[This is Chapter Nine of Murphey’s book Understanding the Modern Predicament.]
Chapter Nine
EXISTENTIAL
PROBLEMS IN A COMMERCIAL CULTURE
The three
chapters that follow this one will go into considerable detail about the
alienation of the modern intellectual from the bourgeoisie. It is worth
noticing, though, that the immediately preceding chapter talked about the
multitudes in general. It did not deal narrowly with the “bourgeoisie." In
it, we saw quite a lot of intellectual dissatisfaction with the multitudes
themselves. The breadth of the dissatisfaction suggests, in fact, that the
alienation of the intellectual is not so much with the middle class per se
as it is with modern man in general. The breadth takes it far beyond the
middle class as such. This is a fact that has been obscured by the politics and
rhetoric that have resulted from the alliance that the intellectual subculture
has for so long formed with the "have-nots" in society. Despite the
broad democratic thrust and the championing of the position of the
underprivileged, modern literature makes it clear that the intellectuals'
loathing has been for the culture at large.
These
thoughts are important as we begin an analysis of the spiritual difficulties
associated with the commercial aspects of our culture, since it would be
misleading to accept the notion that these difficulties are attributable solely
to that commercialism. Such an interpretation is too narrow. The problems are
as much problems of a mass culture as of a commercial one.
In chapter
eleven I will review the causes of the intellectuals' alienation. The
existential problems that I will discuss in the present chapter will be
important at that time. We will see that when the existential problems are
combined with the mediocrities of mass culture, there are strong substantive
reasons for sensitive men to be dissatisfied. It would be a mistake to think
the alienation is caused entirely by the neuroses of the intellectuals
themselves. Real causes do exist. To overlook them would be to ignore some of
the genuine problems in our society. This is true, in my opinion, even though
in weighing the causes I have concluded that the alienation is mainly caused by
the non-substantive factors. This conclusion does not deny that the substantive
problems are at least major contributing causes. They are also important as the
grievances upon which the alienation focuses as it articulates its
dissatisfaction.
There have
been many existentialist analyses of our modern lifestyle. These have almost
always been unfavorable. Instead of repeating someone else's analysis, I can
express more meaningfully the problems as I have felt them in my own
experience.
Those who
have read my book Emergent Man will notice that I will simply be saying
in a more structured way what I said more passionately there. That earlier
discussion will also need to be supplemented by our seeing the relationship of
the spiritual defects to the divisions within modern society.
The
radical solitude. In a certain sense, a human's consciousness is entirely
personal. It can never be directly experienced by another person; it is fully
the possession of the person whose consciousness it is. Although two
consciousnesses can come in touch, with each making an impression on the other,
it is ontologically true that each knows only itself, even though it is its
altered self.
Ortega
observed that "human life...is essentially solitude, radical
solitude" and added that "what is most radically human in man (is)
his radical solitude."l The fact that each person contains a
"soul," so to speak, knowable only to himself means that he is, in an
ultimate sense, alone within himself.
This
ultimate solitude is not, however, just at a time of crisis. It is an inherent
part of individuality. When, for example, I as a professor meet a class, I and
the students share a classroom for a period of time. "Objective
reality" shows us there together, all pretty much alike. But subjectively
there are great personal differences. Each person brings to the class a
consciousness that has its own existential reality and carries its own history
and content. It becomes obvious how different I am subjectively from the others
when I tell them even so superficial a thing as where I have lived:
Only a
reproduction of this subjective existence can be communicated -- and only part
of the whole, at that. A substratum remains that is incommunicable. This was
the basis on which Ortega made an existentialist analysis of love: "From
this substrate of radical solitude that is irremediably our life, we constantly
emerge with a no less radical longing for companionship. Could we but find one
whose life would wholly fuse with, would interpenetrate ours! ...Genuine love
is nothing but the attempt to exchange two solitudes."
