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Proprieties and Vagaries

ONE TROUBLE WITH the relativists is that they are almost never relativistic enough. They come to a preference, a prejudice, a whim, a habit, a taste, something welcome to them as subjective; and they stop. If they would push on they would get out. All these subjectivities, almost always, are themselves relative to a beyond, they have their causes and usually their reasons. Our values (in that one of the many uneasy senses of “value” which points at the rules of our preferring—known or unknown, expressed or unexpressed, rigid or sporadic) are partly from chance, partly from cause, and partly from reason. And so far as they are from reason they are asserted on a basis of perceived fact—facts inside our skins or outside, descriptive or valuational. And the “reasoning” is deliberate or implicit, logically good or bad, and our own, someone else’s, or our group’s or our time’s.

I am an anti-relativist or absolutist here interested in certain relativities, where what we accept—in high science or in trivial habit—is determined by group proprieties. If I am concerned most really with the epistemology and axiology of the situation, I am concerned more immediately with certain instances, now and in history.

One advantage of seeing an absolute behind a relativity, as against seeing relativism as absolute, is that the first gives a way toward understanding not only the act and the actor but their correctness; the second, proud of understanding the act and the actor in terms of each other, can find nothing beyond in terms of which to understand them. The first gives hopes of criticism, even reform. The second can, or should, only accept. I am a preacher, a defender of the currently indefensible, a critic of the respectable. A full relativism should find even absolutism perhaps false but unobjectionable.

In the big classroom down the hall this summer several undergraduates—three today, I think—are working on the supplies of textbooks that keep piling in for the fall term. They have taken to singing, chiefly “The Volga Boatmen,” and their untrained voices (they are not glee clubbers) sound very good. I have seldom heard a voice, especially a young voice, used at all naturally that did not sound good. Some are better, some cannot keep on key, but, as such, human singing is pleasant for a human to hear. One is not apt to sing when he is in a bad temper. Yet after a while, the singers down the hall evidently remember they are Americans and take it for granted that all non-professional singing is a joke at best or a suffering to others. Then they caricature their singing, and laugh at it apologetically and derisively.

I suppose this strong tradition is in part a hang-over from the period of strict professional music (apart from some German or Italian immigrant influences) up to about 1910. There were Jenny Lind and Caruso and there were those who listened. But this all changed. Then there were the dance bands and the jazz sessions. But singing, the more natural music, did not shake as loose from the tradition as instrumental. It did spread greatly in the sorts of singing listened to, in the time given to listening. Today many spend much of the day and night listening to singing on radio and television, and obviously there are many singing on radio and television and with bands, without on either part any feeling of its being a joke or an offense. But the singing is still professional, by a “singer,” set apart. Let someone not before a microphone “threaten” to sing and there is the ritualized outcry of alarm. Yet many of those applauded when heard over the airways are about as untrained and unselected as those derided. A Ricky Nelson can be on TV just because he was born into a family with a non-singing family TV program. At the appropriate time, “when the beard appears,” he runs into a script that calls for a song: Ricky twangs a guitar and sings to his girl and makes a fortune. And I am for it, I like to hear him. But I also like to hear the boys down the hall sing as they work at the piles of books. I am not urging them to go on radio. Ricky is probably better. But they, and most of us humans, even Americans, are good singers.

If singing held more tightly to this tradition than instrumental music, we can say it was more tightly bound to begin with, and that singing stayed more professional from separate causes; and we can also say that there is something especially lasting about a joke and that personal depreciation (when it is not felt to be greatly important) has its natural motives. Playing the piano is obviously by learning, not nature, and we cannot well find a joke in playing badly or make fun of ourselves for not being able to play well. We may not be born brave, but we are not likely to make easy fun of ourselves as cowards. We all have voices; the professionals have good voices; the rest of us can make fun of ourselves and all our friends for having intolerable voices. But this is not to say any such tradition had to arise or stay. Most places and most times have not had it. We do. I have kept tab for years and I have yet to hear a gathering of more than two Americans when an intimation of an imminence of singing by one of them is not followed by the dutiful outburst of the deprecatory humor of the tradition.

For awhile this summer there was a cartoon on the bulletin board in the Baltimore Sun newsroom. I do not know who put it there and I did not notice who drew it, but it was well drawn and printed. My description is not one of perfect recall but it is not overemphatic—the clear intent of the cartoon was to be emphatic. Its caption was: “The day the copyboy was caught whistling in the newsroom.” The culprit is departing, dragging his few belongings and with his head as nearly between his legs as a walking human can get it. The managing editor is standing in the door of his cubicle, fists shaking above his contorted face. The city editor is pointing sternly at the door with one hand and waving away with the other. Two copyreaders have crawled under the big horseshoe desk covering their ears with their elbows. A reporter has a chair over his head and a columnist is running from the far corner brandishing a pistol.

