Patterns of Progress 9780231887793

Table of contents :
Foreword
Prefatory Note
Contents
The Will to Progress
"Cultural Lag"
Of Death and the Future
Index

Citation preview

Patterns of Progress MATCHETTE

FOUNDATION

DELIVERED COLUMBIA

AT

UNIVERSITY,

NUMBER

LECTURES

2

1949

Patterns of Progress By HORACE M. KALLEN

Essay Index

Reprint

Series

BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS FREEPORT, NEW YORK

Copyright 1950, Columbia University Press Reprinted 1968 by arrangement

LIBRARY O F CONCRESS CATALOC CARD N U M B E R :

68-55847

P R I N T E D IN T H E UNITED STATES O F A M E R I C A

To John Dewey FRONTIERSMAN LIGHTER

O F THE

OF THE

SPIRIT

WAY

ON T H E OCCASION O F HIS NINETIETH

BIRTHDAY

Foreword THE FRANKLIN J . MATCHETTE FOUNDATION, INC., UNDER WHOSE

sponsorship the lectures which compose this book were presented at Columbia University in 1949, was established by a bequest provided in the will of Franklin J. Matchette, one of those rare and admirable phenomena in American life, the disinterested amateur in philosophy and education. In a long career as both inventor and business man, he was increasingly led to reflect on the philosophical issues involved in human experience and in the problems of education. In 1930, at the age of sixtyseven, he retired from business to devote his full time to the formulation and development of a philosophical system which had been evolving in his mind for some forty years. This system he called the Absolute-Relative theory, and in 1939 Mr. Matchette published a series of pamphlets giving his theory in condensed form, describing the movement of nature as he saw it from the Zero-Atom to the Absolute. The Matchette Foundation has hopes of editing and publishing the manuscripts of Franklin J. Matchette to provide eventually a systematic view of his philosophy. Mr. Matchette left a considerable part of his fortune for a foundation to interest the public in philosophy. The lectures published in this volume are among the first fruits of that benefaction; with their combined humanism and sense of responsibility to scientific knowledge, they have a happy consonance with the intentions of the Matchette Foundation. IRWIN EDMAN

Columbia University November, 1949

Prefatory Note THE LECTURES OF WHICH THIS BOOK IS A VERY SLIGHT MODIFICA-

tion are in a sense a report of progress on studies begun many years ago and still under way. A substantial part of these studies has consisted of inquiries into the qualities of "progress" as a personal experience among all sorts and conditions of men. For generous response to these inquiries I am particularly indebted to Algo Henderson, former president of Antioch College, the painter Maurice Sterne, the psychologist Robert M . Ogden, the composer Ernst T o c h , the poet and novelist Jane Mayball, the philosopher Charles Morris, the lawyer Isaac B . Lipson, the historian Sidney Ratner, and the President Emeritus of the New School for Social Research, Alvin Johnson. For help with the manuscript, the proofs, and the Index, my debt is great to my wife, Rachel Oatman Kallen. T o all these, to my philosophic colleagues of Columbia University, and to the late Franklin J. Matchette, inventor, businessman and philosopher, whose care for the philosophic enterprise made these lectures possible, my best thanks. HORACE M .

New York City October 10,1949

KALLEN

Contents FOREWORD,

BY

PREFATORY

NOTE

THE

WILL

"CULTURAL

OF

DEATH

INDEX

TO

IRWIN

EDMAN

¡X

PROGRESS

LAG"

AND

THE

vii

1

31

FUTURE

53

85

The Will to Progress IF LETTERS AND THE ARTS ARE SIGNS, THEN THE FREE PEOPLES OF

the woild who have fought through the two world wars have become the sad peoples. They have been twice the victors. Y e t insecurity rides them like a horseman of the Apocalypse and they yearn for safety as once they fought for freedom. T h a t their theologians should sound tocsins and alarums over the evils they charge the times with breeding is a matter of course: to the theological eye, sin is what human beings are made of; man's virtue can be only the war he wages with himself, and his lone hope is to be saved from himself by the grace of an all-powerful, vengefully just, yet forgiving God. B u t the newer poets and philosophers of the free societies also sound alarms: they give the jeremiads of the theologians a secular turn and another direction. T h e approved voices among them are the depressed voices. If they make a music, it is hoarse with disillusion and harsh with fear. And the greatest men of science join to swell that dark diapason, prophesying the last Armageddon to which man's atomic engines of destruction destine the life of man and keening the desolation all must end in. All these voices repeat in their new ways a perennial wisdom which God-fearing souls have addressed to their fellow men generation after generation, again and again and again. I t is, that to be a man is to be in agony; that the valid sense of life is the tragic sense; that every one of the values by which, since the democratic revolution, free men have lived is exposed for the mirage it really is. Especially exposed is the progress they so

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vaunt. This, they say, is a lie that modern man tells himself, an illusion he has whistled up to comfort his soul in the lonely and fearful dark of his existence. All it comes to is a crisis in our culture whose ignominy was the folly called science and whose end is now visibly destruction and death. This seventh anniversary of Pearl Harbor may make this judgment poignantly truer for many. How shall we save ourselves from this pit of progress into which we have digged ourselves? W h a t is there, for man's Salvation, other than the enduring assurance, the inveterate credo that renders us infallibly certain only because the saving power it affirms is impossible in nature and absurd to reason? For nature is the necessity of death and reason the certainty of doom. Both sustain the argument of a foregone conclusion. Save the spirit of man resume its ancient confidence in a Grace Beyond, it cannot be saved from doom. Only if it revive its acceptance of supernal miracle can it be saved from death. By this alone can its eyes be open to the rescuing break-through in nature's closed circle of causation, and to the liberating severance of the ring annealed in the sorites of his own reason. And through these openings Salvation would come in and modern men take it with the same faith as their fathers took it when it was revealed to them. Then they would win back to the ancestral submission. They would believe. Believing, they would obey; believing and obeying, they would receive remission of their agony; their tiagic sense of life would become peace of soul; their illusions of progress would be superseded by the eternally real values which man's faith has ever affirmed, his hope ever aspired to, and Cod's gracious charity ever guaranteed to him. Man would know his immortal home at last, and his passage through mortality would be safe and sure. History records many modes of this argument of Salvation,

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3

each singular to its time and characteristic of its occasion, each in its turn a testimony to man's Joblike existence. O n its face a counsel of despair, the argument yet embodies the undefeated loyalty of the human spirit to its own essence. This loyalty, when in fact powerless against the unyielding brutishness of events, creates itself a compensation for them in idea. Establishing by imagination what it cannot accomplish in actuality, it ordains its creation to be its ideal, its God-given map of existence and guide of life. All ideals, but particularly ideals of this provenance and use, span the distance between a man's desires and his powers, his experiences of hunger and his experiences of satisfactions. Or as the moralists like to say, ideals delineate the good and man's aspiration toward it. T h a t our imaginations create ideals and our wills cleave to them is evidence of the obvious, commonplace yet persistently ignored fact that, even if our world were one which we ourselves had made, most of our living in it consists in efforts and risks to make it over. W h a t personal history does not uncover a continuing struggle to close the gaps between wishing and achieving, fighting and winning, wanting and having, seeking and finding, needing and possessing, desiring and enjoying? Achievements,

winnings, findings, possessions,

enjoyments—

every consummation that experience may take account o f — make up the aggregation of the values which tradition separates into hierarchies of the good, the right, the true, and the beautiful. These, philosophical discourse lodges apart in a "realm of ends" it has invented for that purpose, where they dwell eternal, supernal, and sovereign. T o the strivings and wantings and fightings, the needings and the desirings, and the unending diversifications of works and ways which those propulsions pass into, tradition assigns an inferior status. T h e y also are values, but values derivative and secondary, drawing whatever dignity and

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worth they evince from the ends they work out or come up to. They rate as means, and the ends justify them. As Herman Busembaum, S.J., explained in his Medulla Theologiae published in the year 1650, "when the end is lawful, the means are also lawful." There is, however, another judgment regarding the relationship of means and ends. This is the conclusion from an untraditional analysis which discovered in means a dignity and worth not derivative, but primary and intrinsic. Not the substance of means, only that which ensues from it can be secondary. The end follows from the means, not the means from the end. Any actual end is a consequence, an effect and not a cause; and its quality and existence are outcomes of the characteristic efficacy of the causes called means. The untraditional spirit concerns itself, hence, less with matter than with methods. It understands that, other things being equal, when the means are right their consequences will be satisfactorv; its attention concentrates, not on results, but on ways of getting them; not on products but on processes. For the untraditional mind, going, not goal, is primary. Take care of the means, it believes, and the ends will take care of themselves. One consequence of this transposition of ends and means is that it makes an end of "the realm of ends." It abolishes the boundary between Thisworld of means and the Otherworld of ends. It transvalues the two into one multitudinous world of equally real and functionally diverse events and processes. A consummation is no longer seen as a finality, but as the phase of a transition which in experience it is. A goal ceases to be taken for a terminal and is realized as a step, a slower step, a laggard step, perhaps, but a step in going on. The compensating equilibration of the ideal subsides and fades out; contemplation passes over into operation, knowledge becomes know-how; de-

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5

termination has supervened upon resignation and courage upon insecurity. W h e r e the dynamics of ends and means are thus transposed, the diversifying deficiencies of human existence cease to cry out of the depths unto the Lord for an Otherworldly Salvation. People recognize them for what they are and set themselves to the task of overcoming them hopefully and without illusion. In sum, the personal will commits itself to progress as alone any person makes progress or can make. Now, first and last, Progress is an ideal. Yet, as it has been thought and interpreted, not an ideal for the personal life. The believer in Progress believes in social progress, or else does not believe. Its classical presentations embody patterns of history, not biography. These patterns are diverse and in no way unanimous; but in all, it is Man that goes on, and men who merely come and go. In each, the design is such as to render individuality incidental and the person of no importance. Each impatterns the progress of man on the anonymity of men. Since, to himself, no man is anonymous, since every man has a poignant sense of his own uniqueness and personal worth, those configurations of progress violate what is most authentic in all men's natures. Philosophies which deplore progress as an illusion or denounce it as a deception draw their strength from this violation. But knowingly or unknowingly they are reacting, it seems to me, with violence against this violence. Certainly the ideals for which they gang up on the vision of Progress do envisage the primacy and preciousness of Selfhood. If they depreciate "the infinite perfectibility of the human race," they exalt "the infinite value of the human person." T h e prevailing definitions of the person's infinite value, in the western tradition, have been two: the ideas of his Happiness and of his Salvation. In certain conceptions of perfecti-

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bility, Happiness figures with Freedom as the form of perfection ever more excellent. But when thus assimilated to Progress, the personal specificity of Happiness falls away. An ideal of personal fulfillment, Happiness is by far the older and more widely apprehended philosophical consummation of "the infinite value of the human person." Although by no means excommunicated by the ideal of Salvation, the latter remains its most successful rival: Salvation, not Happiness, has been dominant in our "Judaeo-Christian culture." This culture's underlying faith envisages a drama of salvation common to all Christian cults and sects. Each exclusively provides, in its dogmas and rites, the experience of the faith's substance of things hoped for, its evidence of things not seen. It is now common opinion that the creators of this faith were the heirs of a tradition built upon what Gilbert Murray called "a failure of nerve." T h e Apostle Paul, the Greek and Roman fathers, the Emperor Constantine and other monarchs, built it up more or less without design because the ends and means available to them in their times kept failing to serve or to satisfy the hungers of their struggles for existence. T h e usurpers of their powers as well as their heirs and assigns, such as the popes with their courts, the unpolitical monastic orders, the schoolmen, the Jesuits or the Jansenists, all lived by the "deposit of faith" of their inheritance, where they could, without changing it, and, where they had to, altering it as desire required or events compelled. And so did the apostles of the Protestant evangels and their heirs and assigns. But all alike, rivals and competitors together, insisted that their alterations only established more firmly, clearly and distinctly than ever the miracle of their Salvation and only improved the effectiveness of the ancestral means to the invariant end which the drama of it reveals. In fact, they but chose or devised alternative

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means to the goal without alternative, as men might choose between the alternative roads that all lead to Rome. Yet competing custodians or creators of the alternative techniques of Salvation contended, even when affirming the end justifies the means, that every means cxcept their own nullified the end. For the means to Salvation had to be one and only one; it could be accepted or rejected, but not treated as an alternative to the other means. This remains the conviction of the Salvationist. His foremost concern, consequently, ceases to be the end, Salvation, it becomes the means—the church, the sect, the order, denomination, with all that these words imply. T h e belief, the obedience and conformation which such establishments impose shut out and cut off every alternative. In consequence, the means has replaced the end as the chief good or else has become the same as the end. So far as any believer's experience is concerned, the going is the goal; institutionally, the road to Rome is Rome. If to the believer, however, Salvation is one thing and the means thereto a different thing, he is in a predicament. It has been forced in upon him that the goal cannot be detached from the going; that while he is alive the Delectable City and the way to it are one. He shall not gain his end save by this particular means which is no means to him. This forces him into heresy. He must either devise an alternative means or turn to a different end. T h e alternative means is regularly a new cultus. The different end has been once more, and prevailingly since the Renaissance, Happiness. This distributive ideal was explicitly discerned and defined as a personal repetition of a social end by Plato and redefined as characteristically personal by Aristotle. The latter's definition has become standard. Other definitions have since been devised, for every interest forms its own, but the tradi-

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tion builds its variations upon the Aristotelian theme. Man, as Aristotle saw him, is not supernal. He belongs in the visible and tangible living cosmos. There is a place in its well-ordered structure which is fit for him. and which he only fits, as thisorgan-and-no-other of the cosmic organism. His being, a necessary passing from immaturity to fulfillment, unfolds in such a way as to become wholly manifest and perfect. At the apex of consummation he, and all things that are, have come to their true natures. Each entirely and truly is. No part remains potential, not worked out, unactualized and unexpressed. Thing or thought, plant or animal or man, when thus self-completed, has each attained the optimum of its allotted life span. It has reached the goal of its struggle for existence. Up to that point it has not really existed. Now, at last it does really exist. It has achieved that wholeness which its parts presuppose and which works as their indivisible and undivided entelechy. It has come to the highest good within its capacity, to the singular and specific excellence which by nature it can achieve. For a man, this excellence is happiness. T o youth, hence, happiness can never be anything but a possibility, to old men never anything but a condition each remembers but has been unable to prolong. Happiness is the perfection of maturity, the free activity of the whole man at his best, all his powers in use and delight crowning the use. Happiness is his true nature, explicit and manifest at last. W h e n he is happy, all the man's faculties are in play together, a harmonious team, each member functioning perfectly, with pleasure irradiating all. Thus, to be happy is to mobilize and engage one's energies in free, self-realizing action; it is to have become fully and finally oneself at last. Obviously, we must say of this happiness what Spinoza said of his blessedness; it is a consummation as rare as it is difficult.

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Aristotle, a n d all of his tradition, knew this well. T h a t "master of those who know" was simply speaking according to tradition when h e declared that no man can be said to have been happv until he was dead. T h e Stagirite knew how unsure and fleeting Happiness in fact is. He was fully aware that mankind, as certainly as nature, is replete with impediments to the ripening, and assaults upon the existence, of the happiness of its members. Aristotle makes special mention of low birth, poverty, delinquent offspring, faithless friends, the death of dear ones, loneliness. If later generations saw all existence as impediment and assault and fled to Salvation, their children's children, desiring Happiness once more, have been disposed to regard most traditional obstructions as contingent rather than sure, while the modern man refuses to restrict Happiness to maturity and sees all ages of the h u m a n creature capable of their appropriate ways of it. But he recognizes, as Aristotle did not, an inner contingency. T h e right he holds unalienable 1 is not the right to the possession but the pursuit of happiness. H e relates it to the dearths of hunger and desire rather than to the postponed completion, logically potent though existcntially hidden, in the possible, and he thinks that whenever and wherev er men ccasc to experience a block between their wishes and their ways to fulfilling them, they experience happiness. Their activities have then ceased to be only transition and have become also expression; operation has apparently been taken u p in consummation, value in existence, goal in going; ends and means flow together in one concrete and seamless event. W e now are aware that the experience of happiness, difficult and rare as it is, does occur, and not solely at the plateau of life to which Aristotle restricts it. Each stage of growing u p and growing old has its characteristic completeness and all to1

Cf. Declaration of Independence.