For what
follows, it is important to note that for anything really to mean anything to
us and to take on profound significance for us, it must touch us in this personal inner life. If it does
not affect us in what we are there, its meaning to us is shallow. And it is in
this radical solitude that meaning, once attained, will reside to serve as the
judge of all else.
The
extroverted outer reality. Much in life and among people has little vital
touch in this vibrant center, but passes off without affecting it deeply. There
is an "outer flow" among human beings that could relate closely to
what is important inside each man's solitude, but that is usually preoccupied
with the mediocre and the trivial. This is overwhelmingly present if a culture
turns away from mental and emotional cultivation and prefers the commonplace.
This empty
outer flow is an "extroverted outer reality." Although it can vary in
content from one culture to another, in a commercial society it almost
unavoidably possesses a gregarious, amicable structure, since a gentle
friendliness is most typical of the sales relationships cultivated by a seller
with his customers. Years ago, I noticed a sharp difference in this outer flow
between life in the Marine Corps, where few people thought it necessary to be
pleasant, and civilian life, where people are almost invariably pleasant. There
is much to be said for that friendliness. Because of this, we usually speak
favorably of "extroversion." It is the introvert who is most often
suspect.
However, an
extreme shallowness characterizes this gregariousness -- and it is in this
shallowness that the spiritual problems find their root. In Emergent Man
I illustrated this shallowness by telling an example of a man who drove into a
service station to have his gas tank filled.2 The driver was a member of the Federal Reserve Board on his
way to a meeting that would have to face an international monetary crisis. As
he drove to the meeting, his mind was filled with the many aspects of the
crisis itself, of the upcoming meeting, and even of his years of experience and
study which were about to reach a culmination. When suddenly he noticed his car
was low on gas, he drove into the station, where a young man came out to greet
him. For his part, the young man also had been filled with a subjective world
of his own. He was eagerly looking forward to the end of the day and to a date
with his girl, a prospect which in his mind had created a rich tapestry of
possibilities.
When two
such men meet at a gas pump, what will their contact amount to? Will it
intimately touch the really vital existence of either? For the most functional
of reasons the contact between them will almost certainly avoid anything but
the most superficial involvement with the emotional or intellectual life of
either. After the economist peremptorily tells the attendant the kind and
amount of gas he wants, the two men will probably talk briefly about the
weather and sports. For a minute or two while the gas is being pumped they may
hold the liveliest conversation about the football game they saw on television
the night before. Then they will go their separate ways. Each will return to
the radical solitude that he has not revealed to the other.
Anything
else would be dysfunctional. The economist might be temporarily amused if the
attendant poured out his romantic feelings, but after one or two such occasions
he would probably go to another station.
The attendant, for his part, may have no background for or interest in
the issues involved in the monetary crisis. In any case, the brevity of their
contact forbids anything but the most cursory exploration of any subject. It is
trivia that is most functional to them both in this situation.
Now if we
multiply the gas station example by several billion, which is the number of
such contacts that take place every day in our society, we can easily see the
extent to which our commercial system involves the built-in repetition of
trivia. Even though there are many other things going on at the same time,
there is also this never-ending reiteration of human contacts focused on an
emotionally and intellectually meaningless content. The extent of such contacts
will tend strongly to set the tone for human intercourse in the society.
This trivia can absorb men
existentially, becoming their lifestyle. Our subjective existence consists of
what fills our consciousnesses through a succession of moments. The greater our
preoccupation with an extroversive outer flow, the more we are defined
existentially by it. Many individuals can come to think this flow so natural
that it becomes the center of their lives, negating any deeper radical solitude
in which they cultivate independent emotions or intellect. Although this will
rarely occur totally, a.lifestyle in which a person's time is absorbed more or
less continuously by extroversive contacts over a bridge table, or at a
cocktail party, or watching television will center very largely on matters
that, while pleasant, do not grab him up vitally. I think of this as an
"absorption effect." It is possible for a person's subjective life to
be sucked out and filled with trivial content.
