(PART ONE)
They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?
—Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát
Man, to the degree that he tries to shape his behavior to the requirements of civilization, is unquestionably a cracked vessel. His nature is the scene of a never-ending and never quite resolvable conflict between two very profound impulses. One of these, built into him from birth and not a matter of his own choice, is something he shares with the animals: namely, the imperative impulse to preserve and proliferate his own kind, with all the powerful compulsions that engenders. The other is the need—a need underlying the entire historical development of civilization—to redeem human life, at least partially, of its essentially animalistic origins by lending to it such attributes as order, dignity, beauty, and charity—this last meaning the love of or at least the respect for one’s fellow man, and the capacity for compassion. A central feature of the human predicament is the conflict between these so frequently conflicting impulses—a conflict for which man’s own soul constitutes the field of battle.1
Let us first look more closely at the compulsion to the preservation and proliferation of the species. This impulse, as I see it, takes two forms. One of these is sometimes referred to as “self-love.” Reinhold Niebuhr preferred to use the more gentle term “self-regard,” a suggestion I gratefully accept. The second is the sexual urge. And because the latter is the more obvious, the more primitive, and the less subtle of the two, let me turn to it first.
The Sexual Urge
The sexual urge requires no identification—no description. Everyone knows what it is. It attracts more attention than any other aspect of the human predicament. It is the leading theme of most Western literature, inviting treatment both as comedy and as tragedy. Sometimes deplored, sometimes idealized, it is always near the front of the stage in the enactment of human tensions and dilemmas.
It is far from my intentions to depict the sexual urge as a solely negative and reprehensible feature of the human predicament—as something in a state of total conflict with the higher motivations and strivings of mankind. I recognize the interaction of the two sexes as a primary factor in the development of the human spirit and in human creativity, intellectual and aesthetic. I cannot picture art, thought, civilization per se, without it. Goethe had good reason for ending his great creation of Faust with the words “the eternal feminine pulls us along” (“Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan”). And this is only one of a thousand examples of this recognition. It is probably fair to say that no other aspect of the human condition has ever inspired finer or greater manifestations of the human spirit.
Beyond this, it is true that when the sexual urge accompanies and supports deep intimacy and devotion between individuals, it holds satisfactions second to few, if any, in human experience; and it finds, in this way, a redemption from its less admirable qualities.
Yet the relationship of this urge to other demands of civilized life is complicated. So far as its contributions to human intimacy are concerned: we must not exaggerate the frequency of such idyllic comings together, or the prospects for their endurance when they do occur. People’s physical needs change even when their deeper affections do not. And even these profoundly moving and enriching intimacies can have their ambiguous effects, particularly when they engender proprietary feelings on one part or the other. Men are not generally monogamous in their inclinations, nor are women, for that matter (although their responsibility for children and their greater sense of realism do much to hold them to the monogamous side), And even the deepest personal affection does not assure against the development of such unhappy phenomena as jealousies, suspicions, conflicting loyalties, wounded pride, and tragic unhappiness.
Stripped of its ennobling part in human intimacies, stripped of its mysteries, its multitudinous sublimations, its ornamental trappings, and the higher forms of passion that inspire it, the sexual urge is one of the most tedious, monotonous, at times ridiculous, and least interesting of human proclivities. It is frequently in conflict with the most elementary demands of outward behavior and of inward composure. The act, in its purely physical manifestations, is brief, bestial, and potentially humiliating, so much so as to require elaborate rituals for concealment, disguise, cant, and prevarication just in order to be made even approximately compatible with the decencies of normal social intercourse. Nor is it in any way improved when these unavoidable rituals are neglected or flouted, as occurs in the pathetic bravado and tedium of common pornography.
There is no getting around it: we have to do here with a compulsion we share with the lowest and least attractive of the mammalian and reptile species. It invites most handsomely, and very often deserves, the ridicule, the furtive curiosity, and the commercial exploitation it receives. To highly sensitive persons, it can become a never-ending source of embarrassment and humiliation, of pain to its immediate victims and to others, of misunderstandings, shame, and remorse all around. Not for nothing do the resulting tragedies dominate so much of realistic as well as of romantic literature. Not for nothing has this urge earned the prominent place it takes in the religious rites of confession and prayers for forgiveness.
