The unadjusted man

Title

The unadjusted man

Creator

Viereck, Peter

Language

English

Source

Volume XV (Issue No.1) January 1963

Year

1963

Subject

Social adjustment

Social classes

Individualism

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

The most bloodcurdling crimes are done not by criminals but by perpectionists. This article provides an answer.

Fulltext

The most bloodcurdling crimes are done not by criminals but by perpectionists. This article pro vides an answer. THE UNADJUSTED MAN Peter Today Americans have no outer or geographic frontier left to conquer. This pushes us, instead, to increasingly in ward conquests. Therefore, let us stop being defensive, stop being apologetic about affirming the dignity and im portance of the so-called im practical: namely, the human istic and the spiritual studies. Today, in the campus curri cula, they receive more lip service than a decade ago but they are more squeezed in practice. These curricula re flect an atomic age which puts a new premium on the technician and on practical outer applications of inner theory. Yet without the un derstanding of man’s inner nature, which impractical art — last refuge of civilization’s secret fires VlERECK and literature gives us, and without the inner ethical res traint which religion gives us, our outer practical and me chanical progress is paving our road to hell with good inventions. The number of cells in the brain and the number of the stars in the universe are said to be exactly equal in num ber. So-and-so-many trillion units apiece. From this unprovable fancy emerges a me taphor: the gigantic dream versus matter is balanced ex actly evenly, at the fulcrum of the forehead. Soul versus cosmos: imagine them balanc ing with a one-to-one corres pondence between the units without and within the skull; 72 Panorama between the stars and the no leu radiant brain-cells. Thia true metaphor is de fied—this scale is upset—by any philosophy which deems either side of the equal scale as "more real.” If this were a universe of the Middle Ages, I might argue against one sided overemphasis on the in ward dimension. But in the case of America, there is no danger of overweighing the inner side, the esthetic and spiritual side. America’s dan ger is overemphasis of the outward side: the star-matter, not the gray-matter. The dimension behind the forehead has two functions: the unleashing function of creative imagination .and the restraining function of the Christian-Judiac ethic. These two different functions of in wardness are often found apart and often battle each other in an inner civil war. Yet, even when at war both need each other. Neither is enough by itself to sustain a culture. The esthetic imagin ation without ethics degener ates into irresponsible, anti social bohemianism; ethics without beauty degenerates into the “seven deadly vir tues” of a preachy, devitalized aridity. Here it seems appro priate to recall the so-to-speak deathbed-repentance of a very great thinker who had neg lected inwardness. I wonder how many of my readers will reorganize its author: If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to "read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atro phied would thus have kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of hap piness and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. This was no ivory-tower es thete speaking, but a great scientist and a rather hardboiled one. Namely, Charles Darwin. When I hear of our Am erican delusion of “produc ing” creatively by expensive outer equipment instead of unbuyable inner equipment, I remember my first meeting with Albert Einstein, seeing him in New York, strolling along Riverside Drive, ab sentmindedly scribbling notes on the back of a torn old en velope. From a scrawl on a JANUARY 1963 73 penny’s worth of scrap paper, by a man w'hose inner genius was never adjusted away at age six, and not from teams endowed by foundations with electric typewriters and filing systems came the greatest sci entific discoveries of the cen tury, including those superpractical H-bombs. In short, without an ornery, unadjust ed inner spark, our present drive for outward techniques is not enough to save us either spiritually or militar ily. Let us educators not be in timidated by the practical folk the so-called realists and experts. Let us not be afraid to listen to the so-called im practical people, the so-called unrealistic people. Every overadjusted society swallows up the diversities of private bailiwicks, private eccentrici ties, private inner life, and the creativity inherent in con crete personal loyalties and in loving attachments to unique local roots and their rich historical accretions. Apropos the creative poten tial of local roots, let us re call not only Burke’s words on the need for loyalty to one’s own “little platoon” but also Synge’s words, in the Ireland of 1907, on “the springtime of the local life,” where the imagination of man is still “fiery and magnificent and tender.” The creative imagination of the free sci entists and free artists requir es private elbow-room, free from the pressure of central ization and the pressure of adjustment to a mass average. This requirement holds true even when the centralization is benevolent, and even when the mass average replaces sub average diversities. Admittedly certain kinds of diversity are perfectly dread ful; they threaten everything superior and desirable. But at some point the cure to these threats will endanger the,superior and the desirable even more than do the threats themselves. The most vicious maladjustments, economic, moral, or psychiatric, will at some point become less dan gerous to the free mind than the overadjustment needed to cure them. In the novel and in the poem, the most corrupting development of all is the sub stitution of technique for art. What once resulted from the inspired audacity of a heartbreakingly lonely crafts 74 Panorama man is now mass-produced in painless, safe, and uninspired capsules. This process