I recall
the sharp contrast after several months in Marine Corps boot camp and combat
training. These months were spent in total absorption with group life. I was
crowded in with a number of other men with only a minimal chance to cultivate
my own subjectivity. Finally on a Sunday four or five months after my
enlistment I had time to wander a few hundred yards into the hills away from
the cinder block barracks of Camp Las Pulgas at Camp Pendleton. I sat down
under a tree alone and found the silence beautiful. Almost physically, I sensed
an entire untapped contemplative world which I had almost forgotten. It broke
my absorption in the neurotic bustle of the barracks.
The lives of
our contemporaries and the tone of our culture consist of this gregariousness.
Trivialized sociability is considered the rightful expression of our humanity.
We hardly think anything else possible. This is a phenomenon that relates to
the rise of the multitudes; and it relates, too, to the commercial setting.
When Cobden complained about the lack of serious conversation among the
Russians, who got up from the table to play billiards, he voiced a complaint
that would carry substantially greater force today.
Whatever
the beneficial values of the extroversion, the lifestyle it involves tends
strongly to suffocate the truly vital soul of a man. The radical solitude --
the portion of a man's consciousness that is seriously concerned and sensitive
-- is hidden away. It only rarely finds expression outside itself in such a
milieu. The meaningful things of life are pressed underground and forgotten so
far as the outer contacts among people are concerned, and in the existential
makeup of the men whose content is defined by the trivia.
Family
relationships are an exception. Even when they consist of purely extroversive
activities, they are meaningful in the radical solitude of the people involved.
To see a child bubbling with happiness and taking his first step is a sight
that reverberates deeply, not trivially, within the parent. The same is true to
a lesser degree about extroversive contacts in general if they are with people
we like. An evening of bridge may, for example, involve almost nothing of the
intellect or deeper emotions of the people playing, but just the same it can
glow from the simple companionship. And, too, any of the activities people
adopt in a gregarious, hedonistic culture -- skiing, bowling, cards, gadgetry, boating, traveling and the like --
can develop a deeper meaning if those doing them will raise them to a level of
pride and achievement so that they will touch more than the surface of the
players' lives. Any human activity, if done well, can lose its trivial nature.
There is
thus a continuum rather than a sharp polarity. Contemporary culture, however,
is manifestly toward the shallower end. The trivialization remains perhaps the
most important fact in any discussion in which we attempt to describe the
existential problems of people today. With this in mind, we come to the crucial
questions: Is there anything that is really meaningful and important to human
beings in life? If so, does it find any really satisfying expression in this
outer flow?
I won't
attempt at this juncture to define what the meaningful things are. Different
people will offer a variety of answers. It is enough to say that many people do
feel that there are important things about human existence, that our lives in
one way or another do have significance, and that there are meaningful
answers to the questions of “Why are we here?" and "What are we
hoping to accomplish before we die?" This isn't to deny that many others
will seem content to go through life with only minimal reference to such
concerns, but to many people such ultimate questions are deeply relevant.
Problems Related to the
Trivialized Outer Reality
Whatever
our personal answer to these questions may be, if we take them seriously we
immediately see how little our answer to them is served by the trivialization
of life. It is as though the sacred is always forced to seek expression through
the profane. Whenever matters of ultimate personal significance are suffocated
under a human nexus that denies their existence and offers them no catharsis,
there will be serious spiritual problems. The common thread that runs among
them is that the deeper intellectual and emotional subjectivity of the human
being is given no real place in the person's relations with others. There is in
each the profound split, exacerbated in our culture, between the inner and
outer realities.
Denial
of a higher vision. Many thinkers
have denounced the secularization of modern life because the secularization
takes our eyes off the truer realities, which are spiritual. Whatever the
merits of this critique, there is a counterpart to it in the fact that a
preoccupation with trivia has a definite effect on an individual. Such a
preoccupation fills the mind with itself and necessarily forecloses, to the
extent it is present, a subjective emphasis in other areas. The absorption in
trivia is analogous to emphysema in the lungs: it fills the spaces and denies
entry to the oxygen needed for life.
