From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they
not hence,
even of your lusts that war in your members?—James 4:1
In 1915, Irving Babbitt, professor of French literature at Harvard
University
and architect with Paul Elmer More of the New Humanism, turned his
attention
to the "breakdown of internationalism" that had plunged the world into
the catastrophe of the Great War. Observing the critical situation less
than a year into the European conflict, he prepared a lengthy and
penetrating
two-part essay on internationalism during a brief but busy sabbatical
that
was otherwise devoted to his forthcoming book, Rousseau and
Romanticism
(1919)1--his important
consideration
of the origin of the modern temperament. The companion articles
appeared
in the Nation in June 1915, but carried an editor's disclaimer
that
they did not entirely reflect the Nation's own views on
the war.2
Babbitt was indeed likely to offend the magazine's more jingoist
readers.
By the late spring of 1915, there had already been some loss of
American
life (most notably on the Lusitania in May), and the fighting in Europe
had stalemated in the trenches of the Western Front, circumstances
pointing
to the likely involvement of the United States. But Babbitt's essays
for
the Nation
preceded America's "inevitable" decision to join the
belligerents and were published when deliberation and restraint were
still
possible for America's leaders, when an alternative remained open to
Rooseveltian
"realism" on the one hand and Wilsonian "idealism" on the other, twin
expressions
of the will to power and both violations, as Babbitt would argue, of
humanism's
law of measure.
Throughout the war, Babbitt contributed articles to the Nation
on
topics ranging from Rousseau, to Matthew Arnold, to Buddha,3
making in each essay at least passing reference to the war. But his
extended
analysis in 1915 of the breakdown of modern internationalism spoke
directly
to the West's moral crisis that had culminated with such force in the
Great
War. Babbitt's careful dichotomizing of "true" and "false"
internationalism--one
the product of humane control, the other the product of humanitarian
impulse--led
him to consider the cumulative spiritual problem behind the war's more
readily apparent material causes and behind the superficial mechanistic
explanations for the war then being offered. He sought to disentangle
the
ethico-religious problem from the build-up of armaments, the political
maneuvering, the economic and imperial rivalry, and the
headline-grabbing
events of the battlefields of Europe. While Babbitt did not deny or
even
minimize the war's proximate political, social and economic causes, he
endeavored especially to discern and explain the condition of the human
will and imagination that had allowed a catastrophe of such
magnitude--of
unprecedented extent in geography, material cost, and loss of human
life--the
world having recently talked so expectantly of a coming day of peace
and
brotherhood among nations. Babbitt set out in these articles to
uncover,
in his words, "the solid background of ideas" and to reveal "how these
ideas have actually worked out in life and conduct."
4
Babbitt was most concerned with the displacement in
international relations
of ethical control by an unrestrained will to power, a tendency he
found
all the more striking, if only seemingly contradictory, in an age that
boasted of its democratic, progressive, and humanitarian principles.
Some
would argue, then and now, that the First World War erupted in spite of
these lofty nineteenth-century ideals, that it in fact marked the
bitterest
betrayal of the humanitarian impulse. Babbitt, in contrast to his age,
responded provocatively that the war had come about precisely because
of
this expansive idealism. And he traced the West's "expansive living" to
the sentimental Rousseauist temperament that had come to dominate
European
thought over the past one hundred years, meaning for Babbitt that the
current
international chaos ultimately derived from the moral chaos raging
within
individual human hearts. To the degree that modern internationalism
failed
to recognize the fact of this inner turmoil, it would fail to limit
warfare.
Babbitt refused to blame the German people alone for the
war, rejecting
the prevailing notion that somehow "in their militarism and lust of
empire
they differ from other people, not merely in degree, but in kind"
(677)--a
simplistic interpretation of the war that required no painful
self-examination
on the part of the other combatants, and that naively supposed that if
it were not for German "megalomania" the rest of Europe would be at
peace.