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gether can be—when the gods forget to be the jealous powers they are—a continuum compounding perfection into perfection. But the jealousy of the gods is notorious, and "the hand of God" is a postulate of the disruption of law and order everywhere. W e are disposed to regard an experience of happiness as a strange interlude and cannot possibly refrain from projecting remembrance of it as the gradient of a new ideal. T h e record nowhere tells of ideals which rework joyless experiences, experiences not of liberation or satisfaction. Those of which ideals arc the exaltations and projections supply the forms in which we aspire to impattern the indeterminate dark future, shaping and directing its contingencies and making it shine with their light. The consensus is as long as history that the experiences thus transfigured and sought are rarer far than those rejected, fled, or fought. 2 T h e former are appreciated as Salvation from the latter, and, in point of fact, the idea of Salvation, when taken for a dominant ideal, looks back to some such singular original of release from anguish and bondage, danger, and uncertainty. Those contingencies press, a pervasive multitude, besetting all lives, and derailing all development from the gradient which nature endows it with. Now, we each begin our existence as an arrangement of psychosomatic energies to whose protean stresses we give many names: reflexes, drives, impulses, interests, needs, wants, wishes, desires, the libido, the unconscious, aspiration, love, reason, will—and what else not? Whatever the words, we mean by them the dynamics of our being. W e live and grow and make our personal histories only so long as their élan keeps us moving. 2 T h e idea depressed Immanuel Kant and led him to postulate an aim in life other than Happiness: " I f we take enjoyment or happiness as the measure, it is easy to appraise life. Its value is less than nothing. For who would begin one's life in the same condition or even in the new natural conditions, if one could choose them oneself with enjoyment the sole end?"

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W e are their motion. At our birth they manifest only direction. Each is a centrifugal searching and seeking of a something it knows not what, beyond itself. As it pulls us into the multitudinous world around and about, it encounters delay or blocking here, repulsion there. Its course among events is neither straight nor sure, yet somehow forward and outward; unseeing yet not altogether blind. It keeps tacking by trial and error until it comes, soon or late, upon a thing which gives it pause without blocking, arrest without evasion or recoil. Now the encounter transforms the impulsion from actions in space made up of strivings and samplings and rejections into an activity in place consisting of absorption, compenetration, and identification. The sign of this new motion is satisfaction. When it gives way again to the movements whose sign is craving, we remember it and project the image as a gradient to the motion's own renewal. Renewal cannot be repetition alone; it must contain alteration and novelty as well. But our going now has goal as well as direction. Hour upon hour, day upon day, we thus build ourselves up, to the last syllable of our recorded time, as, together and apart, our diverse propulsions take in and transform chanceful satisfactions into enduringly compounding goals. The processes may suffuse or repel one another or both. Our consciousness of self is the feel of their interplay. Every propulsion tends to expand without cease, without end. Unresisted and unchecked before it has utterly spent itself, each pushes to become the ruling passion of our lives. But the forces of all form enchannelments of each, so that which does come to dominance, if any, depends far more than is believed on the items of the world around which supply satisfaction. It depends far less than is believed on the pseudopodic propulsion which takes a personality into its world. Food, clothing, shelter, health, struggle, reflection,

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work, play, together with the tools and weapons their creation calls for, name ideals no less than beauty, truth, and goodness, no less than happiness and salvation. Indeed, how can the latter make any sense without the former? How can their meanings, not in the dictionaries but in events, come to specific force and form except as the singular things for which words such as food and the like are but generic signs? Each such singularity sustains or enlarges some persons and starves or diminishes others. As one man's meat is another man's poison, so is everything else. Relationships are valences and their variety is endless. This multivalent diversity works among the powers and passions within as among the events of the world without. T h e conflict between our propensities and propulsions, to which so much of our experience is due, is not a rivalry of equals. Some of our drives are eager but weak, hence never attain to satisfactions, or else are unable to achieve such as they had attained and now image, project, and strive after as goals. Such weak drives often distract and impede, by suffusing, the potent ones. Others are overmastering, like a drinker's or a gambler's passion, and conform the rest to their ways and service. Still others, sure of direction, certain of goal, and altogether able to achieve it, are obstructed and delayed because the residual personality refuses the goal and shuts it out, putting ersatz in its place. Again, not the man himself, but his elders and neighbors, living and dead, block this or that one of his spontaneous propulsions, commanding, forbidding, repelling, enforcing. W h a t else do written and unwritten law come to? W h a t else do tradition and custom achieve, if not this exercise of authority by the superior power of a society whose prescriptions, taboos, folkways and mores are immemorial sanctions against the individual and the variant? W h a t do those words name if not the

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ever-multiplying modes in which men constrain other men to submission and obedience? W e are disposed to think of constraint and liberty as the most elemental of human relationships, at once their alpha and omega. But obviously they supervene upon a prior condition. All the sciences of nature, all the arts of culture, all that we call civilization, testifies that the world we are born into is far from that lawful fitness, that harmony of place and being which Aristotle expounds and philosophers after him, each in his manner, labor to vindicate. At best, even in that freudian Eden, the mother's womb, fitness, if an initial condition, soon becomes a dubious achievement and finally the revolt and the defeat which ends in the expulsion from Eden known as birth. Consistently, the fit things are the scarce things, the unfit are the abundant. Not the land, nor the waters, nor the air nor any of the inhabitants thereof provide us, as we first encounter them, with the Eden of satisfactions which merely to grow as man is to require. Together, and in the unending diversities of their parts, things evince an identity which refuses to yield itself to our nourishment or safety or service. Experience first finds them obdurately for themselves and to themselves, declining to conform to us, pressing us to conform to them. All the institutions of civilization, but above all its sciences and arts, have grown as modes of man's struggle with that independence and sovereignty of things. They are in fact the tools of his defense against their powers and of his self-liberation from their rule. They signalize a subduing of the earth and its inhabitants—from mammals to microbes—to the service, safety, and freedom of man. Where he has not been prevented by his own kind from developing and employing the arts and sciences, his legend tells of wilds remade into natural resources, wastes remade into wealth, scarcity into abundance. Applied

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to the remaking of man himself as his education, his legend tells how the arts and sciences labor to build up weakness into strength; to reorder despotism into democracy, to level invidious distinctions of power and privilege into equal rights for human beings, in their persons and in their associations, freely to live and freely to seek the happiness their natures crave. Because the sciences and arts work out and embody, they also envision the goals of men's desires. Their being and seeing are one. Whatever the direction of the will's thrust, they are the roads from the urgencies of Have-not to the activities of Have. They are at once vita contemplativa and vita activa, the knowledge and the know-how which ideals impattern. That is to say, they are Spirit, in the one sense that this word can have a sure and concrete meaning in the human enterprise. Whatever in nature they breathe into receives a soul. In earliest times this soul was only cultus, myth, and magic. Today the soul is above all physics and chemistry and biology, with all their corollaries and derivatives and applications. Ideas energized into ideals, they inspirit matter and man, and re-create both. They, thus re-created, are civilization. So runs the legend. It rarely dwells on the more signal part of the record, that even in the most arrested of civilizations, these re-creative labors seem never to reach a last boundary which has no Beyond. So long as any civilized society has a history at all, its every boundary is a frontier that evokes effort to pass it. And whatever be the form and tempo of its life, such a society ceases to have a history only when it ceases to exist. On the face of things, a fitting of wild nature to be a home for men, civilizations are yet far from presenting those whose milieus they are from birth to death, with the exercise and orchestration that re-shape animal passion into human reasonableness. On the face of things, every civilization seems

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one more wilderness requiring in its turn to be tamed by men pursuing happiness. Hence there have always been observers to argue that civilization corrupts and destroys. The works of man, they contcnd, poison the life of man. They do not consummate the pursuit, in the attainment, of happiness. On the contrary, ever-multiplying and diversifying the modes of pursuit, they digest life and liberty in pursuit and promote it to the be-all and the end-all of the human enterprise. So, they cast down ends into means and idolize mere tools. T o this have modern men sunk in their greed for that delusion, Happiness. It is why, in the West, where their civilization is most forward, and science and the industrial arts have their mightiest propulsions, the modern need for Salvation is most critical, most immediate. And Salvation must be re-turn. Some preach that modernity can save itself by returning to Nature; most, by returning to God. Yet, the Preachers lament, it is among moderns that the authority of the ideal of Salvation dissipates, its power fades, and the dignity and worth of the revealed means thereto wither away. And worse still, it is this turn of events rather than any other, which is appraised as Progress. That appraisal, claim the postulants of Salvation as an indefeasible need, is a sophistry. It is to make nonsense of the personal life, to take the human meaning out of history and to reduce the human enterprise to a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. T h e postulants of Happiness as our indefeasible need gather in two aggregations. One is the assembly of sad sacks who hold with the Salvationists that science and industry have rendered Happiness more frustrate than ever. The other is the company of the undepressed who appreciate science as the method and industry as the matter of the approach to Happiness. Progress is their synonym for this approach and they hold it to be

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genuine and sure. With the tradition, they envision Happiness as fulfillment and completion. But they part from the tradition in not thinking of Happiness as the phase of perfection which, contingencies aside, any individual must by natural necessity pass through as, growing up, he ripens, and growing old, he rots. Nor, again, do they refer Happiness explicitly to any personal experience reported, authenticated and projected as an ideal to realize, a faith to enact into a fact. However they come to the idea of Happiness, they do not consider happiness itself a mode of experience. They consider it an object of the hope which springs eternal in the breast of a mankind "which never Is but always to be blest." Man accepts, they think, today's martyrdom as the price of tomorrow's bliss, the bliss of a Tomorrow which, being Tomorrow, can never come. Happiness, thus, is the unchanging goal, but a flying goal. If it is the crown of perfection and if perfection is never of any today, mankind must be infinitely perfectible, must be forever changing to achieve an unchanging state which accomplishes and ends the change. And while this betterment is a foregone conclusion from human nature, it is independent of personal history and of the human will. Alone the story of mankind can reveal the progress of mankind toward Happiness. But those who tell the story tell each a different tale which varies with the teller's preference as to means regarding the common end. From Bacon to Condorcet, from Condorcet to Spengler, Beard or Toynbee, the elements, the characters, and the events, occasionally even the themes, are similar. Yet the compositions are incommensurable. Consider that great one among the first prophets of Progress, the Marquis de Condorcet. His vision of it sets its spring in the eternal nature of things, and attributes its tempo and form to laws of nature which predetermine the human race to assert its natural rights, to

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liberate its spontaneous energies from their inward blindness and disorder and to drive to victory over their self-engendered and self-maintained barriers which priest and noble and king symbolize. Free at last to find and use the truth, mankind is on the march. On the highways of the arts and sciences it steps now with ever-mounting swiftness and assurance toward perfect Happiness. Nine slow steps of its ineluctable progress have been taken. It is started on the tenth. All these nine were moments of its struggle to set itself free. Now in the tenth it is free and forever growing in freedom. Alone the power of nature can stop it, and it is nature's power which gives the advance its guarantee and will keep it steady and sure. Consider the Communists. They also postulate a pattern of progress ordained to bring to a happy ending the ineluctable war of the classes of mankind. But for the Marxist denominations, the necessity is not in the mechanics of Newton but in the dialectic of Hegel. The class war which is to be consummated in a classless society, where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all, is such that its warriors have no choice of sides in the battle, but go as the self-negations of labor and capital compel, while the eternal dialectic which rules them both shapes the events of history in a predestined pattern to the foregone happy ending which ends its eternal rule. Lastly consider the numerous sect who knowingly or unknowingly take their stand on the coda of Darwin's Origin of Species. Having demonstrated that species develop uncataclysmically, by natural selection from spontaneous variations, Darwin concluded that mankind "may look with some confidence to a secure future . . . as natural selection works solely by and for the good of cach being, all corporeal and mental environment will tend to progress toward perfection." Elabo-

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The Will to Progress

rated and generalized, this consoling observation becomes a philosophic system which interprets all evolution as progress and postulates man's happy destiny as a foregone conclusion. W e no longer remember the tremendous import to our fathers and grandfathers of Herbert Spencer's voluminous elaboration of this idea, nor how extensive are the gospels which equate evolution to a providence without purpose, a providence benevolent though inanimate. How else, indeed, may a man think of the race and its destiny if evolution proceeds through adaptation and adaptation is the fitting of man to man's environment? W h a t else can this fitting be if not the steady progress to the perfect fitness which is happiness? "In each generation," Winwood Reade wrote of the martyrdom of man, "the human race has been tortured that their children might profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it, therefore, unjust that we should suffer for the benefit of those who are to c o m e ? " 3 It can well be that there are conceptions of the dynamics of progress which I am ignorant of, but I think that all may be joined to one or the other of these three types; the mechanist, the dialectical, the evolutionary. Now each of the three defines a different means to an ostensibly identical end, and thus composes the sequence of man's progress in different, incompatible patterns. Each, postulating an unchanging goal, must invest the historian's data of the motions toward this goal with rhythm and direction that bind them into a whole from which the tempos, the groupings, and the conformations of the parts must necessarily follow. They must compose the same aggregations of events into concurrent yet conflicting sequences and rhythms of advance toward a single goal. Their pictures of human nature, whose changes and chances are history's one * The Martyrdom of Man.

The Will to Progress

19

theme, portray it, in sum, as moving obedient to unreconciled, perhaps irreconcilable necessities, toward the unique goal of its multitudinous desires, Happiness. Mankind is necessarily moving many ways at once in only one direction, and each, but no other, is Progress. Surely it does no violence to the character of any such typical ideas of Progress to set aside its monopolistic and totalitarian pretensions and to consider only its singularity. So seen, it is a specific one among a variety of other ones which somebody has willed to believe in, and its works and ways impose no perplexities of reason or faith. The latter follow from its pretensions alone. When they are disregarded, we have before us a value which its adherents have chosen for their standard, their means of measuring, appraising, and shaping the course of events, recorded and unrecorded. Since measured and measure must be commensurable, can the end fail to be consumed in the means? Or the means digested in the end? Either Happiness is Progress and Progress is Happiness, or Happiness is an end so ineffable as to lose all relevances and thus all meaning. And does not the ideal of Salvation come as naturally to a similar end? As the record reveals, Salvation is a goal whose relations with each of the competing sacerdotal and evangelical establishments, claiming to be the sole infallible way to it, are internal and constitutive. The means are irreconcilable and the end is inseparable from the means. Thus, also to the end of Salvation, the going is the goal. The churches, their dogmas, rites, and sacraments, their ceremonials, preachments, and prayers, all so often and long at cross-purposes, are each Salvation. The melange of alternatives of faiths and works are the being of it, and if any of them moves against whatever resistance through whatever barriers toward heightened power and greater possessions, wider influence, this to it is Progress. Let

20

T h e W i l l to Progress

the motion be reversed, the resistance mount, the barriers thicken, its rule diminish, its privileges contract, its claims be denied or ignored, and, generally, let the faith of its faithful fall into doubt; then those who remain firm will see in the reversal only corruption and decadence. What else did that charter of sacerdotal pretension, Pius IX's Syllabus of Modern Errors, intend? The Vatican had taken twelve years, from 1852 to 1864 to formulate the 80 propositions which it condemned and placed under anathema. The last of them repudiated the doctrine that "the Roman Pontiff can and must agree with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." The accursed 79 leading up to it in one way or another designate the principles and practices of the conduct of life of which this 80th was the configurational consummation. Focal for all those condemned doctrines was the idea that the liberties of free men in a free society were the dynamic of all progress and civilization, and that human freedom, hence, had to be the eternal antagonist of sacerdotal authority. The pretensions of the Syllabus so far exceeded the authors' powers that, no sooner was it made public, than clerics produced glosses which might contract its intentions to what was feasible and expedient in a world where clerical power could not be overruling. Thus, a French prelate 4 argued for one section of clerical opinion that the Syllabus indicated how people would believe and obey in an ideal world, where the papally perfect society would be actual. But in the actual world, where the perfect society can be only ideal, the Syllabus does not bind the faithful beyond what is feasible and expedient. Far from opposing "progress as such," that is, true progress, the Syllabus defends it against "a certain so-called progress." It established "the true *Cf. Lagrange, Vie de Monseigneur Dupanloup, 291 seq.

