state, which, according to the philosophy of statism, is not lying at all. Certainly it remains to be seen whether the Western democracies with their strong divisive forces can continue to allow a real freedom of the press, In limited areas, indeed, there are now signs that the day of that freedom is over.

We see this silently arising in the appearance of the press agent and the public-relations officer. More institu­ tions of every kind are coming to feel that they cannot permit an unrestricted access to news about themselves. What they do is simply set up an office of publicity in which writers skilled in propaganda prepare the kinds of stories those institutions wish to sec circulated. Inevitably this organization serves at the same time as an office of censor­ ship, dc-emphasizing, or withholding entirely, news which would be damaging to prestige. It is easy, of course, to disguise such an office as a facility created to keep the public better informed, bur this docs not alter the fact that where interpretation counts, control of source is de­ cisive. During the second World War the United States government set up a vast office of war information, the object of which was to interpret the struggle from the point of view of an administration which had been all along pro-war. In this day of skilled competition for public favor, even separate departments of government have their public information services. I shall illustrate by citing in

99

The Great Stereopticon

some detail from a recent press dispatch from Washington: "T h e United States Navy, which in pre-war days hid its light under a bushel, has decided to embark on a high-powered publicity program ." Its plan, the account goes on to say, is to gather a staff of five hundred men the duties of which will be to provide "photographs, radio programs, and other public information about the navy ." The de­ velopment resulted, it is explained, from a realization that during the war "th e publicity machines of the army and the army air forces were able to capture public support to the detriment of the navy’s reputation," In the course of the war, this candid correspondent declares, the Navy made some effort to get in step with the times when it "introduced modern advertising agency methods and dis­ carded the traditional name of 'office of public relations' for the more euphemistic 'office of public information,' Such is the policy of seeing that there is enough news and that it originates in the proper hands. The practice is becoming universal; not only departments of governments and private businesses but even universities have concluded that freedom of access to news turns out to be expensive and embarrassing.

So much for forces which keep this part of the Stereopti­ con from giving us the living truth; now let us turn to the second part.

Every student of the motion picture has been impressed with the great resourcefulness of this medium. The movie producer is a maker almost to the extent of the poet, for he is working with a means capable of transforming sub­ ject matter. His production carries the evaluative power im plicit in all dramatic representation, and it is, in the usual course of affairs, employed for purposes of enter­ tainment. These two points bear consideration.

Wc  need not  speak  of the  enormous  influence of this

100

T be Great Stereopticon

synoptic depiction of life upon children and adolescents. That is a point concerning reticences and proprieties to­ ward different classes of persons; our interest is rather in the deleterious effects of movie-going upon even adult mentalities that find satisfaction in it. That the public as a whole misses the issue of the motion picture’s influ­ ence can be seen from its attitude toward censorship. For what the public is reconciled to seeing censored arc just the little breaches of decorum which fret bourgeois re­ spectability and sense of security. The truth is that these are so far removed from the heart of the problem that they could well be ignored. The thing that needs to be censored is not the length of the kisses but the egotistic, selfish, and self-flaunting hero; not the relative proportion of un-drapcd breast but the flippant, vacuous-minded, and also egotistic heroine. Let us not worry about the jokes of dubious propriety; let us rather object to the whole story, with its complacent assertion of the virtues of materialist society. We arc speaking here, o f course, from the funda­ mental point of view, A censorship of the movies, to be worthy of the name, would mean a complete reinterpreta­ tion of most of their themes, for the beliefs which underlie virtually every movie story are precisely the ones which are hurrying us on to perdition. The entire globe is becom­ ing imbued with the notion that there is something norma­ tive about the insane sort of life lived in New York and Hollywood— even after that life has been exaggerated to suit the morbid appetite of the thrill-seeker.

The spurious nature of the "interest" of the ordinary movie shows an indifference to the real issues of life. The producer, in order to make his offerings ataactions, that is, in order to make them beguiling, must present them as slick and false as advertising. It has been said that tragedy is for aristocrats, comedy is for bourgeoisie, and

101

T he Great Stereopticon

farce is for peasants. What percentage of the output of motion-picturc factories can qualify as tragedy?' With the animated cartoon, a growing percentage qualifies as farce. But romance and comedy— these measure the depth of the world which movie audiences wish to see.

The third part of the Great Stereopticon is the radio and television. Because they bring the human voice, unique opportunities are open to them.

The primary effect of the radio is to disorder further our picture of the world by diminishing the opportunity for genuine selection (in its system of programs it has achieved a "rationalization" which results in the wildly irrational). One skims through a newspaper, practicing a certain arc of rejection; the movie he may stay away from, but the radio is insistently present; indeed the victims of this publicity are virtually hunted down. In few public places do we escape it, and our neighbor’s loud-speaker may penetrate the very sanctum of our privacy. In our listening, volun­ tary or not, we arc made to grow accustomed to the weirdest of juxtapositions: the serious and the trivial, the comic and the tragic, follow one another in mechanical sequence without real transition. During the recent war what person of feeling was not struck by the insanity of hearing advertisements for laxatives between announce­ ments of the destruction of famous cities by aerial bom­ bardment? Is it not a travesty of all sense to hear reports fraught with disaster followed by the cornedy-varicty with its cheap w it and arranged applause (this applause,

of course, tells  the listeners when  to react and how and

so further submerges them in massness).“

1. A djffcrent bur more serious question is whar percentage o f genuine tragedies to u ld be identified as tragedies by a modern aud ientei f o r the inabiiicy of the eon-telnpor.iry mind to recognize tragedy when it is prcscnrcd see R o b e rt B. H eilm an's " M e lp o m e n e as W a ilt lo w e r ," Scw antt K e ric u , svintcr, 1947 .

2,    I t is a fact  in keeping w ith others w hich  we have cited t h a t rural and urban

tastes m  radio differ.  An official survey  made  by the  Bureau of Agricultural  E c o -

102

T be Great Stereopticon

Here, it would seem, is the apotheosis; here is the final collapsing of values, a fantasia of effects, suggesting in its wild disorder the debris left by a storm. Here is the daily mechanical wrecking of hierarchy.

Not to be overlooked in any gauging of influence is the voice of announcer and commentator. The metaphysical dream of progress dictates the tone, which is one of cheery confidence, assuring us in the face of all contrary evidence that the best is yet to be. Recalling the war years once more, who has not heard the news of some terrible tragedy, which might stagger the imagination and cause the con­ scientious artist to hesitate at the thought of its depiction, given to the world in the same tone that commends a brand o f soap or predicts fair weather for the morrow? There were commentators, ir is rrue, who got the spin: of gravity into their speech, but behind them stood always the announcer, denying by his formula of regular inflec­ tion the poignancy of their message. The radio, more than press or screen, is the cheerful liar.

Thus the broadcast of chaos comes in a curious monotone. This is the voice of the Hollow Men, who can see the top­ pling walls of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome without enough soul to sense tragedy. It is the tone of those dead to sentiment. But this is as we predicted; the closer man stands to ruin, the duller grows his realization; the annihi­ lation of spiritual being precedes the destruction of temple walls.

The radio is, last of all, a prime instrument for discour­ aging the thought of participation. It is the natural mo­ nopoly of communication. For turning whole populations

103

The Great Stereopticon

means could there be? A national radio hookup is like the loud-speaker system of a battleship or a factory, from which the post of command can transmit orders to every part, If we grant the assumptions of the materialists that society must conform to the developments of science, we may as well prepare ourselves for the monolithic state.

Thus far we have been speaking of specific temptations to suppress and distort; it is now time to look at the funda­ mental source of the harm done by the Great Stereopticon. If we are pleading for unity of mind and if we admit the necessity for some degree of subjective determination, it m ight appear that this machine, with its power to make the entire environment rhetorical, is a heaven-sent answer to our needs. We do not in the final reckoning desire un­ interpreted data; it is precisely the interpretation which holds our interest. But the great fault is that data, as it passes through the machine, takes its significance from a sickly metaphysical dream. The ultimate source of evalua­ tion ceases to be the dream of beauty and truth and be­ comes that of psychopathia, of fragmentation, of dis­ harmony and nonbeing. The operators of the Stereopticon by their very selection of matter make horrifying assump­ tions about reality. For its audience that overarching dome becomes a sort of miasmic cloud, a breeder of strife and deg­ radation and of the subhuman. What person taking the affirmative view of life can deny that the world served up daily by press, movie, and radio is a world of evil and nega­ tion? There is iron in our nature sufficient to withstand any fact that is present in a context of affirmation, but we cannot remain unaffected by the continued assertion of cynicism and brutality. Yet these are what the materialists in control of publicity give us.

The sickly metaphysical dream is not the creation solely of those who have cast restraint to the winds to seek profit

104

The Great Stereopticon

in sensationalism. It is the work, too, of many who profess higher ideals but who cannot sec where their assumptions lead. Fundamental to the dream, o f course, is the dogma of progress, with its postulate of the endlessness of becoming. The habit of judging all things by their departure from the things of yesterday is reflected in most journalistic interpretation. Hence the restlessness and the criteria of magnitude and popularity. The fact that capitalism seems to flourish only by expansion is no doubt connected with this; but, whatever the cause may be, there is no law of perfection where there are no standards of measure. The touchstone of progress simply schools the millions in shallow evaluation.

Somewhere, moreover, the metaphysicians of publicity have absorbed the idea that the goal of life is happiness through comfort. It is a state of complacency supposed to ensue when the physical appetites have been well satisfied. Advertising fosters the concept, social democracy approves it, and the acceptance is so wide that it is virtually im­ possible today, except from the religious rostrum, to teach that life means discipline and sacrifice. It means, in the world picture of press agency, a job, domesticity, interest in some harmless diversion such as baseball and fishing, and a strong antipathy toward abstract ideas. This is the Philistine version of man in pursuit of happiness. Even Carlyle's doctrine of blessedness through work has over­ tones o f strcnuousness which arc repugnant to the man of today. Because the journalist-philosophers evaluate the multifarious objects and events of the world by their appeal to the greatest possible number of this type, it is not to be expected that they will recommend the arduous road of spiritualization.

