UNTIMELY
PAPERS
_BY RANDOLPH BOURNE_
UNTIMELY
PAPERS
FOREWORD BY THE EDITOR
JAMES OPPENHEIM
[Illustration]
NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXIX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY B. W. HUEBSCH
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
Van Wyck Brooks has said of Randolph Bourne that he was the very
type of that proletarian-aristocrat which is coming into being. When
Brooks and Waldo Frank and Louis Untermeyer and Paul Rosenfeld and
I--a nucleus at the heart of a group including so many of the “younger
generation”--were joyfully publishing _The Seven Arts_ we inevitably
found the phrase “the young world,” and by this phrase we characterized
nothing local, but a new international life, an interweaving of groups
in all countries, the unspoiled forces everywhere who share the same
culture and somewhat the same new vision of the world. There was in
it the Russian mixture of art and revolution, the one a change in the
spirit of man, the other a change in his organized life.
At first Randolph Bourne was separated from us. He had not yet ended
his apprenticeship to that “liberal pragmatism” which he effectually
destroys in “Twilight of Idols.” He was still relying on the intellect
as a programme-maker for society. But when America entered the war, his
apprenticeship ended. That shock set him free, and it was inevitable
then that he should not only join _The Seven Arts_ but actually in
himself gather us all together, himself, in America, the very soul of
“the young world.” No nerve of that world was missing in him: he was
as sensitive to art as to philosophy, as politically-minded as he was
psychologic, as brave in fighting for the conscientious objector as
he was in opposing current American culture. He was a flaming rebel
against our crippled life, as if he had taken the cue from the long
struggle with his own body. And just as that weak child’s body finally
slew him before he had fully triumphed, so the great war succeeded in
silencing him. When Randolph Bourne died on December 22, 1918, all of
us of the “younger generation” felt that a great man had died with a
great work unfinished.
He had been quite silent for over a year, for _The Seven Arts_ was
suspended in September, 1917, its subsidy withdrawn because of our
attitude on the war. He was nowhere wanted. It was difficult even for
him to get publication for book reviews. Backed only by a few friends,
he held a solitary way, with hardly the heart for new enterprise.
Nevertheless he began a book, “The State,” in which he planned the
complete expression of his attitude, both destructive and creative.
This was never finished. We have only what amounts to an essay; but
undoubtedly this essay is the most effective and terrible indictment of
the institution of the State which the war has yet brought forth. It
furnishes a natural climax to _The Seven Arts_ essays; together they
make a book, both historic and prophetic.
We have nothing else like this book in America. It is the only living
record of the suppressed minority, and is, as so often the case, the
prophecy of that minority’s final triumph. Everything that Bourne wrote
over two years ago has been vindicated by the event. A great chorus
takes up now the song of this solitary, and like so many pioneers he
has not lived to see his truth made into fact.
This book is but the first of several. We shall have, under Van Wyck
Brooks’s editorship, his volume of cultural essays, his reviews, and
a “Life and Letters.” When the complete picture of Randolph Bourne
emerges he will be seen as the pioneer spirit of his age, a symbol of
our future. His place in the American tradition is secure. His life
marks the beginning of our “coming-of-age.”
This book relates to the war and the present crisis of the world. It
does a great service for our country. Without it our showing would
be weak and impoverished compared with the Older Nations. We may
rejoice that as England had her Bertrand Russell, France her Rolland
and Barbusse, Germany her Liebknecht and Nicolai, so America had her
Randolph Bourne.
CONTENTS
EDITOR’S FOREWORD, 5
I--OLD TYRANNIES, 11
II--THE WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS, 22
III--BELOW THE BATTLE, 47
IV--THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN STRATEGY, 61
V--A WAR DIARY, 90
VI--TWILIGHT OF IDOLS, 114
VII--UNFINISHED FRAGMENT ON THE STATE, 140
I
OLD TYRANNIES
(A Fragment, written in 1918.)
When you come as an inhabitant to this earth, you do not have the
pleasure of choosing your dwelling, or your career. You do not even
have the privilege like those poor little shivering souls in “The Blue
Bird,” of sitting about, all aware and wondering, while you are chosen,
one by one to take up your toilsome way on earth. You are a helpless
victim of your parents’ coming together. There is denied you even the
satisfaction of knowing that they created you, in their own bungling
fashion, after some manner of a work of art, or of what they imagined
an adequate child should be. On the contrary, you may be merely an
accident, unintentioned, a species of catastrophe in the life of your
mother, a drain upon the resources that were none too great already.
