Discipline as the Essence of a Meaningful Life

[If nothing else, my father was a disciplined man, as evidenced by his journal writing itself, as well as by the prodigious reading, writing and scholarship practices that his journal entries reveal. In this brief entry, he contemplates “discipline” in two senses of the word — as a field or philosophy to which one dedicates himself, as well as the efforts and practices that one expends in pursuit of that cause. He ends with an interesting take on the role of the artist, working in the space between the disciplines of religion and science. (My father wrote this entry at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he had been transferred for additional infantry training.)]

January 23, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

The compelling need in every man’s life is for a discipline. The best-integrated and most productive lives are those which are built around the sternest disciplines. I thought of this tonight while watching Jose Iturbi play the piano in “Music For Millions.” “There’s a man,” I said to myself, “who’s[sic] life means something to himself and to many other people. That’s because it’s a disciplined life concentrated towards a well-defined end. It doesn’t waste itself.”

In religion, it isn’t this particular creed or that certain dogma which really matters, and those who see nothing but the creed and dogma have not grasped the essence of their religion. That essence is discipline, as it is also the essence of art, and the essence of scholarship.

Every life observes some discipline, but in most lives these are disciplines of a low order, the animal regimen of feeding and sleeping and sex release. These can almost be called reflexes, the biological habits by which life has maintained itself since its mysterious appearance on earth.

The higher disciplines are those which employ the human mind, or call for a conscious refinement and orientation of the emotions. At a middle stage are such disciplines as those of the military man, or the skilled technological worker. Minds which can no longer respect religion for its truth must still admire its discipline in the many great men and women who are still among its adherents. The scientist, after all, is basically at one with the profoundly religious man in his devotion to a system of laws. There is something in certain areas of science, however, which excludes certain religious experience, and in religion, likewise, something which will not admit all of science. The great artist, it seems to me, stands between science and religion, and is capable of using experience from both in his own greatest discipline, the discipline of creation.

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Business-Government Imbalance Poses Potentially Fatal Risks

[This entry begins with an analysis of the interplay between government and business in communist and fascist countries, and contrasts that interplay with America’s historically more-balanced model. From that foundation, my father revisits one of his favorite themes — the importance of individual self-expression and creativity — and discusses how America has done better than most in cultivating and nourishing the individual. Near the entry’s end, however, he cautions that “A society is thrown fatally out of balance when one group within it accumulates the power to deny expression to all conflicting interests.”

Sadly, in our current electoral season, corporations have been given carte blanche by the U.S. Supreme Court to spend endlessly and anonymously to promote their preferred candidates and causes. While Tea Partiers and other right-wing zealots worry endlessly about Big Government, they seem completely oblivious to the threat that Big Business poses to our democratic institutions (to say nothing of the threat to their own self interests…). Perhaps we’ve already reached the tipping point where American democracy is beginning to spin “fatally out of balance.”

September 10, 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

Call government the chicken and business the egg. Then ask which came first, the chicken or the egg. In the Communist state it was the chicken, nor was this simply a matter of chance. In Russia at the time of the Revolution there was only a comparatively small industrial plant, and its owners were on the losing side. So, entirely aside from the Marxist theories, it was quite natural that the political organization should come first, and that it should assume complete control of the development of the nation’s industry, making it a state enterprise. Nor is it strange that the Communist leaders should believe that their way was the best way. They made it work.

In Germany after the World War, the ruling class, mostly in the person of the Kaiser, was eliminated, but German industry, already highly developed, and not greatly damaged by war, remained in the hands of its pre-war owners. Thus they, by default, became the top-dogs in Germany, and controlled the government as they saw fit. This was the prime condition of Fascism. These businessmen picked Hitler as the best front-man available, and have perhaps lived to regret their choice. But that’s debatable, since it isn’t quite clear that Hitler has ever got completely out of hand, or crossed them up badly.

In the United states, the question of the chicken and the egg remains a riddle. Business and government, through the historical accident by which our state was established at the beginnings of the industrial revolution, have grown up together and though the preponderance of power has sifted back and forth during the years, they’ve never been completely out of balance with each other. It’s this system of constantly-maintained balance between business and government which we’ve come to call democracy. It’s an extension of the system of checks and balances which was written into the original Constitution, and which is probably one of the most fruitful social theories ever formulated. Though we may have acquired it partly through accident, it’s very important today that we understand its value and function, so that we’ll be the stronger to dismiss all temptations to destroy it.

The Communist and Fascist states are both built to ignore the most pressing need of modern society, which is the need for individual self-expression. The leaders of these states have become fascinated with the idea of the mass, and have forgotten that the strength of the mass is in its individual members. And though, for a limited time, and under special conditions, it may be possible to inspire mass movements of considerable force, there is nothing more permanent in such a movement than in the display of the pent-up force in a released rocket. Both are brilliant, and soon spent.