This is a
disaster for human beings if intellectual and emotional concerns are important
to the human spirit. Countless people have found that, notwithstanding its
pleasantries, a gregarious, hedonistic life is essentially unfulfilling. Its
amiability and human warmth are very real
and the diversions it offers are enjoyable, but there comes a time when mere
enjoyableness isn't enough. The pleasure does not provide significance,
attainment, creation, pride, satisfaction.
I think of
this as a "suffocation of a higher vision." It invokes a Gresham's
Law of the Spirit, by which the shallow drives out a deeper cultivation. When
men are trivialized, they are reduced. Although many people pass through life
without any apparent difficulty over this (at least superficially; their
sensing of it often shows up in countless personal ways without their even
being conscious of it), for others life hardly seems worthwhile without a
religious meaning. (In my thinking, "religious" includes a type of
secular religiousness, since the secular man is as confronted by the question
of significance as anyone else.)
Lostness
and withdrawal. We should differentiate the different types of spiritual
crises through which people can pass as a result of these things. A crisis may
be felt in several ways. In my own case, as a young man I never lost my
bearings because of the trivialization. Although there were times of
intellectual crisis because I was grappling with difficult and fundamental
issues, they were not due to the emptiness of my contacts with others. What I
did feel, though, and often intensely, was a sense of lostness within the
insanities of an unreal milieu. I didn't lose sight of my own values and
convictions, but it was as though my intellectual and emotional reality -- my
radical solitude -- were a bouy floating in an alien sea. The unexplainable
emptiness, the vacuity and lack of concern, the cravenness and pettiness -- all
of these were very cutting, since I hadn't developed a defense against them or
even an understanding of them. This form of crisis doesn't disappear; it stays
on because it is rooted in the social reality of the individual. Personal
adjustments -- particularly marriage and a family -- lessen its impact, but
otherwise we can hardly escape the effects of it on our social reality.
There can
be another type of crisis, probably far more gripping. This is if the emptiness
causes the person to lose or perhaps never to gain his inner bearings, even
though he may have a spiritual yearning for them. There could be no end to the
turns and twists his soul could take. It could continue until he finds his
bearings and works out his own way of adjusting them to the world.
Those who
undergo the first type of crisis -- the type I have experienced myself --
develop a natural tendency toward withdrawal. The thoughtful and sensitive man
must withdraw; he can't permit himself to be defined existentially by the
trivia. His values demand an inner cultivation that can’t be gained by
preoccupation with the outer flow. Emerson captured the essence of it a century
and a half ago: "It is when your facts and persons grow unreal and fantastic
by too much falsehood, that the scholar flies for refuge to the world of ideas,
and aims to recruit and replenish nature from that source."3 Such a man uses books, art and music to enjoy contact with
other souls who have poured out the deepest expression of their own solitudes
in ways that the trivial milieu can never know. He joins the dialogue that
exists among expressive men over the ages -- and, far from being without human
sustenance, experiences the finest companionship with other men like himself,
many of whom are long dead.
Later we
will discuss directly the causes of the alienation of the intellectual from
contemporary culture. At that time, we will refer back to the present
discussion. I will make the point that this split between the inner and outer
realities, and the intellectual's necessary withdrawal into himself to
cultivate his own meaning, are one of the major substantive explanations for
the alienation. The present analysis is given for a double purpose: for its own
sake, and for its bearing on that later discussion.
Loss of
“vital touch.” A tragic consequence of this existential split lies in the
extent to which it separates people. Gregariousness superficially seems to
bring people together, but spiritually they are strangers if they don't share
their deeper sensibilities and concerns.
My wife and
I have known a couple for several years and have met with them socially many
times. Despite our seeming closeness to them, we never knew they were having
marital difficulties. When they separated and were divorced, it came as a shock
to us. With hindsight, it is evident that we had hardly known them. Our
friendship was superficial and didn't touch the real essence of their lives.
