This article is the sixth in the series “The Crisis of the Individual,” which already includes articles by Reinhold Niebuhr, Leo Lowenthal, Hannah Arendt, John Dewey and Pearl Buck, published in previous issues. The series aims to find out what answers a number of leading thinkers here and abroad can offer to this basic issue of our times.

The physical and spiritual dignity of the human being has in this age been debased on a scale and in a measure unprecedented for centuries. “Why?” “Where did Western civilization go wrong?” “Is the crisis due to the abuse of technology, the failure of religion—or what?”

These are among the questions the series will try to answer. Future contributors to the series will include: Leo S. Baeck, Martin Buber, Lewis Corey, Irwin Edman, Louis Finkelstein, Waldo Frank, André Gide, Sidney Hook, Hans Kohn and Michael Polanyi.

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One sentiment at least I share with those who planned this series on The Crisis of the Individual: I am very tired of ideologues and ideologies. Of course, in the spring even the ageing professorial mind lightly turns to thoughts of—well, in this case, to thoughts of how the smelts are running in a certain rocky creek down east, and the feel of that icecold water on your arms as you scoop up a supper in the approved manner. Then, too, allowance must be made for the fact that ideologies are the modem teacher’s stock-in-trade, and there come times when the entire inventory seems so drab and shopworn that one would mark it down at a very big discount in a spring sale.

At such times it would be appropriate to stand on the sidewalk and chant with Gertrude Stein: A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. . . . But is it? I am sure that to some of my more ideological colleagues it is the sort of funny machine that Klee used to draw, and when the poor rose tries to join in the chorus, its lovely little voice is not even audible. Was it not Hobbes who remarked that if he had read as many books as other people he supposed he would be as ignorant as they were?

Last evening there was a meeting of one of the faculty clubs (stag) with some quite learned and brilliant men present. The dinner was good, the paper at least provocative, and the discussion better than usual. Towards midnight we emerged, smelling strongly of cigarette smoke, into a wonderful night, with the moon brilliant in its first quarter and the stars shining with that stereoscopic effect they have in an exceptionally clear air, so that one can perceive the depth of space. The proper thing would have been to drop the hat and the briefcase and perform a solemn dance on the frozen turf. That is what natural man would have done, and in times past, did.

Instead we jammed ourselves into small boxes on wheels dragged along empty streets by internal combustion engines. And it seemed as if that had been our situation all the evening. Most of us had been using “our” words, “our” ideas, to conceal ourselves from ourselves and from one another, in the sincere conviction that that was the proper thing to do—much as the 18th century used to dress itself up. To do anything else would have been bad form, and quite risky. How could one possibly take the chance of exposing oneself, sans wig, ruffles or crinoline, to what the other person might think of one? Not only oneself, but the spectator, would be acutely embarrassed; and moreover, it would be very difficult, for most of us are really sewed into our clothes.

So we dance our sequestered pavane to a thin little music that sounds like Dali’s ants creeping round his kitchen sink of a soul; and if we try to go any faster something rips.

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Do we really have individual shapes of our own? Or are our souls like 19th-century women’s bodies that actually changed their shape with changing fashions? And are some of the fashions running counter to wholesome life, making, say, for swelled heads and shrunken hearts, heavy feet and spindly legs, callous hands and myopic eyes? This much is certain: a very large part of what passes for current thought consists in the pushing around of a set of second-hand stereotypes; and the average mind (which includes the academic mind) is stocked with figures taken from the cartoon and the comic strip. Such figures—although, unfortunately, they interbreed—are highly abstract. A. N. Whitehead pointed out ten years ago that abstraction, or abstractness, is the characteristic of common thought; it takes a trained mind to think concretely and realistically. One suspects indeed that only a minority of people—at any rate, among city-dwellers—either do or can receive much experience of life at firsthand; it is all abstracted and categorized before it registers.