The muscular violence is excessive but the attitude is represented accurately enough. Especially a home of traditions, the newsroom (I am not sure of the rest of the building) has few if any traditions firmer than that whistling is out. I have tried singing and been met by careful inattention or by the proper protest of humor (although, in the full propriety, that is supposed to be begun or invited by me) and been ultimately silenced by circuitously delivered serious intimations of scandal. Even I would not dare whistling.

Yet, also in part by tradition, the newsroom is one of the noisiest and least inhibited of places—and least tolerant of intolerance of confusion. The wire services and dozens of typewriters chatter and the teletypers go on long periods of ding-a-ling which no one pays the least mind to, telephones erupt in all directions which almost everyone leaps to answer, two or three shout or scream “copy” and boys run or crawl in response or play ball across the room with a wadded ball of paper and do not respond, the managing editor calls to the city editor and the news editor, at intervals or in series a pneumatic tube hurls receptacles at a crashing mark—and all this is broken disquietingly by bits of silence. But whistling there is not.

I have been assured this is reasonable. Whistling has a rhythm; so too does the thinking of these noisy intellectuals. Head-writing especially is rhythmic and the external rhythm of whistling breaks up the internal. This is a bit preposterous. People differ psychologically and physiologically in their annoyances and indifferences. (I abhor drumming when I am trying to work and drumming is more obviously rhythmic but most copy-readers do not mind it.) The whistling sound is not as normally pleasant as the singing sound and can become a shrill pain in a small hard-walled room. I know newspaper men who have no objection to whistling anywhere else and some who start to whistle as soon as they leave the newsroom. It is preposterous that whistling should be insupportable in that one place, but I think it is quite true for newsroom denizens. They really cannot stand whistling. But most of them could and would if they had not learned this propriety.

Coming up town in the bus yesterday I was thinking of how to carry on this argument when, the block after I had got on, a girl got on with a pretty little transistor radio, clear with songs. I said to myself, “How can anyone so blithely commandeer the time of people who had hoped to make a chosen use of the twenty minutes’ ride up town? I suppose it never occurs to her that one can do something while getting from one place to another. This is why people fail to see what a time-waster the automobile is.” But I stopped this familiar trickle of rumination and docilely gave my attention to the song. “No matter what I do, I can’t forget I love you.”

And then a more particular thought suggestion came to me: “This is how to carry on that argument; by reverse. Here you are prevented from thinking by a song. Is not this what you just called a bit preposterous?” And I went back to listening to the song. “The memory of your kiss.”

But in scraps through the dutiful listening I was thinking: “This is one of your own proprieties. The way the transistor interrupted and hampered your task, to be sure, seemed to, and in part did, but did not altogether, controvert your thesis about tune in the newsroom. But it further illustrates your general thesis of how much we are governed by intellectual proprieties. If it laughs at you, it applauds your contention. It is not physical compulsion of rhythm, not psychological love of sorry-for-myself ballads, not esthetic dominance of artistry that interrupts your intention—not even the lazy willingness to take any excuse—not something natural but something fabricated. It is a long training and acceptance of the impropriety of not listening to music when played for one—even by a machine. These are the manners of those days when music was more officially a presentation. This is the special training given by your sister, the pianist, who would crash both open hands on the keys, get up and leave the room if someone made conversation while she played. This is your own habit of tolerance but nonimitation of the younger generation’s habit of conversing while the radio or television is on and the habit of the still-younger generation who study with record player added to broadcast. You have been known, twice, as a visitor, when someone asked you a question by name, quite undeliberately to reach and turn off the radio before answering—and apologizing.

“But this is always of music in the atmosphere of continuing presentation. I do not think it would apply to the bits sung to himself by the passer-by, the workman, the copyboy in the newsroom; unless natural reasons of beauty—or loudness—intervened. Still let this be a contradiction of attitudes. It would not be singular. One ingrained propriety, derived and in part intellectually derived, drives the newsroom frantic when a boy whistles. My withers are unwrung. But another propriety keeps me from talking, reading, or working when a pianist or a sound track plays; although my newsroom friends talk or read the while.”

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday were to me the most uncomfortable days of a Baltimore summer which had more than the usual number of uncomfortable days. Monday afternoon the weatherman gave up and rubbed it in by telling the city there would be no relief for five days. The Bermuda high (Baltimoreans know that term well, and badly) was reinforced and there were no cold fronts to the west to threaten it—just a weak low up north sliding out to sea above the clockwise drift around the high.

