One may paraphrase the famous words of Karl Marx and say that a specter is haunting the modern mind, the specter of insecurity. Surely the outstanding characteristic of contemporary thought on man and society is the preoccupation with personal alienation and cultural disintegration. The fears of the nineteenth-century conservatives in Western Europe, expressed against a background of increasing individualism, secularism, and social dislocation, have become, to an extraordinary degree, the insights and hypotheses of present-day students of man in society. The widening concern with insecurity and disintegration is accompanied by a profound regard for the values of status, membership, and community.
In every age there are certain key words which by their repetitive use and redefinition mark the distinctive channels of faith and thought. Such words have symbolic values which exert greater influence upon the nature and direction of men's thinking than the techniques used in the study or laboratory or the immediate empirical problems chosen for research. In the nineteenth century, the age of individualism and rationalism, such words as individual, change, progress, reason, and freedom were notable not merely for their wide use as linguistic tools in books, essays, and lectures but for their symbolic value in convictions of immense numbers of men. These words were both the outcome of thought and the elicitors of thought. Men were fascinated by their referents and properties.
All of these words reflected a temper of mind that found the essence of society to lie in the solid fact of the discrete individual—autonomous, self-sufficing, and stable—and the essence of history to lie in the progressive emancipation of the individual from the tyrannous and irrational statuses handed down from the past. Competition, individuation, dislocation of status and custom, impersonality, and moral anonymity were hailed by the rationalist because these were the forces that would be most instrumental in emancipating man from the dead hand of the past and because through them the naturally stable and rational individual would be given an environment in which he could develop illimitably his inherent potentialities. Man was the primary and solid fact; relationships were purely derivative. All that was necessary was a scene cleared of the debris of the past.
If there were some, like TaMe, Ruskin, and William Morris, who called attention to the cultural and moral costs involved—the uprooting of family ties, the disintegration of villages, the displacement of craftsmen, and the atomization of ancient securities—the apostles of rationalism could reply that these were the inevitable costs of Progress. After all, it was argued—argued by liberals and radicals alike—in all great ages of achievement there is a degree of disorder, a snapping of the ties of tradition and security. How else can the creative individual find release for his pent-up powers of discovery and reason if the chains of tradition are not forcibly struck off?
This was the age of optimism, of faith in the abstract individual and in the harmonies of nature. In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, what we are given, as Parrington points out in his great study of American thought, is the matchless picture of a child of nature revolting against the tyrannies of village, family, and conventional morality. It is a revolt characterized, not by apprehensiveness and insecurity, but by all the confidence of the frontier. In the felicities and equalities of nature Huck finds joyous release from the cloistering prejudices and conventions of old morality. Truth, justice, and happiness lie in man alone.
In many areas of thought and imagination we find like perspectives. The eradication of old restraints, together with the prospect of new and more natural relationships in society, relationships arising directly from the innate resources of individuals, prompted a glowing vision of society in which there would be forever abolished the parochialisms and animosities of a world founded upon kinship, village, and church. Reason, founded upon natural interest, would replace the wisdom Burke and his fellow conservatives had claimed to find in historical processes of use and wont, of habit and prejudice.
“The psychological process which social relations were undergoing,” Ostrogorski has written of the nineteenth century, “led to the same conclusions as rationalism and by the same logical path-abstraction and generalization.” Henceforth, man's social relations “were bound to be guided not so much by sentiment, which expressed the perception of the particular, as by general principles, less intense in their nature perhaps, but sufficiently comprehensive to take in the shifting multitudes of which the abstract social groups were henceforth composed, groups continually subject to expansion by reason of their continual motion.”1
Between philosophers as far removed as Spencer and Marx there was a common faith in the organizational powers of history and in the self-sufficiency of the individual. All that was needed was calm recognition of the historically inevitable. In man and his natural affinities lay the bases of order and freedom. These were the affirmations that so largely dominated the thought, lay as well as scholarly, of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. All of the enmity of the French Enlightenment toward the social relationships that were the heritage of the Middle Ages became translated, during the nineteenth century, into a theoretical indifference to problems of the relation of individual security and motivation to contexts of association and cultural norm. Both freedom and order were envisaged generally in terms of the psychology and politics of individual release from the old.
