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ern
Free Age
ylbout the Fallacy of Progress
H \S there been no progress in this age which,
like other ages when they saw the light,
calls itself modern? There has been
pro^'rrvi in every kind of human effort in which
the means could not from the nature of things
be mistaken for end ; there was progress in other
matters so long as the permanent and changeless
end" were kept in view and mechanistic and
behavioristic superstitions did not seek either to
outrage or violently to pervert the nature of man
. given. Thus one of the eternal ends of every
human creature and of every group of human
creatures is health and length of days. The
progress made by modern medicine toward this
end of an inestimable preciousness. And since
lew understood what, for instance, the immunol-
gists were doing in their laboratories and since it
occurred to no immunologist to display his labora
tory technic as an end in itself that was to be
'ubaituted for the attainment of health and
length of days, so this progress was and still is
•rue progress toward the amelioration of man’s lot.
Nor have the physicians, the vast majority ex
emplars of the peculiar bourgeois virtue of dis
interestedness, often taken part in the great game
t substituting Utopia for reality. They are
dmost the only respectable class of men—I mean
worthy of respect—left in our society. Unlike
their colleagues in, let us say, economics and
pedagogy and certain schools of psychology, they
n> ver neglected their job for doctrinaire delusions.
l he\ helped women to bear more easily the pangs
t childbirth; they did not let the women suffer
md propose that the race should become oviparous.
There are or, at least, up to a certain point
f time, there were other kinds of progress. In
ft^pect of the liberation of speech and especially
”t creative speech we had almost caught up in
uo»t countries with the John Milton of 1644; in
'evpect of marriage and divorce with the same John
Milton of the year before; in respect of the ap-
P'<‘'i :*ion of the values created by other groups
■nd communities of men, while carefully guarding
; Ur < wn, we were not far from the practical paci-
r,sm md cultural benevolence of the old Goethe.
Tid it is conveniently forgotten today—I empha-
'izc ‘he word conveniently—that the pre-war
Soci ist party in Germany did go very far toward
^rin. ng to the workers both economic justice and
P ; cipation in human culture. And even today,
amir, onfusion and raving, progress is seen to be
j**' e when eternal ends are fought for by means
• to Isaiah and Jesus, but not put into prac-
for e—when an elderly, feeble, naked brown
*v refusing food can force the lords and
' both of his own people and of the British
e to begin to fulfill for the lowdiest of men
cams of the prophets of Israel. But Gandhi
cs progress, let it be noted, because he is a
tice !
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By Ludwig Lewisohn
America's distinguished critic, Ludwig
Lewisohn, author of "This People," "The Is
land H ithm and other best sellers, has
specially written for The Southern Israel
ite this article which will form part of a
book scheduled for publication this fall under
the title, "Towards Religion." An essay on
this subject appeared in the June issue of
Harper’s Magazine. Harper fif Hr at hers,
publishers, have graciously consented to the
Publication of this article.
religious-minded man who knows what human
nature is like and what its limitations arc. He
wants to upraise and slowly humanize the pariahs.
He is no sick extremist shouting to the untouch
ables the paranoiac words of the Internationale,
“Ye have been naught, ye shall be all!”
That line of verse, with its crashing naught and
its equally crashing all, is well worth pondering
as well as, on the other hand, the frenzies of fury,
with which the radicals of the right, the Fascists
of Italy and the Nazis of Germany, regard certain
classes or races or nations. 'The extremists are
all sick souls and their extremism, their radicalism,
is to them an end in itself. 'This truth can be
quite scientifically studied among the turmoils of
contemporary Germany. When in a given election
the Nazis lose, the Communists gain and vice
versa; the numerical strength of the parties of the
middle remains fairly constant. Eye-witnesses
confirm this pendulum swing of hundreds of
thousands of individuals from one radicalism to
another and back again. 'This swing is admirably
symbolized by the fact that Benito Mussolini
began as a radical Socialist, was once condemned
for blasphemy, and expelled from both an Austrian
province and from the Sw r iss Republic for his left-
wing radical activities. 'The extremes of so-called
libertarianism and the lust for dictatorship stem
from the same sick root. Nor will anyone who
has had a quarrel with society, whether economic
or moral, have failed, if he is capable of self
scrutiny, to discover in himself at one time the
mood and impulse to make common cause with
those who would destroy that society and, at an
other time, to imagine himself in a dictatorial
position toward that society by means of which
he could mold it nearer to its liking.
Within the rational mind these impulses arc
first curbed and next channelled into the advocacy
of such reforms and ameliorations as are con
formable to those known historic processes which
depend upon the nature of man and of his world.
In the sick mind, in the unadaptable character, in
the more or less neurotic type, these impulses
devour the whole man. He will no longer regard
the limitations of either nature or human nature.
He flees from the unendurable present and from
the permanent so-ness of both himself and the
. few understood what, for instance, the immunologists
were doing in their laboratories . . . "
universe into a Utopia of the future or of the
past and dreams either of a classless society in
which all obstacles to his desires will be removed
or of a hierarchical one in which he, at the top
of the hierarchy, will force all things to his liking.
The whole question of progress and of the
inner nature of radicalism can be well studied
although, as it were, in miniature from the charac
ter and fate of those among the younger American
intellectuals who have in recent years taken flight
into cither reactionary or communist ideologies.
1’hey grew up in an age of mechanical progress in
which base means were mistaken for new ends
and in which Babbitt, wholly cut off from his
toric culture but driving a good car, thought him
self the heir of the ages. With him and his works
these young men could not possibly make com
mon cause. But they were, after all, children of
the same age as himself. Partly, at least, on ac
count of the inconceivable degradations into which
Babbitt and his mechanics had thrown the so-
called higher education, these young men, too, had
lost emotional touch with the historic culture of
mankind.
It was not a question for them of revaluing
values, which is true progress. They had no living
values, religious or philosophic or cultural, to re
value. 'They were essentially as empty as Babbitt
himself; they were almost as ready to declare
history bunk as Mr. Ford himself. They very
properly loathed the World War. But they in
terpreted it not as a retrogression, a losing of the
right way, a lapsing into barbarism; they conceived
of it as a result of those values of history and
culture which, in fact, all participants of the War
had sold out and betrayed. Hence our young
men sincerely believed that all the received values
were “Bunk.” There was, in addition, the snob
bishness of being “modern” and “free.” Hence
they devaluated all values. There was nothing
left for them to live by, nothing wherewith to
affirm themselves and their lives and activities
and their world, nothing wherewith to make sig
nificant a typical human fate. Nothing was any
good any more—nothing, neither love nor faith
nor the joys of the mind nor the hope of a better
posterity. No pride or piety was left. Their
souls were stripped and (Please turn to page 14)
T Hl SOUTHERN ISRAELITE *
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