There is, in short, no escaping it: the sexual urge, the crude expression of nature’s demand for the proliferation of the species, enriching, confusing, and tragedizing the human predicament as it does at every turn, must be regarded as a signal imperfection in man’s equipment to lead life in the civilized context. It cannot be expected to be otherwise at any time in the foreseeable future.
Self-regard
A similar situation confronts us when we come to the other of man’s great imperfections: his self-regard, self-love, egotism, or whatever one wishes to call it. Here, too, we have an endless source of what Sigmund Freud called man’s “discomfort” in civilization. The nature of this discomfort is not easy to describe. Reduced to the simplest terms, it consists of the special concern the individual has for the advancement of his own interests and desiderata—but this, in combination with the difficulty he experiences in evaluating his own personality, with the uncertainties and feelings of insecurity that assail him in just that respect, and with his persistent need to seek reassurance in the reactions of others to his own person. We have here, in the interaction of these factors, an ineradicable further source of complexity, frustration, unhappiness, and even tragedy in human affairs—and not just in the affairs of the individual but in those of society as well.
The critical approach to this situation is complicated by the fact that there is one area of human reaction and behavior—let us call it the area of self-respect—within which the special concern of the individual for the self has a natural, necessary, and useful place, not only in harmony with the legitimate interests of society but actually supportive of them. Each of us, after all, inhabits that particular assemblage of physical substances—flesh, bones, fluids, and so on—that comprises his or her own body. Each of us, and each of us alone, has primary, if never complete, control over that body: over what it does, how it reacts, how it comports itself in the face of the endless challenges with which daily life confronts it. However severely habit or the promptings of the subconscious may limit our autonomy in this respect, it is we, after all, who animate many of the physical reflexes of this body and determine a great part of its social behavior. No one else, whatever his power over us, can fully replace us in that capacity. And since it is not only useful but necessary that this control be exercised somewhere and by someone, our exclusive power to exercise it is not just a privilege but a responsibility; and it carries with it, when reasonably and modestly exercised, a certain justifiable dignity.
There is, then, I repeat, an area in which self-regard is not a source of discomfort and trouble in human affairs—or at least need not be and should not be. But it is a narrow area, difficult for the individual to identify and to adhere to. And it is a precarious one, because it is pressed by dangers from two sides: from the individual’s underestimation of his own qualities, on the one hand, and from his overestimation of them, on the other.
The Underestimation of Self
Let us take first the rarer of these two phenomena: the underestimation. This can be of two kinds. One of them is what I think of as real underestimation, present in the individual’s own consciousness. It can be induced by personal failures, by dreadful mistakes, by oversensitivity, or by the pangs of conscience. It can also be induced or promoted by influences from the outside: by evidences of low opinion or contempt for the subject by others—evidences that shake self-confidence. When blows of this sort can be absorbed into an inner humility and can find expression in a reasonable moderation of hopes and goals, they need not, and should not, constitute encroachments on self-respect. But where this is not possible, feelings of inadequacy can assume dangerous forms: excessive discouragement, depression, and despair—conditions that can ruin a life. (The totalitarians, incidentally, were well aware of these realities. It was upon just such vulnerabilities that many of their brainwashing techniques were founded. Their efforts were directed, in the first instance, at the destruction of the prisoner’s confidence in himself. Only when this was destroyed and the prisoner had lost all self-respect could they have hope of creating, within the given physical frame, a new personality that would be totally under their control.)
There is also, of course, another kind of underestimation: the feigned one. It takes various forms: demonstrative and insincere self-debasement, exaggerated professions of humbleness or modesty, profuse denials of the value of one’s own contributions, and the like. Actually, such behavior is almost invariably motivated by the desire to provoke from the other person some sort of a reassuring denial of the validity of these professions. As such, it is really the evidence of much insecurity, of an inability or reluctance to confront the trials of self-scrutiny, and of a corresponding undue dependence on the reactions of others for the establishment of the image of self.
