be changed into a cunning savage? Will he become simply a creature who
exploits the earth’s resources and alternates his labors in production
with a complete spineless subsidence into physical comforts? Is the
day of Apeneck Sweeney and Molly Bloom dawning on a culture that has
known the sardonic Swift and the charm of Madame de Sévigné? Atlas who
used magnificently to bear up the sky--is he to be stretched prone in
comfort in the twenty-first century, no vulture tearing at his flesh as
at his brother Prometheus, but a radio to lull his mind?
The signs are plentiful of another transition: we have gone from
the dominance of religious values to the dominance of intellectual
ones and then to the primacy of emotional values. The last
stage--barbarism--will occur with the complete triumph of practical and
instinctive values. Then Atlas will indeed be but an economic creature,
cleverly producing what he needs by the least effort, and spending his
increased leisure in the pursuit of cheap distractions from thought and
serious emotion. He will truly have diminished to the ninth part of a
human being.
Such, in a picture, is my reading of the critique of Western
civilization so elaborately and weightily presented by Babbitt and
More. They have traced the movements of our psychological center of
gravity and view with foreboding the future of a society whose members
will not make the almost impossible struggle to elevate its center, to
resume the former standing posture of Atlas. But this simplification
should be followed at once by a warning to the reader who has not
consulted the whole body of works by Babbitt and More. Do not surmise
they have trimmed to a thesis. They have been the patient collectors
of historical evidence, and the thesis emerges from a study of all
the gatherable evidence. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” is
Babbitt’s working rule. Secondly, do not think that the evidence, while
susceptible of simplification in the mass, is in detail simple. Man is
as prolific in ideas as Nature is prolific in insects (unfortunately,
most ideas are of the insect order): he is a being as full of desires
as an egg is full of meat (and his shell has been broken): he is
as active and restless as a monkey (and about as purposeless).
Consequently, his mental, emotional and instinctive manifestations are
variegated in the extreme. Variegated, but not pure chaos, not without
a pattern. Babbitt and More are pattern-perceivers, not imposers of
arbitrary patterns. In the third place, do not think that all value
is denied to romanticism and naturalism. They have in fact many good
elements, which More and Babbitt fully recognize. What is bad about
these schools is their rejection of the more human elements in our
psychology, what is bad is their glorification of a lowered center of
gravity.
The New Humanist, as any one knows who is acquainted with his mind,
does not wish to turn the clock back but to incorporate the gains of
romanticism and naturalism into a broader synthesis with a more stable
center.
* * * * *
A few people can take seriously the question of the degeneration of our
civilization. If you are one of these, prepared to admit seriously the
possibility that the species of mankind may over long periods fall and
rise in quality, then you are likely to reflect seriously on all the
questions that American Humanists find of the first rank and interest.
If you approach these questions with the same intent sobriety with
which they are propounded, then you will find a dilemma confronting
you. At one horn there is Naturalism: at the other--Humanism. The
statement signalizes a change in this book: up to now it has been
an interpretation of American Humanism, from now on it will be a
criticism. It is plain that I find the naturalistic horn no horn to
grasp. Its disadvantages have been too forcibly presented by the
writers grouped around Babbitt and More. On the other hand, we would
have to thank their opponents had they revealed with equal skill and
force the drawbacks and dangers attached to the alternative horn,
but I cannot feel that the anti-Humanists have done their business
satisfactorily to date. They have been rather living examples of the
fallacies and partialities exposed by the New Humanists than the
exposers of the latter’s weaknesses. The reason is that almost to a
man the anti-Humanists were not seriously and fundamentally interested
in the questions put in the foreground by the Humanists. They saw no
dilemma, because in the absence of serious and passionate concern over
the main issues, there is no dilemma.
What is there new that the young chips from the old block of
rationalism can tell us? The limitations of nineteenth century
rationalism have been established for some time: years ago we cashed
all its cheques and its account has not been replenished. Likewise
the humanitarian’s credit since the Great War has been low. He may
tell us now that the problem of the will is unreal and the business
of improving the environment of man will gradually solve the problem
of human happiness, but we are not living in the hopeful spring of
1914. We do not see man any longer in a rosy light. It is the same
with the æsthete: he too is a pre-war creature. Representatives of
all these types were huddled together in the symposium, _The Critique
of Humanism_, and there carried on the old warfare of the allied
Romanticists and Naturalists against the Humanists. But that war has
been fought to a finish, and it is tiresome not to have some new
developments. Also it appears we have come down a long way from the
days of Shelley and Coleridge, of Darwin and Spencer, of Flaubert
and Zola who did indeed make Naturalism and Romanticism _something_
to argue about. We are down now to the intellectual nursery--to the
childish quarrelsomeness of a Burton Rascoe and the peevish complaints
of an Edmund Wilson (whose excursion, by the way, into the criticism of
Sophocles deserves a mirthful place in the memory of the _cognoscenti_).
