nations of Europe can easily be measured by the observer of European
events during the last seven years. To that civilization belong the
ideals, to those cultures, the realities, of the Great War. And all of
us who have thought and fought in it have souls which are irremediably
divided between that civilization and those cultures. If we should
limit ourselves to the consideration of present facts and conditions,
we might well give way to despair: not for a good many years in the
past have nationalities been so impervious to the voice of the common
spirit as they are in Europe to-day. And the sharp contrast between
ideals and realities which has been made visible even to the blind by
the consequences of the war, has engendered a temper of violence and
cynicism even among those rare men and parties who succeeded in keeping
their ideals _au dessus de la mêlée_, and therefore did not put them to
the destructive test of a promise which had to be broken.
The moral problem which every nation of Europe will have to labour at
in the immediate future, is that of the relations of its historical
culture or cultures with the exigencies of the _humana civilitas_. It
is the problem that presents itself more or less dimly to the most
earnest and thoughtful of Europeans, when they speak of the coming
“death of our civilization,” or of the “salvaging of civilization.” To
many of them, it is still a problem of institutions and technologies:
its essentially spiritual quality does not seem to have been thoroughly
grasped as yet. But it is also the problem that confronts, less
tragically, with less urgency, but not less inevitably, this great
European Commonwealth which has created its own life on the North
American continent for the space of the last three centuries.
* * * * *
This European Commonwealth of America owes its origin to a small number
of adventurers and pilgrims, who brought the seeds of English culture
to the new world. Let us very rapidly attempt a characterization of
that original culture.
England holds as peculiar and distinctive a position among the nations
of Europe as Italy. She is the meeting-point of the Romanic and
Germanic elements in European history; and if her culture may appear
as belonging to the family of mediterranean cultures (to what we have
called the _latina civilitas_), to an English Catholic, like Cardinal
Newman, there was a time, and not very remote, when the Protestant
could be proud of its Teutonic associations. From a Catholic and
Franco-Norman mediæval England, logically emerges, by a process similar
to that exemplified by Italy and France and Spain, the England of Henry
VIII and Elizabeth, of Shakespeare and the Cavaliers: Renaissance
England. She flourishes between the suppression of the monasteries
and the suppression of the theatres. She moulds, for all centuries
to come, the æsthetic and political mind of the English people. But
she carries the germs of a widely different culture in her womb: she
borrows from them, already during the Elizabethan age, some traits that
differentiate her from all other Renaissance cultures. And these germs,
slowly gaining impetus through contrast and suppression, ultimately
work her overthrow with the short-lived triumph of Cromwell and the
Puritans.
After 1688, the law of English life is a compromise between Puritan and
Cavalier, between Renaissance and Reformation, which sends the extreme
representatives of each type out of the country, builders of an Empire
of adventurers and pilgrims--while at home the moderate Cavalier, and
the moderate Puritan, the Tory and the Whig, establish a Republic with
a King, and a Parliamentary feudal régime. But the successive stages
of English culture do not interest us at this point, except in so far
as America has always remained closer to England than to any other
European nation, and has again and again relived in her own life the
social, political, spiritual experiences of the Mother Country.
It is from the two main directions of English spiritual life that
America, through a double process of segmentation, Elizabethan or
Cavalier in the South, Puritan in the North, draws the origins of her
own life. It is in the Cavalier and the Puritan, still within the
circle of English life, that the germs of American culture must be
sought. The peculiar relations of the Cavalier and the Puritan to the
general design of European civilization define the original attitude of
this Commonwealth beyond the sea towards the other European cultures,
and are the origins of the curves which, modified in their development
by the addition of new elements and by the action of a new, distinctive
environment, American culture has described and will describe in the
future.
* * * * *
Puritanism is essentially a culture and not a civilization. The Puritan
mind, in its quest for an original Christian experience, falls upon
the Old Testament and the Ancient Law. The God of the tribes of Israel
becomes its God, a God finding a complete expression in the law that
rules his chosen people. A compact, immovable spiritual logic, a set
of fixed standards, a rhetoric of the virtues, the identification of
any element of growth and change with the power of evil, a dualistic
morality, and the consequent negation of a spiritually free will,
these are the characteristics of Puritanism, constituting at the same
time, and with the same elements, a system of truth and a system of
conduct. In both the meanings in which we have used the word religion
at the beginning of this essay, Puritanism is a perfect, final
religion. Transplanted to America when Europe was slowly becoming
conscious of the metaphysical implications of the destruction of the
old Cosmology--when the discovery of an infinite universe was depriving
a purely transcendent divinity of the place it had been given beyond
the limits of a finite universe--the infinite universe itself being
manifest, in the words of Bruno, as _lo specchio della infinita
deità_,--it gave birth to an intrinsically static culture, standing out
against a background of transcendental thought.
