Knowledge versus Wisdom, and Faith in the Crosshairs

[In this long and “heavy” journal entry, my father starts by discussing the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, but then moves into an assessment of religion as a particular — and at-risk — form of wisdom. His attribution of the 1940s information explosion to the availability of high-speed printing and cheap paper seems incredibly quaint when viewed from our Internet-powered age of instant access to almost any “fact,” scholarly paper or book. If anything, however, the adage he cites “that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it,” seems more on target today than ever.

Later in the entry, my father explores the collision between intellectual speculation and inquiry and the institutionalized wisdom, or faith, of religion. This analysis is just one of the internal debates my father depicted in many of his early journal entries, as he sought to define and adopt a “personal faith” of his own.]

March 20, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

I think I remember it being said by someone who should know that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it. There is a certain charm in the facility of this statement, and perhaps a certain amount of truth in it. At any rate, it needs considerable dissection into its roots before it can have much meaning.

The profession of scholarly research, with its offspring of popularized writing, has reached a proportion in our day sufficient to keep the book and magazine markets flooded with discussions, analyses, expositions, and criticisms of the details of life and thought in every culture which has preceded our own. Probably this phenomenon is due to the development of high-speed printing, combined with the mass production of cheap paper, but the cause doesn’t interest me as much as the effect.

This research ranges all the way through the mechanic trades and arts to the religious beliefs and practices of former civilizations, and while one individual will usually be interested only in a small segment of the whole span, these studies are easily available to almost anyone with the interest and the time to consult them, and this availability is common knowledge. People today live in a house in which the back door is perpetually wide open on all that has gone before, and there is no selectivity in displaying this vista of the past. People no longer look back through the carefully-oriented lens of myth and tradition, but through the clear, indiscriminate glass of historical fact. Though the many histories written from a nationalist bias must modify this analogy, it is not particularly such works which I have in mind here, but rather the objective studies of scholars in the myriad fields now open to research.

Apparently, then, there has been a vast and accelerating increase to common knowledge in our era. The popular quiz programs on the radio attest to a mania for the acquisition of diverse and often unrelated items of information. But whether wisdom has decreased in proportion to this increase in knowledge is another question, if we mean by wisdom the ability of a human mind to correlate the facts of experience and of history into meaningful patterns which may serve as a reasonably dependable guide to future action. When a certain pattern of wisdom comes to dominate a whole community, it may be called a religion, or, at least, an ethical system, if the ceremonial and supernatural accoutrements usually associated with a religion are lacking. We see that most communities in the past have, each in itself, been dominated by one special religion or ethical system, accepted without question by the majority of its members, and, furthermore, denying the right of all rival religions or ethics. Catholicism, for instance, held a practically exclusive grip on the peoples of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. It acted as a mold, determining the directional flow, within narrow bounds, of even the brilliant minds of the period. To all men it was both a discipline and a bond. It undoubtedly quickened the communal spirit, but it also bound society to the status quo by putting penalties on the speculative mind. The powerful predisposition to faith all but annihilated the habit of inquiry which had gained great strength in the classical civilizations. So if faith is equivalent to wisdom, the former faith-cultures have been wise far beyond our own, for faith and inquiry tend to exclude one another and ours is predominantly an inquiring culture, at least in those realms where faith has formerly held the upper hand; namely, in religion and ethics.

Even the Catholic church, which still adheres to the medieval insistence on the unity of faith, has many members who are beset with doubts. As for members of the Protestant sects, they have so long enjoyed the privilege of the individual interpretation of their faith that the discipline of communal faith has disintegrated in their churches to the vanishing point. There has probably never before in any civilization been so universal a disrespect for the exclusive claims to right which one faith makes over another. And no searching into religious faith, no reexamining of religious faith can hope to restore its former force in society, for the critical analysis of a faith is tantamount to an admission of its inadequacy under conditions of the present. If it filled the human need for faith, there would be no need to question or examine it. A living faith quite subconsciously determines the lines of intellectual development and material operation in the society of which it is the organic foundation; when a given faith must be submitted to objective study, it’s either dead or dying.

