What opinion of all this is held today by the small but growing critical minority of whom we were speaking at the beginning of this chapter? That minority is fairly well persuaded that no culture such as the indexes reveal will produce the kind of men and women who can long keep our people happy or our coutnry competent to survive in the world as it is coming to be.
The first thing that strikes this critical minority, as it looks at the whole cultural picture, is that ours is a nation of new-rich people, well washed, all dressed up, rather pathetiaclly unsure just what it is washed and dressed up for; a nation convinced that a multitude of material goods, standardized, furiously and expensively advertised by appeals to greed and vanity, will in themselves make life worth the living. Because we are new-rich, we overvalue possessions. Almost any individual who makes a great deal of money very rapidly supposes that mere possession of wealth is evidence of worth. He also is apt to imagine that with his means he can buy happiness. These mistakes usually seem folly to the old-rich, to one who was born to property, whose father and mother were bred with it. Such a one knows that merely because he or his friends have it, is no sign that they are worth it, but quite commonly the contrary. he has learned through experience that money is not in itself very valuable stuff. Happiness, which is what all men desire, cannot be purchased; it is an illusive something not for sale. The old-rich know these things well enough, but the new-rich rarely discover them until they too have grown accustomed to possessions. So it seems to be with our society. We go in, almost without question and in all classes, for the sordid nonsense of supposing that externalities possessed ennoble the owners, that a full fist invariably indicates a fine spirit.
The second conviction on which our culture is based seems to be this, that animal appetites are mighty and to be sacrificed unto if we would enjoy a satisfactory existence; and the chief of all the appetites is sex. Our stage, our music, our dancing, our books and magazines, our advertising, our dress, strike strenuously an exaggerated not of sex appeal. We have even devised a popular moral philosophy based upon the supposition that, if one refuses to indulge sexual appetites, he or she is in danger of the madhosue. No reputable psychiatrist gives such advice to his clients; but we go for our psychology not to him but to the editor of the tabloid newspaper. No one will deny that sex is important; but it is not so centrally important as most of us seem to suppose. Man is a sexual animal; but he is a great deal more than that.
Our culture, in the third place, seems based upon a conviction that to be comfortable is utterly indispensable if man is to fulfill his destiny. It occurs only to exceptional people that the whole cult of comfort is petty, ignoble, unworthy of human nature, absurd. All too few ask whether it can possibly be that, since our primeval ancestors crawled from the slime of the sea, first the animal world and then the human race have struggled on, at cost of travail and pain and tears and death, merely that modern man may sit down and be comfortable.
The fourth impulse back of our cultural endeavors and achievements seems to be a ridiculous notion that whether a man be good or bad, wise or foolish, matters less than that he should conform to pattern. The pattern to which we are expected to conform is that set by the overgrown and depersonalized megaloplis. We shall say more later on about the growth of this conformity.
And fifth, our crowd-mindedness renders us suggestible, maniuplatable, easy meat for almost any propagandist who is willing to flatter, to encourage animality, to promise ease and opulence with a minimum of labor expended to get them, and freedom from responsibility.
"Well, what of it?" someone asks. "If the culture we have is the culture we like, then it is what we like. Where is the harm as long as we approve of ourselves, which we most certainly do? And are not the other nations envious of us for the very things your critical minority calls our defects?" A word or two about each of these questions may be in order.
Do other peoples envy us? The answer, as may be discovered by any open-minded traveler, is that they have little or no desire to become like us in anything except technological know-how. They usually regard us otherwise with condescension mixed with dread that somehow or other we may overthrow what they regard as a better way of life and degrade them to our cultural level. This is no exaggeration. Not only is it so oin Western Europe; it is the mood in Russia, in most of Asia and the Near East, in Latin America from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn. They look on our concern for size, speed, new models every year, as more than a little childish. They consider our effulgent and stentorian advertising both wasteful and ridiculous. They know too much about our restlessness. They see how our very mass production is preventing the joys of craftsmanship. They laugh at our hysterical enthusiasm for sports in which we take no part. They deplore our indifference to ideas and our disrespect for continuity and tradition. They sense in us tremendous power without our having any clear notion of what we desire to do with that power. They are afraid of us moroe than they admire us. They love us not. Is it conducive to a proper happiness or to our safety, that we should be held in such general disesteem?
"Where is the harm," the other question puts it, "if what we are suits us?" The harm lies in this, that down the ages no people whose compelling cluture has been based on greed for goods, on avidity for sensation, on search for enervating comforts, on conformity to a type set by subhuman urbanization, on a divorcement of the people from the soil, on eager response to the flatteries of propagandists, ever has managed to exist very long. Our wrong emphases are acids which dissolve the social cements. Unsureness about what life is for eventually brings about ineffectiveness in all departments of living, after a while ven in technological proficiency. Then, to cure an alarming disorder, in rides the Man on Horseback with plausible oversimplifications.
If we are to rescue America from Americans, we shall ahve to raise up a new generation which will live less immaturely. This can happen only if Demos recovers from his present self-applauding jamboree, only i fonce more he comes to know the comparative values of human living as the race has learned them down the millenia. As we stand revealed by candid examination of the indexes, our culrue is childish. If we go on as we are, we shall not produce the kind of citizens necessary for America's continued happiness or safety. We shall not bring forth "a type of man who sums up in his character quality of understanding, of humility, of truth, of humor, or moral stature, of strength and resourcefulness of mind, of pregnant ideas, of universal sympathy and friendship and love." If we and our children must live out our days in the sort of culture that the indexes indicate, can anything be done by us and for us in the circumstances? If nothing can be done to arrest disintegration, then how can those of us live happily who know what it means to be effectively human?
Even if the hippies were rebelling against the bad aspects of modern American culture, too often they threw out the baby with the bath water, especially when it came to rejecting traditional morality with respect to authority, sex, and drugs. Do we even have to go into the artistic features of that movement? Do 60s and 70s music really transcend the juvenile and rebellious spirit of those who listened to it? Perhaps there are a few exceptional songwriters who tried to get in touch with something deeper, but one cannot separate the search for meaning from those rules and customs governing daily behavior--it's all interconnected.
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