And the devil in it is that the abstractions carry a terrific emotional charge; that is why they are common, perhaps indeed it is emotional frustration that creates them. It is not genuine emotion, it is not honestly come by: it is ersatz, of a peculiarly dangerous kind: it is the herd, the mob. An urgent doubt arises not only as to whether we can call our thoughts our own, but as to whether we can call our emotions our own; and a vicious circle is set up. The ersatz emotion forestalls our apprehending things and people as they really are, and so prevents our having any reality to think about.

How many millions of people today, meeting a stranger, are tacitly asking themselves, “Is he Jewish?” And if they think he is, the stereotype instantly takes charge of their avenues of perception, so that they are rendered almost incapable of ever knowing and appreciating that human being. You will find that same blocking not only in race relations, but between Protestants and Roman Catholics, “isolationists” and “interventionists,” “capital” and “labor” (note how abstract the terms are) and many other more or less distinct groupings. The result is to make the demarcation lines appear much sharper than they really are, and to diminish the will and even the desire to speak across them.

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II

The inadequacy of our current attempts to control and harmonize collective life needs no emphasis; nor does the danger in which it has landed us.

Let me say frankly that I have no general thesis to add to the number of such that are being urged, and I doubt whether talking about it all does much good—save in one respect. Increasing individual awareness may itself be useful in this particular sphere, inasmuch as the very nature of the problem calls for the reassertion of the individual against the mob. If in reply you say that the individual as such can accomplish nothing, I am tempted to answer that that is perhaps the most dangerous stereotype of the lot. How do you know? Can he not at least accomplish something for himself? And is that nothing?

Looking back over the tentative observations of many years, I find myself reverting again and again to what, I now think, is an incontestable fact: the thinness of the average individual life-experience.

That is a difficult thing to demonstrate because it implies comparison; so let me begin with the least demonstrable aspect of it, in an assertion that many readers will consider arbitrary. The fine edge of ordinary sense-perception is now generally blunted. The average person of today has not the same capacity for immediate senseexperience that his parents and grandparents had, especially in regard to nature. He may be able to recall a stanza or two of, say, Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, and he may even have listened to a nightingale. But he has never heard Keats’s nightingale. He does not have, and probably cannot have, any direct knowledge of what Keats was talking about, and he cannot comprehend the poem as his parents did. He may perhaps, in college, have read Pater’s Child in the House, or some of those marvelous nature passages in Marius, or some of Stevenson’s autobiographic essays, or the work of W. H. Hudson or Katherine Mansfield. He has “read” some of these—but he has never experienced anything like the directness of sheer sensory perception that underlies them, except perhaps in childhood—and even that I doubt.

I doubt it very much. I do not believe the “modem” child ever sees a flower, a tree, a wave, a cloud, as completely or intensely as the child of forty years ago. I am certain the adolescent does not. At a very early age the abstract environment takes charge (all machinery is an abstraction) and the natural rhythms that relate the body to the material world are distorted-including the sense of duration. So, inevitably, are the imagination and the dream material. If you want to experience nature you must get into it; you must at least walk or climb; the utmost that can safely be allowed in the way of apparatus is a horse or a bicycle. In an automobile, no matter to what fine places you may go, you do not get anywhere because you do not do any getting.

And if you want to make something of your environment (but why after all should you?) you must stay in one place, become “attached to” one specific bit of the world. Americans are ceaselessly on the move, from year to year and generation to generation, though the Lord knows where they think they are going. Perhaps they are merely running away from themselves, and mortally afraid of being left behind: they might find themselves alone, and what modern can stand that? Let’s get together. For heaven’s sake, why?

Lots of suburban women begin every day by looking at the advertisements, and go into town every day to look at the shops. When they are tired of looking at the shops they look at a movie; some of the smarter ones look at an art show. Coming home they may look at a book, or more probably a digest of a book (very few people actually read books); endlessly in between whiles they look at themselves. The returning male mixes a few cocktails to tide over that vague emptiness of life which besets one when the daily drive is over. If there is nothing arranged for the evening a problem arises: how to fill up the few hours of leisure. For the adolescents that is a problem to be solved only along the lines of the Coca Cola ads; and the grownups are not so very different. Yes, the average life experience is certainly a little thin; it contains extraordinarily few sources either of quietness or of joy.