Anton Chekhov, in a letter addressed to a younger brother in 1879, gave the classic response to the phenomenon of false modesty. He had received a letter in which the brother had signed himself as “your insignificant and obscure little brother.” “Do you know,” Chekhov asked in reply, “before whom you should confess your insignificance?” And he proceeded to answer his own question.
Before God, if you will, before intelligence, beauty, nature, but not before people. Among people you have to show your worth. After all, you’re not a crook, are you? You are an honest fellow, are you not? Well then, respect the honest fellow in yourself, and recognize that the honest fellow is never insignificant. Don’t confuse “coming to terms with yourself’ with “recognizing your insignificance.”
The Overestimation of Self
On the other side of the narrow area of legitimate self-respect lies the far greater and more common danger: that of the overestimation of one’s own worth, or at least the temptation to invite and to welcome the overestimation of it by others. This latter distinction is important; for here, in the thirst for inflation of the ego, is where the reliance upon the reactions of others, as the authentic measuring stick for evaluation of self, tends to be overwhelming. And this is often true not just for the neurotically insecure person but for the normal one as well. The fact is that the ability of the individual to form independently, solely out of the resources of his own judgment and without recourse to the critical reactions of others, a firm, sound, and reliable image of his own worth is extremely small. We all see ourselves in the mirror reflection of the response of others to our personality. Much as we may strive for objectivity in such an effort, we can never entirely succeed; for in this instance the very word “objectivity” is a contradiction of terms.
Not that the effort is entirely useless. There are always things to be gained by the mere effort to take at least a realistic view of oneself, the effort to find some balance between the strengths and the weaknesses of one’s own personality. But success in this effort can never be more than partial. The chaotic mix of sensitivities, hopes, expectations, anxieties, uncertainties, temptations to self-admiration, and pangs of contrition that surges back and forth even in the average healthy human spirit, aside from being only partly under one’s own conscious control, affords no firm foundation for judgments about oneself. Beyond which there is the fact that man is a social animal; he does not live in isolation. Thus a large part of whatever value his person may possess must lie precisely in the field of its interaction with others and can be judged only on the evidences of that interaction.
This writer can recall his own reactions when, as a poor and very provincial freshman at Princeton, a year younger than most of his companions, he found himself confronted with the greater sophistication and smoother manners of many of his fellow students and was brought to realize that he cut a very poor figure, if any at all, in their eyes. And he recalls that he tried, at one point, to say to himself, “You must not accept at face value the standards these fellows apply to you. You must try to make your own.”
It was a brave undertaking. The discipline was probably useful. But in the main, the freshman was reaching for the stars. In the first place, what were his standards? Those, presumably, of his family and his midwestern entourage. But challenges to those standards now confronted him from every side. Could he fully trust them? It was a great wide world, outside of Milwaukee, and he was beginning to become aware of it. What did he have to fall back on?
But actually, he would never be able to establish, and probably never should have tried in the first place to establish, any total independence in this respect. Immature as may have been many of the values the other students tended to apply to him, they were not totally so. He had his faults; and the others were probably better aware of some of them than he was. The best he could do, in the end, not only then but even more in later life, would be not to ignore these outside reactions but to try to put them into their place: to distinguish, that is, the kernel of truth they embraced from the injustices and the false standards they reflected, and to learn from them where he could, without establishing them as the sole criteria for self-judgment. For there was danger, too, in a total reliance on the judgments of others. He was to see, in later life, other men whose view of themselves had come to rest exclusively on these outside judgments, and to pity them for the insecurity this reflected.
The conscientious individual is obliged, then, in the effort to evaluate his own identity, to take into account not only his own inner uncertainties but also the evidence afforded to him by the reactions of others to his personality. But in this last effort, he steps out onto a slippery slope, because these evidences are seldom fully reliable. The real judgments of others are not likely to be fully revealed in their outward behavior. Ordinary politeness, including even a certain charitable reticence, can easily conceal feelings of quite a different nature. Outward deference, as everyone knows who has ever occupied a high executive position, easily slips over into unctuousness and flattery.
