This essay, though written as if the author intended it for a pretentious journal, is quite valuable, not for its grandiloquence or its citations, but for this: it outlines the consequences of the separation of the individual’s loyalties to himself and his standards from those ideals that make a free, coherent society possible.
I envision that separation as a piece of two-dimensional geometry. Western civilization was at its strongest when the principles of the Enlightenment were fused to the ideals of Christianity: that is, when individual freedom as a political principle was united with the overarching Christian ideal of the Golden Rule. When individual freedom came to be seen as subordinate to group acceptance and conformance, and “good will toward men” retreated into the abstract as a formless will to “social justice,” the seams on the Grand Experiment started to show.
Of course, that would not have been possible without the unconscious acceptance by so many of the utilitarian axiom: “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which implies a further principle: “The end justifies the means.” But as Emerson told us in Compensation:
The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem – how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual bright, etc. from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end….We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.
By this law of the universe, the ethereal aspirations for “universal peace” and “social justice” dissolve in the mists, and what remains is only the mindlessness of subjection, whether willed or coerced.