For a
number of years, I saw a cousin regularly during the summer. Through our
separate routes, we each came to spend some time in the Colorado mountains;
then we went our own ways during the rest of the year. We talked, went on hikes
and occasionally camped out together. Then four or five years intervened during
which I didn't see him; we were both grown and the regularities of childhood
could no longer be counted on. At the end of this time, my mother thought to
ask me, "Did you hear about Johnny?" She then told me he had gotten
married, but had soon discovered he had cancer and had died.
I wanted to
write a note to my aunt, his mother, expressing my sadness. But the note was
peculiarly difficult to write. I could write the usual sentiments, and they
would be true enough; but I wanted to say more. But I couldn't, and the reason
was that I realized that I really didn't know the meaningful things about him.
I knew only the surface of his life. Did the tragedy lie mainly in the fact
that a boy I had known -- a likeable, friendly, shining human being -- had died?
Or was it instead in the fact that a person of unique worth, of developed
intellect and sensibility, of a whole complex of aspirations and strivings, had
left us, mostly unfulfilled? There is a world of difference between these two,
and suddenly I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about him in this second
sense. I knew nothing about the depths of his mind and soul, not even so
superficial a thing as the type of career he had pursued. To write a letter
speaking only of the one, as though that counted most, was in effect to deny
the importance of the other. For better or for worse, I never wrote the
note. [Note in 2003: It is
precisely for this reason that I have requested that upon my retirement from
the faculty at Wichita State University there be no events commemorating
it. I don’t want my life of intellect,
about which virtually no one there knows a thing, to be trivialized by an
effusion of even the most amiable of banalities. My relationships with the people at the
University have all been within the context of what I am here calling the
“extroverted outer flow.”]
D. H.
Lawrence built much of his philosophy around an awareness of this loss of vital
human connection. His "philosophy of touch" stresses the existential
remoteness among human beings and the spiritual need for them to share the
deeper aspects of their lives.4 He shared Ortega's existentialist perception, which I noted
earlier, that "genuine love is nothing but the attempt to exchange two
solitudes." Many modern voices have expressed the same need. I believe it
is the main explanation underlying the various centers of "touch
therapy" that have sprung up in recent years and that seem so esoteric
from our ordinary perspective. Outside commercial culture in the precincts of far-flung
and often alienated intellectuality, people have sought to do something about
this spiritual separation. Although I am not now discussing the steps that
could be taken to overcome this gulf, it is worthwhile to point out that the
gulf is a problem that bourgeois culture should take seriously. At such time as
the supporters of our culture are able to move from a strictly defensive
posture, this should be among their concerns.
All
becomes politics. We easily recognize that inner sensibilities require
cultivation. We don't necessarily realize, though, that the outer flow becomes
an art of its own. The absorption of people in trivia isn't just a passive
process; it is also active. The extroversion requires skills of its own. Many
people master these skills by adopting completely the style and values of the
extroversion.
On one
occasion a few years ago I sat among a circle of college professors and
graduate students who were visiting in a home near the Princeton University
campus. I was a graduate student in economics at New York University; one of
the men was employed by a writing project and had recently been the editor of a
newspaper; another had just returned from a mathematics conference in India.
But instead of leading to a probing conversation springing from our studies and
experience, the evening centered around the expert garrulousness of two college
girls. They held center stage for two or three hours, sitting on the floor in
the middle of the room, and were remarkably good at a banter that had no content
outside the art of gregariousness. I could give this as an example of the split
between the two realities, but it also illustrates the skill that the
extroversion involves. The girls possessed this skill far more than any of the
others present, despite the others' education and experience.
This has
more significance than appears, though, from an example involving just one
evening. Extroversive skills and values have become the primary way of life
among acting men. This involves an approach to life that is very different from
the approach made by the sincere man of ideas.