As for the latter, it cannot be said too emphatically that the operators of the Great Stereopticon have an interest in

105

T he Great Stereopticon

keeping people from breaking through to deeper signifi­ cances. Not only is the philosopher a notoriously poor consumer; he is also an unsettling influence on societies careless of justice, That there arc abysses of meaning be­ neath his daily routine, the common man occasionally suspects; to have him realize them in some apocalyptic revelation might well threaten the foundations of ma­ terialist civilization. It is no wonder that experienced employers advertise for workers who are married and sober, for the other type sometimes begins to wonder which is the real reality, and they cannot afford help which might behave as Santayana, when he reportedly deserted the Harvard lecture room at the voice of spring, or Sherwood Anderson, when he left without adieu the Ohio paint factory,.

The speculations of journalism seldom go beyond the confines of business and propriety, and its oracles have been quick to assail those who come with disturbing notions— quick and unscrupulous, too, if they sense that the notions contain some necessary truth. In this they bear out the observation of Socrates that society docs not mind an individual's being wise; only when he begins to make others wise does it become apprehensive, This is to say that they fear the spread of what has truth and reason on its side. Has any brilliant social critic of the last century received something better than a sneer from the pundits of journalism until his appreciation by the thoughtful forced a grudging recognition? A Nietzsche, a Kierkegaard, a Péguy, a Spcngler— it is impossible for journalism to take these people seriously. The existence of the one threatens the existence of the other. The proprietors of the Stereopti­ con have a pretty clear idea of the level at which thinking IS safe for the established order. They arc protecting a materialist civilization growing more insecure .and panicky as awareness filters through that it is over an abyss.

Thus, by insisting upon the dogma of progress, by pic­

106

T he Great Stereopticon

turing physical sufficiency as the goal of living, by insulat­ ing the mind against thoughts of an immanent reality, the Great Stereopticon keeps the ordinary citizen from per­ ceiving "th e vanity of his bookkeeping and the emptiness of his domestic felicities." It is the great jitojeccion ma­ chine of the bourgeois mentality, which we have already seen to be psychopathic in its alienation from reality.

It is curious to sec how this mentality impresses those brought up under differing conditions. I recall with especial vividness a passage from Walter Hines Page's The Auto­ biography of Nicholas Worth. Page, who grew up in the Reconstruction South and later went North to school, had received his earliest impressions in a society where catas­ trophe and privation had laid bare some of the primal realities, including the existence of evil— a society, too, in which the "prim itive infection" of the African race, to use a term employed by Jung, had developed in the white man some psychological cunning. It seemed to Page that his northern acquaintances had "minds of logical sim­

p licity ."*  Such,  I  think,  must  be  the  feeling  of anyone

who comes out of a natural environment into one in which education, however lengthy and laborious, is based on bourgeois assumptions about the real character of the world. It is a mind which learns to play with counters and arrives at answers which work— ^in a bourgeois en­ vironment, If we reverse this process and send the "m ind of logical ^simplicity” into regions where mystery and contingency are recognized, we re-enact the plot o f Con­ rad’s Lord Jim . There is a world of terrifying reality to which the tidy moralities of an Anglican parsonage do do not seem applicable,*

3, In his navrl T h i B a its n ia n i, w h ich deserves to be better kn ow n , Henry Jam es sends the " so u th e rn '* type of mind into a northern environm ent, w ith consequences

107

T he Great Stereopticon

Seen from another point o f view, the Great Stereopticon

is a translation into actuality of Plato’s celebrated figure

o f the cave.  The defect o f the prisoners,  let  us recall,  is

that they cannot perceive the truth. The wall before them, on which the shadows play, is the screen on which press, motion picture, and radio project their account of life, The chains which keep the prisoners from turning their heads arc the physical monopoly which the engines of publicity naturally possess. And is it not pathetically true that these victims, with their limited vision, are "in the habit of conferring honors among themselves to those who are quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before and which followed after, and which were together"?

The result is that insulation by technology has made the task o f disseminating wisdom more difficult since Plato's day. In Athenian sophistry and demagoguery Plato faced evils of the same kind, but they could not work behind such strategic entrenchment, and it was hardly as difficult for the wise man to make himself heard in centers of in­ fluence, Nothing is more natural than that, in an age domi­ nated by materialism, authority should attach to those who possess. W hat chance today, to make the situation concrete, has a strcet-corner preacher, without means and w'ithout institutional sponsorship, in competition with the glib assertions of a radio oracle? The denizens of the cave have never been so firmly enchained as in this age, which uses liberty as a veritable incantation.

There are, it is true, certain hopeful signs of restiveness

t h e   h e t r a y a i , t h e   p r i m i t i v e  a r t i s t  h a s  t a u g h t   th e    w h i t e   m a n ’s   n n n a t u r a l r i g o r ,

be eotnical sim plifita cioos .

108

The Great Stereopticon

growing out of our condition. M ost of us have observed among ordinary people a deep suspicion of propaganda since the first World War. The lesson of chat disillusionment has lasted surprisingly. So intense has been this distrust that during the recent conflict the most authentic stories of outrages, documented and proved in every possible way, either were met with outright disbelief or were accepted gingerly and with reservations. The common man realizes that he has been misled and that there are those who would mislead him again; but, lacking analytical power, he tends to group every instance of organized expression with propaganda. In times o f peace, too, he has exhibited a certain hardheaded resistance to attempts to drive or cajole him. We have seen in this country politicians elected in the face of almost unanimous press opposition; we note oftentimes a cagey dismissal of the obvious falsification in advertising, and I have heard simple men remark that newspapers should not print items of a private and dis­ tressing nature such as we have classified as obscene.

In serious writing, too, there arc some hopeful portents of change. It has been noted how modern poets have re­ acted against the debased coinage of cliché language, and indications appear in other types of literature that the middle-class world picture is being abandoned. Perhaps Arthur Koestler is right : as the bourgeois novel flickers out, an entirely new type of writer is destined to appear: "a ir ­ men, revolutionaries, adventurers, men who lead the dangerous life ." Such, indeed, seem Silonc, Saint-Exupcry, Hemingway. They will carry the gift for reflection into experiences of intense physical distress, and they will emerge with a more genuine contempt for materialist ex­ planations than has been seen for centuries, When Saint-Exupéry, for example, declares that "th e physical drama it­ self cannot touch us until someone points out its spiritual

109

T he Great Stereopticon

sense," he makes an affirmation of tragedy and signifi­ cance. In a way, these men have the same recourse as medieval mystics, who, in suffering, caught the vision. And, since their faith has been tested by fire, they cannot be intimidated by those things which reduce the armchair philosopher to meekness. They have broken through the falsity and have returned to tell that the world is not at all what it has been made to seem— not after one has cut loose from security and comfort and achieved a kind of freedom far different from that promised by political liber­ als, who are themselves pushing slides into the Stereopti­ con. In reflecting on what is taught by extremities, one is reminded of Yeats's saying that saints and drunkards arc never Whigs.

It will certainly have ro be asked whether European fascism was not just this impulse vulgarized and per­ verted. The rebellion of youth, the repudiation of bour­ geois complacency, the attempt to renew the sense of "h o li­ ness and heroism ," appear the beginning of a revolt at least as deep-seated as that which made the French Revolu­ tion. The revolt was led by ignorant spirits who were im­ pelled from behind by resentment and who, through thcir determination to invert the Christian ethic, made an un­ exampled fiasco. There is no reason to believe, however, that the deep dissatisfaction with the superficiality of Western life has been removed or even mitigated. And this is why we wonder how long the Stereopticon can preserve the inane world which the bourgeois finds congenial. It is, after all, only a mechanical means of unifying empirical communities.

In summary, the plea that the press, motion picture, and radio justify themselves by keeping people well informed turns out to be misleading. If one thinks merely of facts and of vivid sensations, the claim has .some foundation,

110

The Great Stereopticon

but if he thinks of encouragement to meditation, the con­ trary rather is true. For by keeping the time element continu­ ously present— and one may recall Henry James's descrip­ tion of journalism as criticism of the moment at the moment— they discourage composition and so promote the fragmentation already reviewed. Wc have seen in other con­ nections how specialization is hostile to ail kinds of or­ ganization, whether that organization is expressed as image, as whole, or as generalization. In the last analysis this reveals itself as an attempt to prevent the simultaneous perception of successive events, which is the achievement of the philosopher. Materialism and success require the "decomposed eternity” of time for their operation, and this is why we have these hidden but persistent attacks on memory, which holds successive events in a single picture. The successive perception of successive events is empiri­ cism; the simultaneous perception is idealism. Need wc go further to account for the current dislike of long memo­ ries and for the hatred of the past?

Recurring to Plato’s observation that a philosopher must have a good memory, let us inquire whether the continuous dissemination, o f news by the media under discussion does not produce the provincial in rime. The constant stream of sensation, eulogized as livcl) propagation of what the public wants to hear, discourages the pulHng-togethcr of events from past time into a whole for contemplation. Thus, absence of reflection keeps the individual from being aware of his former selves, and it is highly questionable whether anyone can be a member of a metaphysical com­ munity who does not preserve such memory. Upon the presence of the past in the present depends all conduct directed by knowledge.

There can be little doubt that this condition of mind is a large factor in the low political morality of our age.

I l l

The Great Stereopticon

Oswald Garrison Villard, a political journalist of the old school, who spent half a century crusading for standards of probity in public administration, once declared that he had never ceased to marvel at the shortness of the public's memory, at the rapidity with which it forgets episodes of scandal and incompetence. It sometimes appeared to him of little use to attack a party for its unethical conduct, for the voters would have no recollection of it. The glee with which the epithet "ancient history" is applied to what is out of sight is of course a part of this barbarous attitude. The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetites. Those who remember alone have a sense of relatedness, but whoever has a sense of relatedness is in at least the first grade of philosophy. Henry Ford's statement that history is bunk is a perfectly proper observation for a bourgeois industrial­ ist, and it was followed with equal propriety by another; "Creeds must g o ." Technology emancipates not only from memory but also from faith.