The principles of growth in Puritanism were not specifically
Puritan: they were those universal values that Puritan discipline
succeeded in rediscovering because every moral discipline, however
fettered by its premises, will inevitably be led towards them. Quite
recently, a sincere and ardent apologist of Puritanism recognized
in a document which he considers as the highest expression of that
culture in America, a paraphrase of the Roman _dulce et decorum_.
The irrationality which breaks through the most hermetically closed
system of logic, in the process of life, asserts itself by extracting
from a narrowly institutional religion values which are not dependent
upon a particular set of institutions, nor are valid for one people
only. But we might detect the germs of that irrationality already in
the very beginnings of the system, when Milton adds the whole weight
of the Roman tradition to the Puritan conception of democracy--or
in the divine words of the Gospels, through which in all times and
places every _anima naturaliter christiana_ will hear the cry of Love
rebelling against the letter of the Ancient Law.
What the Cavalier brought to America, we should have to investigate
only if we were tracing the history of divergent directions, of local
cultures: because the original soul of America is undoubtedly the
Puritanic soul of New England, and the South, even before the War of
Secession, in relation to the main direction, to the general culture,
has a merely episodical significance. Yet, though the founders of New
England were only Puritans, certain traits of the Cavalier spirit,
the adventurer in the pilgrim, will inevitably reappear in their
descendants, repeating the original dichotomy in the generations
issuing from an apparently pure stock: partly, because a difference
in beliefs is not always the mark of a fundamental difference in
temperaments, and partly because those traits correspond to some of the
generally human impulses suppressed by the choice of the Puritan.
There is one element which is common to Puritan and Cavalier in
America, and which cannot be said to belong in precisely the same
fashion to their ancestors in England. It is, in England and the rest
of Europe, a mythology formed by similar hopes and desires, by a
similar necessity of giving an imaginary body to certain thoughts and
aspirations, on the part of the spirit of the Renaissance as well as
of the spirit of the Reformation: a mythology which, in the mind of
the European during the centuries between the discovery of America
and the French Revolution, inhabits such regions as the island of
Utopia, the city of the Sun, and the continent of America. In that
mythology, Utopism and American exoticism coincide. But the adventurer
and the pilgrim were actually and firmly setting their feet on one
of the lands mapped in that purely ideal geography, and thoughts and
aspirations confined by the European to the continent of dreams, became
the moral exigencies of the new Commonwealth. Thus America set herself
against Europe as the ideal against the real, the land of the free,
and the refuge of the oppressed; and was confirmed in such a position
by her natural opportunities, by the conditions of pioneer life, by
contrast to European despotism--finally, by the Revolution and the
Constitution, in which she felt that the initial moral exigencies were
ultimately fulfilled. It is to this myth of a Promised Land, which
is neither strictly Puritan nor strictly Cavalier, and yet at times
seems to coincide with the less static aspects of Puritanism, that a
peculiarly American idealism, unconquerable by defeat and even by the
evidence of facts, abstract, self-confident, energetic, youthful and
optimistic, owes its strength and its courage: an idealism which is
hardly conscious of what Europe has been taught by centuries of dire
experience--the irreparable contingency and imperfection of history;
and which believes, as firmly as the Puritan legislator believes it,
that such institutions have been devised, or can be devised, through
which the ideal law, when thought out and written, will not fail to
become the law of reality for all times to come.
From two contrasting elements, a firm belief in a Law which was at the
beginning, and a romantic mythology, a third characteristic of the
American mind is thus engendered: a full confidence in the power of
intellect conceived as a mechanism apt to contrive practical schemes
for the accomplishment of ideal ends. This intellectual faith is
similar in its static nature to the moral faith of the Puritan: it is
the material weapon of Puritanism. Perfectibility is within its reach,
but not the actual processes of evolution. The intellect that does not
conceive itself as a process or function, but as a mechanism, can
tend towards, and theoretically possess, a state of perfection, but
will resent and condemn the gropings and failings of actual, imperfect
growth and change. Not without reason, the greatest individual tragedy
of the war, in a typically American mind confronted with the sins and
misery of Europe, was a tragedy of intellectual pride: of the inability
of a static intellect to become charitably active in the tragic flux of
European life; a tragedy which a little moral and intellectual humility
might well have spared to the generous hopes of America, and the
childish, messianic faith which irradiated for only too short a time
the bleeding soul of Europe.