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There are compensating excitements, of course; mostly ersatz. The movies, going modem, with the aid of skilful direction and clever music, can make crime or surgery or psychoanalysis or alcoholism or even religion so much more exciting than those things usually are. We ask them to by our patronage; they readily comply. And as for sex—dare it be hinted that very few human specimens, male or female, are under any circumstances whatever quite as absorbing, alluring, exciting, as their prototypes in shadowland? There is true comedy in the situation of the young woman who has learned to expect that all the bells in heaven would celebrate the advent of some ordinary male, is puzzled by the fact that she cannot really hear them, and unhappily wonders what she ought to do next in such an unprecedented dilemma.

But anyway, Time Marches On—to the accompaniment of the barker’s voice and the big drum (hollow things make most noise); and “the news” provides the excitement, the emotion, the sense of significance and dramatic crisis that the average life experience so persistently lacks. Look at some of the title-frames: empty uniforms marching nowhere; blurred figures dashing aimlessly through air, smoke or water; mechanical power on the rampage; burning buildings falling down or blowing up; destruction on the loose; nasty children throwing gigantic firecrackers—all to induce a proper mood of receptivity for “the news.”

Somewhere, somehow, somewhy, great things are happening every day, the Drama of Life is going on, and our unsatisfying individual lives are finding fulfilment in a pageant of violent action and blah-blah-blah that is so much more significant than it looks or sounds. Isn’t it grand? Who does not know that feeling of slight disappointment when the morning or evening newspaper fails to produce a scare headline? What layout man or caption writer does not know that his job depends on keeping the bloody pot boiling? People have to have it that way because they need it that way. Put on the screen a quiet masterpiece like The River, and the high-school kids will hoot and yowl; run a paper and eschew scare headlines and you will go broke, as many good editors and proprietors have done. We have to have it hot and strong because our actual experience of life is so thin. We have to personify and hypostatize and emote because our little souls are starved.

Accordingly, the approach to every public question moves over a latent hysteria (Mr. Churchill’s Fulton speech provided striking evidence of that) and the way events shape up is the reflection of the way we want them to shape up. On the emotional plane, where the abstractions and stereotypes are formed, peace, goodwill, mutual understanding and accommodation have no attraction for the majority of people—not because people are bad, but because they are bored. Of course we agree with all that the leaders say about peace and harmony—but won’t it be thrilling to see the pictures of the atom explosions next June (or whenever it happens), even though all we intend to destroy are some poor sheep and cattle; and what a thrill when we have to drop the new bombs on—well, take your choice: we are a great and righteous people with the most excellent intentions, and there is quite a variety of foreign villains to get indignant about. You never know what may happen, so we have to be prepared (with our growing stockpile). Prepared for what? Death. Just that, ladies and gentlemen: nothing new, after all, but a little more of it.

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III

The somnambulist, dreaming, can fall down real stairs and break his real neck. The neurotic, releasing his private tensions, can smash any amount of public property. The psychopath, quite out of touch with reality, can none the less make reality uninhabitable.

I am not for a moment suggesting that the social and “ideological” issues of our time are unreal, or any less critical than we fear; what I raise in question is our ability to comprehend and grapple with them as they really are. Are we fit, as the individual components of a democracy, to face our world? I suggest that we are spiritually—or, if you prefer, psychologically—in very poor condition, and that we need to go into training. What sort of training?

Whatever sort it be, it will take time: not perhaps a long time as history reckons time, but a long time in terms of the popular perspective, which expects cures and miracles overnight: a long time in the view of those who expected the League of Nations to achieve world order in a couple of decades, and were content to see it torpedoed as soon as it denounced a new imperialism.

