Transcript
{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a number of technical questions to solve. Miss {Boone} is unable to locate a -- the speech, The Reply to Hayne. -- Would -- is anybody able to help out on this? I thought I had put it on -- on reserve. But obviously, there is only the bibliography on reserve. Would you help?
(Well, Sir, there are only three or four complete copies in the library. There are several incomplete, but they got the important part you wanted cut out. No, no, no. I mean, they are edited -- and this is what has been edited out.)
(The important -- the important part is abridged.)
(The important part to this course.)
All over town. There we are.
(The downtown public library probably has 50. My copy was Storage Copy 24.)
(Right. I know. They must have at least 50 copies.)
So, Miss {Boone}. The -- the only problem is that you have to go the public library of one of the towns that compose Los Angeles County. You can't rely on the university library. That's the whole story. Isn't that true?
(True. Never have. You never can rely on the university library.)
The second technical thing is: I have here copies of a very ingenious document. A New Englander, Mr. Charl- -- Power Smith, has published a very good book, The Yankees and God. It's a history of the mind of the United -- of the people of this country over the last -- 300 years.
I happily found this book; and he has there condensed the contrast between Herman Melville and Emerson in a letter which he makes Melville write to Emerson. It is really Moby-Dick condensed into one page. So the wording is Mr. Smith's invention. But the content is a very great statement as to the essential contrast between the eternal people and the public of the 19th century. And -- and you, of course, you are hangers-on to the 19th century, in as far as you go to this school, and are the public in these United States, and go to the -- see the Oscar award, 20 minutes short. Who has seen it? Who has? Well, I'll say the people are emerging from the public. There's only a minority who have seen it.
Hooray.
So I -- I -- Mr. Smith was good enough to allow me to have this distributed among you. But there is a hitch. I want you to bring this to the exam. On the other hand, I want you to study and read it now. And I'm sure that from -- between today and the day of the exam, you -- half of you will lose this paper. So, God help you. I shall not be willing or able to replace it. So then I now distribute these papers, you know that you have to deal with it in fear and trembling. Now once more: I shall not replace these copies. If anybody comes and says he has lost it, he has lost it.
I still believe, you see, in marriage without divorce.
(I agree.)
Just pass it around, as you -- because they see -- they'll hand it on. Don't worry. Thank you very much. We can here start the -- at the other end, too. I'll keep a copy myself, you see.
(But of course. After all, you might need it for the exam, too.)
Yes. I'm entitled to lose it.
Now may I now take you into my confidence? The treatment of history, as you know--especially social history--has consisted of a loose string of beads, just one fact following the other. I have tried to -- to introduce, to -- to initiate you into the fact that the process of a nation, of forming a national character is very much more profound than the forming of a che- -- chemical synthesis. And I have tried to build up an understanding that such a process is -- or as I have called it in -- in my works, a crucial process. And that any social group moves to keep its own steadily between the past from which it hails, and the future towards which it is destined, and keeping its own as an inner entity within its frontiers or under its skin; and fighting off, or enlarging, or conquering an outer world.
I called this last time already in the form of a cross. This crucial situation, as it is called in -- in--well, in Kierkegaard, perhaps--is the human situation. Man is not a drop in the water. He is not an individual in a -- in a sequence of in- -- atoms or individuals, but he is in a crucial position; and any man, who after 1850 has become an American, has been placed in this quandary, or in this cru- -- in -- in this cross of reality--as it has been called in my various different works on the subject--he has to inherit the certainty that he comes after Christianity and has not omitted any of the sanctions of the Christian tradition. That is, he may be a
post-Christian, he may be a pagan, he may be an agnostic in his own mind; yet he has inherited certain principles, you see, which didn't exist in antiquity -- for example, that all men are born equal. He -- he cannot go behind the Declaration of Independence. He cannot go behind the transformation of the Cross -- the Star of David into the Free Masonic cross. The Egyptian cross is not the -- the star of the -- the Egyptian star is not the star really of the pharaohs, before Moses left Egypt; but it is simply a generalization of the Star of David now for all mankind. It's a universalization.
