[This is Chapter 1 in Murphey’s
book Understanding the Modern Predicament.]
In my family we know my
grandmother, Mrs. Frank McDonough, Jr., by such various names as Reata or "Shorty" or
"Momo. " The most
recent generation has even added another name --"Gigi,"
for "great-grandmother." She was ninety years old last August 2,
having been born an unbelievable fourteen years before the beginning of this
century. She was already twenty-eight when World War I broke out in
In a reflective moment a year
or so ago she surprised me by saying that, if given the fanciful option people
sometimes talk about, she would not choose to live her life over. "Once is
enough, thank you," she said, considering the wear and tear that life, just
in itself, entails.
That birthday was like many
other happy days going back beyond the reaches of my memory. She was surrounded
by a loving family. My grandfather wasn't there, of course; he left us,
survived powerfully by a gentle and manly presence which we all feel even now,
in 1964 after a life that was itself long and
worthwhile. For several years after his death,
Grandmother remained in the mountain home they had shared for so many years
after his retirement from the practice of law. Now on her ninetieth birthday
the frail vibrancy that shone through her as she served everyone "Pepsi
floats" suggested the vitality that had been so typical of her during her
younger years.
It is probably not too
presumptuous to say, despite the negative she voiced on her speculated option,
that she has had an awfully good life. It has not been touched, except briefly
and not too intimately, by war; and it has been free of disease and of major
tragedy. There has been a steady flow of love and comfort and attainment. She
bore and raised four children; she took part in innumerable community projects,
helping others; and for many years her work with pastels, doing both landscapes
and portraits, has been a source of real satisfaction to both herself and
others.
My grandmother is worth keeping
in mind as I write about the "modern predicament." I will be going
into detail about the elaborately intertwined ingredients that make up modern
society and that determine our understanding of social reality. In doing so, I
will try to explain the divisions and neuroses within modern civilization. But,
through it all, we will want to remember that this complex and contradictory
social structure has offered the setting for countless lives, such as hers,
that have been lived fully and well. Our civilization is without a doubt the
highest ever attained by men, and nothing that I say by way of trying to
understand certain features of it should detract from the reality of its
achievements. And "Shorty" has been one of
those achievements.
The reader will not
automatically know what I mean when I refer to a "modern
predicament." It may be supposed that I mean all the disturbances that
have been so visible to everyone on a day-to-day basis: two enormous world
wars; assorted other wars, some major; a protracted Cold War, which is not over
despite our desire recently to bury it from sight; conflict of all types;
restless movements of social change. But I intend the "modern
predicament" to refer to all this and much, much more. The disturbances
are just the outward, most visible signs. They reflect an inner reality that is
tremendously complicated, but that is susceptible to being understood, at least
as to its long-term outlines.
It will be easiest to acquaint
the reader with this predicament by speaking specifically about three aspects
of it:
(1) In the first place, we need
to think beyond the implicit notion about human life that we so rightfully
assume to be true in childhood and of which we, in our continuing innocence,
rarely seem to be fully disabused. This is the notion that there is a state of
normalcy that represents the well-meaning, conscientious, decent aspects of
human existence, and that everything that happens to the contrary must be an
exception, to be accounted for as an aberration. It is a sanguine notion that
is unhappily contradicted by an overwhelming fund of human experience, which
indicates instead that human nature is seriously mixed.
I don't think we can really
understand either our own lives or modern civilization in adequate perspective
unless we appreciate that even in the highest of times men are only partly
"civilized." I know that I can't supply a definition of what full
civilization and full maturity would entail, but I do know that, whatever they
are, men have clearly not attained them, except in part.
In at least one of its
dimensions, the reality of modern life is defined by our origins and our
nature. This underscores the problematical features -- the
"predicament" -- of the contemporary world. We must take into account
the cosmic infancy of mankind's peoples, institutions, ideas and cultures. This
is an infancy that colors all contemporary life, just as it has all past life.
We have a rich heritage from the Greeks, the Romans and the Middle
Ages, but even though this has been immensely fertile and suggestive it has not
presented the modern world with a set of final solutions to the main human
questions. It is a fact of the utmost significance that we do not face those
questions bound together by paradigms from the past.
