Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  The trouble is that popular sociology is open to an occupational temptation. The objective posture of the social scientist is apt to be turned into a superior vantage point from which negative judgments are pronounced upon society in the guise of objective observations. In Vance Packard’s latest book (The Status Seekers), for example, there are many fascinating items about the growing status-consciousness of Americans, the rather frightening lengths to which people will go to have the right address and the right antiques in their homes. Such phenomena as these and the social credentials of Northeastern executives (being white, Anglo-Saxon, and Episcopalian) are sociological facts. It is all too easy, however, for the cruising social critic to take the final step back and see all human motivations as a rat race of status-seeking and backbiting. In the heady atmosphere of social science, even the most universally accepted social norms become suspect. When Vance Packard observes that, among Air Force personnel, SAC pilots have achieved high status and that, among churchgoers, a madame of a house of prostitution is awarded a low status, it looks as if sociology has exposed yet another piece of monkey business. Yet it would be more straightforward either to assent to society’s estimate of the SAC pilot and the madame or else take exception to it, rather than to relegate all of society’s values to a vaguely disreputable limbo of ordinary people who act in an ordinary way as against those of us who are privileged to understand them.

  But if olympianism is a defect of much of social-indictment literature, it is not a fault of The Waist-High Culture. Griffith is an acute social critic and is as aware as anyone of the tendencies toward banality and the second-rate in much of American life. But if he sees the well-advertised faults of suburbia and the executive suite, he has a second sight which gives the book its peculiar value. He sees people, and he never forgets that what must in the last analysis be confronted is not a trend or a social class but a particular fellow living in a particular house and finding himself in a particular concrete predicament.

  It is no doubt legitimate, for sociological purposes, to speak of a member of the upper middle class who has his house done over in Early Federal, with decorator Picassos as status symbols. But let us not forget that this same class member may have saved a comrade’s life in battle, suffers from sinusitis, has a sick wife, and works like a dog to pay his debts. He cannot really be understood by a sociology of motivations but only by a larger view of man which takes account of what a man is capable of and what he can fall prey to. There is not really such a thing as a consumer or a public or a mass man except only as they exist as constructs in the minds of sociologists, ad men, and opinion-pollsters.

  The Waist-High Culture never succumbs to the passion for the abstract (perhaps it is Griffith’s reporter’s training which saves him; he is now foreign news editor of Time).He has heard the indictment often enough and does some pretty expert indicting himself, but he confesses to “a nagging doubt about the validity of the indictment.” The American people are a vital people, he reminds us, and they are no more satisfied with the stuff that flows into their living rooms than are their critics. The suburbanite may in a sense have been seduced by the pleasures of the middle class, but it would be nearer the truth to describe his predicament as one of blighted intentions, the satiety and discontent of which follow seduction. “If guilty, they are not guilty as charged, and are at least entitled to the old frontier verdict: ‘Guilty, but not so dern awful guilty.’”

  The American intellectual does not escape the indictment—or rather it is his escape which is charged against him. But if his performance has been a sorry one, it is only the other side of the same coin of mediocrity. The rest of us are disappointing in our docility before mass culture, and the intellectual is hardly more helpful in his self-promotion to an elite. It is the hardest thing in the world to see the intellectual in any other framework than the class lines he himself has drawn: us free creative individuals versus you slobs, or us normal red-blooded Americans versus you crummy eggheads.

  In his book, Packard succumbs a bit to the temptation and polishes off the intellectuals with some diverting remarks about status-seeking eggheads in Upper Bohemia. Griffith gives them a rough time, too, but he does so from the sense of loss of the intellectual’s contribution and what he sees as the latter’s self-imposed isolation from the community.

  The alternative to isolation is not necessarily togetherness. In any case, what is so distressing about isolation and togetherness is the impoverishment of both, the sense of needless loss which cannot but come over one when he considers either the alienated intellectual or the stratified commuter. If any one theme runs through these quite different social critiques, it is the poverty of the classes, not only the down-and-outers, and indeed not so much the blue-collars, but the middles and uppers, both upper country club and upper Bohemia. It is the remarkable discrepancy between the opportunities at hand and the felt meagerness of life as it is lived. The status-seeker is such a poor man and so unnecessarily so. But he is no poorer than the jackdaw of the salons who is “up” on everything and in love with nothing, who knows what Edmund Wilson thinks of the Dead Sea Scrolls but has never read St. John’s Gospel (apologies to Griffith).

  Griffith began to have his nagging doubts when he heard for perhaps the hundredth time what he calls the European Speech. It took place in the Piazza San Marco. His cultivated European friend extended a hand to the cathedral and the campanile and began to go on about how beautiful and restful it was, how we Europeans move among beautiful things and have time to enjoy art and music. But in America—the hurrying and the scurrying. Where are you going? Why do you bustle so? Yes, it is true: the American must always nod. “Our hurry was mad, our newness was often slapdash, and here was great beauty.” Yet there is something wrong with the European Speech. The two things don’t really go together: the leisureliness of the café life and the building of St. Mark’s Cathedral. The cathedral had been built by ambitious and bustling men, not by café sitters. It would be easy enough to launch a counterattack on cultivated Europeans as a race of museum keepers, café philosophers, and America haters, but Griffith does not do this. He likes and admires them, for one thing. Nor is he much interested in their rather superficial charge of hustle-bustle. He is concerned to make a far more serious self-accusation.