What humane spirit, after reading a newspaper or at­ tending a popular motion picture or listening to the farrago o f nonsense on a radio program, has not found relief in fixing his gaze upon some characteristic bit of nature? It is escape from the sickly metaphysical dream. Out of the surfeit of falsity born of technology and commercialism we rejoice in returning to primary data and to assurance that the world is a world of enduring forms which in themselves are neither brutal nor sentimental.

112

C H A P T E R     V I

THE SPOILED-CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Wherever the typical mass character becomes universal, a ll higher values are as good as lost.

—  R a u s c h n i n g .

HAVING been taught for four centuries, more or less, that his redemption lies through the conquest of nature, man expects his heaven to be spatial and temporal, and, behold­ ing all things through the Great Stereopticon, he expects re­ demption to be easy of attainment. Only by these facts can we explain the spoiled-child psychology of the urban masses. The scientists have given him the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have. Since the prime object of the latter is to appease, he has received concessions at enough points to chink that he may obtain what he wishes through complaints and demands. This is but another phase of the rule of desire.

The spoiled child has not been made to see the relation­ ship between effort and reward. He wants things, but he regards payment as an imposition or as an expression of malice by those who withhold for it. His solution, as we shall see, is to abuse those who do not gratify him.

No one can be excused for moral degradation, but we arc tempted to say of the urban dweller, as of the heathen, that he never had an opportunity for salvation. He has been ex­ posed so unremittingly to this false incerprerarion o f life

113

The Spoiled-Child Fsychology

that, though we may deplore, we can hardly wonder at the unreasonableness of his demands. He has been given the notion that progress is automatic, and hence he is not pre­ pared to understand impediments; and the right to pursue happiness he has not unnaturally translated into a right to have happiness, like a right to the franchise. If all this had been couched in terms of spiritual insight, the case would be different, but when he is taught that happiness is obtain­ able in a world limited to surfaces, he is being prepared for that disillusionment and resentment which lay behind the mass psychosis of fascism. He has been told in substance that the world is conditioned, and when unconditioned forces enter to put an end to his idyl, he naturally suffers frustration. His superiors in the hierarchy of technology have practiced an imposition upon him, and in periodic crises he calls them to account.

Let us consider an ordinary man living in Megalopolis. The Stereopticon has so shielded him from sight o f the abysses that he conceives the world to be a fairly simple machine, which, with a bit of intelligent tinkering, can be made to go. And going, it turns out comforts and whatever other satisfactions his demagogic leaders have told him he is entitled to. But the mysteries are always intruding, so that even the best designed machine has been unable to effect a continuous operation. No less than his ancestors, he finds himself up against toil and trouble. Since this was not nominated in the bond, he suspects evildoers and takes the childish course of blaming individuals for things insepa­ rable from the human condition. The truth is that he has never been brought to see what it is to be a man. That man is the product of discipline and of forging, chat he really owes thanks for the pulling and tugging that enable him to grow— this concept left the manuals of education with the advent of Romanticism. This citizen is now the child of

114

T he Spoiled-Child Psychology

indulgent patents who pamper hts appetites and inflate his egotism until he is unfitted for struggle of any kind.

The spoiling of man seems always to begin when urban living predominates over rural. After man has left the coun­ tryside to shut himself up in vast piles of stone, after he has lost what Sir Thomas Browne called pudor rusticas, after he has come to depend on a complicated system of human exchange for his survival, he becomes forgetful of the over­ riding mystery of creation. Such is the normal condition of the déraciné. An artificial environment causes him to lose sight of the great system not subject to man's control. Undoubtedly this circumstance is a chief component of bourgeois mentality, as even the etymology o f '‘bourgeois" may remind us. It is the city-dweller, solaced by man-made comforts, who resents the very thought that there exist mighty forces beyond his understanding; it is he who wishes insulation and who berates and persecutes the phi­ losophers, the prophets and mystics, the wild men out of the desert, who keep before him the theme of human frailty.

It is part of his desiccation to substitute for the primal feeling of relatcdness a false self-sufficiency. If he could con­ tinue to realize the presence of something greater than self and see the virtue of subordinating self to communal enter­ prise— that is, see the virtue and not simply respond to coercion— he might remain unspoiled even in the city. But, when competition to be considered "eq u al" sets in, there ensues the severance which is individualism. It has proved as true of the spirit as of the flesh that the city renders sterile.

This fact has been discerned in many societies, but in our own it takes on an added liability through the expansion of science. If cities encourage man to believe that he is superior to the lim itations of nature, science encourages him to he-

115

T he Spo'tled-Child Psychology

lievc that he is exempt from labor. In effect:, what modern man is being told is that the world owes him a living. He assents the more readily for being told in a roundabout way, which is that science owes him a living, The city w ill shelter him, and science will support him; what more is required by the dream of utilitarianism? And what possible lesson can man draw from this but that work is a curse, which he w ill avoid as far as possible until science arrives with the means for its total abolishment? When men must no longer win bread by the sweat of their brow, the primal curse will have ceased; and we are assured daily by adver­ tisements that the goal is not too far off.

How obvious here is the extinction of the idea of mission. Men no longer feel it laid upon them to translate the po­ tential into the actual; there are no goals of labor like those of the cathedral-buildcrs. Yet, unless man sees himself in relation to ordinances such as these, what lies ahead is the most egregious self-pampering and self-disgust, probably followed by real illness. With religion emasculated, it has remained for medical science in our age to revive the an­ cient truth that labor is cberapeutic.

The polarity of the actual and the potential creates a tension in the presence o f which complete comfort is impos­ sible. Here is the secret of the mass man's impatience with ideals. Certainly there is no more innocent-seeming form of debauchery than the worship of comfort; and, when it is accompanied by a high degree of technical resourcefulness, the difficulty of getting people not to renounce it but merely to see its consequences is staggering. The task is bound up, of course, with that of getting principles accepted again, for, where everything ministers to desire, there can be no rebuke to comfort.

As wc endeavor to restore values, we need earnestly to point out that there is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement o f a civilization. On

116

T he Spoiled-Child Psychology

the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay. Greek civilization, to take an outstanding example, was notably deficient in crea­ ture comforts. The Athenians sat outdoors on stone to be­ hold their tragedies; the modern New Yorker sits in an in­ clined plush armchair to witness some play properly classi­ fied as amusement. When the Greek retired for the night, it was not to a beautyrest mattress; he wrapped himself up in his cloak and lay down on a bench like a third-class rail­ way passenger, as Clive Bell has remarked. Nor had he learned to pity himself for a spare diet. Privations of the flesh were no obstacle to his marvelous world of imagina­ tion.

On the other hand, how many Americans have returned from Europe with terrible talcs of the chill and draftiness of medieval castles and Renaissance palaces, with stories of deficient plumbing and uncomfortable chairs! Mark Twain was right to make his Connecticut Yankee score the lack of conveniences in Camelot. Yet it is just such people who will remain indifferent to the drabness of Gopher Prairie and Zenith and find their mental pabulum in drugstore fiction.

Culture consists, in truth, of many little things, but they are not armrests and soft beds and extravagant bathing facilities. These, after all, cater to sensation, and, because culture is of the imagination, the man of culture is to a degree living out of this world.

The worship of comfort, then, is only another aspect of our decision to live wholly in this world. Yet here man encounters an anomaly; the very policy of living wholly in this world, of having no traffic with that other world which cannot be ‘'proved," turns one's attention wholly to the temporary and so actually impairs his effectiveness. Wc may feel satisfied to be damned for not producing great art or for not observing ceremony, but what if it is shown

117

T he Spoiled-CbUd Psychology

that addiction to comfort unfits us for survival? This is not a new story; the fate of the fat and flabby animal over­ taken by the lean and hungry presents an allegory of famil­ iar experience. Nor is it necessary to review the days of R o ­ man degeneracy, though the case would be apposite; let us rather sec the problem in its essence and ask whether the worship of comfort does not follow necessarily from loss of belief in ideas and thereby induce social demoralization. The fact that it originates with the middle class, with those who would be moderate even in virtue, as Nietzsche re­ marked, is significant. After a people have repudiated ideals, they respond to the prick of appetite as an animal to a goad, but this, for reasons already outlined, does not take the place of systematic labor toward a suprapersonal goal. Jn becoming pragmatic, they become ineffectual. De TocqueviJle, alert to discern the effects of different social ideals, noted this well-. "In ages of faith, the final end of life is placed beyond life. The men of those ages, there­ fore, naturally and almost involuntarily accustom them­ selves to fix their gaze for many years on some immovable object toward which they are constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty passing desires in order to be the better able to content that great and lasting desire which possesses them. . . . . This explains why religious nations have often achieved such lasting results; for whilst they were thinking only of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in th is."

Great architectonic ideas are not nourished by the love of comfort, yet science is constantly telling the masses that the future will be better because the conditions of life are going to be softened. With this softening, the masculine virtue of heroism becomes, like the sentiments of which Burke spoke, "absurd and antiquated."

118

T he Spoiled-Child Psychology

The way was prepared for the criteria of comfort and mediocrity when the Middle Ages abandoned the ethic of Plato for that of Aristotle. The latter’s doctrine of rational prudence compelled him to declare in the Politics that the state IS best ruled by the middle class, fo r him, the virtuous life was an avoidance of extremes, a middle course between contraries considered harmful. Such doctrine leaves out of account the possibility that there are some virtues which do not become defective through increase, that virtues like courage and generosity may be pursued to an end at which man effaces himself. Naturally the idea of sclf-effaccment will be absent from any philosophy which prescribes for a prosperous worldly career.

Here the conception of Plato— expressed certainly, too, by Christianity— of pursuing virtue until worldly conse­ quence becomes a matter of indifference, stands in contrast. Aristotle remains a kind of natural historian of the virtues, observing and recording them as he observed techniques of the drama, but not thinking of a spiritual ideal. A life ac­ commodated to this world and shunning the painful experi­ ences which extremes, including chose of virtue, entail was what he proposed for his son Nicomachus.

One could anticipate that this theory would recommend itself to the Renaissance gentlemen and later to the bour­ geoisie when their turn came. In Thomism, based as it is on Aristotle, even the Catholic church turned away from the asceticism and the rigorous morality of the patristic fathers to accept a degree of pragmatic acquiescence in the world. This difference has prompted someone to say that, whereas Plato built the cathedrals of England, Aristotle built the manor houses.