2 vols., Paris, 1894,

T h e Will to Progress

21

meaning" of progress and civilization. Regardless of what secularists and libertarians may contend, the Syllabus also conserves everlastingly the perfect, "Christian," sense of the term liberalism. Condemned are only the false liberalism, false civilization, false progress of the imperfect societies where there is a wall of separation between church and state, where all religions are free and none is favored, where no doctrine is infallible truth, no alternative an unforgivable heresy, where neither the political economy nor the arts and the sciences are under compulsion to submit to the censorship of totalitarian authority. The nearest approach to a perfect society uncorrupted by these liberties is Soviet Russia. Certainly in the domestic planned economy of that Utopian land there is small gap between the pretensions of the power-holders and the exercise of their power. There, state is church and church is state, commisar is priest and priest is commisar, and no competitor is permitted to challenge the monopoly of the Communist divinity—that omniscient, omnipotent, dialectical materialism supernaturally able to do all things—with its hierophant politicians, with its ceremonials and festivals, its canonical saints and heroes, its dogmas regarding true, or communist, progress, civilization and democracy, which it opposes to the false, corrupt, liberal bourgeois ideals of the same that it accurses and excommunicates. Curiously, although the Soviet Union and the Universal Apostolic Roman Catholic Church are each infallible and, while both condemn the identically false libertarian idea of Progress and its supporters, they militantly condemn each other's ideas as well. Here the same situation, consummating the same sequence, can be, and often is, simultaneously Decadence and Progress, betterment and corruption. Which, follows only from the system of beliefs and the power which makes it flesh to

22

The Will to Progress

walk on earth. For the system is to the believer his road map and plan of life. He knows that the course of events is a Progress when he feels that the events are going his way. In the eyes of the more or less informed citizens of free societies, the history of the West, from the Protestant Reformation on, is a record of Progress. Indeed, the very idea was born from reflection upon the labors of the subsequent generations in attaining and compounding scientific knowledge; in originating, multiplying, and improving the tools whose creation and use are called the Industrial Revolution; and in changing, by and through those, the ways of the common life. During the two hundred years and more since first philosophers delineated and discussed the idea of Progress, it has become an article of common faith of free society. With the innovations and their manifoldings, with the enchannelment and alterations of thoughts and tools and things appraised as the steps of Progress, there has gone of course an attrition and diminution of all powers that work as barriers or frustrations to such changes. To the believers in the latter can that course of events be anything but decadence? Progress, then, signalizes a selection and re-creation from, not an acquiescence in, the stream of social change; an alternative among our basic transvaluations of an identical existence. Events happen. Their sequences are irreversible; so that the order of their succession, which we call time, gives us no ground on which to appraise the passage of an earlier event into a later as progress or as decadence. Neither do the quality and structure of the succession, nor its direction, nor its goal, if any. John Bunyan's Pilgrim and William Hogarth's Rake are portrayals of personal histories which their creators qualify as progress. Yet no one would take these personal histories for commensurable wholes. They have in common neither a

H i e Will to Progress

23

terminus a quo nor a terminus ad quern, nor any steps between. Although the Pilgrim's Progress is consummated, the Rake's is arrested. Its cutting-short by hanging is an external contingency disguised as an internal necessity. All sorts of sequences, even more diverse than these two, are appreciated as Progress. W h a t then, calls out this valuation of any course of events? Answers, explicit or implicit, in studies such as Bury's, in past or current demonstrations of the idea such as Condorcet's or Marx's or Winwood Reade's or Toynbee's leave me unsatisfied. If individuals figure at all, it is by irradiation from the whole; they progress only as passive parts of a society-in-Progress. T h e latter is recognized by an order and rhythm of change which mark its advance toward an unchanging state at once the goal and the criterion of the advance. The process of advancing is perfectibility. This is a function of the terminus ad quem, that unmoved mover toward which all events progress in a motion of which it is also the law. The motion is history. Progress is not made by persons and in persons, but passes through persons. It is collective. Persons are somehow its channels or passengers but not its powers. T h e vehicle embarks them at birth and lands them at death, and that is all. T h e idea may be valid, but I do not think so. However the dialectic of an argument may run, in the concrete immediacies of the daily life the forces arc—persons. In so far as Progress names anything real, it names an enterprise into which sequences of interpersonal action and reaction shape themselves. Whatever unity of goal and movement this comes tq js a consequence of those shapings, a compounding of their diversities, abstracted from the multitudinous confluences of experience and held as an ideal to live by and for. The unity is anything but an all-surrounding and all-regulating one, infallibly marshaling social change into an order and rhythm whose

24

The Will to Progress

other name is Progress. T h e quality of existence which this designates is first a certain succession in our own experiences of which we have become aware, and which we have selected from the multidimensional crosscurrents of our life's stream to be our vision and guide. That, in another person's story or a group's record, which we can orchestrate to this selection, then also is Progress for us. It is still a selection from the total flow without direction of the impacts and suffusions, which are the all of experience. This, and not a preferred arrangement from it by a biographer, is the all of a man's life, and, like Faust's, it begins and ends and has no unity—even if we assume a common spring for the spontaneities of going on and the activities of living. Within any life's autonomous sufficiency and total aimlessness, however, choices do occur, directions are changed, goals are set or abandoned, gradients are laid down and the barriers along them are leveled; the inner and outer, the material and personal resistances are overcome; a union though not a unity comes to be, as propulsions do orchestrate to make themselves an open road which feelings of freedom and satisfaction signalize at last. The barriers, the resistances, the frustrations and the advances through, over, and beyond them, are as diverse as the lives they qualify. Let any such advances combine into a form which is sustained and cherished against all competition. Let it be renewed when it lapses. Let it be prolonged when renewed. Then an observer can recognize it for a ruling passion, a life, a faith, a career, an ideal, and he can say it impatterns a will to progress. As such, it must be relative to the personal being whose intellect defines it in words and images, whose faith affirms it, and whose years it qualifies with consistency, uplift, and vision, transvaluing an unpurposed sequence into intentioned progress. Whatever import a life attains, it attains thus.

T h e W i l l to Progress

25

" T h e thing of deepest . . . significance in life," William James once told his students, "does seem to be its character of progress, or that strange union of reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present . . . the solid meaning of life is always . . . the marriage of an unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage and endurance, with some man or woman's pains."

5

Inquiry shows that the characteristic features in a pattern of progress are the feel of struggle, of barriers passed, of resistance overcome, and of a way opened ahead. One friend, a distinguished psychologist, refers to the frustrations of his literary ambition, his struggles against them, his feeling of " a wild euphoria when things were going my way," his sense of release when events "clicked." Another, a notable educator and administrator, tells of his day-long labors in trying to bring a group of specialists in a certain field to a consensus, and how at a point where he realized that he had "knitted them together in thinking," he experienced a feeling of "having made considerable progress." T o a young poet and novelist who had grown up in a household where "progress" figured in assertions of maternal authority, the word long carried a mood of compulsion, standing, she says, for "a cold and hostile force pulling me in the direction I ought to g o " toward prescribed "success" or "victory." Later, progress came to mean her rebellious deviations from the obligatory way, and still later a sort of fusion of purposeful passing through barriers with spontaneous development. A t no time did the word denote absence of barrier, 5 W h a t Makes a Life Significant. Later, George Mead referred to experience in this mode in quite a different set of perspective-giving terms. "Problems," he wrote, "must appear in the consciousness of a person . . . in some sense as a new view of life, as an aspect of life peculiar to him.—All of us have problems; insofar as they are not mere mistakes, they represent an onward movement. Progress . . . even from the point of view of evolution is the constant meeting of problems and solving them,"

26

The Will to Progress

resistance, and struggle. On certain occasions it identified an indescribably poignant "feeling of survival, of not breaking down in the face of adversities." Other friends, in other walks of life, tell of other singularities which to them signalize "progress." Often the experienced barrier to a new turn in a new direction was an older successful way of going, and again, it was the new tempo of some unhabitual convention. And so on. Personal accounts of progress uncover no single pattern, no straight, inevitable line, developmental or other. They speak of regressions and other shifts of interest or direction; changes of field, of method, and of tempo; of new lives, new careers supervening. Yet of special significance is the fact that awareness of a terminus ad quem does not figure in personal descriptions of progress. As compared with its idea, experiences of progress do not seem to include consciousness of goal. Direction is felt, but it seems conspicuously direction away from, not direction toward. At that, the awareness of a terminus a quo, though definite, becomes dimmed by the feel of the movement away from it. Even the plateaus of euphoria figure as events in the process and not as conclusions. Introspection discerns progress in terms of obstructions removed, barriers razed, resistances overcome, problems solved, powers thus built up and freed. Personal experience measures advance by what's behind, not what's ahead. What inhibits or resists or frustrates is not the important thing in the measure of advance. The important thing is the sequence of overcomings and self-liberations, and that the compounding units of the succession gather momentum and force as they make their singular ways. Generally, progress has been held to be the movement away from the scarcities and helplessnesses of prescientific culture; but there are sects to whom its content is movement away from the demanding complexities of industrial civilization. Multitudes find in the princi-

T h e W i l l to Progress

27

pies and practices of naturalism the barriers to life more abundant. Minorities experience the doctrines and disciplines of supernaturalism thus. To many, progress is liberation from the compulsions of authority; to others, from the responsibilities of liberty. For all, making progress is the consequential overcoming of their felt evils; attaining their defined goods does not clearly figure. The sense of the road opened, of pursuit unhindered assimilates whatever idea of a goal there might have been. This, in part, accounts for the illogic of "infinite perfectibility." The phrase embodies the Enlightenment's unexpressed feeling that distance from, not distance to, gives the span of Progress, that hence the going is the goal. So far as I know, no conclusive explanation exists why that which is focal in the experience of progress drops out when it is abstracted and refined into the pattern and ideal of social change. The nucleus of the experience is, of course, its unceasing dynamic—the person's choosing of direction, the undiscourageable thrust of his will against the barriers, the compounding of the consequences. No doubt the perspectives of the newtonian system of laws, in whose context the idea of Progress was first constructed, were influences. No doubt spokesmen for free society like Turgot or Condorcet found in that necessitarian concept of nature a ground of assurance that no human despot could honestly challenge. No doubt making human progress one more manifestation of natural necessity was to guarantee the defeat of all human blocks to man's pursuit of happiness. Yet it is a fact that the vision of progress was concurrent with the conception of mankind as a brotherhood of men each different from the others, and all by nature equally free, as different, to think, to believe, to talk and write and work and play and associate with one another on equal terms in their religious, political, economic, and cultural enterprises. Men first

28

The Will to Progress

saw progress as the form of history when they first aspired to democracy in government, to laisser faire in business, free conscience and the separation of the state from the church in religion, free inquiry, free thought and expression in the arts, the sciences, the press, and the school. T h e overcoming of the resistance to these ideals, whose orchestrated gradients characterize, although they do not even remotely constitute, the civilization of our day, is organic to the conventional meaning of progress. At the same time, the ideals endow individuality with a meaning and importance such as it never before received, and which in free societies it retains throughout all the changes and chances consequent on the democratic and industrial revolutions. If the nineteenth century was the century of progress, it was by the same token the century of individualism, and its progress is identified with the many ways in which the people, whose lives spanned it, freed themselves from the blocks to their growth in dignity and worth. It was during the nineteenth century that the expression "infinite worth of the human person" was invested with a specific, concrete, and consequential meaning, a Thisworldly meaning without precedent in the actual workings of the laws and institutions of society. T h e steps of this investment, taken at no small cost in striving, blood, and suffering, are the Progress which the liberal generally acclaims. True, envisaged as a course of history, conceptualized into terms of discourse, the steps could suggest the measured footbeats of an unconquerable army marching. But in fact, they were taken in the free decision of an individual here and an individual there to carry on and not yield, opening roads of thinking and living. Such volitions mold process into purpose which other individuals then observe and emulate. A communion forms of common strivings in a common venture against the ever-present barriers to the open and unknown. The

The Will to Progress

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communion is a synergy of personal forces advancing the new faith at their own risk by the union of their wills to believe in it. Actually, that faith in Progress created the progress it was faith in; and even though luck as well as pluck had a role in its making, once made it verified the belief which could make it. A self-compounding organization of beliefs and verifications eventually formed itself. A process, beginning in a voluntary decision by some person, compounded into an idea of necessary progress under law of an entire society. But obviously, the law and the necessity were effects, not causes, the consequences of the voluntary association of determined persons in a common action. Let a failure of nerve beset any, let his will grow laggard, and progress stops for him. If, now lax, he in his turn prophesies his laxity as ideal, the whole society, hearing, may come to a standstill; or, if he keeps the pace but reverses direction, what had been progress is reappraised as regression. The individuals who figure in communions of progress are not many. The will to this progress and not another, is by no means everybody's will. This progress is the chosen way of life of a minority, which must ever be at the hazard of winning the free allegiance and voluntary cooperation of the majority, against the powerful odds held by rivals advancing other faiths. The minority convinced of progress has to labor at the perennial task of persuading or overcoming those rivals themselves, by its vision and work, its passing of barriers, its opening of new ways to diverse excellences and to life more abundant in thoughts and things. These excellences, this abundance, persons who approve the minority's faith and works must never forget, are by no means necessities of nature. They are works of man. They are inventions. They are discoveries. They happen, but they do not have to happen. Often their novelty surprises the very intelligence that creates them and the will that idealizes

30

The Will to Progress

them and undertakes and sustains the trying struggle to reproduce and diffuse them in events. T h e progress of the enterprise is in the determination and skill of the entrepreneurs. Between their always smaller company and the diversified majority there is an initial distance which our day signalizes as "cultural lag." But can those who have not accepted progress conceive "lag?" Does not the idea of "lag" presuppose the idea of progress?