And your parents have not only not conceived you as a work of art, but
they are wholly incapable after you are born of bringing you up like a
work of art.
The last indignity perhaps is that of being born unconscious, like
a drugged girl who wakes up naked in a bed, not knowing how she got
there. For by the time you do dimly begin to apprehend your relation
to things and an intelligible world begins to clarify out of the buzz
and the darting lights and dull sensations, you are lost, a prisoner of
your surroundings inextricably tangled up with your mother’s soul and
all the intimate things around you. Your affections have gotten away
from your control and attached themselves to things that you in later
life discover you never intended them to touch. You depend for comfort
on attitudes of your mother or father or nurse or brothers and sisters,
that may be taken away from you, leaving you shivering and forlorn.
Your impulses have had no intuition of reality. They have leaped forth
blindly and have recoiled against or been satisfied with things of
which you did not have the choosing, and which only very partially
seem to concern themselves with your desires. For a few years, with
infinite tribulation, you have to dodge and butt and back your way
through the little world of other people and things that surround you,
until you are a little worn down to its shape and are able to predict
its reactions.
Everything about you is given, ready, constituted, rigid, set up when
you arrive. You always think that some day you are going to catch up
to this givenness, that you will dominate instead of falling in line.
Fortunate you are if you ever come to dominate! Usually as your world
broadens out more and more around you, you merely find a tougher
resistance to your desires. Your world at home is simple, personal,
appealed to by all sorts of personal manifestations. You can express
intense resentment and affect it, or you can express intense joy and
affect it. Mother and father have an invincible strength over your
feebleness, but your very feebleness is a weapon to break their harsh
domination. Their defenses melt against your scream or your chuckle. As
you grow older you become stronger to manipulate the world. But just
in proportion does the world become stronger to manipulate you. It is
no longer susceptible to your scream or your smile. You must use less
personal instruments. But that requires subtlety and knowledge. You
have still painfully to ferret out the ways of this world, and learn
how to use all sorts of unsuspected tools to gain your ends.
For there stands your old world, wary, wily, parrying easily all your
childish blows, and beating you down to your knees, so that you must
go back and learn your long apprenticeship. By the time you have
learned it, and have become master, behold! your life is inextricably
knotted into it. As you learned your apprenticeship, you did as the
world did, you learned the tricks in order that you might get your
revenge on this world and dominate it as it has tantalizingly held you
off and subjugated you. But by the time you have learned, are you not
yourself firmly established as a part of the world yourself, so that
you dominate nothing. Rather are you now a part of that very flaming
rampart against which new youth advances. You cannot help being a part
of that very rampart without extinguishing your own existence.
So you have never overtaken the given. Actually you have fallen farther
and farther behind it. You have not affected the world you live in; you
have been molded and shaped by it yourself. Your moral responsibility
has been a myth, for you were never really free enough to have any
responsibility. While you thought you were making headway, you were
really being devoured. And your children are as casually begotten as
you were, and born into a world as tight and inelastic as was yours.
You have a picture of great things achieved, but Time laughs his
ironical laugh and rolls you in the dust.
You would perhaps the more easily become free and strong if you could
choose your qualities, or regulate the strength of your impulses. But
you cannot even do that. Your ancestors have implanted in you impulses
which very seriously inhibit you and impede you in your grappling
with the world. There is anger which makes you misinterpret people’s
attitudes towards you, and makes you resist when you often should
accept. There is fear, which makes you misinterpret the unfamiliar and
haunts you with its freezing power all through life. There is love,
which ties you irrationally and too strongly first to your mother and
your father, and then to people who have no real part with you. And
there is the swift revulsion into hatred, when the loved one resists or
refuses you. These impulses, which are yours just because you are an
animal, soon become your masters, and further tie your hands in your
response to the bewildering world into which you have come.
We grow up in the home that society has shaped or coerced our parents
into accepting, we adopt the customs and language and utensils that
have established themselves for our present through a long process
of survival and invention and change. We take the education that is
given us, and finally the jobs that are handed out to us by society.
