The American Dilemma

THE DIGNITY OF MAN (338 pp.)--Russell Davenport--Harper ($4).

At the close of World War II, when the victorious armies of West and East met and momentarily fraternized, a U.S. correspondent asked a Russian officer over lunch what he thought the war was all about. Replied the Russian: "Svoboda [Freedom]!" The correspondent never forgot that answer. Journalist Russell Davenport, who in 1940 had quit his job as FORTUNE'S managing editor to direct Wendell Willkie's presidential campaign, was also a poet (My Country) and philosopher. To his brooding, deep-thrusting mind, the exchange with the Red army man summarized "the predicament of the free world." It drove him back to the first values of his existence, and led him finally to draft this book. The Dignity of Man (finished by his widow and several journalist friends after "Mitch" Davenport died last year at 54) is a searching inquiry into the greatness as well as the failures of America. Fear of Nothing. When Communist dictators claim Svoboda as their own, when Communist slave masters accuse capitalism of slavery, Americans blame "Communist propaganda." But, Davenport points out, the trouble is deeper than that, for Communist propaganda appeals to "human universals" in the name of a new view of man--materialist, dialectical man. "Our enemy is not any particular nation. It is not any particular army. It is not even any particular form of government. It is this Idea of Man." The U.S. finds itself frustrated in fighting this idea to the extent that the U.S. itself shares it. If often since the war the U.S. has stood more or less speechless before mankind, unable "to breathe life into what we ourselves believe," the failure is not merely one of propaganda, political warfare or communication--it lies in America's own philosophical tradition, in its unlimited faith in material progress and its excessive optimism about human nature. Faith, not so much in pure science, but in social doctrines that falsely lay claim to being scientific--Davenport aptly calls them metascience--led Western man to apply mere quantitative measurements to all things. Marxism, as Davenport analyzes it, is grounded in just such metascience, plus 18th-century philosophical absolutism, i.e., the belief that a universal human order should, if necessary, be forced on mankind with the help of guillotine or firing squad. If the U.S. opposes Communism entirely on its own materialist ground and with its own materialist weapons, e.g., by basing policy chiefly on economic appeals and military force, the U.S. will lose, because "if the materialistic-naturalistic thesis is correct, then the case for Communism is stronger than the case for the free way of life." For liberty and the "dignity of man," thought Davenport, are meaningless unless sanctioned by God. All of this has been said before by others, but rarely so well or with the eloquence of a poet who could write:

It is Nothing that we must fear: the thought of Nothing: The sound of Nothing in our hearts . . .

Overwhelming Task. There are vital differences between Davenport and others who have had similar insights. Dissatisfaction with military and economic weapons does not lead him to conclude that such weapons should be abandoned: "Without them the entire free world would be exposed." Distrust of the faith in progress does not lead him to assert that it should be discarded, for it has "become vital to the health--indeed to the survival--of modern civilization . . . In terms of human destiny we are committed to the optimistic tradition." It is America's special task--"of truly overwhelming proportions"--to find its own synthesis between faith in progress and awareness of its limitations; to learn "how to inquire into the nature and destiny of man in a new way ..." The new way will lie not in "adjustment" to the outer world, but in the realm of man's inner world, which links him mysteriously and universally to his fellow men. Yet, in turn, this vision of spiritual (rather than merely social) brotherhood did not lead Davenport toward mysticism. Right reason is still man's supreme weapon: "The Thomist doctrine, that Reason is the handmaiden of Faith, has never really been overthrown." Where does such faith-with-reason lead America? Daven port did not live long enough to give more than clues to an answer. One clue lies in his feeling that the conflict between old-fashioned American individualism and the modern pressures for the welfare state need not (perhaps should not) be resolved, but kept in equilibrium: that this very balance, this state of tension, itself is freedom. Another clue lies in an insight, admittedly unfinished, on how the U.S. should face Communism: "At the total level the Communists will beat us every time, because they can totalize ruthlessly and process man to the pattern they desire. But at the person-to-person level we shall always beat them, because at that level we have something to give that they cannot match. We have the fundamental proposition of our Revolution to give: that man is the child of Nature's God; that he carries within him a spark that links him with the universe and differentiates him from the animals ... By practicing person-to-person democracy we can teach the world to see in every individual that individual spark which gives to the principles of freedom a godlike validity."

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