That there is a definite human need for faith is illustrated by the preoccupation of many of the best minds of our day with the formulation of a personal faith. First comes the feeling of estrangement from the traditional faiths of the past which are still artificially imposed on the majority of children at the same time that their secular schooling inculcates in them the rudimentary habits of inquiry and scientific skepticism, which, whatever their ultimate value, are consistent with the conditions of twentieth-century life. The average child, perhaps, comes to see the discrepancy between his imposed religious faith and his naturally-acquired habit of inquiry, but he pushes his discovery no further than the mediocre compromise which results in a dormant intellect and a sentimentalized faith. Those who are compelled to push on farther will almost inevitably run into a period of cynicism in which all values are questioned. Finally, the man whose creative impulses are thwarted by the sterility of cynicism, brings himself to the point of making a definite choice between scientific skepticism and traditional religious faith. It is now an exceptional case when the latter is not discarded in favor of the former. We are indeed a civilization between faiths, but not a civilization without faith, nor yet a civilization without wisdom. Widespread industrialization has long demanded a new faith, which has meant the spreading discredit and slow crumbling of the old faith, with all its giant reverberations in institutional life. Therein lies the high drama, both tragedy and comedy, of our times.

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Chaos in the Classes at Air Cadet College

[At the time of this writing, my father had been accepted into the Air Corps and had subsequently qualified (at his previous Jefferson Barracks, Missouri post), for Aviation Cadet training. He had been sent to Carbondale, Illinois in mid-February 1944 for four months of academic instruction at Southern Illinois Normal University (SINU). The five-day-per-week instruction covered physics, math, English, geography and history, and was supplemented with physical training, drill and cross-country running.

My father was thrilled to have made it into the Air Corps, and also happy to find himself in the familiar routine of attending college-level classes at SINU. As this entry illustrates, however, he was less than impressed with the academic habits of his fellow trainees. He also bemoans the absence of any guiding philosophy or ideology motivating his peers. It’s interesting — and telling — that he suggests his own differences in these regards made him “the world’s worst soldier.” His description of the inability of the trainees to engage in meaningful discussions — “All that mattered was that each one should fire his salvo, and then retire only long enough to reload” — seems depressingly familiar to anyone who follows present-day political discourse, especially as practiced by the gun-enamored zealots of the far right.]

March 26, 1944 (Carbondale, Ill.)

I am the world’s worst soldier. Now that may be a slight exaggeration, but it’s intended only to give force to the basic truth of the statement, that as a soldier, I stink. Of discipline I approve, but not the military kind, applied from outside with loud-mouthed threats. I want a discipline that stands stiff inside me, like my bones, and which can no more be shed than these.

I say that most of the boys here in the CTD [College Training Detachment] are not disciplined, and, on the contrary, many of them are very loose and lax. It’s in the classrooms that their inability to achieve a harmonious compromise between themselves and the group of which they are part is most clearly revealed. They are high school playboys, for all their uniforms, only semi-civilized, and with token educations. A sentimentalist might see in them a native American “culture,” but to me it looks like a compound of ignorance and egocentricity, which two terms may be considered in large part synonymous.

They breeze into the classroom, and either prostrate themselves in their chairs or crowd to the windows. There is no order, no restraint. They cudgel each other with various gleaming excerpts from their personal lives. The room is alive with noise.

When a teacher enters, one or more of them trumpets “Attention!” and the mass rises for a moment to various approximations of that attitude. But it is a empty gesture, a simple conditional reflex without meaning. No order results. The quack of voices fills the room again almost before the echoes are silent. The boys give no respect to the teacher, and this is not an affront from them, but an evidence of their lack of understanding of their civilized positions in that gathering. The jungle law prevails, – every man for himself.

Order, when it is achieved, is an accident, not a cooperative accomplishment in which anyone can have confidence. It is at the mercy of the first boy who receives an impulse to snap his trigger tongue. It means nothing that the teacher may be in the midst of his exposition. Joe suddenly sees the light, and he must immediately deliver himself of it. Often the appeals of the teacher for order and silence have little effect, and never a permanent effect.