"Cultural Lag" THE STUDENTS OF SOCIETY WHO FIRST EMPLOYED THE EXPRESSION

"cultural lag" did not, I am sure, mean it to be anything but descriptive. Like the doctors of every scientific discipline, they kept aiming to free their science from all terms of preference, appraisal, esteem or value and to shape it into a perfect organization of signs and meanings which conveys nothing but " t h e facts." T h e y were after "scientific objectivity," and their making and remaking of the language of their domain was, and remains, a prime mode of savoring this tasty meat. T h e y had found such expressions as "progress," "social evolution" loaded with connotations which rendered them terms of valuation instead of description. "Social evolution" carried, they observed, the idea of an order of necessary development; "progress," the idea that each later stage of development improved upon its predecessors. T h e y felt that such connotations were barriers in the social scientist's progress toward "scientific objectivity." A facilitating instead of an obstructing vocabulary would need to be abstract, indicative, and noncommital. In the expression "social change" they had found, they believed, the desired noncommital equivalent for "progress" and "social evolution." T h e y could study people's ways with thoughts, things, and one another as a procession of events-in-process,

uncontaminated

by judgments

of

value. T h e expression "cultural lag" is among the consequences of their aspiration. As symbols go, it is a comparative newcomer in the vocabulary of the social sciences. I t was brought into play

32

"Cultural L a g "

amid the febnlities of the gallant "lost generation" whose deplored gaieties held the stage in the second decade of this century. B y first intention, "cultural lag" signifies the long-familiar and frequently discussed discrepancy between the tempo at which the knowledge and use of the non-human world are changing and the rate of change of human institutions. T h e latter—folkways, mores, religion, the family, law, literature, the arts—were called "non-material," the former, "material." T h e former were said to be changing faster than the latter on the ground that changes in the former are cumulative. Material changes were held to be set off by inventions, every one of which consists in a recombination of old devices and old stuffs in a new way, but none of which can be a sheer innovation, making a complete break with the past. Almost all come as small modifications of some material or device already existing which enable it to do the same job better than the unimproved original. Should the later development fulfill expectations, it displaces the earlier. Failure may or may not result in extinction; performance may be sufficient for survival but not for "success." T h e records of the patent office suggest that inventions multiply as Malthus said people multiply, and the more of them enter use and survive, the more new ones they lead to. However, although the process is self-compounding and cumulative, it consists of a succession of spurts which looks to some like a tide flooding and ebbing, to others like the smooth and rapids of a river, to others still, like the explosions of a rocket, new inventions bursting like clusters of varicolored light f r o m the older ones. E a c h new device detonates a new cluster of alterations, great and small. T h u s the invention of the automobile set off a constellation of chain-reactions which reshape every phase of life in the United States, and ultimately perhaps,

"Cultural Lag"

33

life even where; reshape government, war and work, play, worship, the economies of the sciences and the arts—everything. The airplane, the radio, the motion picture, the video and other such initially unconsidered trifles work in a like manner. Of course, their effects are not everywhere the same. T h e people of each land and each culture develop a pattern of social change singular to themselves. In each, the new invention ensues upon or invades a certain state of the industrial arts. The economy must be able to provide the invention's inventor with the materials and know-how that his creative intelligence reacts to and works on; its importer with customers whose satisfactions in its use will more than repay them for the readjustments the use makes needful. In each culture, the new invention sets up changes that act upon other changes going on—attracting, repelling, crossing, interpenetrating, holding back, speeding up, reconstituting tempos, patterns, and substances. Among the interacting forces, the "non-material" components of the culture play, of course, a characteristic part. W e are told that, whatever may have been their power in the preindustrial world, it fails to preserve their dominance in the economy of industry. Religion, the arts, the family, the political order must and do accommodate themselves to the impacts of the "material culture." But the accommodation is slow, unfirm, reluctant, its pace uneven, the whole process willfully laggard and retarded. Its pattern and tempo embody the differentiae of "cultural lag." Obviously, the health of a culture would depend on the harmonics of its changes. The sciences, the arts and the crafts, the ideas and the institutions must keep step; whatever their rhythms, they must orchestrate. Where they are equally smooth and slow, the life of society is like the life of an animal, a continuous unconscious process of growing up and growing old,

34

"Cultural Lag"

or perhaps not growing old but just growing. If, however, any single process, because of some inward mutation or outer influence, gathers speed or slows up, and if this new tempo persists and mounts, first dissonance, then discord, accumulates. The end may come as the breaking away of the part from the whole, or as an over-all loosening of the whole, or as a complete repatterning which would be called social revolution. It is a matter of curious interest that the expression "material culture" should be advocated for that part of the culture complex of modernity whose rate of change is most rapid; that "nonmaterial" should be made to signify the far more inert residual part of the complex, and that the latter should be so out of step with the former as to produce the condition of "cultural lag." Well, such is the theory. Willy-nilly, it postulates a variety of associational structures, with their stuffs and orders, their singularities of speech and action, each more or less autonomous, each more or less an independent variable, yet so related to the others that a change of the rate of change, in any, will bring about maladjustments in all. Now the relationships which "cultural lag" envisages have obtained always and everywhere. Institutions can and do get out of step in any society, and, if anthropologists and historians once direct their attention to this item of the cultural weather, reports upon it will be as ample as upon anything that presently preoccupies them. But the attention of the learned has been caught only by its manifestations in the societies where science and industry have become important and has been concentrated upon the discrepancies of tempo between the "material" and the "non-material" components of our industrial civilization. Those that arise within "material culture" itself, without reference to its bearing on the "non-material," and those that arise within the "non-

"Cultural Lag"

35

material" without reference to its bearing on the "material" seem not to have stirred investigation. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the variables within each of the two categories of culture so resemble each other as to make the difference in tempo seem less likely to call up the idea of cultural lag. But I do not think so. I suspect that the differential variations have in these cases not aroused curiosity nor stirred inquiry for quite other reasons. The reasons are suggested by the very terms chosen to designate the condition. "Material," "non-material," "lag" do not seem to me to be terms of description at all. Given the climate of opinion and the social atmosphere, they suggest curious paradoxes of esteem and disesteem. To call the economy of the sciences and their applications "material culture" is to acquiesce at least unconsciously in the charge that the age of science and industry is "materialistic," that is, ethically degraded. To ascribe "lag" to the non-material components of the culture is however to suggest that the preferable tempo is the tempo of the "material"; that the "non-material" moves too slowly, not that the material speeds too fast. It is to suggest a more or less unconscious acceptance of the ideal of Progress as historically men have been envisaging Progress now for almost two hundred years—progress, namely, as the expansion of the scientific enterprise and the industrial economy by the multiplication of discoveries and inventions. Apparently, our social scientists regard "material culture" as the Joneses of civilization; apparently, their "cultural lag" signifies the failure, however caused, of "nonmaterial culture" to keep up with those Joneses. In effect, "lag" is a term of disesteem whose measure is progress; it condemns the slowness of movement away from a terminus a quo. Yet analysis provides no justification for calling the sciences and industrial arts "material" or their cultural older brothers

36

"Cultural Lag"

"non-material." It is true that these later ways of men with nature and with one another make up a knowledge which is genuinely power over both, undreamed-of power whose elements are insight and skill and whose fusion we have come to call know-how. And it is true that this mighty know-how is manifest in the multitudinous diversity of ideas, goods, services, and improved relationships it produces. But no one who regards the "non-material" culture with a candid eve and an honest heart will deny that it also consists of an informed technique in handling people and things. Not otherwise than "material" culture, "non-material" is an art of assembling and distributing power over man and nature, based on certain ideas of what each is and how it works. Let one be the concentration, the freeing, and channeling of energies within the atom; what is the other if not an analogous operation embodied, say, in a ritual such as Communion or "the sacrifice of the Mass," which puts to work the energies attributed to the sacred wafer? Both in fact are know-how, that is, a synergy of knowledge and skill applied to directing and controlling the seen and the unseen. Both eventuate in human relations, goods, and services. But the "non-material" culture produces few such results, while the "material" produces many. Given identical needs and wishes seeking their satisfaction in culture, the "non-material" is, on the record, an economy of cultural scarcity, the "material," an economy of cultural abundance. Moreover, in "material" culture, the human component, the know-how—that knowledge and skill which together are the spirit which animates the body of man in civilized action—plays the greater part; the matter it invests and transforms plays the lesser. In "non-material" culture, on the other hand, the spiritual component is by comparison small; the transformation of matter has the magic simplicity of transubstantiation. "Non-material" culture cannot

"Cultural Lag"

37

make a silk purse out of a sow's ear save as a miracle; "material" culture does it as a scientific matter-of-course. "Material" culture is the dynamic, "non-material" culture is the static, spiritualization of matter. In each, the turning point is an invention or a discovery. In each, the human imagination diverts its creative undertaking from a continuum of personal habit, social custom, conventions of conduct, communication, and address regarding human relations as these are affected by the making, distributing, and consuming of all sorts of goods, ideas, and services. Their scope, as everybody knows, is cosmic. Secularly, they embrace Thisworld's food, clothing, shelter, medicines, entertainments, weapons, and the similar objects of desire or aversion. W h e n consecrated by rites performed duly and in good order, they insure and bring about survival and sustenance in a happier Otherworld. Unhappily, although the entire aggregation of works and ways is continuous, it is not consistent. Machines tend to junk, rituals reduce to hocus pocus; obsolescence is the lot of all things and ideas, and faiths wear down like machines. T h e devoutest believer may come to express all he believes by turning a prayer wheel or patterning a gesture. There are points in the stream of experience where slowdowns occur; at others, speed-ups; occasionally something happens that seems complete stasis. In the last instance a hunger heightens to starvation, a drive undergoes blocking or frustration, feeling is dammed up and pushed back on itself; events become problems. A personality finds itself held to a pause of deliberation and questioning, in which it is either seeking how to hold back what has started to move too fast, or to speed or move on what has slowed down or stopped. Inventions, revelations, and discoveries name the arts and sciences, which in the belief of the inventor or the discoverer

38

"Cultural Lag"

or prophet, accomplish these wanted alterations of motion and rest, are the solutions of problems. Among persons to whom the problem is how to restore and conserve the old ways and old tempos, the discoveries and revelations and inventions are new means to an ancient end. Among persons whom the old has ceased to satisfy, the revelations, discoveries, and inventions are new means to new ends, vehicles of life on a new way at a new tempo. But the conservation of ancient arts of life exacts new skills with new tools and materials no less than the alteration of those arts. One transforms in order to prevent change; the other, to insure it. W e cannot preserve an old institution without changing it any more than we can preserve ourselves without changing ourselves. Tradition is alteration not less substantially, only less conspicuously, than innovation. Both transmute the tempo and direction of the institutional being. Among churchmen they are all the diversifying innovations of the denominations and sects, heretical and orthodox, reformation and counter-reformation, compounding their consequences as time marches on. Among musicians, they are the invention and addition of new musical instruments, the discernment and use of hitherto unimagined tonalities, rhythms, and harmonies. Among painters and sculptors they eventuate as diversifications of techniques and themes wherein schools and times and places differ from one another. Among men of letters they are experienced as the multitude of analogous variations whose record is the history of literature and whose prototype is the war of the ancients and the moderns in the battle of the books. Similar discrepancies of tempo and direction have arisen, and continue to arise, in government and law, with similar disputes over restoring the old rates of change, suppressing the new, absorbing the new tempos in the old, conforming the old to the new.

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39

However, the greatest impression of this common aspect of the human enterprise has been made by industry, and the appraisals of social progress and cultural lag have been reactions to the drama of industrial and not of other cultural events. In the economy of industry the scope and numbers of the compounding relationships were so great as to have rendered their operation elsewhere as practically imperceptible as sunlight does moonshine. Consider the matter of power alone. The specialists tell us that Cheops, building the Great Pyramid, kept 100,000 slaves at work for 30 years. In terms of expendible energy, it would take 30 slaves, working in relays of 10 every 8 hours, to produce one horsepower a day. Here in the United States we every year burn enough coal, oil, and other fuels to produce 130,000,000 horsepower. This is counted the equivalent of the labor of two slaves working for each one of the earth's billion human beings. During World War I the American Army employed machines producing 3,500 horse power per division. During the Second World War there were 400,000 horse power per division. Now that which transvalues coal, oil, and the rest from inert figures of earth into a dynamic resource of civilization is man's understanding of their natures and operative relationships, his invention and multiplication of tools wherewith to convert them into energy, his skills in using the tools, and essentially, the ability of men and women to fuse understanding and skill into the singular know-how of their personalities. Transmitting this know-how is education, which is thus the sine qua non of power and a chief essential in any pattern of progress. The "non-material" culture depends no less on the arts of communication of which it consists, depends indeed far more than the "material." The freer, the more plentiful, the opportunities to speak, to write, to listen, to read, to teach, to

40

"Cultural Lag"

learn, the more likely an abundance of know-how. Plenitude of opportunity here is a function of rapidity of reproduction of communications. By unaided word of mouth, could people talk to each other in great numbers or for very long? How generally available could they make clay tablets or papvri marked with symbols for the eve to read? When books were handwritten it took long to complete them, and scribes were never numerous enough so to cheapen the production of such books as to make them abundant. They used to be so scarce and so costly that monasteries would chain the manuscripts they copied. Is it not a far cry from that state of things to Gutenberg's invention of movable type, and from Gutenberg's types and presses to the modern printer's tools of mass reproduction, and to what they presuppose in physics and chemistry and mathematics and the graphic art? Stripped to its bare dynamics, what is printing if not the unbounded precise and swift compounding and repetition of identicals—identical letters, words, sentences, chapters, books? W e call the symbols which make up printers' fonts, type—but each, when first created, is an individual form with a singularity all its own, like any painter's painting. It becomes effectually a type when it is set in motion, reproducing itself in other media. Its typicality is then a name for its self-repetitive function, indefinitely extensible. Mass production is the exercise of that function which is both soil and ground for the economy of abundance in ideas. And may it not also be the initiation of multitude and abundance in all things? Whatever the occasion or context of invention or of discovery, the event possesses, where and as it occurs, the individuality of a newborn child. It is an idea in somebody's mind and singular to his person. He may talk about it to others. He may enter upon an exploration of its relevant and related fields. In due time he may project his idea as an

"Cultural Lag"

41

image or gTaph upon paper, and work out relationships and consequences in visual symbols. Soon or late he will find himself constructing a model, making tests, perhaps, of his adventure in pure science. Not concerned with profits, he will be getting others to repeat the model and the tests. Concurrently he will be keeping records, reviewing, discussing, seeking to eliminate faults, to strengthen virtues. In the fullness of a time having its own rhythm, lags, accelerations, he will have brought the invention to fulfillment and envisage a progress. After some more checking and testing, he may be able, if he is a free man risking his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor in a truly free enterprise, to persuade friends and acquaintances to share the risk, to create and set in order the necessary tools and start producing. Public acceptance of the end-product will depend on many factors of which its superior virtues need not be the most potent. More potent may be how widely and by what means those virtues are made generally known; continual production; storing the product, and paying the costs until the knowledge converts stasis into movement, lag into acceleration, producer-accumulation into consumer-distribution; overcoming the antagonism alike of honorable and of dishonest competitors whose plants would needs be retooled and products bettered if the innovation were to establish itself. Although competitors may be genuinely free enterprisers, in the present state of the industrial arts they are likely not to be. O n the record, new enterprise finds itself confronting oversize financial and industrial establishments that mobilize all their gargantuan resources either to buy it out or to ruin it. Of course, if the innovator is a subordinate of theirs, he sets them no problem. His invention is automatically their property and they can do as they choose with it. In very many cases they choose to abolish production where it is already going on,

42

"Cultural

Lag"

or never to launch it where it is not yet under way. There are withheld from use thousands of inventions which, if put in production, would raise the standard of living everywhere. This policy of economic contraception and abortion need not be due to monopolistic greed, although greed cannot be ruled out as a motive. Let an institution or a product or a plant become obsolete, then the singularity of the know-how which effectuates production becomes first irrelevant, then otiose, then vestigial and finally fossilized. T o the men and management concerned, the event is a waste of people and tools neither of which may be for their lives expendable. T h e hardship and suffering of "technological unemployment" ensue. And whom do the superiorities of the innovation pay for the evils that its adoption entails? The decision to adopt or not to adopt is preceded by a calculation of risks. Only if the prospective human gains are believed likely to absorb the financial and social costs of abandoning the old and undertaking the new is the wager placed and the risk assumed. Private ventures can do this at lesser hazard to fewer people than great corporations affected with a public interest or than states and governments. Yet it is the former, not the latter which are said to lag when they fail to take the "calculated risk." Obviously, if the intention of any establishment is not merely to maintain monopoly, or make money, or accumulate power, but to keep its enterprise dynamically alive, it will neither sterilize nor abort innovation, be it of things or of thoughts; it will simply seek by retarding, or speeding up, innovative retooling and production, so to regulate the tempo of adoption as to render the innovative alteration the most economical and painless that the discrepancies permit. It is notorious that the tempo of the production of new things has been far slower than need be; that large numbers of inventions are suppressed which could be readily made available with

