Do We Need a National Purpose?
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
By Robert V. Daniels DO WE NEED A NATIONAL PURPOSE? Traditional values are inadequate to the problems of modern America In The Last six months we have seen the nation's press filled with...
...One was the shock to American complacency occasioned by the Russians' first sputnik in 1957...
...The trouble, however, is not the lack of some magic "purpose," but the inadequacy of many traditional American values and institutions, so that the nation's efforts cannot be effectively channelled to solve or alleviate the problems which we face...
...The panacea of reaffirming old American traditions, such as most of the national purpose writers prescribe, will only make it all the more difficult to think our way out of the maze of 20th-century problems...
...The sputnik set off a hysteria of national humiliation, and Galbraith had the answer—we had elevated our standard of living too successfully and starved all our public services...
...This is sound, but it goes beyond the limits of what is strictly national...
...These people are primarily local in their interests and when they do give attention to national affairs, they are hamstrung by formulas a century old...
...Ours is an immensely complex, pluralistic society animated by myriads of individual and group purposes...
...This is not a matter of the Federal bureaucracy, with its vast powers and responsibilities, but the attitude of the policy makers at every level of government...
...the local versus the Federal political instrument...
...By and large the national purpose talk is the response of many responsible and thoughtful people to the frustrations of an era when the most powerful nation on earth does not seem able to bring anything like the requisite vigor to bear in meeting its domestic and international problems...
...Will we uphold democracy and equality consistently...
...Robert V. Daniels has written The Conscience of the Revolution and A Documentary History of Communism...
...The primacy of the individual over the public approach has been the most conspicuously unbalanced aspect of American tradition and the one now subject to the sharpest criticism...
...Americans have no lack of purpose...
...Where the most thoughtful and sober conduct is demanded, we witness instead a sequence of immature slogans and frantic hysterias in American thinking about foreign affairs...
...Most of the recent commentators, however, make the mistake of blaming the people for their individualism, and reaffirming American tradition, when it is the tradition, rather than mass depravity, which is responsible for the excessively individualist approach from which we now suffer...
...We need something much more difficult to sustain—the critical honesty to see the truth about our society...
...American elective politics are still largely rooted in the local community and are dominated by an anachronistic class of small-town lawyers and businessmen together with equally backward city machine politicians...
...What people need is to be helped to recognize the need for more of the public approach to their common purposes, whether education, employment, housing, or medical care...
...Some of the national purpose discussion has unfortu-nately led to a more uncompromising nationalism, as though it were the exclusive American mission to fight Communism and to adopt every Communist technique of pressure and propaganda in the name of "freedom...
...Everywhere in the discussion of national purpose, and particularly in the Times-Life series, the Communist problem is adduced as the reason we must have a purpose, the Communists being presumably so purposive that they can be met successfully only by an equally purposive America...
...The inadequacy of American thought and action regarding the public interest can be traced directly to the second area of outworn tradition—the primacy of the local interest over the central in American political life...
...This habitual emphasis is no longer appropriate...
...We have not had any such firm sense of party purpose, let alone a real political philosophy, since the days of the New Deal...
...Everything since has been emergency problem-solving by people who intellectually have never left the 19th century...
...It is either a sham or a menace...
...Instead of "national purpose" we should be speaking of universal human purposes which Americans might promote through the agency of their government...
...They are the relation between individual and the public interest...
...Obviously we have a national purpose, or rather a nation-wide purpose, of which the advertisers are keenly aware...
...Why, then, all the hullabaloo about national purpose when nobody really wants what this implies...
...The Eisenhower years represent the climax of political irrelevancy, with a President who doesn't believe in anyone being a real President...
...it obstructs rather than facilitates the fulfillment of our purposes...
...Now a reaction has set in, and a series of modern American prophets has begun to warn of the national calamity that impends if the people do not rise above their individual pleasures...
...every step in the direction of alliances, foreign aid, etc., has to be justified as a contribution to our national interest and primarily for the negative aim of defending ourselves against Communism...
...The dynamic parts of American society are the nationwide organizations of all sorts and the mobile middle class which moves too much to get rooted in a community...
...Logically this will involve sacrifices which in the past this country has not been prepared to make...