One of the alarming features of current democracy is its loss of memory. People do not recall what happened six months or a year ago, let alone a generation ago. In the recent excitement over Iran scarcely any writer referred even to events as recent as the expulsion of Riza Shah in 94I or the Anglo-American oil agreement of 1944; the Anglo-Russian partition of Persia in 1907 was totally below the horizon, though its geography sheds a good deal of light on Russian policy. This loss of memory entails an inability to feel, think or plan in historical time, even at the top political levels. There is a marked contrast here to the 19th century, and it is connected with the rise of demagogues. All abiding achievement takes place in historical time, not newspaper and radio time, and the genuine statesman knows it. But the statesman cannot work alone; he must be supported by a sufficient group of men whose perspective tallies roughly with his own, even though their immediate aims may differ.

Consider how long it took for England to achieve the emancipation of Catholics and Dissenters, or the right of free association for wage earners. Just seventy years elapsed between the publication of Adam Smith’s great plea for freedom of trade and its legislative triumph; and the movement, like all such campaigns, was kept going by the conscious persistent effort of able men whose horizon was not limited by their own mortality. It was not the Zeitgeist at work, it was not the legendary law of economic determinism, it was human intelligence in operation against a mountain of obstacles.

It took roughly three generations of acquisitive materialism to land the world in its present mess, and it may take as long to get it back on the highway. It cannot be less than two, for a very simple reason. We are talking not about theories but about attitudes, conative impulses, value-systems. Nearly all the teachers, writers, shapers of mood and opinion now at work are people whose minds and tempers are already set in the mold of the recent past. Some of us may achieve a good deal of self-criticism, may see rather clearly what is wrong and less clearly what would be better. But the utmost we can achieve is to give the younger generation a push on the road to it; our impact, like our vision, is very limited, and we cannot carry enough of the people enough of the way. We must wait for and work for the rising generation of thinkers and teachers, who may be capable (given the initial push) of a more radical and vigorous idealism, and in greater number. Then they in turn may be able to infect a mass big enough to achieve prudent and effective action. You will find that nearly all abiding change in history has demanded this intermediate generation. Once in a rare while something extraordinary happens to speed up the process (perhaps some such thing is happening now) but a couple of generations is a very short time in which to render Western man fit to be trusted with even his present potential. If Western society survives the next five years, we may consider ourselves, here in America, embarked on such an enterprise.

During that period—as I have insisted throughout the past decade—an adventurous or Palmerstonian foreign policy would be the height of folly. We have not got, as yet, the human material to make a beneficent success of it—look at the faces! Not merely do we not know enough about the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Spanish and Latin Americans, to make them over by physical force into the image of God (or Uncle Sam): we do not know enough about ourselves. We shall not become the great people that we can be and are meant to be by working extensively over the morass of power politics; we shall work intensively, defending and developing our own great heritage, that we may achieve not only for ourselves, but for all the world, things comparable to what Europe gave us in its dying agony—of which, so far, we have too few to show. Our task, our duty, our mission, are here at hand; and our responsibility is very heavy.

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IV

What sort of training? A teacher naturally tends to talk about education. Just now all the teachers are talking and writing about education, but without getting much nearer agreement as to what they mean by the term. The newly appointed head of an Eastern college announced recently that “the morning newspaper ought to be in every classroom.” To hell with the morning newspaper! Every effective educational system the world has known has been directed to the integration of the developing personality within a coherent system of values, manners and morals. That cannot be achieved through a collection of contemporary studies, or through any collection of studies aimed solely at the contemporary. As one of Britain’s leading historians said recently, the use of history is not simply to “throw light upon the present” but to stretch the mind and imagination, open up unfamiliar vistas of experience, and turn knowledge into wisdom.

Let us follow Dr. Trevelyan a little farther:

In the days of our own grandfathers, and for many generations before them, the basis of education was the Greek and Roman classics for the educated, and the Bible for all. In the classical authors and in the Bible, history and literature were closely intervolved, and it is that circumstance which made the old form of education so stimulating to the thought and imagination of our ancestors. To read the classical authors and to read the Bible was to read at once the history and the literature of the three greatest races of the ancient world. . . . I fear that today the study both of the classics and of the Bible has dwindled to small proportions. What has taken their place? . . . Part of the lacuna has been filled up by rubbish.

