Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

In such an atmosphere of shadowy spiritual relationships, where the thinness of contact of mind with mind is childishly disguised under the banner of good fellowship, it might be expected that the intellectual life must be led not only with that degree of individualistic isolation which is naturally necessary for its existence, but likewise in a hostile and unintelligent environment of almost enforced “difference” from the general social type. Such an atmosphere will become as infested with cranks, fanatics, mushroom religious enthusiasts, moral prigs with new schemes of perfectability, inventors of perpetual motion, illiterate novelists, and oratorical cretins, as a swamp with mosquitoes. They seem to breed almost overnight; we have no standard to which the wise and the foolish may equally repair, no criterion by which spontaneously to appraise them and thus, by robbing them of the breath of their life, recognition, reduce their numbers. On the contrary, we welcome them all with a kind of Jamesian gusto, as if every fool, like every citizen, must have his right to vote. It is a kind of intellectual enfranchisement that produces the same sort of leadership which, in the political field of complete suffrage, we suffer under from Washington and our various State capitals. Our intellectual life, when we judge it objectively on the side of vigour and diversity, too often seems like a democracy of mountebanks.

Yet when we turn from the more naïve and popular experiments for finding expression for the baulked disposition to think, the more sophisticated jeunesse dorée of our cultural life are equally crippled and sterile. They suffer not so much from being thought and being “queer”—in fact, inwardly deeply uncomfortable at not being successful business men, they are scrupulously conventional in manner and appearance—but from what Professor Santayana has called, with his usual felicity, “the genteel tradition.” It is a blight that falls on the just and the unjust; like George Bernard Shaw, they are tolerant before the caprices of the mind, and intolerant before the caprices of the body. They acquire their disability from the essentially American (and essentially feminine) timorousness before life itself; they seem to want to confine, as do all good husbands and providers, adventure to mental adventure and tragedy to an error in ratiocination. They will discant generously about liberty of opinion—although, strictly speaking, opinion is always free; all that is restricted is the right to put it into words—yet seem singularly silent concerning liberty of action. If this were a mere temperamental defect, it would of course have no importance. But it cuts much deeper. Thought, like mist, arises from the earth, and to it must eventually return, if it is not to be dissipated into the ether. The genteel tradition, which has stolen from the intellectual life its own proper possessions, gaiety and laughter, has left it sour and déraciné. It has lost its earthy roots, its sensuous fulness, its bodily mise-en-scène. One has the feeling, when one talks to our correct intellectuals, that they are somehow brittle and might be cracked with a pun, a low story, or an animal grotesquerie as an eggshell might be cracked. Yet whatever else thought may be in itself, surely we know that it has a biological history and an animal setting; it can reach its own proper dignity and effectiveness only when it functions in some kind of rational relationship with the more clamorous instincts of the body. The adjustment must be one of harmony and welcome; real thinkers do not make this ascetic divorce between the passions and the intellect, the emotions and the reason, which is the central characteristic of the genteel tradition. Thought is nourished by the soil it feeds on, and in America to-day that soil is choked with the feckless weeds of correctness. Our sanitary perfection, our material organization of goods, our muffling of emotion, our deprecation of curiosity, our fear of idle adventure, our horror of disease and death, our denial of suffering—what kind of soil of life is that?

Surely not an over-gracious or thrilling one; small wonder that our intellectual plants wither in this carefully aseptic sunlight.

Nevertheless, though I was tempted to give the sub-title “A Study in Sterility” to this essay, I do not believe that our soil is wholly sterile. Beneath the surface barrenness stirs a germinal energy that may yet push its way through the weeds and the tin-cans of those who are afraid of life. If the genteel tradition did not succumb to the broad challenge of Whitman, his invitations have not been wholly rejected by the second generation following him. The most hopeful thing of intellectual promise in America to-day is the contempt of the younger people for their elders; they are restless, uneasy, disaffected. It is not a disciplined contempt; it is not yet kindled by any real love of intellectual values—how could it be? Yet it is a genuine and moving attempt to create a way of life free from the bondage of an authority that has lost all meaning, even to those who wield it. Some it drives in futile and pathetic expatriotism from the country; others it makes headstrong and reckless; many it forces underground, where, much as in Russia before the revolution of 1905, the intelligentsia meet their own kind and share the difficulties of their common struggle against an environment that is out to destroy them. But whatever its crudeness and headiness, it is a yeast composed always of those who will not conform. The more the pressure of standardization is applied to them the sharper and keener—if often the wilder—becomes their rebellion against it. Just now these non-conformists constitute a spiritual fellowship which is disorganized and with few points of contact. It may be ground out of existence, for history is merciless and every humanistic interlude resembles a perilous equipoise of barbaric forces. Only arrogance and self-complacency give warrant for assuming that we may not be facing a new kind of dark age. On the other hand, if the more amiable and civilized of the generation now growing up can somehow consolidate their scattered powers, what may they not accomplish? For we have a vitality and nervous alertness which, properly channelled and directed, might cut through the rocks of stupidity with the precision and spaciousness with which our mechanical inventions have seized on our natural resources and turned them into material goods. Our cup of life is full to the brim.