is tak ing over every category of ed ucation and literature. The stream of consciousness for which James Joyce wrestled in loneliness with language, the ironic perspective toward society which Proust attained not as entertainment but as tragedy, the quick, slashing insights for which a Virginia Woolf or a Katherine Mans field bled out her heart, all these intimate personal achi evements of the private life are today the standard props of a hundred hack imitators, mechanically vending what is called "The New Yorker-type story.” Don’t underestimate that type of story; though an imitation job, it is imitation with all the magnificent tech nical skill of America’s bestedited weekly. And think of the advantages: no pain any more, no risk any more, no more nonsense of inspiration. Most modern readers are not even bothered by the differ ence between such an effici ent but bloodless machine job and the living product of in dividual heart’s anguish. What then, is the test for telling the real inspiration from the just-as-good, the cof fee from the Nescafe? The test is pain. Not mere phy sical pain but the exultant, transcending pain of selfless sacrifice. The test is that holy pain, that brotherhood of sacrifice, that aristocracy of creative suffering of which Baudelaire wrote. "Je sais que la douleur est I’unique noblesse” In other words, in a free de mocracy the only justified aristocracy is that of the lone ly creative bitterness, the artistically creative scars of the fight for the inner di mension against outer me chanization:—the fight for the private life. Nothing can mechanically "produce” unadjustedness. But at least some studies— the "impractical” literary classics—provide it with more fertile soil than does “educa tion for citizenship.” The latter slogan has led to over adjustment in life, McCarthy ism in education.. The stress of many liberals on teaching ephemeral civic needs instead of permanent classics gave the antiliberal demagogues their opening for trying to terrorize education into pro pagandizing "Americanism.” JANUARY 1963 75 What “progressive education” forgot was this: its favorite word “citizenship” would of ten be defined in practice not by some lofty John Dewey but by some thought-control ling politician, interested in garnering not wisdom but votes. Yet all these seemingly ir resistible pressures of overad justment can be triumphantly resisted, after all, if the Un adjusted Man makes full -use of his many available bur rows. I am .thinking of Kaf ka’s story, “The Burrow.” The very vastness of Ameri ca’s machinery of depersonal ization makes it easier in Am erica today than in “old cul tured Europe” to safeguard undisturbed the burrows of the creative imagination. They often occur where least expected: in the drabbest, most bustling metropolis. To rely on burrows does not mean to become isolat ed, deracinated. Such sane asylums for individual ity, spreading contagious health amid mechanized con formity. need never degene rate into the inhuman aloof ness of the formalist, ivory tower pose, so long as their quarrel with America re mains a lovers’ quarrel. Without the inner dimen sion, outer civil liberties are not enough. We can talk civil liberties, prosperity, democracy with tongues of men and angels, but it is merely a case of “free from what?” and not “free for what?” if we use this freedom for no other purpose than to commit television or go lust ing after supermarkets. In contrast with earlier eras ever more colleges want to know: is the applicant well-adjust ed, a good mixer, chockful of leadership qualities? To any student reckless enough to ask my unstreamlined advice, I can only growl: ‘Why not for once have the moral courage to be unadjusted, a bad mixer, and shockingly de void of leadership qualities?” From being well-adjusted for its own sake, what a short step to becoming overadjust ed: the public-relations per sonality of public smile, pri vate blank. In effect, an ecs tasy of universal lobotomy. This kind of overadjustment does not mean merely the stampedes toward “normal cy” that have periodically characterized our less mecha 76 Panorama nized past; rather, the new trend means a bed^of-Procrustes, shaped by a conti nuous secret Gallup Poll, for whose pseudo-norms our gen uine inner spontaneity is continaully slaughtered. From this trend a new Am erican idol emerges: the Overadjusted Man. Against it a new liberator emerges, a bad mixer and scandalously deviod of “education for citi zenship”: the Unadjusted Man. Unadjustedness seems the only personal heroism left in a machine-era of which William Faulkner said at Stockholm: “We all had better grieve for all people beneath a culture which holds any machine superior to any man." Today the humanist, the artist, the scholar can no longer be the prophet and seer, the unriddler of the outer universe; modern science has deprived him of that function. His new hero ism, unriddling the inner universe,. consists of this: to be stubbornly unadjusted to ward the mechanized, deper sonalized bustle outside. The Uandjusted Man is the final, irreducible pebble that sabotages the omnipotence of even the smoothest running machine. The unadjusted should not be confused with the mal adjusted, the merely crotche ty; nor with the flaunted grandstand-nonconformity of b ohe m i a’s “misunderstood genius” act. The alternative to these mere caricatures of the Unadjusted Man is a viewpoint more selective in its non-adjusting—a viewpoint whose coin has two reciprocal sides: adjustment to the ages, nonadjustment to the age. The meaningful moral choice is not between con forming to the ephemeral, stereotyped values of the mo ment but conforming to the ancient, lasting archetypal values shared by all creative cultures. The sudden uprooting of archetypes, which had slowly, painfully grown out of the soil of history, was the most important consequence of the world-wide industrial revolu tion. This moral wound, this cultural shock was even more important than the economic consequences of the Indus trial