II A PORTRAIT OF OUR AGE

“A highly unified age may offer examples of highly unified personalities; but there is likely to exist in the individual of today the same confused conflict of tendencies that we see in the larger world.”—Irving Babbitt in Literature and the American College.

Some Humanist yet to be, inspired by the model of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, will write successfully a rival piece on our follies for the delectation of later ages. The future Erasmus will likely call his genial dissolvent In Praise of Modernity: in it he will conjure up the Spirit of Progress and constrain her to deliver a panegyric of all our modern excesses. But the loquacious Spirit of Progress could never accomplish that task in less space than a book, and a single chapter is our limit for a broad sketch of our age. It is not for us then to be indirect and ironical, but to find without loss of time some simple clear mirror for the reflection of the plain facts of our period. Where shall such a mirror be found? Nowhere better, it seems to me, than in the outlook on life of the typical general reader, in the outlook of such a person as G. R., whom I shall briefly describe.

G. R. in his forties is a respected and successful lawyer. In his college days he wrote verse: in fact, he was Class Poet at Commencement, but soon afterwards he lost interest in his courtship of the Muse. He continued, however, to read rather widely and with the object of keeping abreast of new developments in thought and art. You will find his name among the subscribers to the Theatre Guild and on the mailing lists of our best liberal weeklies.

As I have indicated, G. R. is successful. His comfortable duplex apartment in the east Seventies of New York city bears witness to his rise in the world, and out on Long Island he has acquired a remodelled farmhouse for weekends and summertime. His three sons attend a private school inspired by the educational ideas of John Dewey. Their father to a casual acquaintance is not very different from some tens of thousands of other substantial well-educated American men. Like them he gets a little bored by the baiting tactics of H. L. Mencken: like them he enjoys driving a car and playing golf regularly. He still awaits being put into American fiction with the same distinctness that certain types he despises, such as the George F. Babbitts, have been limned.

G. R., now that much of his youthful idealism has been found inappropriate to the facts of his existence, has the strong impression that we are all floundering about in the present era. And this impression of his is certainly a generally diffused opinion. In a time of floundering our first consideration must be to get at the plain realities of our condition, and that is why I have recourse to G. R., on whose mind and feelings they seem most clearly imprinted. He is susceptible to the main currents of modern life, but not being unduly specialized, he does not show traces of these currents that are highly peculiar to himself.

Singularity is the fault of many explanations that are being offered of why we are floundering and how we may take arms against our sea of troubles. These explanations come from economists, sociologists, psychiatrists, political students and other specialists. They often apply correctly to aspects of our confusion, but, coming from specialists, they necessarily tend to be recondite. And what they seek to explain and remedy, namely the easily recognized and very widespread state of mind and feeling which G. R. epitomizes, is not recondite at all. Why not then, as I have suggested, make a direct report, involving no detailed knowledge of economics or social theory, of what G. R. and the rest of us can all be aware of in terms of daily personal experience? Surely it seems best when we are floundering to imitate the Socratic example, to turn to the common mind, to trust in sound sense, before we repeat as our own the views of some specialized pleader.

What gives us all, G. R. has often inquired, this persistent feeling of blindly living along without a compass? The first part of the reply is easy. Involuntarily, we have looked to Society for a compass and it is patent that Society offers none. It has moulded us, directed us, tossed us about in its channels: that we know, and we continue to feel its multitudinous pressures every day. But Society does not show us, nor has it shown us, any central ideal for its collective self and for its individual members. Ideals there are in abundance, the ideals of professions and institutions, but a master ideal ruling over them there is not. There is competition of ideals, but no sovereign aim subordinating all other aims in life to itself. “Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus”—we need not wonder that this has become for us a meaningful quotation.