Cruelty is inherent in their egocentric attitude. There is little conception of the effect their remarks may have on other people. The first day that a woman teacher took over Mr. Cox’s geography class, many of the boys made insulting or unkind remarks about the old man, who was very probably a personal friend of our present teacher. They didn’t have the sense even to be quiet after her first defense of him, but hooted her words and launched back to the attack.

Discussion is impossible. Several times we attempted it in Dr. Barnes’ history class. Practically no one was allowed to complete a statement of his particular opinion, not even Dr. Barnes. He was, in fact, interrupted so persistently that he often had to give up. The boys were of no mind to give fair hearing to each other’s opinions, and to allow their own to be modified. All that mattered was that each one should fire his salvo, and then retire only long enough to reload. The general ignorance of any philosophy or philosophical method was pathetic. The attitude towards learning was that its value depended upon its date, with anything earlier than the twentieth century of no value at all. History they viewed as a partitioning of centuries behind closed doors, and what use to open the doors?

Their civilization deficiency shows plainest in their attitude towards examinations. We here in the CTD are supposedly living under a system of Cadet Honor. This idea is openly raped at every examination. I’ve been surprised even by fellows to whom I’d attributed some measure of maturity. Their cheating is not on the sly among themselves, but a frankly-undertaken group enterprise. Honor is to them a word, not a discipline; they are enough aware of their deficiency to use the word with open cynicism.

They are equally cynical of many other words, such as patriotism, freedom, democracy, and the like. This is because they have never thought their way through to the rules of life of which these words are simply the shorthand symbols. Their response to orders has no higher motivation than fear. They defy orders whenever they think they can get away with it.

These boys are not ideological soldiers. Since they have no ideas, how can they be expected to fight for ideas. Though the Army may be doing some good with its indoctrination program, the main emphasis is still on glory, – pride in the unit, ribbons, medals, citations, advancements in rank.

I’m writing only about what I see and hear, and it may be that I see only the surface, and hear only the immaterial. My generalizations about the American Army as a whole are guesswork, and I’m not making any predictions on my personal conclusions. But I’ll ask a question. If most of the boys come back from the wars without definite ideas about why they’ve been fighting and what they’ve won, why, then, will they have been fighting, and what will they have won? Will the answers be provided by act of Congress, or presidential declaration? Is [there] any wall against cynicism, despair, and general emotional instability, except an integrated philosophy of life, both personal and social? 

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A School Teacher’s Life

[The following, a vignette about an elementary school teacher my father met at a USO dance, is typical of the profiles of people he regularly entered into his journals. This entry — the last in his fourth journal — provides a glimpse of a young woman’s career and family life, her approach to teaching and her unselfconscious prejudice. My father’s description of the teacher’s salary and class size also provides an interesting point of comparison to some current hot-button educational debates.]

February 7, 1944 (Jefferson Barracks, Mo.)

Bernice Wildhaber is a thin blond girl of about 22. She lives in north St. Louis, and teaches fourth grade in grammar school. Ever since she was little, she wanted to be a teacher, and she never lost the ambition. For a while she thought of joining the WAC’s or the WAVE’s, but finally it seemed to her that teaching school was just as patriotic.

“Much more important in the long run,” I said.

She really loved teaching school. I wouldn’t be bored by hearing her tell about it, would I?

“No, not a bit. My father’s a school teacher, and maybe some day I’ll be one, too.”

Well, that was good. Most fellows ran the other way when they found out she was a school teacher. She had forty-five kids in her class, all of them Jewish youngsters. And they were the best bunch any teacher could wish for. Very clean and neat, and most all of them unusually bright. They didn’t misbehave at all. The only thing was that they loved to talk. They talked all the time…

I asked her if she hoped to go on to high-school teaching. O, no, she wanted to stay right where she was. She wasn’t smart enough to teach high school, and it was too much trouble to get a master’s degree.

