relations between men (politics and government) in the air, as in
an earlier chapter I deliberately endeavored to raise man’s concern
with the physical universe up into the air. That is where I think
such topics should be now: they should be open questions toward which
the best attitude is an open attitude. Therefore I used a writer
like Georges Sorel as a wedge to break apart our fixed ideas about
classicism, romanticism and revolution.
To conclude the chapter, I shall now give several social attitudes
which I think are, in our time of dissolving answers and new-formed
questions, compatible with American Humanism as a basis. They are a
policy of detachment, the religious view of Cæsar and his things,
liberalism (yes, liberalism, but a special kind!) and anarchism (also
a special kind). And although in discussing these attitudes, I shall
refer them to the American Humanist, please understand that in this
connection I am identifying the intelligent skeptical modern man with
the Humanist. What, in short, should be the rôle of the civilized man
toward practical affairs? He should adopt a policy of detachment, urges
Julien Benda in his recent widely debated book, _The Treason of the
Intellectuals_.
In this work Benda deplores the entrance into practical life of
European intellectuals. For, he says, there are two moralities, a
worldly practical morality and a disinterested “clerical” morality,
and the two should not mingle to their confusion. They have existed
parallel throughout civilization, the “clerk” or intellectual guiding
himself by one set of values, the layman by a totally different set.
But today, charges Benda, the “clerk” forsakes his disinterestedness,
enters the practical world and promotes the growth of national,
class, race and party passions and hatreds. This is the treason to
the intellectual order committed by such diverse men as Kipling,
D’Annunzio, Sorel, Péguy and Maurras. Fidelity to the intellectual
order is detachment from political and class activities: it is setting
the example of pure devotion to the values of culture and to those
alone. Thus the intellectuals affect life, not by throwing themselves
into its partizanships and justifying them, but by removing from them
and setting up an example whereby men may know their own lay morality
for what it is.
This clearly is not the view of More and Babbitt. Their natural
aristocracy is not conceived as aloof but as exerting pressure directly
on lay affairs, as seeking to control them by its superior wisdom and
morality. But should the New Humanists gain in numbers, I would expect
to see among them before long adherents of Benda’s thesis, for personal
predilections will always lead some men toward such a standpoint.
Benda, it should be observed, does not quite take the religious view
of market and state affairs. “Render unto Cæsar the things that are
Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” specifies the clear
vision of two orders of things, but is actually the code of a very
paradoxical and rare type of person, the unworldly man of the world.
The things of Cæsar are to be known for what they are and conformed to
for what they are: they are not, however, to be justified. In this way
the religious person is in the world, but it is not his home, he is
not of it because his estimate of it differs from the estimates of the
men around him. Consider Socrates’ outward conformity to the customs
of Athenian life and his inward non-conformity. Why this paradox in
the religious person? Is it that he sees simultaneously the world’s
need for reform and the impossibility of reform? Does he see that
things in the main must be as they are, and only individual salvation
is possible? What makes him render unto Cæsar, but with such perfect
lucidity and no laudation, the things that belong to him?
The nut in these days of remoteness from religious inspiration is too
hard for us to crack. We can only wonder at the early Christian secret
of accommodating oneself to the world and yet placing oneself above
its customs and grandeurs. So though Benda approaches the religious
conception of two moralities to be adjusted to, he actually counsels
withdrawal from the first, the practical world, and a resolute turning
to the world of ideals. More and Babbitt, on the other hand, as I have
tried to show, actually do a little justifying of the economics of
Cæsar. They would have the civilized man do more than put up with a
necessary evil: they would have him defend it. All in all, we are not
likely to see much evidence in our era of a genuinely early Christian
view toward the market place and the legislative hall.
But can we imagine the undogmatic liberal lamb and the dogmatic
humanistic lion lying down together in the breast of one individual?
Not long ago I dismissed the liberals, perhaps too airily, for their
bankruptcy in ideas and their impotence in action. Not to speak of
the betrayal of liberal hopes by the Treaty of Versailles, impotent
the liberals had to confess themselves to be after the failure of
their concerted effort to secure a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Do their best, they could not avert that tragic stain of suspicion
on Massachusetts justice that will never wear off. Again in the
Smith-Hoover presidential election, they were as ineffective as their
enemies could wish. But one does not mock the defeated, one only asks
that such bitter lessons as defeat gives should be patiently conned.