If you are a lawyer like G. R., you live up to a code of legal ethics; if you are a physician, you encounter a standard of good medical practice; if you are a scientist, you know what the scientific ideal is: yet you do not in those professions or in other occupations or in the churches find an intelligent standard of living for all men to which common assent is given. That implies a great deal more than most people realize. It is saying that there is no central significance in the lives we are living. Society tells us of none, and there is only conflict and confusion on our most important concerns as human beings. Let G. R. ask of Society: what is the meaning of my existence? what is the true aim of my existence? Society can only reply: I am not at present organized about any answers to these questions. You must fulfil obligations to me, but I acknowledge no obligation to you as an individual in the matter of spiritual guidance. That, my dear sir, is your personal outlook. Take your choice, if you like, among a variety of conflicting opinions, but none of them have my ultimate sanction.

Of course, as G. R. often fails to remember, such a state of affairs has not always been. It was not so in ancient Palestine, not so in ancient Egypt, not so in the Middle Ages in Europe. Many times in history has Society returned to its members a full coherent reply, right or wrong, to the prime question of the individual, what is the significance and aim of my existence? It has, first of all, defined the social duties of the individual, but afterwards it has admitted that it in turn existed to further the primary aim of the individual. Not today.

This, the complete failure of contemporary Society to declare Truth and found itself on it, is clearly the first cause of our sense of confusion. It is not that we are out of harmony with Society’s declaration of Truth: it is that we know that Society is rather helplessly established on Pilate’s question and certainly it washes its hands of the business. Whether it is possible or desirable for Society now to give a single answer to the question, why are we alive, is an entirely different consideration. In bringing out the fact that our Society does not hold up a standard of Truth, I would not wish to be understood as meaning that Tibet is superior to America because it is unified in a religious way we are not. Far from that! What is being driven at now is simply the ineluctable fact that American Society does not promote an authoritative conception of spiritual life, and the result of this, be it good or bad, is competition and confusion of ideals.

Bad it may be, for if man cannot have the real thing, it is notorious he will take substitutes. We are held together not by a grand ideal which is both social and individualistic, but by a number of pseudo-ideals winning mass-acceptance. What are they? Study our national behavior, and because it is obviously standardized you will have no trouble discerning what our brazen images are.

G. R.’s mind, for example, is typical of most of us in that it is soaked in the dogma of social progress. A very compact statement of this dogma was once given in the process of criticizing it by Robert Shafer, one of the New Humanists. “Social progress has become,” he said, “a species of popular religion of which the chief articles of belief are: that earthly life is in and for itself a good thing, that terrestrial happiness is possible for all men, that applied science and industry have given us the means for abundant enjoyment, and that it is now the task of social science and government so to order our common life that toil shall not rest heavily upon any of us and that the means of enjoyment shall be equally open to all. It is, moreover, generally believed not only that terrestrial happiness is possible for all men, but that it is infallibly coming to pass—that is, that social science and government are bound to succeed in their task.”

That this is really our credo, our actions as well as our words testify. We say nowadays that we “accept life.” Why we accepted it and for what we accept it, we do not clearly know; so we say that life in itself is good. Our actions furthermore make us all out to be believers in the attainment of widespread terrestrial happiness. Our forefathers may have dreamed about laying up treasure in heaven, but not we. For we can point with great faith to a means for abundant enjoyment here and now: we point to applied science and industry. They are to reduce toil for us, toil, we are quite sure, being a main cause of unhappiness. With more leisure we shall be happier, for then we shall be able to amuse ourselves, as we say, and to enjoy comfort.

But how external all this is! Precisely. For some reason we feel that the way to improve man is to improve the environment by means of applied science and the better organization of industry. This, we think, will increase the sum of happiness. It does not matter whether we are captains of industry or social rebels: we are both thinking in terms of changing the environment, and neither of us has even a faint perception of a simultaneous need to improve man directly by an inward transformation. That is why I call the doctrine of social progress, whether it is framed by a member of the Republican party or of the Socialist, a pseudo-ideal, for it promises only more leisure, not a use of leisure conducive to human happiness. It does not implant a new motive in us but inspires the belief that our old motives will receive fuller scope for action, and by so receiving this larger scope, we shall be made happy.

