Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

The quotation is not from a baccalaureate sermon: it is from the Harvard class oration of 1921.

The prime relaxation is talk, infinite talk—within its local range, full of tang, flicking with deft satire the rumps of pompous asses, burlesquing the comic (that is, the abnormal) in campus situations, making of gossip a staccato criticism—and beyond that range, a rather desultory patter about professional sport, shows, shallow books, the froth of fashion, all treated lightly but taken with what a gravity! For the other relaxations there are, according to taste, the theatre of girls and music, the novel, bath-robed sessions at poker and bridge, late afternoon tennis or golf or handball (very nearly the only sports left to play for their own sake), and the bouts with Bacchus and Venus which, though they attract fewer college men than non-college men, are everywhere the moral holidays that insure our over-driven Puritanism against collapse.

A favourite subject for college debates and Freshman themes argues the case for and against going to college. You could listen to scores of such debates, read thousands of such themes, without once meeting a clear brief for education as a satisfaction of human curiosity. Everywhere below the level of disinterested scholarship, education is regarded as access to that body of common and practical information without which one’s hands and tongue will be tied in the company of one’s natural peers. “Institutions of learning,” as the National Security League lately advised the Vice-President of the United States, “are established primarily for the dissemination of knowledge, which is acquaintance with fact and not with theory.” Consequently the universal expectation of the educational establishment has little to do with any wakening of appropriate if differing personalities, and has everything to do with a standard patina, varying only in its lustre, its brighter or duller reflection of the established scene.

Nevertheless, the essential Adam does break through and quiz the scene. Though it come lowest in his scale of emphasis, the typical underclassman knows the qualms and hungers of curiosity, experiments a little with forbidden fruit, at some time fraternizes with a man of richer if disreputable experience, perhaps strikes up a wistful friendship with a sympathetic instructor. Then the world of normal duties and rewards and certainties closes round him, and security in it becomes his first concern. Sometime he intends really to read, to think long thoughts again, to go to the bottom of things. Meanwhile he falls into the easy habit of applying such words as “radical” or “highbrow” to those infrequent hardier spirits who continue restless and unappeased. Later in life you will catch him explaining that radicalism is a perfectly natural manifestation of adolescence and the soundest foundation for mature conservatism. Wise churchmen still talk that way about religious doubt, and bide their time, and later refer to the “death of doubt”—which has really been buried alive. The Martian would conclude that the function of terrestrial education is to bury curiosity alive.

But could he now feel that this educational establishment, this going machine of assimilation, is responsible for our uniformity? Will not American school and college life now seem too perfect a reflection of American adult life to be its parent? Everything in that scale of college values, from the vicarious excitements of football to what Santayana has called the “deprivations of disbelief” has its exact analogue in our life at large; and neither any college tradition nor yet the “genteel tradition” is of so much significance as the will to tradition that both reveal. The Martian will long since have suspected himself guilty of a very human error, that of getting the cart before the horse.

For we have made our schools in our own image. They are not our prisons, but our homes. Every now and again we discipline a rash instructor who carries too far his private taste for developing originality; we pass acts that require teachers to sink their own differences in our unanimity; and our fatuous faith in the public school system as the “cradle of liberty” rests on the political control we exercise over it. Far from being the dupes of education, we ourselves dupe the educated; and that college men do not rebel is due to the fact that inside a world our uniformity dominates as easily as it dominates the school, the regimen works, college men really do get ahead, and the “queer” really are frustrate.

Then, what is the origin of our “desperate need to agree”? There is a possible answer in our history, if only we can be persuaded to give our history a little attention. When we became a nation we were not a folk. We were, in fact, so far from being alike that there were only our common grievances and a few propositions on which we could be got together at all, and the propositions were more like stubborn articles of faith than like tested observations: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ... certain inalienable Rights ... Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... the consent of the governed ... are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” That is not the tone of men who are partakers in a common tradition and who share reasonable and familiar convictions. Thus under the spur of our first national necessity we gave the first evidence of our capacity to substitute an arbitrary and not too exacting lowest common denominator to which men can subscribe, for the natural and rigorous highest common multiple that expresses their genuine community of interest. The device succeeded because we succeeded, but it was the propositions that got the credit. The device has continued to succeed ever since for the same reason that tradition succeeds in the modern college—nobody who has had any reason to challenge the propositions has been able to get at us.

Our proper job was to create a people, to get acquainted with each other and develop a common background. But the almost miraculous success of our lowest common denominator stood in the way of our working out any highest common multiple. Instead of developing a common background, we went on assimilating subscribers to the Declaration, our arbitrary tradition, “Americanism.” We have been so increasingly beset by aliens who had to be assimilated that their Americanization has prevented our own.

We now believe our national job was the Conquest of the West, as if scattering people over a continent were any substitute for creating a People. But we have never been seriously challenged. If our good luck should hold, the second or third generation after us will believe our job was the subjugation of a hemisphere, including the assimilation of genuine peoples who have done us less harm even than the Indians did. But, whatever our practice, we shall never admit that our theory has altered. Still lacking any common background, we shall still enclose ourselves against the void in the painted scene of our tradition.

But our luck may not hold. We may be challenged yet.