Six Idea to Make us Human; E. Opitz

EDMUND A. OPITZ as to make us human MOST PEOPLE live lives of quiet desperation, Henry David Thoreau told us. If there was truth in that observation, in the pleasant, spa cious old New England of Tho reau's day, how much more truth is packed into those words in these melancholy days! Events have got ten out of hand and the world lurches into chaos. Things have fallen apart taster than any of us would have dared predict, and we are seized by pangs of guilt and self-doubt. So many promising experiments have gone sour, from the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson to the latest ukase of the present administra tion. The statesmen of this era talked peace and sought to outlaw war, but they let the twentieth The Reverend Mr. Opitz is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Educa tion, a seminar lecturer,and author of the book, Religion and Capitalism: AWes Not Enemies. century break down into the bloodiest period of all the twenty five hundred years of warfare studied by Pitirim Sorokin. "We live," wrote this great scholar, "in an age unique for the unrestrained use of brute force in international relations."

The threat of protracted inter national conflict is bad enough, but there is also the well-founded fear of domestic violence and crime. And even if we are lucky enough to escape actual robbery, we know that inflation is steadily draining our wealth. We've seen the race issue go from integration to Black Nationalism; we've witnessed the emergence· of the sex and' drug cult, the rise of astrology, witch craft and voodooism; V.D. has reached epidemic proportions among the young ; and then there is abortion, homosexuality, the campus crisis, the environmental 644 THE FREEMAN November crisis, the inner crisis in man him self. For is it not true, as Yeats says in a famous poem, that "The wicked act with dreadful intensity, while the good lack all conviction." Youth Seeking Identity It is a time of troubles for all, but perhaps it's easier for the old whose habit patterns firmed up in a healthier era than for the young who are searching for a value sys tem and cannot find one. Depres sion, in the vocabulary of many young people, does not mean the economic malaise which this coun try staggered through during the Nineteen Thirties; it means the somber mood in which they hang question marks around life, won dering if it really is worth living.

They are trying to find meaning for their lives in terms of the values their elders lived by - or on any other terms - and they are not having much luck. We some times find their behavior rather bizarre; the long hair, the weird clothing, the haphazard life styles. But perhaps these symbolize a message they are trying to get across to us. Some of the so-called hippies, by deliberately being i11 housed, ill-clothed and ill-fed, may be practicing a charade whose message is that the More Abund ant Life, as defined in New Deal terms, is not a proper goal for man. Perhaps they have a suspicion that reality is wider and deeper than the physical universe revealed to common sense - as re ligion has always maintained and so they experiment with mind expanding drugs. They grope after some form of religious expression, but still they drift. Now, we know something about the rise and fall of civilizations.

In our schoolbooks we read about "The glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome." Toynbee, Spengler and Dawson have made· us aware of dead civil izations on other continents. A civilization comes into existence cradled in dominant ideas, launched by deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice, and it maintains it self in a tonic condition only se long as it has solid grounds fOl believing in itself and its destiny But civili~ations wane; Rome fell; Spengler predicted the decline oj the West. We need not buy ~ single one of Spengler's theories but it is hard to argue against hil phrase: The West is in decline Great numbers of people in thi: favored land no longer believe i1 the things that made Wester] civilization unique. An animal species which ha flourished in a given area may b wiped out by a disease, or it rna be decimated by a predator, or climatic change may destroy it food supply. Everyone of thes 1972 SIX IDEAS TO KEEP US HUMAN 645 afflictions has beset primitive peo ples in times past, but a civiliza tion does not founder for any of these reasons. A civilization goes under when its people, for one reason or another, lose contact with the big keynote ideas of their culture.

