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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 ! mar mast Em; the achic 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 * [5]