Has American liberalism shown in the last two years any disposition
to revise itself, or to seize on a new idea, or to adopt a new set of
tactics, or to overcome its defects? Apparently only two liberals have
really tried to overhaul their policies and they are Walter Lippmann
and the late Herbert Croly. Of the two, Croly in my estimation went
deeper in his fragmentary writings in the _New Republic_ than did
Lippmann in _A Preface to Morals_. From 1924 until his illness in
1928 Croly appeared to be, in Arnold’s language, “turning a stream of
fresh and free thought” upon his previous stock notions and habits,
and in 1927 and 1928 the results began to be excitingly visible in
his editorials and occasional articles. In particular, the defeat of
the agitation for Sacco and Vanzetti seems to have deepened his sense
that some all-important element was missing from American Liberalism.
Liberalism must transform itself into a discipline of self-liberation
was his conclusion, and he hit on the term, Socratic Liberalism, to
distinguish the new conception from the old faith in legislative
action and environmental improvements. “What liberals need is not a
new concrete political or social program,” he concluded. “They need a
new evaluation of all programs, a new attitude towards them and a new
method of giving reality to them.”
Liberals have always been short on two things: skepticism and a full
realization of the inner life. They have been long on curiosity, on
tolerance, on human kindness, on a sense of the plasticity of man, on
optimism. They have put their faith in what Arnold called _machinery_,
that is, in programs of social and economic engineering, many of which
have turned out to be both available and realistic plans of action.
Generally speaking, the American liberal believes or hopes that the
ethical defect which capitalist economy introduces into the practices
of the State can be overcome by education, a belief that contrasts
with the pessimistic view of More, which we noted, namely, that the
defect is inherent in human nature. Croly’s radical proposal was simply
to marry liberal curiosity and sentiment to skepticism. “Although,” he
wrote in an important editorial entitled _Realistic Liberalism_ (_New
Republic_, November 23, 1927), “liberalism was fundamentally an attempt
to give increasing dignity, enlightenment and fulfilment to human life,
it has moved towards its goal almost entirely by trying to improve
the political and economic environment of modern men and women. Its
program called for the services of expert political or social engineers
and invoked the legislative power of the State to put the program,
which might be either negative or positive, into effect. But in all
its efforts, it assumed that an improvement of the conditions in which
people lived would liberate a corresponding moral and intellectual
energy in the people themselves. From this point of view, liberalism
was a well intentioned but inconsiderate attempt to redeem human nature
without asking human beings to participate in their own redemption,
except by devising social programs, winning elections, passing laws,
inventing more machines and increasing individual and social capital.
They were never asked to revolutionize and reform the inside of their
own minds or to ponder what, if any, the relation might be between
political self-government and individual self-government. They have
rarely asked the question whether a liberated society, in which there
was little or no oppression, no privation and no monopoly of power,
wealth and comfort, might, nevertheless, be composed of extremely
cheap individuals.”
It is commonly thought that skepticism of the machinery of social
reform puts a blight on one’s desires for material improvements. But it
does not necessarily do that, certainly not in Croly’s case. Skepticism
does blight opportunism and the exaggerated faith attached to projects
of external betterment, but the desire to experiment remains: only
the experimenter realizes he must not be cocksure of himself, he
must be humble and admit the need of a rigorous self-culture prior
to social experiment. Skepticism is in fact a great reviver of the
inner life, and Croly became in his last articles a preacher on the
neglected text, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.” Like Arnold, he
declared in substance that culture is a condition of internal working.
“Liberals are invited, consequently, to repent of their dependence on
mechanism and to practice on themselves the faith in enlightenment
which has always been their stock-in-trade.... The only realistic
policy for liberals is to start methodically to stretch and intensify
their consciousness in the hope that it will become eventually a more
adequate instrument for the watching, the understanding, the unfolding,
the harmonizing and the deliverance of their personal lives.”
To Croly, then, the important thing was that liberalism should be
more than a doctrine or a program: it should be a discipline of
self-liberation, for only the self-liberated are qualified to become
liberators of others. Anybody, of course, can mouth generalities
about self-emancipation, internal development, and so on, and anybody
does. The rare person--the person who really means to do what he
says--goes a step further and inquires and speculates about a method
of self-liberation, about some definite means of converting rhetoric
into facts. This, in such editorials as _Socratic Liberalism_ (_New
Republic_, December 28, 1927) and in such articles as _The Human
Potential in the Pacific_, _Christians, Beware_, and _Consciousness
and the Religious Life_ Croly proceeded to do. He wanted a scientific
method for self-study and self-development, and he actually proposed
one summed up in this sentence: “So the hypothetical separation by
the individual of himself as an observer from the accidents and the
compulsions of his actualized personality, and his systematic effort
to be aware of how this personality behaves, may prove to be the
indispensable route to liberated and reunited consciousness of self.”