* * * * *
If we have called Puritanism a culture, what name shall we reserve for
that vast and complicated collection of mechanical contrivances which
constitute the material body of American society to-day? We are in the
presence of a technology, a more highly developed one, perhaps (with
the possible exception of Germany before the war), than any that has
ever existed in the world. Technologies have a logic of their own, and
that logic is apt to take the place of higher spiritual constructions;
either when conditions of life lend a miraculous character to the
means of sustaining life itself and invest the practical actions of
hunting or agriculture with a religious significance; or when the
complexity of their organization is such that the workings of that
practical logic inevitably transcend the power of observation of the
individual agent, however highly placed in the machinery itself, and
moral or intellectual myths are born of an imperfect knowledge. This is
the case of America, and in America this technological or industrial
mythology has crushed out of existence the rival myths of the farms
and the prairie, allowing them a purely romantic value and decorative
function, through the industrially controlled power of the press.
Even pioneering, and the conquest of the West, a process in which
Americans of another age found an energetic, if partly vicarious,
satisfaction for certain moral and ideal yearnings, has receded, in the
mind of Americans of to-day, into the shades of a fabulous and solemn
background.
The industrial revolution followed in America the lines of development
of its early English model. This commonwealth beyond the sea,
agricultural and democratic, found in itself the same elements which
gave birth in the original country to an industrial feudalism, grafting
itself, without any solution of continuity, on a feudalism of the
land. The ineradicable optimism of the American invested the whole
process with the same halo of moral romance which had coloured the age
of pioneering, and accepted as a useful substitute (or rather, as a
new content) for Puritanic moralism the philosophy of opportunity and
of success constantly commensurate with true merit. The conception of
intellect as a mechanism to be used for moral and ideal ends, gave
way to a similar though more complex conception, modelled not on the
methods of pure science, from whose early conquests the revolution
itself had been started, but on those of applied science or of
practical machinery.
When, in the natural course of events, the bonds which kept together
the purely economic elements of the country became more powerful and
real than any system of political institutions, when, in fact, a
financial syndicalism became the structure underlying the apparent
organs of government, all the original ideals of America had already
gathered to the defence of the new order. Hence the extraordinary
solidity of the prevailing economic system in this country, when
compared with any European country. Economic, as well as political
systems, ultimately rest on convictions rather than on sheer force,
and the radical in America, in all spheres of thought, is constantly
in the necessity of fighting not mere institutions, as in Europe, but
institutionalized ideals, organisms and personalities which establish
their right on the same assumptions which prompt him in his rebellion.
There is less difference in fundamentals between a Carnegie and a Debs
than between any two individuals placed in similar positions in Europe.
An interesting by-product of this particular development is the myth of
the captain of industry, possessed, in the popular imagination, of all
the virtues. And a consequence of this myth is an unavoidable revision
of the catalogue of virtues, from which some were expunged that do
not lead to industrial success, and others were admitted because
industrial success is thought to be impossible without them. This myth
is not believed in by the aspiring multitudes only, but by a good many
among the captains of industry themselves, who accept their wealth as a
social trust, and conceive of their function in a manner not dissimilar
from that of the old sovereign by the grace of God.
* * * * *
This transposition of ideals from the religious and moral field to the
practical and economic, leaves only a very thin ground for personal
piety and the religion of the Churches. Yet there is no country in
the world (again, with the only possible exception of Northern Africa
during the first centuries of the Christian Era) which has produced
such a wealth and such a variety of religious movements as America. The
substance of that very thin ground is diluted Puritanism, Puritanism
which, in a vast majority of the population, converts itself, strangely
enough, as we have seen, into social optimism, a belief sufficient to
the great active masses, but not to the needs of “the heart,” when the
heart is given enough leisure to consider itself, through either too
much wealth or too little hope: through the discovery of its emptiness,
when the possession of the means makes manifest the absence of an end,
or through the spasms of its hunger, when means are beyond reach,
in the hands of the supposed inferior and unworthy. In this second
case, even a purely sensual craving dignifies itself with the name
of the Spirit. The more or less official Churches, in an attempt to
retain the allegiance of their vast congregations, have followed the
masses in their evolution: they pride themselves essentially on their
social achievements, a little doubtfully, perhaps, knowing that their
particular God has no more reason to inhabit a church than a factory,
and that the highest possible embodiment of their doctrine is an
orderly and paternally governed industrial organization.
To the needs of “the heart” minister the innumerable sects (and
here again, the American religious history repeats, in magnified
proportions, the characteristics of English religious life). But
because of the gradual impoverishment of the central religious
tradition of the country, because of the scanty cultural background
of both apostles and neophytes, it is hard to recognize in the whole
movement an intimate spiritual dialectic which might lend strength and
significance to the individual sects. A vague mysticism appropriates to
itself, in a haphazard and capricious fashion, shadows and ghosts of
religious experiences and opinions, whose germs of truth lie in other
ages and other climates. The only common feature seems to be a distrust
of intellect, derived from the original divorce of the intellectual
from the spiritual in the Puritan, a distrust which at times becomes
active in the denunciation of the supposed crimes of science. It is
this fundamental common feature which will for ever prevent any of them
from becoming what all sects fail to be, a religion.
