Chapter VIII: Part 8

After all, Sorelism in the United States is a matter of academic interest. Extremists of the left constitute a negligible and senseless group, and the moderate socialists are pitifully weak. The liberals? Bankrupt in ideas; seemingly ineffective in political action; decadent in morale if one may judge by the slackness of the men being groomed to follow the generation of Croly, Lovett, Villard and Alvin Johnson. As for the labor movement in general, is it not the despair of Communist, Socialist and Liberal alike? Inaccessible to ideas, unrebellious, shortsighted, what can be hoped from the American Federation of Labor other than a perpetual seesaw battle for higher wages and shorter hours? The Wandering Jew, Daniel Halévy told Sorel, may be taken as a symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind, condemned as he is to march for ever without knowing rest. But there is naught of the Wandering Jew about the groups just mentioned, and a Sorelist among them would wear his heart out in the attempt to convey a sublime vision of future ethics.

For contrast, we may turn to Babbitt’s political theorizing in _Democracy and Leadership_, which has been called without exaggeration perhaps the weightiest book in its field written by an American. “When studied with any degree of thoroughness,” writes Babbitt in his introduction, “the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.” The order is correct. But although Babbitt thinks more coolly and, I suspect, with greater ease on politics and economics than More, he too is least satisfactory in economics: his treatment of that science is almost incidental and certainly slighting. In the opinion of many, this will not do.

Let us unearth what there is of Babbitt’s thought on the economic problem. He rightly criticizes unorthodox political economy for its purely quantitative view of work. True enough, as he notes, orthodox political economy prepared the way for this view: Locke practically identified work with physical effort and made it the sole legitimate source of property, and Adam Smith tended to a similar conception of work in relation to property. But the Marxist, according to Babbitt, fell into the deeper fallacy of identifying work with value. Babbitt then proceeds to discriminate among physical work, mental working on the material order, and ethical work on oneself.

The discrimination is valid, but in making it Babbitt seems to accept the interpretations of orthodox political economy. Value, he appears to hold, is largely determined by the law of supply and demand and by competition. He notes that “as a result of the concentrated mental effort of the gifted few, an effort displayed either in invention or else in organization and management, the common laborer may today enjoy comforts that were out of the reach even of the opulent only two or three generations ago,” and he adds the laborer “should be the first to recognize that exceptional capacity should receive exceptional rewards.” Quite a point is made of competition. “Above all, social justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total suppression of competition. Without competition it is impossible that the ends of true justice should be fulfilled, namely, that every man should receive according to his works.... The remedy for the evils of competition is found in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and successful, and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the under dog.”

But surely Babbitt knows the arguments against each of these points, and my regret is that he did not, while making his defence of the established economic order, deal closely with the specific arguments against it. Let me cite some of these which seem to necessitate refutation if one is to defend with a good intellectual conscience the existing system. The Law of Supply and Demand (or L. S. D. for short) has absolutely no weight outside the market: it is concerned only with the relations of Sellers and Buyers, Supply being the abstraction of all the Sellers and Demand the abstraction of all the Buyers. _Outside the market_ what happens? “In all transactions between friends, between members of the same family, between Governments and their servants, in public services, and in all institutions run socially or by gentlemen, L. S. D. is kicked out of doors and the Rule of Supply and Need takes its place,” says Orage in _An Alphabet of Economics_. Again, I should say Babbitt does not separate Capitalists and Management as he ought to, when he speaks of the gifted minority to whom the workman owes his increase in comfort (by the way, is increased comfort a relevant argument?). Laborers are responsible to Management and must always be. Management today is responsible to the Capitalist, but must it always be? That is the question of moment to those who speculate about a new industrial synthesis. As for the competition extolled by Babbitt, that has to do with the price system which, it is a commonplace, is superimposed on the productive system. We may profitably hear from Orage again. “Production concerns values; competition concerns prices. From production to competition is a transition from value-creating to price-fixing; and the competitive system is one in which prices are left to be decided by the play of the market.... Essentially Competition is sale by auction, and usually without reserve.” A reserve price being impossible for perishable commodities, “Competition is thus all in favor of nonperishable commodities (Capital in particular); but it is all against perishable commodities, and Labor in particular.” Under those conditions one may have a feeling for the under dog whose energy and skill are perishable that cannot fairly be described as sickly sentimentality. That in his plight the under dog should have to hear so much about the bracing effects of keen competition for him in industrial society--this is adding mockery to injury.

