The Rats & the Katz

The Third World War to Save Civilization had ended (with the help of the improved atom bomb) in the virtual extinction of the human race. The only visible survivors, a mother and daughter, were huddled near a rubble heap in the middle of Manhattan, which, blasted and fused by the bombs, elsewhere lay between its rivers as narrow, smooth and shiny as a coffin lid.

The women were the celebrated international liberal, Angela Katz, author of Everyone Sleeps in One Big Bed--A Plea for the Internationalization of the Atom Bomb, and her daughter, Carrie Chapman Katz, named for the famed U.S. feminist. At the moment when civilization was whiffed out, they had been working in the stacks of the New York Public Library on Author Katz's new book, Down with Work--The Nuclear Physics of Economic Democracy, and perhaps owed their freak escape from the blast to the deadening effect of so many books.

Now Author Katz sat rocking back & forth with the pendulum regularity so often seen among psychoneurotics as 20th-century civilization reached its brilliant apogee. Her grimed, lined face suggested that of a ravaged Nefertiti,-and she gazed upon the general obliteration with the self-conscious superiority of the implacable progressive. At her feet, sprawled on her stomach, Carrie Chapman Katz was devouring a book and the gristle on an uncooked thighbone. Both women were completely bald--the result of radioactivity. They were also in the last stages of hysterical fatigue, for day & night they had to fight off assault waves of rats, whose fecundity seemed to be increased by atomic action. If both women should nod at once, even for a moment, the revolting masses would be on them, and the rats, with their ingenious minds and uninhibited pragmatism, would be the heirs of the lost-atomic world.

Suddenly Author Katz glanced at the unparalleled scene around her and cried: 'If I do not have a book to read, I shall jo mad. Is it good?" she asked, glancing at her daughter's book.

"Mmmm, yes, delicious," said the girl, brandishing the thighbone without glanc-ng up. "At least as a change from rat. Where did you get it?"

"Don't think so much about food," said icr mother. "Remember, we are all that is .eft of civilization. I meant is your book good reading."

"Oh, that. Well, it's the only book that's survived, except three copies of Gone With the Wind."

"What is it?"

"It's called The Liberal Tradition--A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom."

"The Liberal Tradition," said the older woman, "the Liberal Tradition. What a quaint sound it has now--almost like Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe. Who wrote it?"

"Professor William Aylott Orton. It was published on the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the class of 1917, Yale College."

"Ah, yes, I remember it now. I meant to read it at the time, but somehow I always found myself reading Harold J. Laski instead. I think it was unfavorably reviewed in the New Republic, and Max Lerner did not like it. It called him a prisoner of the left. Now that that permanent layer of atmospheric dust obscures the sun, I don't suppose I shall ever be able to see to read it. Of course," she coaxed, "I don't want to seem to dictate what you should or should not do, but tell mother what's in The Liberal Tradition before the rats come again."

Young.Miss Katz, who in the pre-atomic world had been an inveterate book reviewer, instantly lapsed into her professional manner. Said she:

The Liberal Tradition, by William Aylott Orton (Yale University Press; $3.50), is a 317-page attempt to redefine liberalism by groping for i) its spiritual roots; 2) its historical roots; 3) the adventitious roots that nourish its current distortions and perversions. Author Orton is an Anglo-Catholic liberal. Since the religious ground on which he stands is one of the few relatively solid footholds in a shifting universe, it makes a cozy vantage point from which to scrutinize that inherently shifting political and moral position--liberalism.

The Liberal Tradition is as provocative as the basic question it poses: liberals, what of the night? Readers are likely to find it most penetrating in its analysis of liberalism's current crisis, helpful but less exciting in its review of the liberal record, least satisfying in its concluding counsel: back to faith, which flies in the face of that skeptical materialism which is part of the dynamic of liberal rationalism.

Liberalism, as an attitude of mind, goes back at least to Periclean Athens. Liberalism, as a political philosophy, is scarcely 100 years old. It is practically impossible to snare it in a neat net of definition. But its manifestations are everywhere. Its vigor, says Author Orton, is proved by the roster of its raging enemies. Among them he lists: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Pope Pius IX, Professor Harold Laski. "Dogmatists and determinists of the red or the black, defenders of the tyranny of men or majorities, exponents of class war, racial war, or national war, have discovered beneath their differences a common determination to give political liberalism a premature burial." It is still unburied because "liberalism, in its essence, is a part of life; and where it is destroyed, the alternative is death. It representsjthe effort to formulate, as a principle of collective action, certain fundamental dispositions of human nature. As such, it inherits a tradition unmatched by any other po litical principle; yet it is not the only principle, the only tenable position, and nothing is gained by speaking as if it were." Compensating Pole. The other "tenable position," says Author Orton, is conserva tism. In it he sees the compensating pole of western civilized thought and conduct -- indeed, "together these principles reflect the polarity of life itself, of all phenome nal existence. Force and inertia, action and reaction, change and stability, the dynamic and the static -- without this universal dualism, meaning and reality, on the human plane at least, vanish into nothingness." Author Orton finds confirmation of the deep "political instinct of the English that out of the struggles of Whig and Tory two strong parties finally emerged frankly calling themselves Liberal and Conservative. Each has developed in mod ern times its central core of philosophy going well beyond matters of mere interest or expediency. ... It is unfortunate that no such development has taken place in the United States."

Conservatism, says Orton, may be the guardian of the community. "Liberalism is the architect of the community." "Where in this dies irae," he asks, "can the liberal find firm ground?" His answer: in the recovery of that religious spirit, which was liberalism's heritage from the Christian tradition, until igth-and 20th-century rationalism and materialism destroyed it.

Encircling Gloom. Miss Katz paused. Around the two women darkness thickened with the lonely realization that in that illiberal night they were the only human life left in the world.

"You don't need to go on," said the older woman. "I see the rest of the argument. One of the curious things about the end of civilization (for of course the bomb was only the coup de grace) was that so many people knew what was wrong, but nobody could really do anything about it. Whatever words William Orton may use to charm the dense skepticism of his century, he is merely saying that liberalism divorced from religion becomes (in philosophy) a sterile materialism, in politics tyranny. He is explaining the genesis of a type that was common in pre-atomic civilization--the liberal who had become a revolutionist without realizing that he had ceased to be a liberal. He is explaining how one great category of liberal minds--the scientists--came to make the atom bomb and how liberal mankind came to permit them to. He is explaining how you and I come to be here in this vast emptiness with night falling. But he can only explain. He cannot offer a counterpart, in the language and feeling of the atomic age, of the words of the Psalmist:

When I consider Thy heavens, the "work of Thy fingers;

The moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained;

What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?"

She glanced up at the dust-thickened sky through which no moon or stars could penetrate.

"Mother," cried her daughter. "Now it is you who are forgetting that we are all that is left of civilization. You are beginning to talk religion!"

The older woman blushed. "I have a confession to make. I have begun to doubt. . . ."

"Not those most awful doubts. . . ."

"Yes. I am no longer certain that materialism is enough. Perhaps liberal science, which invented the atom bomb, is not the way, the truth and the light."

"Hush, mother," cried her daughter. "Someone may hear you! Besides, I think the rats are going to attack again." In tense silence the two women waited. In silence, millions of rats, heads erect, whiskers vibrant, beady eyes alert, waited for that mass impulse, unreasoned but irresistible, which would be the signal for their hordes to remove these last human obstructions to the rat world.

-A queen of Egypt's XVIII Dynasty, who for some 1 7 years while the country slowly fell apart helped impose liberalism unique in Egyptian his tory on Egypt and her husband, Akhenaton, who, like his wife, was a devotee of atomic energy.

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