Babbitt stepped back from this arrogant provincialism to "a truly
international
point of view" from which to diagnose the real disorder afflicting
Europe
and to discover why the "existing type" of internationalism had broken
down. Babbitt noted with what stunning ease modern nationalism had
overrun
modern internationalism, crushing even such an avowedly transcendent
and
unifying movement as Socialism. The behavior of Socialists across
Europe
in 1914 seemed evidence enough that modern internationalism had not
provided
a check on nationalism (677). And the ascendancy of this irrepressible
nationalism was not, contrary to popular claims, the sole
responsibility
of such German thinkers as Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi. Writers
in Germany and England alike before the war had praised their nation's
expansiveness, indulging in the ubiquitous and dangerous "exaltation of
vital impulse over vital control" that Babbitt had warned about even
before
the war (705).5 Germany
was
not the only nation to drift away from civilization in the prewar
decades
and slip the moorings of a sane nationalism and humane cosmopolitanism.6
Babbitt traced the emergence of modern nationalism and
modern internationalism
to the French Revolution and the Romantic temperament, generally
following
Edmund Burke's interpretation of the events of the 1790s, yet without
sharing
Burke's degree of trust in traditionalism and conventionality. Unlike
the
English and their narrowly applied Revolution of 1688, France had
exported
revolutionary doctrine beyond its borders, intending not merely to
reform
its own institutions but to transform its neighbors' as well, toppling
inherited institutions (monarchy and church, in particular) as
impediments
to an instinctive international fraternity that needed only to be set
free
in order to express itself. By spreading "brotherhood," France
ironically
produced intense nationalism, both within France itself--as the
European
coalition fought to contain the "Christ of nations" and reverse the
revolution--and
outside France as its mass army waged an ideological crusade and
sparked
nationalist resistance among its neighbors. Sentimental brotherhood in
the eighteenth century had ended with all of Europe at war; the "will
to
brotherhood" had been revealed as the "will to power," externally in
empire-building
and internally in the ideological imperialism of the Reign of Terror.
Ultimately,
France's quest for radical democracy and its "humanitarian crusade" of
liberation had culminated in Napoleon, whose invading armies again
spread
nationalism. Revolutionary France had followed a path from humanitarian
brotherhood, to nationalism, to predatory imperialism, and thus "ceased
to be the 'Christ of nations' and became the 'traitor to human kind,'
universally
denounced by disillusioned radicals at the end of the eighteenth
century"
(678).
Returning to the situation in 1915--Europe's greatest crisis
since the
Napoleonic Wars--Babbitt noted the facile and narrow-minded tendency to
identify Germany as the latest impediment to peace and the new "traitor
to human kind." According to the popular view, Germany, once home to
Kant's
idealism and faith in brotherhood, had sadly degenerated in the age of
Bismarck's nationalism and Nietzsche's superman into its present
incarnation
as the exporter of a decadent Kultur. But again, Babbitt warned
that Germany's expansive living pointed to a larger problem that
affected
all of Europe and beyond. Nietzsche's superman was itself rooted in the
habit of mind that had also produced Stendhal's worship of Napoleon,
Carlyle's
"Great Man" theory of history, and more generally Romanticism's cult of
the "original genius." From this wider perspective, the German nation
of
1915, while perhaps no less menacing to its neighbors, appeared not as
a historical oddity or atavistic throwback to an earlier age, but more
understandably as dominated by a widely held naturalistic view of human
nature that since the late eighteenth century had displaced traditional
Christianity and humanism (678).
