The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900-1940
Hoeveler, J. David
BOOK REVIEW The New Humanism: A Critique- of Modern America, 1900-1940 J. David Hoeveler / University Press of Virginia / $12.00 Stephen Vaughn Stiidents of American history have sometimes...
...man was held to be a morally responsible being...
...The romantic, his natural expansiveness unrestrained, tended toward extremes...
...One of the latest and most intelligently written books to focus on our conservative heritage is David Hoeveler's.The New Humanism, which deals sympathetic cally, but not uncritically, with several individuals, the most prominent of whom are Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Norman Foerster, and Stuart Pratt Sherman...
...Greek and Latin, mathematics, science, and philosophy were seen not only as valuable increments of culture but also as tools to sharpen and train the reasoning powers and the intellect...
...Realizing that in the twentieth century man was freer to pursue his desires and whims but had never been "more slave to his passions and his material ambitions,'' the New Humanists called fora "law for man" and a "law for thingThe New Humanists were also concerned about new directions being taken in education, "The old-time college had established as the necessary function pf education the discipline and training of the mental and moral faculties...
...Whereas other commentators often saw American acquisitiveneiss as a derivative of capitalism and technology, the New Humanists believed the sources of modern deterioration lay in the intellectual and cultural past, especially in the romantic and naturalistic traditions inherited from the previous two centuries...
...The modern age, however, as the New Humanists were quick to realize, does not provide citizens with internal restraints and in fact works to break down existing inner checks, with mass media advertising preaching a gospel of hedonism and contemporary literature calling for the liberation of man's natural self...
...Hoeveler also suggests that their thought diverged from another strain of 20th-century conservatism which expounded 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism and an interpretation of social Darwinism that emphasized unrestrained competition...
...the naturalists, tracing back to Bacon, weakened traditional moral values by attacking the dual-, ism of human nature, a concept of great importance to New Humanist thinking...
...As might be expected, the New Humanists were not popular in their own day, as evidenced by Babbitt's understated remark that,"Fighting a whole generation is not exactly a happy task...
...BOOK REVIEW The New Humanism: A Critique- of Modern America, 1900-1940 J. David Hoeveler / University Press of Virginia / $12.00 Stephen Vaughn Stiidents of American history have sometimes contended that the United States lacks a conservative intellectual tradition, though studies by Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter, Ronald Lora, and George Nash have raised questions about this argument...
...The 'spiritual' side of man, as heretofore conceived, was now likely to be labeled the 'mental/ and mind was judged to be only an evolutionary product that reached its most advanced stage in homo sapiens...
...Human intelligence was but an adaptive djeyice for the survival of the organism...
...Their critique of American society between 1900 and 1940, together with ascertain kind of post-World War II conservatism, marks, in the author's view, "the" emergence...of a well maticulated philosophical or cultural conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and others/' Babbitt and More, for instance, agreed with Burke's argument that individuals are qualified for civil liberty in direct proportion to their ability and willingness to put moral checks upon their natural appetites...
...Hoeveler believes that mid-19th-century American thought, despite the inroads made by romanticism and naturalism, was still characterized by a teleological view of the universe, strongly influenced by Christianity...
...suggested that change and purposelessness were the ultimate realities, and it strengthened the naturalistic interpretation of human nature by calling into question the traditional Christian idea of man as a special creation in the image of God...
...In failing to perpetuate the humanistic and classical past, modern colleges and universities had thus "enslaved themselves to popular tastes, to the prevailing commercialism, and to the leveling egalitarianism of American: democracy...
...That the New Humanists should now be reconsidered may be in part a result of the author's own disillusionment with certain aspects of the 1960s...
...Their criticisms of modern literature and modern education set them at odds with their time...
...Hoeveler has provided us with a thoughtful work which nicely complements Morton White's Social Thought in America and Henry F. May's The End of American Innocence...
...Conceptions of human nature were founded on the doctrine of man's free will...
...But a number of forces came to undermine these ideas about God, man, and the universe...
...Against this the New Humanists argued that "human freedom could assert itself only through an element in man that distinguished him from both the animal and physical world and from his own 'natural' self...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