The trend continues, and in a modern document like the Four Freedoms one sees comfort and security embodied in canons. For the philosophic opposition, that is of course

119

The Spoilcd-Child Psychology

proper, because fascism taught rhc strenuous life. But others with spiritual aims in mind have taught it too. Emerson made the point: "Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. W hat shall it say, then, to the sugar plums and cat’s cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard, which rack the wit of all human society?" Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether rhe seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, hut to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice o f man.

The modern temper is losing the feeling for heroism even in war, which used to afford the supreme theme for celebra­ tion of this virtue. It is significant that, whereas wars were formerly spoken o f as crusades or, at least, as trials, ir was the practice in America to refer to World War II as a "|ob ," These little changes in speech are as revealing as changes in dress. It was a " jo b " to be done so that the boys could get home to their bourgeois existences, which had not contemplated such a cataclysm, and which had no nomenclature for it when it arrived. The organs of propa­ ganda were hard put to convince the public that this was not just an ordinary job, since the reward was at best in intangibles and since there might be no reward at all. Thus we saw the constant reference to soldiers' and work­ ers' hours and pay, in an effort to make the soldier see that he was fighting for something more than fifty dollars a month and to persuade the factory worker that the measure of his performance was not the wage earned but what was being turned out for the front. It was an organized cam­ paign, using all the resources of the Great Stereopticon to bring home to a people gone materialist the truth that sacrifice means not investment but giving up something to the transcendental.

120

The Spoiled-ChUd Psychology

During the early part of the second World War there came to light the story of a farmer from the back country of Oklahoma— one of the yet unspoiled— who, upon hear­ ing of the attack on Pearl Harbor, departed with his wife to the West Coast to work in the shipyards. His wife found employment as a waitress and supported the two. Unable to read, the new worker did not understand the meaning of the little slip of paper handed him once a week. It was not until he had accumulated over a thousand dollars in checks that he found out that he was being paid to save his coun­ try. He had assumed that when the country is in danger, everyone helps out, and helping out means giving.

On the other side, there is meaning in the one popular ballad to come out of World War II. "Roger Young" has the line, "O w e’ve got no time for glory in the infantry," The language of business was increasingly applied to war, as when "soldier" and "sailo r" were displaced by the neu­ ter "servicem en." To say "O ur boy is in service" instead of "Our son is fighting for his native land" pretty well empties out the heroic strain.

The war of unlimited objectives which the democracies waged at the end may, in fact, be explained by the rage they felt over having their comfort disrupted and the contingent nature of their world exposed. In this rage they made the egregious mistake of supposing that "unconditional" w*ar is 3 means of doing away with all war. That may turn out to have been part of their unfitness.

So much for physical conflict; now we must pause to ask whether the spoiled-child psychology docs not unfit us also for that political struggle which now seems to loom in­ exorable. We have reference, naturally, to the new balance of power between East and West, between bourgeois liberal democracy and Soviet communism. With their ideal o f hap­ piness through comfort, the Western people look forward to

m

T he Spoiled-Child Psychology

an era of undisturbed living, in which such progress as their meta physic demands w ill take the form of a conquest of nature. These conquests arc threat enough to the prized equilibrium, if the truth were understood, but they may be little in comparison with the ideology fostered by their great rival to the East. For, however much the Bolsheviks have bemused themselves w ith other sophistries, they have never lost sight of the fact that life is a struggle. And, since they sec expansion as the price of survival, they are wholly committed to dynamism. To the leaders of Eastern com­ munism there is no such thing as a "good-neighbor policy" in OUT sense. That would involve a respect for abstract rights. How they must chuckle over this fatuity of liberal­ ism. They sec the world in a mighty evolution, in which the abstract rights of individuals and of nations go down before irresistible processes.

Ir is mainly this which makes the "blue heaven" of the Western liberals so precarious. W hat are the inalienable rights, by which they demonstrate their claim to happiness, to that power whose metaphysical dream is dynamism? Even if wc could assume pacific intentions on both sides, rhe future would not be safe for Western liberalism. Its funda­ mental incapacity to think, arising from an inability to see contradictions, deprives it of the power to propagate. Soviet communism, on the other hand, despite its ostensible com­ mitment to materialism, has generated a body of ideas with a terrifying power to spread. And it is this impending de­ feat in the struggle to win adherents which will upset the balance and drive liberalism into loss of judgment and pan­ ic. One can almost say that this has now occurred. We sec before us the paradox of materialist Russia expanding by the irresistible force of idea, while the United States, which supposedly has the heritage of values and ideals, frantically throws up barricades of money around the globe.

122

T he Spoiled-Ckild Psychology

It will perhaps seem whimsical, but I have thought that the most promisiDg bid for peace would be for the two great rivals to dispatch, each to the other, their ablest philosophers. Then we would sec which side could convert the other with reference to the nature o f the world and of man. And the world, having agreed in advance to abide by the decision, would thus be made one. This is the only hope for unity. The circumstance of living together in space and rime has never yet made men peaceful. Rather, the contrary is true; and there are wise words by Hamilton in the Fed­ eralist: " I t has from long observation of the progress of society become a sort of axiom in politics, that vicinity, or nearness of situation, constitutes nations natural enemies." The supposition that science is uniting the nations by bring­ ing them closer together physically is but another aspect of a theory previously noted that natural means can take the place of creed as the binding element.

It is unlikely, therefore, that the era of soft living which our scientists and advertisers have promised will be realized on any condition. While these two worlds face each other there seems to remain only the question of whether the West will allow comfort to soften it to a point at which de­ feat is assured or whether it will accept the rule of hardness and discover means of discipline If the latter course is chosen, it seems likely that the Western people are destined not for the happiness which they have promised themselves, but for something like Peguy's "socialist poverty ." In an effort to secure themselves against the challenge of dyna­ mism they w ill divert more of their substance and strength into armies and bureaucracies, the former to afford them protection from atm ck, the latter to effect internal order. In this event, personality w ill hardly survive. The individ­ ual will be told that the state is moving to guarantee his freedom, as in a sense it will be; but, to do so, it must pro­

123

The Spoiled-Chiid Psychology

hibit individual indulgence and even responsibility. To give strength to its w ill, the state restricts the wills of its citi­ zens. This is a general formula of political organization.

All such questions lead inevitably to the question o f dis­ cipline, The Russians with habitual clarity of purpose have made thcir choice; there is to be discipline, and it is to be enforced by the elite controlling the state. Now the sig­ nificance of this for the West is chat one choice is made for it too; there w ill be discipline here if the West is to survive. Organization always makes imperative counterorganiza­ tion. A force in being is a threat to the unorganized, who must answer by becoming an organized force themselves. Thus a great decision confronting the West in the future is how to overcome the spoiled-child psychology sufficiently to discipline for struggle. (The attempt of the United States to make military service attractive by offering high pay, free college education, and other benefits looks suspiciously like bribing the child with candy,)

In these ways we get our reminders that science has not exempted us from struggle in life, though patterns change and deceive the shallow .

The failure o f discipline In empirical societies can be traced to a warfare between rhe productive and the con­ sumptive faculties. The spoiled child is simply one who has been allowed to believe that his consumptive faculty can prescribe the order of society. How an entire social group may fall victim to this may be illustrated by the develop­ ment of collective bargaining. Demagogic leaders have told the common man that he is entitled to much more than he is getting; they have not told him the less pleasant truth that, unless there is to be expropriation— which in any case is only a temporary resource^— the increase must come out of greater productiviry. Now all productivity requires dis-

124

T be Spoiled-Child Psychology

ciplinc and subordination; the simple endurance of toil re­ quires control of passing desire. Here man is in a peculiar dilemma : the more he has of liberty, the less he can have of the fruits of productive work. The more he is spoiled, the more he resents control, and thus he actually defeats the measures which would make possible a greater consump­ tion. "Undem ocratic” productivity is attacked by "demo­ cratic” consumption; and, since there is no limit to appe­ tite, there is no limit to the crippling of productive ef­ ficiency by the animal desire to consume, once it is in a posi­ tion to make its force felt politically. Was there ever a more effective way to sabotage a nation's economy than to use the prestige of government to advocate the withholding of production? Strikes were originally regarded as conspira­ cies, and so they w ill have to be again when the free nations find collapse staring them in the face. W hat happens finally is that socialism, whose goal is materialism, meets the con­ dition by turning authoritarian; that is to say, it is willing to institute control by dictation in order to raise living standards and not disappoint the consumptive soul. To the extent that socialism has done this by means of irrational appeals— and no others have been found efficacious in the long run— we have seen the establishment of fascist sys­ tems.

We need go no further to sec why self-advertised leaders of the masses today, whether they owe their office to elec­ tion or to coup d'état, have turned dictator. They have had to perceive that what the masses needed was a plan for harmony and for work. Now any plan, however arbitrary, w ill yield something better than chaos— this truth is merely a matter of definition. Accordingly, programs with fan­ tastic objectives, some of them contradictory, have been set up. That they put an end temporarily to disorder and frustration is historical fact. A study of their motivation,

125

The Spoiled-Child Psychology

however, shows thar they all had scapegoats; they were against something. The psychology of this should not be mystifying; the spoiled child is aggrieved and wants re­ dress, A course of action which keeps him occupied while allowing him to express his resentments seems perfect. We should recall the strange mélange of persons whom fascism cast in the role of villain: aristocrats, intellectuals, million­ aires, members of racial minorities. In the United States there has been a similar tendency officially to castigate "econom ic royalists," managers of industry, "bourbons," and all who on any grounds could be considered privileged. It looks alarmingly like a dull hatred of every form of per­ sonal superiority. The spoiled children perceive correctly that the superior person is certain, sooner or later, to de­ mand superior things of them, and this interferes with con­ sumption aod, above all, with thoughtlessness.