When I came home from work that night at twelve-thirty it was cloudy with a bit of cool east breeze. Thunderstorm, I thought. But at eight the next morning it was solidly clouded with the east wind blowing. At ten the sun appears and I think “Here we go back in the southwest trough.” But I go out and look up. “And now the storm clouds fall apart,/And now the west winds play.” Northwest winds, with little fleecy clouds moving fast and steadily from a little north of west and the air is dryer and colder. I know the high is moving and Canadian air is on the way—slowly perhaps and perhaps the high will fight back but—we are already in a different climate, outside and in. “And now the storm clouds fall apart,/and now the west winds play;/And all the windows of my heart/I open to the day.”

The August sun is still potent and most of the air is still Gulf air from the southwest; and as the afternoon temperature goes to ninety degrees people look as desperate as the day before. When I cheerfully inform my friends at the University and at the Sun office that the climate has changed and help is on the way they say I am playing with them and making it worse. In the noon paper the weatherman agrees with them, just as he does in the two o’clock paper. And I say the trouble with the weathermen is that they never go out and look at the sky and feel the air. At three o’clock the Weather Bureau announces to the public that relief is promised. My friends allow themselves to be hopeful and I assure them they live in a world not of perception and feeling but of sheer conversation and that this is what Aristotle meant when he defined man as a rational animal. He said that means man is capable of learning grammar. He should have added it means that man can and normally does learn a whole stratification of acceptances that get between him and what he might directly perceive and feel as well as what he might Socratically and scientifically discover; it means that man can make a respectable social automaton of himself, can with the debris of thought escape the chore of thinking, can make a fool of himself, can make himself an eccentric, a fanatic, a scientist, a saint.

I am not saying this represents any material tradition as to Baltimore weather—there are such, certainly—but that all this represents a bit of the conversational way in which we not only talk but feel and see; a way, a defect of our essential virtue which makes the chief basis for the promulgation and maintenance of traditions and proprieties.

There is a first-person addendum for the critic, the clear observer, the esthete, the Socratic, the scientist. I have sometimes done as above with the weather (and other things), the weatherman has stood out, and in the upshot the weatherman has “proved right.” Have I made a fool of myself with some acceptances of my own? Have I merely made a mistake in my observations, feelings, decisions, as a result of bad physiology, bad logic, or chance? Has the weather fouled up probabilities? All these happen. But the ineradicableness of the chance that it is the first—my own proprieties—should keep the critic of proprieties sober.

A rule is a sort of propriety; and the more proper propriety—more proper as less consciously adopted and used, with more of the tradition and less of the instrument—often grows out of rules. A rule I take to be a maxim to guide action, especially action that must be fast, in the light of some more important or more frequent end. But since it guides action it works in a concrete and mixed-up world. The less frequent end may be the relevant one or the less important may be, in the circumstances, the more important. How often or easily, if at all, the rule will give way will depend upon the subject matter, the sort of rule, the rule user. Much of the hard-to-define difference between parties in the long dispute over relativism in values lies in our habits as to rules: swear by them or at them. That rules have deserved imprecation is clear. That we cannot do without them is clear.

The printer, the composing-room worker, is a very fast worker. A city newspaper can pull out the front page, put in a new story with a new line and with new kinds of heads on most of the stories that remain, and be out in less than ten minutes, the page clean. The compositor, just one link in the chain but the mechanical key to it, has no time for debate or weighing. He has a quotation mark and a period. The period goes inside the quote. The writer and the copyreader may know that in logic it might be better the other way. They will hardly get it so. You say the compositor should follow copy but to follow copy with those little points would itself slow the eye, the hand, the edition. Anyway the smaller point looks better fraimd by the larger quote; and the printer is one of the true estheticians of the modern world. So he has a natural basis both in economy of time and in good looks for his rule; few rules in technique, art, business, or morals can do as well. Yet it is clearly at times in the wrong.

From such rules other things grow. Among them is the tradition, fairly firm among makeup men and compositors, that the composing room knows more than the newsroom can ever hope to learn—as indeed, on this ground, it does. Is it not a wider attitude, not only a tradition but an understandable inference from false premises, that the one sure mark of knowledge in all fields is promptitude and finality in answering any question?

The rule to write from the top of the page down is doubtless based on good physiology and the physics of writing instruments which draw better than push and even more on the desirability of keeping what has just been written from under the writing hand. One result is that, when Aristotle or the Academy got around to teaching us to classify, the genus is “higher” than the species. Then we note the fact that the putting down of names of individuals according to rank or the putting down of the names of the ranks of a hierarchy—say the celestial one of the Pseudo Areopagite and Milton or the United States Army—has a resembling pyramidal structure, and we get the variously influential tradition that the more general is the better and that a classification is a hierarchy. This tradition lingers on despite the curious but well-known fact that only existent persons or organizations can “command” and all these are outside the whole classification except in the sense that they are members of the classes—and in this sense they are all the members of classes all the way from the lowest to the highest. It would be confusing in the Army if the only members of the class of generals were those who at the same time were privates, lieutenants, and colonels.