The same we saw with the eye of Horus -- instead of the cross, with "In God We Trust," with the nondenominational bias of this country. I tried to show you that to be low-brow in this country means to free the immigrant from the stages of one, few, and many, and allow him to say "all." But only in the sense that these "all" have all the goods produced by the one, the few, and the many. You remember the simile of the spring, and the brook, and the river, and the sea.
So this world in which we here live today, especially here in this town of Los Angeles, with its sprawling unity of all classes and regions, and this unity of village--and orange grove, and desert, and big city, this new kind of urban village--means that this sea, this sea of humanity in -- which you call today the United States of America, is a sea that has been filled by rivers. And these rivers have been formed by brooks; and these brooks have been formed by springs. And that's a very different thing as if you begin with the sea and say, "There is nothing but the sea."
So I tried to show you that Americans -- who were very complicated spiritual beings, and had nothing to do with the so-called "natural beast" of which you sometimes boast that you are. America is a highly sophisticated civilization. And it is not at all natural. It's the most unnatural thing that exists in the world. Much more complicated than Bolshevism. Or at least as complicated. And this function--this office of America to enlarge, and to -- and generalize, and to impart to all what has come first up in a few, or even in one lonely spirit at first--this, I tried to show you is an office held in the socie- -- family of nations. And therefore, it isn't enough to say that America is big, or has one vote or five votes in the United Nations. It has a specific office. -- It is a member, in the same sense as the members of our body all differ in function. And are not i- -- to i- -- be identified the foot with the arm, and the eye with the stomach.
Everything you learn in school is telling you the opposite. It's time to tell you that this is a country where everybody has his opportunity, and where we begin, so to speak, in the prairies and in the Rocky Mountains with sunsets and sunrises. This is the most sophisticated, most complicated civilization. That's why it is so threatened, why it is so frail, that it is in great danger today of losing its
soul. This is the crucial situation for the one reason: that any human being, you yourself, have at every one moment to stand between the past and the future, and between your integrity of yourself and an outer world that makes it demands on you, on -- on which you feed, because you -- we have to eat, and we have to buy, and we have to make money, and we have to survive.
So man's crucial situation, I tried to show you, will always deal with his inner life. And I put Emerson here. It will always have to conquer a frontier, as your paper has to cope with. That will be the frontiersman. It's a good word. You can also put "immigrant" and "pioneer" in this. All men to whom the conditions of an outer presen- -- pressure of a world that makes its demand, you see, are foremost. And you have no time for the delicacies of the infinitude of the private citizen of Mr. Emerson's description.
You have to -- always to stand on the shoulders of the past. You cannot relapse into Egyptian darkness. You have to take the biblical tradition of a people of God into account, because that is how this country had been founded. I put simply the word "people" here. And here is the word "public." And I have today to complete this situation of the Cross of Reality of the Americans by showing you that with the end of the Second World War, the public had dissolved; and the people had disintegrated into what is called today, with a not very articulate term very often, the "masses," the mob. We have no democracy any longer. We have a mobocracy, because the electorate is no longer told the issues. The government does what it has to do, and just says something else to the public. That's always when mob rule comes in. We are not able to understand many of these issues. They have become too complex, too complicated. So what we get is onetenth of what these people have to cope with. As I told you, for the last 13 -- 14 years, we have governed 125 air bases in the rest of the world, in Ethiopia. Not one of these places has been discussed in Congress or before the public before it was taken or occupied. You don't even know three-quarters of these bases.
You just know that -- by accident I fl- - flew over the Arctic Circle when I had to come here from Europe for these lectures. So I discovered that at Frobisher Bay, we had a military -- a naval air base. Now Frobisher Bay is -- is not anywhere in the territories of the United States, you see. It is beyond Canada. Labrador. And there we are, 1800 men stationed.
That's how we are governed. Half of the thing is unknown to you. Or more than half. All the important things are unknown to you. And that's still called "democracy" officially, gentlemen. But there is a division today between the people who govern, and have to govern, and have a very heavy responsibility, and that which this electorate is fed on, on -- Puerto Rico, and Alaska, and Hawaii, and all these niceties of utterly unim- -- utter unimportance.