The observant and thoughtful person, of course, will try to allow for these distortions. But the effort will never be easy. This is so in part because the allowances to be made can never be more than conjectures, sometimes no more than suspicions. But beyond that, and more serious still, the subject’s very uncertainty about himself, together with the urgings of his amour propre, will always get in the way. However genuine his private humility, however stern the restraints he tries to place upon himself, however hard he tries to hold only to his own standards, there will always be some thirst for reassurance. And there will always be some sneaking hope that he will find reflected, in the words and behavior of the other person, a soothing and self-gratifying resolution of his own uncertainties.
And the worst of it is that this thirst for reassurance by the reactions of others can very seldom, if ever, be wholly satisfied. The more it is fed, the greater becomes the appetite. The more the ego is allowed to expand, the more powerful the temptation to reach for even larger expansion.
In its more innocent, and fortunately more common, forms, this tendency to overestimation of the self finds its expression in such very human weaknesses as conceit, ostentation, posturing, and pompousness—forms of behavior that are usually easily seen through by others and, often, find their own punishment in the ridicule they invite. I am reminded of the experienced diplomat at the court of St. Petersburg some hundred and twenty years ago, who, in advising a newly arrived colleague on how to approach the Russian chancellor of that date, said, “Take a viol of the purest flattery and wave it vigorously before his nose. Il n’aura jamais assez (He will never have enough).” But this sort of vanity alone, however well it lends itself to humorous exploitation by the novelists and playwrights, can also sometimes produce its full share of real unpleasantness, in the way of humiliation, disappointment, and frustration, for the unfortunate subject. And there are far more serious forms that this indulgence of the ego can assume—ones that can, and do, cause much trouble for the subject himself and for society.
One of these will be found, of course, in the kindred vices of envy and jealousy. These latter, the least admirable of human weaknesses and the ones least likely to enhance anyone’s happiness, are also products of the insatiable human ego—the frustrated ego, in this case, denied some longed-for object and determined to see whether the loss could not be compensated for at someone else’s expense.
But even more serious, as a projection of the insistent need for indulgence of the individual’s self-regard, is the lust for authority, for power, for demonstrated preeminence over others. This urge, assuming an open-ended multiplicity of forms, some relatively innocent and harmless, others more questionable, pervades a great part of personal and organizational life. Sometimes confused with true leadership and prestige, it will be found, for example, in marriages, in families, in youth groups, in social clubs—wherever, in fact, people associate in small ways for personal or other purposes. But much more prominently and ruthlessly does it come to the fore in larger and more formal associations and hierarchies of every sort: professional, military, bureaucratic, and commercial, among others. It finds its acme wherever governmental power is involved, and particularly in politics, which, after all, is simply the competition for the control over the governmental process. (We shall see more of this when we turn to the nature of governments.) This form of self-regard is, in short, a major and unavoidable accompaniment of all organized human activity.
Here again, of course, we find ourselves confronted with the question of degree. What is good in moderation is not good when things are carried too far. Just as there is a reasonable and socially acceptable level of the individual’s self-regard, which I have defined as self-respect, so, when it comes to the preeminence of any one person in a group or association, there is a reasonable level of dignity and deference the position of leadership has a right to expect. Where leadership is quietly and unostentatiously exercised, with due respect for those over whom it is exercised, and with a sense of responsibility no smaller than the authority it implies, no exception can be taken to it, and the self-regard of the person who exercises it will suffer no unhealthy inflation.
But these limits are not easy to maintain. Nor are those over whom authority is exercised always willing to accept even the moderate and reasonable exercise of it. Because the authority of the one individual implies the subordination of another, because the expansion of one person’s power implies the relative powerlessness of someone else, because the pride of position of the one individual presupposes the corresponding humbleness of place of another, all manifestations of this thirst for authority and power involve rivalry. And all rivalry involves some measure of unpleasantness. The hubris of one person’s success is always accompanied, somewhere, by the humiliation of someone else’s failure. With the arrogance of power goes the ignominy of unwilling subordination or of frustrated ambition.