Babbitt identified naturalism's revolt against the dual
tradition of
Christian and humanistic self-discipline, and its substitution of a new
basis of morality, as lying at the heart of the breakdown of internationalism.7
Elsewhere, in Literature and the American College (1908) and in
Rousseau
and Romanticism (1919), for example, Babbitt condemned both
utilitarian
(or Baconian) naturalism and emotional (or Rousseauist) naturalism for
rejecting humanism's "decorum" and "law of measure" in favor of a
restless
and grasping individualism.8
Humanism, in contrast, maintained the distinction and tension between
the
"law for man" and "law for thing," and recognized the inner struggle
between
the individual's "permanent self" and "ordinary self," with happiness
possible
only through ethical control. Naturalism lost sight of the separate
"law
for man" in its Baconian quest for power, and cast off restraint in its
Rousseauist enthusiasm for "instinct." Babbitt faulted the naturalistic
humanitarians for stressing humanity's collective struggle for material
progress and well-being while downplaying the struggle between good and
evil within the individual heart. The lovers of humanity denied the
necessity
of this inner struggle, resolving the "civil war in the cave" by
rejecting
all "convention" as "unnatural" and "artificial." The basis of morality
was no longer the disciplinary virtues, but rather sympathy,
benevolence,
"humanity." Human nature was not inclined to evil and therefore
properly
restrained by humility or decorum, but was instead inherently pure and
benevolent, needing only to be free to express its instinctive inner
beauty
(678).9
Thus, seeing morality and virtue as matters of the external
world, the
"beautiful soul" is "expansive," a key word in Babbitt's lexicon: "Not
having to reform himself, the beautiful soul can devote himself
entirely
to reforming society." Babbitt argued, proceeding once again from
Burke,
that the humanitarians made the one virtue of compassion serve as the
sum
of all virtues. No longer grounded in self-control, virtue was
redefined
by the humanitarians as expansive sympathy, creating a volatile mixture
of inner rebellion and outer philanthropy. This impulse to change the
world
was expressed in two ways that on the surface seem contradictory. The
rationalistic
humanitarian, on the one hand, hoped to change the world by tinkering
with
institutions. The emotional humanitarian, on the other, hoped to change
the world by spreading the spirit of brotherhood. Between them, the
utilitarian
and sentimental humanitarians combined to form the "Promethean
individualism"
of the modern age (678).
Having thus defined the modern individual temperament,
Babbitt extended
the circle of his analysis from the individual to the nation, finding
the
national temperament of Germany and the rest of Europe rooted in the
same
humanitarianism that produced indulgent, expansive chaos within
individual
souls. And the modern view of human nature, as it was lived out in
nations,
presented the greatest challenge of all to contemporary international
relations.
As the individual in the humanitarian age submitted to no "inner check"
or "veto" over his own impulses, so too the expansive nation recognized
only its own civilizing mission, or its historical imperative to spread
Kultur,
or its divine calling to "uplift" other peoples. Add to this impulse
the
pressures of population, limited resources, and economic rivalry in an
industrializing Europe and it was clear, Babbitt continued, that "the
problem
of adjusting the relations between highly expansive individuals and
nationalities
is indeed the modern problem par excellence" (679). And this
fundamental
problem of the "moral anarchy" of expansive living became "all the more
dangerous," he warned in a later essay, as it was "combined with . . .
an increasing mechanical and material efficiency."10
Europe's perfection of its destructive capacity, Babbitt seemed to say,
had arisen from the meeting in the modern world of the Rousseauist lack
of control over the inner man with the Baconian increase of control
over
physical nature, what he later would call "that singular mixture of
altruism
and high explosives that we are pleased to term our civilization."
11
But if this lethal combination was indeed modern civilization's most
pressing
challenge, where did the solution lie? Was humanitarianism, whether
sentimental
or utilitarian, equipped to meet this challenge and to "adjust" the
relations
among expansive nations, as it claimed? Babbitt, returning to a
constant
theme in his work, argued that humanitarianism "will have to be judged
. . . not by its theory and its professions, but by its fruits" (679).
