How Stands Our Pursuit of Happiness?
KENNAN, GEORGE F.
By George F. Kennan How Stands Our Is our American civilization of the year 1955 well designed to produce the rich and meaningful life? We have always gone on the theory that an increase in the...
...once a mainstay of the vitality of our society...
...These are the questions we have not yet learned to ask ourselves, as a political society...
...As in the case of our educational and recreational facilities, we have lightheartedly resigned the control of these things into the hands of people who are perfectly worthy people and doing nothing reprehensible, but whose interests, being purely commercial, do not even take into account the need for the preservation of the health and integrity of the local community itself...
...Yet these questions must be asked...
...Kennan's "The Triple Threat from Within," NL, June I, 1953...
...Kennan, who was interned by the Nazis in 1941 and banished by the Soviets in 1952, is the author of American Diplomacy 1900-1950 and Realities of American Foreign Policy...
...These were the assumptions that lay, so to speak, at the end of that rainbow of material progress we followed through the first century-and-a-half of our national history...
...But if, like myself, you find yourselves obliged to answer these questions with a decided negative, then you will have to join me in asking why all this is so, what it is that we have failed to take into account in our calculations of the past, and what this means to us for the future...
...no surer guaranty of his bad behavior...
...Two factors loom up in my mind as central ones in connection with this failure of material progress to bring us greater benefits...
...These are all facts that limit in important ways that freedom of choice which, by tradition and by the theory of our society, the individual citizen was supposed to enjoy and by virtue of which he was supposed to have been the master of his own fate and his own happiness...
...Here the automobile, ubiquitous and triumphant, has been the principal disintegrating agent...
...Nothing is harder than to discuss the inner world of a great people such as ours, with all its immense variety and complexity...
...Look at the state of our youth...
...Concerned to divert rather than to develop, the commercial cultural product has led to passivity of recreation...
...I am not sure that the mass of our people know how to make good use of that choice, where it exists...
...What we are faced with is, not only a disintegration of the civic community as such but also a fragmentization of the family group, to a point where the home loses its integrity and becomes a fortuitous dormitory for strangers of different age groups...
...Even if this were not at stake, the deterioration of the local community would be bad enough...
...Some readers may recall Mr...
...and it has been part of our traditional philosophy that the individual, confronted with this choice, would know how to use it wisely...
...when administrative boundaries no longer have even a remote relation to social realities...
...The quarrel then might not be about the ownership and control of the factory but about its very existence...
...to spectatoritis...
...the disintegration of local community life...
...If you can answer these questions in the affirmative, then you are yourself a happy person...
...and happening all over our country...
...when residence is being separated from livelihood by ever-increasing distances and time intervals...
...Secondly, there is the growing domination of cultural and recreational activity by commercial media, usually connected with the advertising profession, whose motivation has little, if anything, to do with the deeper sense of human welfare...
...and when this type of community begins to lose its reality for people, then I for one have no great confidence that they will be good citizens in the wider frameworks of state and national government...
...Here George F. Kennan (cut at right), best known as a former Counselor of the State Department and U.S...
...And the results of this examination, so far as I am concerned, are not encouraging...
...By making advertising the main business of our newspapers, overshadowing physically and financially the other function, it has affected in unfortunate ways the freshness, the independence and the competitiveness of our press...
...Are they that much happier than people elsewhere who do not have this abundance...
...First, there is the disintegration of real community life almost everywhere, as a result of the revolutionary innovations in transportation and 'The satisfying of man's material needs is only the beginning' Pursuit of Happiness...
...The meaning of citizenship begins with the neighborhood...
...All judgments are necessarily subjective, intuitive, and imperfect...
...Are they that much happier than the Americans of earlier generations, for whom this abundance did not exist...
...And it is because of them, and similar factors, that our American environment has become in certain ways a dangerous and unhealthy one...
...But I do say that these purposes are irrelevant to, and wholly out of accord with the importance of, those human reactions they are using as a means to their end...
...We are going to have to ask them, and to find answers to them, before we will dispose of such things as personal insecurity, urban blight, civic apathy, juvenile delinquency and mass cultural vulgarity...
...and when, finally, it becomes increasingly impossible for the individual citizen to survey and apprehend the social context in which his life proceeds, and by which the real prospects for his happiness and that of his children are determined...
...not conducive to the best development of the individual, either for his own sake or from the standpoint of his value as a citizen...
...Already it is the turn of the psychologist or social philosopher to utter the grave warnings...
...But we are now approaching the end of this rainbow, in the sense that material plenty is really there for almost all of our citizens who are not too lazy or too improvident to seek it...
...I have no quarrel with the advertisers...