We see this in the social sciences of the age. What was scientific psychology but the study of forces and states of mind within the natural individual, assumed always to be autonomous and stable? Political science and economics were, in their dominant forms, concerned with legal and economic atoms—abstract human beings—and with impersonal relationships supplied by the market or by limited general legislation. All social and cultural differences were resolved by the rationalist into differences of quantity and intensity of individual passions and desires. The stability of the individual was a function of his unalterable instincts and his sovereign reason; the stability of society was guaranteed by the laws of historical change. The two goals of scientific universality and moral emancipation from the past became largely indistinguishable in the philosophy and the social science of the age. Bentham's boast that he could legislate wisely for all of India from the recesses of his own study was hardly a piece of personal eccentricity. It sprang from a confidence both in reason and in the ineradicable sameness and stability of individuals everywhere.
Above everything towered the rationalist's monumental conviction of the organizational character of history—needing occasionally to be facilitated, perhaps, but never directed—and of the self-sufficing stability of the discrete individual.
Two
Today a different set of words and symbols dominates the intellectual and moral scene. It is impossible to overlook, in modern lexicons, the importance of such words as disorganization, disintegration, decline, insecurity, breakdown, instability, and the like. ‘What the nineteenth-century rationalist took for granted about society and the nature of man's existence, as the result of an encompassing faith in the creative and organizational powers of history, the contemporary student of society makes the object of increasing apprehension and uncertainty.
At the present time there is in numerous areas of thought a profound reaction to the rationalist point of view. No longer are we convinced that basic organizational problems in human relations are automatically solved by readjustments of political or economic structures. There is a decided weakening of faith in the inherent stability of the individual and in the psychological and moral benefits of social impersonality. Impersonality, moral neutrality, individualism, and mechanism have become, in recent decades, terms to describe pathological conditions of society. Nearly gone is the sanguine confidence in the power of history itself to engender out of the soil of disorganization seeds of new and more successful forms of social and moral security.
A concern with cultural disorganization underlies almost every major philosophy of history in our time. The monumental historical synthesis of a Toynbee represents anew the effort of the prophetic historian to find in the casual forces of history meanings that will illuminate the darkness of the present age. Like St. Augustine's City of God, written to sustain the faith of fifth-century Christians, Toynbee's volumes, with all their magnificent learning and religious insight, are directed to the feelings of men who live beneath the pall of insecurity that overhangs the present age. One cannot resist the suspicion that for most of Toynbee's readers the governing interest is in the sections of A Study of History that deal not with genesis and development but with decline and disintegration. And it is hard to put aside the suspicion that Toynbee himself has reserved his greatest interpretative skill for the melancholy phenomena of death and decay, a circumstance which, like Milton's characterization of Satan, may bespeak an irresistible, if morally reluctant, love for his subject. Toynbee's cataloguing of historic stigmata of social dissolution—schism in society and the soul, archaism, futurism, and above all, the process of “deracination,” the genesis of the proletariat—reads like a list of dominant themes in contemporary thought.
Are not the works of the major prophets of the age, Niebuhr, Bernanos, Berdyaev, Sorokin, Spengler, and others, based foremost upon the conviction that ours is a sick culture, marked by the pathologies of defeat and failure of regenerative processes? Is it not extraordinary how many of the major novelists and poets and playwrights of the present age have given imaginative expression to themes of dissolution and decay—of class, family, community, and morality? Not only are these themes to be seen among the Titans—Proust, Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Eliot—but among a large and increasing number of secondary or popular writers. It is hard to miss the centrality of themes of dissolution in contemporary religious and literary expressions and the fascination that is exerted by the terminology of failure and defeat. Disaster is seen as the consequence of process rather than event, of “whimper” rather than “bang,” to use the words of T. S. Eliot.
How extraordinary, when compared with the optimism of half a century ago, is the present ideology of lament. There is now a sense of disorganization that ranges all the way from the sociologist's concern with disintegration of the family and small community to the religious prophet's intuition that moral decay is enveloping the whole of Western society. Premonitions of disaster have been present in all ages, along with millennial hopes for the termination of the mundane world. But the present sense of dissolution is of a radically different sort. It looks to no clear salvation and it is held to be the consequence neither of Divine decree nor of fortuitous catastrophe. It is a sense of disorganization that takes root in the very conditions which to earlier generations of rationalists appeared as the necessary circumstances of progress. Where the nineteenth-century rationalist saw progressively higher forms of order and freedom emerging from the destruction of the old, the contemporary sociologist is not so sanguine. He is likely to see not creative emancipation but sterile insecurity, not the framework of the new but the shell of the old.