We wish however to take the anti-Humanist attack at its high point,
not at its feeblest, and the acclamation of reviewers nominates the
piece by Lewis Mumford, _Toward an Organic Humanism_, as the best to be
had. The essay produces a glow in the reader, as Mumford almost always
succeeds in doing, but when the glow fades and the substance is coolly
inspected, the keen reader is bound to feel that he has been cheated
by the author’s cheerfulness. There is no originality of thought. The
usual contention that the American Humanists cut themselves off from
contemporary life. The usual contention that they are too negative.
The usual misinterpretation of “the inner check.” The air of an
enthusiastic master unveiling the secrets of “organic humanism.” And
the secrets? They appear rather banal, vague, inconclusive. Life is a
“multitude of functions”: we must live in a state of tension and grow
and renew ourselves: we must reconcile almost everything in sight.
“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be
as happy as kings.” At the end the essayist generously offers a big
bed wherein he assures us romanticist and classicist, Humanist and
mechanist, naturalist and idealist, divested of their philosophical
clothes, can lie down happily together. I am not convinced that we
can progress very far by the method of obliterating intellectual
distinctions which discriminating men have labored to erect. If this
piece by Mumford is the best anti-Humanist criticism, it looks as
though there was nothing to do but to set out from here to plough a
fresh furrow. Let me hope it will not be a lonely furrow as well.
It is, from my viewpoint, necessary to make an almost clean discard
of all the current adverse criticism of the New Humanists recently
committed by American writers. I would myself give away all of it to
the needy poor in intellectual circles for the few lines written years
ago by A. R. Orage on Paul Elmer More’s _The Drift of Romanticism_.
“Mr. More,” he said, “has also, it appears to me, the defect of
orthodoxy--he fails to realize the inevitability of heterodoxy and the
consequent necessity of paradoxy. The classic is for him, as it is for
me, the perfect literary form: all form, in fact, is classic. But the
romantic should be recognized, when it arises, as a challenge to form,
as an impulse demanding severer forms to contain it.” This, praise be
given, does take a step towards a new criticism of orthodox classicism.
It does not rest on mere dissatisfaction with the emotional side of
American Humanism, a dissatisfaction that is so widespread there must
be something to it, but it actually points out the defect. What is
more, it suggests a way to overcome the defect, and that not by denying
the distinctions involved but by incorporating them into a paradoxy.
It challenges the student to make an entirely new approach to an old
controversy.
Orage, it should be noted, has always been profoundly interested in
such questions as the American Humanists now raise anew: the quality
of modern society and the quality of the modern individual, the art
of life and a technique for practicing it, the nature of man and his
need for regeneration, moral responsibility and how to attain it, the
contraction of men into specialists and the way unto Renascence fulness
of experience. Without profound interest in questions of this nature,
there is no dilemma to be produced, and no need for a paradoxical
attitude to face it.
With that recognized, let us now press forward to grips with the New
Humanism.
* * * * *
Twentieth century Humanism undeniably has an appeal for the liberated
man or woman. Of course, I do not mean liberated in any absolute
sense, but use the word in its present conversational meaning to
signify those who have freed themselves of popular delusions. I mean
just that civilized minority that do not need the offices of H. L.
Mencken to open their eyes to current cant. They are, to be brief,
total disbelievers in the so-called “American Credo.” It is not easy
to shock them about sex. They have learned to view many of the facts
of life realistically. They are of a questioning turn of mind. They
prefer sophistication to godliness. Generalizing, we can say they have
shed two classes of superstitions, the superstitions that have usurped
the place of ancient religion and the superstitions that flourish in
the neighborhood of modern science. They do not believe, that is,
that either the churches or the scientists “can fix everything up.”
Emancipated from the official Christianity of our day, disillusioned
about the day’s science, they experiment and drift in a middle region,
an amorphous group, curious about the possibilities of life but
skeptical of finding a pansophy.
In the last decade and a half in America they veered toward
naturalism and now know what awaits them in that quarter. Romantic
disillusionment--disheartened optimism--the modern distemper so
eloquently confessed for our generation by Joseph Wood Krutch. Now
apparently a vanguard is veering toward Humanism. And so far one can
distinguish two main types among this advance guard--those who have the
humanistic temper by nature and those who are naturally of a religious
inclination.
What the humanistic temper is this book has sought to make clear.