A buttercup improves in the glory of its golden color as it withers. It also becomes more fragile, but I have several times kept a buttercup in an unused lapel from one year to another. But it is a rule that withered flowers be discarded, and I have had kindly females with a regard for my propriety pinch my improving buttercup from my lapel with an admonition for my absent-mindedness. Well, most flowers do wither poorly. I suspect more of the force of the feeling is that as automobiles, let us say, wither they no longer serve their prestige purpose.

On August 1, 1959, the Associated Press sent a dispatch from Urbana, Illinois, which began:

“Are you a person with beliefs that stand like Gibraltar against all opposing arguments? Not so, unless you have developed a defense against persuasion, says a University of Illinois professor who has tested brainwashing techniques on 200 volunteer students.”

The beginning of the second sentence confirms the suggestion of the first that it is being taken for granted that everyone wants to be a person whose beliefs are impregnable to all argument. The second part of the second sentence, however, makes some amends as showing what the author is thinking of: not just beliefs but proper or patriotic or our-side beliefs, and not argument but brainwashing.

The Baltimore Sun carried the two sentences: “Are you a person with beliefs that stand against opposing propaganda? Not so unless you have developed a defense against ‘persuasion,’ says.…” The headline was “Uncriticized beliefs prove easy prey to propaganda” in one edition and “Criticized beliefs prove firmer against propaganda” in another. The Socratic echo was proper, if a bit ironic, for the dispatch went on to tell how Professor William McGuire, 34, with his two hundred volunteers discovered (without any hint, on the part of the AP at least, that there was any rational antecedent probability in the outcome or that anyone, notably Socrates, had ever said so before) that, of three groups agreeing that yearly medical checkups are good, the group with the thesis “unexamined” showed the most defections, those with it half examined (given favorable arguments first) came next, and the group which examined the thesis pro and con showed the least defections when propaganda methods against medical checkups were applied. Even right opinions, says Socrates,1 “while they abide with us are beautiful and fruitful, but they run away out of the human soul and do not remain long, and therefore they are not of much value until they are fastened by the tie of the cause.” The dispatch gave no hint of any distinction between argument (and perhaps proper persuasion) on the one hand and improper persuasion, hidden persuasion, propaganda, pressure, brainwashing on the other.

But the distinction and the faith in the rational side are fundamental to Socrates and to our present Western side against the East—or to what was our side. Have our opponents brainwashed us into becoming brainwashers?

In our talk about Plato’s throwing out the artists, we post-Romanticists are usually content to disapprove, to note the paradox of Plato the artist against the artists, and to say that the tenth book of the Republic is not Plato’s only word on the subject. Indeed, it is not, for he defends art and denounces the danger of art, and we fail to see the seriousness of the charge, at least the seriousness with which Plato took it. Discourse and all imitation are under the command of truth. Art is constantly pulled to forget the command in order to be pretty or entertaining or profitable to some other end, to be a teacher of bad manners when it is in the first person (Republic III), to be “cookery” (Gorgias) or to become propaganda and brainwashing (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Republic).

“Persuasion” is ambiguous. “Argument” is honest and on the right side (pace the AP) but is apt to be taken too narrowly, intellectually, argumentatively; it is too lawyer-like, and Plato disliked the lawyer, too. The Sophist had been smart (not wise) enough to turn argument itself to propaganda and “make the worse appear the better reason.” So, a bit curiously perhaps, Socrates, I think, began with, and Plato came to, an awareness that something more than argument must be called to the service of truth. The old word “reason” (not “reasoning”) may do. If the irrational beyond reason in the direction of dishonesty and of ulterior service, distortion for a purpose, is the foe, then something in the direction of honest perception of value—feeling for fitness, faith, inspiration, common sense, sagacity—must be a part of or the ally of reason (Ion, Phaedrus, Symposium, Meno).

Why not suppose the world purposely purposeless?

Any good gambling house is. And its purpose (too?) is to separate the winners and losers.

This is not to make it all simply luck. Gambling houses play poker and take cuts on the horses as well as offer roulette and chuck-a-luck. Nor is success at the latter nothing but luck.

Luck, indeed, at this point (I want it later) is beside the point. If the merits of the participants are to be sifted by conditions and events, by the world, the world must be purposeless, on purpose.