Ideas Make Us Human Wherein lies the great differ ence between the human species and every other? We have much in common with other forms of life, especially with the warm blooded vertebrates. In structure we bear some resemblance to the manlike apes, but the critical dif ference in the domain of ideas far outweighs any resemblances. If a chimpanzee has any thoughts at all about what it means to be an ape, they are rudimentary; he's a pretty good animal without even thinking about it. But no man is fully human unless he maintains a lively contact with a set of ideas as to what it means to be a person. This is where our disease has set in, in the realm of ideas. The perilous days we are living through are not the result of a drying up of the food supply, which is more abundant than ever. There's been no marked change in the physique of modern man, and disease·· is not a menace. Nor are we beset by predators. The malaise from which we suffer has impaired the ideas which instruct us what it means to be men and women, and we function poorly in conse quence. The people of our race built the Parthenon, constructed the great systems of philosophy, painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, wrote the plays of Shake speare and the music of Bach; and we can't figure out how to teach our kids tolerance and mu tual respect without busing them all over town! Something is defi nitely wrong with us, and it won't be right with us until we come to terms with six big ideas .. I'll men tion them briefly now and deal with them at greater length later on. They are the right convictions about free will, reason, self responsibility, beauty, goodness, and the sacred. We have "blown it" at everyone of these points, and that's more than enough to account for the sorry spectacle modern man has made of himself.

It also points the way to recovery. Let's, first of all, hear a portion of the indictment leveled at us by contemporaries. Downgrading Man The human race is getting a bad press these days, and we love it. Norman Cousins told us a while back that "Modern Man is Obso lete," and we confer a couple of distinguished editorships on him in a frenzy of approval. Robert 646 THE FREEMAN November Ardrey writes a book to demolish what he calls The Romantic Fal lacy and argues that our fore bea.rs were killer apes, whose blood lust still surges in our veins. And so great is the demand for preach ments of this sort that the book has gone through seventeen print ings! The creature we used to refer to as the glory of creation is, when you scratch the surface, little more than a Naked Ape, Desmond Morris tells us. This book has gone through six print ings and there are two paper back editions. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Morris writes a second book, The Human Zoo. The Nobel Laureate in bi ology, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, goes Morris one better with a book entitled The Crazy Ape. And it is common knowledge that this odi ous race fouls its own nest, pol lutes the environment of its neigh bors, wars ceaselessly on its own kind, destroys wildlife, watches Lawrence Welk 'and votes Republi can. The creature Dnce·regarded as Iittle lower than the angels is now ranked several degrees below the beasts!

The books whose titles I have listed above purport to be in the realm of science. In the realm of the admittedly fictitious there is a new school of novelists who aim, in their stories, to reveal man as the pitiable slob he really is. A critic comments that "From Cer vantes to Hemingway, storytellers have assumed that man has hopes and aspirations, and that they could be expressed meaningfully. Bosh, says the new school. Man is a blob, creeping and leaping about in a. world he cannot control, his words meaningless or hypocritical or both."! Immortality of the Soul How different the outlook of a great writer like William Faulk ner, in these words from his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in 1950: "I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an in exhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and en durance."

Brave words such as these are in danger today of being drowned out by the sheer bulk of the other message, which, through the num erous outlets it has contrived, pro duces the enervating atmosphere of misanthropy in which we strug gle for survival. Take the movies. We are given films which degrade our species by focusing on the sordid, the silly, the ugly, the cowardly, the disgusting; as if all elements of the dramatic were 1 Time, October 13, 1958.

1972 SIX IDEAS TO KEEP US HUMAN 647 lacking in characters who exhibit nobility, heroism, kindness, or even common decency. Another tack is taken in such a, film as "The Hellstrom Chronicle." The mere ability to film those aston ishing pictures of the insect world represents the culmination of the work of many geniuses, but this heartening thought is squelched by the narrator who tells us toward the end of the film that they really do organize things better in the insect world, and human beings should learn from wasps and ants to submerge their individual talents for the greater glory of the hive and termitary! The examples I have cited from works of popular science and the realm of entertainment might be multiplied many times, and they represent no more than the frac tion of the iceberg that pokes it self above the surface of the water. The huge mass below the water line represents the mood, outlook, trend or, drift that sways the multitude.

In many previous ages lonely thinkers and poets sounded the note of pessimism, voiced their despair, and vented their hatred of life. But they were read and heard by only a handful of their contemporaries; they did not reach the multitudes. The masses of men in previous ages were com fortably insulated against ideas of any sort; most of them couldn't read and the range of' the human voice limited the size of the audi ence. The traditional religious be lief gave men's lives meaning and even dignity, and most human energy was used up in producing enough to live on. Catering to the Masses Things are different now. Anti human sentiments, dislike of hu manity, hatred of life, are epi demic among present-day intel lectuals, and the idea that life may not be worth living has perco lated down to the masses of peo ple. This is a new situation in history. The masses of men are relatively inarticulate but only a mass audience can make a book a best seller, or award a golden record to some singer, or enable a film to gross ten million dollars.

