Inner Liberty in the Machine Age
VIERECK, PETER
Why human individuality is a blow to tyranny Inner Liberty in the Machine Age By Peter Viereck Between long intervals of dormancy, like seventeen-year locusts, artists and writers suddenly buzz...
...Let us recall not only Burke's words on the need for loyalty to one's own "little platoon" but also Synge's words, in the Ireland of 1907, on "the springtime of the local life," where the imagination of man is still "fiery and magnificent and tender...
...This kind of overadjust-ment does not mean merely the stampedes toward "normalcy" that have periodically characterized our less mechanized past...
...This moral wound, this cultural shock was even more important than the economic consequences...
...I feel as uncomfortable with the "responsibility" of the engage artist and poet as with the old bohemian irresponsibility pose...
...Holyoke College, is author of Conservatism Revisited, The Sluime and Glory of the Intellectuals and The Unadjusted Man...
...The sudden uprooting of archetypes was the most important consequences of the worldwide industrial revolution...
...In every city's "put Christ back into Christmas" campaign, the carols blare their anti-materialist reminder the loudest from the mechanical loudspeakers in the busy department stores...
...This requirement holds true even when the centralization is benevolent and even when the mass average replaces sub-average diversities...
...In contrast, consider this sentence...
...In an impersonal machine age, the fight is to preserve the concrete, the intimate, the inefficiently wayward...
...ultimately, freedom's advantage over totalitarianism lies in the greater imaginative resourcefulness of the non-specializing free individual...
...If that trend continues, then museums of the future will display, next to the dinosaur egg and the dodo, a glass case labeled: "Here is the last book, a strange object now extinct...
...freedom too important to leave to political theorizers...
...It is freer every time you feel spontaneous sympathy for strangers...
...Don't get me wrong...
...Nor are these examples any worse than a campus exquisite drawling: "We unfortunately miss in this book that rich surrealistic obscurity which our modern taste has been led to expect...
...families with television sets read fewer magazines than those who do not have them...
...The cultivation of poetry," wrote Shelley, "is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of selfish and calculating principle, the accumulations of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the laws of human nature...
...From being well-adjusted for its own sake, what a short step to becoming overadjusted: the public-relations personality of public smile, private blank...
...I don't condemn literature entirely...
...The fight is for the private life...
...11U values arc not determined by a democratic plebiscite: he may even be arrogant enough to retort, "One man and God make a majority...
...Indeed, in an atomic age, unless outer material power is assimilated to inner spiritual laws, all our efficient mechanization is merely paving our road to hell with good inventions...
...His refusal to adjust is a gesture beyond the need of colossal rhetoric...
...Peter Viereck, Pulitzer Prize poet and professor of history at Mt...
...The philistine conformist and the ostentatious professional nonconformist are alike in being rooted in nothing deeper than the thin topsoil of stereotypes...
...Perhaps such chumminess-ratings even imply an unconscious police mentality, an FBI not of compulsory lawfulness but of compulsory fun...
...The meaningful moral choice is not between conforming and nonconforming hut between conforming to the ephemeral, stereotyped values of the moment and conforming to the ancient, lasting archetypal values shared by all creative cultures...
...The uncomfortable feeling increases when patriotic propaganda is brought in, which surely the artist can leave to others, not because patriotism is unneeded but because he can serve it more permanently by deepening his insight and broadening his sensibility within his works of art...
...The Soviets recognize this in reverse...
...So doing, he serves the demands of moral responsibility, just because he does not moralize or propagandize...
...An amateurish life is a life of harmonious proportion...
...It is even a liberating political act— precisely because not intended politically...
...Capp s reply: "Professor Rapp haughtily dismisses my review as an "amateur statement.' I—gulp!—guess I am an amateur...
...Stereotypes have been manufactured out of the mechanical processes of mass production: quickly, painlessly, artificially...
...The Unadjusted Man is the final, irreducible grit that sabotages the omnipotence of even the smoothest running machine...
...It finds time to cultivate the complete human being, insisting on a balance between public and private duties, between outer and inner needs, between mental and emotional fulfilments...
...Clemenceau must have had this in mind when he remarked that "War is too important a matter to leave to generals...
...In effect, an ecstasy of universal lobotomy...
...4) Good adjustment...
...They were weapons of liberation in those davs because they gave their public what it did not expect...
...The distinction holds true whether the shuffling about be done by the a priori abstract rationalism of the 18th century or by the more inhuman and metallic mass production of the 19th, producing new traumas and new uproot-ings every time some new mechanized stereotype replaces the preceding one...
...On the more precious campuses and in the self-consciously advanced pages of the quarterlies, highbrow nonconformity has succumbed to its own kind of hacks as blithely as the lowbrow conformity of Screen Romances...