There is a large and growing area of psychology and social science that emphasizes this contemporary preoccupation with disintegration and disorganization. Innumerable studies of community disorganization, family disorganization, personality disintegration, not to mention the myriad investigations of industrial strife and the dissolution of ethnic subcultures and “folk” areas, all serve to point up the idea of disorganization in present-day social science. The contemporary student of man is no more able to resist the lure of the evidences of social disorganization than his nineteenth-century predecessor could resist the manifest evidences of creative emancipation and reorganization. However empirical his studies of social relationships, however bravely he rearranges the semantic elements of his terminology to support belief in his own moral detachment, and however confidently he may sometimes look to the salvational possibilities of political legislation for moral relief, it is plain that the contemporary student of human relations is haunted by perceptions of disorganization and the possibility of endemic collapse.2
Three
A further manifestation of the collapse of the rationalist view of man, and even more revealing, is the conception of man's moral estrangement and spiritual isolation that pervades our age. Despite the influence and power of the contemporary State there is a true sense in which the present age is more individualistic than any other in European history. To examine the whole literature of lament of our time—in the social sciences, moral philosophy, theology, the novel, the theater—and to observe the frantic efforts of millions of individuals to find some kind of security of mind is to open our eyes to the perplexities and frustrations that have emerged from the widening gulf between the individual and those social relationships within which goals and purposes take on meaning. The sense of cultural disintegration is but the obverse side of the sense of individual isolation.
The historic triumph of secularism and individualism has presented a set of problems that looms large in contemporary thought. The modern release of the individual from traditional ties of class, religion, and kinship has made him free; but, on the testimony of innumerable works in our age, this freedom is accompanied not by the sense of creative release but by the sense of disenchantment and alienation. The alienation of man from historic moral certitudes has been followed by the sense of man's alienation from fellow man.
Where the lone individual was once held to contain within himself all the propensities of order and progress, he is now quite generally regarded as the very symbol of society's anxiety and insecurity. He is the consequence, we are now prone to say, not of moral progress but of social disintegration.
Frustration, anxiety, insecurity, as descriptive words, have achieved a degree of importance in present-day thought and writing that is astonishing. Common to all of them and their many synonyms is the basic conception of man's alienation from society's relationships and moral values. If in Renaissance thought it was the myth of reasonable man which predominated; if in the eighteenth century it was natural man; and, in the nineteenth century, economic or political man, it is by no means unlikely that for our own age it is alienated or maladjusted man who will appear to later historians as the key figure of twentieth-century thought. Inadequate man, insufficient man, disenchanted man, as terms, reflect a multitude of themes in contemporary writing. Thus Berdyaev sees before him in the modern world the “disintegration of the human image”; Toynbee sees the proletarian, he who has lost all sense of identity and belonging; for Ortega y Gasset it is mass man, the anonymous creature of the market place and the mass ballot; for John Dewey, it is the lost individual—bereft of the loyalties and values which once endowed life with meaning.
“The natural state of twentieth-century man,” the protagonist of a recent novel declares, “is anxiety.” At the very least, anxiety has become a major state of mind in contemporary imaginative writing. Underlying many works is the conception of man as lost, baffled, and obsessed. It is not strange that for so many intellectuals the novels and stories of Franz Kafka should be, or have been until recently, the basis of almost a cult. Whatever the complexity and many-sidedness of Kafka's themes, whatever the deepest roots of his inspiration, such novels as The Trial and The Castle are, as many critics have observed, allegories of alienation and receding certainty. The residual meaning of these novels may well be man's relation to God, a universal and timeless theme. But it is nearly impossible not to see them also as symbolizations of man's effort to achieve status, to uncover meaning in the society around him, and to discover guilts and innocences in a world where the boundaries between guilt and innocence become more and more obscured. The plight of Kafka's hero is the plight of many persons in the living world: isolation, estrangement, and the compulsive search for fortresses of certainty and the equities of judgment.