Considering himself to be a thoroughly critical modern, Babbitt
demanded
that these schemes for peace produce tangible results, that they
actually
produce peace.12
By this accounting, both utilitarian and romantic
humanitarians had
failed dismally. The rationalist counted on "enlightened self-interest"
to limit war, while the sentimentalist offered to manage conflict
through
a growing sympathy for abstract "Humanity." Babbitt found the first,
and
the more utilitarian, view to be prevailing over the nineteenth
century's
sentimental infatuation with the idea of a "brotherhood of nations."
The
world at the moment seemed to place more confidence in arbitration
treaties,
the Hague conferences, and the reasoning of those, like the widely read
British author Norman Angell in The Great Illusion, who argued that
when
nations were confronted with the statistical evidence of the costs of
modern
war they would abandon it as futile. Supposedly, once it could be
demonstrated
that the profits of war were an illusion, the impulse to fight would
wither.
But these rational appeals had gone unheeded in August 1914:
"Unfortunately,
whatever uses the various humanitarian devices may have in lessening
international
friction on minor occasions, it is only too plain that on supreme
occasions
they fail" (679). Babbitt held out little hope that utilitarian
mechanisms
could ever prevent war in the absence of an inner check on appetite.
Likewise, emotional pacifism had also proven incapable of
restraining
nationalist ambition in 1914, and this sentimental regard for
"Humanity"
had an even longer record of failure. From the Abbé de
Saint-Pierre's
Project for Perpetual Peace (1712-1717), to Kant's treatise on
"Perpetual
Peace," down to the great peace movement of the late nineteenth
century--pacifist
efforts had been followed by war. Babbitt called this pattern "the
monstrous
irony that dogs the humanitarian." Moreover, this irony indicated
something
wrong in the sentimental basis for peace itself, an inherent flaw that
the humanitarians would not admit. They argued instead that their ideas
simply had not yet been tried the right way, or that their
transforming,
regenerative spirit had not yet penetrated deeply enough. Continuing
failure
pointed only to some remaining impediment to peace, to some enduring
interference
with natural goodwill and brotherhood, and not to any fundamental error
in the proposed humanitarian solution. Germany was the current
impediment
to world peace. Or perhaps it was the arms manufacturers who conspired
to postpone the golden age. Remove these obstacles and peace would
flow.
International peace was only a matter of the proper arrangement of
things
in the natural, external order. Babbitt supposed that "nothing short of
the suicide of the planet would avail to convince the humanitarians
that
anything is wrong with their theory--and even then, the last surviving
humanitarian would no doubt continue to moan conspiracy" (679).
This observation brought Babbitt to what he called
humanitarian internationalism's
"fatal flaw." The humanitarians assumed, contra Hobbes, that
the
state of nature is not a war of all against all brought on by man's
continual
lusting after power, but rather a Rousseauist Arcadia. The French
Revolution
had proved Hobbes correct, Babbitt argued; the "will to power" had
overwhelmed
the "will to brotherhood." The removal of customary restraints had
brought
anarchy, not peace. The emotional humanitarian's appeal to sympathy and
the utilitarian humanitarian's appeal to self-interest had manifestly
not
ended warfare. The flaw in current internationalism was the assumption
that the modern expansive temperament could be contained by sympathy or
self-interest apart from a reevaluation of human nature. It seemed
obvious
to Babbitt, then, that despite Norman Angell and his disciples, "the
great
illusion is not war but humanitarianism." And humanitarianism was an
illusion
at every level of human experience. It failed to reconcile nations, or
factions within nations, or the war raging within the human soul: "[the
expansive view of life] does not establish peace and unity among
different
nationalities, it does not establish peace and unity among members of
the
same nationality, it does not establish peace and unity--and this is
the
root of the whole matter--in the breast of the individual" (679).
Centrifugal
living, as it might be called, could by definition never lead to social
harmony or international peace.