  The sobering fact is, and this is no European or Hamiltonian saying so, that there has occurred a decline in the quality of American life: “—never in the history of the world has there been such a proliferation of the second-rate.” The decline, moreover, has occurred in direct proportion to the extension of the suffrage. In 1971, when the electorate amounted to less than five percent of the American people, the Federalist Papers were written in the form, not of a treatise in political science, but of pamphlets to sell the Constitution to the public. Men were described therein as universally venal, ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. The Federalist authors had some very clear-eyed and hardheaded notions about the weaknesses of human nature and the attendant dangers to the republican form of government. But now the first rule of politicking and pamphleteering is to flatter the little man—though this very phrase expresses a contempt and cynicism which the Federalist authors would never have subscribed to. Attack malefactors of great wealth or bleeding-heart liberals, but don’t lay a finger on the voter, especially not the independent voter who despises politics and breaks away from his TV once every four years to vote for a man—because he looks sincere on TV. It is this very flattery which the Federalist authors warned against.

  Yet it is still possible to prescribe democratic therapy for democratic failings. Certainly the answer is not a restriction of suffrage. We may defend quality, says Griffith, but we will never defend privilege. The fact is that the great issue is still in doubt: democracy has by no means proved that it provides a hospitable soil for quality in politics, science, or art. What makes the stakes so high is that it could so provide for quality and in a fashion never dreamed of by the aristocratic patrons—or it could fail
so utterly as to justify the famous remark in The Third Man about what six hundred years of democracy produced in Switzerland: the cuckoo clock.

  Griffith’s book might be said to present, not the solution, but the dilemma of the educated American—assuming that the latter is something more than a “social unit,” that he is also a man who is to a degree aware of his own predicament. Both Griffith’s and Packard’s books are valuable pathologies of the American sickness. Yet one can’t avoid the impression that Packard thinks he is treating a skin disease and is very sure of his diagnosis, while Griffith knows that the sickness is a lot deeper and a lot obscurer. Packard’s diagnosis is status-seeking and class-stratification, and in the last chapter he prescribes his cure: we ought to cut it out. A $12,000-a-year white Protestant junior executive living in a development of $12,000-a-year white Protestant junior executives ought to get to know Jews and Negroes, poets and milkmen. It would make for a more interesting life. Sure it would, and it would be a good thing, all in all. But the question is whether or not this new intergroup group would not and does not habitually fall prey to its own strain of the virus: not status-seeking and social stratification maybe, but a compulsive other-directedness and an antic nonconformity which may conceal a spiritual wasteland more desolate than Levittown. The trouble goes deeper than one’s choice of friends or cars. It is, as Griffith knows very well, a religious dilemma in that ultimate goals are involved. To say so is by no means to prescribe religious conversion as a social technique. For “religion” is itself apt to be conceived in terms specified by the very worldview for which it is prescribed as a cure.

  The predicament is evident enough. It is more or less generally recognized, even by sociologists, that, despite unprecedented cultural and material advantages, the lives of a great many people in America and the West (not to mention the Communist countries), often the very people in a position to enjoy the fruits of Western culture and prosperity, have sunk to unprecedented depths of paltriness and banality. Psychologists have described a new syndrome, “destination sickness,” a disillusionment exemplified by the Marquand character who realizes his ultimate goal and finds waiting for him the station wagon and the country club. And the dilemma is felt as such. The victim knows he is victimized. He is aware of the blight of his intentions. He is aware, moreover, of the recklessness of the usual prescriptions. Griffith must know in his heart of hearts that there is no use in calling for a recovery of “clarity of purpose” or a return to the vigor and integrity of the Federalist authors, no more use than Packard’s naïve injunction to stop status-seeking and social-stratifying.

  Griffith is more acutely aware than Packard of our cultural dependence on the Judeo-Christian ethos, “Even those of us who live with no faith live on its accumulated moral capital,” he writes. And certainly those of us who profess to live with faith are the more at fault for our failure to demonstrate a necessary connection between faith and the good life. Much of the so-called religious revival in American life looks uncomfortably like the very status-seeking and hard sell so acutely diagnosed by both Packard and Griffith.