This, as you see, sets up a working dualism in human psychology. But
the interesting thing is that Croly’s effort to introduce at the
back of liberal sentiments and liberal intellectual interests the
two elements of skepticism and a practical concern with one’s own
psychology was completely abortive. Not even the editors of Croly’s
own paper have picked up his revolutionary proposals and carried them
forward in the slightest way.[8] The most profound liberal in America
thoroughly failed when it came to lifting liberalism out of its groove.
But unless I am very wrong, some kind of _entente_ could be worked out
between a Socratic Liberal and a Socratic Conservative or Humanist.
They would at least find a ground for basic agreement and differ, when
they differed, on opinions as to the passing trends of the time.
Finally, we come to that special brand of anarchism which I anticipate
will be acceptable to some Humanists in the future. The New Humanists
have been freely upbraided by many people anxious as they say “to
do good to others.” What! these well intentioned persons have said,
bother with self-reform when there are so many ills of the world to
be alleviated! Play with definitions, heed the Inner Check, talk
about discipline when social abuses abound! “And what,” says one of
the epigoni of the _New Republic_, “has Humanism to do with the scene
outside my window: with the jobless men who saunter in the dusk, or the
dying village, or the paper mill abandoned across the river--this mill
whose owners have gone South where labor is cheap?”
A lengthy reply to that has been in print for seventy-six years in the
whole final section of Thoreau’s first chapter in _Walden_. “As for
Doing-Good, that is one of the professions which are full ... Men say,
practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming
to become of more worth and with kindness aforethought go about doing
good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather,
Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his
fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star, of the sixth magnitude,
and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage
window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness
visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence
till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face,
and then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own
orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered,
the world going about him getting good.... There are a thousand hacking
at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root and it may
be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the
needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery
which he strives in vain to relieve.... Do not stay to be an overseer
of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”
This is the twofold defence of the individualist: he confesses his
doubt that men’s knowledge and powers _as they are_ can do more than
merely meddle and muddle in social relations and he insists upon the
regeneration of oneself as being in the long run beneficial to those
around one. It is the very essence of the social criticism of the
American Humanists and conceivably to some temperaments among them it
might lead, as it did in Thoreau’s case, to personal secession from
the United States! The social anarchist like Thoreau is not heartless:
he is convinced of being helpless--like the man who has not learned to
swim and sees some one offshore drowning. The humanitarian plunges to
the rescue, but as he cannot swim, the only result is he drowns too.
The Humanist suffers from the spectacle of drowning souls, but he may
sensibly conclude with Thoreau that nothing can be effected toward
saving them until one has oneself learned to swim.
If American Humanism spreads, my prediction is that we shall eventually
see its adherents manifest as rich a variety stemming from certain
conventions of thought, feeling and discipline as we perceive in
Renascence Humanism. We shall see humanistic disciples of Thoreau
doggedly resisting the pleas of the Doing-Good professors, liberal
Humanists annoying by their socratic tendencies the orthodox liberals,
detached Humanists accused of defeatism and retreating to ivory towers
of thought, Socratic Conservatives like More and Babbitt, and perhaps
even a few Humanists tinged with the religious view of politics and
government. But we shall hardly see any measure of popularity attach
itself to any of the positions I have adumbrated.
XI
THE DILEMMA OF THE LIBERATED
_“Intellectual freedom is earlier and easier than complete
spiritual freedom.”_--T. S. Eliot in the _Hound and Horn_ magazine.
In the last sixty years isolated individuals of distinction have
told the Western world that it was living in a state of decline.
Nietzsche was probably the most tormented of these prophets and used
the strongest language. Modern man to him was an instrument out
of tune: mankind itself was degenerating. We in America had Henry
Adams charting the change from mediæval unity to twentieth century
multiplicity and theorizing about the degradation of the democratic
dogma. Today Bertrand Russell is quoted as saying that the clock of
Europe has been running down since the Renascence, Chesterton advises
us that we are simply existing on our Catholic capital and using it
up, Whitehead notes that science has lived on the accumulated capital
of the ideas of the seventeenth century and that religion has been
weakening for several centuries. But all these contemporaries manage
nevertheless to keep a cheerful outlook, Whitehead elaborating thoughts
for a new scientific and philosophic synthesis, Chesterton rejoicing
in his personal rediscovery of Catholic truths, and Russell being, as
a wit has expressed it, terribly at ease in hell. The man with the
most complete brief is Oswald Spengler, who studies the morphology
of history. In his philosophy of history synthesized from a survey of
eight cultures (Indian, Mayan, Greek, Egyptian, etc.), it is held that
we in the West have our spring and summer, are now in the autumn and
inevitably must pass to the winter stage of our cultural cycle. Gone is
any possibility of a Renascence: we have had ours, and are now in the
megalopolitan “civilization” phase, committed to technology, destined
for more huge wars, the uprising of untutored hordes, and the coming of
dictators. The arts will perish as important influences.
