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Introduction: Literature and the Human Condition
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19246 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
1,224 Words |
| Author
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Walter Poznar
Walter Poznar is professor of humanities at Saint Leo College,
Florida. He has published numerous articles on higher
education and literature. |
How will future generations characterize the twentieth century? An age of incredible brutality? Dehumanization? Ideological madness? A period of crippling fear and hopelessness? In the late 1930s, English writer Leonard Woolf titled one of his books Barbarians at the Gate. Many would now claim that the barbarians within the city have savagely demolished those traditional humanist values that for generations had sustained Western culture. God is dead, faith in man is crushed under the weight of decadence and violence, and the individual is adrift in an empty and terrifying universe.
All value systems have crumbled, all forms of communal identity devastated, all human ties shattered. The aloneness of the individual has become absolute. The ideological utopias of the nineteenth century, broadly based on humanist principles, have succumbed to a pervasive and enervating sense of meaninglessness. Humanitarian predictions by earlier social prophets have been overwhelmed by the massive evils of a world no longer able to promote the glorious dreams of the past.
It is within this context of apprehension and nervelessness that the essays in this section seek to examine the human condition in our time. What can the individual do to save himself when all historical and ethical supports have been undermined? Goethe once wrote:
The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content: nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.
But even our sense of wonder has been atrophied, vulgarized in popular culture. William James put it succinctly when he asked in one of his addresses "Is Life Worth Living?" How can faith in anything be salvaged in the wasteland of the twentieth century?
Ernest van den Haag traces the growing influence of eighteenth-century assumptions about freedom and equality, and points to the inability of modern man to found a satisfactory and authoritative ethical system on reason, the emasculation of religious faith in America into "an incoherent vague deism" promoting "good deeds, social work and the liberal zeitgeist." The traditional values that have survived have no credible authenticity, no firm philosophical foundation, not even our vaunted reverence for freedom. What the philosophers of the eighteenth century failed to understand is that only religion can provide those communal bonds without which all human ties
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