The two states of mind which are nearer to-day to being true religions
are, on one side, Americanism (a religion as a common bond), and on the
other, Radicalism (a religion as a personal experience). Americanism is
the more or less perfect expression of the common belief that American
ideals realize themselves in American society. Radicalism is the more
or less spasmodic protest against such a belief, sometimes coupled
with an individual attempt at realizing those ideals in one’s life
and actions. The sharpest contrast between the two attitudes is to be
found in their ideas of political and spiritual freedom; which to one
is a condition actually existing by the mere fact of the existence of
American society such as it is, and to the other a dynamic principle
which can never be permanently associated with any particular set of
institutions.
The original spirit of Puritanism can hardly be said to be alive to-day
in America. In a few intellectuals, it confuses itself with other high
forms of moral discipline in the past, and reappears with a strange
fidelity to form rather than substance, as Platonism, Classicism,
Mediævalism, Catholicism, or any other set of fixed standards that can
be accepted as a whole, and can give the soul that sense of security
which is inherent in the illusion of possessing the final truth.
The consequence of such a deviation is that these truly religious
souls, after having satisfied themselves with a sufficiently vast and
beautiful interpretation of their creed, resent any cruder and more
dangerous form of intellectual experience much more keenly than they
resent crudities and dangers actually present in the nature of things.
They are intellectuals, but again, with no faith in intellect; they
are truly isolated among their fellow-countrymen, and yet they believe
in conformity, and assume the conformity of American society to be the
conformity of their dreams.
Such a static apprehension of truth, such an identification of
universal spiritual values with one or another particular tradition,
is in fact as much an obstacle to the new life of the human spirit as
the external conformity enforced by social optimism. But the polemic
against the older intellectuals is carried on by younger men, many
of them of recent immigrant blood, but all of them reared in the
atmosphere of American culture, and who differ from them more in the
objects of their preference than in the vastness or depth of their
outlook. There is a way of clinging to the latest fashion in philosophy
or in art which is not a progress in any sense in relation to older
faiths; of combating a manifest logical fallacy by the use of the same
sophism; of embracing sin with the same moral enthusiasm that in less
enlightened times was kept in reserve for the highest virtues only.
More important, for their influence on certain phases of American
life, than these intellectual echoes, are the moralistic remnants of
Puritanism. It is always possible, for small groups of people, strongly
endowed with the sense of other people’s duties, to intimidate large
sections of public opinion into accepting the logical consequences of
certain undisputed moral assumptions, however widely they may differ
from the realities of American life. It is under such circumstances
that the kind-hearted, easy-going American pays the penalty for his
identification of realities with ideals, by being deprived of some very
dear reality in the name of an ideal which had long since ceased to
have any meaning for him.
* * * * *
From whatever side we look at American culture, we are constantly
brought face to face with a disregard or distrust, or a narrow
conception, of purely intellectual values, which seems to be the common
characteristic of widely divergent spiritual attitudes. The American
does not, as the Englishman, glory in his capacity for muddling
through: he is proud of certain logical achievements, and has a
fondness for abstract schemes, an earnest belief in their validity and
efficiency; but no more than the English does he believe that intellect
is an integral part of the human personality. He recognizes the
identity of goodness and truth, provided that truth can be found out by
other means than purely intellectual: by common sense, by revelation,
by instinct, by imagination, but not by intellect. It is here that even
the defenders, among Americans, of the classical tradition miss the
true meaning of the message of Socrates and Plato, the foundation of
humanism.
What is peculiarly American in the opinions of American philosophers is
a clear and distinct expression of the common attitude. The official
philosophy of America has repeated for a century the views of English
empiricists and of German idealists, sometimes with very interesting
and illuminating personal variations. It has even, and it is an
original achievement, brought them to lose their peculiar accents and
to coincide in new theories of knowledge. But the heart of American
philosophy is not there: it is in pragmatism, in instrumentalism,
in whatever other theory clearly establishes the purely functional
character of truth, the mechanical aspect of intellect. Having put the
criterion of truth outside the intellect, and considered intellect as
the mere mechanism of belief, these doctrines try to re-establish the
dignity of intellect by making of it a machine for the reproduction of
morally or socially useful beliefs. The operation is similar to that of
an anatomist who, having extracted the heart from a living body, would
presume to reconstruct the body by artificially promoting the movements
of the heart. The doctrine of the purely pragmatic or instrumental
nature of intellect, which is the logical clarification of the
popular conception, is a doctrine of radical scepticism, whatever the
particular declarations of faith of the philosophers themselves might
say to the contrary: it destroys not the objects of knowledge only, but
the instrument itself.