...strictly speaking it is not "purpose" at all, but a propaganda gimmick, a sort of moral tonic, to serve the single negative aim of fighting Communism...
...Communism should stand as an object lesson in the evil of trying to discipline a nation to one official set of aims...
...The backwardness of American political life is all the more appalling in the light of the international problems which the country faces...
...Traditional values are inadequate to the problems of modern America In The Last six months we have seen the nation's press filled with breast-beatings about the absence or inadequacy of our "national goals" or "national purpose...
...It is wrong because, in reality, Communism gets very little strength from its ideology and pays an exorbitant price for it...
...Communism pursues national purpose at the expense of every human purpose...
...Three major areas can be singled out where tradition or habit impede this country's response to its problems...
...The retreat to tradition is a blind alley...
...To the average politician, the complex problems of the nation and the world, the intricacies of life in the network of corporate and federal bureaucracy, the puzzles of modernity run wild in the sprawling megalopolis, are incomprehensible if not irrelevant or antithetical...
...In practice we have made a considerable readjustment during the last three decades, though our oratory still hankers after the past...
...Now we seem to have reached the point where further progress demands the explicit rethinking of the requirements of the public interest, the Federal instrument and the international outlook...
...It is high time to outgrow the bugbear of "socialism," and allow ourselves to do what we need...
...The country needs leaders bold enough to call on it to pay more taxes for better public services in the realization that this is the best way to advance its most urgent purposes...
...It is illogical because it reduces "purpose" to an instrument in the contest with Communism...
...All the pious intentions of the White House and Congressional conservatives to turn governmental responsibilities over to the states cannot give rural-dominated state governments either the power or the desire to deal with complex nation-wide economic and social problems...
...The quest for some new overriding goal is an absurdity...
...We face a difficult time of revising these old axioms in order to realize the potential of the modern democratic way of life...
...The other was the publication, in 1958, of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, which will probably go down in American history as the most influential book of our generation...
...Certain deep-rooted American traditions—individual enterprise, states' rights, national sovereignty—are proving one-sided or inadequate in the face of 20th-century reality...
...To be sure, since 1941 vast progress has been made in accepting the realities of world politics and American's position therein, though the growth out of isolationism has not been without strains and relapses...
...Mass society, world polities and the complexly organized corporate economy have developed so far as to make individual action and responsibility futile...
...and the national as against the international outlook...
...Localism is the reason for the great failure in the realm of thinking about national or public purposes— the failure of the major political parties...
...The proper function of a political party is to offer the public its alternative of a national purpose—a party purpose, in effect—which may be accepted or rejected by the voters...
...The cities and the states and the men they send to Congress are obsolete...
...The problem of national purpose has now been in the public consciousness for more than a year—ever since Charles Percy, the Chicago camera-maker and Republican ideologist, persuaded President Eisenhower to put it in his 1959 State of the Union message...
...However, the national framework still prevails...
...This reasoning is both illogical and factually wrong...
...At the same time, many writers acknowledge the international character of the values which they want this country to defend...
...Traditionally we have been heavily unbalanced on the side of the individual, the local and the national...
...Cease tolerating dictators who don't threaten us...
...These groups are both under-represented in American politics and insufficiently controlled...
...Were we to make our own doctrine of national purpose truly effective by coercing every deviant individual into accepting it, we would have lost the battle by making ourselves so like the Communists that the difference would not be worth fighting about...
...In the absence of the Communist challenge our national intellectual slumber would be untroubled by worries about "purpose...
...Give up some sovereignty and submit to the World Court and UN taxes...
...Two major events stand out in the background of this singular development in American public life...
...National purpose" is clearly no answer to America's present political malaise...
...This is the direction in which the human purposes we share call for us to move, but here again tradition is the obstacle...
...The only healthy national purpose we can agree on is the purpose of providing the necessary protection and public services to enable these other purposes to be pursued...
...Their needs, problems and abuses evoke only apathy, suspicion or obstruction from the individualistic conservatives who dominate the legislatures...
...More money, more sex, more status, more health, more leisure—these make up the overriding aim of self- and family-indulgence that appears to animate the vast majority of Americans...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 34