Several years ago when I first
read Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the
Masses, I was struck by how closely his observations about contemporary man
corresponded with my own experience. He indicated that since the beginning of
the nineteenth century
I have seen a lot of this
psychology in my day-to-day contacts with other people, as well as in the newsmaking events of our society. Accordingly, Ortega's
analysis helps clarify the reality in which we live. But I have nevertheless
felt that it would be a mistake to accept the analysis given in The Revolt
of the Masses by itself, without a still wider perspective. To take it at
face value might suggest that modern man has fallen and has taken on a
mediocrity that was absent before the nineteenth century. But this would hardly
tell the story.
The explosion of the average man to a higher level of life during the past two centuries simply brings into view a shallowness that until then had existed in the submerged corpus of mankind in the form of a thorough-going illiteracy, ignorance and muteness. The earlier void had been veneered-over by elites, but it is worthwhile to understand that any such veneer was masking a bad situation. Mankind was certainly problematical then; it was problematical so long as it relied upon veneers; and the problematical nature of modern "mass man," far from being anything new, is an extension of the human condition as that condition came down to us from the past.
None of this really contradicts
Ortega. But it supplements his insight in a way that is necessary if we are to
understand exactly how profound the problematical nature of modern man actually
is. If we see Ortega's mass man in the context of the continuing infancy of the
human race, we can have no difficulty appreciating why it is that mankind, even
in so advanced a time as the twentieth century, is so self-lacerating.
(2) The second aspect of the predicament involves less of an overall perspective. It focuses on certain specific ideas and movements that have occurred during the modern period.
This aspect has to do with a
social and intellectual fact that has been one of the salient features of the
modern age and that has served as a catalyst of such power that all of our
ideas and institutions and movements have either resulted from it or been
altered by it. Its effects have been so far-reaching that I feel justified in saying
(in anticipation of my third point) that it has determined much of the
underlying ontology -- i.e., the basic reality -- of our civilization.
This fact has been the alienation
of the intellectual.
The intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who supported aristocracy did not, at least at that time, make their peace with the incoming modern age and with the new "bourgeoisie" of individualist, industrial society. They correctly saw such a society's incompatibility with the values they cherished from the old order, with the consequence that they excoriated the new order before they gave it any real chance on its own. This was continued without a break by the new intelligentsia of the Left, who in the middle of the nineteenth century took up their stance outside the predominant culture, denouncing it angrily and formulating a variety of alternative models and philosophies rationalizing change. Since that time, this critique has been reiterated in tens of thousands of volumes and films.
Several causes have combined to
bring about this alienation, but I ascribe it mainly to envy and to the
intellectuals' struggle for power and status. The most important consequence of
the alienation has been the resulting alliance that the modern intellectual
subculture has struck with the "have-nots" in society. This
consequence has been radically influential in determining the direction of the
alienation itself. The main political and economic movements have sprung from
this alliance: Socialism and the Welfare State.
Such an alliance spawns its own
worldview. It is a worldview that sees millions of people as entrapped and
exploited by the stronger individuals in a voluntaristic
society. In its moral dimension, its tone is to raise the needs of the have-not
to an ethical pinnacle and at the same time to deny the work-oriented ethic of
the middle class. The State is seen as a liberating helpmate. Any sort of
relativism -- and there have been many -- is embraced, since relativism is the
readiest intellectual device by which to weaken a people's attachment to
existing values and social forms. And, too, the worldview has its own special
heroes and villains; it interprets all men and events according to its own
lights. Enormities of the worst kind -- such as occurred under Stalin and Mao
and are presently occurring in
This is not to say that the
alliance and its correspond1ng worldview have won a total victory. Despite
their successes, they have had to race alongside and to have their influence
within the whirling dervish of modern life -- and that life has its own mass,
force and inertia. The result is that although conservatives see the Left as
having changed the face of modern life, the Left itself does not think of
itself as having been particularly successful.