As adults, we act in the way that society expects us to act; we submit
to whatever regulations and coercions society imposes on us. We live
almost entirely a social life, that is, a life as a constituted unit
in society, rather than a free and personal one. Most people live a
life which is little more than a series of quasi-official acts. Their
conduct is a network of representations of the various codes and
institutions of society. They act in such a way in order that some
institutional or moral scripture may be fulfilled, rather than that
some deep personal direction of growth should be realized. They may
be half aware that they are not arrived at the place towards which
their ardors pointed. They may dimly realize that their outward lives
are largely a compulsion of social habit, performed, even after so
many years, with a slight grudgingness. This divorce between social
compulsion and personal desire, however, rarely rises to consciousness.
Their conscious life is divided between the mechanical performance
of their task, the attainment of their pleasures, and the wholly
uncriticized acceptance and promulgation of the opinions and attitudes
which society provides them with.
The normal, or the common, relation between society and the individual
in any society that we know of is that the individual scarcely exists.
Those persons who refuse to act as symbols of society’s folk-ways,
as counters in the game of society’s ordainings, are outlawed, and
there exists an elaborate machinery for dealing with such people.
Artists, philosophers, geniuses, tramps, criminals, eccentrics, aliens,
free-lovers and free-thinkers, and persons who challenge the most
sacred taboos, are treated with great concern by society, and in the
hue and cry after them all, respectable and responsible men unanimously
and universally join. Some are merely made uncomfortable, the light of
society’s countenance being drawn from them; others are deprived of
their liberty, placed for years in foul dungeons, or even executed. The
heaviest penalties in modern society fall upon those who violate any
of the three sacred taboos of property, sex and the State. Religion,
which was for so many centuries the most exigent and ubiquitous symbol
of society’s demand for conformity, has lapsed in these later days and
bequeathed most of its virus to the State. Society no longer demands
conformity of opinion in religion, even in those countries where
nominal adherence is still required.
There is nothing fixed about the objects to which society demands
conformity. It is only the quantity that seems to be constant. So much
conformity, like the conservation of physical energy in the universe,
but the manners in which people shall think alike, or behave, or what
objects they shall consider sacred, differ in myriad ways throughout
different social groupings and in different eras. Diametrically
opposite ideas are held in two social groups with the same vigor and
fury; diametrically opposite conduct is considered equally praiseworthy
and necessary; two social groups will visit with the same punishment
two diametrically opposite actions. To any student of primitive
societies or of the history of Western civilization, these facts are
commonplaces. But the moral is not a commonplace as yet. Yet it must
be evident that most of the customs and attitudes of these societies
were almost wholly irrational, that is, they were social habits which
persisted solely through inertia and the satisfaction they gave the
gregarious impulse. The latter had to be satisfied, so that anything
which cost the least in invention or reasoning or effort would do. The
customs, therefore, of primitive tribes seem to practically everybody
in a modern Western society outlandish and foolish. What evidence is
there that our codes and conformities which perform exactly the same
rôle, and are mostly traditional survivals, are any the less outlandish
and irrational? May they not be tainted with the same purposelessness?
Is not the inference irresistible that they are? They seem to us to
be intelligent and necessary not because we have derived them or
invented them for a clearly imagined and desired end, but because they
satisfy our need for acting in a herd, just as the primitive savage is
satisfied.
The most important fact we can realize about society is that to every
one of us that comes into the world it is something given, irreducible.
We are as little responsible for it as we are for our own birth. From
our point of view it is just as much a non-premeditated, non-created,
irrational portion of our environment, as is the weather. Entering it
in the closing years of the Nineteenth century, we find it as it exists
and as it has developed through the centuries of human change. We had
nothing whatever to do with its being as it is, and by the time we have
reached such years of discretion as dimly to understand the complex of
institutions around us, we are implicated in it and compromised by it
as to be little able to effect any change in its irresistible bulk. No
man who ever lived found himself in a different relation to society
from what we find ourselves. We all enter as individuals into an
organized herd-whole in which we are as significant as a drop of water
in the ocean, and against which we can about as much prevail. Whether
we shall act in the interests of ourselves or of society is, therefore,
an entirely academic question. For entering as we do a society which
is all prepared for us, so toughly grounded and immalleable that even
if we came equipped with weapons to assail it and make good some
individual preference, we could not in our puny strength achieve
anything against it. But we come entirely helpless.
II
THE WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS
(June, 1917)
To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against
war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which
the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of
war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists,
college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of
literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their
intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the
war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people. And the
intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent gesture.
