The Waning of Humaneness

...Nor are we all that likely to perish from the collective abuse of additives, aerosol cans, and Egg McMuffins, nasty as they may be...

...Still, allowing for its occasionally misdirected elaborations and its sometimes oppressive erudition, The Waning of Humaneness remains a profoundly important work, its message both a warning and a beacon civilized men can only ignore at their peril...

...There is something to be said for each of these points, bleak though they are...

...there are good reasons for the assumption that we are but a developmental phase on the way to becoming truly humane beings...

...Well, there is more, for "even if, just in time, humans should Aram Bakshian, Jr writes and broadcasts frequently on politics, history, and the arts...

...Lorenz also misses the mark in blaming social deterioration on the "de-humanizing" effect of urban living and working conditions...

...The first sentence—and it is a sentence in more ways than one—in his foreword to The Waning of Humaneness starkly declares that "now, as never before, the prospects for a human future are exceptionally dismal...

...Lorenz holds that human behavior and perceptions are capable of creative evolution—and because, presumably, he does not believe in a divinely immutable fate for mankind—he can deny the historical inevitability that is the opiate of utopian and cataclysmic intellectuals alike...

...Unfortunately, Mr...

...don't take The Waning of Humaneness with you to the beach unless you want to sleep through the week-end...

...He was recently nominated by President Reagan to serve as a member of the National Council on the Humanities...

...We humans," he concludes, "are only an ephemeral link in the chain of the live and the living...

...Leisure, not labor, is the root of the problem...

...Like it or not, however, he is on their side...

...Lorenz could well be mistaken, it certainly behooves all decent human beings to proceed on the assumption that he may be right, namely to pray as if everything depended on God . . . and work as if everything depended on us...

...Like many survivors of the nightmarish goings-on in Mittel-Europa in this century, he places an artificially high premium on life close to nature...

...Just as pet owners should be wary of attributing too many human motivations to Rover and Tabby, animal behaviorists should be leery of assigning too many bestial motivations to human beings...

...His is a triumph of integrity over readability...

...Lorenz's elaboration of it, and his style of presentation...

...We are still allowed a little time to hope that this may be so...

...The kind of aimless materialism and self-indulgence that was once the exclusive (and often self-destructive) preserve of the rich and privileged is now routinely enjoyed, if that is the right word, by the bulk of the population...

...Although translator Robert Warren Kickert has made heroic efforts to render a readable English version of Mr...

...The primary threat to a civilized future—Mr...

...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987...

...Lorenz's original German, he hasbeen sufficiently honest to preserve enough of the Teutonic pomposity and pedantry to give one an idea of how laborious the writings of even Nobel Prize-winning German thinkers tend to be...

...Because Mr...

...these are the core problems that must be recognized and overcome...

...Lorenz relegates to third place in the Apocalyptic Hit Parade...

...In effect, after declaring his rather draconian sentence, he offers the human race the novel prospect of time on for good—or, at least, improved—behavior...

...this despite Austrian aphorist Karl Kraus's valid observation that, when people try to excuse a particularly beastly piece of behavior, they invariably fall back on the alibi that they are "only human...

...H aving agreed to this much of his argument, one may still find fault with some of Mr...

...W hat makes Konrad Lorenz refreshingly different from most social critics (and, even more so, from most behaviorists) is that, having rightly or wrongly diagnosed the problems facing modern civilization, he proposes to consider them, not as pre-ordained symptoms of irreversible decay, but as components of a social malady capable of diagnosis and cure...

...Lorenz would probably prefer the word "humane," but it comes to the same thing, since we are talking humanist values here—for mankind is not the existence of a lethal arsenal, which, precisely because of its deadliness, is not likely to be used en masse, at a level that would threaten the race as a whole...

...fleeing back to the forest is no answer to the problems faced by the contemporary West...

...Konrad Lorenz may not believe in angels...

...Lorenz has got them backwards, both in order of gravity and order of probability...

...Lorenz's sylvan paeans with a grain of salt...

...Any one familiar with the brutality of real, rather than idealized, rustic life must take Mr...

...THE WANING OF HUMANENESS Konrad Lorenz/Little, Brown/$17.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...While Mr...

...But that is not the worst of it since, "even if this does not happen, every human being remains in peril of a slow death through poisoning and desiccating the environment in which he lives and by which he is sustained...

...somehow impose a check on their blind and unbelievably stupid conduct, they still remain threatened by a progressive decline of all those attributes and attainments that constitute their humanity...

...The anchorless, extended adolescence of Western youth, from those on the dole all the way up to those in graduate school, the universal accessibility of bad drugs and worse social fads, the eroding effect of global, mass-marketed pop culture on traditional values and aesthetic standards, the general failure of family and educational delivery systems of desirable social norms...

...M r. Lorenz may also have fallen prey to his own expertise as an animal behaviorist...

...The primary threat, and it is one that has faced humanity from the beginning, at every step in thehistory of mankind (with many individual societies and classes falling casualties along the way), is the decline in civilized, or humane, attitudes and behavior that Mr...

...Up to a point, Lord Konrad...

...Social decay and the degradation of communal and individual values, whether self-inflicted or imposed by conquest or subversion, account for everything from the ruin of ancient Greece and Rome to the current moral and material squalor in totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union (where the senior management is desperately trying to patch and improvise social correctives to the innate inhumanity of the system), the sinking of societies in many parts of the Third World, and the degradation of "beneficiaries" of welfare-state dependency and other social dropouts in the democratic West...

...Had enough...

...The march of civilization has been the march out of relative rural bondage and into relative urban freedom...

...Most probably the human race will soon and swiftly, but certainly not painlessly, be committed to suicide through the use of extant nuclear weaponry...