It is in this, in the thirst for reassurance through preeminence, authority, power over others, and the forms of exaggerated deference all this engenders, that the weaknesses of human self-regard—its involuntary quality, the inability of the individual to perceive its reasonable limits, and its tendency to feed upon itself—find some of their most sinister expressions. It is here that the conflict between what the individual actually is and what the interests of civilization would ideally require him to be becomes most acute. Here, too, as in the case of the sexual urge, what we have before us is a real flaw in human nature—a flaw which places definite limitations on man’s happiness, whether personal or social, the correction of which lies in part beyond the limits of his own powers.
It is with this caveat in mind, then, that I must revert to my original proposition that man—Western man, at any rate—is a cracked vessel: that his psychic makeup is the scene for the interplay of contradictions between the primitive nature of his innate impulses and the more refined demands of civilized life, contradictions that destroy the unity and integrity of his undertakings, confuse his efforts, place limits on his possibilities for achievement, and often cause one part of his personality to be the enemy of another. Whipped around, frequently knocked off balance, by these conflicting pressures, he staggers through life as best he can, sometimes reaching extraordinary heights of individual achievement but never fully able to overcome, individually or collectively, the fissures between his own physical and spiritual natures.
That this is so should not be taken as a reason for despair. The struggle against these handicaps can have, and does have, its glorious moments. And it is, as at so many other points in life and as we shall have other occasions to note, in the inherent worthiness of the struggle rather than in the visible prospects for success that the true glory will be found. But what these considerations should do, as we set out on the unsteady terrain of the search for a personal and a political philosophy, is to warn us against any and every sort of utopian purpose or expectation. Man is not perfectible. These fissures in the human psyche are profound and elemental. As long as civilized life subsists, it will continue to be marked by them and to be limited by the restraints they impose.
The Little Demon
What has been talked about here—the instinctive compulsions that nature has instituted to assure the preservation and proliferation of the human species—constitutes what could be called the demonic side of human nature. And these are not the only examples of it. Others could have been mentioned. There are, for example, the tragic tensions of those—the artists, the composers, the poets—who lose themselves in the creative cultivation of beauty and are torn away from all successful adjustment to the mundane necessities of life. There comes a point, in fact, where beauty, for its reckless devotees, becomes the advocate of death against life.
There are, in any case, few persons who are not touched by one or another of the manifestations of this demonic dimension of human nature and experience. Essentially untamed and unruly, it assumes a multitude of forms, varying with every person. I like to picture it as a little demon companion, in attendance on every civilized person: sometimes representing the sexual urge, at other times the ego’s endless search for reassurance, but always constant and persistent, always at hand with outrageous and sometimes positively indecent suggestions, determined to mess up the even tenor of one’s life wherever it can, a major nuisance or a minor one, depending on circumstances and on the level of resistance it encounters, but seldom, if ever, to be wholly shaken off. Locked out at the front door, it comes in at the back one or through the window. And if all these entries be closed to it, it presents itself in a variety of the most ingenious and inviting disguises.
People do better or worse in contending with this troublesome little companion: in rejecting its suggestions or, when they cannot be wholly resisted, in concealing the effects of them. There are some who do very well indeed in this last respect, putting on a bold front of serene independence, as though they had all the circumstances of their lives, thank you, well under control.
One would do well not to be too easily misled by those impressive displays of a total personal autonomy. There are few who have not, at one time or another, had to do battle with the little troublemaker; and if there is at the moment no outward evidence of its being a factor in their lives, don’t worry: you may be sure it has been there in the past, or soon will be.
But at the same time, one should not be too critical of those who put on this bold front. Once someone has offered as much resistance as one can to the demon’s inroads on the good order of his or her life, the best way of coping with the pesky little fellow is to deny it the satisfaction of outward attention by acting, so far as one can, as though it did not exist. The Victorians may indeed have carried these pretenses too far; but that is probably better than not carrying them far enough. A lot of the weight of civilization rests at times on the better of our pretenses. Without them, civilization could probably not exist. “I find this frenzy,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a sonnet addressed to a gentleman with whom she had evidently been having a less than serious affair, “insufficient reason for conversation when we meet again.” Right she was; and would there were more of her!