...In an age of boorish, narrow specialists and of efficient experts who do everything "too well" in unimaginative, slavish stereotypes, only the amateur leads a free and vital life...
...A recent New Yorker cartoon shows a wife complaining not because the husband has a holier-than-thou look but because he has a "better-adj usted-than-thou" look...
...In all these examples, the point is the change in what the burgher has been "led to expect...
...to play it too well is the sign of a misspent life...
...it becomes the prime determinant of human relationships, recreations, esthetic tastes and moral opinions...
...This choice between lowbrow and highbrow overadjustedness allows humanistic values the choice between being starved to death and being hugged to death...
...It is a documented statistical fact that in 14 million homes equipped with radios, "no magazines are read...
...Unadjustedness seems the only personal heroism left in the era of which William Faulkner said: "We all had better grieve for all people beneath a culture which holds any machine superior to any man...
...Educators are proudly "impressed" by the current growth of university courses in Great Classics, Great Issues and by the student shift from materialist radicalism to religion...
...They have been synthesized in the labs of the entertainment industries and in the blueprints of the social engineers...
...inasmuch as ivory towers are no longer bombproof...
...half the adults in America never buy books...
...But let him refuse as savagely as possible to lay down—in the name of "responsibility"—his dream life for his country...
...rather, the new trend means a bed-of-Procrustes, shaped by a continuous secret Gallup Poll, for whose pseudo-norms our genuine inner spontaneity is continually slaughtered...
...he is the non-technician, not yet deprived of creative imagination by expertise...
...Every overadjusted society swallows up the diversities of private bailiwicks, private eccentricities, private inner life, and the creativity inherent in concrete personal loyalties and in loving attachments to unique local roots and their rich historical accretions...
...The earth is a freer place to breathe in every time you love without asking or calculating any return...
...Why human individuality is a blow to tyranny Inner Liberty in the Machine Age By Peter Viereck Between long intervals of dormancy, like seventeen-year locusts, artists and writers suddenly buzz into the market place in loud droves, proclaiming: "Look, everybody...
...Such "confidential" classifications in many an American college may sometimes hound their unaware victims ever after, as inexorably as a confidential police dossier...
...A ghastly example in American education of this public-life fetish is the recommendation blank for Duke University...
...literature too important to leave to English departments...
...nor with the never-adjusted, the merely crotchety...
...To show I'm not exaggerating, here is a recent letter that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Dear Editor: I am 100 per cent in favor of the curtailment of library service...
...According to Mark Twain, to play billiards moderately well is the sign of a gentleman...
...Whatever work of art expresses ethics, beauty or love with genuine human individuality is thereby a blow against tyrants (whether Communists, fascists, or domestic American thought-controllers...
...To remain individual in an overadjusted society, start out, first of all, by being an amateur at everything, never a professional...
...2) Occasionally demonstrates inadequacies of adjustment...
...The depersonalization characterizing the present trend is the goal of adjustment as an end in itself...
...Three of the differing modes of creativity—religious, esthetic, intellectual—have this in common: They are what the individual does with his loneliness...
...Over-reading...
...5) Exceptionally stable and well-adjusted...
...nor with the flaunted grandstand-nonconformity of bohemia's "misunderstood genius" act...
...The contrast between institutions grown organically and those shuffled out of arbitrary rationalist liberalism was summed up by a British librarian on being asked for the French constitution: "Sorry, sir, but we don't keep periodicals...
...For it aspires beyond the propagandistic, the expedient and the temporary to the true and lasting aspect of things...
...his attempt to distinguish between such rival value-claims is a dilemma of tragic soul-searching, not of easy, conditioned answers...
...3) Satisfactory adjustment...
...It is freer every time you make your drudgeries and routines still more inefficient by taking plenty of time out to experience the shock of beauty, whether in nature, poetry, music or the fine arts...
...Even humor is too important to leave to its specialists...
...If socal adjustment were means, not ends, that would still allow for ultimate spontaneity and personality...
...Liberty depends on a substratum of fixed archetypes, as opposed to the arbitrary shuffling about of laws and institutions...
...They condemn the lyric poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak for the crime of expressing emotions of private love and loneliness, which are resented as a thorn in the side of a collectivist Utopia...
...And when anti-materialism gets publicized like toothpaste, when religion gets wrapped in cellophane, and God vended as an immortal tranquilizer pill, then commercial materialism wins its biggest triumph of all: a triumph in the name of anti-commercialism...
...Against this trend a salutary new spoilsport emerges, the Unadjusted Man...
...I have been so busy for the last eighteen years creating humor (effective enough at least to hold the daily attention of 40 million people) that I just ain't had any time to study up on how to do it...