I will add now one further example and one more description of the
temper. The example is the poet Robert Frost who in all probability
holds no formal views on American Humanism, and perhaps is largely
unacquainted with the ideas of Babbitt and More, but who nevertheless
writes verse highly satisfactory by humanistic criteria. An intimate
understanding of this poet’s psychology _through_ his works will
give you better than reams of exposition what the actual flavor and
humor and clear-cut quality of humanistic experience is like. The
description of the humanistic temper is by Robert Shafer. Writing
in the _Hound and Horn_, Summer Issue, 1930, Shafer said: “The true
humanist has ever been a practical man of the world; avoiding those
tempting chimeras metaphysical speculation and pseudo-science;
suspicious of rigid abstract formulations; preferring to define his
position tentatively, by the methods of critical scrutiny, in close and
fruitful relation to actual but ever-changing circumstances; avoiding
the self-defeating violence of revolution; preferring to work with and
through existing institutions; sacrificing sudden impressiveness to
steady, quiet persistence; not expectant of victory; and content even
with apparent defeat in untoward times if apparent defeat is the reward
of moderation, sane judgment, disciplined taste, and a comely serenity.”
As for the liberated who are religiously inclined, who have, that is,
the religious temperament, they are quite easy to describe. I refer
simply to intelligent civilized men and women who are accessible to
ideas of a religious order, who are prepared to entertain but only
to entertain religious assumptions, who experience a little thrill
from the (to us) occult language of the Sacred Books. I mean no more
than that: it amounts to a kind of sympathetic curiosity in religious
matters.
Now, forsaking the liberated for a while, I have to consider something
very unusual in contemporary experience--_the religious spirit_.
The difficulties in the way of conveying a fresh sense of this spirit
are almost insuperable. I cannot begin as Norman Foerster and other
Humanists do by professing respect and admiration for the great
organized religious bodies in their present condition, for the thing I
attach value to is the religious spirit and that has departed. I agree
with Hulme and other scattered observers that the present age totally
misunderstands religion. Warm ashes of the Christian Faith remain, most
notably in Catholicism, but we moderns are almost hopelessly clogged
with false associations, sentimentalities, stock responses to religion,
and nothing very potent in us can be lit up by the feeble glow cast by
the best surviving elements in the Churches. So thick is the forest
of our associations about religion, so lost and wandering are we in
it, that I shall scrupulously avoid citing any historic examples of
the religious spirit: that would in all likelihood lead simply to
tangential arguments, to treading in the mazes of our associations
about figures. Whereas it is the essence itself, this spirit so
foreign to our ways, that I would suggest. Without a prior common
understanding, examples may in fact be pernicious.
Try then, my reader, as I have tried, to throw out of the mind all
our stale notions about the spirit of the religious man. Realize as
strongly as possible the nonreligious motives that have entered into
modern Christian thought, making the “religious life” what Whitehead
protests it should not be, a research after comfort. Put to a violent
death the democratic feelings that have been allowed to corrupt the
uncompromising character of religions at their source. To go on in the
hortatory way,--shock your preconceptions one by one. Be prepared to
admit that a genuinely religious man would seem monstrous to you.
As I conceive of the religious spirit, neither the religious
inclination nor the humanistic temper approximate to it in the least
degree. There is an absolute difference. They do not grow into the
religious spirit, but must suffer a transformation. My emphatic
judgment is that Humanism can never merge into religion by a mere
extension of itself, but that there exists a chasm between the two
which the New Humanist _qua_ Humanist can never leap. Religious and
humanistic inclinations can make terms with each other, but between the
religious spirit and the humanistic temper there is opposition forever.
I point to the _early_ Christians who insisted, as Babbitt notes, that
there is only a stark supernaturalism and a stark naturalism with no
intermediate territory for the Humanist.
Briefly now I will essay a probably futile task, the adumbration of the
man of religious spirit. Probably futile, because he is incredible to
us. We cannot credit such a passion for perfection as he incarnates.
To us religion is anthropomorphic: to him religion is theomorphic.
In that you have the astounding reversal of our suppositions which
he makes. Consequently when we read, “So God created man in his own
image, in the image of God created he him,” we at once think of God
as being like man: the religious spirit, however, thinks of man as
being like God, an utterly revolutionary difference, for, since man
in his ordinary condition is obviously anything but Godlike, this
theomorphism stimulates in the religious spirit the tremendous ambition
to become like God, a perfect being. Could there be anything more
rash and sublime and impossible? Provided one has shed sentimental
conceptions of deity. “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is
perfect.” Every resource must be used, every power must be strained,
every second of life must be taken for the impossible task. The mind
is an instrument of perfection: it must accordingly be developed
to the utmost. The body must be strong to undertake the enormous
labors imposed on it. The emotions must be unbelievably enriched.
