America's New Hero

...She told the press: "I spent most of my time on a character study of the graduate student...

...Both of them are graduate students of economics...

...Communism has been dying for lack of sustenance...

...The outside threat encouraged a spirit of union on the Ann Arbor campus...

...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Hail to the Conquering Hero Some months ago, I wrote a column to the effect that my old school, the University of Michigan, would be able to take care of its Communists without any help from Washington...

...Why not synthetic culture pills and, finally, synthetic mass-produced souls...

...The trained seal's love of literature means leaping sleekly through the endlessly receding hoops of the criticism of the criticism of criticism and, after each successive hoop of the newest New Criticism, gratefully swallowing some fishy "explication" in mid-air...

...Unfortunately, the Thomas Mores, the examples of the higher kind of non-conformism, are rare in any age...

...Viereck is also a prominent magazine writer and lecturer...

...On the campus, there is a hot fight going on about the morals of the thingwith a heavy majority against the young lady...

...The case of one of these men, Ed Shaffer, has a romantic angle which has stirred the campus to its depth...

...I am using the word "secular" not in any denominational, clerical sense, but to mean vanitas, vanitatum the selling of one's soul for a mere utilitarian mess of pottage, or, for that matter, pot of message...

...That sort of lowbrow just naturally tries to get votes by attacking the universities and the "eggheads...

...The most corrupting, most insidious development is the substitution of technique for art, the substitution of the mass-produced "just as good" for the real thing...

...But nohe had to hit the headlines by coming to Michigan...

...He spoke in sharp terms of the danger of Communist infiltration...

...Knowing friend Ed's reputation, she hesitated to follow him and sought advice from various sources...

...It is better to adjust to the ages than to the age...

...But if it does occur in whatever country you happen to inhabit, in that ultimate moral choice, then the non-materialist, the Christian, the man with inner liberty, walks to his scaffold smiling and unhesitant, like St...

...Thomas More, because he is "God's servant first" and not the servant of a chummy well-adjustedness...

...Viereck demonstrates here, these pressures can come from the most unlikely sources...

...in effect, a Regular Feller...

...In the literary and scholarly world today, non-conformism has become one more conformist pose...

...I gather from their pictures and interviews that the hero is a bold and venturesome chap and the lady is gentle, timid, easily alarmed...

...The freedom of opinion that we treasure so greatly includes freedom to inquirefreedom to teach and freedom to learn, freedom to question, to disagree, to challenge...

...Alternative Two is the wholesome, adjusted Rotarian, with his robot values in a world of cellophane, plastics and hygiene-worship...

...Picture this robot army on the march toward soulfulness and Advanced Ideas, each robot intoning dutifully: "I'm a real human being, an independent, non-conforming, embattled individualist just like everybody else...

...New buildings were going up...

...If only Mr...

...second and simultaneously, thereby to be the Unadjusted Man, stubbornly and deliberately maladjusted to the outer mechanized world of mass-men and robots...

...There speaks the voice of liberty for our own age also...

...Is it accidental or is it typical of our civilization that precisely our most commercialized industry, namely the cinema, includes a firm whose motto (with a straight face) is "Ars gratia artis...

...As a consequence, they have shriveled to practically nothing...

...What, then, is the test for telling the real inspiration from the almost-real, the just-as-good...

...In short, even while rejecting the vanity of this world, Western man remains not only its servant but its "good servant...

...For example, the "stream of consciousness" for which James Joyce wrestled in loneliness with language, the ironic perspective toward society which Proust attained not as entertainment but as tragedy, all the quick, sensitive insights over which a Virginia Woolf or a Katherine Mansfield bled her heart outall these intimate individual achievements are today mass-produced as the standard props of a hundred hack imitators, mechanically vending what is called "the New Yorker-type short story...

...Not only does this attitude distinguish More from the Western radical...

...In other words, we now have a third important alternative in addition to the two confronting us in the past...

...For our own age, you must in that quotation substitute "servant of the state" or "servant of secularism" for "king's good servant...

...The various teams were winning their share of games...

...For certain special historical reasons, which 1 tried to analyze in my recent book Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals (Beacon...