...Even such machines for overadjustment as the women's fashion magazines have put the imprimatur of chide on "difficult" Southern avant-garde novelists...
...The Unadjusted Man rejects superficial norms not for rejection's sake but to serve valid ones...
...But the battleline reversed itself as soon as the public of the Big Magazines did expect "nonconformists in the Brando tradition" and as soon as the more rarefied public of the little magazines did expect surrealist obscurity...
...The first characteristic of the overadjusted public life is the refusal to read books...
...What characterizes the free spirit...
...The point is less frivolous than it may seem...
...The imagination of the artist requires private elbow room, free from the pressure of centralization and the pressure of adjustment to a mass average...
...he is a hero partiv because without heroic pose...
...Because of its spontaneous unpredictability, it is a gesture of free individualism against the predictable, unspontaneous blueprints of statism and totalitarianism...
...Thereupon the goal of adjustment, defensible and indeed indispensable as a social lubricant, becomes far more than that...
...But there is such a thing as over-reading...
...We may add: Atom bombs are too important to leave to scientists...
...A free society requires not only free ideals and free institutions but free personalities...
...Like every other citizen, the artist must be willing to "lay down his life for his country" when freedom is at stake...
...What is new today is the more sophisticated ability of the Overadjusted Man to masquerade as his opposite: namely as the unadjusted conserver of humanistic, artistic and religious values...
...There are too many interests in the world of entertainment today for people to bother chiefly with books...
...Yet being "responsible" will dry up the creative imagination if it merely means the respectable kind of responsibility...
...The free personality is an "amateur" in both senses of this word: He does things for love, not utility...
...Indeed, he is no hero at all in the eves of the majority but a laughable Don Quixote, loo unadjusted to be setlled down with a steady, productive windmill...
...In the long run, whatever enriches your inner sensibility with the unguessed surprises of beauty and love is a moral act...
...The alternative to these mere caricatures of the Unadjusted Man is a viewpoint more selective in its non-adjusting, a viewpoint whose coin has two reciprocal sides: adjustment to the ages, non-adjustment to the age...
...Intolerable is the very concept of some busybody benevolence, whether economic or moral, "curing" all diversity by making it average...
...On it, each applicant must be classified under one of five adjustment ratings: "(1) Very unstable and poorly adjusted...
...This distinction—between lasting roots and ephemeral surfaces—the Unadjusted Man is committed to try to make, even though gropingly, fallibly...
...Responsibility, yes, but responsibility to the universal laws of ethics and to the individual laws of integrity, not to the book sellers, the entertainment market known as "the public," the all too solid tastes of the "solid, tax-paying citizen...
...He spent the last year lecturing on American literature al the University of Florence...
...Not by political poems for freedom in the unfortunate manner of Edna Millay's Make Bright the Arrows, but by deepening his moral insight and humanity within the limits of the esthetic spirit, the artist serves the free spirit also—serves it absent-mindedly as it were, but all the more effectively...
...we've stopped being Irresponsibles...
...This is true whether you are a poet, scholar or political leader, whether you are an artist of life or love or billiards...
...Aggressive nonconformity in Emerson's day and surrealist obscurity in Joyce's day were a justified heroic revolt against philis-tino stereotypes...
...The word "nonconformity" has become so debased that one is no longer surprised to read, in an AP dispatch of October 3, 1955, a characterization of a movie star as "a nonconformist in the Marlon Brando tradition...
...From their viewpoint, the Soviets are right...
...More impressive is the fact that for these classics, these issues—now made gregarious, painless— their original creators toiled in loneliness, faced the rack...
...Archetypes have grown out of the soil of history: slowly, painfully, organically...
...The unadjusted should not be confused with the maladjusted, the psychiatric...
...Especially in this new era of television, who finds much time to read anything but a newspaper...
...The apt Carlylian rejoinder to this is: "Egad, you'd better...
...The easy conformity-baiting of adolescent radicalism refuses to adjust even to deep and valid norms...
...This article is based on a talk delivered at a recent Kenyon College ""Conference on Freedom...
...The learned Professor Albert Rapp, a professional scholar in the field of humor, in the letter column of the New York Times Book Review of February 4, 1951, accused cartoonist Al Capp, creator of "L'il Abner," of making "amateur statements" about humor and lacking (in Professor Rapp's own phrase) professional "status...
...to preserve the non-busy, the non-useful...
...His imagination overcomes the advantage in discipline that totalitarianism has over freedom...
...Thereupon avant-garde became one more rear guard: the arthritic somersaults of aging enfants terribles...
...to preserve the dawdling inner life, whether as the creatively alone or simply as the playfully private, the unapologetic fun of play...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 41