So the environment is the focus of our energies. We aim to complete our conquest of Nature, as we say. But in the process of subduing the natural world, we have, many people believe, got ourselves organized into an intolerable plutocracy. This scheme of social organization must be revised or transformed to give better opportunities for material enjoyment to all members of society. Then, and only then, so the meliorists of environment and society assure us, will it be possible for the individual to work directly at self-improvement.

It is worth repeating the question of the individual under any and all conditions of human existence. I will do so in the words of the late Stuart P. Sherman, who as a thoughtful young man went to Society and books with the question that comes to all thoughtful young men, “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” He found, as we all have found, no grandly framed answer by Society to this question, no consensus of all intelligent men today, no reply that appealed at the same time powerfully to the mind and the heart and was furthermore associated with a practical way of life. Sherman then gave up the question and, as if under hypnotic suggestion, put forth another, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?” Under hypnotic suggestion, I said, for in truth our relation as individuals to Society should not be described as a reasonable one but as that of subject to hypnotist. An answer to the first question, is life worth living, and for what purpose, is not to be plucked down from our social atmosphere, but our air swarms with the assumptions that life is worth living, that it is good in and for itself, that terrestrial happiness is possible. We have not to question the basis of life but only to discover durable satisfactions.

But Society as hypnotist rules us in this search too. We all become members, it appears, of the cult of distractions and comfort. No? Look again at what we actually do, observe our national behavior. Sherman did just this: he said, in pursuit of his second question, let us see what Americans spend their money for, since we spend for what we believe in, since our expenditure is an act of faith. Well, he found that we as a nation spend heavily for plumbing, for bodily health, for university education, for automobiles, for organized athletics, and for advertising and publicity purposes. He put, it is true, an optimistic and sentimental interpretation on these facts. What his list shows, however, is that our center of gravity is in the practical life, and that we are addicts to the pursuit of comfort and pastimes. “I can’t think,” said Sherman, referring to college sports stadia-building, “of any more significant architectural phenomenon since the cathedral building of the Middle Ages”—nor can I, but I am thinking of the differences in purpose, worship and appeal. We idolize baseball players and boxers, not saints and artists and sages.

Are not these pithy words of Frank Jewett Mather true? “What is in America our accepted vision of the good life? For upon it must rest our art. What do we all agree to (saving always negligible minorities of ‘knockers’)? I fear it would come to these few articles of faith:—to make a lot of money by fair means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die with one’s boots on. This is a credo which has within its limitations positive merits, and it is by no means lightly to be decried, but it palpably offers little spiritual nourishment to the ‘art-artist,’ to quote a recent mayor of New York. A certain kind of art it feeds admirably. And it naturally gets the art it feeds—the immaculate bank clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like apparition in the porcelain tub, the beach party in the classy car—the art of the advertisement generally. And this ideal also finds its authentic expression in the cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the moving picture, and the potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over the radio. These are our representative arts, as sculpture was the representative art of Greece, or painting of Florence.”

Thus far our search for the plain facts of our present floundering condition has led us to a paradox: we lack any standard of a good, a noble life, yet we are amazingly standardized in our lives. Finding no common vision of what life ought to be conducted for, we fall prey to exceedingly powerful social suggestions. We behave, first of all, as if the machinery of existence, the getting of a living, were an all-important end in itself. And on the margin left free by practical affairs we look for a good time, we try to be neighborly, we increase our comfort.

G. R. is entangled in this paradox: at the same time he falls into the conventional modes of American behavior, he protests against them: he decries the lack of a common luminous standard for life and yet does not set himself to search for one. He continues to flounder unhappily.

Some of G. R.’s psychological biography is now relevant. At one time a large part of his mind was under the control of a certain view of the world which I shall personify as “the Sunday School boy.” Later “the Sunday School pupil” at the back of his brain was supplanted by “the village atheist,” the personification of the world-view G. R. now holds. Both these characters in his brain are elusive, capable of many disguises, and below the surface. One must go stealthily to capture them.