...because, at mid-century, mass-man shoddiness has become so slick, so sophisticated that it masquerades as its opposite...

...He must, for example, favor for religious reasons rather than reject for religious reasons those thoroughly material social reforms which make a free society more just...

...There, as Herbert Agar once pointed out, speaks Western man...

...The University Senate, the top layer of the faculty, worked out a plan for giving a quick and fair trial to any teacher accused of Communist taint...

...This young man finds his name blazing in the headlines partly because he felt drawn, some months ago, to a pretty girl, Daphne Price...

...He might have studied foreign affairs especially how to grab the initiative from the world Communist bloc...

...though an imitation job, it is imitation with magnificent technical skill...

...An exciting example of this higher kind is the dying words of Thomas More on the scaffold: "I die the king's good servant, but God's first...

...The higher kind does adjust gladly to higher norms, but rightly rejectsout of thoughtful maturity, not out of adolescent affectation the shoddy norms of keeping up with the Joneses...

...For years past, the Regents, the members of the faculty and the students have been conscious of the dangers of Communism...

...nor does it mean the mass-man's at least honest and open shudder of contempt...

...New departments were being organized...

...Among his historical works are Conservatism Revisited and Melapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, both of which had contemporary overtones...

...Instead, he can assume a less dramatic but actually nobler role...

...The scientists were serving their country in the regular ways...

...The loss to romance as spring comes on is beyond calculation...

...We must distinguish between genuine sensitivity that is, amateur sensitivity and the professional sensitive plant, the professional wincer, the drugstore non-conformist...

...Alternative One is the Unadjusted Man, cultivating his inner riches of liberty and reverie...

...Viereck's defense of the individual spirit against conformity, now appearing in the guise of non-conformity, is a much-needed corrective to the omnipresent herd pressures of our time...

...The literary masterpieces and great educational institutions of the past were privately sweated for and bled for, not publicly lip-serviced...

...And think of the advantages: no pain any more, no risk any more, no more nonsense of inspiration...

...Outer civil liberties are not enough...

...Popular...

...When I say that the new hero of America is the Unadjusted Man, I am not speaking psychiatrically...

...Most modern readers are not even bothered by the difference between such an excellent but bloodless machine job and the living product of individual heart's anguish...

...Not mere physical pain, but the joyous pain of selfless sacrifice...

...be cannot evade its moral choices by fleeing from reality to some inactive Nirvana...

...As Mr...

...The examples of the lower kind are frequent: let us try to analyze why they are today both more frequent than ever before and more difficult to detect...

...Hence, we must inspect very closely the credentials of those artists, scholars, poets and educators who most loudly proclaim their non-conformism...

...In the 1950s, Alternative One has taught us, and taught us rightly, to turn instead to the traditional cultural, humanistic and religious values of the spirit...

...I know it sounds weird, but this is what the FBI led me to think they wanted...

...This is obviously a possibility for boys to consider before they invite girls to a show or a canoe trip...

...But then he went on to assert the independence of the states in matters of education: "The Federal Government has no business defining the subject matter that shall be taught, the students who shall be taught, or the teachers who shall do the teaching in our colleges and universities...

...The test is that sacrament of pain, that brotherhood of sacrifice, that aristocracy of creative suffering, of which Baudelaire wrote: "Je sais que la douleur est l'unique noblesse...

...A more directly political book was The Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals, published last year by Beacon Press...

...Thus far, this is the achievement of Congressman Kit Clardy and his expensive staff...

...Unlike the evader who flees from reality even when it is not necessary to do so, Western man, with his not-to-be-despised material and organizational achievements, rejects being "the king's servant" only as the last resort, never as the first resort...

...I can only answer, "I hope not," and wonder how many credit points for adjustment to mediocrity would be won by, say, a young Kafka of the future...

...short of such an extreme, he remains voluntarily and gladly the king's servant...

...This attitude contrasts with the radical who revolts indiscriminately against authority...

...much of our Philistine-baiting has become only a more highbrow mask for the same old Philistia...

...This manhis name is Kit Clardy had proclaimed that Ann Arbor was a nest of subversives and that he intended to purify it...

...For such docile circus animals, literature no longer means the shudder of awe before the beautiful...

