What Is Man's Condition?:

...It is the peculiarity of our time that the denizens of sub-history have intruded more and more into history...

...Human Progress, and Raymond Aron touches on it in The Century of Total War, to mention only two books...

...He has often written for the American Mercury, Harpers and Scribner's...

...War and...

...Mumford has not seen it this way...

...Mumford's man is a creature of incredible elevation, required by his author to operate all of the time at the very top of his bent, a bent which is strong for the graces, the esthetic emphasis, the solemn moral purpose...

...When a writer like Lewis Mumford, who is full of fervor for man's welfare and equally full of assurance that he knows how to achieve it, gives us a view of man that is related only to a tiny minority of men in all history, I get annoyed...

...Their incidental contributions did not get into the records which historians have normally consulted in constructing history...

...What I want to know is: What is the nature of the creatures who environ me every day in the week, who vote in the elections, execrate and applaud Joe McCarthy, admire Eisenhower or Stevenson...

...I find myself increasingly confused by the fragmentary and fragmentizing reports of the experts in special disciplines that touch on man, the anthropologists, the symbol boys, the Fromms and the Riesmans, the fellows who tell us how they would manipulate men...

...This is the first of the regular monthly articles which C. Hartley Grattan (cut at left) will write on subjects of his own choosing for THE NEW LEADER...

...This bothered me long before I read In the Name of Sanity...

...Alexis de Tocqueville, was disquieted and skeptical about them...

...When the depreciation of man in its current expression began I do not know, but I do recall vividly enough that my own first realization of the point that man's irrationality is a vastly important facet of him came from reading William Trotter's Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace in 1920 and an initiation into Freudian psychology about the same time...

...On the one hand, there is the emphasis on his rationality, the point about him that supported the campaign for his admission to history (or participation in public affairs, if you like...

...The proper study of mankind is man...

...I was brought up on the theory that human nature is not a fixed thing...

...This is part of Professor John U. Nef's task in his admirable study...

...Even the first great student of their actual and potential role...

...and that much that is described as human nature, both in praise and in blame, is folklore of dubious worth...

...It is my purpose to take off from another aspect of Mr...

...Like many writers who consistently operate on a high level of abstraction and to whom a glittering but precariously based generality is something rarely resisted, Mumford seems to generalize man somewhat in the image he has of himself when he is writing for publication, without for a moment reflecting that few men, for good or ill, are much like that...

...I am not saying that the professors should have by-passed the study of irrationality, or that they should take any special interest in defending the thesis that man is a rational being...

...To my mind, this begs the question...

...I am saying that it is odd that they have done so little to reconcile the two approaches, assuming their greater than ordinary need for some useful conception of man's "nature...

...I think that this is an entirely exceptional man, even among the men whose doings are recorded in history as traditionally written...

...Historians have lately begun to talk about and investigate a phase of the human story which they are calling sub-history...

...Historians are hard at work trying to establish the cause-and-effect relationship...

...Hence, I cannot see that by appealing sententiously to human nature we get far in defining man...

...I submit that his whole position turns upon his conception of man, and, if he can't persuasively define him, his prescriptions for his rescue lose much of their force...

...What, then, is man...

...The first reaction to this suggested to me by my betters was that man's irrationalities must be controlled by education, but, as the emphasis on his irrationality increased (as it steadily has), as its nature was more fully explored and its expressions more elaborately documented, a sense of discouragement about man spread like a kind of poison gas, even to those quite unacquainted with the books and articles in which the data were developed...

...American political theory is founded on a conception of man's rationality, but the political practice (as the last campaign amply documents) is based on an assumption of his irrationality...

...It is precisely on the plains of human nature, traditionally conceived, that the students of man's irrationality have made their inroads from their coigns of vantage in the academic mountains...

...This reader (a Mumford reader of thirty years' standing, starting with Sticks and Stones in 1924) has long felt that Mr...

...While I can see the importance of such a man as an ideal, or as a provoker of better conduct than ordinary men achieve, I cannot see that we can chart a course for a mass society on the basis of this conception of man...

...Sub-history is supposed to deal with the doings of those people who have formed the inarticulate masses of mankind in most historical societies...

...Grattan is the author of many books, including Why We Fought, The Three Jameses and Introducing Australia...

...The current confusion is beautifully illustrated in education...

...it is a continuing process, and there is plainly a tie-up between their presence and the state of the world as we find it...

...Of course, I know that Mr...

...If you appeal to human nature, you must, to sustain a point, then define human nature--which is equivalent to defining man, precisely what I am after...

...The net effect of all this has been a sharp decline in the evaluation currently placed on man...

...Reading educational literature sheds little light on a sensible reconciliation of the two approaches to man...

...This is the fruit of the movement toward democracy...

...One patch of sand in which many ostriches bury their heads when confronted with this difficulty is human nature...

...rationality...

...I have no objection whatever to this ideal of man, but I ask if this is man in the mass as we know him today, the fellow who must, with his strengths and inadequacies, find his way in the contemporary world...

...No, I insist that we need a careful balancing up of the studies of man, the allegations about him, the attributions of rationality and irrationality, with a view to devising a new and viable conception of man...

...And their intrusion into history is not always considered an unalloyed benefit to the human situation, as Ortega y Gasset and other writers of a similar disposition have vehemently argued...

...Most people seem to have accepted this result without thinking much about it...

...I want to know what one may reasonably think of his fellow creatures at this moment in history...

...it was very much on my mind as I read The Conduct of Life (a work so very different from Emerson's of the same name...

...that man is indeed a fantastically malleable fellow, as is readily demonstrated from history...

...Contrast John Stuart Mill's view of man with that which you consciously or unconsciously entertain--and Mill wasn't a flaming optimist either...

...Speaking generally, confidence in man has been sadly eroded...

...How can you devote a lifetime to teaching the children of man without a clear notion about what these men may be...

...The emergence of the denizens of sub-history into history has been a continuing process for at least two centuries now...

...They have failed to balance up what they really think of man, but instead stumble around, bumping now against what their book-learning tells them about man's irrationality, now against their inherited notions about man's capacity for rationality, imbibed from the classic arguments for democracy...

...One can't rescue man unless one can define his nature By C. Hartley Grattan OTHER AND MORE SKILFUL hands than mine have dealt with Lewis Mumford's conception of politics as "the art of the impossible" and of the role of love in public affairs, as expressed in his new book, In the Name of Sanity...

...I am convinced that we have lost track of any adequate and satisfactory conception of man, and 1 was hoping that Mumford, who with good reason is much upset about the current condition of man, would apply his talents to phrasing a conception which would serve the purposes of more people than himself...

...I want to know what, in the strictest sense, these creatures are...

...On the other hand, there has for some years been a great deal of emphasis on his irrationality, a point which raises doubts about the consequences of his participation under the conditions of mass society to which his participation has led...

...I think not...

...The rise of sub-historical man has provoked those who trouble themselves about his character into an ambivalent attitude toward him...

...While he declares his fundamental purpose to be the rescue of man from the difficulties in which he currently finds himself, he is content to be rather more rhetorical about man than about other topics he touches...

...Mumford shares this weakness with a host of other writers on current affairs...

...History as we usually know it went on more or less over their head, and they suffered and benefited from it without personal participation...

...Yet, nobody doubts that they are here to stay and that those who feel they arrived a good while ago are going to be joined by their brothers in other climes no matter what is said by the intelligentsia...

...Mumford's tract for the times, his conception of man...

...Professors have done a lot of work on man's irrationality, but, as educators, they still proceed at least to some extent on the assumption that man's educability is based upon his (residual...