[925] “The Rise of a New World” is the subtitle of the German edition of Keyserling’s America Set Free, and is in every respect the most succinct résumé of the theme of the book. For this book is not purely and simply about America, any more than The Spectrum of Europe was purely and simply about Europe. It presents an extremely variegated picture that glitters in all the colours of the rainbow, sombre and gay, pessimistic and optimistic—a veritable spectrum, which is often more like a spectre, of America. The immediate cause of its birth is the abrasive surface of the transatlantic continent, across which Keyserling’s aerial and procreative spirit flew, crackling and striking sparks as it went. The book is like an independent organism that exhibits as many characteristic features of its mother as of its father. This is particularly evident in the fact that America has become for the author a symbol of the rise of a new world. At first it looks as if this “new world” was America, but at the end of the book it becomes clear that the new world includes old Europe—that is, ourselves. “The Rise of a New World” is as much concerned with Europe as with America, for the book is the product of the mutual impact of Keyserling and the United States. (Another book of his will deal with South America.2) One must bear this fact in mind, because it provides a clue to a correct understanding of the book’s subjectivity. It is not unintentionally subjective, as if by regrettable accident, but is meant to be so. To this it owes its dual aspect: America seen through European eyes. Unavoidably, European psychology is translated into American terms that sound foreign to our ears, and this gives rise to a disconcerting and fascinating play of light and shadow, through which two fundamentally incommensurable worlds are alternately compared and contrasted.
[926] Never before have I realized more clearly how difficult, if not impossible, it is fully to understand anything foreign, and to give an exhaustive account of it. A purely objective comparison would remain stuck in superficialities. Hence anyone who undertakes a comparison must call upon all his subjectivity for assistance if he is to produce a picture that will really tell us something about the foreigner. One should never read Keyserling in the belief that what he says about something is really so—or even that he thinks it is. Temperamental and downright as his utterances are, they are never hypostatizations. He simply expresses his opinion, and for this we can only be grateful. This book contains a wealth of the most deliberate, serious, and trenchant opinions, and there is every advantage to be gained from reflecting on them, even if one does not agree with them at first, if at all. Judging by my own experience of life in America, I have no fundamental objection to make against Keyserling’s views. I begin to have misgivings only when he sets foot on that most hazardous territory of all, namely that of prognosis. But apart from that, his picture of America is splendidly compendious. The most striking thing is the fact that—very much in contrast with his standpoint in The Spectrum of Europe—he lets the American earth have its say. The immensity and massiveness of the continent must have done something to him. He feels its primeval, not yet “humanized” character. He misses the “psychic atmosphere” in the North American landscape. “No gods have yet sprung from its union with man,” America has “no soul yet,” because the conquerors of a foreign land “may take their bodies with them, but not their souls.”
[927] This categorical judgment certainly sounds rather bleak, but Keyserling has said something very true which offers a key to the locked recesses of American psychology. His analysis does not, to be sure, penetrate to these depths, but it does move within the wide field of American phenomenology, which, from the psychological point of view, offers material that is well-nigh inexhaustible. The vastness of the continental land-mass, the preponderance of immense open spaces, produce, so the author thinks, an atmosphere which resembles that of Russia and Central Asia. This bold comparison is a leitmotif of the book, and it comes up again and again in his discussion of the contrasting parallel between American private enterprise and Russian Bolshevism. “[America’s] very spirit is one of width and vastness. This spirit of width and vastness is similar to that of Russia and Central Asia, and entirely different from that of Europe” (p. 70). That is why America might be compared, not with Europe, but with China (p. 73). For this reason America should not be ashamed of her Babbitts. “Babbitt ... is today the soundest and most reliable representative of the entire continent” (p. 75), precisely because he is the type who is closest to the earth. This type will survive and, in time, will cause all European, and particularly all Anglo-Saxon, influences to disappear.
[928] Keyserling regards the philosophers Emerson and William James as “contrasting ideologists” (p. 100). Dewey, on the other hand, he regards as the “most representative American” (p. 112), and the reasons he gives for this are not bad. He has an equally convincing view of the founder of Behaviourism, John B. Watson, as the American psychologist, and adds that his “psychology” means as little to the European as does Dewey’s “philosophy.” To make up for this, Dewey means all the more to the Asiatic (i.e., Russia and China), because his philosophy is really “psychology bent on education” (p. 113). The fact that Dewey’s importance extends even to Asia (an example being the educational reforms in China) proves the curious similarity of their respective psychic situations despite all the differences. Here again Keyserling, it seems to me, hits the mark, for in Asia as well as in the chaotic mixture of races and cultures in America there is a social and educational problem of first rank to be faced. The European emigrant is rejuvenated on American soil; in that primitive atmosphere he can revert to the psychological patterns of his youth—hence his adolescent psychology with all the educational problems this entails. As a matter of fact, the moral condition of post-war youth in America presents the country with an immense educational task, compared with which other cultural tasks that seem of more importance to the European must inevitably take second place.
[929] Keyserling considers that the ideal of a high living standard is the mainspring of American morality. It expresses itself in the idea of “social service,” and also in the idea of social welfare. Keyserling calls this the “animal ideal” (p. 158). “What animal, if it could think, would not enlist under the banner of the highest possible standard of living?” exclaims Keyserling (p. 164). And it is this ideal that constitutes the essential core of the typically American outlook on life: behaviourism. Watson is therefore “one of the foremost representatives of what the United States stood for in the twentieth century” (p. 167). At the same time, behaviourism provides the intellectual link with Bolshevist psychology. For this reason the American, for all his hustling, is mentally the most passive of men (p. 271), and “American civilization is the most uniform that has ever existed.” “The ideal of health, then, contributes in its turn to the animalization of the American. But the same is true of education as it is generally understood. It is becoming more and more a form of training such as animals can be submitted to.”