They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively
willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American
democratic masses. A war made deliberately by the intellectuals! A
calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable
facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be
stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert
intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding
their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into
war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding
a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations
entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist
madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will
secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This
is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have
formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a
population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably
intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war
certainly did not spring from either the ideals or the prejudices,
from the national ambitions or hysterias, of the American people,
however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and however clearly the
intellectuals prove their putative intuition.
Those intellectuals who have felt themselves totally out of sympathy
with this drag toward war will seek some explanation for this
joyful leadership. They will want to understand this willingness of
the American intellect to open the sluices and flood us with the
sewage of the war spirit. We cannot forget the virtuous horror and
stupefaction which filled our college professors when they read the
famous manifesto of their ninety-three German colleagues in defense
of their war. To the American academic mind of 1914 defense of war
was inconceivable. From Bernhardi it recoiled as from a blasphemy,
little dreaming that two years later would find it creating its own
cleanly reasons for imposing military service on the country and for
talking of the rough rude currents of health and regeneration that
war would send through the American body politic. They would have
thought any one mad who talked of shipping American men by the hundreds
of thousands--conscripts--to die on the fields of France. Such a
spiritual change seems catastrophic when we shoot our minds back to
those days when neutrality was a proud thing. But the intellectual
progress has been so gradual that the country retains little sense of
the irony. The war sentiment, begun so gradually but so perseveringly
by the preparedness advocates who came from the ranks of big business,
caught hold of one after another of the intellectual groups. With
the aid of Roosevelt, the murmurs became a monotonous chant, and
finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be
disreputable and finally almost obscene. And slowly a strident rant
was worked up against Germany which compared very creditably with the
German fulminations against the greedy power of England. The nerve of
the war-feeling centered, of course, in the richer and older classes
of the Atlantic seaboard, and was keenest where there were French or
English business and particularly social connections. The sentiment
then spread over the country as a class-phenomenon, touching everywhere
those upper-class elements in each section who identified themselves
with this Eastern ruling group. It must never be forgotten that in
every community it was the least liberal and least democratic elements
among whom the preparedness and later the war sentiment was found.
The farmers were apathetic, the small business men and workingmen
are still[1] apathetic towards the war. The election was a vote of
confidence of these latter classes in a President who would keep the
faith of neutrality. The intellectuals, in other words, have identified
themselves with the least democratic forces in American life. They
have assumed the leadership for war of those very classes whom the
American democracy has been immemorially fighting. Only in a world
where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head
of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and
world-democracy. No one is left to point out the undemocratic nature
of this war-liberalism. In a time of faith, skepticism is the most
intolerable of all insults.
Our intellectual class might have been occupied, during the last two
years of war, in studying and clarifying the ideals and aspirations
of the American democracy, in discovering a true Americanism which
would not have been merely nebulous but might have federated the
different ethnic groups and traditions. They might have spent the time
in endeavoring to clear the public mind of the cant of war, to get rid
of old mystical notions that clog our thinking. We might have used the
time for a great wave of education, for setting our house in spiritual
order. We could at least have set the problem before ourselves. If
our intellectuals were going to lead the administration, they might
conceivably have tried to find some way of securing peace by making
neutrality effective. They might have turned their intellectual energy
not to the problem of jockeying the nation into war, but to the problem
of using our vast neutral power to attain democratic ends for the rest
of the world and ourselves without the use of the malevolent technique
of war. They might have failed. The point is that they scarcely tried.
The time was spent not in clarification and education, but in a mulling
over of nebulous ideals of democracy and liberalism and civilization
which had never meant anything fruitful to those ruling classes who
now so glibly used them, and in giving free rein to the elementary
instinct of self-defense. The whole era has been spiritually wasted.
The outstanding feature has been not its Americanism but its intense
colonialism. The offense of our intellectuals was not so much that they
were colonial--for what could we expect of a nation composed of so
many national elements?--but that it was so one-sidedly and partisanly
colonial. The official, reputable expression of the intellectual class
has been that of the English colonial. Certain portions of it have been
even more loyalist than the King, more British even than Australia.
Other colonial attitudes have been vulgar. The colonialism of the other
American stocks was denied a hearing from the start. America might
have been made a meeting-ground for the different national attitudes.