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little suffering and much good for the people. Yet we hear little or nothing of how corporate culture lags behind science and invention or how governments, except when at war, are much more laggard than private enterprise, and free governments than despotic. Recent and parvenu governments may, as the record of the Soviet Union shows, reverse the relations. There the oligarchy is driving with all the police power it can mobilize, toward a completely industrialized economy. It projects its intent in sequences of "five-year plans." That these plans, or any, leave room for the variant, for the invention, the discovery, is anything but likely. A plan is a program of repeating a past, of endlessly multiplying it; it cannot genuinely concern itself with the novel and unprecedented and be a plan. The Kremlin's five-year plans are programs of cultural invasion by force, not of free diffusion or creative innovation. They are arrangements for repeating types whose originals have all been lifted from elsewhere. Shall the resistance evinced by the peoples of Russia to the enactment of these plans be appraised as "cultural lag"? What pattern of progress is their enactment, when among its instruments are slave labor, planned hunger and persecution taking the lives of millions of peasants, and spiritual starvation of all Russians by means of a censorship strangling free thought and free communication in every art and every science and every religion held inharmonious with the Stalinite dogma? Can progress be thought in terms merely of the multiplication of machines and the accumulation of power? Can it be thought only in terms of an abundance to be enjoyed by a generation as yet unborn, living in a Tomorrow that never comes? Of course, it can, and is. Yet even for such true believers progress as the terminus ad quem of a long run is as empty as no progress at all. Progress must be now. For the generations of men do

44

"Cultural L a g "

not live in the long run. Each lives and labors and suffers and enjoys in its short run and it must make advances and gain liberties as it goes on, during its own Today. How, then, can those who hold the measure of progress to be the going and the goals of free men, in a free society, fail to appraise the Soviets not only more laggard, in essentials, than the Tzarist empire of which it is the vulgar and brutalized avatar, but also regressive and barbarous as, modernly, the Russia of Tzars was not? If the measure of Progress is the rapid imposition of an industrial economy upon a feudal agricultural people; if it is a rationalization, by means of the Communist religion, of the use of force majeure, then, indeed, the power-holders of the Kremlin are the party of progress, and residual Russia is joined to the non-communist world outside in the guilt of "cultural lag." However, there is no available evidence that the multitudes of Russians are in any effective way aware of the discrepancies between their own tempos and those demanded by their industrializing planners, their masters. Willy-nilly, the implementation of any plan, inside Russia or outside, succeeds only as it orchestrates to the characteristic culture rhythms of the people involved. Let it seriously conflict with those rhythms, and the people will automatically and unaware protect themselves by withdrawing attention, by slowdowns, by a mishandling of tools and the like, and by flight. The power-holders will call these unaware defense-reactions sabotage, but by no exercise of power can they long prevent them. Force here can only intensify the discrepancies it is employed to remove. The people of Russia and their cultures are not only out of step with the masters of Russia; all pressures of police and propaganda notwithstanding, they go, as is natural, at their different speeds on separate roads; there is little or no synergy of will and work. Never will masters and servants be fellow workers sharing in equal loyalty

"Cultural Lag"

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to a common enterprise. This happens only where there obtains the minimum of participation and awareness such as free unions of workers or farmers in free countries manifest. There, "progress" and "lag" are relevant terms, since the unions use the powers they have won to bring about the change which they, and not the governments, require, and are secured in their initiatives by the basic law of the land. If, then, "cultural lag" is to be ascribed to the Russian multitudes, it is not the "objective social scientists" who are entitled to make the ascription. Only companions of the communist faith, exercising an invidious judgment of value, hold this title. If the expression can be employed non-ethically at all, it would be redundantly, to point the fact that the activities of different human groups differ in pattern and tempo. I do not, however, believe that anything is gained by such a redundancy. The expression is meaningful only as it communicates a preference, a judgment of value that cannot but vary with the concrete situation which evokes it. In each such situation, persons decide between alternatives of action. The decision is an act of faith. It initiates a program of change into which its maker endeavors to impattern events. The felt compoundings of such transformations as he does effect he appreciates as progress; the inertia, the reluctance, the resistance of the other fellow, his preference for a different going to a different goal, he may deprecate as lag. But as the record of the Kremlin sufficiently attests, lag readily becomes a synonym for heresy, vice, and sin. W e know what Nazi power and Nazi faith appreciated as progress and condemned as lag, and how the democracies triumphant over these from the first inverted those appraisals. W e remember and mourn how the republicans of Spain had struggled to embody the principles and practices of free society in that land tragic as the Russian land, for a

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"Cultural Lag"

people even more abject, hungry, and miserable. W e do not forget how the present power-holders of Spain subjected the republicans whom they defeated by arms not their own, to a continuing auto da jé. W e know that, to Spanish official faith, that which free society appreciates as progress figures not as lag merely but as obstruction, as aggression by a foe waging ineluctable war. According to falangist doctrine, truth is authoritarian dogma, goodness is submission and obedience to the commands of the hierarchical church and state, beauty is the total office of the dominant cultus joined to the Hispanidad of the falange espantóla tradicionalista, progress is the envisioned march from their present impotence to the empire of the world. Totalitarian plans of progress—be they sacerdotal, communist, nazi, fascist, falangist—are alike in that they all knowingly invoke aggressive action against the different, merely because it is different, as both the means and end of the domination of humanity each intends. None rejects the components of modernity whose growth, diversification, and enrichment sustain whatever is singular and characteristic in the modern's tradition of progress. The hierophants of those cults require only that the culture of modernity shall serve as the handmaiden of the ineffable doctrines and disciplines of which they have chosen to be at once the strategists and ministers, prophesying, saying that God, or destiny, or dialectical necessity, did the choosing and anointed them to rule mankind. If they appraise science and industry as laggard, it is because those lack so in handmaidenly submission and servility. The last generation has known, however, another appraisal of modern progress which condemns it as evil not only for its interpersonal consequences, but for its essential qualities. This condemnation was made in the light of a faith employing a far more ancient estimation of human life than any which the

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spokesmen of the Judaeo-Christian tradition could lay claim to. It was that of Hindu disillusion. T h e enlightened ones who attained it preached a gospel which rejects as vanity and emptiness all the actualities of living, which teaches that salvation comes to men only as they will the complete mortification and not even the partial satisfaction of their desires—only, hence, as they breathe on in an ineffable passivity, refraining from every action that might do violence to any Oiher living thing. Gautama, a royal prince, abandoned his princely station, and donning the yellow robe, tramped through all India preaching this gospel of peace through withdrawal of the will. He got a following. But neither he nor any of his disciples was able to win men of power to take non-violence for the policy of power. Asoka, the most imperial of Buddhists, was a conqueror who renounced the use of force only after he had destroyed by force all the princes strong enough to challenge his power. In the conduct of life, the Buddhists of Japan, China, and other Far Eastern countries have never been unemulative of Asoka. A n d Indian priests and princes, even when of the Buddhist persuasion, were not less given to violence than the rulers of any other land. It is the twentieth century which has seen an innovation in the oriental theory and practice of non-violence. T h e innovator was the late Mohandas Gandhi. He worked out a way of using non-violence as an instrument of aggression in a policy of power. M a n y men and women of goodwill in Europe and the Americas who sanctify Socrates because he would not disobey the law even to save his life sanctify Gandhi because he chose to disobey the law even if he died for it. T h e y revere him as a strong soul to whom peace was both a means and an end in the conduct of life. They revere him as an esprit fort who had chosen to reduce his personal wants to the ascetic minimum

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"Cultural Lag"

required for vegetative survival. They imagine him going among his people, their servant and liberator. His personal history indicates that as a young man he had aspired to a career as Europeans think career; that the career had been refused him rudely and harshly; that, soon after, he turned away from all participation in the works and ways of the Western world —except its medical science and its industrial profits. He undertook a new career, for whose attainment he employed means sure to be dramatically impressive to the West aqd religiously effective among Indians. T h e theory and practice of these means is Western. Gandhi clothed them in oriental garments and steeped them in religious color. They are the strategy and tactic of the class war as those had been implemented by the I . W . W . in the United States. They consist in the withdrawal of efficiency by the workers in field and factory; in the ignoring of law and statute by subject and citizen. But the "civil disobediences" that they sum up to do not consist in committing any positive injury to person or property; they consist in doing nothing either positive or negative to person or property. They are simply noncooperation; they are simply complete self-withdrawal from the enterprises of industry and government even though the withdrawal destroy the enterprises and those who depend on them for life and a living. Thus, Gandhi and his Western admirers meant different things by peace. For the latter, it was a compromise and collaboration of interests and desires. For Gandhi it was the imposition of his own will by the refusal of cooperation. Gandhi's word for this refusal was satyagraha. T h e practice of satyagraha caused arrests which filled jails, shootings and deaths of crowds of unarmed miserable rebels passively disobeying the laws and lifting not a finger to defend themselves from law enforcement. T h e consequence of Gandhi's endeavor to impose his will by

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non-violence was thus violence; violence not only by the British raj but by native opponents and also followers. The Mahatma often employed one other conspicuous aggressive but non-violent device to coerce both foe and friend to his will. This was the dharana or hunger strike. Like satyagraha, it was postulated on the knowledge that the people to be coerced by it were sufficiently moralized to suffer from feelings of guilt and remorse when unarmed and non-resistant foes perish, be it by their own hands or their opponents'; and to be sensitive enough to world opinion to prefer making even dangerous concessions rather than figure before the world as slayers of the helpless and unarmed. Many of the Hindus whom Gandhi thus coerced were creatures of the brahminical culture which exalted ascetic passivity, the British whom he fought were creatures of that same tradition of democratic progress whose works and ways were to Gandhi anathema. Because of his uses of satyagraha and dharana, his own people canonized him as Mahatma and his Occidental admirers as a peace-loving Holy One. T o rationalize his practices he projected a certain ideal of human nature and human destiny. In the light of this ideal, Progress would be the replacement of modem industry by the traditional arts and crafts of preindustrial India; the suppression of British rule by an "independence" which, in terms of the tradition dominating the Hindus, might mean anything but the freedom and welfare of the peoples of that sub-continent as decent Westerners and most Hindu intellectuals understand freedom and welfare. Gandhi urged boycotting all foreign goods; he preferred to see the loot taken by the underfed crowds burned rather than used to still their hungers. He required the British entirely out of India: let them, he wrote, "entrust India to God, or in modern parlance to anarchy; parties will then fight like dogs or will, when real

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responsibility faces them, come to a reasonable agreement." He manifested no concern over the inevitable suffering and murder of countless innocents that must precede his dubious "reasonable agreement." During World W a r II he was ready to admit the Japanese to India; and he praised Pctain for surrendering to Hitler. W h o can say whether he had any perception whatsoever of the deep moral abyss between the British ruler with all his imperfections on his head and the Buddhist or Shinto Japanese conqueror? that he had any idea of how those or the Stalinites or the Falangists would have responded to his satyagrahas and dharanas? Means are means and not follies only as they succeed in reshaping the material, human and non-human, to which they are applied. T h e record contains nothing to suggest that "civil disobedience" and hunger strikes could, when employed to coerce totalitarians, lead to anything but the complete extirpation of them that trusted in these instruments. T o those other totalitarian faiths, the Gandhian cultus with its works and ways would be unspeakable heresy. If its diffusion was the all of progress to Gandhi, the totalitarians should, in the light of it, have been not only willful laggards but deadly foes. That the twentieth century Mahatma could not see them as such is sufficient commentary on what was validly progress to him, and what cultural lag. Now, having reviewed some of the consequential meanings of "cultural lag," is it not reasonable to conclude that when such "lag" is not a function of the will to progress, it is the achievement of a will to lag? For men and events can be said to lag, only when some move more slowly than others, at a pace all have agreed to, upon a way all have consented to,

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toward a goal all alike desire. Then the laggards are those too inwardly weak or outwardly frustrated to keep the pace. They need, and as a rule they ask for and receive, the aid and comfort of their pace-making fellow pilgrims. Therein the tempo of progress becomes the configuration of the tempos of the entire company. But often "cultural lag" is used as a sign for the inertia of the multitudinous indifferent, who, never having learned, have neither assented to nor dissented from the communion of going and goal, but are moved blindly along because they don't care if they do, and don't care if they don't. And yet again the expression is applied to men and women seeking a different road to a different terminus ad quern, men and women to whom progress means another direction to an alternative goal. In them lag is resistance to moving on the designated ways toward the chosen end. Like molluscs, they not only decline to move themselves, they are set against being moved by others. Those that care enough may heighten passive resistance into aggressive opposition, aggressive opposition into militant undertakings to divert a caravan from the path it is upon toward the destinations they themselves prefer. Then ensue the wars of religion with their reformations and counterreformations, their revolutions and counter-revolutions which historians make so much of. Progress declines to stasis and stasis falls to regression. But soon or late a man here, a woman there, freely assume the burden of the human spirit, and, attaining in their turn the know-how, again turn the will to Progress, and take its works and ways—with all their demands upon the brave heart and the wise head—for their working faith. In the light of the record, which shows us progress and lag as contrary appraisals of identical sequences, no providence assures progress, no law of nature necessitates it. Moderns can have

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the progress they will to have by freely accepting the hazards which attend the patterns of its going and goals. The one which is generally held to ovenule all others, and all things human and divine, is the hazard of death. What meanings, then, can death have for progress?

Of Death and the Future ALIKE AS IDEALS AND AS EXPERIENCES, PROGRESS AND LAG EVINCE

many patterns. If there exist discourse about their configurations which does not suffuse description with appraisal or digest existence in value, it has escaped my knowledge. By and large the appraisals carry with them realization of temporal direction: a person experiencing progress is aware of how far he has gone; a person experiencing lag, of how far he has to go. Both are dimensions of duration, but lag projects futurity as progress does not. Either may qualify the same course of events. W e have considered already how each does in fact work like a gradient of achievement or frustration within configurations of Happiness or of Salvation when these are taken for ideals. Devotees of both, however, esteem as momentous still another experience which counts as an event of no importance in that specific and singular conspectus of the course of human events wherewith mankind were first invited to take Progress for their ideal. This other experience is the experience of death. The pagan Creeks, holding that happiness is the natural consummation of every human life, were naturally pretty well convinced that you couldn't concede that any life was happy until it was over. A verdict of happiness could be valid only after the happy man had died. Their Christian descendants, anxious about personal salvation, hold that no man is truly saved unless he dies, once to the flesh, and again, and finally, in the flesh. If the judgment of happiness was a conspectus of the

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past, the vision of salvation is an assurance about the future. T h e point of departure, for judgment in the one and for vision in the other, is death. B y contrast, the classical ideal of progress pays death but passing heed; appraises it, indeed as incident and irrelevancy. Condorcet, writing down his gospel of Progress to be the religion of a new humanity and the doctrine and discipline of all later generations, invoked natural law as the guarantor of man's future progress. But the guarantee was valid only for the species M a n , not for the persons who are the species. Such persons might believe or deny the laws of progress as they would. T h e y are born, they grow up, they grow old, they die. B u t their race goes on so long as the earth endures, and in the new ages of progress each generation will live longer than its fathers. " M e n will not become immortal," but at last "death will be nothing more than the result either of an unexpected accident or of the slow destruction of the vital forces." Y e t however long death is postponed, it is the race, not the individual which ineluctably obeys and fulfills the laws of Progress. " I f the unlimited perfectibility of mankind is, as I believe, a universal law of nature, man should not regard himself as being circumscribed by a fleeting and isolated existence and destined to disappear after a succession of good and evil fortune for him and for those whom chance has placed in his way. He is an active part of the great whole and participates in an eternal work. Existing only for a brief moment on a point of space, he can, through his labor, embrace all places, unite himself to all ages, and be effective long after his memory has disappeared from the earth."

1

Neither private purpose nor cosmic

accident, the laws of progress are the laws of nature, ordaining the destiny of man. N o t the drives of prejudice and ill will 1

Condorcet, "Sur l'instiuction publique," Oeuvres, VII, 183.