But if sympathy and self-interest failed to restrain
national ambition,
and failed to build a new commonality among peoples to replace the lost
Christendom of the Middle Ages, did humanity have no alternative to the
present anarchy brought by expansive impulse other than a Hobbesian
despotism
or rule by a Nietzschean superman? Babbitt offered hope, but a hope
requiring
a monumental act of will and imagination to reverse the course of the
past
century, heading away from the "sham spirituality" of humanitarian
expansiveness
and toward the true spirituality of the self-discipline that was
central
to both humanism and Christianity. As he wrote, "true spirituality
insists
that men cannot come together in a common sympathy, but only in a
common
discipline." Rather than yield to impulse and expand, individuals had
to
concentrate on "a common center" beyond themselves, whether that
limiting,
disciplining center be the example of Christ or the humanist's law of
measure.
For nations, likewise, concentration on the "common center" could alone
produce true internationalism, an internationalism built on control,
not
impulse. The catastrophic slide could be reversed, Babbitt argued, but
only through the restraining, disciplinary rigors of religion or
humanism,
by consciously submitting to the "human law" of moderation and decency:
"it may well be that the present imperialistic drift can be checked
only
by a quieter and saner view of life, only by a recovery of the
disciplinary
virtues, the virtues of concentration" (705). In opposition to
restless,
centrifugal living Babbitt offered a humanistic principle of control.
Historical experience made it clear that this
self-discipline would
not be easy. Ancient Greece, for instance, had become restless and had
passed from democracy to imperialism, heeding leaders who elevated
"vital
impulse" over "vital control" and choosing not to refrain from
"decadent"
and "irrational imperialism" (704). But despite past failure--or rather
because of past failure--Babbitt called in 1915 for resistance to the
appetite
for empire and glory. Of course, he recognized that the spirit of the
times
said otherwise. Intellectuals and statesmen were busy urging their
peoples
on to expansion (whether to material or ideological empire). But the
survival
of the West required discriminating between true and false, and then
rejecting
false and dangerous notions, no matter how popular. "The task of
breaking
with convention--that is, with the organized common-sense of the
community
in which one lives--is indeed formidable" (705). Babbitt longed for the
recovery of a "commoner sense," not mere traditionalism or
conventionality,
but an apprehension of "inspired and imaginative good sense," a
"positive
and critical" alternative to the prevailing wisdom and circumstances of
the moment (705).
Babbitt was emphatic that the fashionable ideas of his day
did not hold
the key to international peace and goodwill, nor to producing the kind
of leaders essential to that end. Neither progress, nor
humanitarianism,
nor idealism, nor democracy--none of the sacred but ill-defined words
of
the current chaotic age--held the answer. And as he later lamented,
"nothing
is more characteristic of such an era than its irresponsible use of
generalterms."
13
It was not enough to be "progressive," for example; one had to know
what
one was progressing toward. It was not enough to talk of peace and
liberty
and humanity; one had to define these terms or risk wandering endlessly
in the dream world being spun by the humanitarians. In the case of the
meaning and limits of democracy, this sort of misunderstanding had done
particular damage, Babbitt feared. Democracy had become a politician's
conjuring word, and only through careful definition could the valuable
qualities of democracy be salvaged. Simply more democracy, mere
quantitative
democracy, was not the cure for social strife or international war.
There
was nothing inherently peaceful or unifying about pure democracy. In
fact,
Babbitt thought he discerned within quantitative democracy an
unmistakable
historical tendency toward imperialism; an internally "undisciplined"
democracy
would become a "grasping and dangerous" democracy, he later wrote.14
Any democracy that abandoned internal institutional constraints on
political
will would soon grow impatient with checks on its external imperial
will
as well. Any democracy, including America, that abandoned its
established
"veto powers" in favor of a capricious popular will, would only hasten
its decline into social anarchy and precipitate its plunge toward an
impulsive
foreign policy (705-706).