Every human being, even the least philosophic man, is compounded of two attitudes, an attitude toward the world and an attitude toward himself. The latter seems more native, less educable, than the former. Of our picture of ourselves we are almost never aware, and even when in rare instances we come to realize what the picture is, it seems impossible to change it. We can only sometimes correct its influence on our actions and feelings, but we go on habitually conceiving of ourselves as before. Our attitude toward the world, on the other hand, seems to derive from education and to be susceptible of change. A world-view of some sort we must have, but the particular one we receive, often unconsciously, is, as people say, “wished on us,” usually when we were children. G. R. illustrates a change in world-conceptions, passing as he did from the dominance of “the Sunday School pupil” planted early in his mind to the later dominance of “the village atheist,” installed there in his twenties. But let us ask some general questions first.

What attitudes toward the world are characteristic of ourselves and our contemporaries? That is, what are our chief emotional states in regard to that immense given object, the world? What are our imaginations of life? An interesting enumeration of some of them was given a few years ago by a practical psychologist. “There is,” he said, “the ‘Puritan’ picture which represents life as a hard and narrow school. This evokes the attitude of the nervous schoolboy in the constant presence of the stern dominie. There is the ‘Pagan’ picture of life as an orgy of Greek gods inviting men to drink and feast with them. There is the ‘Serious’ view of life which imagines ‘God’ to be struggling against almost hopeless odds for the redemption of matter. The emotion or attitude evoked is one of ‘helping poor father.’ There is the ‘Scientific’ view that sees life as an orderly insignificance, all dressed up but with nowhere to go. There is the ‘Æsthetic’ view in which life is an artist making and exhibiting works of art, with man as the appreciative witness. And so on.”

But which of these and other unlisted world-conceptions are most conspicuous in intelligent American society today? I think they are the two that G. R. has been victimized by; one asserts the universe to be purposive and meaningful to man, the other declares the contrary. The first for convenience we can call the Victorian world-view, and the second the “Scientific” view. Both when stripped bare seem pretty absurd, yet who will say that we, even when we recognize the puerile character of our governing conceptions, do not go on being dominated by or at least being considerably influenced by absurdities? It is not easy, any one who has tried will testify, to overcome our early education.

Consider the Victorian world-view which is implanted in most people brought up like G. R. in one of the Protestant churches. H. G. Wells has sought for thirty-five years to shatter it. His procedure has been to delineate its formation time and again in his novels and then show how impotent it is to face a really hard blow from circumstance. From Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, for instance, I can quote a very neat description of the present-day Protestant Weltanschauung as it is popularly held, but in this form who but a very honest man will see that something very like it underlies much of his opinions about life?

“God began afresh with me in England,” says Mr. Blettsworthy in reference to his boyhood, “as the confederated shadow of my uncle, a dear English gentleman of a God, a super-Blettsworthy in control, a God of dew and bright frosty mornings, hopeful and unresentful, whose peculiar festivals were Easter and Christmas and the Harvest Thanksgiving. He was the God of a world that was right way up, stern only to smile again, and even through the solemnity and restraint of Good Friday peeped out my uncle’s assurance that the young gentleman would come back safe and sound on Sunday. A serious time, of course, occasion for grave reflections, but meanwhile we had our hot cross buns....

“He was awfully decent, was God, as his uncle displayed him, and he and my uncle made me want to be decent too. In a world of ‘All right’ and ‘Right O’ and ‘Right you are, Sir.’...

“My uncle shook back the sleeves of his surplice and leant smiling and persuasive over the pulpit, making everything clear and mild like English air, and I felt that if I were given a vision sufficiently penetrating I should see high above the blue ether another such kindly Father, instructing his fortunate world.”