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in the living nor the impotence and emptiness of death can keep humanity from that certain future of life, liberty, knowledge, and power, ever more abundant and ever more perfect. T h e prophecy expresses Condorcet's singularity. He attributed its inspiration not to his own will and vision, but to a new revolutionary rule of reason in society—sometimes broken, even criminally, but all in all sure to be followed—which of itself guarantees that "the description of the progress of mankind can be written in perfect liberty." Condorcet had started this writing after a political faction, ostensibly protecting the new-won liberties of the French, proscribed him because he had defended those liberties from the violence this faction had offered them by its new constitution. He wrote, while a fugitive in hiding, knowing himself to be under sentence of death. And he sought the hazard of this death rather than permit his hostess to continue to risk her own life by sheltering him. Although he was sure that death is extinction, there is no indication that he regretted dying. T h e certainty which sustained him was on the face of it as opaque and indefeasible as any belief that the dead live on in a supernal Otherworld. It was that his share in mankind's "eternal work" endures even after his very memory has perished. T o me, also such a certainty is a compensatory option on whose mechanics the personality supports its integrity even at the moment of its annihilation. Of the stuff that dreams are made on when our little lives are rounded with the sleep of death, its primordial urges are the drives creating most of the poetry, the religions and the philosophies of the peoples of the world. It is because we die that we devise a vision of the undying necessity of the ideals we die for. It is because the progress of a personal history willy-nilly comes to the place where the rest is silence that the philosophers and prophets of progress envision it as the goal and going of all the generations of man, "embracing

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all places and uniting them to all ages," most yearningly, the ages still unborn. Perhaps this is what leads philosophers of progress to pay so little attention to personal history; why they have little more to say about death than that social progress must bring a postponement of personal extinction. The hazard of this extinction accompanies every man on his daily round and he knows it, aware or unaware, in all his doings. His image of it derives from two modes of experience. One is a certain panic on suffering in some form, a diminution and black-out of awareness, a sliding-down and sloughing-off into nothingness. This has diverse occasions, the commonest one is falling asleep; it is also frequent during anaesthesis in hospitals: there is hardly anybody, I think, who has not experienced this abysmal drop and the ensuing frantic thrust after wakefulness. The other is seeing in death, coffined or uncoffined, a person one has known and cared for, alive, and passing into an empathy of the inflexible emptiness of feature and figure. The hurt of these experiences owns a singularity poignant beyond any torturing pang whose crescendo of pain stretches the consciousness to the breaking point, but neither diminishes nor empties it. They introduce something sharply reversing the habitual eventuations of consciousness. In so far as they have an identity, they overturn being and value, even the ordinary negative values of the daily life. The late George Foote Moore said somewhere that death "has always seemed an unnatural thing." And if the term signifies the immediate experience I believe it to signify, fear is inward to it ab origine. It is this specific "fear of death" which poets, priests, and philosophers practice their imaginative arts to assuage, creating the forms of flight from that singularity of eclipse and effacement. Dogmas of immortality are compensations in idea for its occurrence in fact. The compensatory role suffuses these dogmas

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with values intrinsic to themselves and independent of all other experience, makes of them so many more instances of the loyalty of the personal life to its own integrity. But the dogmas serve also representative and programmatic functions. These latter intimately concern the body and its residue, the images and shadows of the body whose life has ended; they design for the person it was eternal salvation and everlasting happiness. They rationalize an economy which, if the anthropologists tell us truly, is most widespread and diversified and consists in "the cult of the dead." The readying, housing, imaging, service, and care of the bodies that have died is a major activity of the world's religions. The places where they a.i laid take a large part of the humanized earth. The moiety of the vessels, rituals, and symbols of the Otherworldly cults consist of aide-memoires whose purpose is so long as possible to keep the absent dead a present image and remembrance among the living. And if present, somehow without any future as live men and women experience their futures; present, therefore, like the figures on Keats' Grecian Urn, their persons and existence unchanged from the moment of death. So, for all who remember their dead and yearn to live with them again, so—even for wise realists like Thomas Jefferson and William James—the dead may live. But, be it in heaven, or be it in hell, they do not live on. To stay the beloved friends they have been in life, they must stay dead; they cannot have any personal history after they are dead. Their future is futureless. Need one labor the paradox? The ideal of immortality envisions the dead as being alive yet not living. As the negation of mortality, it is the negation of life. The living cannot be immortal, since, being alive, the future of each is genuine. For each it consists in the alterative stretch and pulsing of time, its changes and chances, with their speedings-up and slowings-

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down, their surprises and innovations, all distinct and individual yet passing over one into the other, composing the personal history which a biographer may in part recount, and soon or late falling into the immobile futurelessness which is death. Death begins where all that stops; it is the end; and faith in immortality is at once assent and dissent regarding the end. To affirm immortality is to contradict, not only all experience, but the natural reason which is a growth from experience. The affirmation is now a deep-lying part of the folkways and mores of our civilization. But there was a time when it lay far less immersed than now in "the deep slumber of decided opinion." However our ancient forebears practiced the cult of their dead; and however they may have feared death for themselves, they have left no record of a panic need to nullify the fact of it, such as accumulated with the long-deepening "failure of nerve" which took the Christian scheme of salvation for its anodyne and shaped it into both a vehicle of flight and a city of refuge. Moderns are apt not to remember that the wand of healing and the guarantee of refuge in that scheme was the death and resurrection of Jesus. That was real news for Mediterranean mankind. If true, that contradiction of all experience and all reason was not only good news, it was the best news of all news. And how did one know it was true? One knew because it was brought upon a testimony not of legend, not of rite, but of living men who had seen and spoken with him who was dead and is alive again. Believing was ineluctable, after such seeing. If the event was a contradiction of experience, so much the falser, experience; if it was contrary to reason, the more untrustworthy, reason. Tertullian gave this appraisal of the event its most authentic expression: "'And the Son of God died:' this is credible because it is absurd. 'And he rose again from the tomb:' this is certain because it is impossible."

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That, all experience and reason to the contrary notwithstanding, men prefer to live and die in the infallible faith of their resurrection as the living bodies they were before they died, is now no news in the world. What other want moved Catholic Miguel de Unamuno to write: "If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny even without hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically"? Corliss Lamont has provided us with an admirable survey of the role and rationale of this invincible craving for a life beyond life. He calls it the Illusion of Immortalityand, as reason and experience slowly come to some sort of parity with uncompromising faith, and more and more people learn to overcome fear by understanding and to test belief by all its consequences in living, the appraisal of immortality as illusion does win agreement. Repugnance to complete extinction remains, nevertheless, inveterate: Lamont quotes Heine: "How the soul fights against the thought that our persons must cease to be, that annihilation is forever! The honor vacui which we ascribe to nature is really native to our hearts." And Heine is representative of a host of sensitive and reasonable spirits. Even the most disillusioned and matter-of-fact minds, contemplating the infinite stretch of time and the endless expanse of space in the before and after of whose vast inane man's existence is but an infinitesimal instant, speak forth a profound unease and selfpity over the acknowledged brevity of the human enterprise. By heart and head they esteem brevity as futility. They regret the human enterprise as too brief for worth, the human scale as too small for significance.3 When the installation of the world's greatest telescope was being celebrated at Palomar in California, the orator of the occasion dedicating this new tool 2 s

G . P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1935. See Dating the Past, by Frederick E. Zeuner, London, 1946.

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of progress to the pursuit of astronomical truth is reported to have in addition advised * his fellow celebrants that against the background of the unfathomable universe which the telescope was already penetrating, " t h e petty squabbling of the nations is not only irrelevant but contemptible. Adrift in a cosmos whose shores he cannot even imagine, man spends his energies in fighting with his fellowman over issues which a single look through this telescope would show to be utterly inconsequential." T h a t charming ironist among our historians, the late Carl Becker, estimating the time lapses which certain gains in human powers and relations implied, came to an analogous conclusion. Although he conceded progress in technology to the past one hundred years, he doubted whether there has been any progress "in intelligence and the art of living during the past two thousand." He allowed some over all progress in human values in the course of some 250,000 years but decided, that in terms of infinite time, "progress and the very existence of man himself became negligible and meaningless."

5

T h e mood which the ideas of space and time and power employed by the physics of his own age aroused in Henry Adams was similar, but went nearer to defeatism and despair. They turned him into the soothsayer of a sustained historical pessimism. By his readings in physics he had convinced himself that the principles of history must follow from the laws of this physics, and that the most momentous of these laws for all existence was the second law of thermodynamics. All forms of energy, be they those of the sun or those of human culture, are parts of a process of degradation whose end is zero. T h e idea, hence, that history records the displacement of lower by * The New York Times, June 3, 1948. • The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, "Progress," XII, 495.

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higher forms of human behavior and organization, that the life of man is a progress, upward and onward, is an illusion. Civilizations dissipate like gases. They, too, embody the rule of phase which the physicist has discovered and which the historian should understand and apply to the course of human events as they fall from existence to nothingness. 6 "Inconsequential," "negligible and meaningless," "degradation and dissipation" are judgments of value, in the mouths of the judges, absolute, and evoked, not by the singularity of that which the judges judge, but by its littleness in space and shortness in time. They regret the measure, not the matter, of the human adventure. T h e mood of the sorrowful spirits who made them is akin to that of sophisticated dialecticians such as Kant or Royce or Bergson who, disturbed by the inability of reason to prove that we are alive when we are dead, were led to argue for the moral as well as metaphysical necessity that this should be so. It would seem that persons acquiescent in the findings of the sciences and hopeless of immortality remain brothers under the dialectical skin to their fellows who divert those findings into proofs of the special pleadings whereby the diversionists make themselves, if not certain, at least most hopeful, of immortality. May it not be that Heine's horror vacui obsesses them all alike? And must it not obsess them, and all the generations and conditions of mankind? From time to time we hear of pessimists who gloat like Arthur Schopenhauer at the harsh strenuosities of all living and confess not to a horror vacui but a horror * Henry Adams makes this point variously in his Letter to American Teachers of History, The Education of Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, his novels and his letters. T o his sentiment, if both the Virgin of Mediaevalism and the Dynamo of Modernity are the illusions he argued they might be, the Virgin, bringing peace of mind and personal assurance, was the illusion to be preferred.

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pleni. Schopenhauer lived out his more than three score years and ten in a lusty gratulation upon the evil savor of this worst of all possible worlds, where birth is a fall, existence is sin, experience the pangs of insatiable cravings, itself but the passing drive of one universal, unintelligent, unintelligible dark will, ever straining toward that quietus of which death is the perfection, never gaining anything but a war of all things with all. Nothing that fights this war but fights at once for its own survival and its own annihilation. The élan of its existing is to renounce existence, and the authentic human forms of this élan are the arts and religion. In so far as through these works of theirs men approach renunciation of the personal life, they establish art and faith as the elder brothers of death in which renunciation is completed. Why then, should a man not make his own quietus with his own bare bodkin? Because, alas, the death which cuts off personal existence is, like the birth which initiates it, an event in a universal succession wherein the blind, impersonal will eternally seeks the quietus of insatiable craving and eternally never finds. Singular existences are brief but greatly tragic stages of this tragic immortality of seeking, an immortality dooming the hopes of all who, driven by the horror pleni, look for the peace of death in suicide. The sophistry of this defeatist gospel is patent. Since its obvious conclusion is suicide, its author needed a doctrine which would justify him in not terminating the pleasures of his lusty pessimism with dagger or drug. The immortality of the universal will probably seemed to Schopenhauer just such a doctrine, and who shall envy him the comfort of it? But then, who can well deny those who hold that the familiar horror vacui must have mothered his doctrine? They recall that observation of old Lucretius, When you are, death is not; when death is, you are not, and declare that neither eternal impersonal will

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nor everlasting personal God can at best do more than repeat any original; to restore to identical life in another that dead singularity itself is beyond all power. As Charles Peirce remarked, discussing the doctrine of chances, "All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death." f And death, Peirce adds, by making the number of our risks finite, "makes their mean result uncertain"; that is, if some persons do die in hopeless miser)', others end at the height of good fortune. But who, before he dies, shall experience betrayal and breakdown, and who may die secure in his faith and fortune is in no way a foregone conclusion. Without death Pascal would lose his wager, for if Peirce is right, the very doctrine of chance which Pascal employs to make it a bet on a sure thing assures its becoming a dead loss. In his eternity Pascal would live to see the eternal God in whom he had trusted betray his trust, and at last break down as, according to this doctrine of chances all beings must. But, since Pascal died invincibly believing, and his death was in fact the annihilation whose mere thought unleashed the horror from which his Pensées are his flight,' nothing can ever falsify his faith for him. Let, then, man the believer bet on a future life with G o d or on Nature and mortality. He can win his bet only in the event that he dies. Nevertheless, knowledgeable persons, thinking reasonably about their personal histories, grieve that they 1 "Chance, Love and Logic," The Doctrine of Chances, p. 7 1 . « See the Pensées, particularly, Section III, "Of the Necessity of the Wager,"

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must end, that none thereafter has a future. T h e y cannot with a good heart accept the fact that if personality is unique, the very uniqueness puts it beyond any resumption or renewal after it dies. Those who can, and do, are few, and not vocal, and their philosophies are fewer. Almost every conspectus of man's nature and destiny continues in the vein of the great tradition. F e w of those philosophies agree that death is truly death, most present new proofs which their authors hope shall be more convincing than those devised by all the generations including their own, to establish that death is only an appearance, that reality guarantees happy deathlessness for the companions of the faith; miserable, for the misbeliever. But believing or denying, the systems are alike the meditations on death which Plato long ago declared philosophy to be. Our day fashions its new look for this meditation in the form of existentialisms. There is one of the right and one of the left. Merely to read them is to recognize the authenticity of their mood. For the mood is perennial. It is the ancient failure of nerve in modern dress. T h e unnerved but make a new hypostasis. T h e y transpose personal experiences of

cravings

denied assuagement and assuagements void, like chewing gum, of sustenance, into the metaphysical substance of personal being. In existentialists, the mood identifies the ineffable this-and-noother of personal being as existence, and the going and goal of personal history as anxiety, dread, agony, consciousness of guilt. T h a t is, the failure of nerve makes itself the synonym of existence. It practices the most widespread of philosophers' fallacies—that of composition. Existentialists argue that every man, if he only knew it, is a unique agony, and they are at pains to cause him to know it. Among those of the right these pains appear to be the latest mode of so producing the traditional conviction of sin and fear of death-as-a-miserable-after-

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life as to impel resort to the Hidden God of the ancient salvation. T h e ways to this God are either the arguments of a metaphysical Protestantism in mufti or the lace-skirted rites and duties of a church universal, militant and apostolic, claiming a world-wide imperium of infallible doctrine and discipline. Existentialists of the left are more than merely secular exponents of that secularized right doctrine. Although various derivations are announced for them, they are in spirit of the provenance of Schopenhauer. Their philosophical propensity is his. Like him, they find existence to be an evil and an agony, but, like his theological elder brothers, they also agonize over death. Among the German companions of the cult, the awareness of death is the nuclear component of the tragic conflict wherein the uniqueness, the haecceitas or soness—the existentialist new word for this is "facticity"—of personal existence consists. Their most influential voice has been Martin Heidegger, who sublimated his existential agony in the peace of mind of Hitlerism. T o know that one must die, he prophesied, makes of the emptiness, out of which our birth is a fall and into which we disappear at death, an inward crisis. W e recognize that to exist is all there is, that there isn't any more. W e are what we are and as we are without rhyme or reason, without ground or goal, and therein existence is freedom and freedom is existence. True, our existence has a horizon, and all our lives we yearn to get beyond the horizon. But the horizon is death and what is there beyond death but death? W e are born to die. T o exist is to be sick unto death; to be free is to be free unto death. For death is the sine qua non of a person's being a person. " I am," says Heidegger, "freed by my doom to be mvself." As a philosopher, reflecting as common men do not upon the ultimates of value and existence, he argues himself aware that he is a stranger here, although there is no other

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place to be his home. Strange figure fallen on an empty ground, he nevertheless appraises as his home the void whence he says he fell; and purports thus to transpose agony into aspiration, fear of death into courage. T h e word void he fills up into a synonym for that inert parmenidean, eternal and universal plenum which enfolds both is and is-not. Its more immediate ancestor is the equivalent nothingness of Schopenhauer's annihilation of striving that is his signature for the world as idea. In Heidegger's personal language the terms are dasein, sein and

das seiende.