With the loss of the humanist tradition, some effort was made to devise a new integrative principle on the basis of 19th century rationalism. The effort persists in certain quarters; what it has accomplished you may discover in the latest works of Mr. H. G. Wells or the recent pronouncements of the atomic scientists. Today we have no generally accepted principle or purpose of education, and the current reports of the institutions of learning are designed to convey that fact as tactfully as possible so as not to alarm the stockholders. There is a lot of talk in those reports about “values,” but you will seek in vain for a coherent system. You may read a good deal about open-mindedness; but it is unfortunately true, as Trevelyan hints, that if you keep your mind sufficiently open people will throw a lot of rubbish into it. The only common note is an echo of the American passion for information; but there is an undertone of scepticism about even that, coming from those who wonder, not unreasonably, what is the use of it.

I was talking, several years ago, with a couple of young Russians recently arrived here for further study. They asked whether American students knew anything about Russian literature. O yes, I assured them, many of our own students did; one of the classes right now was studying Dostoievsky. The response was unexpected: a mixture of amusement and exasperation. How could healthy American adolescents have the remotest idea of what Dostoievsky was talking about? Perhaps my Russians were right; and then again, perhaps it does not matter. But very recently one of my students told me she was studying Italian. Had she read any Dante? Yes, they were tracing the historical allusions in some passages of the Inferno, and it was very interesting. Did she know the Vita Nuova? No, she had never come across that. I was tempted to enlarge on my limited (but very precious) acquaintance with the Ricci edition; but then I thought, No: how could you have the remotest idea of what Dante was talking about? How could you hope to follow the translation of that “very youthful angel” to the climax of the Divine Comedy? How could you, fair child, ever understand that it might have been you? That is something you will never learn—here in this classroom. . . . But perhaps that does matter.

To stretch the facilities, to educate the imagination, the sympathies, the emotions and the will, to foster and fructify the dynamic urges—how to do that? I can say only this about it here: it involves directed activity, and it involves discipline. It involves work, in short—for that is what work is. There is far too much passive cerebration, too much sitting. Lots of the young people in high schools and colleges would be getting a better education as apprentices to a trade, with opportunity for as much study as they really had a mind to. Lots more should be spending half their time in active service to their communities, eliminating ugliness and waste, making parks and gardens and bicycle paths, building hostels and clubhouses, creating their own bond with society by doing something for it—for that is the only way in which true sociality is achieved.

Incidentally, there is a moral training here. You can be dishonest in a classroom examination and it may not seem to matter very much. But if you are digging a ditch or setting type or weaving a fabric or making a bench the job is either well done or it isn’t; you can fool neither yourself nor anyone else. And there is a curious connection in aesthetics between honesty and beauty.

Again incidentally, the one way to dissolve class or national or racial snobbery is to set people to work together at something that is worth their while, something noble enough to eliminate the herd instinct. One wonders whether Europe will ever be given the chance to learn that lesson. “Noble” here does not mean high-falutin; draining a swamp, clearing and sweetening scrub-land, building a dam or a highway, are nobler tasks than adding to the profits of the movie industry, no matter how much fancy architecture the latter can command. Common work creates community, provided its object does not make personality a cipher. Common interest creates community, provided it is genuine personal interest and not the expression of a stereotype.

I am very weary of these group discussions of the “race problem,” for example, with their constipated psychology and everyone on his best behavior, which always result in driving deeper the sense of difference because that is precisely what the meeting is all about. But gather a group of people who are actively interested in the ballet, or boatbuilding, or poetry, or psychoanalysis, or rock gardens, or what have you, and race consciousness evaporates in the ardent atmosphere. The trouble is that there are not enough people interested in anything to that degree: that is why the stereotypes take charge. (Perhaps the reader will pardon a digression for a good example of the stereotype in charge. Many years ago, talking with Ruth St. Denis, I asked if in her teaching experience she had noticed that some types were much more gifted than others. Yes certainly, she said; and I waited for her to add that the Jewish girls were naturally the more talented. Not at all. She said that whenever she found a really gifted young dancer, there was always latent aesthetic ability in the mother.)