I like to think that this cup will not all be poured upon the sandy deltas of industrialism ... we have so much to spare! Climb to the top of the Palisades and watch the great city in the deepening dusk as light after light, and rows of lights after rows, topped by towers of radiance at the end of the island, shine through the shadows across the river. Think, then, of the miles of rolling plains, fertile and dotted with cities, stretching behind one to that other ocean which washes a civilization that was old before we were born and yet to-day gratefully accepts our pitiful doles to keep it from starvation, of the millions of human aspirations and hopes and youthful eagernesses contained in the great sprawling, uneasy entity we call our country—must all the hidden beauty and magic and laughter we know is ours be quenched because we lack the courage to make it proud and defiant? Or walk down the Avenue some late October morning when the sun sparkles in a clear and electric air such as can be found nowhere else in the world. The flashing beauty of form, the rising step of confident animalism, the quick smile of fertile minds—must all these things, too, be reduced to a drab uniformity because we lack the courage to proclaim their sheer physical loveliness? Has not the magic of America been hidden under a fog of ugliness by those who never really loved it, who never knew our natural gaiety and high spirits and eagerness for knowledge? They have the upper hand now—but who would dare to prophesy that they can keep it?

Perhaps this is only a day-dream, but surely one can hope that the America of our natural affections rather than the present one of enforced dull standardization may some day snap the shackles of those who to-day keep it a spiritual prison. And as surely will it be the rebellious and disaffected who accomplish the miracle, if it is ever accomplished. Because at bottom their revolt, unlike the aggressions of the standardizers, is founded not on hate of what they cannot understand, but on love of what they wish all to share.

Harold E. Stearns

SCIENCE

The scientific work of our countrymen has probably evoked less scepticism on the part of foreign judges than their achievements in other departments of cultural activity. There is one obvious reason for this difference. When our letters, our art, our music are criticized with disdainfully faint commendation, it is because they have failed to attain the higher reaches of creative effort. Supreme accomplishment in art certainly presupposes a graduated series of lesser strivings, yet from what might be called the consumer’s angle, mediocrity is worthless and incapable of giving inspiration to genius. But in science it is otherwise. Here every bit of sound work—however commonplace—counts as a contribution to the stock of knowledge; and, what is more, on labours of this lesser order the superior mind is frequently dependent for its own syntheses. A combination of intelligence, technical efficiency, and application may not by itself suffice to read the riddles of the universe; but, to change the metaphor, it may well provide the foundation for the epoch-makers’ structure. So while it is derogatory to American literature to be considered a mere reflection of English letters, it is no reflection on American scientists that they have gone to Europe to acquire that craftsmanship which is an indispensable prerequisite to fruitful research. And when we find Alexander von Humboldt praising in conversation with Silliman the geographical results of Maury and Frémont, there is no reason to suspect him of perfunctory politeness to a transatlantic visitor; the veteran scholar might well rejoice in the ever widening application of methods he had himself aided in perfecting.

Thus even seventy years ago and more the United States had by honest, painstaking labour made worthwhile additions to human knowledge and these contributions have naturally multiplied a hundredfold with the lapse of years. Yet it would be quite misleading to make it appear as if the total represented merely a vast accumulation of uninspired routine jobs. Some years ago, to be sure, an American writer rather sensationally voiced his discontent with the paucity of celebrated savants among our countrymen. But he forgot that in science fame is a very inadequate index of merit. The precise contribution made by one man’s individual ability is one of the most tantalizingly difficult things to determine—so much so that scholars are still debating in what measure Galileo’s predecessors paved the way for his discoveries in dynamics. For a layman, then, to appraise the relative significance of this or that intellectual worthy on the basis of current gossip is rather absurd. Certainly the lack of a popular reputation is a poor reason for denying greatness to a contemporary or even near-contemporary scientific thinker. Two remarkable instances at once come to mind of Americans who have won the highest distinction abroad yet remain unknown by name to many of their most cultivated compatriots. Who has ever heard of Willard Gibbs? Yet he was the recipient of the Copley medal, British learning’s highest honour, and his phase rule is said to mark an epoch in the progress of physical chemistry. Again, prior to the Nobel prize award, who outside academic bowers had ever heard of the crucial experiment by which a Chicago physicist showed, to quote Poincaré, “that the physical procedures are powerless to put in evidence absolute motion”? Michelson’s name is linked with all the recent speculations on relativity, and he shares with Einstein the fate of finding himself famous one fine morning through the force of purely external circumstances.