Considering the results of the recent research by Dr. Angus Hector MacLean of Columbia University into the ideas about God of Protestant children, Mr. Blettsworthy’s account is more than fair toward what we learn in Sunday School. Furthermore, since most of us never give any serious thought in later years to Religion, we never learn very thoroughly what a travesty of the religion of Christ our instruction has been. We take it naïvely for something like the genuine thing. We may vary or subtilize the picture, trying to make its anthropomorphism less crude, but in essentials it remains the same. A fatherly personage rules the universe and we are his darling concern. At the back of our minds there is still a “little Sunday School pupil” piping up in adult’s language that the world runs on a benevolent principle and that we should therefore be altruistic toward our neighbors in imitation of the divine principle.

But it is possible for many people by an extension of their reading to exorcise this “little Sunday School pupil” and to install in his place what I can only designate as “the village atheist.” Once this oddity is established there, we react to life according to the dictates of the “Scientific” imagination of it. In this view there is only one kind of real knowledge, and that is modern science: there is only one sanction for knowledge and that is bestowed by the scientist. All art, all religion, all morals, all philosophy must bow before the final authority of science. They do not yield us other and different knowledge of the world, valid in its own way, but they are purely fictive unless backed up by the arch-critic of all contemporary culture, the scientist. “This is a scientific age,” says G. R. to his friends who still continue to speculate about religious matters.

This point, our exclusive reliance on scientific investigation and thought for the truth about things, needs no stressing. It is one of the preëminent signs of the modern mind. We do not take seriously the kind of knowledge offered by art, for instance, and in fact we do not call it knowledge at all. But it needs to be repeated again, for we continually forget it, that modern science is carried on by intensely specialized men whose activities are understandable to only a few hundreds and who do not popularize their doctrines. In many cases indeed, the various theories of quantum for one, these activities are extraordinarily hard to render into the idiom of the world. So it comes about that the many intelligent men who have adopted the “Scientific” view are actually just as Victorian as those who retain a sentimental “religious” life-picture. For their “Scientific” view is forty or fifty years old, going back to such famous and gifted popularizers as Huxley and Tyndall. By it they believe that the world is a vast mechanical concern, thoroughly materialistic, orderly and eventually knowable, but without purpose, and in this world man is an accidental form of life. He is alien to the world, and it is indifferent to him. How old-fashioned this is! Does it not bring to mind the discussions of some provincial group of tight-minded atheists set on combating the conventional propaganda of latter-day Christians? Yet, though the advanced physicist has forsaken this world-conception, it persists in many persons today who fancy themselves as intellectually “free.”

G. R., for instance, picks up the latest Nation the postman has brought to his door and there in a feature article of one of our most intelligent weeklies, he reads: “It (the natural world) is a system if not with any purpose at least with an order.... Man is a half happy but, historically considered, quite explicable accident.” Now what is that but saying over again to G. R. what the Victorian scientist said in effect to G. R.’s father—the universe is all dressed up but has no place to go? Yet these sentences are by a professor of philosophy in a large university who is regarded as au courant with the latest developments in thought. By this you may see how beneath a considerable surface complexity in the modern mind there may lie major assumptions of an astonishing naïveté. There is indeed a “village atheist” in many of us who controls our emotional state toward the world, and we shall have a great deal of trouble to dislodge him.

The truth is that neither the Victorian world-outlook, nor the “Scientific,” nor the “Pagan,” nor the “Æsthetic,” nor any other of the world-outlooks subscribed to in the present time by minorities inspires a creative emotion toward life. But of that, a creative world-conception and its corresponding attitude, more is to be said in a later chapter.

Perhaps we shall make a better case for ourselves if we examine our chief current conceptions of man. After all, nothing obviously is closer to us than our organisms: we may find that the world at large is a receding object for speculation, but who can be oblivious of the intimate bonds existing between what we call our “ego” and the manifestations of our personality? It is a truism (which we are always trying to forget) that we are attached by self-love to the strange being that bears our name, and it is furthermore known that self-love falls into a certain number of stock forms or attitudes toward oneself. Into these we need not go now: they fall more logically into the psychologist’s province. But it is pertinent for us to take up certain large conceptions of man which have a great hold on us, and deeply color our self-attitudes.