What, one wonders, is this compulsive preoccupation with explicit sex that marks so much of the American printed word and so many of its displays on the photographic screen? We know the elements of human anatomy. We know how procreation takes place. We have no need for these persistent reminders of what the average schoolchild has usually learned, alas, at the age of six or seven. And as for the intended effect, the impression we are supposed to gain of the boldness and cleverness and daring originality of the writer or film director who dishes out all this muck: I can find in all this only the unintended confession of a serious artistic and intellectual poverty—a desperate effort to draw attention to one’s self by pornographic illustration or suggestion when other and more significant means of doing so are beyond one’s capacity.
So let us, wherever we can, keep the little demon and its doings in the quiet background of our lives, well removed from all forms of exhibitionism on the façade. The remaining areas of consciousness and activity will benefit from its absence; and it will be forced to recognize, in the very fact of its ostracism, the limits of its power over us.
But the recognition of the part that the demonic powers play in the lives of individuals places two demands upon us. One of them is, of course, that we not go too far in the idealization of other individuals. We must not expect their personality, ever, to be wholly devoid of these complicating factors.
It used to be said, in the days when people had valets and ladies’ maids, that no man was ever completely a hero to his own valet. A cruder version of this recognition of human limitations came to my attention when, in one of my younger years, I expressed to my first ambassadorial chief, Mr. William C. Bullitt, my wonder at his lack of any sense of intimidation in the presence of people who were regarded, at that time, as “the great.” “My dear George,” he replied, “someone once told me that the human body was 97 percent water. Whenever I see one of these illustrious characters approaching, I try to remember that, and I decline to be impressed.”
He was both wrong and right. The percentage of water in the physical frame was not, of course, the crucial factor. There were, within such people, things worse than water that served to impair, or to make unreal, their lofty pretenses. On the other hand, there are certain kinds of people in the judgment of whom none of us should be put off by relating their value simply to the physical composition of their bodies, or even to the supposed contradictions of their emotional life.
First, there are the saints. They are the members, presumably, of that tiny elite of human beings who are truly able to control or at least expel from the surface of their motivations and behavior the disturbing little demon to whom reference has just been made. That such persons have occasionally existed and continue to exist, I am glad to believe, even though I am not sure that I have ever met any; and if they, combining this extraordinary personal power with pity and concern for the rest of us, are able to mediate effectively for us in another life, so much the better. But there will never be many of them. And while we others may try to emulate them, we must never expect fully to succeed. Perhaps, in fact, most of us were never meant to do so.
The other category of persons for whom we should not permit our respect to be modified by this recognition of their normal physical and emotional limitations are the truly great. By these I mean particularly the ones—the poets, the composers, the great scholars and thinkers—who find it possible to combine immense intellectual or aesthetic powers with the sense of responsibility toward others which abilities of this order should make incumbent upon them. Such persons, too, have existed; and we must hope that there will be more of them. This level of superiority does not mean, of course, that they have been, or ever will be, immune to the sort of limitations that were discussed above. What it does mean is that they have achieved such unusual levels of accomplishment—levels of greatness, if you will—that in the face of them these normal foibles of human nature become relatively trivial aspects of personality, so greatly overshadowed by other qualities that we are justified in disregarding them or, at least, forgiving them.
And this mention of the word “forgiveness” brings me to the second of the two demands upon us that present themselves when we consider the part played in the human personality by the instinctive, animalistic, and demonic side of man’s nature. Since we are all affected by this side of ourselves—since we are all in one degree or another or at one time or another helpless in its tentacles—we ought to acknowledge a certain sense of brotherhood, and reserve some sympathy, for others who are similarly distressed.
Sometimes, no doubt, we do just that. But in other instances our inclination is to say, “Ah yes, but many of these are such disreputable and unfeeling characters that they deserve whatever discomfort or ignominy their confusion brings upon them.”
Perhaps—perhaps; but one should be careful. It is of just such assumptions, of just such cheerful and confident moods of disassociation from the weaknesses and miseries of others, that the little demon likes to avail itself, for the achievement of those of its aspirations and purposes that had better been left unachieved. Self-satisfaction in the face of the woes of others is one of those chinks in the door through which this resourceful companion gains entry when other means of access are unavailable.