An intellectual class, cultural colonists of the different European
nations, might have threshed out the issues here as they could not
be threshed out in Europe. Instead of this, the English colonials
in university and press took command at the start, and we became an
intellectual Hungary where thought was subject to an effective process
of Magyarization. The reputable opinion of the American intellectuals
became more and more either what could be read pleasantly in London,
or what was written in an earnest effort to put Englishmen straight
on their war-aims and war-technique. This Magyarization of thought
produced as a counter-reaction a peculiarly offensive and inept German
apologetic, and the two partisans divided the field between them. The
great masses, the other ethnic groups, were inarticulate. American
public opinion was almost as little prepared for war in 1917 as it was
in 1914.
The sterile results of such an intellectual policy are inevitable.
During the war the American intellectual class has produced almost
nothing in the way of original and illuminating interpretation.
Veblen’s “Imperial Germany”; Patten’s “Culture and War,” and addresses;
Dewey’s “German Philosophy and Politics”; a chapter or two in Weyl’s
“American Foreign Policies”;--is there much else of creative value in
the intellectual repercussion of the war? It is true that the shock of
war put the American intellectual to an unusual strain. He had to sit
idle and think as spectator not as actor. There was no government to
which he could docilely and loyally tender his mind as did the Oxford
professors to justify England in her own eyes. The American’s training
was such as to make the fact of war almost incredible. Both in his
reading of history and in his lack of economic perspective he was badly
prepared for it. He had to explain to himself something which was too
colossal for the modern mind, which outran any language or terms which
we had to interpret it in. He had to expand his sympathies to the
breaking-point, while pulling the past and present into some sort of
interpretative order. The intellectuals in the fighting countries had
only to rationalize and justify what their country was already doing.
Their task was easy. A neutral, however, had really to search out the
truth. Perhaps perspective was too much to ask of any mind. Certainly
the older colonials among our college professors let their prejudices
at once dictate their thought. They have been comfortable ever since.
The war has taught them nothing and will teach them nothing. And they
have had the satisfaction, under the rigor of events, of seeing
prejudice submerge the intellects of their younger colleagues. And they
have lived to see almost their entire class, pacifists and democrats
too, join them as apologists for the “gigantic irrelevance” of war.
We have had to watch, therefore, in this country the same process which
so shocked us abroad,--the coalescence of the intellectual classes
in support of the military programme. In this country, indeed, the
socialist intellectuals did not even have the grace of their German
brothers and wait for the declaration of war before they broke for
cover. And when they declared for war they showed how thin was the
intellectual veneer of their socialism. For they called us in terms
that might have emanated from any bourgeois journal to defend democracy
and civilization, just as if it was not exactly against those very
bourgeois democracies and capitalist civilizations that socialists had
been fighting for decades. But so subtle is the spiritual chemistry of
the “inside” that all this intellectual cohesion--herd-instinct become
herd-intellect--which seemed abroad so hysterical and so servile, comes
to us here in highly rational terms. We go to war to save the world
from subjugation! But the German intellectuals went to war to save
their culture from barbarization! And the French went to war to save
their beautiful France! And the English to save international honor!
And Russia, most altruistic and self-sacrificing of all, to save a
small State from destruction! Whence is our miraculous intuition of our
moral spotlessness? Whence our confidence that history will not unravel
huge economic and imperialist forces upon which our rationalizations
float like bubbles? The Jew often marvels that his race alone should
have been chosen as the true people of the cosmic God. Are not our
intellectuals equally fatuous when they tell us that our war of all
wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good?
An intellectual class that was wholly rational would have called
insistently for peace and not for war. For months the crying need has
been for a negotiated peace, in order to avoid the ruin of a deadlock.
Would not the same amount of resolute statesmanship thrown into
intervention have secured a peace that would have been a subjugation
for neither side? Was the terrific bargaining power of a great neutral
ever really used? Our war followed, as all wars follow, a monstrous
failure of diplomacy. Shamefacedness should now be our intellectuals’
attitude, because the American play for peace was made so little more
than a polite play. The intellectuals have still to explain why,
willing as they now are to use force to continue the war to absolute
exhaustion, they were not willing to use force to coerce the world to a
speedy peace.
Their forward vision is no more convincing than their past rationality.
