Humanism and America

From Plato to Irving Babbitt humanists have been occupied with the idea of leadership, since men are social beings, unhappy and self-destructive in mutual hostility, happiest and greatest when co-operating in community in the wisest available ideas. Whose ideas? Plato proposed the leadership of philosophers. But he himself did all that a philosopher can do. He was of the greatest; in one of the high masterpieces of human thought he proposed a scheme for the salvation of Greece—and while he wrote and Athens read, Greek civilisation declined. Something had departed that but an age before had made of Athens the supreme exemplar of what human existence may come to at its best, in zest of life and ardour of co-operation, in brilliance and profundity of thought, something that had created a society more lovely than any other in recorded history, and produced a literature and a full free current of ideas that are still the model and despair of all our aspirations.

May this loss have been loss of disciplined community at the basis of all thought? Each man thinks not what he will but what he can with the articulate particles of his consciousness. Only by community here can one mind think the same thoughts as another. In such community minds will hold their common ideas with heightened ardour, as in friendship a common thought rises to new vitality by being shared in utter comprehension. It was not an accident that friendship played so profound a part in Greek life, not an accident that thought and letters so flourished. For expression had met understanding, and understanding had enriched the common premisses of thought. One among them, at all events, made the association.

“Not long afterwards,” says Thucydides, “nearly the whole Hellenic world was in commotion. When trouble had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further.... The meanings of words had no longer the same relations to things....” And he goes on to detail wherein the confused meanings of terms unsettled the mutual comprehension upon which the harmony of civilised life depends.

As for us, we are in something of a like predicament. The most striking aspect of contemporary life is the contrast between the fruitfulness of the scientific world, its vitality, its harmony, its world-wide co-operation, and our frankly acknowledged moral bankruptcy—vigour and fecundity in the area to which discipline has been shifted, and futility and chaos in the area from which discipline has been withdrawn. It is not that men have ceased to be concerned with moral choice. So long as they pursue on reflection what seems to be good, so long are they exercising their moral nature. Never, I dare say, has there been a wilder play of reflection on what seems to be good.

If we are suffering a moral chaos it is not from the abandonment of morals but from a helpless discrepancy, an incapacity to think the same thoughts. Given another Plato, our only chance of accord under his leadership would be such community with him and with each other in the articulate elements of his utterance as would evoke the same living thoughts in our various minds.

The task of creating such community is a subtle one, immeasurably more difficult than the corresponding task of modernism. The particles of consciousness with which we think here are quick with feeling—with sentiment, impulse, passion, and desire, drawn in each individual from his own native depths. They are neither such sheer conventions as the units of measure that make up the syntax of scientific thought, nor objective and tangible like the data of nature with which science deals. They are the dynamic forces of life itself, spontaneous and imperious, and they impel us whether or no. Whether they are to drive us in anarchy or in harmony, however, depends upon our ability so to channelise them, so to articulate and identify them for thought, as to bring us into mutual understanding of those ideas in which they play a part. The first service of the humanistic discipline was that it put the individual mind into intimate contact with the tradition of humane letters in which were embodied and shaped the articulate elements of such ideas. It was the second and no less significant service of this discipline that in clinging sedulously to the great tradition of that literature it tended to give to all minds thus imbued the same elements filled with the same substance, and so put mind into community with mind.

In abandoning the common discipline of this area of the consciousness modernism has not only done something to dilute our powers of thought there, but has left us, mind and mind, out of community and in a moral confusion that lies, not in the open conflict of ideas, but in tacit disparities of idea that never meet.

Modernism reaches its ultimate goal in a knowledge of nature. But nature has no need of our knowledge. It is we who need it, for our own ends. In the measure in which, for the conception of those ends, we lose our powers of thought, so precariously wrought in the long travail of the past, and so dependent upon unremitting reconquest, we shall in fact have killed the goose that lays the golden egg.