The theme of the individual uprooted, without status, struggling for revelations of meaning, seeking fellowship in some kind of moral community, is as recurrent in our age as was, in an earlier age, that of the individual's release from the pressure of certainty, of his triumph over tribal or communal laws of conformity. In a variety of ways this contemporary theme finds its way into popular writing, into the literature of adventure and the murder mystery. The notion of an impersonal, even hostile, society is common—a society in which all actions and motives seem to have equal values and to be perversely detached from human direction. Common too is the helplessness of the individual before alien forces—not the hero who does things but, as Wyndham Lewis has put it, the hero to whom things are done. The disenchanted, lonely figure, searching for ethical significance in the smallest of things, struggling for identification with race or class or group, incessantly striving to answer the question, “Who am I, What am I,” has become, especially in Europe, almost the central literary type of the age.
Not even with Richard III’s sense of bleak triumph does the modern protagonist cry out, “I am myself alone.” Where in an earlier literature the release of the hero from society's folkways and moral injunctions and corporate protections was the basis of joyous, confident, assertive individualism, the same release in contemporary literature is more commonly the occasion for morbidity and obsession. Not the free individual but the lost individual; not independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not to conquer but to be conquered: these are major states of mind in contemporary imaginative literature.
They are not new ideas. A whole school of literary criticism has devoted itself in recent years to the reinterpretation of writers in other ages who, like Hawthorne, Melville, and Dostoevsky, portrayed the misery of estrangement, the horror of aloneness.3 In Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich and in almost all of Dostoevsky's novels we learn that the greatest of all vices is to claim spiritual and moral autonomy and to cast off the ties that bind man to his fellows. So too in the theological writings of Kierkegaard there is luminously revealed the dread reality of man, solitary and tormented, in a hostile universe. In the writings of the Philosophical Conservatives, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, the vision was central of man's isolation and impotence once he had got loose from society's traditions and moral constraints. Far from being new ideas these are as old as moral prophecy itself.
What is now so distinctive about these ideas is their penetration into so many areas of thought which, until recently, stressed a totally different conception of the nature of man. For a long time in modern European thought the rationalist view of self-sufficing, self-stabilizing man was ascendant in moral philosophy, Protestant theology, and social science. Few were the works that did not take the integrity and self-sufficiency of man before God as almost axiomatic. But now in widening spheres of thought we find a different concept of man.
Thus the theologian Paul Tillich sees before him in the Western world today a culture compounded not of traditional faith and confidence, but one agitated by feelings of fear and anxiety, uncertainty, loneliness, and meaninglessness. So long as a strong cultural heritage existed, and with it a sense of membership, the modern ethic of individualism was tolerable. “But when the remnants of a common world broke down, the individual was thrown into complete loneliness and the despair connected with it.”4
Historically, Protestantism has given its emphasis to the immediacy of the individual to God, and, in theory, has relied little on the corporate nature of ecclesiastical society or the principle of hierarchical intermediation. Popularly, religion was directed not to Kierkegaard's solitary, tormented individual, alone in a hostile universe, but to the confident, self-sufficing man who carried within himself the seeds not only of faith and righteousness but of spiritual stability as well.
But this faith in the spiritual integrity of the lone individual is perceptibly declining in much Protestant thought of the present time. Today there are many leaders of the Protestant churches who have come to realize the inadequacy and irrelevance of the historic emphasis upon the church invisible and the supposedly autonomous man of faith. “It is this autonomous individual who really ushers in modern civilization and who is completely annihilated in the final stages of that civilization,” declares Reinhold Niebuhr.5
Behind the rising tide of alienation and spiritual insecurity in contemporary society, more and more theologians, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant alike, find the long-celebrated Western tradition of secular individualism. The historic emphasis upon the individual has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationships that must in fact uphold the individual's own sense of integrity. Buber, Maritain, Brunner, Niebuhr, and Demant are but the major names in the group that has come to recognize the atomizing effects of the long tradition of Western individualism upon man's relation to both society and God. “When the relation between man and God is subjective, interior (as in Luther) or in timeless acts and logic (as in Calvin) man's utter dependence upon God is not mediated through the concrete facts of historical life,” writes Canon Demant.6 And when it is not so mediated, the relation with God becomes tenuous, amorphous, and insupportable.