  Nevertheless, a final remark is in order. As Griffith has decided, after much reflection, that there is something wrong with the European Speech, we might, after much listening, append another nagging doubt. There is something wrong with the Ethical Secularist’s Speech. As Griffith observes, the latter usually considers himself to be as commendably motivated as those with faith, and often is. To these good folk, who live so securely on the accumulated capital of the Christian faith, the core of faith itself is apt to appear as an anomaly, easily dispensable and in fact dispensed with one or two standard objections. It seems pertinent here to raise a question, not about the objections, but about the posture from which the objections are mounted. The point is that, even though the objections be answered, nothing is really changed for the objector. All that business about God, the Jews, Christ, the Church seems no less dispensable—queer—whether it is true or not. Yet our ethical friend who is aware of the sickness might do well to consider the possibility that the dislocation of his times is related to this very incapacity to attach significance to the sacramental and historical-incarnational nature of Christianity. Instead of chewing over the same old objections, that is, he should consider the more pressing problem: how is it that even if these things were all true, could be proved, it would make no difference to me?

  For what is being assaulted today in the literature of alienation is this nice old secular height from which he mounts his objections. But as the assault goes on, the questions which occur to us begin to change. It no longer seems so appropriate to ask: Why do people do these things—seek status symbols and the miserable pleasures of the middle? as it is to ask: Why should they not do such things, or anything else?

  And when, inevitably, the question of religion is raised, it should be remembered that the relation of Christianity to Western culture and one’s own culture is much too radical to be settled by one’s fancied aversion to this particular dogma or that particular churchgoer. Indeed, such a good man—better than we, we admit first off, since this matter of comparative worth seems to bother him—might sooner or later come to see that, culturally speaking, our posture is something like the cat in the cartoon who ran off the cliff and found himself standing up in the air. Maybe he can get back to earth by backing up; on the other hand, he might be in for a radical change of perspective.

  1959

  The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind

  IN THESE BRIEF REMARKS I wish to offer two propositions for your consideration. One is that our view of the world, which we get consciously or unconsciously from modern science, is radically incoherent. A corollary of this proposition is that modern science is itself radically incoherent, not when it seeks to understand things and subhuman organisms and the cosmos itself, but when it seeks to understand man, not man’s physiology or neurology or his bloodstream, but man qua man, man when he is peculiarly human. In short, the sciences of man are incoherent.

  I hasten to reassure you that I am not here to attack the social sciences in the name of the humanities. It may be true that science teaches nothing about living a life, or as Kierkegaard would say, they, the sciences, have not one word to say about what it is to be born a man or woman, to live, and to die. It may be true, but it doesn’t do much good to keep saying it. It may be true, too, that the social sciences are themselves disordered, with each claiming to be primary and to explain all the others, but it is not very interesting to keep saying so.

  The second proposition is that the source of the incoherence lies within science itself, as it is presently practiced, and that the solution of the difficulty is not to be found in something extra-scientific, not in the humanities or in religion, but within science itself. When I say science, I mean science in the root sense of the word, as the discovery and knowing of something which can be demonstrated and verified within a community.

  What I am raising here is not the standard humanistic objection to science, that it is too impersonal, detached, abstracted, and that accordingly it does not meet human needs, does not take into account such human experience as emotions, art, faith, and so on. Such objections may or may not be justified, but even if they are, they leave the status quo ante unchanged, science as regnant over the entire domain of facts and truth, with religion and suchlike in charge of hopes and feelings and anything else they wish to claim. Perhaps scientists’ sovereignty can be disputed, but my purpose here is not to challenge science in the name of humanism. Scientists are used to and understandably unimpressed by such challenges. No, my purpose is rather to challenge science, as it is presently practiced by some scientists, in the name of science.

  Surely there is nothing wrong with a humanist, even a novelist, who is getting paid by the National Endowment for the Humanities, taking a look at his colleagues across the fence, scientists getting paid by the National Science Foundation, and saying to them in the friendliest way, “Look,
fellows, it’s none of my business, but hasn’t something gone awry over there that you might want to fix?”

  We novelists would surely be grateful if scientists demonstrated that the reason novels are increasingly incoherent these days is because novelists are suffering from a rare encephalitis, and even offered to cure them.

  My proposal to scientists is far more modest. That is to say, I am not setting up either as physician or as the small boy noticing the naked Emperor. It is more like whispering to a friend at a party that he’d do well to fix his fly.

  For it can be shown, I think, that in certain areas science, as it is presently practiced, fails on its own terms, not in its ruling out traditional humanistic concerns as “unscientific” or “metaphysical” or “nonfactual,” but in certain areas fails rather in the confusion and incoherence of its own theories and models. This occurs, I think it can be shown, in the present-day sciences of man. There is nothing new in what I am proposing. I wish it was my discovery. But it was pointed out a hundred years ago by an American scientist and philosopher whom most people never heard of and who has been ignored by scientists ever since—until recently.

  I wish to present this man’s discovery to you, albeit in the briefest terms, which the limitations of time require, not merely to show what light it sheds on the incoherence of science and of our own view of the world, but for its promise of contributing to a new and more coherent anthropology; that is, a theory of man.

  The puzzling thing is that the incoherence is both known and unknown, as familiar on the one hand as a member of one’s own family, and as little remarked. It is like a long-standing family embarrassment, like Uncle Louie, who, it is true, is a little strange but has been that way so long that it is not so much a case of covering up as having got used to it. We don’t talk about Uncle Louie. The understanding is that that is the way things are and nothing can be done about it.