So the disinte- -- I put here simply now a question mark. But it certainly is not the enlightened public of 1850 of which Mr. Emerson dreamt, and there are no pioneers in 1850 who themselves are the law in Wyoming, you see, and found a state. You and I, we have very little to do with this. I have been happy in the -- in my lifetime here in this United States to be twice in pioneering ventures, of real pioneering, and a third time to discover uncharted territory and -- and name some mountains and rivers who haven't been -- even been on the -- on the map before, in my own right. Now that's a great experience, and it feel- -- I feel that I have some understanding of what the -- the people since 1850 were allowed, so to speak, to do: christen this people -- this country, you see, and its rocks and mountains for the first time, and to found villages and settlements for the first time. Since I know this, I have also the deep feeling that this situation at this moment, for 150, or 160 million out of 170 does not exist any longer. And so I -- I would put a question mark here.
So this I call the American cross of reality. The problem of an America is to give to all the achievements which come after Christianity is firmly established as the first -- as the starting point, so to speak. Where do we go on from there? you may ask, you see. This is very difficult, to introduce every human being into this tradition. As you know, in 1800, 10 percent of the people of this country were Church. And yet all -- 100 percent of the people received the Christian heritage I think more directly and more explicitly as now when 60 mill- -- 60 percent of the American people belong to churches. Because the churches themselves I think are sugar-coating their traditions, and you can go to church for years and not know what it's all about.
So I -- I think officially Christianity has now gotten hold of the people to a large extent, that when -- when I go to the church--and I'm a very faithful churchgoer, as a matter of fact--I am always wondering what has become of the Church.
So to be post-Christian, if I may use this rather dangerous word--only between you and me; I -- I wouldn't sell it publicly, because it can then be misunderstood as though it meant that we are through with Christianity--what I mean is that we have to stand on the basis of Christianity. These three points now in the following ha- -- next half of my course I shall have to prove. I will show you how the Supreme Court of the United States and how the people of the United States have always been forced, very often against their will, to say the minimum requirement is Christian principles. Whether it was the question of personal freedom, or was it a question of marriage, for example, the -- I'll show -- show you from the story of the Mormons how serious this problem of the marriage vow has, you see, been; how it has loomed large in the history of this country; how blood has been shed in large proportions, just for upholding this
one Christian principle, that a husband and his wife are in the simile of Christ and His Church, because that's the only basis for monogamy. In Judaism, monogamy was only declared valid in the year 1000 of our era. The Old Testament knew nothing of monogamy. And that's why of course the Mormons said, "Why should we?" you see, going back to the Old Testament.
The second thing is: I have to show you that -- why Emerson is only a private citizen. I'll come to this in a minute. And the third thing is that the uniting thing between this world of privacy and public life, the bond between the two, which is the word "individual," or "citizen," or "voter," or "person,"--ev- -- anything that means a singular, you see, in this country, "each," "everybody"--that this word today breaks down and that most people we have heard of in politics and are going to hear in the future, for the last hundred years have made trouble, are people who did not reach stature of the person, who were weaker than the individual.
I may read you for this purpose, a -- a poem by Edgar Lee Master, from his "Spoon River Anthology," which 50 years ago already--or -- no, not quite, ja, 1915 -- still 45 years ago--expressed this very well. In his "Spoon River Anthology" is a cemetery, you see. And everybody there has his own obituary written on the stone. And so he -- there's a man, Thomas Rhodes, called:
"Very well, you liberals and navigators into realm intellectual. You sail on the rough { } of imagination, blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets. You, Margaret Fuller { } and Tennessee {Catherine Snopes}. You form with all your boasted wisdom, you found"--no pardon me--"You found with all your boasted wisdom how hard at the last it is"--now will you kindly copy this line?--"how hard at the last it is to keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms."
"How hard it is to keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms."