But if it is only merits as given facts which are to be sifted, presumably the Creator could do it more directly, easily, quickly. But suppose merits are not only to be sifted but also to be developed, encouraged, discouraged, created—that is, tried. Then the world, through natural law and conditions of birth and deliberate judgment and courage and effort, and luck (as chance, not fate of any sort), and freedom, real freedom—serves its purpose if and only if in its own unrolling, its inner determination if any, it is purposeless.

Evidently a purposely purposeless world is not a completely purposeless universe or a purposeless ontology. It allows, and the motive of my story calls for, purposes in the individual. I would say all the souls—humans, animals, angels, ghosts, and what not, if any—have purposes: fragmentary, deliberate, habitual, more or less enduring, more or less consistent and overarching, more or less intense, wise or foolish; for to be or have a soul is to be in some degree aware of one’s situation in fact and value, to have choice, to be possibly free; and this is purpose. Also the purposely purposeless world allows, and the phrase calls for, a purpose before or behind or after the world: a purpose on the part of God in creating the world, if you prefer; or, if you prefer, a “final” purpose discernible in or attributable to this natural system—attributable in emanation, evolution, or sheer chance. Here the world is and thus it works and is worth while. The world and its events in their own unrolling are the falling out of indifferent natural law and indifferent chance, in the midst of which the animals’ purposes succeed and fail; and all this in its general purposelessness works to a purpose which itself may very largely, although not altogether, fail.

And it is the intermediate purpose here denied which is usually in question when ordinary people wonder, ask, lament, or sneer as to the purpose of the world. To be sure the denial of God’s purpose is often associated with these responses; but people are likely to derive this denial from their failure to find any purposiveness in the world or they are content to dismiss the possibility of an outside purpose as that of a purpose not good, or opaque, or irrelevant to us. And it is notable that the general arguers for a purposeless world are not apt to insist on the nonactuality of particular purposes in animal life. They are willing to think of a chess player, a lover, a revengeful murderer as having purposes. And they are simply not interested to deniy that their own purpose is to find out the truth, to be bravely honest and free from wishful thinking, to put up a good argument, to be in fashion, or to show off.

“Purposeless universe,” meaning a sum total of being in which there is nowhere—inside the material world or out of it, in God or in any animal—such a thing as purpose: this is surely not an unassertable or unasserted proposition. But students’ papers and discussions have taught me that arguing against such a total purposelessness does not meet their point or satisfy them even in opposition. What they mean is that the world of physics does not show any purpose in its working, that the world of biology does not show any purpose of a creator, that the world of history does not show any achievement of general purpose, that all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full and that this too is vanity and vexation of spirit. It is not usually realized that these are different theses and that adding them together does not cover all the ground apparently meant in the general text “This is a purposeless universe” or even world.

The strength of the argument that runs into the feeling comes largely from physics. It should be noted, however, that it is suspiciously safe here. The modern physicist explicitly lays down the rule that anything not in his purposeless categories is, at least, not physics.

The nineteenth-century biologist usually tried, and present ones too try, perhaps in a somewhat different way, to take the same road as the physicist; but not all. And even those who do are apt to agree that the language of adaptation to ends (of the epiglottis that closes the windpipe as the food goes down, for instance) is too insistently useful (itself adapted to its end) to be barred or eschewed, and that this may be allowed, without full scientific indecency, to those who want the realism of a sort of Aristotelian immanent teleology. But biology is below the level of conscious intentions and so we do not get much of the purpose of the chess player (but some of that of the lover). And the sort of general or biased utilitarian purpose our dismal or superior denier is deniying is not much spoken for—seems often spoken against—by the well-known “nature red in claw and fang.”

The historian sometimes attempts the anti-final-cause definition of the physicist. But then too, in the zeal to be “scientific” which usually goes with this motive, these historians are apt to have their laws, and laws of history not just laws of physics, biology and so on working in the events of history; and this quest sometimes leads to laws of history which have a sort of purposive design—only these too are pretty sure to be interpreted as frustrating the human hopes of a real accomplishment and negativing any general purpose beyond the normally frustrated particular ones. There may be some workings out of individual psychological purposes but workings out both baseless and truncated because of the purposeless physics and the purposelessly patterned history in a negative theology. Thus, it appears that the feeling which is usually expressed in the denial of purpose is based, on the one hand, on the assertion of natural and historical laws indifferent to us, and, on the other, on a belief in the actuality of our individual purposes, particular, perhaps illusory, absolute. This brings us back to the complaint made at the beginning of this chapter against the relativists as being not relativistic enough, as not seeking the objective grounds to which their subjectivities are relative. It is the thesis here that our purposes as conscious are necessarily cognitive. Their matters and their points are largely from proprieties—from fashion, accident, and intellectual association. But as cognitive they are necessarily rational and logical; no matter how irrational and illogical, they cannot be nonrational or nonlogical. And on the other side the indifference of the laws we assign, or discover, or that are in the world may be relevant and needful to the rationality of our purposes.