For more and more theologians of today the solitary individual before God has his inevitable future in Jung's “modern man in search of a soul.” Man's alienation from man must lead in time to man's alienation from God. The loss of the sense of visible community in Christ will be followed by the loss of the sense of the invisible. The decline of community in the modern world has as its inevitable religious consequence the creation of masses of helpless, bewildered individuals who are unable to find solace in Christianity regarded merely as creed. The stress upon the individual, at the expense of the churchly community, has led remorselessly to the isolation of the individual, to the shattering of the man-God relationship, and to the atomization of personality. This is the testimony of a large number of theologians in our day.
So too in the social sciences has the vision of the lost individual become central. It was the brilliant French sociologist Emile Durkheim who, at the beginning of the present century, called attention to the consequences of moral and economic individualism in modern life. Individualism has resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals who lose even the capacity for independent, creative living. The highest rates of suicide and insanity, Durkheim discovered, are to be found in those areas of society in which moral and social individualism is greatest.
Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration in society. Hence, as Durkheim pointed out in studies which have been confirmed by the researches of many others, there is a higher rate of suicide among Protestants, among urban dwellers, among industrial workers, among the unmarried, among, in short, all those whose lives are characterized by relative tenuousness of social ties.7
When the individual is thrown back upon his own inner resources, when he loses the sense of moral and social involvement with others, he becomes prey to sensations of anxiety and guilt. Self-destruction is frequently his only way out. Such sensations, Durkheim concluded from his studies of modern society, are on the increase in Western society. For, in the process of modern industrial and political development, established social contexts have become weak, and fewer individuals have the secure interpersonal relations which formerly gave meaning and stability to existence.
At the present time, in all the social sciences, the various synonyms of alienation have a foremost place in studies of human relations. Investigations of the “unattached,” the “marginal,” the “obsessive” the “normless,” and the “isolated” individual all testify to the central place occupied by the hypothesis of alienation in contemporary social science.
In studies of the aged, the adolescent, and the infant; of marriage, the neighborhood, and the factory; of the worker, the unemployed, the intellectual, and the bureaucrat; of crime, insanity, alcoholism, and of mass movements in politics, the hypothesis of alienation has reached an extraordinary degree of importance. It has become nearly as prevalent as the doctrine of enlightened self-interest was two generations ago. It is more than a hypothesis; it is a perspective.
Thus Elton Mayo and his colleagues, in their pioneering studies of industrial organization in the Western Electric plant, found that increasingly modern industry tends to predispose workers to obsessive responses, and the number of unhappy individuals increases. “Forced back upon himself, with no immediate or real social duties, the individual becomes a prey to unhappy and obsessive personal preoccupations.” There is something about the nature of modern industry that inevitably creates a sense of void and aloneness. The change from what Mayo calls an established to an adaptive society has resulted for the worker in a “profound loss of security and certainty in his actual living and in the background of his thinking…. Where groups change ceaselessly, as jobs and mechanical processes change, the individual experiences a sense of void, of emptiness, where his fathers knew the joy of comradeship and security.”8
Similarly in innumerable studies of the community, especially the urban community, the process of alienation is emphasized. “The urban mode of life,” we read, “tends to create solitary souls, to uproot the individual from his customs, to confront him with a social void, and to weaken traditional restraints on personal conduct…. Personal existence and social solidarity in the urban community appear to hang by a slender thread. The tenuous relations between men, based for the most part upon a pecuniary nexus, make urban existence seem very fragile and capable of being disturbed by a multitude of forces over which the individual has little or no control. This may lead some to evince the most fruitful ingenuity and heroic courage, while it overpowers others with a paralyzing sense of individual helplessness and despair.”9
Perceptions of alienation are not confined to studies of Western urban culture. In recent years the attention of more and more anthropologists has been focused on the effects that Western culture has had upon the lives and thought of individuals in preliterate or folk societies. The phenomenon of detribalization has of course been long noted. But where most early students of native cultures were generally reassured by the preconceptions of rationalism, seeing in this detribalization the manifold opportunities of psychological release and cultural progress, recent students have come more and more to emphasize the characteristics of alienation which are the consequence of the destruction of traditional groups and values.