My own view is that capitalism cannot be whitewashed, and for the reason that it is founded on only a comparatively narrow portion of human psychology. It is a function of Practical Man or Instinctive Man: it enormously stimulates greed and virtually debars the entrance of any generous motive. It is guaranteed to make men acquisitive but not magnanimous. For my life, I cannot see how it can admit within itself any forces of regeneration. Unsound in theory, tending always to be swindling and ruthless, it manages to work, but only after a fashion that can satisfy no one but a very small class of profiteers. There are plenty to make emotional protests against this state of economic affairs but we ought to supplement them with hard practical criticism. For that let us go to a quarter not tinged with Bolshevik or anti-capitalist sentiment: let us resort to the advocates of the highly interesting Douglas Social Credit Plan in England. They point out that the purpose of an economic system is to produce as much as possible and to get the things produced into the hands of consumers. If we are producing at our maximum, and there is not enough to go around, that is, if only a proportion of the potential consumers can be satisfied, then there is nothing more to say from the economic viewpoint. Suffering from unsatisfied need is irrelevant to the economist if maximum production can provide for only fifty per cent, let us say, of our population. But the fact is that we produce nowhere near our maximum, not even in wartime when production speeds up enormously. Limited or falling production, say the Douglas people, is only a specter: nothing more. Hence, it follows that the present system is criticized in the most damaging way by two undoubted facts: (1) the presence of poverty on a large scale, that is the presence of hordes of potential consumers who cannot acquire commodities, and (2) by unemployment, which as I write is estimated at from three millions to eight millions in our country, unemployment meaning unused producing ability. We can produce more, immensely more than we do: witness the fact of unemployment. We can consume far more: witness the fact of poverty. Understand this, and you have some idea of the sheer inefficiency of the established system. One important qualification must be added: the Social Credit people find the source of the trouble not in private ownership of the tools of production or in unequal distribution but in the money industry, in the financial system, which is what they propose to reform.

I have gone into details of criticism in order to show that the New Humanists are fairly caught on the capital charge of _failing to recognize the economic problem_. However sensitive they may be to the “excesses” of capitalism, they accept it and the financial system with it as the defensible status quo, and with no great marshalling of reasons either. I would urge on them, not any one of the proposed solutions current, but the adoption of the mood and temper appropriate to a baffling problem whose dimensions cannot be ignored. The case as I diagnose it is similar to that in which the modern man finds himself put in respect to science. The case calls for an awakened curiosity, earnest search for solutions, the keenest criticism of both the status quo and new theories, the cultivation of impartiality. I should like to see the New Humanists with their background of ideas, their equipment for criticism, their breadth of vision, convert themselves into eager, impartial students of our common economic problems. I find them to be not free-ranging students in this field, but tied uncritically to the existing industrial order, an order furthermore that has had a comparatively brief historical existence. But why should they not become our best critics of economic questions, uniting general culture to familiarity with the special science of production?

What we need stands out with absolute clarity: a livelier research into the alternatives to or revisions of capitalism and a livelier criticism of these alternatives or revisions. Many American intellectuals at the present moment, discouraged with democracy, think of only two alternative possibilities, Bolshevism and Fascism, each, I may say, being abhorrent to the New Humanist. For the American Humanist appears to commit himself completely to the democratic experiment, and to have more respect for the old ideas of democracy than you usually encounter nowadays in our disillusioned intelligentsia. But what vitiates democracy so terribly that it becomes a pretended thing? Profiteer economics. On the other hand, in the case of Bolshevism as in the case of Fascism, democracy disappears; individualism goes down to defeat before the dictatorship. If we would retain democracy then, the fact not the pretence, we must revise the economics associated with it, and that perhaps is possible. At any rate, we have not exhausted all the alternatives even in speculating about revision. We have not even assembled all of them before us for study and discussion.

The proof of this is our ignorance of the dazzling Social Credit Plan of Major C. H. Douglas, which I mentioned above. Agitated for in England ever since the Great War, it has yet failed to cross the Atlantic, or rather one has to use a high-powered microscope to see the few American students of it. This is easily explainable, however, since with justice Major Douglas has been called the Einstein of economics, and a considerable amount of free brain, of unmortgaged intellectual energy, must be expended to grasp his novel and yet non-revolutionary, non-confiscatory scheme of reform. Although I know it is impossible to understand his proposal from the germ, I yet will give the germ-proposition on the chance that it will pique the curiosity of those rare readers who can detect even in the germ the presence of a new principle that promises to be worth study. The gist of his proposal is simply to regulate prices by productivity, by relation, that is, to supply. I will add that the Douglas criticism of Marxian economics is that it confuses ownership with control. We must look, not to ownership, but to the financial system for the real control that is exercised today over industry. Has Major Douglas, as it is claimed, reached the bottom of economics?

