The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohrt Mankind in a Modern Maze JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH is not a preacher, and though he has been around a good deal and has taught in various universities, he makes no...
...What is their purpose...
...They fear that if they were to say what they think, they would lose their customers and their incomes...
...Secure in this faith, he lived and worked and died without a worry...
...For a long time, however, he has been thinking about the great ladder of life—from the lichen up to mankind...
...It is a much more inspiring conception than the old one of the Garden of Eden with a little, limited God fussing about the business of making a man out of clay...
...It is into speculations about these things that this book offers to lead us...
...We have more and better clothes, food, houses and everything else imaginable...
...our decendents will be a miserable lot of creatures struggling for a mere animal existence...
...We have just begun to get an adequate notion of what we call human nature...
...Krutch remarks that people no longer join churches, but that churches join people...
...If our investigations into our inward nature keep pace with our rocketings into space, we may make even more wondrous discoveries...
...I shall not try to report Krutch's lines of thought...
...If we throw them overboard and have nothing to take their places, we are in a sad situation...
...What he means is that our people have their heads filled full of cheap and sleazy notions by our salesmen and advertisers and therefore our clergymen tone down their messages to make them fit in with what they find on hand...
...They study history, literature and the sciences...
...well-fed, well-housed animal will, in the end, satisfy no normal human being...
...My father was born in 1816, the year after the battle of Waterloo...
...Soon we shall have so many people that they cannot be decently fed and cared for...
...But the main question to which Krutch addresses himself is that put by the Psalmist: "What is man that thou art mindful of him...
...Understanding the world, learning why things go as they do and trying to make them go better are the last things anyone thinks about...
...He felt certain that men would go on becoming wiser and happier...
...Unless we very soon have sense enough to face up to the galloping birth rate...
...We are worried because the Russians got ahead of us in the rocket race, but we are not at all worried because so many of us are living just about on the level of rather smart, high-class animals...
...Take this point, for example...
...Sociologically we are stuck in a bottomless quagmire...
...We believe that man is merely the top creation of the great ladder of life...
...He would be astonished now if he could look over my shoulder and discover that we have here a learned and thoughtful man who seriously considers the possibility that sooner or later we shall blow ourselves to flinders...
...Anyone who wants to learn what he has to say can buy the book or ask for it at the desk of the public library...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohrt Mankind in a Modern Maze JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH is not a preacher, and though he has been around a good deal and has taught in various universities, he makes no pretenses in the field of philosophy...
...Or think of the millions of young people who go to college...
...Scientifically we go on by leaps and bounds—even if it kills us...
...It makes little difference what words you use...
...It explains in clear and lively terms the predicament in which the human race finds itself...
...Very soon we shall break through the envelope of air which has from the beginning kept us tied to the earth—and who knows what wonders lie before us...
...It has long been inevitable that sooner or later he would give us a book about his thinking in general...
...What do they get out of all their studies...
...Every scientific advance filled him with a deep and placid pleasure...
...All of the religions have been developed to satisfy cravings deep in the human heart...
...They are preparing themselves for a world where we make more things than we can sell...
...Life as a comfortable, well-dressed...
...In such a world, salesmanship and what we call public relations are the most highly rated arts...
...Let me say, merely, that it has made a deep impression upon me...
...And it is now here: Human Nature and the Human Condition (Random House, $3.95...
...We are all, of course, evolutionists...
...This is the sort of book which ordinary fellows ought to read and probably won't...
...Here we are—we Americans, for example—the richest nation that ever existed...
...In some respects we human beings have just now a special right to feel proud of ourselves...
...But with all this extra gear, all the gadgets and conveniences, we are unhappy and uncertain about all the deeper issues of life and death...
...He believed as thoroughly and happily in reason as his ancestors had believed in God and heaven...
...Man, at the top of this universe of myriads of creatures, has developed what we used to call a soul...
...Because we know-more than our ancestors did about physiology and medicine, the population of the world is, in the modern lingo, "exploding...
...A part of Krutch's argument is based on what scientific technology-has brought us to...
...Early in youth he threw overboard all the certainties of religion and developed a firm faith in the principles of science...
Vol. 43 • January 1960 • No. 1