She’d gone to teacher’s college right in St. Louis. Anyone who wanted to teach in St. Louis had to go there. But she was still technically a substitute teacher, getting paid by the day. So she could hardly ever afford to miss a day. That meant six dollars. None of the girls in her class had been given their appointments yet. She didn’t know why, except that there was a lot of trouble on the school board, and they’d changed over to a new system of appointing just about the time she’d started.

I asked her if she’d tell me how she went about teaching English grammar. It was the ancient traditional method, – anatomizing the parts of speech, drilling on the irregular verbs. Since she said that the kids seemed to enjoy this stuff, I didn’t tell her how much I’d hated it.

Instead I asked if she had them do any original writing. Yes, but not nearly as much as in the two previous grades, where they had to write a little story almost every day. She only had them do one about twice a month now. For one thing, she hated to correct the papers. That was one thing she hadn’t counted on before she started teaching. She figured that the papers would be fun for her…

Her whole family was working. Her father drove a bus, and had to get up every morning at three-thirty. He was done a little after noon time, and always slept for about three hours as soon as he got home. Then in the evening he went to bed at nine-thirty, and the house had to be quiet after that. Her father listened to all the commentators, unless there was some program the girls wanted to hear more, which was often. Her mother worked in a dress factory, and her sister, who was two years younger than she, was a stenographer.

She’d never had a real vacation, because every summer she felt she had to work. Last summer she’d put in several weeks at the Ordnance plant, – weighing and gauging fifty-caliber bullets. But it was terribly boring, and she did quit in time to take two weeks off. She was certainly glad to get back to school, though she hadn’t thought she would be when she finished in June.

This summer her father had told her she’d have to take a vacation, to gain some weight. She’d lost weight from worrying during the summers she was supervising playgrounds, and she hadn’t been able to gain it back. A while ago she had her father get her a case of beer, because she’d heard that a bottle of it every night would give her weight. But she hadn’t liked it at all, and after a doctor told her it wouldn’t do any good, she started taking vitamin pills instead.

When I told [her] that it was a funny thing, but I couldn’t remember a single one of my grade school teachers, she said it was almost the same with her, except she’d gone to a convent all the way through high school. There weren’t any teachers there, – just nuns. She skipped first the fourth, and then the seventh grades, so that by the time she started high school, she was two years younger than the rest of her class, and painfully aware of it. The girls had their own class clubs, but they wouldn’t admit any “skips.” When she was thirteen, though, she shot up practically to her present height. Things weren’t so bad after that.

After we began talking about teaching again, I supposed that they were studying the geography of some part of the world. Yes, they were just beginning the Belgian Congo tomorrow. They’d finished last week with Egypt and the Nile Valley. She’d been very pleased with a test she’d given them. Usually she wrote the answers on the board along with the questions, because they had so much trouble with them. But this time she’d given them ten blanks to fill in with things she’d especially stressed, and they did surprisingly well.

Did she ever attempt to tie in events of the war with places they were studying? No, no, she didn’t know enough about it to attempt doing that. Last week, though, one of her uncles, who had been to North Africa, came home on furlough, and she had him speak to the class, since by a coincidence they were studying the Sahara desert at that time…

I wondered if Negroes went to the same schools with white kids. Oh, no, they had their own schools, including three high schools. She wouldn’t be able to teach a class herself if there were Negro children in it. She wasn’t prejudiced. But she was sort of affectionate, and often she put her arm around different kids who came up to see her at the desk. And she couldn’t possibly do that with Negro children.

She’d been coming to the USO off and on for over a year now. It was really the nicest place the girls could go, even though there was an awful lot of red tape to getting on the list. She was glad to give me her address and phone number, and if I couldn’t see her again before I shipped out, well, to write to her, anyway.

I said I would.