It is rather plain by now that even thrift is regarded as an evidence of such superiority. Regularly in the day of so­ cial disintegration there occur systematic attacks upon capi­ tal. Though capital may, on the one hand, be the result of unproductive activity— o ro f "th e ft," as left-wingers might declare— on the other hand, it may be the fruit of industry and foresight, of self-denial, or of some superiority of gifts. The attack upon capital is not necessarily an attack upon inequity. In the times which wc describe it is likely to be born of love of case, detestation of discipline, contempt for the past; for, after all, an accumulation of capital represents an extension of past effort into the present. But self-pampering, present-minded modern man looks neither before nor after; he marks inequalities o f condition and, forbidden by his dogmas to admit inequalities of merit, moves to obliterate them. The outcry comes masked as an assertion that property rights should not be allowed to stand in rhc way of human rights, which would be well

126

The Spoiled-ChUd Psychology

enough if human rights had not been divorced from duties. But as it is, the mass simply decides that it can get some­ thing without submitting to the discipline o f work and proceeds to dispossess. Sir Flinders Petrie has written: "W hen democracy has attained full power, the majority without capital necessarily eat up the capital of the mi­ nority. and the civilization steadily decays." I would sug­ gest as worth considering in this connection the difficulties o f the Third Republic in maintaining the ideal of honest coil against the pressure of venality and politics and, on the other side, the ruthless determination of the Bolsheviks to permit no popular direction of affairs.

In the final analysis this society is like the spoiled child in its incapacity to think. Anyone can observe in the pam­ pered children of the rich a kind of irresponsibility o f the mental process. It occurs simply because they do not have to think to survive. They never have to feel that definition must be clear and deduction correct if they are to escape the sharp penalties of deprivation. Therefore the typical think­ ing of such people is fragmentary, discursive, and expressive of a sort of contempt for realities. Their conclusions arc not "earned" in the sense of being logically valid but are seized in the face o f facts. The young scion knows that, if he falls, there is a net below to catch him. Hardness o f condition is wanting. W ithout work to do, especially without work that is related to our dearest aims, the menial sinews atrophy, as do the physical. There is evidence that the masses, spoiled by like conditions, incur a similar flabbiness and in crises will prove unable to think straight enough to save themselves.

This is, in conclusion, a story of weakness resulting from a false world picture. The withcring-away of religious belief, the conviction that aU fighting faiths are due to be sup­ planted, as Mr. Justice Holmes intimated in a decision, turn

127

T he Spoiled-Chiid Psychology

thoughts toward selfish economic advantage. The very at­ tainment of this produces a softening; the softening prompts a search for yet easier ways of attaining the same advantage, and then follows decline. So long as private enterprise sur­ vives, there remain certain pressures not related to mass aspiration, but when industrial democracy insistently bat­ ters at private control, this means of organization and direc­ tion diminishes. Society eventually pauses before a fateful question: Where can it find a source of discipline?

128

C H A P T E R     V I I

THE LAST METAPHYSICAL RIGHT

In  a  country  when  the  sole  employer is  the

State, opposition means death by slow starva­

tion .— T r o t s k y .

THE foregoing chapters have been concerned with various stages of modern man's descent to chaos. Beginning with the first yielding to materialism, we have seen a train of consequences proceeding, in the same way that conclusions come from premises, to the egotism and social anarchy of the present world. The topic now changes, for the fact of one's writing signifies that he admits no necessity for these things. The remaining chapters therefore present means of restoration.

At the outset of proposing any reform we must ask for two postulates, that man both can know and can will. Some may think they are too doubtful to be assumed, but without them there is no hope of recovery. In the confidence that those who have considered these questions most deeply w ill agree that there is a presumption in their favor, I shall proceed to outline the task of healing.

I have endeavored to make plain in every way that I regard alt the evils in our now extensive catalogue as flow­ ing from a falsified picture of the world which, for our im­ mediate concern, results in an inability to interpret current happenings. Hysterical optimism is a sin against knowl­ edge, and the conviction has been here expressed that noth­ ing substantial can be done until we have brought sinners to repentance. Such phrases echo the language of a world thought past reviving, but the statement means simply that those who are in a quandary must be made to see that

129

T he  Last Aietaphysical Right

quandary. Complacency docs not look before and after. It has been said with probable truth that the Roman Empire was in decline four hundred years before the situation was generally realized. The Whig theory of history, teaching that the most advanced point in time is the most advanced in development, is total abandonment of discrimination. Once man has regained sufficient humility to confess that ideals have been dishonored and that his condition is a reproach, one obstruction has been removed.

We must avoid, however, the temptation of tryung to teach virtue directly, a dubious proceeding at any time and one under special handicaps in our age. It is neces­ sary rather to seek out those “ incalculably subtle powers’’ of which Ortega y Gasset speaks. This means that the be­ ginning must not be less hardheaded and sophisticated than dozens of competing doctrines which would lure people into paths of materialism and pragmatism. Good will alone fails in the same way as does sentiment without the under­ pinning of metaphysic.

The first positive step must be a driving afresh of the wedge between the material and the transcendental. This is fundamental; without a dualism wc should never find pur­ chase for the puli upward, and all idealistic designs might as well be scuttled. 1 feel that this conclusion is the upshot of all that has here been rehearsed. That there is a world of ought, that the apparent does not exhaust the real— these arc so essential to the very conception of improvement that it should be superfluous to mention them, The opening made by our wedge is simply a denial that whatever is, is right, which takes the form of an insistence upon the rightness of right. Upon this rock of metaphysical right we shall build our house. That the thing is not true and the act is not just unless these conform to a conceptual ideal— if w^e can make this plain again, utilitarianism and pragmatism will have

130

The Last Metaphysical Right

been defeated. For such are the ultiinatcs which determine value, significance, and even definition, Since knowledge finally depends on criteria of truth, we can even restore belief in the educative power of experience— which relativism and skepticism both deny. The prospect of living again in a world of metaphysical certitude— what relief will this not bring to those made seasick by the truth-denying doctrines of the relativists! To bring dualism back into the world and to rebuke the moral impotence fathered by empiricism is then the broad character of our objective.

Because we are now committed to a program which has practical applications, we must look for some rallying-point about which to organize. We face the fact that our side has been in retreat for four hundred years without, however, having been entirely driven from the field. One corner is yet left. When we survey the scene to find some­ thing which the rancorous leveling wind of utilitarianism has not brought down, we discover one institution, shaken somewhat, but still strong and perfectly clear in its implica­ tions. This is the right of private property, which is, in fact, the last metaphysical right remaining to us. The ordinances of religion, the prerogatives of sex and of voca­ tion, all have been swept away by materialism, but the relationship of a man to his own has until the present large­ ly escaped attack, The metaphysical right of religion went out at the time of the Reformation. Others have been gradu­ ally eroded by the rising rule of appetite. But the very cir­ cumstance that the middle class rose to power on property led it to consecrate property rights at the same time that it was liquidating others. Accordingly, private property was made one of the absolute rights of man by the middlc-class French Revolution, and it was firmly guaranteed by all the ’'free" constitutions of the early nineteenth century. Its recognition by the American constitution was unequivo­

131

T he Last Metaphysical Right

cal. Now that the middle class itself is threatened, the con­ cept of private property loses defenders, but it is still with us, and, though wc may not be happy about its provenance, here is a too) at hand. Its survival may be an accident, yet it expresses an idea. It is the sole thing left among us to illustrate what right, independent of service or utility, means.

We say the right of private property is metaphysical be­ cause it does not depend on any test of social usefulness. Property rests upon the idea of the hismss of his: prspnetas, Eigentum, the very words assert an identification of owner and owned. Now the great value of this is that the fact of something's being private property removes it from the area o f contention. In the hismss of property we have dogma; there discussion ends. Relativists from the social sciences, who wish to bring everyone under secular group control, find this an annoying impediment. But is it not, in truth, quite comforting to feel that we can enjoy one right which does not have to answer the sophistries of the world or rise and fall with the tide of opinion? The right to use property as something private is, as I shall show more fully later, a sanctuary. It is a self-justifying right, which until lately was not called upon to show in the forum how its “ serv­ ices" warranted its continuance in a state dedicated to col­ lective well-being.

A t this point I would make abundantly clear that the last metaphysical right offers nothing in defense of chat kind of property brought into being by finance capitalism. Such property is, on the contrary, a violation of the very notion of propriitas. This amendment of the institution to suit the uses of commerce and technology has done more to threaten property than anything else yet conceived. For the abstract property of stocks and bonds, the legal ownership of enterprises never seen, actually destroy the connection

132

The Last Metaphysical Right

between man and his substance without which metaphysi­ cal right becomes meaningless. Property in this sense be­ comes a fiction useful for exploitation and makes impossible the sanctification of work. The property which we defend as an anchorage keeps its identity w ith the individual.

Not only is this true, but the aggregation of vast proper­ ties under anonymous ownership is a constant invitation to further state direction of our lives and fortunes. For, when properties are vast and integrated, on a scale now frequently seen, it requires but a slight step to transfer them to state control. Indeed, it is a commonplace that the trend toward monopoly is a trend toward state ownership; and, if we continued the analysis further, we should discover that business develops a bureaucracy which can be quite easily merged w ith that of government. Large business organiza­ tions, moreover, have seldom been backward about peti­ tioning government for assistance, since their claim to inde­ pendence rests upon desire for profit rather than upon prin­ ciple or the sense of honor. Big business and the rational­ ization of industry thus abet the evils wc seek to overcome. Ownership through stock makes the property an autono­ mous unit, devoted to abstract ends, and the stockholder's area of responsibility is narrowed in the same way as is that of the specialized worker. Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is cast­ ing aside its privacy.

The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties. These take the form of indcpcndcnt farms, of local businesses, o f homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property. Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the

133

The Last Metaphysical Right

abridgracnc of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism.

The assertion is tantamount to saying that man has a birthright of responsibility- That responsibility cannot ex­ ist when this essential right can be invaded in the name of temporary social usefulness and extraneous compulsion can be substituted. Therefore wc are bound to maintain that some rights begin with the beginning and that some sort of private connection with substance is one of them. Others, too, wc hope to see recognized, but our present concern is to find one ultimate protection for what is done in the name of the private person.