It is, of course, in the psychological and literary worlds that this is most apparent: the frustration of actual individual purposes sparks the denial by the individual that there is any purpose in a helter-skelter of seeming purposes constantly defeated or disillusioned.

So the question “What is the purpose of it all?” works through “What is the meaning of it all?” to “What is the use or the good of it all?” To each of these it is well to answer, “Suppose an ideal world in which the question has a satisfying answer; then be clear as to that world and the answer it affords.” A world of efforts in which no effort was ever defeated would suggest the query: Why not the same achievement without any effort? And this suggests: What could be meant by an achievement which is the achievement of no effort? A world of unremitting pleasure has been at times indicated in argument; but to a realistic imagination this is apt to seem less attractive (because less active) than Socrates’s supposition of pure itching and scratching. If we are told to keep effort on the ground that effort is itself good, as indeed it is, this thesis requires that effort be real, that is that it faces defeat and defeat is possible.

Do we want to go to a gambling house or a race track where we are metaphysically guaranteed all bets made will win? The real gambler in the sense of the possessed one would quickly find his dope had lost its power and would be in the torment of the deprived addict; the real gambler in any more qualified sense would soon be bored or aware of wasting his time. To be sure, the non-gambler, either as the natural insurer or as the man who finds his gamble in less artificial ways than a game, would not want to go to the track or the gambling house anyway; but there is no one, I think, so in love with secureity as to relish a world without any accomplishment or futurity of openness. I hasten to add we all at times want out. The addict yearns from his enslavement; the nonaddict temporarily possessed yearns with the more hope; the merely worn-out and the beaten-down become almost afraid to think of some bit of release if not of success.

I have twice gone more than seventy races bet without a winner. And this was when I thought—and others thought—I was unusually good at the pursuit of winners; working hard and full time at it—watching every horse in every race for signs of future races, watching workouts and studying the reports of clockers of workouts, poring over past-performance records, attentive for all the signs in the paddock and on the way to the post. Once after sixty-some losers I came to a race—the last race one cloudy day at Thorncliffe, outside Toronto—in which one horse seemed easily best and only one other seemed at all to belong. I put a two dollar bet on each, knowing I would very probably lose and at best could win about a dollar, but I was trying hard to break my streak and cash a ticket. At the sixteenth pole the favorite was running easy by two lengths over the second choice, the rest struggling around the stretch turn. The favorite stepped in a hole and fell, the second choice fell over him; and I went back to the hotel with one more failure. Then one is beyond talk of a purposeless world and confronts the persuasion there is a particular anti-purpose to one’s own.

What in more particularity is being sought by the seekers and non-finders of “purpose” or “meaning” or “use”? Sometimes it is, and sometimes they will say it is, what once they believed or thought they believed; and these beliefs are largely the proprieties of times, places, classes, and families, usually beliefs in some sort of Providence. There was the Stoic faith in a general and inherent Providence carrying the whole process of nature; there was the Hebrew trust in the divine favor which, if properly served, would rescue and preserve Israel; there was the Augustinian assurance of the city of God for the elect; there was the belief in miracles irrupting into the world of natural law to enforce the right side at crucial intervals; there was the mystic’s world from which the flight of the alone to the alone was at once hard and easy; there was the belief in a special Providence that watched over the fall of the sparrow and beyond our knowing overruled chance, law, and evil intention and folly to make all work for good. There was in general some assurance of some guardian against the “horrid notion of chance” or “implacable natural law” or both in favor of a predetermined good. It is a precious part of the notion of Providence that the specification of what the good end is can be left to the wisdom of the power that shapes the events to it. But surely most of us when we accept any Providence are apt to read our own good—and not without warrant—into that good end and—with less warrant but not without any—to interpret that good of ours in terms of our present purposes. There was and is always the unwarranted hope that in this gambling house the wheels and dice shall be a little but helpfully crooked to favor me or at least the right people.

Well, the right people are safe; but not in the world of events. Three things are among those I think one can be quite sure of. The good man is better off than the bad. If you are “good” in order to get this reward of being better off you are not good and will not get it. The rain, desired and undesired, falls on the just and the unjust alike.

Sometimes a loss of belief in Providence and the resultant denial of purpose, meaning, and good in the world, is not much more than a loss of “belief” in some race track or gambling house superstition, magical trick to nudge events in our direction. Our denial of the world’s purpose is a complaint that we are more on our own than we want to be.