In 1966 I
was a candidate for district judge in Colorado Springs. At the same time, two
proposed state constitutional amendments were on the ballot. One was to abolish
the death penalty; the other was to establish an appointive system for judges
that in practice would mean a life tenure. I opposed both of them for reasons
that we won't pause to discuss. Occasionally I was asked to speak on the
amendments at service club meetings, and this included a couple of debates.
This seemed natural, and I went and presented my views. But then in a
conversation over lunch with a popular young attorney he told me something that
put my activity in a wholly different light. He told me how unhappy he was that
his wife had told someone his views on one of the amendments. He didn't want
anyone to know.
There was a
stark difference between his view of life, of the mind and of himself, and my
own. His highest values didn't include reason, openness and the give-and-take
of ideas. Instead, he gave top priority to popularity and success.
"All
life is selling yourself," a speaker once told an audience of business
students. I winced as I recalled the countless times that sincere, open men
have commented in literature on the spiritual and intellectual disparity
between this philosophy of life and their own. If all life is salesmanship, the
gregarious facade becomes supreme. But what then becomes of the inner reality
of the mind and the spirit?
The
opponents of a society based on individual freedom and the market economy have
given this a lot of attention. It is one of the reasons for their alienation.
It is time the friends of such a society became sensitive to these things, too. If a free society means
spiritual, intellectual emptiness, it is its own worst enemy. Freedom must be
seen as a plateau that makes it possible for men to rise higher -- not to
become sunk in a semi-conscious denial of the spirit. I would support freedom
in any case because no person or group is perfect enough to be given extensive
power over others, but this does not mean that I should be an apologist for a
cultural mediocrity that deflects the finest possibilities of freedom. Those
who love liberty most should be the severest critics of such a cultural tone.
The
supporters of freedom take pride in the fact that in a free society a man's
success depends upon his ability. Ludwig von Mises was, of course, one of the
leading classical liberals of our time; he spoke of "the sway of the principle,
to each according to his accomplishments.”5 This is essentially true in a competitive system, since no
amount of gregariousness will entirely mask a shoddy service or commodity. But
this doesn't fully describe the process; "who you know, not what you
know" is quite important. There are two tendencies, which are opposing and
yet in some ways complementary: competition within the profit and loss system
demands accomplishment; and, yet, the cultural tone of extroversive trivia
demands that ideas and attainments be smothered. To the extent that the latter
is at work, all tends to become politics in the broadest sense of the word.
In the late
1960s violence and ideological tension struck American university campuses.
Many people were surprised at the spinelessness of the great majority of
college administrators. But this should not have been surprising; for many
years it had been the man who cultivated the art of "not making
enemies" who had gone up the ladder in administrative positions. This
isn't the same thing as to say that such men were not capable; the gregarious
art requires as much ability in its own way as any other. But it is an art that
ill-prepares men for conviction and character. This is the primary art in our
society both in and out of business. It isn't accidental that it is closely
associated with weakness of character.
This helps
explain many of the apparent irrationalities of behavior today. In Chapter 2, I
mentioned my experience with a college faculty when eight professors who had strongly
opposed a department chairman's action in declaring a "slow-down"
actually voted to support it when it came to a vote at a faculty meeting. This
otherwise incomprehensible turn-about becomes intelligible if we take into
account the mechanism culturally that "turns all into politics." Each
professor was right in thinking that his academic career would be smoother if
he voted with the department chairman.
The
problem of integrity. We come now to a problem that is as old as humanity,
but that is made worse by the existence culturally of a trivialized outer flow:
the problem of integrity. I define integrity in its usual sense -- as the
correspondence between a person's inner being, especially his principles and
values, and his actual life. If the
correspondence is high, he is a man of integrity; if it is low, he is not.
Again we are dealing with something that involves a continuum rather than an
absolute polarity. Most men are somewhere between the extremes.
The problem
of integrity has been so difficult for serious men at all times in history that
those who have sought something close to complete integrity have usually found
it necessary to withdraw into a personal religious shell. They have been forced
to understand that any connection with the world of men would make them
vulnerable. The result has been the religious asceticism and withdrawal into
self that was so much a part of Epicurean and Stoic thought, as well as of
countless other philosophical and religious schools. This has been most urgently
necessary for sensitive men when the life around them has been inane and
brutish.