The people, books, songs, ideas which ride the crest of fashion today are held there by popular support; whereas, formerly, the artist and composer wrote for wealthy patrons. Joseph Hayden composed magnificent music for the Esterhazys; but Leonard Bernstein writes his Mass for the masses. We are dealing with a perverse attitude toward life which has infected major sectors of Western culture at every level. In the year 1929, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote a stunning little 648 THE FREEMAN November book entitled The Modern Temper, using the word "temper" in the sense of frame of mind, or out look. His maj or point was that educated people had come to as sume that science had exposed as delusions the values and stand ards upon which Western Civili zation had been founded, and that the decline of the West was due to Western man's loss of faith in himself. The prevalent belief, he argued, is that men are animals and animals are machines.

What men believe about them selves is an important factor in the success or failure of their efforts. A golfer who firmly be lieves he can sink a putt is more likely to do so than one who be lieves he'll miss the cup. A swim mer like Don Schollander tells how he gets himself "psyched up" be fore a race and tries to make his opponents feel like losers in a war of nerves. It is a notorious fact in baseball that certain pitchers have the "Indian sign" on a particular batter; he's a dangerous hitter except against this one pitcher. The right beliefs, in short, inspire right action. I don't know what an elephant believes about himself; I suspect that he doesn't believe anything about himself, one way or the other. I think it would not matter; he'd go. on being the same old elephant he always was. Sometimes we say of a pet Saint Ber nard who tries to crawl up into our lap that "Bozo thinks he's a kitten." But we know we're jok ing; and even if this was said seriously, we know that Bozo re mains a dog no matter what he thinks he is.

With the human species it is different: Human beings do not attain their full stature as persons unless they are reinforced by the proper ideas and beliefs about the meaning of being a person. We share our physical being with other mammals; biologically speaking, we are anthropoids. By virtue of our genetic equipment we are clever, adaptable hominids; but no one of us realizes his full potential as a man or woman un less he knows what it means to be human. If we so misread human nature as to regard our species as nothing more than the fortuitous product of natural and social forces, then we have impaired our chances of achieving the most uniquely human qualities within our capacity. Environmentalism If it is generally believed that man is merely the product of his environment - the individual a passive outcome of the time and place into which he was born, the human race a consequence of ac cidental chemical and physical 1972 SIX IDEAS TO KEEP US HUMAN 649 events of a few million years ago - when· such beliefs pervade a culture, the result is pessimism and resignation. The sense of in dividual responsibility is dead in a man who regards himself as a passive creature of his circum stances. The only people who prove superior to their circumstances, who surmount environmental handicaps, are those whose beliefs about the human species endow men and women with the creative energy to overcome life's diffi culties.

It may sound as though I am endorsing a "think and grow rich" formula, or the like. Actually, I am talking about the big picture; the dominant world view enter tained by a culture, the prevailing ideology, the real religion. The dominant world view today is some form of materialism; explicit where Marxianism has taken ·hold, implicit elsewhere. Let me docu ment this assertion from a sta te ment entitled "What I Believe" by C. P. Snow; novelist, scientist, member of the peerage, 'writing in the current issue of the Britan nica Roundtable (Vol. 1, No.3). A publication such as this is no vehicle for publishing radical de partures from orthodoxy; Baron Snow's statement is printed be cause his point of view is com monplace among people who re gard themselves as being in step with up-to-date ideas. Snow writes as follows: "I believe life - hu man life, all life - is a . . . fluke which depended on all manner of improbable conditions happening at the same time." But if all life is a chance occurrence, so is Baron Snow's life. And if Snow's life is a fl uke how can his thinking be anything but a series' of flukes?