...More's revolt against secularism and statism is essentially conservative because only revolting when forced to some ultimate moral extreme...

...The comparison is amusing to Mr...

...Why difficult to detect...

...I merely mean: Be unadjusted toward current ephemeral fads...

...Is this not often true today of every category of education and literature...

...Since then, the university has given all sorts of proof that it can take care of its own people who are out of step...

...Western man even when rejecting secular reality knows he must (in this life) live within it...

...If you are accused of being "maladjusted" to the century of the common man, remember that "one man and God make a majority...

...and not "free for what...

...The lower kind is merely the cheap and easy Babbitt-baiting and conformism-baiting of adolescent radicalism, of Greenwich Village, of Bohemia, which refuses to adjust even to valid norms...

...He has enabled one timid girl to publicize her conversations with her Communist boy-friend and he was a Communist whom everyone knew all about to start with...

...Yes, American youth is indeed turning back to religion and to more creative interests than in the shallow, Marxist 1930s...

...highbrow non-conformism has succumbed to its own kind of popularizers and hack educators almost as completely as have Screen Romances and True Detective Stories I on their infinitely lower level...

...Here is a new development in blanks, increasingly frequent, that gives me the 1984 shudders: More and more scholarship blanks are asking, "Is your student well-adjusted...

...It's no go listing proudly the current growth of college courses in Great Books or Great Issues or Great Classics, the growth in courses in how to become a creative writer or a creative reader in ten lessons, when all these Great Books or Great Issues for which our ancestors toiled in loneliness and faced the rack if necessary when all these Great Classics are studied as gregarious, comfortable, painless parlor games...

...It also distinguishes him from the other-worldly attitude found, for example, in Buddhism...

...Peter Viereck (cut at left) has been compared to the young "savage" in Huxley's Brave New World who, armed with a volume of Shakespeare's poetry, did battle with the slick, super-planned, always-happy technocracy that had replaced our turbulent society of human beings...

...Every pro-Kremlin organization has been conspicuously labeled...

...1953...

...Viereck's friends, but it fails to do justice to his resources...

...He is not yet in the university town, but his dramatic and upsetting influence precedes him...

...The new, the third alternative, like the first, seems to affirm the humanities and spiritual values but in an entirely mechanical, uninspired way, so that it only masks more subtly the crass utilitarianism of Alternative Two...

...The test is pain...

...Unlike the passive, other-worldly Buddhist...

...Yet, before we herald that salutary development with premature trumpets, remember this caution: When religion is handled by the yard and wrapped in cellophane, when artistic creativity is sold like dry goods, with spontaneous inspiration left out, then all we have is commercialism triumphing all over again, this time in the name of anti-commercialism...

...Last January, a member of the Board of Regents, Alfred R. Connable, set the tone for the whole institution in a thoroughly American and patriotic address...

...This one, who may or may not be typical, copied and reported her conversations with her swain...

...I was moved to develop that point because a Michigan member of the House of Representatives, perhaps prompted by an urge to rise to the Senate, had determined to do a McCarthy in the old home state...

...A Pulitzer Prize poet (Strike Through the Mask, Terror and Decorum, The First Morning), Mr...

...In the meantime, there has been a healthy growth of understanding and cooperation among students, faculty, executives and Board of Regents...

...We can lose our inner freedom, even if we do save all our outer liberties from the leftist and rightist totalitarians...

...So far as I know, only two students have been subpoenaed by the Clardy Committee...

...That last resort did occur when the "king" was Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin...

...Because they are chameleon-like...

...Her final achievement was to record the list of guests and the words which were said at a birthday party arranged for her by her beau at his apartment...

...America's New Hero The Unadjusted Man By Peter Viereck An occupational disease of college teachers is the filling of scholarship-recommendation blanks about students aspiring to higher groves of academe...

...What once resulted from the inspired and audacious craftsmanship of a heartbreakingly lonely individual is now mass-produced in painless, safe and uninspired capsules...

...Avant-garde is one more rearguard movement, consisting of the arthritic somersaults of those aging en fonts terribles who had once seemed "new" in the days when Jovce and jazz were considered shocking and when The Waste Land and rumble seats were considered expressions of Rebel Youth...