I am not, of course, denying that thinking and talking about large domestic or international issues, and training for such activity, is a legitimate and useful vocation. I make my living out of it, and I do my best to give good value. But I am very certain that the number of people, young or old, for whom that is the most suitable vocation is much exaggerated, and that for a high proportion even of them preparation at a wider and deeper level would be an advantage.

Can I be the only women’s club lecturer who has faced an amiable afternoon audience with the feeling, “Well, nothing that I can say is going to make any appreciable difference to these people, so there’s no point in affronting their native biological optimism?” But even in the highest intellectual circles how often have I seen fine and able men loading up their ideological ships with a heavier cargo of hopes and dreams and passions than such craft can possibly carry! Sad indeed it is to see the wealth of idealism and aspiration that only a full cultural and religious tradition could utilize staked on the vicissitudes of a political system that is already doomed and damned beyond redemption.

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V

“What we need,” said Ibsen in his old age, “is a revolution of the spirit of man.” He could not be much interested in any lesser type of revolution. A good many of us are now suspecting that it is futile to bank too heavily on schemes, committees, organizations, programs, blueprints, while we remain essentially the same sort of people that we are. The deepening and enrichment of the personal life precede, logically and chronologically, the reconstruction of society; otherwise we lack the material and the motive power to realize our vague ideals of peace, freedom, security, opportunity and the rest of the fine words. It is no use for our architects to design a house of steel and gold when all they have to work with is green lumber.

Very easily we discern the deficiencies, the blunders, the perversities of other people; the famous parable on the subject does not suggest that those are illusions. They are there, right enough. What we find it hard to admit is that if we were in the place of those other people, we should probably be doing pretty much what they are; yet that admission is necessary before we can deal constructively with the situation. My students, representing the middle bourgeoisie, are shocked to be told that if they had grown up in the Germany of the late 1920’s most of them would have belonged to the Nazi youth movement. It is a fact, and they will not understand the German problem until they take it in. After that, the problem will still be there, but the approach will be realistic instead of abstract.

And so all round the map; we cannot hope to solve the really troublesome problems until we are able to see what they look like through the other fellow’s eyes. Just now Russian tactics and diplomacy (if it can be called that) are creating a good deal of annoyance; but from the Russian point of view—whether Czarist or Stalinist makes no difference—it is preposterous that the largest integrated land-mass in the world should have no major outlet to the ocean highways save under the muzzles of other people’s guns. And was it really wise (no doubt it was clever) of the British and Americans, these past few years, quietly to arrange to control between them the entire oil reserves of the Middle East? If the Russian leaders could be convinced of our practical cooperation in the solution of their quite practical problems, there might still be a risk as to what they would do next; but would it be a greater risk than is now involved in our insistence on our way of viewing their situation? Does that insistence offer any final solution?

Whatever the late Willkie may have said, the average person, here or elsewhere, does not live in “one world,” and never will; he lives, practically and concretely, in a very specific locality. But if his emotional and mental attitude to all the rest of life is circumscribed as at present, he will go on applauding dramatic anachronisms, and elect leaders who make fetishes out of his own stereotypes.

While the 20th century may so far have been the century of the common man, it will take some very uncommon men to salvage the remaining half of it; and it is not enough to wait passively for them to appear, and to hope we shall recognize them if they do. I have suggested, as one way among others toward a brighter future, that we think a little more about the quality and the range of our own life-experience, prepare ourselves for the great change that is surely coming.

For perhaps it is we ourselves, rather than the poor politicians and the scheming diplomats, that are holding it up.