We go to war now to internationalize the world! But surely their
League to Enforce Peace is only a palpable apocalyptic myth, like
the syndicalists’ myth of the “general strike.” It is not a rational
programme so much as a glowing symbol for the purpose of focusing
belief, of setting enthusiasm on fire for international order. As far
as it does this it has pragmatic value, but as far as it provides a
certain radiant mirage of idealism for this war and for a world-order
founded on mutual fear, it is dangerous and obnoxious. Idealism
should be kept for what is ideal. It is depressing to think that the
prospect of a world so strong that none dare challenge it should be
the immediate ideal of the American intellectual. If the League is
only a makeshift, a coalition into which we enter to restore order,
then it is only a description of existing fact, and the idea should be
treated as such. But if it is an actually prospective outcome of the
settlement, the keystone of American policy, it is neither realizable
nor desirable. For the programme of such a League contains no provision
for dynamic national growth or for international economic justice. In
a world which requires recognition of economic internationalism far
more than of political internationalism, an idea is reactionary which
proposes to petrify and federate the nations as political and economic
units. Such a scheme for international order is a dubious justification
for American policy. And if American policy had been sincere in its
belief that our participation would achieve international beatitude,
would we not have made our entrance into the war conditional upon a
solemn general agreement to respect in the final settlement these
principles of international order? Could we have afforded, if our war
was to end war by the establishment of a league of honor, to risk the
defeat of our vision and our betrayal in the settlement? Yet we are in
the war, and no such solemn agreement was made, nor has it even been
suggested.
The case of the intellectuals seems, therefore, only very speciously
rational. They could have used their energy to force a just peace
or at least to devise other means than war for carrying through
American policy. They could have used their intellectual energy to
ensure that our participation in the war meant the international
order which they wish. Intellect was not so used. It was used to lead
an apathetic nation into an irresponsible war, without guarantees
from those belligerents whose cause we were saving. The American
intellectual, therefore, has been rational neither in his hindsight nor
his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual
reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they
thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class.
Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in
a world-war which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way
the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian
internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the
emotional thread of our intellectuals’ life. We had suddenly to make a
new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism
strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove
with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first
lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual
isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in
the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers
of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of
capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the
horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor
wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large
fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities
and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only ugly contempt
for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for
freedom abroad. All this was natural, but it tended to over-emphasize
our responsibility. And it threw our thinking out of gear. The task of
making our own country detailedly fit for peace was abandoned in favor
of a feverish concern for the management of the war, advice to the
fighting governments on all matters, military, social and political,
and a gradual working up of the conviction that we were ordained as a
nation to lead all erring brothers towards the light of liberty and
democracy. The failure of the American intellectual class to erect a
creative attitude toward the war can be explained by these sterile
mental conflicts which the shock to our ideals sent raging through us.
Mental conflicts end either in a new and higher synthesis or
adjustment, or else in a reversion to more primitive ideas which have
been outgrown but to which we drop when jolted out of our attained
position. The war caused in America a recrudescence of nebulous ideals
which a younger generation was fast outgrowing because it had passed
the wistful stage and was discovering concrete ways of getting them
incarnated in actual institutions. The shock of the war threw us back
from this pragmatic work into an emotional bath of these old ideals.
There was even a somewhat rarefied revival of our primitive Yankee
boastfulness, the reversion of senility to that republican childhood
when we expected the whole world to copy our republican institutions.
We amusingly ignored the fact that it was just that Imperial German
régime, to whom we are to teach the art of self-government, which our
own Federal structure, with its executive irresponsible in foreign
policy and with its absence of parliamentary control, most resembles.
And we are missing the exquisite irony of the unaffected homage paid
by the American democratic intellectuals to the last and most detested
of Britain’s tory premiers as the representative of a “liberal” ally,
as well as the irony of the selection of the best hated of America’s
bourbon “old guard” as the missionary of American democracy to Russia.
The intellectual state that could produce such things is one where
reversion has taken place to more primitive ways of thinking. Simple
syllogisms are substituted for analysis, things are known by their
labels, our heart’s desire dictates what we shall see. The American
intellectual class, having failed to make the higher syntheses,
regresses to ideas that can issue in quick, simplified action. Thought
becomes any easy rationalization of what is actually going on or what
is to happen inevitably to-morrow. It is true that certain groups
did rationalize their colonialism and attach the doctrine of the
inviolability of British sea-power to the doctrine of a League of
Peace. But this agile resolution of the mental conflict did not become
a higher synthesis, to be creatively developed. It gradually merged
into a justification for our going to war. It petrified into a dogma
to be propagated. Criticism flagged and emotional propaganda began.
Most of the socialists, the college professors and the practitioners
of literature, however, have not even reached this high-water mark of
synthesis. Their mental conflicts have been resolved much more simply.
