The Modern Temper: A Study And A Confession (1929)
Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Non-Fiction
We have grown used...to a Godless universe, but we are not yet accustomed to one which is loveless as well, and only when we have so become shall we realize what atheism really means. -Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper
Perhaps the most problematic thinkers of the past for us to assess are those who accurately diagnosed the diseases of modernity but succumbed to them anyway. In his 1956 Preface to this 1929 collection of interconnected essays that apparently appeared mostly in The Atlantic Monthly, the critic Joseph Wood Krutch sums up the crisis of the age of materialism and sciencism as follows:
The universe revealed by science, especially the sciences of biology and psychology, is one in which the human spirit cannot find a comfortable home. That spirit breathes freely only in a universe where what philosophers call Value Judgments are of supreme importance. It needs to believe, for instance, that right and wrong are real, that Love is more than a biological function, that the human mind is capable of reason rather than merely of rationalization, and that it has the power to will and to choose instead of being compelled merely to react in the fashion predetermined by its conditioning. Since science has proved that none of these beliefs is more than a delusion, mankind will be compelled either to surrender what we call humanity by adjusting to the real world or to live some kind of tragic existence in a universe alien to the deepest needs of its nature.While you could hardly ask for a description of the psychotic effects of belief in Science, the flaw in Krutch's conclusion is obvious: the third option is simply to choose to believe in humanity instead of in biology and psychology. That such a humanism is predicated on faith in God rather than in science can hardly be a bar, since we know, and have known, that Reason itself is ultimately nothing but a faith. What Krutch and others who despaired of the human condition in an Age of Reason had essentially done was just to choose a "tragic existence in a universe alien to the deepest needs of its nature," when they could instead have chosen, as their ancestors always had, and as most Americans still do, a universe where the human spirit breathes free.
The Modern Temper is a fascinating read and necessary to an understanding of the kind of spiritual nihilism that enabled Darwinism, Communism, Fascism, Existentialism, etc., but it is a a defeatist text. Mr. Krutch served a most lucid warning about the tenor of his times, but then ran up the white flag, which leaves the work fatally flawed.
(Reviewed:28-Jan-06)
Grade: (A-)