While Babbitt feared that America would follow democracy's
fatal tendency
toward empire, he believed that such a decline could be arrested. And
the
solution lay in the wisdom and virtue of individual citizens and their
leaders. To begin with, citizens themselves had to be law-abiding, and
this would come about only by cultivating the critical spirit, by
developing
the Socratic ability to define and measure, by submitting to
self-scrutiny
and self-discipline. This inner discipline would not result from the
endless
multiplication of laws to regulate behavior--a temptation that Babbitt
saw America succumbing to, and a sign of moral failure rather than true
control. Nor would it come through the muckraking journalist's habit of
pointing an accusatory finger at everyone else, and thereby encouraging
an attitude the very opposite of the truly critical spirit. Nor through
print media that seemed to prevent reflection by trivializing every
issue,
and certainly not through a modern educational system that did not
teach
critical reading and reflection. Babbitt found hope--a realistic
expectation,
in his view--in education for wisdom and virtue rather than for power
and
service. The future of the American republic lay in "a genuinely human
point of view," in an authentic "cosmopolitanism," in the cultivation
of
a true internationalism (706).
But America's will to power also had to be restrained by the
kind of
leader that only humane education could produce. While the humanitarian
pursued peace through elevating the world's material condition, the
humanist,
Babbitt countered, would rather "make sure first that our society has
leaders
who have imposed upon their impulses the yoke of the human law, and so
have become moderate and sensible and decent" (706). Traditional
Christianity--prior
to its reconfiguration into sentimental humanitarianism--also taught
that
peace in the human heart was a prerequisite to peace among men.
Buddhism
as well, he would note elsewhere, understood the link between the
restlessness
of infinite desire in the individual and turmoil in theworld.15
The whole testimony of humanism and the world's religions warned that
the
character of leaders mattered, because character would be translated
into
policy. Peace among nations, therefore, was possible only as a
by-product
of peace, whether religious or humanistic, within the heart of the
leaders
themselves:
To suppose that men who are filled individually with every manner of
restlessness, maddened by the lust of power and speed, votaries of the
god Whirl, will live at peace either with themselves or with others, is
the vainest of chimeras. Whatever degree of peace is ever achieved in
international
relations in particular will be due to the fact that the responsible
leaders
in the countries concerned are not mere imperialist expansionists, but,
whether as a result of religious or humanistic discipline, have
submitted
vital impulse to no less vital control; there will then be hope that
they
may even get within hailing distance of one another, even hope that
they
may subordinate to some extent the private interests of their
respective
states to the larger interests of civilization (706).
With this conclusion about the quality of leadership, Babbitt ended for
the time being his diagnosis of the breakdown in thought and behavior
that
had culminated in the Great War. Much of the material in this essay for
the Nation Babbitt later reworked and elaborated in the
chapters
of his more famous Democracy and Leadership (1924)--a book
that,
significantly, was originally to be entitled Democracy and Imperialism.16
The book benefited from the additional insights gained from three more
years of costly warfare including the slaughter of Verdun and the Somme
and from America's crusade to make the world safe for democracy. But
after
the war he returned to the same conclusion he had drawn nearly a decade
before: "behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic
individual,
just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual."
17
While Babbitt said nothing directly in his two Nation articles
about Woodrow Wilson as a national leader, his call for a certain
quality
of leadership for the sake of peace and limited government raises the
unavoidable
question of what Babbitt thought of his fellow Ivy League academic,
especially
since Wilson enjoyed a reputation then and since as a man of peace. Did
Wilson exhibit restraint, or did he succumb to the "fatal flaw" of
humanitarian
internationalism by relying on sympathy and self-interest to establish
peace? Later, in Democracy and Leadership, published in the
year
of Wilson's death, Babbitt commented at some length on whether Wilson
fitted
his criteria for humanistic leadership. Babbitt was most critical of
Wilson's
sentimentalism, and from his comments throughout Democracy and
Leadership
on Wilson's temperament, it is clear that he found in the war President
elements of both the emotional and utilitarian humanitarian. While
Wilson
talked incessantly of "Humanity," he worked to ensure world peace
through
the mechanism of the League of Nations, which Babbitt expected to turn
out to be merely another "humanitarian chimera"--the kind of futile
substitute
for self-control that historically often had been a means to
imperialistic
ends, as in the case of France's Henry IV and his "Grand Design."