War in the interests of democracy! This was almost the sum of their
philosophy. The primitive idea to which they regressed became almost
insensibly translated into a craving for action. War was seen as the
crowning relief of their indecision. At last action, irresponsibility,
the end of anxious and torturing attempts to reconcile peace-ideals
with the drag of the world towards Hell. An end to the pain of trying
to adjust the facts to what they ought to be! Let us consecrate the
facts as ideal! Let us join the greased slide towards war! The momentum
increased. Hesitations, ironies, consciences, considerations,--all were
drowned in the elemental blare of doing something aggressive, colossal.
The new-found Sabbath “peacefulness of being at war”! The thankfulness
with which so many intellectuals lay down and floated with the current
betrays the hesitation and suspense through which they had been. The
American university is a brisk and happy place these days. Simple,
unquestioning action has superseded the knots of thought. The thinker
dances with reality.
With how many of the acceptors of war has it been mostly a dread of
intellectual suspense? It is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality
necessarily makes for suspended judgments. The intellect craves
certitude. It takes effort to keep it supple and pliable. In a time of
danger and disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to cling to.
The time comes, if we try to hold out, when our nerves are sick with
fatigue, and we seize in a great healing wave of release some doctrine
that can be immediately translated into action. Neutrality meant
suspense, and so it became the object of loathing to frayed nerves. The
vital myth of the League of Peace provides a dogma to jump to. With war
the world becomes motor again and speculation is brushed aside like
cobwebs. The blessed emotion of self-defense intervenes too, which
focused millions in Europe. A few keep up a critical pose after war
is begun, but since they usually advise action which is in one-to-one
correspondence with what the mass is already doing, their criticism is
little more than a rationalization of the common emotional drive.
The results of war on the intellectual class are already apparent.
Their thought becomes little more than a description and justification
of what is going on. They turn upon any rash one who continues idly to
speculate. Once the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual
thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a cog in
the great wheel. There is no good holding back. We are told to dry
our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work.
Not only is every one forced into line, but the new certitude becomes
idealized. It is a noble realism which opposes itself to futile
obstruction and the cowardly refusal to face facts. This realistic
boast is so loud and sonorous that one wonders whether realism is
always a stern and intelligent grappling with realities. May it not be
sometimes a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal
through a sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense? The pacifist is
roundly scolded for refusing to face the facts, and for retiring into
his own world of sentimental desire. But is the realist, who refuses
to challenge or criticize facts, entitled to any more credit than that
which comes from following the line of least resistance? The realist
thinks he at least can control events by linking himself to the forces
that are moving. Perhaps he can. But if it is a question of controlling
war, it is difficult to see how the child on the back of a mad elephant
is to be any more effective in stopping the beast than is the child
who tries to stop him from the ground. The ex-humanitarian, turned
realist, sneers at the snobbish neutrality, colossal conceit, crooked
thinking, dazed sensibilities, of those who are still unable to find
any balm of consolation for this war. We manufacture consolations here
in America while there are probably not a dozen men fighting in Europe
who did not long ago give up every reason for their being there except
that nobody knew how to get them away.
But the intellectuals whom the crisis has crystallized into an
acceptance of war have put themselves into a terrifyingly strategic
position. It is only on the craft, in the stream, they say, that
one has any chance of controlling the current forces for liberal
purposes. If we obstruct, we surrender all power for influence. If we
responsibly approve, we then retain our power for guiding. We will
be listened to as responsible thinkers, while those who obstructed
the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall be
cast into outer darkness. Criticism by the ruling powers will only
be accepted from those intellectuals who are in sympathy with the
general tendency of the war. Well, it is true that they may guide,
but if their stream leads to disaster and the frustration of national
life, is their guiding any more than a preference whether they shall
go over the right-hand or the left-hand side of the precipice?
Meanwhile, however, there is comfort on board. Be with us, they call,
or be negligible, irrelevant. Dissenters are already excommunicated.
Irreconcilable radicals, wringing their hands among the débris, become
the most despicable and impotent of men. There seems no choice for
the intellectual but to join the mass of acceptance. But again the
terrible dilemma arises,--either support what is going on, in which
case you count for nothing because you are swallowed in the mass and
great incalculable forces bear you on; or remain aloof, passively
resistant, in which case you count for nothing because you are outside
the machinery of reality.
Is there no place left, then, for the intellectual who cannot yet
crystallize, who does not dread suspense, and is not yet drugged with
fatigue? The American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with
reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than
imperial Germany. There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours
from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade. What shall we do
with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness, or
who make “democracy” synonymous with a republican form of government?