It is not a little disquieting to realize that in private property there survives the last domain of privacy of any kind, Every other wall has been overthrown. Here a unique privacy remains because property has not been compelled to give a justification of the kind demanded by rationalists and calculators. It must be maintained that property rests on the prcrational sentiments in that wc desire it not merely because it “ keeps the man up"— this would reduce to u tili­ tarianism— but because somehow it is needed to help him express his being, his true or personal being. By some mystery of imprint and assimilation man becomes identified with his things, so that a forcible separation of the two seems like a breach in nature,

But as we lay our plans for restoration, we find practical advantages in its preservation, and, while these are not to be pleaded as its ultimate justification, they are of legiti­ mate use. To combat the swirling forces of social collapse, we must have some form of entrenchment, and especially do we need sanctuary against pagan statism. For it is evident that, as society gravitates toward a monstrous functional­ ism, the very basis of recovery may be destroyed before counterforces can be deployed. Almost every trend of the

134

T he Last Metaphysical Right

day points to an identification of right with the purpose of the state and that, in turn, with the utilitarian greatest material happiness for the greatest number. In states which have unreservedly embraced this ideal, we have seen the very sources of protest extirpated. A functional unit oper­ ates best when it has the machine's one degree of freedom, and governors of the modern kind will not be so restrained by sentiment as to tolerate less than the maximum ef­ ficiency. The day of respect for the "loyal opposition" has gone with the day of the gentleman class. The plain truth is that believers in value are on the point of being engulfed completely, so that they cannot find means of continuance on any condition. In the past, revolutionary movements have frequently drawn strength from elements in the very society that they proposed to overthrow. Such opportunity came through the existence of a measure of liberty. In the monolithic police state which is the invention of our age, assisted as it is by technology, surveillance becomes com­ plete, And when we add to these political fanaticism, which seems an outgrowth of our level of development, the picture grows terrifying.^

Shall we not declare that the thinking people of our day, who see the suicide in massness and who individually rep­ robate the crimes of parties and of states, must be spared their private areas as the early Christians were the cata­ combs? In seeking protection against an otherwise omnip­ otent state, the opposition must now fall back upon the metaphysical right of private property. Actually something of this kind is a custom of long standing in the West. We have not regarded our political leaders as playing for rheir heads. If they meet failure through sponsoring some uo-

t.    [t sccrns in  inescapable conclusion  th a t the N ew  D e a l’s practice o f m aking

special investigations of the in c o m e - ta i payments of  individuals .ind groups w h ich

opposed j t is an instance o f ttend  tosvard econom ic eic otn rnu n icatioa .

135

The Last Metaphysical Right

popular measure, they return home to their bit of the world, and there they plant, or they sell their professional services, or they write for publication in a market not entirely dominated by politics. So Abraham Lincoln, after losing the voters' favor by opposing the Mexican War, re­ turned to the practice of law.

Private right defending noble preference is what we wish to make possible by insisting that not all shall be depend­ ents of the state, Thoreau, finding his freedom at Walden Pond, could speak boldly against government without suf­ fering economic excommunication, Walt Whitman, having become a hireling of government in Washington, discov­ ered that unorthodox utterance, even in poetry, led to severance from income. Even political parties, driven from power by demagoguery, can subsist and work in the hope that a return to reason will enable men of principle to make themselves felt again. Private property cannot without con­ siderable perversion of present laws be taken from the dis­ senter, and here lies a barrier to Gltkhschaîtung.

Nothing IS more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support w ill sooner or later be prosti­ tuted to utilitarian ends. The educational institutions of the United States afford a striking demonstration of this truth, Virtually without exception, liberal education, that is to say, education centered about ideas and ideals, has fared best in those institutions which draw their income from private sources. They have been able, despite limitations w hich donors have sought to lay upon them, to insist that education be not entirely a means of breadwinning. This means that they have been relatively free to promote pure knowledge and the training of the mind; they have afforded a last stand for ''antisocial'' studies like Latin and Greek. In state institutions, always at the mercy of elected bodies and of the public generally, and under obligation to show

136

T he Last Metaphysical Right

practical fruits for their expenditure of money, the move­ ment toward specialism and vocationalism has been ir­ resistible. They have never been able to say that they will do what they w ill with their own because their own is not private. It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute.

Not only does the citadel o f private property make ex­ istence physically possible for the protestant; it also pro­ vides indispensable opportunity for training in virtue. Be­ cause virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, it flourishes only in the area o f volition. N ot until lately has this fundamental connection between private property and liberty been stressed; here in the domain of private property, rational freedom may prove the man; here he makes his virtue an active principle, breathing and exercis­ ing it, as M ilton recommended. W ithout freedom, how is anyone to pass his probation? Consider Thoreau, or any hard-bitten New England farmer of Thoreau's day, beside the pitiful puling creature which statisra promises to cre­ ate. The comparison points to this: a great virtue is realiz­ able here, but wc must be willing to meet its price.

It may indeed appear before the struggle is over that the attack upon private property is but a further expression of the distrust of reason with which our age seems fatally stricken. When it is no longer believed that there is a re­ straining reason in accordance with which men may act, it follows that the state cannot permit individual centers of control. The repudiation of transcendentalism compels the state to believe that individual centers of control will be governed by pure egotism, as indeed they largely arc at present. A t the same time, this repudiation pushes aside the concept of inviolability. The modern state does not com­ prehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason. Once you credit

137

The Last Metaphysical Right

man with the power of reason a n j with inviolable rights, yon sec bounds beyond which the will of majorities may not go. Therefore it is highly probable that, subconsciously or not, the current determination to diminish the area of inviolable freedom masks an attempt to treat man as a mere biological unit. For liberty and right reason go hand in hand, and it is impossible to impugn one without casting reflection on the other.

These are some benefits of property in our time of crisis. But in ordinary times, too, property shows itself a benevo­ lent institution by encouraging certain virtues, notable among which is providence. I tread gingerly here, observing how close I have come to a subject of bourgeois veneration, yet I am inclined to think that there is something philo­ sophic in the practice of providence; certainly there is in the theory. Providence requires just that awareness of past and future that our provincial in rime, eager to limit everything to present sensory experience, is seeking to destroy. It is pre­ cisely because providence takes into account the nonpresent that it calls for the exercise of reason and imagination. That I reap now the reward of my past industry or sloth, that what I do today will be felt in that future now poten­ tial-— these require a play of mind. The notion that the state somehow bears responsibility for the indigence of the aged is not far removed from that demoralizing supposirioa that the state is somehow responsible for the criminaiity of the criminal. I will not deny that the dislocations of capi­ talism afford some ground for the former. But that is an­ other argument; the point here is that no society is health­ ful which tells its members to take no thought of the mor­ row because the state underwrites their future. The ability to cultivate providence, which I would interpret literally as foresight, is an opportunity to develop personal worth. A conviction that those who perform the prayer of labor

138

The Last Metaphysical Right

may store up a compensation which cannot be appropriated by the improvident is the soundest incentive to virtuous industry. Where the opposite conviction prevails, where popular majorities may, on a plea of present need, override these rights earned by past effort, the tendency is for all persons to become politicians. In other words, they come to feel that manipulation is a greater source of reward than is production. This is the essence of corruption.

While we are looking at the moral influence of real prop­ erty, let us observe, too, that it is the individual’s surest protection against that form of dishonor called adultera­ tion. If one surveys the economic history of the West for the past several centuries, he discovers not only a decline of craftsmanship but also a related phenomenon, a steady shrinkage in the value of money. This is a fact of gravest implication, for it indicates that nations do not live up to their bargains. Their promises to pay are simply not kept. What happens is something like this: The nation gets into a difficulty, perhaps through war, then, instead of getting out by means of sacrifice and self-denial, it chooses the easier way and dishonors its obligations. Popular govern­ ments, whose disrespect for points of reference we have un­ derscored, are especially prone to these solutions. A familiar term for the process is inflation, but, whatever it may be called, It represents the payment of pledges with depreci­ ated media, France has afforded some of the most instructive lessons in this evil. During the course of the Great Revolu­ tion, for example, it was determined to issue paper money based on the nation's vast holding in expropriated land. Despite this guaranty, the assignats declined at a dizzy rate. In August, 1795, the record shows, a gold louis bought 36 of them; in September, 48; in November, 104; in Decem­ ber, 152, in February of 1796 it bought 288, and eventually the issue was repudiated. But in the meantime, according to

139

The Last Metaphysical Right

one historian, there came upon the nation “ the obliteration o f the idea o f thrift. In this mania for yielding to present enjoyment rather than providing for future comfort were the seeds of new growths of wretchedness; and luxury, senseless and extravagant, set in: this, too, spread as a fashion. To feed it, there came cheatcry in the nation at large, and corruption among officials and persons holding trusts: while the men set such fashions in business, private and officiai, women like Madame Tallien set fashions o f ex­ travagance in dress and living that added to the incentives to corruption. Faith in moral considerations, or even in good impulses, yielded to general distrust. National honor was thought a fiction cherished only by enthusiasts. Patri­ otism was eaten out by cynicism .“ “ In our own day we have seen the franc decline to a minor fraction of its former value after the first World War and to a minor fraction of that after the second.

Adulteration can, o f course, be a useful political weapon, and one o f the first steps taken by a recent reform adminis­ tration in the United States was the inflation of currency, However much this may be defended as a means of meeting the particular contingency, the essential character of the act is not altered: values determined politically by govern­ ments under shortsighted popular control tend to depreci­ ate. There is perhaps a sort o f economic royalism in main­ taining that the standard of value of today shall not be dif­ ferent from that of yesterday.

Now productive private property represents a kind of sanctuary against robbery through adulteration, for the in­ dividual getting his sustenance from property which bears his imprint and assimilation has a more real measure of value. And this enables him to predict with some degree of assurance or, in the broadest sense, to examine his life. It

1.  A n d rew D.  W h ite ,         M a n tj in France C1S96X p- 79 .

140

T he Last Metaphysical Right

15 important to distinguish between the security which means being taken care of, or freedom from want and fear— which would reduce man to an invertebrate— and stability, which gives nothing for nothing but which maintains a constant between effort and reward.

