Kenyon College - Reveille Yearbook (Gambier, OH)

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ENGLISH George E. Labalmc James D. Squires Born Offspring of Revolt by Dr. Denham Sutcliffe; Kenyon Professor of linglisb Edited for the Reveille Youth and newness are our national preoccupation. Not today's car is the ideal, but tomorrow's. Our reverence is not for the man of years and wisdom, but for the youth of health and promise. Our effort is not to achieve maturity hut to retain youth, or at least the illusion of it. Our pride less often contemplates our social stability than our mobility, not our community or class but our hope of rising above them. Even an undergraduate may be expected to know that few things are more character- istically American than the assumption that wc are the crowning achievement of a teleological history; what Whitman called the culmination of the scheme.” Mrs. Trol- lope. in the eighteen-twenties, was greeted everywhere with the assumption that she must be overjoyed to escape from benighted London and all the kings into the tobacco- scented air of freedom. The fragrant farmers of Cincinnati were confident that she could have seen no city finer than theirs, no political institutions so divinely ordered as theirs, no independence so surly as theirs. Tocqucvillc, at the same time, was struck with our individualism — a new word, said his translator, to which a novel concept had given birth. The cry of our resplendent newness, hence of our superiority, is everywhere in early American literature and folk-lore. We are the pioneers of the world, cried Melville. God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls-We are the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things.” Hawthorne cptiom- ized the popular spirit in the character llolgravc, to whom it seemed “that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten East is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew. . . . Holgrave might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land. I don't think Hawthorne had Emerson in mind when he wrote that, but why should he not have been thinking of the address to Har- vard's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa: Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us arc rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Emerson was right, as usual, in saying that our literature and history were in the optative mood. The mood triumphed. Our revolt from orthodoxy has been so successful that it is against the law to discuss religion in the public schools. Wc have so successfully re- volted from aristocracy that the tastes, manners, and speech of a B.A. arc not to be dis- tinguished from those of a street-vendor. Wc have so competently pulled down the moss-grown past that no ten alumni can communicate in shared symbols, or comprehend a reference more remote than to Ingrid Bergman. Having done with highbrowism, literacy is our last requirement of a Congressman or learning of a professor. I am quite of Koko’s mind about 'the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and every country but his own. What I am asking is whether an entire preoccupation with present and future is a fruitful preoccupation, and whether Cicero's remark is less true now than when he made it, that the man who doesn't know what happened before he was born is forever a child. Forgive me if I don't mention everything that happened before you were born; I'll content myself with reminding you of a thing or two. A nation fell off from the univer- sal church. Shortly thereafter, yet another breach sent a body of men to America where Continued on next page Robert L. Westland Melvin E. LaFountaine A. Kandcll McKechnie Thomas C. Woodhury Page 19

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MAJORS IN Peter Weaver Robert F. Koke David (J. Jensen John E. White Joseph A. Wcndel Frederick L. Phillips Robert M. Kastner Myron B. Bloy Robert L. Johnson, Jr. Page 18