Heredity and Environment
These limitations on human perfectibility are, of course, not the only qualities that inheritance has to offer us. They are unique in this respect only in that they are universal in their scope, affecting to one degree or another practically every one of us. There are numbers of other qualities—some of them extremely good, others extremely bad, and even more somewhere in the middle—that we also receive from the genes. But these, as bestowed upon individuals, are varied in the extreme, in ways that are often unforeseeable, unpredictable, and surprising.
And the fact that this is so brings us to one more question on which a special word must be said. This is the confusion that reigns in so many American minds over the relative importance of heredity and environment as formative influences on the development of the individual personality. One of the most common features of the American outlook is the traditional belief that heredity has very little importance—that every child born in freedom, regardless of class or race or any of the other distinctions of parentage, is a tabula rasa, to be given its ultimate character exclusively by the postnatal experiences, primarily education, to which it comes to be subjected. Heredity, in other words, is neither here nor there.
I think I can discern the origins of this outlook. We are a nation of immigrants. A great many of us, or our families, came to this country from highly stratified societies, in which the circumstances of a person’s life were largely prescribed from birth by the caste or class the person was born into. These distinctions were often seen as unjust, and deserved to be so seen. In the case of many who emigrated from such societies the sense of this injustice, and the desire to escape from it, was often a major factor in the decision to emigrate. One of the attractions of America as a goal of migration was precisely the understanding that American society was devoid of these inherited distinctions and that every child born here would have an equal chance to shape the conditions of its participation in society. This was the foundation for the sense of equality which Tocqueville saw, in the 1830s, as the outstanding distinguishing mark of American society. He regarded it as more important than any other factor in shaping the uniqueness of American civilization; and it provided the very basis for his interest in the country.
But the decision to emigrate was in the vast majority of cases largely or entirely a matter of individual choice and decision. It was often a debatable and even controversial choice, particularly in the eyes of those who were left at home. This being so, it was a choice the immigrant in America often felt a certain pressure to vindicate before those who remained at home in the old country, and before his own conscience. How better to do this than to cite the equality of status that was seen (and not just by Tocqueville) as the outstanding quality of American life? But this required, if only for purposes of comparison, rejection of the value of the inherited distinctions that had been left behind, and demonstration of the virtues of a society where they did not exist. And from this necessity it was an easy step to the assumption that inheritance was a negligible factor—that all that needed to be done for the improvement and perfection of the human species could be done by environment and, above all, by education.
It was never easy to argue against these attitudes, for there was much to be said for them. The earlier allotment of status in life (and with it of the opportunities for self-improvement) solely on the basis of birth and heredity did indeed involve many artificialities and injustices. If superiority in the parent did not preclude superiority in the child, it certainly did not assure it. Many a worthless son was born to an impressive father; and many a potentially valuable one, born to humble parents, had to make his way against the handicaps that this implied. Nature, in her allotment of the various human qualities, good and bad, was capricious and unpredictable. Thus there was indeed much real injustice in any stratification of society based solely on inheritance.
But it was a great and dangerous leap from the recognition of this reality to the assumption that heredity was of no importance at all in the molding of the human personality. The fact that its effects were capricious, unpredictable, and incomprehensible did not mean that they were negligible. On the contrary, a great deal of what the newborn child was destined to be was plainly written into it before its birth. It was simply not true that all were born essentially alike, with similar capacities, inclinations, aptitudes, and traits of character, and that the development of the child as a person and a citizen would depend exclusively or overwhelmingly on the educational influences to which it would be subject. Things were not that simple. The genes played many tricks.
Certainly, the environmental influences were important. The parent, the teacher, the role model, the superintendent, or the schoolmaster: these might be the co-sculptors of the mature personality—the co-sculptors upon whose talents and insights a great deal of the ultimate product would depend. But the material upon which it was given to these co-sculptors to work was prescribed by nature—by inheritance. They could not change it. And, as with every material that was to be sculpted, what could be done to it was bound to depend upon its very nature. There were some things you could make out of ivory. There were others you could make out of wood. But they were not the same things. And in some instances nature, in the creation of the material, had already itself done the greater part of the sculpting.
