Class of '57-Freeman?

Abstract

In June, 1957, nearly a third of a million young men and women will receive bachelor's, or first professional, degrees from college, after four or more years of study which, in the judgment of the college authorities, officially endorsed on a diploma, have carried them as far as is feasible in academic halls along the road of life as free people in a free nation. Of these 300,000-odd, several million (for statistics are curious things) will have taken college courses in philosophy, ethics, religion, and history (ancient, medieval, modern, Asiatic, European, and Latin-American, as well as our own); in international political affairs, foreign economic problems, and social institutions; in psychology and anthropology; in ancient and modern literatures, along with Anglo-American letters. All these fields will be explored, and more too, in addition to art, music, engineering, mathematics, and the exact sciences. Yet in every field save the last five of these, college authorities with all too few exceptions permit, and tacitly approve, that the students form judgments on human beliefs and human conduct, without the privilege and the obligation of full and free access to the human evidence. These young people will examine and judge, for example, the religions that are normative in the life of today, which is to say institutions and beliefs whose present forms are palpitating with old and non-Anglo-Saxon spirit; yet they cannot communicate with the mindquickening imagery of the Vulgate, or the proof and persuasion of Augustine, Thomas, Luther, or Calvin. The students puzzle over today's tangled foreign affairs, yet they are deaf to the demagoguery of a Hitler or a Mussolini. They cannot conceive of the seduction of specious imagery in the writings of a Marx or a Spengler. They cannot imagine what a term like Fuehrerprinzip conveys, implies, distorts, and conceals in the context of a speech by Goebbels. The convincing rhetoric of an Ortega y Gasset, for his elegantly aristocratic arguments on modern society are by no means cold logic, is a dumb show to them. Did Erasmus mean the same thing as the Book of Ecclesiasticus when he alluded to famous men? The Class of 1957 will no be able to tell; yet the course of history hinges on concepts such as this. What did Plato really mean when he spoke of love? And is that what Freud means when he borrows the Greek term employed-sometimes-by Plato? To the budding anthropologist of 1957, what difference is there between the home f an American and that of a Spaniard or Frenchman, in whose dictionaries we seek the word in vain? And when he becomes Under Secretary of State in 1977, will he bear the difference in mind while he ponders the effectiveness of dollar diplomacy? Will he know that the word democracy, to us a heart-stirring term, means to the Middle European a few rich monopolists grinding the faces of the underprivileged into the dirt? (All th world, at times, thinks in terms of the captions on a political cartoon.) Or will he continue to use the term while counterpunching against the blows of the Kremlin?