To begin with, a very large party, probably the most numerous in fact, thinks of man as existing wholly within Nature. By this its members mean that man contains naught of the supernatural: on the contrary, his psychology belongs as much to Nature as does his physiology. He rises out of Nature, but does not transcend it. There is no special law for man as distinct from law for thing: man is utterly material: the old doctrine of the soul’s immortality is a delusion. Browning has sung for them:

But this party which as a whole denies the existence of any radical discontinuity between Nature and Man is itself divided into a sentimental and a scientific faction, and both have representatives in the schools of psychology. The Freudian psycho-analyst will do very well as a spokesman for the sentimental naturalists, and for the scientific naturalists the Behaviorist is perfectly ready to offer his conclusions.

It happens that G. R. belongs to the former persuasion: he has been twice psycho-analysed and the stock he takes in the process can be gauged by the considerable expense he has put himself to. He is convinced that we have a kind of bastard soul, the “unconscious” or as most people prefer to call it, the subconscious, which is a basic conception in the teachings of the Freudians. This bastard soul is dynamic, not merely the residue of the impressions which we have either forgotten or received unawares, and it works its will deviously upon us. The important thing is to become aware of its modes of operating and to keep them from being perverted by false education and false social notions. Repressions and suppressions are, on the whole, mischievous, though sometimes necessary. The mind furthermore is suspect. It fools us by rationalizations: it oftentimes aids in unhealthy sublimations.

G. R. therefore seeks to free his impulses and to follow them spontaneously. He has turned anti-intellectual and tries to establish himself upon his instincts and his feelings without interference from his mind. He trusts in his “unconscious” which he believes to be innocent and naturally good in the old sense of Rousseau. That is why we may term G. R. a sentimental naturalist, for the mark of the breed is its faith in the essential goodness of man and its contention that the environment alone is to blame for the spoiling of man.

At the present time, G. R. is hostile to the scientific naturalist, not on the fundamental ground that man is entirely within Nature, but because the Behaviorist drives out sentiment about the inherent goodness of man. To the Behaviorist man is a doomed creature. He is the product solely of biology and sociology, will-less, an automaton, purely a response-mechanism. His consciousness is doubted, though his complexity is granted. But it is the complexity of a machine. G. R. finds it difficult to refute the Behaviorist’s laboratory experiments, but his “mystic” faith in the “unconscious” insulates him against the terrible conclusions of Dr. Watson and his co-workers.

Nor does he like the phrase, “the indignity of man,” which the New Humanists use for the conceptions of psycho-analyst and Behaviorist alike.

It may seem to some readers that I have overdrawn this portrait of a typical child of our age. But we must not mistake complexity of thinking for thought itself. An elaborate superstructure may rest upon a few naïve assumptions. I have tried to get below the superstructure and there I find a man who leads a standardized life due to the manipulations of Society, who either returns to his mother’s knee when he looks at the world or else regurgitates the stale conclusions of Victorian materialism, who conceives of himself as being naturally good if only he can return to the state of Nature or else he conceives of himself as purely mechanical—and it is impossible to exaggerate either this man’s ignorance of what life may mean or his lack of creative emotion toward the world and himself. His leaders, for all I can see, only subtilize his blindness, but they are stricken in the same way. It is true, one can confidently affirm of our epoch at least, that as A. N. Whitehead observes, “The mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in question.” Our leaders and this poor stock figure G. R. live in the same climate of opinion: they have shaped him, it is obvious, but what is not so immediately clear is that they have also sprung from him.

This at any rate is incontestable. Our age is not rich in individuality as the Renascence was. The Renascence type—the master of many arts, the all-round or universal man—does not flourish with us. And the reason? Once we peer well inside our psychology, it is apparent that we are aimless and uncreative, and that, I think, is sufficient explanation.

The New Humanist is against the psychology of modernity. He stands for another kind of man which I shall try to portray in the next chapter.