Because the alienation of the intellectual and all that has flowed from it have been factors of such potency, modern Western civilization must be understood not as something solid, but as an enormous system of antagonistic energies. It has long been seriously divided, and this division has spread to the remainder of the peoples of the world through the influence of Western ideas. There is no reason to suppose that a society founded upon such radically opposing energies has reached a final stasis. As much if not more so than any other soc1ety, our civilization is transitory and impermanent. It is a unique mixture, which in all likelihood will not be repeated by any other period of history.
(3) My third point about the
predicament focuses on the mental aspects of this division, in the broadest
meaning of “mental.” The more I have
studied the intellectual history of the past two hundred years, the more
neo-Kantian I have become in my view of the contemporary world (and indeed of
any society). By this I mean that social reality is to a very large degree the
product not of objective facts directly perceived, but of perceptions and
patterns of mental organization. This is true in two ways: First, if we look at
our own history or at any process or problem within our society, we understand
it only through the large conceptual framework that we bring to bear upon it.
We do not understand the reality directly; what we have in our minds is a mediated
reality. This mediation involves an amount of selectivity and factual
arranging that is far beyond what we usually acknowledge. There is a reality
separate from ourselves, which is the touchstone of what we are attempting to
understand, but the mediation itself makes up a substantial portion of the
reality as we finally accept it. The second point I make is that a large part
of the social reality we are trying to fathom consists precisely of the mental
states -- the perceptions, concepts and worldviews -- of millions of people.
These mental states themselves constitute a significant portion of the
subject-matter of human society. This means that the effect of the process of
mediation is compounded. There is first the aspect that our understanding of
reality is filtered, and then the aspect that our understanding, as filtered,
is a major datum in our lives and in the lives of others.
Both of these aspects were well
illustrated by the Nazi phenomenon. The National Socialists organized their
perception of modern social reality through concepts developed out of the
earlier German Romantic movement and German Volkish
thought. The reality they perceived and upon which they acted was very
different from reality as perceived by others. From outside their system of
belief, we can see that their perceptions were a mixture of a certain modicum
of selected fact and a generous portion of myth. If we apply the second aspect
to the National Socialists, we see that their worldview became an extremely
important datum influencing the structure of life both for them and for others.
The fact that they saw the world as they did was itself a part of social
reality. It changed everything that touched their
society, creating the existential framework within which life went on. Indeed,
for some twenty million victims this was so potent a part of reality that it
led to imprisonment and death.
The application of this second point
to ourselves is obscured by the fact that we do not readily see in our own
context what is so evident with regard to the Nazis. We know from a distance
that their worldview was in fact a motivating force extraneous to reality that
acted upon and became a part of reality, changing events and the whole makeup
of the modern European experience. What we don't realize, though, is that this
is also true about the ideas we ourselves hold. It lies at the bottom of our
natures to assume those ideas to be true, to understand them as an accurate
reflection of reality rather than as merely a mediation.
But this is a mistake. The existential frame of our own existence, both on a
day-to-day basis and as to the larger events of our history, is largely formed
out of our patterns of mental organization. And, whether we like to acknowledge
it or not, these patterns are shot through with fictions. This is especially so
because of the presence of the ideologies that have
arisen out of the radical division within our society. One cannot contemplate
the vast ocean of interrelated concepts, and their origin out of tensions and
tactical alliances, without being impressed by the extent to which society
strays off into a miasma of figments. And this becomes the social reality in which
we live and with which we must deal.
Thus the predicament of modern
man goes profoundly to the depths of modern social reality and to our
understanding of it. It is a predicament because the effect is only partly
serviceable to human values. Our society, like the neurotic individual, is able
to get by and perhaps avoid being institutionalized; but the neurosis, its
origins and consequences, define the life of the society in terms that we can
appropriately describe as a "predicament. "
The reader will find it helpful
to keep the three aspects of the predicament in mind as he follows the
remainder of my writing:
Part I of the present volume
has to do with the immaturity of mankind and the absence of an inherited
consensus from the past.
Parts II and
My later writing, in
which I review in detail the worldviews of the different ideologies, should be
read and understood as an elaboration of my third point. This enormous web of concepts and of shadings defines our
social reality existentially, since we live according to our understanding.