Democratic society has few moments of this type of hysterical mass movement and in these moments it’s the least democratic. The crude techniques of mass appeal have no place in a democratic system, and should be avoided except as a last expedient at times when the state is threatened by outside force. Even then such appeals should be strongly salted with emphasis on the individual.

For the end of democratic society has never been conceived as the power of the state, but as the opportunity and happiness of the individual citizen. In a civilization which seems peculiarly suited to the creation of great Force-States, this democratic theory may appear almost archaic, and certainly very fragile. But the facts don’t bear out this fear. The United States is today the most powerful state in the world, and at the same time, among the large nations, the most democratic. We have demonstrated that mass effort can be demanded of millions of individuals without destroying their individuality. The danger among us now is that fascination with the material power we’ve built for ourselves will make us forget that the main source of this power is in the individual who is free to think for himself, and, to a large degree, free to direct his own creative activities.

In any society it’s always been hard to find a way of guaranteeing a practical degree of freedom to every adult individual, and most societies haven’t even attempted to find such a way. Industrial society, perhaps, makes it at the same time more possible and more difficult than ever before. The material and mechanical means exist which can free men from slavery to the labor of maintaining a bare subsistence. But these same means can also be used to subject men to the most terrible slavery in history. This is the slavery which makes them not slaves of themselves, or of other men, but of the machine. All human quality is sapped out of this relationship, and men can be brutalized to a point where they are themselves nothing more than machines. Something of this sort has happened to the leaders of the Nazi state.

The safest state of affairs exists in a society where no element or interest is completely satisfied, and no one is completely denied satisfaction, where everyone has an opportunity to voice his own desires and have their merits submitted to a forum of the whole. A society is thrown fatally out of balance when one group within it accumulates the power to deny expression to all conflicting interests. In such a society, sufficiency is sacrificed to efficiency. The machine-quality displaces the human-quality. Such a society cannot last…

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Nazi Philosophy of Destruction versus Christian Morality

[The Nazi strategy of destroying towns and villages while retreating has my father contemplating the importance of Christian morality — and its emphasis on creativity — as a countervailing force. Although my father didn’t adhere to some of Christianity’s core faith beliefs and symbols, he recognized the importance to the war effort of the moral system that these beliefs promoted.]

October 8, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

The shape of the Nazi scheme for the great withdrawal to the Fatherland begins to appear in the utter destruction they are leaving behind them in Russia and Italy. They will not return to the places they’re leaving now, and they know it. So they will attempt to stamp death indelibly upon all the places they have occupied, – to drag all of Europe down into hell, as Hitler has already threatened. We have heard for months of the rape of Russia, of the systematic destruction of all that represents civilization. There are no military objectives for the Germans. Just this morning we read that in Naples hundreds of tons of high explosive, planted in the basement of the post office, exploded yesterday, killing hundreds of people.

This is the way it will be all across Europe as the Nazis retreat. Towns will be completely blotted out, and great cities reduced to rubbish. The terror in Europe will grow more intense, as the advances of the Allied armies will come to mean not liberation, but torture and death. People will not dare to stay in their own homes, for fear that they will blow up. Water supplies will be polluted; there will be no food.

From our point of view this is senseless, and utterly criminal, but to the Nazi mind it probably appears as the supreme logic of their philosophy. For it would seem that that inner drive, which in most civilized human beings has been turned to creative ends, has been perverted in the Nazi mentality to a terrible force of destruction. It is possible that a Nazi commander surveys the ruins of a pillaged city with the same triumphant elation that Michelangelo feels as he stands before his completed David.

“Build thee more stately mansions,” someone says in the Bible. And so far as I can remember, the Bible is often stressing creation, even though metaphorically, as of the soul. Creation, and respect for those who create, for God, the supreme creator, are among the teachings of Christianity, and are in the foundation of the general morals of Christianity. If the Nazi terror is indeed the result of the deliberate destruction of Christian morals, that is reason enough for the preservation of these morals.

I have spent much time arguing with myself and with others over the technicalities of the Christian religion, – God, miracles, the true nature of Jesus. To me, these are matters of unimportance, because I believe that the moral system they are employed to inculcate is of major importance. But I guess I was wrong to argue, if for most people the moral system has meaning only through these symbols. And it is also true that a faith in the strength of these symbols is translated into a corresponding moral strength in the believers which otherwise might not be there.

So why continue arguing over nonessentials? The essentials themselves are being brutally challenged today, and my whole fight should be directed against the challengers. That bomb in Naples was not planted to kill men and women, but to kill beliefs and faith and morals and whatever else has been instrumental in the building of Western civilization. 