It has become apparent to many anthropologists that the loss of allegiance to caste, clan, tribe, or community—a common consequence of what Margaret Mead has called the West's “psychic imperialism”—coupled with the native's inability to find secure membership in the new modes of authority and responsibility, leads to the same kind of behavior observed by sociologists and psychologists in many Western areas. “The new individual,” writes one anthropologist, himself a South African native, “is in a spiritual and moral void. Partial civilization means…a shattering of ancient beliefs and superstitions. They are shattered but not replaced by any new beliefs. Customs and traditions are despised and rejected, but no new customs and traditions are acquired, or can be acquired.”10 So too have the more recent observations and writings of such anthropologists as Malinowski, Thurnwald, and many others emphasized the rising incidence of personal alienation, of feelings of insecurity and abandonment, among individuals in native cultures throughout the world.
In no sphere of contemporary thought has the image of the lost individual become more dominant and directive than in the fields of psychiatry and social psychology. A large number of pathological states of mind which, even a short generation ago, were presumed to be manifestations of complexes embedded in the innate neurological structure of the individual, or to be the consequence of some early traumatic experience in childhood, are now widely regarded as the outcome of a disturbed relation between the individual patient and the culture around him. The older rationalist conception of stable, self-sufficing man has been replaced, in large measure, by a conception of man as unstable, inadequate, and insecure when he is cut off from the channels of social membership and clear belief. Changes and dislocations in the cultural environment will be followed by dislocations in personality itself.
From the writings of such psychiatrists as Karen Homey, Erich Fromm, and the late Harry Stack Sullivan we learn that in our culture, with its cherished values of individual self-reliance and self-sufficiency, surrounded by relationships which become ever more impersonal and by authorities which become ever more remote, there is a rising tendency, even among the “normal” elements of the population, toward increased feelings of aloneness and insecurity. Because the basic moral values of our culture come to seem more and more inaccessible, because the line between right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, becomes ever less distinct, there is produced a kind of cultural “set” toward unease and chronic disquiet.
From such “normal” conditions arise the typical neuroses of contemporary middle-class society. The neurotic is, quite generally, the human being in whom these sensations of disquiet and rootlessness become chronic and unmanageable. He is the victim of intensified feelings of insecurity and anxiety and intolerable aloneness. From his conviction of aloneness he tends to derive convictions of the hostility of society toward him. Many a psychiatrist has observed with Karen Homey that among neurotics there is, in striking degree, “the incapacity to be alone, varying from slight uneasiness and restlessness to a definite terror of solitude…. These persons have the feeling of drifting forlornly in the universe, and any human contact is a relief to them.”11
What is of importance here is not so much the diagnoses of neurosis which are to be found in the writings of the new school of psychiatry but, rather, the implied diagnosis or evaluation of the society in which neurotics live. Two generations ago when the foundations of clinical psychiatry were being laid by Freud, there was, for all the keen interest in neurotic behavior, little doubt of the fundamental stability of society. Then, the tendency was to ascribe neurotic behavior to certain conflicts between the nature of man and the stern demands of a highly stable, even oppressive, society. This tendency has not, to be sure, disappeared. But it is now matched, and probably exceeded, by tendencies to ascribe the roots of neurosis to the structure of society itself. The human person has not been forgotten, but more and more psychiatrists are prone to follow Harry Stack Sullivan in regarding personality as but an aspect of interpersonal relations and personality disorders as but manifestations of social instability. And with these judgments there is the further, more drastic judgment, that contemporary society, especially middle-class society, tends by its very structure to produce the alienated, the disenchanted, the rootless, and the neurotic.
Four
Despite the matchless control of physical environment, the accumulations of material wealth, and the unprecedented diffusion of culture in the lives of the masses, all of which lend glory to the present age, there is much reason for supposing that we are already entering a new Age of Pessimism. More than one prophet of our day has discovered contemporary relevance in Sir Gilbert Murray's celebrated characterization of the ancient Athens that lay in the wake of the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars as suffering from a “failure of nerve.” Ours also is an age, on the testimony of much writing, of amorphous, distracted multitudes and of solitary, inward-turning individuals. Gone is the widespread confidence in the automatic workings of history to provide cultural redemption, and gone, even more strikingly, is the rationalist faith in the individual. Whether in the novel, the morality play, or in the sociological treatise, what we are given to contemplate is, typically, an age of uncertainty, disintegration, and spiritual aloneness.