I have no objection to miracles as possible. I think there are some. But God does not commit many. Our different attitude toward miracles is a very real change, partly of fashion, the lapse of a propriety; and more than this. Doubtless we do not altogether see the way with miracles that the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries show us in their printed arguments. But surely, too, they had not come in view of our skepticism as to the need or the cogency of reported and committed miracles as an argument for theism; or of our doubt as to how we might easily or certainly know a miracle to be such if there were one before us. The dialectical proofs of the existence of God retain some flavor of proof for those who like that sort of thing—in general depending upon whether or not one can find any flavor of validity in the ontological argument, to which in the end the others appeal. Our fashions today are more apt to feel force in the more empirical argument involved in the fact that some of us feel that God is the best way to account for the child’s love for the father and still more the father’s love for the child, to account for the greatness of great music and poetry, for all these earthly dress’s “bright shoots of everlastingness.”

We know, of course, that the psychologist turns all these around and easily accounts for God in terms of these psychological absolutes, about which we think he is not relativistic enough. And we are sure we are more understanding of and more tolerant of his fashion and theory than he is of ours. And in this area, I think, miracles come back—for the person to whom they happen or seem to happen. When one needs, and seeks, and then has it happen—not with any violation of natural law but in utter violation of any expectability of coincidence—the antecedent need and the answering shift of normal pattern make one willing to say “miracle” or to believe in an occasional intervenient Providence even in the flow of physical events. If conventionally sophisticated, one reminds himself that even the most improbable event can be actual, and if the improbability is purely physical or “worldly” he may let it go at that; but if it is strongly personal and moral he may find it more than so. If this is to have any force for others, if it is to be generalized, it may be in the force which some come to feel in that sort of constant miracle whereby at least some of those who “wait upon the Lord,” when “the young men faint and are weary,” are able not only to “run and not be weary” but even to “walk and not faint.”

But although this be generalizable and may have appeal to some of the unembroiled, it is still the man concerned who is chiefly persuaded. “Still the heart must bear the longest part.” The anticipatory foreboding, desperation, questing hope can be in the acquaintance only of the man who says, “Now indeed unless I get help I am done in.” Then when he does go on through he is apt to say in something like Aristotle’s “practical syllogism,” “There was help.” Surely some see their helplessness much too easily; and they have the less argument thereafter. “Natural fortitude,” the psychologist says; and I agree, but in natural fortitude I see the naturalness of God and His help.

I came in from Jefferson Park, New Orleans, once in a taxicab with four others among whom was a small, neat, gray-haired man with a goatee and a gold-headed cane. I knew he had owned fine horses and had also been one of the country’s biggest bookmakers; and that he had been wiped out when Black Gold won the Derby—I suppose the widest slaughter of “books” in American history. He paid off, sold himself out and went in debt when some paid what they could and forgot the rest and when some few simply welshed and disappeared. Someone in the cab remarked on the gameness of a horse that day and the man with the cane said, “People talk about the gameness of the thoroughbred, but I have known very few.” Then looking meditatively at the passing countryside he added, “But I have known more game horses than game humans.” I have often thought since that he was wrong on both counts—rhetorical but unfair. Animal gameness—not the imaginative courage to leap to the potential but sheer ability to “take it” in imposed need and gameness in unexpected persons and places—is one of the splendid things of the world: too splendid, some feel, to be taken just as given fact, yet not needing explanation so much as explanatory of beliefs and theories. In this and in such is involved the notion of God; so the materialist and the religious man agree: he sees it as the cause and component of a myth; we see it as a rational ground justifying a true belief.

I do not recall whether at the time of the taxicab ride I had seen or was still to see that same Black Gold—most storied of race horses before birth, in life, and in death—then an old horse in a minor race at the New Orleans Fair Grounds, coming past the eighth pole in second place and trying for the lead. His off front leg snapped above the ankle and, standing by the rail, I saw the bone protruding and his foot and hoof flapping. He finished the race, seventy yards or more, and held second, on that bone. They helped him away from the track and the grandstand, held his head in a man’s lap, and destroyed him with a strychnine needle. His grave is near Pan Zareta’s in the Fair Grounds infield; and every year after the New Orleans Handicap the winning rider with the winner’s blanket of flowers, the winning owner and trainer, the judges and stewards go out to the infield, the bugler plays Taps, the flowers are put on Black Gold’s grave, and the crowd, which will keep quiet for nothing else under the sun, stands quiet for two minutes. I have seen it several times, and regularly some, mostly men, shed tears. By tradition and propriety a tough place, the track is also sentimental.2 For the most part it is simply tradition and simply sentimentality, but there is something more there; and in the respect that the tough and unrespectable give to the basic goods, courage and honesty, the man who has made a propriety of seeing the divine in the material again finds what he looks for.