Consciousness itself must expand! Religion is indefeasibly the study
and pursuit of perfection: it requires not only that no stone but no
grain and no mountain be left unturned which might furnish a clue or
a stimulus to its quest. This, in its desperateness, its consuming
thirst, its impossibilism, is almost as remote, I need not say, from
Humanism as it is from Naturalism. To the religious spirit it is the
absolute or nothing.
Absolute Truth, absolute Beauty, absolute Goodness--these are what he
yearns for, and he is impatient of moderation, decency, good sense _as
ends_. He cannot, as the Humanist can, seek primarily for stability of
character: he seeks for perfection of character with stability coming
as a by-product. Nor is there any known limit to his skepticism: the
very nature of his pursuit of the unattainable enforces skepticism on
him to the last degree. The religious life is a continual destruction
of those elements of imperfection, illusions. “Prove all things; hold
fast that which is good.”
Obviously, such men as I speak of are extremely uncommon. Their
mark, I have tried to suggest, is that they make their life-task the
wholehearted, single-minded pursuit of a perfection whose fulness we
cannot even dream of, and to which we are quite indifferent as an idea.
They have in our era another mark that differentiates them from us as
completely as if they belonged to another race: an agony of bafflement.
In Biblical language, they have “a zeal of God, but not according to
knowledge.” Their zeal leads them everywhere, they stop at nothing, but
the form of their life in modern times is a searching, not a finding.
Zealous searchers, they are blocked by that “middle wall of partition”
spoken of in the Bible which they know not how to break down. They see
in their quest the need for an enlargement of their powers, but how to
increase them, that they do not know. Theirs is the agony of baffled
search for the means to the perfection they crave with all their being.
They would seem to know in terms of the most exasperating personal
experience that there does exist a radical discontinuity, as Hulme
thought, between man and God or the Absolute. The Humanist we have seen
dwelling on the discontinuity between man and nature. The religious
spirit discovers in his efforts toward self-perfecting, toward
expansion and intensification of consciousness, the discontinuity at
the other border, and it is this frontier between man and the absolute
that he emphasizes. Here, he says, is the all-important barrier, and we
cannot rest until we have leaped it.
Thirst for divinizing oneself, agony of frustration before the “middle
partition”--these are at all times the stigmata of a few men on our
planet. We can _recognize_ these stigmata even though what they signify
lies outside our experience, but because we have not experienced, we
cannot _comprehend_. Yet if one is interested in human limits, one has
to make a rude stab at description of this race of men. Have you never
heard that in the original doctrine of no single great religion is it
stated that man by nature has a soul? Then blame religious democracy.
Man in the great religions at their source is exhorted to labor for a
soul, is urged to acquire one, but religion says he begins without one.
Religion begins with stark naturalism, but ends with constructing a
bridge to a new life. Many are called to the work of creating the new
life--in that respect religion is democratic; but few are chosen, few
succeed in “crossing the stream”--an unpalatable saying to religious
democrats. This brings forward an idea that pales the humanistic
notion of a turning away from the natural self, just as the idea of
the divinization of man pales the idea of the humanization of man. The
religious spirit darkens naturalism far beyond the Humanist portrayal,
and at the same time it gives the possibilities of man an effulgence
that drowns with glory the modest conceptions of the Humanists. The
connecting idea brought forward is rebirth by a process as definite but
far more terrific than physical birth. This is an idea still present,
as we noted, in Pico della Mirandola’s _Oration_, but since vanished
from humanistic teaching.
The suffering of the religious spirit today, however, comes not, I
venture to say, from the pangs of rebirth but from non-satisfaction.
He cannot conceive a soul and therefore cannot gestate one. No wonder
a modern religious spirit occasionally shatters itself in madness!
The zeal of God, but not according to knowledge, is fraught with the
utmost danger, for the truth of our human situation we are told is
terror-inspiring, and a sudden glimpse--
We have done with the armchair mysticism prevalent in the West today.
It is devoid of the desperation, the readiness to leave the library
and the round of civilized comforts and take all the risks, the sheer
heroism that mark the genuine religious man. It clearly has naught of
the spirit of these Buddhistic verses.
Scorched, frozen, and alone,
In fearsome forest dwelling,
Naked, no fire to warm,
Bent on the quest is the Sage.
The distinction is not, please mark however, between comfortable
literary mysticism and self-torturing asceticism. Great religious
teachers have pointed out the fallacy of the latter as the Way. Our
distinction is between the unwillingness to experiment dangerously with
life and the resolute disposition of the genuinely religious to go to
any lengths, if necessary.
And now we may come back to ourselves, the liberated, who have been
illuminated by the steady light thrown on Naturalism by the New
Humanists and have afterwards turned to examine critically Humanism
itself. By the blazing light shafted on it from the religious spirit,
what do we now see there? Holding Humanism up against this searching
sun-like radiance, shall we find ourselves in an unexpected dilemma?
* * * * *