Spengler has popularized the notion of the decline of the western
world, but after all it remains just a notion to most people. Very
few are really convinced to the marrow that European and American
civilization is on a downward slope. Some say it is, but they merely
say it: some think so, but merely think it. To find a man who is
saturated with pessimism about our present and future state is almost
as rare as to find a Rosicrucian in contemporary intellectual society.
Our general tone is optimistic and conceited with only an occasional
breakdown when we focus on some particular spot and admit that it is
unhealthy now and likely to get worse. But we cannot grant that certain
epochs in the past were greater than our own: we cannot get it out of
our heads that we are an improvement on all previous generations: we
cannot shed our faith in progress and see our whole civilization as a
retrogression.
The chief exceptions are Paul E. More and Irving Babbitt. They differ
from Spengler in being much more cautious generalizers: they talk about
one culture only, and chiefly the last four hundred years of that.
They do not think metaphorically about history or try to construct a
science or philosophy of history. A chief point of difference is that
they repudiate fatalism, admitting that we are biassed to roll down one
groove of the future but not denying that other possibilities still
remain open and asserting that by a great effort we may select one
of these as our future. The nearest they come to writing history by
analogy is to point out the similarity between Alexandrian culture and
many of the phenomena of contemporary learning and to make a tentative
comparison between the decadent imperialism of Rome under Tiberius or
Nero and the present tendencies in the United States toward discarding
standards, increasing luxury, and fomenting factional strife just as
we approach the acme of power. But, generally speaking, Babbitt and
More confine themselves strictly to the portrayal of psychological
decay in one locality, Europe and America taken together as Western
culture, during one definite span of time, the last four centuries
and particularly the last two. I have remarked that they do not think
metaphorically about history, yet their teaching can be concentrated
in a metaphor, and perhaps without loss of subtlety gain in power of
appeal.
We can go about picturing the Fall of Western Man if we adopt the
Platonic truism that society is simply a man writ large, for we are
then free to figure Western society as an Atlas the Endurer who rebels
against being otherworldly, ceases to uphold the heavens, and turns
this-worldly. At first his old habits of thinking and feeling persist:
he has merely ceased to make effort to miraculously sustain his center
of gravity outside himself in the “other world.” But now his center
of gravity shifts to within: he no longer stands perfectly upright,
strained toward the Absolute, but leans a little toward this earth. As
he now thinks, the heavens did not all these centuries really need his
support; he was deceived by a myth, he thinks, and it does not occur
to him that he was the one who benefited by his posture and effort. As
he leans toward the earth, he rejoices in his freedom to lean. This is
the end of the Renascence. Well in the past now is the era of Gothic
cathedral building which showed what incomparable architecture Atlas
was capable of when he held up the heavens. Well past, too, are many
other strangely beautiful things, among them “La Gaya Scienza” of the
Provençal culture. From now on a new order of behavior, and it is at
this turning-point that More and Babbitt begin closely to observe
Atlas. What they see is a gradually shifting and settling of the center
of gravity of his psychology.
For a time he holds himself almost upright. He cultivates
_sprezzatura_. He is the seventeenth century gentleman and scholar
who does not pride himself on anything. He _fears_ specialization and
believes that “perfected good-breeding consists in having no particular
mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.” But he
sways a little: a slight turn and he is neo-classical and becomes
stiff, conventional, puristic, the center of his gravity in his mind.
He has begun to totter in the direction he leans--toward the earth.
Then More and Babbitt observe how the giant makes a violent effort
to right himself. It is the romantic recoil from the neo-classical
aridity. It is Rousseau and his followers raving against trying to
put one’s gravity-center outside oneself, or against trying to keep
it established inside oneself in the mind. Slowly the center changes,
then drops suddenly into the emotions. Atlas becomes fiery. He is a
Jacobin. He sets up democracies wherein popular feeling may sweep more
freely. He colors philosophy with subjectivism: henceforward it is not
the drama of the universe but the inward drama of the psyche that he
ruminates upon. He institutes rebellion in the arts, confusing them,
and he chases like a madman after sensation. The phenomena of his new
state--his predilection for idyllic dreams, his praise of spontaneity
and idiosyncrasy, his love of delicious revery, his dislike of
discipline, etc.--grow countless. Atlas is ruled by his feelings, and
they are not counterweighted by his mind. Whole parts and functions of
his psychology are going to rust, most disastrously of all his will. No
wonder he sprawls forward on all fours. With his center of gravity in
his unbridled feelings, he must fall.