[Followed by an entry dated 3/21/46: (But I never did)]

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Wendell Willkie, Liberal Republican, Backs the Liberal Arts

[Throughout his adult life, my father was a card-carrying Democrat and an unapologetic political liberal. Not surprisingly, as a college student in the 1940s, he was taken with the promise of “democratic socialism,” a subject that his journals of this period address several times. Nonetheless, he also found much to like in the ideas and speeches of a prominent Republican of the times — Wendell Willkie. Willkie, the Republican nominee for the 1940 Presidential election, lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to an historic third term. FDR later brought the philosophically compatible Willkie into his administration as a special ambassador-at-large, promoting “One World” internationalism and an end to imperialism and colonialism.

The following journal excerpt, which quotes Willkie extensively from a speech he delivered at Duke University (presumably reported in The New York Times), is an interesting window into the mind of a “liberal” Republican of the era. Not only are such Republicans an extinct breed today, also all-but extinct are politicians of any party who can articulate moral and philosophic ideas — rather than slogans and sound bites — with the sophistication and intelligence Willkie demonstrated. Even then, however, being a liberal Republican carried significant liability; Willkie dropped out of the 1944 Presidential race because his liberalism lost him the support of the GOP establishment.

As reported by my father, much of the content of Willkie’s speech involved the benefits of a liberal arts education, a conviction shared by my father throughout his life. Willkie’s proposal to defer some men from Army service so they could remain in college and meet future American needs, not surprisingly, finds a sympathetic ear in my father. Despite the ambivalence  about military service that he states in this entry, however, my father would go on to enlist in the Army several months later. One note about the end of this entry, where my father’s personal commentary is interspersed among various Willkie quotes. All of Willkie’s quotes, even if not so identified, are bracketed by quotation marks. ]

January 15, 1943 (Middlebury College)

… Last night Wendell Willkie spoke at Duke in defence[sic] of the liberal arts education. It was a most encouraging talk, and added considerable cement to my conviction that Willkie is the man who must be elected next president of the United States. He himself, of course, reiterated his previous statement that there must be no indispensable man in a democracy. And certainly I won’t go around calling him indispensable. When lined up against all other known aspirants to the presidential office, however, I will gladly call him invaluable.

His ideas were so well phrased that I shall quote some of them here, perhaps as handy material for the Emerson paper, certainly as invaluable material for any man who believes in democracy. “I am speaking of education for its own sake: to know for the sheer joy of understanding; to speculate; to analyze; to compare and to imagine.” He lists the conventional frivolous objections to the liberal arts: “When such arguments gain acceptance, that is the end of us as a civilized nation.”

“… there should be some provision in the manpower program for leaving a nucleus in the colleges of men when aptitudes qualify them as definitely for our long-range needs as, let us say, other men are obviously qualified for medicine.” This statement drew a light blast from the Times editorial, which was otherwise commendatory. The Times maintained that these specially qualified youths still ought to stand the test of fire, to be able to understand and speak the language of the returning veterans. I stick with Willkie. It’s not a matter of courage. Probably it would take more courage to stay in college. It’s a matter of waste. Why throw tomorrow’s leaders into the gamble of physical combat? God knows they are preparing themselves to enter an arena of conflict as demanding on the man as any Libyan battlefield. I feel it myself; certainly I could go into battle of arms, but I am not happy at the risk of losing my chance to fight in the realm that I am much better fitted for, the realm of ideas.

I’m looking for a lifetime battle. Today I can say that I believe. Democracy and Christianity are more than words. They are ideas planted deep in my mind, and now coming to first flower. I am happy in the thought of living for them, not of dying for them. My death on the point of a bayonet would contribute very little to the life of these ideas in the world, and I have the confidence to hope that in a lifetime of study, writing, and teaching, I can make a much greater contribution to these ideas that I love, one that might rank with Emerson’s.

There must be many like me, – eager boys who feel the electric shock of this new age zipping through their nerves, and long to be among its prophets, as I do. Is it timidity that holds us back from asserting what we want to do for our fellow men? Will we accept meekly the grasp of the hand that is drawing us into the Army? With me there is a balance of opinion in this problem that keeps me from declaring openly on Willkie’s side. I imagine that valuable experience will derive from service as a soldier in a great Army, though the few reports I’ve heard don’t lead me to expect too much here. Probably it means entrance into some technical training, which probably wouldn’t hurt any, but would it help? Meanwhile, as the deadline approaches, I have these last three months of college to push as far ahead as possible.