To be sure it is by no means certain how far the preoccupations of intellectuals, whether novelists or sociologists, may be safely regarded as an index to the conditions of a culture at large. It may be argued that in such themes of estrangement we are dealing with rootless shadowy apprehensions of the intellectual rather than with the empirical realities of the world around us. Extreme and habitual intellectualism may, it is sometimes said, produce tendencies of a somewhat morbid nature—inner tendencies that the intellectual is too frequently unable to resist endowing with external reality.
Doubtless there is something in this diagnosis. The prophet, whether he be theologian or social scientist, is necessarily detached in some degree from the common currents of his age. From this detachment may come illuminative imagination and insight. But from this same detachment may come also an unrepresentative sense of aloneness, of alienation. However brilliant the searchlight of imagination, the direction of its brilliance is inevitably selective and always subjective to some extent.
Nevertheless, making all allowance for the possibly unrepresentative nature of much of the literature of decline and alienation, we are still left with its astonishing diversity and almost massive clustering in our age. Were themes of isolation and disintegration confined to a coterie, to writers manifestly of the ivory tower, there would be more to support the view of the unrepresentative nature of the present literature of lament. But such themes extend beyond the area of imaginative literature and moral prophecy. They are incorporated in the works of those who are most closely and empirically concerned with the behavior of human beings.
Nor can we overlook the fact that between the mind of the intellectual and the interests and cravings of the public there is always a positive connection of some kind. We need not go as far as Toynbee, Mannheim, and T. S. Eliot in their conceptions of creative minorities, elites, and classes to recognize that in any society there is a close and continuing relation between the actual condition of a culture and the image of that culture which directs the minds of its intellectual leaders—its philosophers, artists, scientists, and theologians. In the nineteenth century and for a decade or two after, the intellectual's faith in the inevitability of progress and the self-sufficiency of man were matched by broad, popular convictions. And in the mid-twentieth century there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that philosophical intimations of alienation and dissolution are set in a context of analogous mass intimations.
There are of course prophets of optimism who find hope in the monumental technological achievements of the age and in the manifest capacity of our industrial machine to provide food and comfort for the many. Such minds see in present conditions of social and moral distress only an ephemeral lag between man's still incompletely evolved moral nature and his technological achievements. In the long run, it is argued, the material progress of society will not be denied, and with the diffusion of material goods and technical services there will be an ever constant lessening of present disquietudes.
But it has become obvious, surely, that technological progress and the relative satisfaction of material needs in a population offer no guarantee of the resolution of all deprivations and frustrations. Human needs seem to form a kind of hierarchy, ranging from those of a purely physical and self-preservative nature at the bottom to needs of a social and spiritual nature at the top. During a period when a population is concerned largely with achieving satisfaction of the lower order of needs—satisfaction in the form of production and distribution of material goods—the higher order of needs may scarcely be felt by the majority of persons. But with the satisfaction of the prime, material needs, those of a social and spiritual nature become ever more pressing and ever more decisive in the total scheme of things. Desires for cultural participation, social belonging, and personal status become irresistible and their frustrations galling. Material improvement that is unaccompanied by a sense of personal belonging may actually intensify social dislocation and personal frustration.
“The true hallmark of the proletarian,” Toynbee warns us, “is neither poverty nor humble birth, but a consciousness—and the resentment which this consciousness inspires—of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society and being unwanted in a community which is his rightful home; and this subjective proletarianism is not incompatible with the possession of material assets.”12
Whether or not it is the presence of the machine and its iron discipline that creates, as so many argue in our day, the conditions of depersonalization and alienation in modern mass culture, the fact is plain that the contemporary sense of anxiety and insecurity is associated with not merely an unparalleled mechanical control of environment but, more importantly, with widespread faith in such control. Fears of famine, pestilence, destruction, and death have been present in all ages and have been allayed by appropriate mechanisms of relief. What is so striking about the present sense of anxiety is that it has little determinable relation to these timeless afflictions and is rooted in an age when their control has reached unprecedented heights of success.
It is impossible to escape the melancholy conclusion that man's belief in himself has become weakest in the very age when his control of environment is greatest. This is the irony of ironies. Not the most saturnine inhabitant of Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, not even the author of that nineteenth-century dirge, The City of Dreadful Night, foresaw the Devil in the guise he has taken.