In short, each of these formative influences, heredity and environment, was important. To obtain a valuable product, both were necessary. The sculpting had to be good; but so did the material. You could not make a good product out of bad or unsuitable material. Yet even the best material could be ruined by unskillful and untalented treatment. What came out in the end was bound to be the result of the interaction of the two factors.
One word more, before we leave these comments on heredity and environment.
We are told by the scientists that human qualities could be artificially shaped by scientific manipulation of the human genes. Something of this sort seems now to be being done in respect to plants and animals. Similar things, we are told, could be done in the case of humans.
Let us fervently hope that this possibility will never be exploited. Just because something is technically possible is not in itself a reason why it should be attempted. The scientists or technicians who would be applying themselves to this task would themselves be the products of the very sorts of genes they would be undertaking to manipulate. Is it to be supposed that the created could be better than the creator?
There are two things human beings should never attempt to bring under their control. One is the weather; the other is heredity. No one who deplores the many bones of contention that divide the human community today, with all the attendant wars and other kinds of beastliness with which people conduct these conflicts, could ever wish upon society the further ones that would develop if ever men were to venture into these forbidden areas. Nature, left with the control of these processes, may at times seem senseless and capricious in the exercise of her powers. But there is at least the saving grace that human beings cannot blame one another when they deplore the results.
The wisdom of the ages has pointed on many occasions, ever since the creation of the legend of Pandora’s box, to the dangers of excessive curiosity about mysteries men were clearly never intended to explore. We have already created, with the splitting of the atom, dangers for ourselves and our progeny that are very close to being beyond our control. Let us, for the sake of the future of our children and indeed of our kind generally, finally agree that there are certain stones better left unturned and that, when it comes to the human species, heredity is one of them.
Chance and Mortality
Before we leave the subject of the various limitations on the ability of the human individual to achieve complete self-fulfillment in this world, there is one other such limitation that should not escape our attention. This is the inevitable element of tragedy that attends the life of every individual in the form of the blows administered to him by his own mortality and that of others, and by the crueler vagaries of chance. In the face of these adversities, no one is invulnerable.
There are, to begin with, the accidents of illness. One person, even sometimes the innocent child, is killed or tortured by illness. Another one is not.
There are the various forms of accident—hosts of them, sometimes even fatal, sometimes crippling. Chance, not justice, decides who is overtaken by any of them and who is not.
There is the phenomenon of old age—of declining powers—the humiliation of becoming, in later years, a mere caricature of one’s earlier self.
Above all, there is the unavoidable phenomenon of bereavement: the fact that those who are loved do not usually die when the one who loves them dies, so one or the other is normally left in the end in loneliness and deprivation, in spiritual impoverishment, sometimes in at least temporary impairment of the ability to respond to life’s challenges.
These things, too, have to be taken into consideration when we reflect on the human predicament. They differ from the contradictions in man’s nature that were discussed earlier in this chapter—differ in the sense that whereas in the operation of those other contradictions the individual was an active (if never decisive) partner, the blows just mentioned are ones wholly beyond his control. They do present a further series of tragic limitations on the individual’s prospects for happiness in this life. And they do stand as evidence for something that the Marxists and the other materialists appear never to have recognized: namely, that a measure of tragedy is built into the very existence of the human individual; and it is not to be overcome by even the most drastic human interventions into the economic or social relationships among individuals^
How, then, does one come to terms with so grim a state of affairs?
If I had to offer my own short personal answer to this question, it would be: “only by faith.” But to leave the answer at that would not be enough. I recognize the obligation to spell out the meaning of the term “faith,” as I experience it, at somewhat greater length. For it lies at the heart of a great deal more that will have to be talked about on these pages.
- I am using the word “man” here, and shall be doing so in other obvious instances, as a synonym for “mankind”; and the pronoun will accordingly take the masculine form. I see in this usage no occasion for apology.