Willkie went on to a discussion of freedom: “It is true that a man cannot be free unless he has a job and a decent income. But this job and this income are not the source of his freedom. They only implement it. Freedom is of the mind.”

…Willkie speaks of the damaging influences of the German universities. “It has encouraged the sacrifice of methods that make for wide intelligence to those who are concerned only with highly specified knowledge; it has held that the subject is more important than the student; that knowledge is more important than understanding; that science, in itself, can satisfy the soul of man; and that intelligent men should not be allowed to concern themselves with politics and the administration of state. Such matters should be left to trained politicians.”

That’s a damning indictment… But on one thing I insist. That science is nothing new in the world, and that it is no more adequate by itself for man today than it has been in the past. Science is generally description and analysis of the workings of natural laws in the material and human worlds. The continued expansion of scientific knowledge can be tremendously valuable for our society, but only when applied to the problems of society by morally sound men. Such men are more than scientists; they are religious men.

“If the humanities, or the humanistic temper which they promote, are permitted to lapse now, we shall have lost the peace before we have gained it, and the real victory after the war will be to the way of life, inhuman, tyrannical, mechanical, of those whom we shall outwardly have conquered.”

Speaking of our trend towards leadership, “hero-worship,” “indispensable men,” he says: “Had we more faith in liberal institutions, we would have, I believe, more faith in ourselves – more faith in the great leavening processes of democracy, which forever pushes new men to the top.” The new men! Emerson yesterday. Willkie today. Tomorrow? I’m trying. “Education is the mother of leadership.”

“More and more the doctrine of telling us what we should know is being adopted… And what has won out In the long battle. Always the truth.” The greatest prize for which man may strive. Each discovery leads one to higher truth, and there is never an end for him who dares to pursue. Melville was one of these, until the climb became too steep even for him.

“We have seen the devolution of human aspiration. It is a tragedy as great as men have ever witnessed.” But men are aspiring even at the darkest hour. Aspiration? It’s becoming the keynote of my life.

“Too many of the planners, I feel, are trying to look ahead by looking backward. Too many are seeking the future in the past.” It is neither in the past nor in the future, but it is now! and not in other men, but in you! Let a man first discover those moral laws that are completely independent of time, and then he will know what his society demands of him.

“Open the books, if you wish to be free.” Better to say, open the books, that they may open your mind. 

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Education for All, Balanced Budget or Not

[This lengthy entry — pared down from a much longer original — followed an evening of caroling by my father and his two siblings while home for the Christmas holiday. After meeting a young farmer among the carolers, my father went on to discuss his belief that all people should have access to the highest educational opportunities of which they’re capable. In this sentiment I see a foreshadowing of his eventual work in university administration and development. My father argues that, if our country is able to pay whatever the cost necessary to wage war, it can also pay the cost of offering the best educational opportunities to all its citizens, regardless of their economic circumstances.

As in the previous posting, my father states his opinion based on lessons learned during the Great Depression — i.e. the need for government spending to address pressing societal and economic needs, regardless of “such bogies of finance as the ‘balanced budget.'” Our country today faces many of the same challenges and, unfortunately, it seems that the no-taxes/cut-spending crowd is prevailing over those (most economists included) who warn that cutting back on stimulus spending too soon could stall, and possibly reverse, the halting economic growth we’ve begun to achieve. My father’s youthful idealism that America’s values were shifting to emphasize “social success” rather than “money success” has since been shown, repeatedly, to be wishful thinking.]

December 23, 1942 (Underhill, Vermont)

…At nine o’clock Kent and his wife arrived, and we proceeded to the main business of the evening. Most of the people who appeared to acknowledge our singing were old folks. They seemed genuinely pleased.