There is, moreover, a natural connection between the sense of honor and the personal relationship to property. As property becomes increasingly an abstraction and the sense of affinity fades, there sets in a strong temptation to adulterate behind a screen o f anonymity. A Spanish proverb tells us with unhappy truthfulness that money and honor arc seldom found in the same pocket. Under present condi­ tions money becomes the anonymous cloak for wealth; telling us how much a man has no longer tells us what he has. In former times, when the honor o f work had some hold upon us, it was the practice of a maker to give his name to the product, and pride of family was linked up with maintenance of quality. Whether it was New England ships or Pennsylvania iron or Virginia tobacco, the name of an individual usually stood behind what was offered publicly as a tacit assumption of responsibility. But, as finance capi­ talism grew and men and property separated, a significant change occurred in names: the new designations shed all connection with the individual and became ‘’General," "Standard," "International," "A m erican," which are, of course, masks. Behind these every sort of adulteration can be practiced, and no one is shamed, because no one is identi­ fied; and, in fact, no single person may be responsible,^ Hav­ ing a real name might require having a character, and char­ acter stands in the way of profit. The invented names have a kinship with the dishonest hyperboles of advertising.

Accordingly, one of the most common tricks of the mas-

3.  T h e mosr strik in g  illu stration is the Spanish phrase for c o rp o ratio n , saciedad

anonima.

141

The Last Metaphysical Right

tcrs of raodero commerce is to buy up an honored name and then to cheapen the quality of the merchandise for which it stands. The names have been detached from the things and can be bought and sold. They were established by individ­ uals who saw an ideal of perfection in the casks they under­ took, and they were willing to be judged by their fidelity. In this way does utility drive out the old-fashioned virtue of loyalty to an ideal, which is honor.

Accordingly, if wc take into account all reasonable fac­ tors, it is by no means clear whether the world is growing richer or poorer. The idea that it could be growing poorer will of course be scouted by those fascinated by a multiplic­ ity of gadgets, but we should ponder carefully what is meant by this steady withdrawal of quality. We who have just passed through a great war arc familiar with the feeling that no matter how much we improve our wage, we never seem able to buy what we want; wc pay and pay, and yet the essential quality that we seek eludes us. Such deprecia­ tion has occurred to a marked extent over the last thirty years and to a lesser extent for far longer. The world is being starved for value. Wc arc being told bigger lies and wc are being fed less— this is the substantial fact flowing from the degradation of the ideal, A genuine article of fine material, put together by that craftsmanship which is ob­ livious of time, is almost certain today to be in the super-luxury class, if indeed it is not already a museum exhibit. The genius of value seems to have taken wings along with the other essences which nominalists would deny.

A most eloquent example may be seen in the story of housing. A hundred years ago, more or less, when men built houses to live in themselves, they were constructing private property. The purpose was one to be honored, and they worked well, with an eye at least to the third genera­ tion. This is a simple Instance of providence. One can sec

142

The Last Metaphysical Right

those dwellings today in quiet villages of New England and in remote places of the South, the honesty of the work that went into them reflected even in a grace of form. A century or a century and a half goes by, and they arc both habitable and attractive. Let us look next at the modern age, in which houses arc erected by anonymous builders for anonymous buyers with an eye to profit margins. A certain trickiness of design they often have, a few obeisances to the god com­ fort, but after twenty years they are falling apart. They were never private except in a specious sense; no one was really identified with them. Thus our spiritual impoverish­ ment is followed by material impoverishment, in that we arc increasingly deceived by surfaces. Wc lose in the most practical manner conceivable when wc allow intension to be replaced by extension.

We must now get back to some general aspects of our problem and inquire whether the distributive ownership of real property might not correct a subversion of values which has been a scandal of the last century. I refer here simply to economic determinism. The fact that property broke away from this metaphysical relationship gave it a presumptive autonomy which played havoc with our think­ ing about the whole world. A consequence evident to every­ body was the enthronement of economic man. The tendency of property under capitalism to aggregate lent powerful support to the notion that economic factors arc ultimate determinants. Perhaps this was only an interpretation of surface phenomena; yet so many men became the pawns of corporate economic bodies that it seemed plausible to ex­ plain all human activity as product or by-product of the search for economic satisfactions, (Wc must not forget, too, that Darwinism was lurking in the background.) Politics, arts, everything, came under the rule; man was primarily a food- and shelter-finding animal, and whoever wished the

143

The Last Metaphysical Right

final explanation of political organizations and cultural differences was advised to seek it in what really counted— the struggle for material accommodation. It came to be assumed that politics was a mere handmaiden of economics, and books describing the ancillary role of political belief were received as revelations. This was the supreme falsifica­ tion by the bourgeois mentality*

People who live according to a falsified picture of the world sooner or later receive sharp blows, and the first of these came in the Great Depression. It is interesting to note the reversal of roles which this disruptive experience effected. For everywhere the crisis was met by putting eco­ nomic activity under stern political direction or, in other words, by setting political authority over supposedly un­ changeable economic law. Such action, incidentally, oc­ curred in the United States and in Germany at almost the identical moment. This corrected the fallacy by which eco­ nomics had broken loose from the metaphysical hierarchy and presumed an exclusiveness. It will stand as a true obser­ vation that this episode marked the end of economic man. The principle re-emerged that what is done with economic goods must be somehow related to man's destiny. And so the world picture as final determinant was partially re­ established.

The idea of metaphysical fight subsumes property, and it is this idea that was lost to view in man’s orientation away from transcendence. If material goods had been seen as something with a fixed place in the order of creation rather than as the ocean of being, on which man bobs about like a cork, the laws of economics would never have been postu­ lated as the ordinances of all human life. But this again re­ quires belief in nonmaterial existence.

It would be naïve to take an unmixcd delight in the thought that politics has at length dethroned economics.

144

The Last Metaphysical Right

The simplest meaning of the event, together with that of many others wc have detailed, is that the world of 1789 has come to an end. There is a degree of comfort in knowing that we are not at the mercy of iron economic laws and that we can will the character of our wealth-getting activi­ ties, This could, in fact, be an important step toward ra­ tional freedom. But, under the present dispensation, the prospect of making politics the final arbiter is not without its terror. No thoughtful person can feel that we have found means of getting our political authority regularly into the hands of the wise. We have here something like the fallacy of humanism carried over into politics; our magistrates arc, alas, human, all too human. Can wc admire, or even trust a man who is merely the common denominator of all men? We have escaped one form of irrational domination only to be threatened by another which may prove more irrcsponsible— dom ¡nation by the property less bureaucrat. I emphasize this in order to keep before us the question of how to preserve the spirit of obedience in a purely secular society.

It is by now reasonably plain that the frantic peoples of Europe thought their solution was to turn over their lives to unrestricted political control. By doing this, they found temporary amelioration and the illusion of future security. But the people into whose hands they allowed authority to fall were so selfish and so irrational that they exemplified power without wisdom. They did demonstrate chat politi­ cal dictation can end economic chaos; but this, after all, was technique. The question ol what to do after the power of political control had been sensed found no reasonable an­ swer, The leaders cultivated a political fanaticism, which had the result, as Emil Lederer has shown, of institutional­ izing massncss. We have already pointed to the antithesis of mass and society. A primary object of those who wish to

145

The Last Metaphysical Right

restore society is the deraassing of the masses, and in this the role of property is paramount.

Private property, in the sense we have defined it, is sub­ stance; in fact, it is something very much like the philo­ sophic concept of substance. Now when we envision a so­ ciety of responsible persons, wc sec them enjoying a range of free choice which is always expressed in relation to substance. 1 certainly concur with Péguy that the relationship between spirit and matter is one of the great mysteries, but I do not think that the mystery calls for the annihilation of matter. It is, on the contrary, important to keep substance in life, for a man’s character emerges in the building and ordering of his house; it does not emerge in complaisance with state arrangement, and it is likely to be totally effaced by com­ munistic organization. Substance has a part in bringing out that distinction which we have admitted to be good; it is somehow instrumental in man's probation.

The issue involves, finally, the question of freedom of the will, for private property is essential in any scheme which assumes that man has choice between better and worse. It is given him like the Garden of Eden, and up to now he seems guilty of a second forfeit of happiness. An abuse, however, does not stigmatize ihe thing abused. And, under­ lying all, there is for us in this critical battle against chaos the concept of inviolable right. Wc prize this instance be­ cause it is the opening for other transcendental conceptions. So long as there is a single breach in monism or pragmatism, the cause of values is not lost. It is likely— though this is not a question to be resolved by babes and sucklings— that human society cannot exist without some resource of sacrcd-ness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.

Therefore one inviolable right there must be to validate all other rights. Unless something exists from which wc can

146

T he Last Metaphysical Right

start with moral certitude, we cannot depend on those de­ ductions which arc the framework of coherent behavior. I have read recently that a liberal is one who doubts his premises even when he is proceeding on them. This seems the very prescription for demoralization if not for insanity. And I think it true that the sort of metaphysical moral right wc have outlined bears comparison with the a priori principles which wc cannot doubt when wc do our thinking.

The Greeks identified god with mind, and it will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteris­ tic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions arc laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind. Moral certitude gives the prior assurance of right sentiment, Intellectual integrity gives clarity to practice. There is some ultimate identification of goodness and truth, so that he who ignores or loses faith in the former can by no possible means save tbe latter.

For centuries now opportunism has encroached upon es­ sential right until certitude has all but vanished. Wc arc looking for a place where a successful stand may be made for the logos against modern barbarism. It seems that small-scale private property offers such an entrenchment, which is, of course, a place of defense. Yet offensive operations too must be undertaken.

147

C H A P T E R            V I I I

THE POWER OF THE WORD

The csnuptwn of man is foUoived ky the cor­ rupt mn of lanpiiage.— E M E R S O N .

AFTER securing a place m the world from which to fight, we should turn our artencion first to the matter of language. The impulse to dissolve everything into sensation has made powerful assaults against the forms which enable discourse, because these institute a discipline and operate through predications which are themselves fixities. We have sought an ultimate sanction for man’s substance in metaphysics, and we must do the same for his language if wc are to save it from a similar prostitution. All metaphysical community depends on the ability of men to understand one another.