Although existentialism is a stalk from a Germanic root, its flower and fruit are Gallic. W h a t vogue the good tidings has is owed to its French apostles. Their vision of the burden of man's life is not less but more colored by dialectic and new diction; and the style of their deliverances compenetrates the argot of the philosophers with the tropes and images of the poet and novelist. They impress with their indignant irony over the deceptions that traditional morals, religion, and philosophy practice on men's hearts, while at the same time they recognize that, dialectically, the illusions must be. Jean-Paul Sartre, whom we may take for the representative conjurer of this existentialist vision, exemplified it in plays and novels as well as in philosophical argument, and his works are on the church's index of forbidden books. For him the verb to be is a transitive verb; transitive, that is, when it signifies the substance of a self-conscious entity, which exists pour-soi, and hence is a person. T h e person's surroundings also are truly there; but so far as he is concerned, those exist unaware, merely en-soi. For him, they, even the humans among them, are things only; no more than possible means to his personal ends. Transitively, being is freedom, and freedom in any man is the irrational blind fact of felt lack, of an incompleteness craving completion, never attaining, ever frustrate,

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therefore ever in action. Freedom, says Sartre, is actually the void that is in man's heart, that forces the human reality to create itself and not simply to be. This makes of the human essence a sort of metaphysical histrionism. Man is forever putting on an act, and therein is the captain of his soul and the master of his fate. For, enacting a role is creating a self. Our actor's art is a constant choosing between parts which the exigencies of an alien world present us with. Through these roles a personal history enacts itself into a future for which the actor alone and no other can be responsible. A man's performances, affirmative as they may be, are events in a unique process of self-nullification whose zero point is the emptiness of death: "Je suis mon propre néant," says Sartre. So existence is freedom and freedom is disaster. T h e catastrophe is not a simple self-slaughter. Others have a part in it, when they regard the person, since to them, as to him, what is not their craving can be but a means of that craving. Attention from another devalues the self-conscious person to an unconscious thing. Only le desir, the desire—Freud called it once libido, and again Eros—which is sexuality can translate pour-soi into en-soi without this consequence. For the craving called desire has "the body in its facticity" for its transcendent object. Craving itself becomes flesh in attaining this flesh; free activity complétés its entropy in utter inertia, it is now a thing, but a thing self-made and self-satisfied. Of course, the reification does not attain the utter effacement of death. But death's spring remains inward to us, terrorizes us, and we contrive a curtain of separation between it and our existence, a web of faith and morals under whose compulsions we, dreading, live. The myths within this web are not only the ancient ones of the tradition, not only the gods and their commandments. They include also Progress, liberty, happiness. They plague us like

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flies. They keep existence, as they must, the synonym for misery. In our depths, nevertheless, each knows right well that the web and the flies are creations of the will freely believing, as illusory as the emperor's clothes in the fable. Each knows right well that his cowardice, not his strength, is the mother of his illusions. Therein is his sin, that he exists; and he cannot look upon its nakedness with his own eyes, unashamed. His shame is his recognition of his lapse into this sin. A man who can look upon his naked self recognizes how utterly alone he is, how unjustifiable his existence, how without excuse; he recognizes, that is, his freedom, and is overcome with the existentialist agony. If he be also an existentialist metaphysician, his agony will be compenetrated by the despair which his metaphysical insight brings. Not only is he an absurdity living by absurdities, but he very well knows it. Despair is identical with will, being the reflective grasp of freedom by itself. If its ineffable loneliness has a high place in the decisions of heroes and of saints who choose torture and death rather than betrayal of causes or comrades, it can be observed as readily among criminals and fools. It works also in the banalities of the most commonplace personal existence. How absurd that existences should be like that! How can the existentialist who perceives the absurdity not suffer nausea? Existence makes him sick and being thus sick is the insight that life is absurd, that events are irrational and our reasonings about them reasonless. Here we are, "condemned to be free"; let us then bravely endure ourselves alive, and when we die, die our own deaths! I have endeavored to sketch in barest outline the new gospel of disillusion, a gospel of freedom at once nude and puritanical, bitter, brave, and resigned, the like of which the philosopher's art has not quite achieved before. As we recall, in the great tradition man's entire earthly enterprise has more than once been

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appraised as absurd, but never as absurd and nauseous. Those perennial appraisals have been made in the savor of an Otherworld, somehow all sweetness, serenity, and light. Faith affirmed them, reason sustained them. Even Schopenhauer's ratiocinations about the role of art and religion in the conduct of life invokes the ghost of this Otherwordly savor, and Heidegger's clever dialectic about the relations of sein and das seiende to the "facticity" of singular existences invokes a ghost of that ghost. Spokesmen of the "new orthodoxy" such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr purport to freshen up the authentic ancient savor by means of new sprays of streamlined dialectic. They join the new words to the old: Spirit, Pride, Temptation, Finite, Infinite compenetrate with Anxiety and Freedom and Agony in their redefinition of human existence as the warfare between the supernatural self and the natural man whose doom is death and whose redemption is the dark grace of an ineffably perfect, transcendent Dens Absconditus* A blind, no less ineffable, but dialectically elaborated faith may perhaps reach to this miraculous grace, or perhaps God's eternal providence may hold its own absolute vindication of the hungry sinfulness which is the all of our existence. Of ourselves, we are both empty and impotent, and the agonized conscience prays: "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!" The late Rainer Maria Rilke had put it all in a sentence: "Because the middle-class world believes in progress and humanity, it has forgotten the ultimacies on which man's existence turns; it has forgotten that it is outdistanced, before it starts and forever, by death and by God." 10 Whether or not Sartre be of the middle class, he is far from having forgotten that death and God are the tradition's winners • "Religion," says Niebuhr, "is merely the final battleground between God 10 and man's self-esteem." Briefe, 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 2 1 .

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in life's fixed race. On the contrary, he has assumed to banish Heidegger's ghost of the ghost. He has undertaken to establish that the tradition is a cheat and a liar, by deflating its ineffable absolutes into absurdities. He esteems God as the creation of freedom afraid of itself; and agrees that, if to die is to cease from existing, death can be only when the person is not. Every race that's run is run by the existent, in his existence, for his existence. That which outdistances him is the same as that which he leaves behind—himself. The implication is, then, that the future, and the death which ends the future, are alike without rhyme or reason, alike absurd. T h e sophisms of this faith seem to me an extension and intensification of Heidegger's, precisely because the former purports to strip existence to the bone and expose its nakedness. But if the altogether of existence is absurd, need it be so when fully clothed in Maya? If the naked truth be indecent exposure, why should not decency be the religious garb and the scientific garniture of that same figment? What is absurd that is not made so by some experience of harmony or common sense or reason enjoyed, remembered, and cherished, and thereafter employed as the criterion of events not itself? Were all existence nauseous, could any human being distinguish the palatable or survive his nausea long enough to persuade others that existence ought to make men sick? As predicated of the entire universe or the smallest bit of it, absurd and nausea are epithets of reaction; appraisals, not descriptions. They arc rejections in revulsion or regret. The rejecter is sorry, not that something is what it is, but that it is not something else by which the philosophical weigher and measurer weighs and measures it. Aware or unaware, lie is employing a fclicific calculus which his heart has clected to take for valid at all times in all places. He hypostasizes the value he has chosen into a rule of accountancy wherewith he

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balances the books of the human enterprise. Unless there were some assets, some capital investment of faith and works, there could be no enterprise, nor any measure of profit and loss, nor any meaning to judgments of bankruptcy. The existentialist devaluation is not the less a cheat than the idealist because it voids the human enterprise: The postulate that mankind starts on nothing, trades with counterfeit and ends in nothing requires its own Deus Absconditus of faith and works, and the Sartreite gives Freudism a metaphysical turn by assigning "desire" to this role. By his "desire's" thrust into incarnation, what is ghost in him becomes flesh, and walks on earth, and, as flesh, knows at least the genuine reality of another not himself. At this knowledge he stops, completed. But the event doesn't stop. It breeds, and the tradition he condemns as absurd is the free birth of that unimmaculate conception, transposing desire into love, and love into God, so that God grows as love,11 and love transfigures into the God of our salvation, whose knowledge and art are the omnipotent Word, which, enfleshed in creation, guarantees necessarily and forever the order, harmony, and goodness of the love-begotten world. Why need these consequences of desire be any more absurd, as units of measure openly applied, than when they are hiddenly employed? Why should the rationalist's patent idealization of enjoyed experiences and his derealization of distressing ones be illusion and the existentialist's idealization of distress and derealization of enjoyment be reality? A psychoanalyst might see in this philosophy an enjoyment of distress and describe its spokesmen as apostles of a cult lustfully imaging the "real" world as pandemonium instead of heaven, savoring all their When given the new look, the result becomes somewhat paradoxical: "God," writes Niebuhr, "is not merely the X of the unconditioned or undifferentiated eternal, God is revealed as loving will, and this will is action in creation and redemption." 11

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good in others' evil and more or less their own as well. "Sadists and masochists all, my masters!" the psychoanalyst might declare. But this is a contingent speculation. Regret or approve the course of human events as much as you like, they go on. They go on as the interplay of unique personal histories, commingling in the generations, from birth to death. They go on, as their hungers prompt and their chances permit, from emptiness to fullness, from misery to enjoyment, even to the enjoyment of misery. T h e ways they go upon are defined by maps of life and programs of living which impattern both the goings and the gratifications to and from which they go. These patterns are ideals, and ideals are the race's classic name for the patterns' function of illuminating and defining an undefined, never completely definable dark future. A man's ideals, we recall, are the lights of his will-to-believe as he works at making, unmaking, remaking, and transforming institutions and cultures. Those synergic consequences of interpersonal exchanges are the fruits of individual initiatives toward shaping both the human and the non-human into the lineaments of the ideal. They incarnate the all of the human enterprise. Partners and rivals participate in them on their own power, at their own risk; and to be human is to participate in them. Although the works may fail, the faith is inveterate and invincible. Turns occur in experience where the program is stopped in its tracks and the plan is gone with the wind. These turns are crises. They come particularly on encounters with sheer diversity, sheer change, and with death. Faith then employs the ideal to compensate for the crisis instead of to resolve it; the spirit gives itself over to devising verbal proofs that the situation repudiated is impotent before the power which repudiates it. T h e Word-made-flesh becomes infallibly W o r d again and everybody lives happily ever after.

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Philosophic rationalism is the body of these proofs, and, so far as I can see, no less an expression of devotion to the sovereign integrity of human nature than existentialism and no more a wish-engendered fantasy. For if a thinker is in fact to take existence as radically as the existentialists claim they do, then he must take also its prejudices without prejudice and without reservations. He must take its happenings in their joint and several singularities, each in itself and of itself neither absurd nor rational nor good nor bad but simply happening. A radical existentialism would perceive that the relations whereby existences become important or unimportant, beneficent, maleficent, beautiful, ugly, right, wrong— in a word, valuable—are no more illusory than the existences which they relate to man. Indeed, a radical existentialism would be aware of its own impulsions when evaluating existence. It would know why it has come to pick its stark "facticity" for the ineffable center of its passionate regard; why that ineffability has become so absorbing that minds esteeming different ineffables appraise existentialism as enjoying absurdity above all things. It would recognize that rationality, absurdity, and every other sign of preference and esteem are projected upon events by somebody's act of freely choosing one or another out of their streaming aggregation, by his devoting to it care and cultivation, disturbed neither by any anxiety over death nor any fear of the angry but nevertheless loving God. O f course, the agonized conscience itself, living haunted by death or terrorized by God or both, can also be chosen to tend, to cultivate, and to cherish, as we know from the Christian theologians and existentialist anti-theologians who make a cause and career of it. They can be as disingenuous as Elmer Gantry, or as sincere as the bravely suffering Blaise Pascal, who doubted not "that the duration of this life is but a moment, that the state of death

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is eternal, whatever may be its nature, and that thus it is impossible to take one step with sense and judgment unless we regulate our course by that point which ought to be our ultimate end." But we know also of not less sincere and bravely suffering spirits who were as sure that death is extinction, yet felt no horror; who are so heedless of death that they do not even scorn it, nor even devise such compensations for extinction as the lifeless immortality with which Spinoza thought to take the sting out of death. Nature, his argument runs, being a singular, total One, universal and eternal, holds in her unaltering and inalterable structure all lesser singularities forever fixed, each personal history from eternity comminuted and motionless, and constituting one of the infinitude of clear and distinct ideas in the thinking but unreflective mind of God. For those who do not need even such consolation for the event that death is the end of them, the living of life is enough. They affirm it freely as they live it, with all the experiences that make it up. They exemplify the other, quite different, observation of Spinoza's, that "a free man thinks of nothing less than death, and that his wisdom is not a meditation upon death but upon life." Condorcet, busy outlining the progress of the human spirit, with death threatening around the corner, one can see, practiced this wisdom; and it might, perhaps be generally said that those who have taken progress for their map of life and program of living are wise in this way. Perhaps this is the insight of Goethe's dying Faust, when he declares on the brink of his grave: Yes, I am dedicated to this thought; It is Wisdom's last solution: He only earns his freedom, as his life

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Who daily must conquer them for himself. And thus with dangers ringed around, Child, man and graybeard live their gallant years. Such is the endeavor I would see On free earth standing with a people free. Then to the passing instant I could say: "Thou art so beautiful, stay on, I pray." Never in ages can be worn away The traces of my mortal day. In foretaste of such supreme delight I now enjoy the instant's loftiest height. So, be the futurelessness of death ever so imminent, Faust feels his true future in the ongoing now, in the durational stretch of immediate experience now projected as an ideal. The late Oliver Wendell Holmes owned an insight of this sort. On his ninetieth birthday he for the first time in his life spoke over the radio. He said to the nation listening: "In this symposium, my part is only to sit in silence. To express one's feelings as the end draws near is too intimate a task. "But I may mention one thought that comes to me as a listener-in. The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: T h e work is done!' "But just as one says that, the answer comes: 'The race is over, but the work is never done while the power to work remains.' "The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.