The
extroversive outer flow with its functional imperative toward the meaningless
entails, by its very nature, a suffocation of concern over each individual's
principles, values or system of convictions. If he lives within that flow in
keeping with its expectations, there will be little place for his deeper
concerns. No real hearing will be given to any objections he may have. The
commonplace just isn't interested. It considers the individual's convictions an
eccentricity.
This is one
of the more important factors to be taken into account in business ethics. The
"ways of the world" try to extend themselves into all corners. They
insist on their own norms and develop their own rationale. A person with higher
values than the average will not ordinarily find himself honored for his
ethics. More often, he will be denigrated as naive and impractical. I remember
an instance in which a young lawyer was called into a senior partner's office
and was told to see a judge to have a client's traffic ticket fixed. It
happened that the "fixing" could no longer be accomplished, although
at an earlier time the judges would dismiss tickets if asked to do so by
attorneys. The young lawyer tried, but the best he could do was to get a
reduction of the fine.
What might
have happened if the young lawyer had refused to make such an effort? What if
he had said that he felt an ethical scruple against it? Let's assume he
mentioned this with the utmost tact, in the most inoffensive possible way. If
so, he might have gotten away with it, at least once. But as he left the senior
partner's office, is it likely that the older lawyer would say to himself
"He's a fine young man. He has ethics!" If anyone thinks so, his
experience in life has been different than mine. Far more likely, the older
lawyer has his own ethically mediocre position fully rationalized: "That
young man is still wet behind the ears. They don't send them out of law school
understanding what is practical. We have to serve our clients just as
aggressively as any other lawyer. Damn
it, I'll have to run the ticket over to the courthouse myself!”
The ethical
denominator of the two men is very different. One is deeply concerned with a
system of convictions and scruples; the other has rationalized expediency. This
can occur in any culture, but a cultural tone that makes people unaccustomed to
hearing personal convictions strongly reinforces it. When "all has become
politics," a person does not politick best by raising irritating obstacles
in the form of principled objections.
In such a
milieu, a person who acts with uncompromised integrity will soon "burn his
bridges." Those who withdraw from human contact -- such as the religious
hermit, the ascetic or the intellectual who by Emerson's description
"flies for refuge to the world of ideas" -- are taking the only
position consistent with complete integrity. Those who choose to remain among
men, though (and for my part I think this is by far the better choice), find
that the daily problem is how to make their stands where they will count most.
They have to optimize their most important principles while being careful not
to burn all the bridges.
Colorado
law has voiced a "strong public policy" against gambling, and the
state Supreme Court has long declared this in high moral tones. I was in court
one time when the sheriff brought in several slot machines he had confiscated
from clubs over the weekend. The judge solemnly ordered them smashed. But every
year while I was attending law school and practicing as a young lawyer in
Denver the local bar association sponsored an annual summer buffet for its
members. Several times after the dinner was finished the dinner tables were
cleared away and gambling tables were brought in. Money piled high as lawyers
gambled.
I have no
particular opposition to a person's gambling if he I wishes. I would be
inclined to leave it to his own choice. But I was bothered by the hypocrisy. I
wrote a letter to the president of the bar association about it. The scruple
came to nothing: the event was held exactly the same way the next year. The
only gain was in illwill. The question is whether it was worth it to have
burned that bridge. For the man who doesn't withdraw, it is necessary to ask
whether he could do more good, by having more influence, by not raising a given
point.
The world
needs its Savonarola's -- those irritating men who serve as thorns in its side
to remind it of important truths. But the argument for becoming a Savonarola
isn't clear-cut. There are costs, and these are not just to one's position in
life. They are also costs to ones effectiveness, and costs in terms of
frustration and alienation. Anyone who chooses to live in the world must select
his priorities to optimize his values. I should emphasize that this is very
different from ignoring important values and simply joining the parade of
"getting on." It has the danger, of course, of degenerating through a
process of continuing rationalization, and that would have to be guarded
against.