Revolution. Liberty de pends on a substratum of fixed archetypes, as opposed to the -arbitrary shuffling JANUARY 1963 77 about of laws and institut ions. The distinction holds true whether the shuffling about be done by the a priori abstract rationalism of the eighteenth century or by the even more inhuman and me tallic mass-production of the nineteenth century. Not in the sense o*f any political party (least of all America's Old Guard Re publicans), nor in the sense of intolerant social preju dices, but in the sense of a pessimistic view about per fecting outward social prog ress and in a preference for inner spiritual and cultural tjrowth, in that nonpolitical, nonreactionary sense, the in ner dimension of man tends toward a conservative rather than liberal yiew of human nature. “How can a mere political innovation,” asked Nietzsche, "ever suffice to change men once and for all into happy inhabitants of the earth?” So long as people believe in the perfectibility of out ward society, they will con tinue to use those freedom destroying “bad means” (to talitarianism) that promise “good end.” According to the quickest short-cut to this the perceptive Polish poet and anti-Communist, Czeslaw Milosz, “A gradual disap pearance of the faith in the earthly paradise which just ifies all crimes is an essential preliminary to the destruct ion of totalitarianism.” By rejecting the possibility of an earthly paradise, cultural con servatism rejects all brands of Rousseauistic perfectibility of man, rejecting the a priori utopias not only of Jacob inism and of socialism but also of doctrinaire laissezfaire capitalism. Earth is one of the unin habitable planets. Unlike the habitable ones, Earth is a planet with a built-in cel lar of error, death, decay. If frail children scrawl blue prints of progress on the ceil ing, how will that conjure away the reality of the house, including the ceiling itself, rest on the foundation of that cellar of error, death, decay? Just as our planet is uninha bitable, so our society is in defensible. This is the stub bornly conservative, and un Jeffersonian, truth of the hu man condition. Yet some how we must live. Then is any social betterment possi ble at all? Sustained better78 Panorama ftjent never; fluctuating bet terment often. Gradual, li mited reform can indeed be accomplished, always working within a rooted framework, moving always from particu lar to particular. Such hu mane reforms can be achiev ed and urgently ought to be. We must build what society we can out of what clay we have: the clay of decay, the clay of frailty and constant unpredictable blunder. But the good builder builds with the clay at hand; never does he pile up utopias from some ideal airy clay that does not exist on his particu lar planet. The most blood curdling crimes are done not by criminals but perfection ists. Criminals normally stop killing when they attain their goal: loot. Perfectionists ne ver'stop killing because their goal is never attainable: the ideal society. It is not a question of be ing inhumanely blind to the monstrous faults of the order, ol all old orders. It is simply a matter of learning induct ively the impossibility of any new program too sweeping, any progress long sustained. Only dead chemicals can be sweepingly reorganized, sustainedly prefected; every thing alive is indefensible be cause infinitely precarious. Humanity is willful, wanton, unpredictable. It is not there to be organized for its own good by coercive righteous busybodies. Man is a cease less anti-managerial revolu tion. Whenever enlightened re formers expect the crowd to choose Christ, it cheers for Barabbas. Whenever some Weimar Republic gets rid of some old monarchy, the liber ated crowd turns its republic over to some Hitler. Then what consolation remains for the brute fact that sustained progress is impossible? Sheer self-deception is the hope of overcoming man’s doom by founding a more exact social science. How can there ever be an exact science dealing with man? Science is exact when dealing with predict able chemicals; only art can deal with flesh. There are indeed consolations for man’s precariousness, but they con sist not of trying to end it but of learning to find in it not only the lowest but the highest reaches of the spirit, not only cruel social wrongs but the holy welding-flame of JANUARY 1963 79 the lyric imagination, trans figuring frailty into beauty. This is the Baudelairean truth that the best roses grow from manure. The refusal of society to be a social science, outwardly conditioned, its insistence on remaining an art, inward, spontaneous, unpredictableall these human realities for ever wreck the most scienti fic polls and blue-prints. The Economic Man of Smith and Marx, with his famous. Eco nomic Motives, has never ex isted. You can only achieve the goals of cutward material ism by an inward idealism. You can only make lasting your outward economic gains by inward values that subo.r dinate economic gains to indi vidual freedom. If you base society on the idea of tech niques and economic gains, then you lose not only the freedom but the economic gains. Without spiritual know-why, you lose even your technical know-how. In place of the economic capitalist philosophy of Adam Smith and its parallel, the economic socialist philosophy of Marx the world through trial and error will come to see the economic necessity of an antieconomic philosophy, the ma terial necessity of antimater ialism. Pragmatism is unprag matic; it won’t -work.-The Saturday Review. Freedom of teaching and of opinion in book or press is the foundation for the sound and natural development of any people. The lessons of history — especially the very latest chapters — are all too plain on this score. It is the bounden duty of everyone’to stand with every ounce of energy for the preservation and enhancement of these liberties and to exert all possible influence in keeping public opinion aware of the existing danger. — Albert Einstein. 80 Panorama

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