[930] This mental condition goes hand in hand with the lack of authority in the States. “The State and the Government are not considered as institutions ranging above the private individual. On the contrary, they are supposed to be mere executives of his will” (p. 235). “Every American citizen rejoices in [American political institutions] and will do his utmost to uphold their prestige in foreign countries. But as regards his own person he views them in a totally different light. At home he is, first and last, a private entrepreneur” (p. 236). “The United States are one gigantic Canton Appenzell—the most provincial province in Switzerland” (pp. 237–38).
[931] There is no lack of bons mots in this book, for instance the club-woman as the “aunt of the nation,” who does her best to deprive her naughty little nephew of alcohol, on the ground that it is injurious to health. There is also the crack about the “kindergarten” (p. 271) psychology of adult Americans, and many other entertainingly apt drolleries.
[932] The chapter on “The Overrated Child” seems to me the best in the book. “America,” we are told, “is fundamentally the land of the overrated child” (p. 267)—an expression of the nation’s youthfulness and at the same time an attempt to perpetuate it. What Keyserling has to say about the relation of the sexes and of members of the family to one another, and about parents, husbands and wives, marriage, the upbringing of children, the demasculinization of men and the masculinization of women is very well worth reading, not merely because it concerns America but because we Europeans can learn something from it of value to ourselves. Anyone who still does not know how much the American way of life is infecting Europe’s upper classes, just as Asiatic Bolshevism is seeping into European Communism, should take this opportunity to find out. Europe is dangerously close to becoming a mere hyphen between America and Asia. It cannot yet be said that the European has “only the fearful choice” between Americanization and Bolshevism. Europe, thank God, still exists in her own right. But we should realize all the more clearly how far the Americanization of the social upper crust has advanced. That is why I wish Keyserling as devoted a public in Europe as in America. Above all, one should not let oneself be irritated, even when it sometimes looks as if a nasty-tempered dog were mercilessly shaking its victim, or as if a universal schoolmaster were giving the boys good advice for their journey through life. One should never get annoyed with Keyserling, for at bottom he means it well. And how often he hits the mark! Everything he says about America from the European point of view may be arbitrary, cock-eyed, or just plain wrong, and yet the thoughtful European can derive plenty of stimulation from this book, not only for himself as a European, collective being, but for himself as an individual. After all, the American is a human being like ourselves, and his ideals and moral motives belong to the same Christian era as ours. Hence any criticism of him affects us as well. The reader will be particularly impressed by this in the final chapter, on “Spirituality.” Here Keyserling seems to be talking about America, but in reality he is making a profession of faith, and expressing a hope for the future, which apply to Europe in a higher sense than to America, although they are also of profound significance for any American living in a Christian era.
[933] It had never struck me so clearly before how much Keyserling is the mouthpiece of the collective spirit, until I read this chapter. One might easily expect from Keyserling, the “intellectual aristocrat,” lofty pronouncements borne along on the rarefied breezes that blow from the differentiated academic mind. But nothing of the sort happens here. On the contrary, he speaks of things that are not only remote from the academic mind, but are unknown to it and are even regarded with contempt. They are things which really do concern the psyche of modern man, which do not appear on the surface, but which become visible to anyone who is interested in the background and who has occasion to speak with people who usually do not talk very loudly. But the “silent ones in the land” are greater in number than the makers of noise. In this chapter, Keyserling speaks from the background, and to those who dwell in the background. Here he is no longer the enfant terrible, no longer the brilliant talker; here he grips you. We hear a Keyserling who commands attention, one who speaks with the voice of many, and so gives expression to a great time of change. The man of this age undoubtedly speaks through him when he rates understanding above faith and experience above a credo. The individual, “master of himself and freed from the shackles of tradition, is beginning to understand the old truths, in so far as they are truths which in earlier times were simply accepted on authority, in a new and personal way. At the very time when the old forms are disintegrating, advanced minorities are beginning to experience their essential meaning, their living and immortal substance, more profoundly than at any time since the golden age of Christianity, when Greek thinkers were giving shape to the Christian view of the world. This means nothing less than that the age of the Holy Ghost is now at hand” (p. 464).
[934] Who would have thought that? Or rather, who actually thinks like that? Who are these “advanced minorities”? Where are they? I will tell you: your next-door neighbours, the Meiers and the Müllers, of whom you would never have expected it, think like that. Sometimes they know it and sometimes they don’t. If they do, they conceal this knowledge more carefully than the worst scandal. Nowadays it is no longer the old-fashioned objects of modesty that are guarded by a feeling of shame, but a secret spirituality. There are millions of people today who make “spiritual” experiments on themselves, and who are so shamefully conscious of their incompetent and illegimate behaviour that more often than not they close their eyes to what they are doing. Their numbers justify Keyserling in speaking out so confidently, in saying something so unprecedented and so unbelievable that he should know that all Churches, all academies, all governments, and all joint-stock companies will shake their wise and venerable heads at it. How many of these “silent ones in the land” would dare to shake the good Count democratically by the hand on the strength of this confession?