There is work to be done in still shouting that all the revolutionary
by-products will not justify the war, or make war anything else than
the most noxious complex of all the evils that afflict men. There must
be some to find no consolation whatever, and some to sneer at those who
buy the cheap emotion of sacrifice. There must be some irreconcilables
left who will not even accept the war with walrus tears. There must be
some to call unceasingly for peace, and some to insist that the terms
of settlement shall be not only liberal but democratic. There must
be some intellectuals who are not willing to use the old discredited
counters again and to support a peace which would leave all the old
inflammable materials of armament lying about the world. There must
still be opposition to any contemplated “liberal” world-order founded
on military coalitions. The “irreconcilable” need not be disloyal. He
need not even be “impossibilist.” His apathy towards war should take
the form of a heightened energy and enthusiasm for the education, the
art, the interpretation that make for life in the midst of the world of
death. The intellectual who retains his animus against war will push
out more boldly than ever to make his case solid against it. The old
ideals crumble; new ideals must be forged. His mind will continue to
roam widely and ceaselessly. The thing he will fear most is premature
crystallization. If the American intellectual class rivets itself to a
“liberal” philosophy that perpetuates the old errors, there will then
be need for “democrats” whose task will be to divide, confuse, disturb,
keep the intellectual waters constantly in motion to prevent any such
ice from ever forming.
III
BELOW THE BATTLE
(July, 1917)
He is one of those young men who, because his parents happened to mate
during a certain ten years of the world’s history, has had now to put
his name on a wheel of fate, thereby submitting himself to be drawn
into a brief sharp course of military training before being shipped
across the sea to kill Germans or be killed by them. He does not like
this fate that menaces him, and he dislikes it because he seems to find
nothing in the programme marked out for him which touches remotely
his aspirations, his impulses, or even his desires. My friend is not
a happy young man, but even the unsatisfactory life he is living
seems supplemented at no single point by the life of the drill-ground
or the camp or the stinking trench. He visualizes the obscenity of
the battlefield and turns away in nausea. He thinks of the weary
regimentation of young men, and is filled with disgust. His mind has
turned sour on war and all that it involves. He is poor material for
the military proclamation and the drill-sergeant.
I want to understand this friend of mine, for he seems rather typical
of a scattered race of young Americans of to-day. He does not fall
easily into the categories of patriot and coward which the papers
are making popular. He feels neither patriotism nor fear, only an
apathy toward the war, faintly warmed into a smoldering resentment
at the men who have clamped down the war-pattern upon him and that
vague mass of people and ideas and workaday living around him that he
thinks of as his country. Now that resentment has knotted itself into
a tortured tangle of what he should do, how he can best be true to
his creative self? I should say that his apathy cannot be imputed to
cowardly ease. My friend earns about fifteen hundred dollars a year as
an architect’s assistant, and he lives alone in a little room over a
fruitshop. He worked his way through college, and he has never known
even a leisurely month. There is nothing Phæacian about his life. It
is scarcely to save his skin for riotous living that he is reluctant
about war. Since he left college he has been trying to find his world.
He is often seriously depressed and irritated with himself for not
having hewed out a more glorious career for himself. His work is
just interesting enough to save it from drudgery, and yet not nearly
independent and exacting enough to give him a confident professional
sense. Outside his work, life is deprived and limited rather than
luxurious. He is fond of music and goes to cheap concerts. He likes
radical meetings, but never could get in touch with the agitators. His
friends are seeking souls just like himself. He likes midnight talks
in cafés and studios, but he is not especially amenable to drink. His
heart of course is hungry and turbid, but his two or three love-affairs
have not clarified anything for him. He eats three rather poor
restaurant meals a day. When he reads, it is philosophy--Nietzsche,
James, Bergson--or the novels about youth--Rolland, Nexö, Cannan,
Frenssen, Beresford. He has a rather constant mood of futility, though
he is in unimpeachable health. There are moments when life seems quite
without sense or purpose. He has enough friends, however, to be not
quite lonely, and yet they are so various as to leave him always with
an ache for some more cohesive, purposeful circle. His contacts with
people irritate him without rendering him quite unhopeful. He is always
expecting he doesn’t know quite what, and always being frustrated of he
doesn’t quite know what would have pleased him. Perhaps he never had a
moment of real external or internal ease in his life.