At the beginning I should urge examining in all serious­ ness that ancient belief that a divine element is present in language. The feeling that to have power of language is to have control over things is deeply imbedded in the human mind. We see this in the way men gifted in speech are feared or admired; we see it in the potency ascribed to incanta­ tions, interdictions, and curses. We see it in the legal force given to oath or word. A man can bind himself in the face of contingencies by saying Yea or Nay, which can only mean chat words in common human practice express some­ thing transcending the moment. Speech is, moreover, the vehicle of order, and those who command it are regarded as having superior insight, which must be into the necessary relationship of things. Such is the philosophic meaning of great myths. “ And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them,

148

T he Power of the Word

and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof," This story symbolizes the fact that man's overlordship begins with the naming of the world. Having named the animals, he has in a sense ordered them, and what other than a classified catalogue of names is a large part of natural science? To discover what a thing is "called" according to some system is the essential step in knowing, and to say that all education is learning to name rightly, as Adam named the animals, would assert an under­ lying truth. The sentence passed upon Babel confounded the learning of its builders.

As myth gives way to philosophy in the normal sequence we have noted, the tendency to see a principle of divinity in language endures. Thus wc learn that in the late ancient world the Hebrew memra and the Greek logos merged, and in the Gospel of John we find an explicit identification;

In the b eginn in g w as  the W o rd , and

the W o rd w a s w i t h  G o d , and the W o rd w a s G o d .

T h e sam e w a s in the beginn in g w i t h G o d .

A following verse declares chat logos as god lies behind the design of the cosmos, for "without him was not anything made that was made.' ’ Speech begins to appear the principle of intelligibility. So when wisdom came to man in Christ, in continuation of this story, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." The allegory need give no difficulty; knowledge of the prime reality comes to man through the word, the word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wis­ dom and at the same time some identification with the eternal, usually figured as everlasting life.

It seems that man, except in periods of loss of confidence, when skepticism impugns the very possibility of knowl­

149

T he Poiaer of the Word

edge, shows thus an incurable disposition to look upon the word as a means of insight into the noumcnal world. The fact that language is supra personal, uniting countless minds which somehow stand in relationship to an overruling di­ vinity, lies at the root of this concept. If, as Karl Vosslcr has observed, “ Everything that is spoken on this globe in the course of ages must be thought of as a vast soliloquy spoken by the human mind, which unfolds itself in millions of persons and characters, and comes to itself again in their reunion," language must somehow express the enduring part. Certainly one of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumcnal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transi­ tory phenomena. Not without point is the cynical observa­ tion of Hobbes that “ words arc wise men's counters— they do but reckon by them— but they arc the money of fools." Doctrines thus sharply defined can cell us whether a period is idealistic or pragmatic. Because this circumstance con­ cerns the problem of restoration at a critical point, it be­ comes necessary to say something about contemporary the­ ories of language.

The most notable development of our time in the province of language study is the heightened interest in semantics, which seems to stem from a realization that words, after all, have done things on their own, so to express it. I shall re­ view briefly the state of the question. The problem of the word was argued with great acuteness by the Middle Ages, and one of the first ma)or steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aqui­ nas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi et subs'tstendi were replaced by modi signijicandi et intdligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the

150

The Power of the Word

change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, and words become useful signs,

Semantics, which I shall treat as an extreme outgrowth of nominalism, seems inspired by two things: a feeling that language docs not take into account the infinite particu­ larity of the world and a phobia in the face of the autono­ mous power of words.

The semanticists are impressed with the world as process, and, feeling with Heraclitus that no man can step in the same river twice, they question how the fixities of language can represent a changeful reality, S. I. Hayakawa, one of the best-known popularizcrs of the subject, tells us that "the universe is in a perpetual state of flux." ^ Alfred Korzyb-ski has declared that the use of the word " i s ," in the sense condemned in his system of semantics, so falsifies the world that it could endanger our sanity. Such men work laborious­ ly to show by categories of referents all the things a single term can mean, and, at the same time, they take into ac­ count the circumstances of the user, apparently in an effort to correlate him with the world of becoming. (This should recall the earlier tendency of Romanticism to regard a work of art as expressive of the artist's emotional condition at the moment of its execution.) They desire language to re­ flect not conceptions of verities but qualities of perceptions, so that man may, by the pragmatic theory of success, live more successfully. To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as arc the empiricists, the claim to ap­ prehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doc­ trine chat ideals are hallucinations and that the only nor-

1.  Language in Action, p. 121.

151

T he Power of the Word

mal, sane person is the healthy extroverc, making instant, i nstinctivc adiuscments to the stimuli of the material world. To such people as these, Christ as preacher of the Word, is a ■'homosexual paranoiac." In effect, their doctrine seems parr of the general impulse to remove alt barriers to im-mcJiatc apprehension of the sensory world, and so one must again call attention to a willingness to make the physical the sole determinant of what is.

In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the scmanticists are actually testifying to the phil­ osophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconduc­ tor of the current called "emotion" and its concomitant of evaluation, They are introducing into language, in the course of their prescriptions, exactly the same atomization which we have deplored in ocher fields. They are trying to strip words of all meaning that shows tendency, or they are trying to isolate language from the noumcnal world by ridding speech of tropes.

Let us consider an illustration from Hayakawa's Lan-gtiagc in Action^ a work which has done much to put the new science before the public. It is easy to visualize a social situ­ ation, the author tells us, in which payment to unemployed persons will be termed by one group of citizens "relief" and by another "social insurance." One can admit the possibil­ ity, but what lies behind the difference in terminology? The answer is: a conception of ends which evaluates the tendency of the action named. The same sort of thing is encountered when one has to decide whether the struggle of the American colonists against Great Britain should be termed a "rebellion" or a "war for independence," In the first case, the bare existential thing, the payment of money to needy persons (and it will be noted that this translation

152

T he Power of the Word

docs not purify the expression of tendency) is like anything else neutral as long as we consider it solely with reference to material and efficient causes. But, when we begin to think about what it represents in the totality, it takes on new attributes (emotional loading, these may be called) causing people to divide according to their sentiments or their metaphysical dream.

It is in such instances that the semanticists seem to react hysterically to the fear of words. Realizing that today hu­ man beings are in disagreement as never before and that words serve to polarize the conflicting positions, they pro­ pose an ending of polarity. I have mentioned, earlier, people who are so frightened over the existence of prejudice that they are at war with simple predication. The semanticists see in every epithet a prejudice.

The point at issue is explained by a fundamental proposi­ tion of Aquinas: "Every form is accompanied by an inclina­ tion ." Now language is a system of forms, which both singly and collectively have this inclination or intention. The aim of semantics is to dissolve form and thereby de­ stroy inclination in the belief that the result will enable a scientific manipulation. Our argument is that the removal of inclination destroys the essence of language.

Let us look more closely at the consequence of taking all tendentious meaning from speech. It is usually supposed that we would then have a scientific, objective vocabulary, which would square with the "real" world and so keep us from walking into stone walls or from fighting one another over things that have no existence. Actually the result would be to remove all teleology, for language would no no longer have nisus, and payment to the needy would be neither "relief" nor "social insurance" but something without character, which we would not know how to place in our scheme of values, (The fact that equalitarian

153

T he Power of the Word

democracy, to the extent that it makes leadership super­ fluous or impossible, is repudiating teleology must not be overlooked here. Teleology enjoins from above; equali-tatian democracy takes its counsel without point of refer­ ence. The advantage of semantics to equalitarian democracy is pointed out by some scmanticists.)

Hayakawa has said further that ‘‘arguments over intcn-sional meaning can result only in irreconcilable conflict."“ With the proper qualifications, this observation is true. Since language expresses tendency, and tendency has direc­ tion, those who differ over tendency can remain at harmony only in two ways; (1 ) by developing a complacency which makes possible the ignoring of contradictions and (2) by referring to first principles, which will finally remove the difference at the expense of one side. If truth exists and is attainable by man, it is not to be expected that there will be unison among those who have different degrees o f it. This is one of the painful conditions of existence which the bourgeoisie like to shut from their sight. I see no reason to doubt that here is the meaning of the verses in Scripture: "Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you. Nay; but rather division" and " I bring not peace, but a sword." It was the mission of the prophet to bring a metaphysical sword among men which has been dividing them ever since, with a division that affirms value. But amid this division there can be charity, and charity is more to be relied on to prevent violence than are the political neo-fanaticisms of which our age is signally productive. Posi­ tivism cannot grant theology‘s basis of distinction, but neither can it provide a ground for charity.

When wc look more narrowly at the cpistemological problem raised by the scmanticists, we conclude that they wish to accept patterns only from external reality. With

I .  I t i J . ,  p. 63.

154

The Power of the Word

many of them the notion seems implicit that language is an illusion or a barrier between us and what we must cope with, "Somewhere bedrock beneath words must be reached," is a common theme. Some talk about achiev­ ing an infinite-valued orictitation (this last would of course leave both certitude and the idea of the good im­ possible). Mr. Thurman Arnold, who seems to have as­ similated most of the superficial doctrines of the day, takes a stand in the Folklore of Capitalism even against definition. He argues that every writer on social institutions "should try to choose words and illustrations which will arouse the proper mental associations with his readers, If he doesn’t succeed with them, he should try others. If he is ever led into an attempt at definition, he is lo st." On the same foot­ ing of ingenuousness is another observation in this work: "When men begin to examine philosophies and principles as they examine atoms and electrons, the road to the discovery of the means of social control is open." The author of Political Semantics, fearful of the intervention of abstrac­ tions, suggests that the reader, too, add something to the definition given, a notion savoring strongly of progressive education. "Possibly the reader himself should participate in the process of building up a definition. Instead of being presented with finished summary definitions he might first be introduced to an array of examples arranged in such a way as to suggest the 'mental picture’ in terms of which the examples were chosen."* There is just enough here to sug­ gest the Socratic method; but the true implication is that there are no real definitions; there are only the general pic­ tures one arrives at after more or less induction. The entire process is but a cHmbing-dowo of the ladder of abstraction.

Now whether it is profitable to descend that ladder is certainly not a question to be begged. Semanticists imagine,

3,  N o rm iD  H . H ioLon, p ih rtc a l Stmantici, p. fig.

155