The mask
of hypocrisy. We can see from the preceding two sections that a lifestyle
that trivializes human relations tends to involve a high degree of hypocrisy.
Those who develop the art of extroversion and shy away from living a cultivated
personal reality will often be hypocritical in the ordinary sense of thinking
one thing and doing another; even this blatant form of hypocrisy will be
widespread. But a more subtle hypocrisy will also be pervasive because of the
operation of two additional mechanisms.
First,
there are many people who never cultivate their own deep values. Technically,
then, they are not splitting their actions from their thoughts. Strictly
speaking, they are not engaged in hypocrisy. But the effect is much the same.
Second, a
culture that persistently trivializes things will distort its perception of
reality. To a man who takes reality, or some part of it, seriously, this
trivialization looks like a lie. A good example arises out of the same faculty
fight I have mentioned about the department chairman's declaration of a
slow-down. The fight was taken seriously by everybody involved and left scars
for years. But three or four years later the dean made a passing reference to
it in an after-dinner speech. The reference was amiable and minimized the
incident almost to the point of denying it ever occurred. This extroverted
trivialization of it seemed a falsification to those who still felt the pain.
No doubt it could be thought of as hypocritical. The dean's reference to it was
functional in an after-dinner speech, just as the outer flow is generally
functional. My point, though, is that there is a split between such a
functional reference and the truth of what happened.
It is
interesting that Burkean conservatives argue the benefits of hypocrisy. They
are not committed philosophically to a piercing rationalism. Because of this,
they are ideally situated to see how functional hypocrisy often is, both as a
healing balm and as a protection for the mythology that holds a society
together.
In light of
this, the case against hypocrisy may not be indisputable. But men live largely
by reference to reality. Ayn Rand has stressed the opposite of what the Burkean
observes; she has emphasized the need for men to grasp reality rationally. A
culture that enhances hypocrisy obscures and denies the concern for truth that
exists in the radical solitudes of individuals as they seek to understand and
deal with the world.
A
lowered intellectual level. It should hardly be necessary now to mention
the effect the trivialization has on the intellectual, moral and aesthetic tone
of our society. Intellectuals have been criticizing our culture on precisely
this ground for a century and a half. We will review these criticisms in detail
in Chapter 10 when we trace the history of the
alienation of the intellectual. Sinclair Lewis didn't make
up George Babbitt out of wholecloth; we can acknowledge this even if on the
whole we disagree strongly with Lewis' overall position.
I mentioned
earlier that the mediocrity within our culture is by no means entirely caused
by the society's commercial emphasis and the resulting extroversive
preoccupation. It is even more a result of the sudden rise of the multitudes.
It is a mistake to blame this mediocrity on capitalism, unless we are also
willing to credit capitalism with the "accession of the masses" and
then make a negative judgment about that, too. The literary, aesthetic, moral
tastes of the average human being of past ages were not so high that we were
bequeathed a paradigm from which we have fallen. The collapse of aristocracy in
the nineteenth century raised the importance of the average man and his values.
Perhaps
most important is the fact that the alienated intellectual has failed to raise
an exalted standard. This is probably because of his alliance with the
"have-nots" and the entire ideology he cultivated to fit that
alliance. In literature, morals and the arts he has championed the
"anti-hero"; and he has proclaimed a carping "poverty of the
soul." He has often indulged a relativistic nihilism. This deprives
civilization of essential leadership. It must be corrected before our society
can fully regain its bearings.
1. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Man and
People (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1957), pp. 46, 50.
2. Dwight D. Murphey,
Emergent Man (Denver: Bradford-Robinson, 1962), pp. 4, 5.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson
(Viking
Press, 1946), p. 70.
4. Mark Spilka, The Love of Ethic of D.H. Lawrence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957).