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Modern World Threats to Creativity and Culture

[This journal excerpt revisits the theme of individual creativity, which my father saw as being threatened by many of the conveniences and distractions of the “modern” world in 1942. After all, how could the average person be creative when they were so easily drawn into passive activities such as listening to the radio, watching movies, or driving their automobiles through the countryside? Plus, people’s association with culture was fast becoming one of paying to experience its expression by others, rather than one of contributing to culture themselves.

My father, of course, would eventually see television eclipse all other forms of passive entertainment, and lived long enough to witness the emerging role of the Internet as a huge time sink. One can make a case that the Internet cuts two ways — both as a vehicle for endless browsing and superficial exchanges, and as a platform on which individuals can create and disseminate creative works with an ease unparalleled in history. On balance, though, I think the warnings my father raised in 1942 are much more apparent, and dire, today.]

January 28, 1943 (Middlebury College)

A central point in the arguments for socialism is the increased leisure time that will redound to the working classes, which they will be able to use in “a new burst of cultural feeling,” as E.C. Lindeman puts it. More efficient organization and utilization of the means of production will make comparatively short that part of the day which each individual must spend in physical labor. In other words, we put the machine in the proper place, as our slave, or, at least, as a subordinate partner, and then use our leisure time to participate in a great revival of the arts.

Maybe. We might remember, however, that our leisure life is as completely mechanized as our working life, – the automobile, radio, motion picture machine, and mass production printing presses. So we wonder if our machines really can give us new leisure, to be used creatively, or do they simply force us to live at such a whirlwind pace that we shall never really have the time for a “new burst of cultural energy.” We get our culture in such fitful and varied snatches that each one of these snatches becomes practically meaningless to us. We cram our lives up with incidentals in which we ourselves have no creative part – listening to the radio, watching sports contests, going to the movies and the theatre, driving through the countryside.

All these activities are supposedly part of the “broader, fuller life” which our machines have made possible for us. I don’t agree. If anything, the life of the common man today is narrower, even than that of the pioneer on our Western frontier a century and a half ago. Then a man was forced to produce the essentials of his own life. Though this was admittedly hard labor, it furnished a wide range in which he might exercise his creative powers. Today we don’t build; we buy. Our vaunted division of labor has been carried so far that we learn to spend our days as assembly lines, performing the simplest single operation in the manufacture of a product which we shall probably never use ourselves. For this degradation into an automaton we learn to be satisfied with a wage with which we can buy the essentials of life, and perhaps have enough left over to buy a little culture. Is it any wonder that men who find their lives crammed into such a narrow orbit sometimes go on strike. Wages aren’t their primary objective, no matter what they are told. Way down in deep they have a yearning to be men. Of course they are fighting against the feeling of insecurity, but behind this feeling is the caged fury of wild creative beings who have grown up in a society that has made the cramping of their native powers a prerequisite of existence.

No malevolent “ruling class” has consciously willed this situation. We grow up learning to listen to the radio, to watch movies, to ride in automobiles. Most of us never have a chance to be born, in any creative sense. We become culturally lazy by learning to admire the cultural activities of a few outstandingly creative, or skilled, persons in our society, and worse than this, we learn to look upon this admiration as a privilege, by often being forced to pay for it. We become hero-worshippers, and forget that we ourselves might have become heroes.

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Thoughts on Dying in War

[Although my father’s early journal entries generally depict a young man mature and articulate beyond his age (20 at this writing), they sometimes veer into the over-heated rhetoric of youth. The following excerpt is one such example. This excerpt also touches on the theme of “creative activity,” which is a recurring topic in my father’s writings during this period. He repeatedly identifies the process of ongoing creation as his own personal goal, as well as that of all civilized societies and successful institutions.]

September 27, 1942 (Middlebury College)

A Sunday of much wind and rain, finding me in a state of mild depression. I could go on in this mood long enough, and end up where I was a year ago. What plans do I have? Would I really enjoy being married to Dottie? To any woman? Will I ever have a chance to be married? Or will I be sucked into the monster machine for war to die a glorious death, to have my weak flesh spattered against metal. Is this the purpose and the destiny of all large social groups, or will the idealists some day see their dream of a peaceful world society fulfilled? Certain it is that individual men and women are as greedy and selfish as ever they were, and probably more so, now that they have lost the ability to provide the necessities of life for themselves. Can the pressure of social law and custom as successfully restrain the combative instincts in men as it now successfully goads them into destructive operation? Is it pointless to ask whether it is better to die in peace than in war, since we must die anyway? I don’t think that the question is pointless. It seems to me that most people would willingly sacrifice their lives in an act of creation, where they would balk at being decimated as mere engines of destruction. If a man has complete faith that his death on the battlefield will contribute ultimately to the building of a peaceful, creative world society, then he will presumably die gladly, without complaint. It may be that creative activity can never proceed without conflict in human society. 

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