...This change you will already have noted in the mechanically "cultural" uplifters of the lecture platforms and in the professionally arty quarterlies...

...Our great universities, steeped in the sin of intellectual pride, are killing intellectuality and killing the humanities not by the old-fashioned vulgarity of the nineteenth-century Gilded Age but by turning an entire generation of graduate students into trained seals...

...You can talk civil liberties and prosperity and democracy "with the tongues of men and angels," but it is merely a case of "free from what...

...Don't underestimate that type of story...

...This article is adapted from an address presented at the National Conference on Higher Education, sponsored by the Association for Higher Education...

...The latter are only more openly robotized: they frankly try to kill a spiritual and humanistic education by open attack on it, while the highbrow hack kills it by hugging it to death...

...Unlike the days of the Renaissance, today the scholar, the educator, the teacher of the humanities can no longer be the prophet and seer, the unriddler of the outward universe: modern science has deprived him of that function...

...Note this additional point: Even though More is being executed by his king for putting God first, he does not say: "I die the king's bad servant" or "I die refusing to serve the king in anything, even in those duties which must be rendered not unto God but unto Caesar...

...If the humanities survive the external materialist assault, then will they survive it only in order to succumb from within to the slick substitutes of synthetic humanities, synthetic religion...

...Both of them are and have been for some years open and active Communist workers...

...their anti-Babbittry, their sensitivity...

...I assert that this manicuring of our sacred humanistic and spiritual values into mere fashionable fads may kill these values more surely, even though more subtly, than if open barbarians, torch in hand, were burning down our churches, our libraries and our universities...

...The President set up a small council of students to advise with him in case any student was called by the Washington committees...

...Picture to yourself a whole army of regimented robots, consisting of noble-browed educators, sonorously "eloquent" guardians of culture, and hearty, tweedy, pipe-smoking teachers of "creative-writing" courses, which with "lovable" whimsy they call "workshops...

...and for "God" some may wish to substitute "universal moral standards, the need to use good means and nothing but good means, no matter what your political or secular goal...

...if you use this freedom only in order to commit television or to go lusting after comic books...

...Let us distinguish between two entirely different kinds of non-adjustment...

...For the sake of inner freedom, it is better to adjust to what your conscience says is eternally right than to your neighbor's expediency...

...He might have cast an eye on domestic matters how to pass a few of the bills which President Eisenhower has on his program...

...Against this menace of the all too well-adjusted man what David Riesman calls the other-directed man, what Ortega y Gasset calls the mass-mana new hero emerges in America today: the Unadjusted Man...

...Synthetic food pills we already have...

...But he remains so only up to the point where being its servant does not encroach on God, on conscience, on those ethical norms within which all social reform must operate if it is to avoid 1984 or November 1917...

...Western man does not let religion relieve him of the duty to face and master the material problems of this earth...

...His twofold role now is: first, to be more than ever the explorer of the inner universe, the universe behind the forehead...

...It is said that no more than 20 or 25 students out of nearly 20,000 have furnished the motive power for all of them...

...Let us make sure (despite our Huey Longs and McCarthys) that it will never occur in America...

...Without such material reforms, freedom becomes an empty phrase, in which all men are equal but some (as Or well put it) more equal than others and in which equality means only (as Anatole France put it) imprisoning the rich as well as the poor man for stealing bread...

...Viereck is also a professor of Russian history at Mount Holyoke and a prolific political and historical writer...

...Alternative Three is parloring God just as snobbishly today as the professional or conformist "non-conformist" of the 1930s was parloring socialism...

...Do adjust for God's sake, do adjust to the great permanent ethical and cultural and religious traditions...

...I suppose it is significant that, instead of going to her mother, this 19-year-old maiden went to the FBI...

...Everything seemed to be going beautifully at the university...

...In the 1930s, the phrase "parlor socialism" was used to describe those who became socialists not out of inner conviction, but because it was then fashionable in the intellectual salons to be leftist, materialist, and obsessed with economics...

...Clardy could have got interested in something else...

...Michigan's student journalists have pilloried the party-liners...

...He spoke against the threat to freedom: "Today we must be more than ever clear as to the values we defend and promote...

...A good mixer...