18
Both impulses--sentimental and utilitarian--revealed Wilson's will to
power
through "world service."
It is important to note that Babbitt did not condemn Wilson
for intervention
in the European War per se. He seemed more concerned with the
expansive
temperament behind intervention than with the fact that the United
States
had gone to war. As much as he desired peace within the individual and
among nations, Babbitt was no pacifist. In fact, he criticized Wilson
for
his famous pronouncement "that a nation may be 'too proud to fight.' "
Rather than the evidence of Christian humility and humane control that
such a statement may appear to be on the surface, this declaration
struck
Babbitt as a prime example of the "humanitarian confusion of values."
"An
individual may be too humble to fight," Babbitt conceded, "but a nation
that is too proud to fight may, in a world like this, be too proud to
survive
as a nation." Babbitt preferred that Wilson had spoken up for justice:
the greatest virtue in the secular order, he wrote. This does not mean,
however, that Babbitt sided with the belligerent Teddy Roosevelt, whose
wartime crusade for an ill-defined and universal justice was
potentially
just as abstract and unlimited as the Wilsonian war for Humanity. Both
Roosevelt and Wilson advocated wars ofservice.19
More pointedly, Babbitt criticized Wilson's wars of service,
whether
in Mexico or Europe, as imperialism by another name and as likely to be
as direct a threat to democratic institutions as any conventional
imperialism.
World service was merely sentimental imperialism and would lead to
world
empire and to the death of the American republic. In the World War,
Wilson
had helped turn America into the world's latest version of a crusading
nation, the role France had occupied in the 1790s. And the crusading
passion
of the "uplifters" for domestic reform and world service, if unchecked,
would culminate in an empire under the impulsive rule of an
unrestrained
executive--all in the name of human betterment. Babbitt was unsparing
in
his characterization of progressive interventionism, whether domestic
or
foreign: "If we attend carefully to the psychology of the persons who
manifest
such an eagerness to serve us, we shall find that they are even more
eager
to control us." 20
"Service," no matter how sincere, was a symptom of the modern will to
power,
and, by his disregard for constraints, Wilson failed the test of
leadership:
Woodrow Wilson, . . . more than any other recent American, sought to
extend our idealism beyond our national frontiers. In the pursuit of
his
scheme for world service, he was led to make light of the
constitutional
checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for
unlimited
power. If we refused to take his humanitarian crusading seriously we
were
warned that we should "break the heart of the world." . . . The truth
is
that this language, at once abstract and sentimental, reveals a temper
at the opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman.21
In condemning Wilson's leadership in such blunt terms, Babbitt was not
questioning Wilson's moral circumspection or his sincerity. Babbitt
never
offered in print a full assessment of Wilson's life and character. He
was
concerned, rather, with a few observable qualities of leadership
exhibited
at a vital moment in the nation's history. He found in Wilson not a
statesman
of virtue but a romantic of mere temperament and sympathy. Babbitt
lamented
Wilson's indiscriminate use of general terms, his flights into the
idyllic
imagination of "Humanity" and "service," and his failure to exercise
the
"will to refrain," a quality of leadership that Babbitt found
indispensable
to any enduring civilization. Thus, Babbitt's search for the error in
first
principles behind the international anarchy of the twentieth century
brought
him to the failure of leadership. And here his argument came full
circle.
As he later remarked, "we are living in a world that in certain
important
respects has gone wrong on first principles; which will be found to be
only another way of saying that we are living in a world that has been
betrayed by its leaders."