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Born Offspring of Revolt the vicissitudes of their faith bred a religious assurance, unleashed from all control in dogma or creed that has been called no less than terrifying in the lengths to which it was to go in proclaiming the individual as his own Messiah.” Property was once chiefly confined to an hereditary aristocracy. For them, possession entailed obligations: conservation of the land, for example, to posterity; an obligation to serve as models, or at least as patrons, of learning, taste, and virtue. The notion arose that property and class are separable, and they were separated, so that among us the man of property has no obligation whatever to serve either as model or patron of learning, taste, or virtue. Calvin affirmed pre- destination; success became a sign of God’s favor; devo- tion to business came to look like devotion to God; and then God disappeared from the equation, and we were left with the sanctity of success. What happened before you were born was in short no less than the creation of a context of tastes, morals, ideas, and ideals in which you must make a life. That context is founded not in nature but in history. Your tastes, ambitions, and values were created by society. In the degree that you arc uncritically immersed in the mo- ment — when you forget, that is to say, that those values were choices — then you are at the mercy of that so- ciety and will he incapable of sharing intelligently even in the great American tradition of revolt. When a so- ciety forgets the tradition out of which it sprang, it abdicates from humanity. It may be symbolized by an Ahah who, having smashed the quadrant, lost the log. and magnetized his own needle, pursues the demon of the absolute across uncharted seas. When Calvinism seemed to restrict the notion of limit- less human progress, we turned it in on a new model. We turned in the concept of the scholar and gentleman for the ideal of the practical man. We turned in mon- archy. What prevents us from turning in democracy? What prevents us from turning in the idea that of all things, man is most valuable; that nothing is good — not business, not government, not progress — if it as- saults his primal dignity or debars him from his pos- sibilities? What will prevent us from turning in democracy and the concept of human dignity is a knowledge what they are and a faith born not of propaganda but of participation. What will prevent our turning them in is the existence of a large class of men who know the difference between choice and submission, between the local and the universal, the fleeting and the more nearly permanent. What distinguishes those men from the social mass, is the idea of excellence. The mass of men accept their civilization as a natural thing; are likely to think them- selves no more indebted for the political institutions under which they live than for the air they breathe. Forgetting that free education is a benefaction from the past, they demand it as a prerogative; seem to think that, like the sun and rain, it subsists by an agency bc- yound themselves. They use their cars or their peni- cillin or their civil rights as casually as they would pick up a stone from the roadside; as if these, like the stone, were natural objects, infinitely self-sustaining, needing only to be used. What distinguishes the sort of men 1 have in mind is a knowledge that all these common- places of twentieth century life were created by the arduous and often sacrificial labor of men who had de- voted themselves to the idea of excellence. Yet more: the men I speak of also know that the precious com- monplaces of civilization could disappear far more easily than they were brought into being, and that as they were created by intellectual labor, so they must be sus- tained by it. They know, for instance, that men do not passively inherit freedom — political, religious, or in- tellectual — they earn it. They know that science, medicine, the law, and the arts were not, like the sun, erected for man. but that they were erected and must be upheld by man. If the mass of men are to continue their unintelligent enjoyment of the fruits of intelli- gence, a self-selected few must dedicate themselves to in- telligence. Such men will make high demands upon themselves, will judge themselves by standards radically different from those by which the mass of men arc con- tent. One characteristic mark of such men will be an un- easy sense of their own ignorance. Their knowledge of the past may cause them to wonder, now and then, whether modernity is the brand of excellence. They will not suppose that ideas, any more than juke-boxes, arc self-created; or that ideas, any more than juke-boxes, sustain themselves. They will know that the idea of a car preceded the creation of the car, and that cars will be improved not by ignorant enjoyment of them but by critical analysis of the physical principles on which they are constructed. And so of politics, religion, morals, and the arts — of the ideas of the just, the divine, the right, and the beautiful. They will in short know their own origins not merely as physical creatures but as humane creatures; they will have a sense of the past. That class of men will come chiefly. I think, from the colleges, and more especially from the college of lib- eral arts. Those colleges deal with much that is not easily demonstrable and that may have no obvious re- lation to the ideal of social advancement. Your society has prepared you to make an allergic response to such studies, and in bull session you will — if not expertly, at least loudly — demonstrate their futility. You will assert sour free-born right to have no interest in phi- losophy and to call history the bunk. The college will reply that you were born with no such right, and that the price of your being human is to learn how you may become so and remain so. You will clamor to be allowed to express your individuality, and the college will reply that individuality means one-ncss. a harmony of knowl- edge, taste, and virtue that must be put into you before it can be poured from you, and that your present notion of individuality is one of twenty-three known varieties of f x lishness, compounded of ignorance and vulgarity. If it seems to you that I am putting a value on fogey- ism or counselling retreat into dreams of a golden age, I have misrepresented myself. I am only announcing that today’s man is yesterday’s child, and that he cannot become time’s orphan without suffering the classic ef- fects of orphanage — the pangs of insecurity, of be- longing nowhere, of counting for nothing. Why should not such a man turn in democracy for almost any model that gives him an assurance of — or at least an illusion of — his value? Inasmuch, therefore, as the sense of continuity is weak in our society, the college of liberal arts frequently finds itself in conflict with the popular whim. In a world where the professor of Greek who cannot change a tire is inferior to the man who can do nothing else, the college persists in valuing the profes- sor. It insists that progress is as much from something as to something; that progress, chance, and change are not synonyms. Its concern is of course with the mo- ment. but also with the origins of the moment, the impli- cations of the moment, and ultimately with the value of the moment. It insists that its graduate shall know himself as a member not merely of the local and geo- graphical community, but also of the human community. By the accidents of genetics and economics, you have been appointed to that class of men. Mow well the genes and the dollars cooperate, you know better than I. This speech was delivered al Wabash College. March 15. 1950; revised and enlarged for delivery a! Kenyon. Apri II, 1950. Page 20