...Priestley, like Ortega y Gasset, Lewis Mumford and others, was arguing that material wealth, even when equitably distributed, is no guarantee of the health of a society or the happiness of its citizens...
...No scientific proof is possible...
...This last process, as you know, has a wide variety of distressing effects...
...This new philosophy will have to take account of the fact that the satisfying of man's material needs is only the beginning, and does not answer, but only opens up for the first lime in all their real complexity and difficulty, the crucial questions as to what environmental conditions are most favorable to man's enjoyment of the experience of life and to the dignity of his relationship with other men...
...And then ask yourselves: Are these people as happy as they ought to be in the face of their material abundance...
...The effects of the other factor I mentioned...
...It has invaded the home, and asserted its domain over the minds of small children, crowding the school and appropriating to itself a major role in the actual educational process...
...are scarcely less alarming...
...1 do not say that their business purposes are in any way evil or reprehensible...
...when the reckless and growing dispersal of all facilities for living tends increasingly to pull people away from their homes, to fragmentize their interests, their allegiances and their civic influence...
...should be left in permanence to the conscience of an industry the nature of whose interest has so little relation to the things that are really at stake...
...We have been, as a nation, extraordinarily obtuse to the importance, from the standpoint of the deeper satisfactions of those who use them, of the sheer geographic arrangement of the facilities for life and work...
...At the back of all this is usually, though not always, advertising...
...communications that the last half century have brought us...
...Ambassador to Moscow, returns to what has always been a special concern: the inner health of American society...
...He is currently at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study...
...And consequently, I question whether material progress alone, as we have sought it heretofore and have come to know it today, is really bringing us the results we hoped...
...I know that many of them are personally distressed about these very same things...
...Yet these things are happening...
...I question whether it is making us a happier-and inwardly a richer...
...We are getting enough evidence today to examine the validity of these underlying assumptions...
...a people in danger, at least partially, of becoming sluggish intellectually, underdeveloped emotionally, creative only where commercial interest raises its capricious demands, filled with an inner restlessness and dissatisfaction, incapable of integrating our full strength and bringing it to bear where it is most needed, dull and uninteresting to others and, what is worse, not terribly interesting to ourselves...
...It seems to me preposterous that cultural and educational stimuli of such enormous importance, exercising so intimate and vital an influence on the inner world of our people...
...We have always gone on the theory that an increase in the amount of material goods and leisure time gave the individual a wider area of choice by which to make his own inner life rich...
...in other words, that money can never replace man as the measure of all things, and that Western man, caught in the fantastic consequences of industrialism, faces a whole new range of problems...
...I am not sure that the area of choice is really made wider by the conditions in which our material plenty is being achieved...
...on their comprehension of life and their attitudes toward it...
...Until we do this, we will continue to be, as we are now, not a bad people or a weak one or even a consciously unhappy one, but an endangered one...
...There could be no more bitter blow than this at the true sources of man's security...
...By its great appetite for such things as film and reprint rights and condensations, it is threatening to dominate the field of literary publishing, thus far a last refuge of genuine cultural values...
...Thus, in ever-increasing degree, the right of monopolizing our attention, of absorbing our capacity for intellectual and emotional reaction, of shaping the habits and the imagery on which our thought depends, is being claimed by those whose primary interest in us is only the influencing of our conduct as purchasers at the shopping center...
...I can only say: Look around you...
...This is why I think that some day we are going to have to come to a new social philosophy, which will go deeper into the true sources of man's prosperity than does our traditional attachment to free enterprise or does, for that matter, socialism, or communism, or the rationale of the European welfare state...
...Yet it is hard for the local community to retain its vitality when violent changes are constantly occurring in its composition and function...
...Today, we see all around us the chaotic and depressing effects of this failure on our part to insist on public responsibility for the control of processes that are certainly matters of public concern in their effects...
...on an appalling scale, dulling the creative faculties of millions of people, undermining the very talent for active recreation...
...In an article entitled "End of a Party" in The New Leader of March 28, J. B. Priestley mused that "the economic phase of politics had a beginning not so very long ago, and now we may be within sight of the end of it...
...This article is based on his commencement address at the New School for Social Research...
...Look at the state of our education, our recreational habits, and our cultural life...
...Look at the faces you see behind the endless streams of windshields on our highways...
...when the disorderly and uncontrolled development of our great urban areas is constantly rendering physical equipment obsolete and unsuited to new purposes to which commercial interests dictate that it should be put...
...With its characteristic staccato patterns, its lack of follow-through, and its endless abrupt transitions of theme, commercial entertainment has tended everywhere to weaken the faculty of concentration and to debauch the capacity for sustained and orderly thought...
...people...
Vol. 38 • June 1955 • No. 25