22
Babbitt did not live to see the Second World War. But
already in 1924
he feared for a civilization that had not yet unmasked and contained
the
deadly combination of Baconian power and Rousseauist impulse. Even
before
the Great War ended, Babbitt foresaw that the postwar order would not
be
peaceful. In his 1915 essay he concluded that the war would only
exacerbate
the animosity seething among the European powers, and he feared,
rightly
so, "the almost inexpiable hatreds it will leave behind" (706). How, he
wondered in another wartime essay, "are European nations, when each has
attained to the highest degree of self-assertion, to live at peace with
one another?" 23
After having waged an unlimited war to destroy each other, where would
nations turn next? Without a corrective to expansive living, the modern
drift toward moral anarchy and physical destruction so unmistakable in
the First World War would only accelerate as humanity's power over the
natural world continued to increase. The predictive power of Babbitt's
insight into the dangers of the modern temperament could not have been
clearer than in his prophecy in 1924 concerning the development and use
of atomic weapons. From that early date--more than twenty years before
the first atomic bomb was dropped--he saw that as the imagination had
already
conceived of the possibility of atomic warfare, the knowledge would be
uncovered, the technology created, and the power used:
The results of the material success and spiritual failure of the modern
movement are before us. It is becoming obvious to every one that the
power
of Occidental man has run very much ahead of his wisdom. The outlook
might
be more cheerful if there were any signs that Occidental man is seeking
seriously to make up his deficiency on the side of wisdom. On the
contrary,
he is reaching out almost automatically for more and more power. If he
succeeds in releasing the stores of energy that are locked up in the
atom--and
this seems to be the most recent ambition of our physicists--his final
exploit may be to blow himself off the planet.24
Empty reassurances about mankind's rationality and compassion would not
avert catastrophe; foolishly, Babbitt continued, "We are told that our
means of destruction are growing so terrible that no one will venture
to
use them--the same argument that was heard before the War."
25
Obviously, something other than self-interest and sentiment were needed
to preserve order among nations, especially when the costs of war had
become
so terrible. Both humanism and humanitarianism claimed to be able to
limit
war, but humanism looked past abstractions and mechanisms to address
the
condition of the human heart, the ultimate source of war and
disorder.
*Richard M. Gamble is Assistant
Professor
of History at Palm Beach Atlantic College and Fellow in
Twentieth-Century
History at the Center for Constitutional Studies. [Back]
1 Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston:
Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1947/c. 1919); George A. Panichas and Claes G. Ryn,
eds.,
Irving
Babbitt in Our Time (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of
America
Press, 1986), 232-233. [Back]
2 Irving Babbitt, "The Breakdown of
Internationalism,
Part I," Nation 100 (17 June 1915), 677-680, and "The
Breakdown
of Internationalism, Part II," Nation 100 (24 June 1915),
704-706.
All page references in parentheses in the following paragraphs are to
these
two articles. [Back]
3 "The Political Influence of Rousseau,"
Nation
104
(18 January 1917), 67-72; "Matthew Arnold,"
Nation 105 (2 August
1917), 117-121; "Interpreting India to the West," Nation 105
(18
October 1917), 424-428. [Back]
4 Irving Babbitt, "Humanists and
Humanitarians,"
Nation
101
(2 September 1915), 288-289. This brief letter to the editor was
Babbitt's
response to some of the criticism of his articles on the war.
[Back]
5 Babbitt offered two examples of prewar
attitudes:
Bernhardi's
Germany and the Next War (1912) and J. A. Cramb's Germany and
England
(1914). In 1910, in The New Laokoon, Babbitt warned of the
consequences
of "vital expansion." [Back]
6 See also "The Political Influence of
Rousseau," 71.
[Back]
7 For Babbitt's detailed explanation of the
distinction
between humanism and humanitarianism, see "What is Humanism?" in Literature
and the American College: Essays in the Defense of the Humanities,
Introduction by Russell Kirk (Washington, DC: National Humanities
Institute,
1986), 71-87. [Back]
8 Literature and the American College,
88-108;
Rousseau
and Romanticism, x-xx. [Back]
9 See "The Political Influence of
Rousseau," 69. [Back]