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"And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago: "Death plucks at my ears and says, 'Live, I am coming.' " Mr. Justice Hughes described this ninety-year-old colleague of his as "invincibly young." He was invincibly young because he perceived that to function is all there is to living and his wisdom was a meditation upon the function. The future was in living now, since the living live only as they function. William James, who was more curious about the possibilities of an afterlife than Holmes, had nevertheless, when near his own standstill, found the same wisdom—the insight that the values of life are intrinsic, that no outer power can affect their validity for good or ill. He expresses it when, in Bad Nauheim, sick unto death, he had read Henry Adams' lamentations over the second law of thermodynamics. Adams' agonizing bothered him, stayed in his mind, and ill as he was, he thrice wrote Adams about it. History and Progress, James told the depressed historian, go on regardless of the amount of cosmic energy at work in them. Ergs in man's brain and ergs in a dinosaur's may be equal and interchangeable. But in man's brain they work out into the humanly precious facts of civilization and its history. True, the second law of thermodynamics defines history's standstill. But since history can be only the course of events before that standstill, the law has no bearing. The cause might mount to a euphoric climax: " . . . the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, 'I am so happy and perfect that I can't stand it any longer.'" 1 2 Values, in 12 In the postcards James wrote, the universe may be like a clock running down and the movements of the hands an effect of the dissipation of its energies. The history which that movement consists in, is independent of the amount of energy the clock is expending; it is a function of the direction the hands follow on the dial, and the direction gets its meaning from the

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sum, are consequential functions within the human enterprise. The ups and downs of their existence may be incidental to the total entropy; to physics the merest epiphenomena; but they are the force and figure of the human creature, and the universal doom is irrelevant to their sovereignty. Here James is almost with his last breath affirming the humanism bespoken by the ideal of progress, the humanism which, taking the conditions of man's existence and all man's relations to these conditions at their face value, "facing reality," replaces the consolations of religion by the powers of science and the yearning for happiness or salvation by the struggles of progress. Humanizing the wildernesses of existence by making them over into homes for free men, this form of the human spirit, like its peers and rivals, starts from the precariousness of its own being. It knows that the safest man lives dangerously; that his world is mostly indifferent, often inimical, always stronger; that his own powers are small, his reason fallible, his choiccs gambles, his present survival without guarantee and his final extinction without appeal. The experience upon which this knowledge is reflection had already composed into a wisdom of living which was hoary when spoken by Job suffering agonies and confronting extinction, but maintaining his integrity against both human judgment and divine omnipotence. 13 figures that mark it off—o to XII, signifying progress, XII to zero, decay. Yet again, imagine man in the universe like a hydraulic ram in a brook. That engine might stand for "the machine of human life." If the water flows, then let the stream be full or thin, the machine will work, raising so much water. "What the value of this work as history may be depends on the uses to which the water is put in the house which the ram serves." ia Behold, I know that he will slay me; I have no hope; Nevertheless will I maintain my ways before him. Till I die will I not put away mine integrity from me My righteousness hold I fast and wOl not let it go My heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.

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Agreeing with the modern existentialists and the traditional Salvationists that there is a warfare to man upon earth, that he is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, that his troubles and wan are configurations of his freedom, this humanism accepts the burden of them healthily; it keeps its nerve. It battles the problems which are existence with no agonized conscience, no fantasies of guilt, no disposition to blow up experiences of conflict into a tragic sense of life; nor are its weapons the compensating devices of the Otherworldly or the existentialist anodynes of the Thisworldly. Its sense of life is sober, not tragic, and given to laughter far more than to tears. It wants the spirit to be gallant and disciplined in the know-how of free thought and free society and to advance these, whatever the hazard, at every human frontier. Progress is, perhaps, the most suggestive synonym for this latest of the humanist dispositions, since it is the doctrine and discipline of pioneering made art. Because the two together signify the same meliorist posture of the will of man, the future must, within their conspectus, be the immediate forward stretch of duration, and a present extrapolation of an experienced event. It cannot be a time that never arrives but is always about to. W e do experience the future-as-such, and the experience is the feel of a leaving-behind ratheT than a moving-toward, of novelties emergent and the past-beingchanged. Convention to the contrary notwithstanding, goal and direction work as viable inward parts of the patterns of the going, and not as rigid outward gradient and standstill completion. So far as I can see, the formula "infinite perfectibility" central to the classical idea of progress owes its derivation to the immediacies of this experience. Although its signs in discourse are intended to mean an unbroken, unbreachable, continuous process, it is not such in any personal history. Perhaps

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this is why the prophets of progress have been prone to predicate it of society and not of society's several members. They could do so only in the realm of discourse where they could for a little time hold terms to a more or less invariant meaning. Inquiries into what actually happens when social progress OCCUR do not, as we have seen, uncover any ground for such predication. Not only is the sum of things, as Lucretius observed, being ever replenished and mortals live one and all by give and take; in the processional of progress the sum of things is kept arduously crescent. If all human life be a race coming to a standstill in a little finishing canter, then the life of Progress is a torch race such as the Athenians used to hold in honor of Prometheus. The runners are the mingling generations, and the later receives from the earlier, as that comes to its finishing canter, the fire of the ideal which defines the spirit of progress. The fire is a working faith that freedom is the mother of intelligence, intelligence the strength of freedom, and know-how the substance of intelligence. Progress is in process wherever new runners lift the torch higher, carry it faster, bring it to a newer, brighter flame, until in their turn they hand it over and slow down to their own standstill. Countless are the runners, many-colored the flames of their torches, and unendingly different in heat, in brightness; nor can any runner be sure in advance who may carry onward his promethean fire. When he runs in the race called Progress, he runs by his own choice at his own risk in a contest without guarantees, on his own faith that others soon or late will take light from his light, and that, when at last he slows down to the standstill of death, another will have accepted the flame from his hand and be hastening to push back the frontier of darkness and impotence. His faith in Progress is his faith in the will and force of this Other whom he

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contingently meets and touches and knows and understands, mood to mood, voice to voice, hand to hand, and flesh to flesh, hence faith to faith. It is to this Other, his contemporaneous descendant, his ancestral successor, that he looks for appraisal and vindication, not to dead forefathers nor to the hidden God self-revealed to such forefathers, though not to him. For him the reality of death is an immanent condition of progress. It was Thomas Jefferson, himself of the fellowship of Condorcet, who made the point that death being extinction, the right and power of life reside only in the living; the dead are nothing and have neither right nor power over the earth, "nor a wisdom more than human . . . beyond any amendment." Let the generations, then, freely carry on, reshaping the past to their own needs by their own living lights, unburdened by the dead ash of the dead flame.14 For the Progress whose wisdom is science and work civilization, then, the will to progress is the condition prior. Its spring is brave men's lone initiatives, that stream together in their hazardous labors and join them in communions. Its faithful look for aid and comfort neither to divine providence nor to mechanical necessity. They know that, whatever causes Progress to perish, it survives in and through the undiscourageable labors of those whose faith it is. They know, too, that it is one among alternative configurations in the human enterprise and is ever under attack on behalf of far more familiar and consoling ideals of destiny, especially those operating in the salvational and felicific traditions. Which of the contending visions shall at last become the wide world's ruling aspiration, its map of life and design for living? Which shall become the ideal suffusing all its rivals with its own qualities, tempo, and direc" C f . " T h e Arts and Thomas Jefferson," by H. M . Kallen, Ethics, No. 4, July, 1943, 280.

LIII,

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tion? T h e modernists of progress do not pretend to predict. They recognize only that when choices are free, the choosers come to a kind of consensus, an orchestration of the diversity of preferences into a patterned union. They are aware that, lacking the force of such free consent, ideals remain the aggressive fantasies of factions ever at war. The diversity of churches, godly and godless, of states, of cultures, each a going concern of doctrines and disciplines, is each a testimony how the believing will may create, support, enlarge, and endure the pattern of ongoing life and thought each wills to believe in. T o choose out of these diversities the orders of humanism-inprogress which our unnerved contemporaries so reprobate is also to agree with the latter upon the urgencies of war and work, the uncertainty of life and the finality of death. But it is likewise to confront the condition affirmatively, and amid the contingencies of existence to advance the human enterprise on the human scale, humanly, with a cheerful heart and a clear head. T h e cultures of the species warn us how very, very reluctant both the world's élite and the world's unprivileged, however free to choose, have been to make this choice. Again and again the generations have preferred the securities of enslavement to the hazards of liberty, each in its time taking some ideal of a faction of safety-seekers—Salvationist, felicific, dialectical—to impattern the going, the goal, and the tempo of its progress and to suffer and die for its name's sake. Nevertheless, as the record teaches, the number to whom wisdom is courage in living and not consolation for dying, who prize freedom above safety, increases. Neverthelesss, the frontier of free thought does recede, its method does develop, its achievements do diversify and multiply. Nor is the world-wide crescendo of hatred which traditionalism bears to modernism a small measure of the progress of its

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works and ways. Is there truly a crisis in our culture? Among the Chinese, crisis is denoted by two characters. One signalizes danger, the other, opportunity. In every crisis the two are antipathetic appraisals of an identical situation. Their differentiae are panic and pluck, flight and fight, sterile compensations in vision, fruitful consequences in work. During every crisis communions form themselves which impattern these differentiae as a guide of life. One flees danger and pursues Salvation, the other gTasps opportunity and works for Progress. Which communion can in honor be declared guilty of crisis? The companions of salvation charge it to the liberal spirit devoted to progress. But is it the latter's record and not the accuser's fears that breeds and nourishes the crisis of our time? Why should its force not be the obstructors of progress, whose ever-renewed pretensions and incompetencies figure so largely in the councils of the world that exemplify the alleged crisis? Maybe the crisis is theirs who cry, Crisis.' whenever they are able to match the moral as little as they are able to match the material advances that modern progress keeps compounding? " Certainly the record justifies the conclusion that the crisis is theirs. As the plain people of the world experience the arts and sciences of modernity making the earth more fruitful, men and women healthier, more knowledgeable, and more understanding, their rights surer, their liberties more stable and their liberty more abundant, they perceive the singularity of progress, and believe. The actual, not the postponed, efficacy of works is the lord which helps their unbelief. To them, and to the spokesman of progress for whom it is a reasoned faith whose risks are tested daily in measurable consequences, its alternatives retain an always lessening attraction " Cf. E. L. Thorndike, Human Nature and the Social Order, New York, Macmillan, 1940.

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and validity. Each generation, their company wins recruits. If their vision hold steadfast, their wills firm, their know-how fruitful, why should not the ways and works of their choice be the pattern of the future chosen by everybody, so long as death is real and a future comes?

Index Abortion, economic, 42 Adams, Henry, 60, 61 n, 76 Aristotle, 7, 8, 9, 13 Arts, 1 j ff., 62 Authority, 12, 20, 25, 27

62; Lucretius on, 62; Peirce on, 63; and the future, 63, 64; philosophies of, 64; existentialists on, 65 ff .; Sartre on, 67, 70; and ideals, 72; and radical existentialism, 73; Pascal on, 73, 74; Spinoza on, 74, 76; an immanent condition of progress, 80 Dharana, 49, 50 "Dialectical materialism," 21 Discovery, 36 ff., 40 Disillusion, Hindu, 47 Dupauloup, Monsignor, 20 n

Bacon, 16 Barth, Karl, 69 Beard, 16 Bcckcr, Carl, 60 Bergson, 61 "Calculated risk," 42 Change, social, 31, 33, 38, 45 "Civil disobedience," 48, 50 Civilization, 13, 14, 15, 20 Communications, 40 C o m m u n i o n , 36

39,

Condorcet, 16, 23, 27, 54, 55, 74, 79 Constraint, 13 Contraception, economic, 42 Craving, 11 Crisis, 82 " C u l t of the dead," 57 "Cultural lag," 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35- 39. 43- 44- 45- 5°. 53 Culture, Crisis in, 1 ff., 82 Culture, Judeo Christian, 6, 33 Darwin, 17 Death, 53 ff.; Condorcet on, 54, 55; and ideals, 55; as extinction, 56; and art, 56; and immortality, 58; and Jesus, 58; and Schopenhauer,

Eden, Garden of, r 3 Education, 14, 39 Ends, and Means, 3, 4, 5, 7, 15 Enlightenment, 27 Entelechy, 8 Enterprise, 41 Existentialisms, 64 ff. "Failure of N e r v e , " 6, 58, 64 Faust, 74, 7 5 Felicific calculus, the existentialist, 70 ff. Freedom, 6, 13, 17, 20, 24, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 78, 79, 81 Frontier, 14 Future, the, and death, 63, 64; and progress, 78 G a n d h i , Mohandas, 47, 48, 49 G a u t a m a , 47 G o d , 15, 65 ff., 69, 70, 7 1 , 73, 74, 80

86 Government, and cultural lag, 42, 43- 45 Grace, 2 Gutenberg, 40 "Hand of God," the, 10 Happiness, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, io, 12, 14, 15, »6, 17, 19, 27, 53 ff., 67 Hegal, 17 Heidegger, Martin, 65, 69, 70 Heine, 59, 61 Heresy, 7, 21 Hispanidad, 46 History, and progress, 5, 23 Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell, 75, 76 Horror pleui, 6 1 , 62 Horror vacui, 59, 6 1 , 62 Humanism, 77 Human scale, the, 60, 81 Ideal, 3, 10, 12, 20, 2 1 , 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 72, 81 Immortality, dogmas of, 56 ff.; illusion of, 59; moral necessity, of, 61; of seeking, 62 Individual and progress, 28 ff. Industrial revolution, the, 22 Industry, 46 "Infinite perfectibility," 27, 78, 79 "Infinite value of the human person," 5 ff., 28 Innovation, 41, 42 Invention, 30 ff., 40 James, William, 25, 57, 76, 77 Jefferson, Thomas, 57, 79 Jesus, 58 ob, 77 oneses, 35 Kant, 10 n Keats, 57 Know-how, 33, 36, 39, 40, 42, 78, 79.83

Index Lagrange, 20 n Lamont, Corliss, 59 Liberalism, 20, 21 Liberty, 13, 20 ff., 27 Lost generation, the, 32 Lucretius, 62, 79 Malthus, 32 Man, agony of, 1; Aristotle on nature of, 7; energies of, 10; and neighbors, 12; works of, 15, 16; in progress, 29 ff. Marx, 23 Mass, the sacrifice of, 36 Mass production, ^o, 41 "Material culture,' 33, 34, 35, 36, 37. 39 Mead, George, 25 n Means, see Ends Miracle, 2 Moore, George Foote, 56 Murray, Gilbert, 6 Naturalism, 27 Nature, 15, 17 Newton, 17 "New Orthodoxy," the, 69 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 69 "Non-Material Culture," 34, 35, 36, 37- 39 Non-violence, 47 ff. Othcrworld, 4, 37, 55, 69 Pascal, 63, 74 Peace, 48 Peirce, Charles S., 63 Philosophers, 1 Pius IX, 20 Plan, 43 Plato, 7, 64 Poets, modern, 1 Printing, 40 Progress, 1; a lie, 2; an ideal, 5; impersonal, 5, 6; competitive to sal

Index vation, happiness, 15; Condorcet on, 1 6 ff.; Communists on, 17; Darwin on, 17 ff.; as evolution, 18; conflicting patterns of, 18 ff.; singularities of, 19; as happiness, 19, 3 1 ; salvation, as, 19; in syllabus of Modern Errors, 20 ff.; Communist, 21; as decadence, 2 1 ; idea of, in free societies, 22; as a valuation, 22 ff.; individuals in, 23 ff.; will to, 24; nature of, 25 ff.; and democracy, 28; ideal of, 3 1 ; and invention, 4 1 ; and discovery, 4 1 ; and planning, 43 ff.; falangist idea of, 45, 46; totalitarian plans of, 46; and Gandhi, 48 ff.; and cultural lag, 50 ff.; and death, 53 ff., 74; and brevity of life, 59, 60; Carl Becker on, 60; Henry Adams on, 60 ff.; existentialist view of, 67; and God, 69; William James on, 76, 77; Humanism in, 77, 78; and the future, 78; as a torch race, 79; faith in, 79, 80; competitors to, 80; and crisis, 82

8? Sartre, J. P , 66, 69 Satisfaction, 11, 13, 24 Satyagraha, 48, 50 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 61 ff , 65, 66, 69 Sciences, 13 ff, 46 Scientific objectivity, 31 Self, consciousness of, 11 Sin, 1, 64, 68 Social evolution, 31 Soul, peace of, 2; nature of, 14 Soviet Russia, 2 1 , 43, 44 Spencer, Herbert, 18 Spcngler, »6 Spinoza, 8, 74 Spirit, 14 Suicide, 62 Supernaturalism, 27 Syllabus of Modern Errors, 20 ff. Tertullian, 58 Theologians, 1 Thisworld, 4, 37 Tillich, Paul, 69 Toynbee, 16, 23 Tradition, 38 Turgot, 27

Rates of change, 38 Rationalism, philosophic, 73 Reade, Winwood, 18, 23 Reason, 2 Resurrection, 59 Revelation, 37 ff. Rome, 7 Royce, 61

Valences, 12 Values, 2, 3

Salvation, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 1 0 , 1 2 , 15, 19 ff, 53 ff., 7 1

World, fitness of the, 13

Unamuno, Miguel de, 59