His thoughts then are random events,without rational founda tion. "All that happened," he con tin ues, "is within the domain of the laws of physics and chemistry . .. it was a completely material process. . . . A few million years ago, subject to the laws of sta tistical chance, the creatures that were our direct' ancestors came into existence.... Speech and what we call conscious intelligence accrued .... We are still an animal species, but much cleverer than all others." Snow goes on to add, rather wistfully it seems, "It has been a very unlikely process, with many kinds of improbability along the way." Nature1s Passion for Order Now, old Mother Nature has a passion for order. She has an aver sion to disorder, and the Laws of Probability simply record Mother Nature's gyroscopic tug to keep things on course. The Laws of Probability record that the num ber of male and female children 650 THE FREEMAN November born is roughly equal. Flip a penny fifty times and it will come up heads on the average of about every other throw - twenty-five times out of fifty. Make a thous and random throws of a pair of dice and the Laws of Probability can tell you approximately how many times they'll come up snake eyes, and how many times you'll get box cars. Numbers between two and twelve are within the system, and each of the eleven pos sible numbers will appear a cer tain number of times according to the laws of statistical chance.

But let's pose this question: In a thousand random throws of the dice how many times will we get seventeen? How many times will the dice turn into a rabbit? The answer is that this would never happen; spooky questions like this imply belief in magic. Now sup pose we ask the same question, but say that the dice have been thrown once a second for a billion years. Now how many seventeens and how many rabbits? The an swer of any sensible person is "None!" to both questions. The number seventeen and rabbits are outside the system of the little spotted cubes called dice. When a man like C. P. Snow de clares that nonlife becomes life due to the operation of the Laws of Probability over immense time, he attributes magical properties to mere duration. He assumes that dice do turn into rabbits if the time span be measured in billions of years. And when he invokes an other huge block of time to ac count for the transformation of the nonmental into the mental and the nonrational into the rational, he is endowing the mere sequence of days, centuries, and millenia with miracle-working efficacy.

Monkeys vs. Shakespeare We've all heard the assertion intended to illustrate what mere chance and time can accomplish that if a thousand monkeys were seated at a thousand typewriters and banged away for a thousand years they would reproduce every one of Shakespeare's sonnets. The premise upon which this wild il lustration is based is that a Shake spearian sonnet is nothing but a mechanical arrangement of black letters on white paper. There are indeed letters on paper, but there is one other special ingredient in these sonnets: Shakespeare's ge nius. There is no place for genius in the world view ,of the material ist who professes to believe that mind is an offshoot of matter. A poet simply marks the location where a-poem occurs, according to B. F. Skinner: "The poet is also a locus, a place in which certain genetic and environmental causes come together to have a common 1972 SIX IDEAS TO KEEP US HUMAN 651 effect."2 And besides, the genius is a salient individual who stands out above the crowd when really he should be content to seek "so~ cial gains!"

What men believe about them selves has a great deal to do with determining the success or failure of their efforts in the several de partments of life, and when in fluential segments of the literate population embrace notions about the universe which demean man by depriving him of his most dis tinctive characteristics the culture is thrown off base. Let me now probe a little deeper along this line. I shall argue that six major ideas, together with body, brain and nervous system, transform what Snow calls "an animal species, but much cleverer than all the others" into a full fledged member of the human spe cies. A creature with anthropoid features who completely lacks these ideas is not of our species even though he walks, talks, and dresses like a man. Fortunately, in consequence of the animal health and grace in even the worst of men, it is almost impossible for any person to eliminate from his make-up all traces of. these ideas; 2 Saturday Review, July 15, 1972.

some influence remains to keep us reachable. Now then, six big, potent, inter related ideas, without which man is not man. • 1. Free Will. Man's gift of fre:e will makes him a responsible being. • 2. Rationality. Man is a rea soning being who, by taking thought, gains valid truths about himself and the universe. • 3. Self-responsibility. Each person is the custodian of his own energy and talents, charged with the lifetime task of bringing him self to completion. • 4. Beauty. Man confronts beauty in. the very nature of things, and repI:oduces this vision in art. • 5. Goodness. Man has a moral sense, enabling and requiring him to choose between good and evil. • 6. The Sa·cred. Manpartici pates in an order which transcends nature and society. Each of these big ideas is in trouble today. The attack on them has been gathering momentum for a couple of centuries and the case against has just about carried the day in influential circles. We'll further examine these ideas in a concluding article next month. .~ LEONARD E. READ r~~'-'~'-"-'l I ll l l I ---------.-......~.~.~.~..~.~~'-------From whence come wars and fighting among you?