Kent is a young farmer, 23 years old. The local board had deferred him because he’s running one of the largest farms in the vicinity. There’s nothing deceptive in his nature. His face is pleasant, broad featured, Yankee; his body is big and strong, his hands massive. I suppose you’d call him raw-boned, a typical farm type. Bashfulness is a quality completely foreign to him. He was well-acquainted with me from the moment of shaking hands. Before I left him at midnight he had given me a frank appraisal of his fortunes and hopes…

I don’t envy Kent. He reminds me of Thoreau’s farmer who went through life carrying his farm on his back, a slave to his occupation. Kent isn’t degraded yet to this unhappy state, but the time may come. I just can’t see how he has much chance. His wife is a good kid, willing to work hard… he seems quite proud of her, partly because she’s an “out-of-state” girl, partly because she’s had an education…

…There is certainly a formidable barrier between the well-educated and the uneducated which can’t be melted down by simple appeals to humanitarianism. This doesn’t offer an excuse for snobbishness on the part of the well-educated. It does mean that the channels for communication between the two levels are considerably circumscribed. What a democratic state needs is an educational system which offers an opportunity for the maximum development of native talent (mental ability) in whatever economic level it appears. We should not be much concerned for the existence of these economic levels, so long as those at the bottom can earn enough to live without suffering. What we must avoid is the freezing of these levels. We know that exceptional minds appear at the bottom as well as at the top of the economic heap. The economic factors, however, have thus far been given far too much weight in determining what minds shall come to fruitful expression in the world. When genius is allowed to starve to death behind economic barriers, this is one of the most disastrous expenses that any society can shoulder. If the expenditure of money can build an educational system that will make such starvation or malformation of genius highly improbable, no sum will be too large to spend.

This was the point which was emphasized in that supplement to Fortune which I read in Burlington yesterday at the library. The National Economy, it was called. We have come traditionally to exalt money to a position where it becomes our master, instead of keeping it where it should be, in subjection as a slave to help us achieve social profits. We have too long been tyrannized into poverty and national weakness and unhappiness by such bogies of finance as the “balanced budget.” It’s taking a terrible war to break the delusion. We are finding out that we can spend just as much money as we need to preserve our national existence under the hammer blows of enemies who learned the same lesson several years before we did. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions our national debt runs into on the books, as long as we keep our national destiny in our own hands, – it doesn’t matter, if we apply the knowledge that we already have for the control of our financial system. This, of course, is the basic idea in the compensatory government spending theory of Keynes, Hansen, and their associates.

It is indeed, not only a new theory, but a new philosophy of economics, and marks the overall change from the last century’s focus on “money” success to this century’s focus on social success. It can’t be repeated too often that money is properly a tool, and not a tyrant, for men.

We do have the knowledge and the mechanical means now to assure every inhabitant of our country, and ultimately the world, freedom from economic insecurity. While this cannot be considered as the highest aim of man’s activity, it is essential to any permanent progress of man in his spiritual sphere. It is very important that economic security always be recognized as a means to a better life, and not as an end in itself, or as a guarantee of that better life. For life can be “better” only in a moral sense, and science, including economics, which we are using as a means to that better life, is in itself amoral. The Nazis are demonstrating that it can very well be used as a means to a worse life.

We don’t debase ourselves or jeopardize our ideals by studying our science as avidly as do the Germans. In fact, we criminally betray ourselves to destruction if we do not seize upon science for all it can show us about the waging of war and the building of the new world order. The significant difference comes if we use science as a weapon on the side of Christian morality. Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr. makes this point clear in an interesting exposition of the science of geopolitics in the Dec. 21^st issue of Life. We don’t damn ourselves by using what knowledge we can discover to make ourselves powerful, if we use our power to give our ideals of Christian morality expression in the lower but nonetheless necessary, level of economic life. The name of [Halford J.] MacKinder’s book on geopolitics was Democratic Ideals and Reality. He brought it out in England in 1918. Our trouble was that we wrote out a peace in which democratic ideals continued to be abstracted from reality.

What excites me now is that today there are a lot of men who know that we must not repeat this disastrous experience. Keats it was who maintained that the ideal can’t be separated from the real. Democratic ideals are just so much hot air until they are expressed as relationships of men to men, and men to goods in the marketplace.

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