The pursuit of competitive enterprise was a magnificent and courageous idea in its heyday. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considerable changes occurred. In our present day of giant business and monopoly capitalism how many people can become successful as individual competitors? There are very few groups left who, like doctors and psychotherapists and some farmers, still have the luxury of being their own economic bosses—and even they are subject to the rise and fall of prices and the fluctuating market like everyone else. The vast majority of workingmen and capitalists alike, professional people or businessmen, must fit into broad groups such as labor unions or big industries or university systems, or they would not survive economically at all. We have been taught to strive to get ahead of the next man, but actually today one’s success depends much more on how well one learns to work with one’s fellow workers. I have just read that even the individual crook cannot make out very well on his own these days: he has to join a racket!
May describes the new world as interdependent and individualism must now take a different guise than “every man for himself.”
As this hostility has come closer to the surface in recent decades, we have tried to cover it up by various devices—by becoming “joiners” of all sorts of service organizations, from Rotary to Optimist Clubs in the 1920’s and 30’s, by being good fellows, well liked by all, and so on. But the conflicts sooner or later burst forth into the open. This is pictured beautifully and tragically in Willie Loman, the chief character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willie had been taught, and in turn taught his sons, that to get ahead of the next fellow and to get rich were the goals, and this required initiative. When the boys steal balls and lumber, Willie, though he pays lip-service to the idea that he should rebuke them, is pleased that they are “fearless characters” and remarks that the “coach will probably congratulate them on their initiative.” His friend reminds him that the jails are full of “fearless characters,” but Willie rejoins, “the stock exchange is too.”
Willie tries to cover up his competitiveness, like most men of two or three decades ago, by being “well liked.” When as an old man he is “cast into the ash can” by virtue of the changing policies of his company, Willie is caught in great bewilderment, and keeps repeating to himself, “But I was the best-liked.” His confusion in this conflict of values—why does what he was taught not work?—mounts up until it culminates in his suicide. At the grave one son continues to insist, “He had a good dream, to come out number one.” But the other son accurately sees the contradiction which such an upheaval of values leads to, “He never knew who he was.”
The second central belief in our modern age (other than individual success) has been the faith in individual reason.
This belief, ushered in at the Renaissance like the belief in the value of individual competitiveness which we have just been discussing, was magnificently fruitful for the philosophical quests of the enlightenment in the seventeenth century, and served as a noble charter for the advances in science and for movements toward universal education. In these first centuries of our period, individual reason also meant “universal reason”; it was a challenge to each intelligent person to discover the universal principles by which all men might live happily. But again a change became apparent in the nineteenth century. Psychologically, reason became separated from “emotion” and “will.” The splitting up of the personality was prepared by Descartes in his famous dichotomy between body and mind—which will dog our tracks throughout this book—but the full consequences of this dichotomy did not emerge till last century.
For the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century man, reason was supposed to give the answer to any problem, will power was supposed to put it into effect, and emotions—well, they generally got in the way, and could best be repressed. Lo and behold, we then find reason (now transformed into intellectualistic rationalization) used in the service of compartmentalizing the personality, with the resulting repressions and conflict between instinct and ego and superego which Freud so well described.
When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the “whole man.” When people today use the term they almost always imply a splitting of the personality. They ask in one form or another: “Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?”
The beliefs in individual competition and reason we have been discussing are the ones which in actuality have guided modern western development, and are not necessarily the ideal values. To be sure, the values accepted as ideal by most people have been those of the Hebrew-Christian tradition allied with ethical humanism, consisting of such precepts as love thy neighbor, serve the community, and so on. On the whole, these ideal values have been taught in schools and churches hand in hand with the emphasis on competition and individual reason.
Henrik Ibsen in literature realized what was happening, Paul Cézanne in art, and Sigmund Freud in the science of human nature. Each of these men proclaimed that we must find a new unity for our lives. Ibsen showed in his play A Doll’s House that if the husband simply goes off to business, keeping his work and his family in different compartments like a good nineteenth-century banker, and treats his wife as a doll, the house will collapse. Cézanne attacked the artificial and sentimental art of the nineteenth century and showed that art must deal with the honest realities of life, and that beauty has more to do with integrity than with prettiness. Freud pointed out that if people repress their emotions and try to act as if sex and anger did not exist, they end up neurotic. And he worked out a new technique for bringing out the deeper, unconscious, “irrational” levels in personality which had been suppressed, thus helping the person to become a thinking-feeling-willing unity. So significant was the work of Ibsen, Cézanne and Freud that many of us used to believe that they were the prophets for our times. True, the contribution of each is probably the most important in their respective fields. But were they not in one respect the last great men of the old period rather than the first of the new? For they presupposed the values and goals of the past three centuries; important and enduring as their new techniques were, they coasted on the goals of their time. They lived before the age of emptiness.
It seems now, unfortunately, that the true prophets for the middle twentieth century were Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Franz Kafka. I say “unfortunately” because that means our task is that much more difficult. Each one of these men foresaw the destruction of values which would occur in our time, the loneliness, emptiness and anxiety which would engulf us in the twentieth century. Each saw that we cannot ride on the goals of the past. We shall quote these three frequently in this book, not because they are intrinsically the wisest men in history, but because each foresaw with great power and insight the particular dilemmas which almost every intelligent person faces now. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, proclaimed that science in the late nineteenth century was becoming a factory, and he feared that man’s great advances in techniques without a parallel advance in ethics and self-understanding would lead to nihilism.
The Loss of the Sense of Self
Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality.” Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being “de-humanized,” and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons. But this loss of the sense of self did not occur overnight.
Those of us who lived in the 1920’s can recall the evidences of the growing tendency to think of the self in superficial and oversimplified terms. In those days “self-expression” was supposed to be simply doing whatever popped into one’s head, as though the self were synonymous with any random impulse, and as though one’s decisions were to be made on the basis of a whim which might be a product of indigestion from a hurried lunch just as often as of one’s philosophy of life. To “be yourself” was then an excuse for relaxing into the lowest common denominator of inclination. To “know one’s self” wasn’t thought to be especially difficult, and the problems of personality could be solved relatively easily by better “adjustment.”