I think the New Humanists should be interested in the question, and if they should, they would certainly steal a march on that portion of intellectual America which prides itself on its vigilance for new ideas, but which to some of us often appears a little sluggish in living up to its boast. Perhaps in the Social Credit Plan the Humanists would discover not only the key economic theory, but a theory which when applied would make their politics entirely feasible. For the Plan alters nothing but the financial system.

We have all seen what one writer calls the degeneration of government from a plane of democratic idealism and tolerable administration to a plane of control by political machines, ward-bosses and racketeers, and seeing it a great many intellectuals have given up hope of democracy, have ceased to be even interested in it. But this writer, Jean Toomer, goes on to speak for a larger mass of our citizens when he notes that “there is still enough idealism left in us, there is still active in us a sense of decency sufficiently strong to make us feel unhappy about this trend. We cannot laugh at it or shrug our shoulders and play the game ... there still exists in most of us a fairly strong wish to see the American political experiment turn out well; and for this reason we ask of a political writer that he show a degree of resistance to political rottenness, a degree of insistence on decency, ability, and intelligence in politics.” Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_, the supreme Humanist treatise on American political thought, was written not for futilitarians or cynics but precisely for the mass of intelligent citizens described by Toomer who wish to see democracy turn out well. The baldest of summaries must here suffice for a work that should have given rise to a whole literature of commentary.

_Democracy and Leadership_ studies types of political thinking from Aristotle to Woodrow Wilson, with special attention given to the naturalistic imperialism of Machiavelli, the idyllic imagination of Rousseau when it dreams on politics, and the moral imagination of Edmund Burke. Like More, Babbitt leans heavily upon Burke’s ideas of a natural aristocracy, the power of example, and the imaginative justification of privileges.

One of the strongest features of the book is its study of the humility of Asia expressed in Buddhism and Confucianism. The West learned sufficiently the lesson of self-reliance in the Renascence, but it has not learned the lesson of humility, and from the Babbittean standpoint this is essential.

A very brief description of Babbitt as a political thinker would note first that he is an anti-imperialist as well as an anti-Bolshevist. He is in fact an old-fashioned democrat who thinks that whatever the quantitative achievements of the United States have been, qualitatively we have thus far failed. He opposes the Jeffersonian tradition and regrets the victory of Andrew Jackson. His tradition is strongly unionist. Washington, John Marshall, Lincoln, the last viewed as a unionist rather than an emancipator--these are the principal figures in his democratic tradition. It is perhaps not too much to say that Babbitt considers the Declaration of Independence a Rousseauistic document and the Constitution a humanistic document. At any rate, he makes much of the Supreme Court as a check on the spontaneous popular will and stands firmly for constitutional democracy as against direct democracy.

His program? The formation of a Socratic remnant. We need a movement, he says, in our political life which will be Socratic, Aristotelian and Christian, a movement, that is, that will stress definition, habit and humility. The beginning is to subject our catchwords--the political terms that sway our imaginations and actions--to a Socratic dichotomy, and in this book Babbitt himself performs some masterly dichotomizing of such infectious words as “service,” “liberty” and “imagination.” The Aristotelian phase of the program is education along the lines we observed in our last chapter. The Christian phase has to do with the recovery of humility.

It is evident, I think, even from the bare outline how Babbitt runs the political problem into the philosophical and religious problems. Where one boggles is at the very beginning, the economic problem as it merges into the political. That is, Babbitt’s politics has to compete with his economics, and at the present time economics in practice is the determinant. As in the case of More, Babbitt is most convincing in dealing with Man Psychologic, least convincing in handling Man Economic. His enemies, I may add, are most persuasive about Man Economic and least equipped to study Man Psychologic.

The economics of commercial men (the science, that is, of production for profit, not the science of production for use) puts the whole question of right relations between man and man far up in the air. We can theorize about these relations as much as we like but when we drop to earth again, present economic habits spoil the theories. There is, for instance, nothing in the least degree Utopian about Babbitt’s politics. He is thoroughly realistic in his political vein, but all the time he is working in that vein he presupposes not a reform of the economics of commercial men but an amenability on the part of this black economics to his theory of democracy.

In this chapter I have deliberately tried to keep the problem of 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.

But now is his center sinking again? Will Atlas, no longer the Endurer, 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.