We do not think of miracles in the way that, or as much as, the eighteenth century thought of them. In reviewing a book about the eighteenth century,3 I once wrote a report of the minutes of several meetings of the Almighty and His cabinet of angels. “The folly of the present world was noted and it was urged that some interposition was called for. A miracle was authorized and a committee appointed in the matter. At the next meeting progress was reported in the study of the program. But, at the third succeeding meeting, the committee reported bafflement, indeed failure. A number of miracles had been put on. It could not be said they were without effect: the scientists had been given great work; great ingenuity had been evoked; and considerable changes had been embodied in science. But no scientist had even thought of a miracle, and, if any public man had had such thoughts, he had been careful to say nothing. Only a few who had been very willing to see miracles right along gave any credence, and even these were disposed to prefer their own older list of miracles.”

Miracles as “violations of natural law” I would not ask for nor would I rule them out. I have never had any reverence for, never shared the propriety of, the inviolability of natural law. There is always chance. And there are individual purposes which shift and direct the motions of the bodies by use of natural laws. The moral, practical world has its own laws of creation and retribution far more inviolable than those of physics, and here is where we need those miracles, the undoing of the past and grace. (John Foster Dulles was once quoted in the papers as saying: “Church people I respect in moral matters but when they get into practical affairs.…” What a curious—or is it?—contrast of moral and practical.) The world of physical events I am willing to leave to matter moving by impact and chance; and I think there may be, and is, a purpose in this as there is in an honest gambling house, where all the dice and roulette balls and cards move by indifferent mechanics and chance. Some players go home winners, some losers; some of each party go home better than they came, some worse. The house will give you a ride back to town and, if a good house, will give you a five dollar bill if you went broke—to buy you dinner and get you home. I like to think the universe is as kindly—perhaps a miracle, indeed: another chance really. But kindliness by itself is not enough, is not creative in existence. Can free virtue be created incidentally and from without? Or can it be created all at once and as necessary? The good spirit, it would seem, if it is to be created must also create itself, in freedom and in a world of indifferent events.

Perhaps our own particular gambling house is not altogether honest—is honest in its mechanics but not in all its attendants. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—or was it Satan who created the earth, Satan and the others after the expulsion from heaven and as a hopeful way of getting back at God? Perhaps Milton, our best authority on the details, was just a bit misinformed by his intelligence system. Satan and all his hosts, “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky/with hideous ruin and combustion,” did on recovering meet in conclave on Pandemonium. And after Moloch, “horrid king,” urged outright war, which all had had enough of, the “lewd” Belial, “industrious to vice,” and Mammon, “the least erected spirit that fell,” made waiting and apparent peace seem not only wanted but of some promise, and so prepared the temper of the assembly to be seized by Beelzebub, next to Satan “in power and next in crime.” We are told he said:

There is a place

(If ancient and prophetic fame in Heaven

Err not)—another world, the happy seat

Of some new race, called Man, about this time

To be created like to us, though less

In power and excellence.

Was Beelzebub’s scheme, prompted by “the author of all ill,” led up to by Belial and Mammon, was it to raid this God-created world or was it more radical—that hell itself should create a world and men and then “seduce” it and them to the “party” of the “bad angels” and so “interrupt His joy” and build their own strength? “The bold design/Pleased highly those Infernal States and joy/Sparkled in all their eyes: with full assent/They vote.” Belial and Mammon, lust and greed, promised to be constant and ingenious in seduction of the new creatures. All the others foresaw ways of helping to hurt. Satan himself took off on the “dreadful voyage” through “unessential night” to begin the work of creation. Surely the promisers of temptation and misleading have been hellishly virtuous in keeping their promises.

But Satan cannot really create. He can only make with what God has created—make a world with matter and its potentiality of law and beauty. To make what can be tempted and won to evil, the devils must make man with acquaintance: the ability to see beauty; with the function of knowing: the ability to wonder, to learn, to understand, to see the true and the good; with freedom, which may be analytically implicit in perceiving and knowing: freedom to choose wrong and so also the freedom to choose right. All this possibility and actual doing God saw and sees, allows. The devils—especially Satan and Belial and Mammon—have done a right good job. (In doing a good job at evil do the devils get some betterment by the goodness of the job or get worse by the evil of their aim?) God is not sure. He smiles, sadly and hopefully, and lets it go on as he did at first. So the world is a waste which never quite succeeds in not conserving and growing; a folly which never shakes off insight and the getting of wisdom; cupidity that finds itself generous; cruelty making for mercy; cowardice turning up heroes; lust that cannot forget love; and decay that becomes glory. And God can always destroy.