In other words, here is Masters, a midwesterner of -- very proud, as you know, midwestern accent, says that there is, beneath the entity, the unity of the soul, the danger of splitting into ce- -- what he calls "cellular atoms." That is, he speaks of the fission of the individual, that man is just not by nature one. You and I may be many. We may at least be two, the dark and the bright angel inside ourselves. As the psychoanalysts today proclaim, you see, that Judas Iscariot and Jesus were one and the same person, just two halves of the same thing. Well, this may be the nonsense which they have to sell in New York. But this exaggeration, and this crudity shows you to what we have come. The fact that there live many souls in one man's breast is here expressed much more poignantly. The soul is only in existence if we can reconcile the parts of your being. But it may be -- be
split into cellular atoms.
In the days today of the splitting of the atom itself, you may understand that since 1850, the people who were not able to keep their integrity--the juvenile delinquent, the Negro, the Jew, the unemployed, labor in general--they all form groups that point to the fact that man is not by nature one, that he is just as often disintegrated. Any -- any man -- why -- is this country, you see, the country of schizophrenics? There doesn't exist in Italy one-fifth or 5 percent of the number of schizophrenics and lunatics in this country, because -- Italy is a -- is a country of faithful souls. This country is a country of hoping individuals, without any faith. And therefore the -- rate of -- of lunatics is immense. It is larger, as you know, as in -- than in any other country of the world.
Now lunacy, insanity--which is a very serious problem of this country, as you know, and the quacks--like psychoanalysts, who offer themselves to cure this schizophrenia, and they themselves usually are schizophrenic--Freud certainly was. He was never analyzed, and he certainly was a schizophrenic.
These people point to this great fact that the dissol- -- the way from people to public, ladies and gentlemen. And you must see this for your own salvation if you want to become a useful member of America at this moment, and the human society at large. Today that's not the issue. The issue between people and public cannot be solved unless you solve the problem of the split between mind and body, and between privacy and public life of the individual, by admitting that we are not born as individuals. It's the greatest achievement of a blessed life if, when you bury a man or a woman, you may say they have become a person. At the end of life we may be one. But not at the beginning. At the beginning you are exposed to all contrari- -- contrarieties. You're pulled and torn, aren't you? Any man who is honest with himself knows that he is torn between various { }. He doesn't know where he belongs. We have to find ourselves.
Woodrow Wilson, even, who lived still in a -- in a -- in a daze of Herbert Hooverism, of proud individuality, and thought that was -- that was natural, he wrote in 1910, two years -- before he became president, a very wonderful article, "When a Man Comes to Himself." Now that is to say that a man has to come to himself. And before, he isn't one. Before, he's many. "When a Man Comes to Himself" is a very good essay title, if you understand it in its depth--that was -- 40 years ago -- 50 years ago -- 1910, 50 years ago.
We have traveled much further today. The disintegration of whole groups in our society, and the inarticulatedness of them is such, as you see it in -- in Mississippi, where you have 49 percent of Negroes, and you have 1 percent of Negro vote. And the vote after all is the voice of a man in the community. And
we live this down and say we live in a democracy, where 50 percent of the people in a state don't -- can't vote. They have no voice. Therefore they are not one. Because what makes a man one is the word that he speaks in public. You become one once you can get up in church and say, "This is my wife," and force everybody to follow suit and call them from this day on, "Mrs. Smith." Before, she was just -- Miss -- Miss Bogart. And now she's suddenly -- you have forced on the community by your vow, you see, a new voice, a new name. Then you are a person.
But you know how it is today handled; even such a marriage doesn't mean anything. -- They keep their, as I told you, their maiden names, these wives, and don't want to be remembered as married.
So from 1850 to 1950, it has worked into our system the struggle between individuals and less-than-individuals, between voters and people who are not vocal, be they children, be this -- be they labor, you see, be they Filipinos, be they p‚ons, be they immigrants, because the immigrants in Tammany Hall are exactly in the same position. Take the Indians, you see. Same situation on their reservations. This blot on our civilization, these desert reservations, where people are looked upon, and visited, observed, animals in a zoo.
So the sub-individual problem is the problem of the United States and all over the world, by the way, at this moment: the masses. And a mass -- member of a mass is experienced the breakdown of his right to be called a personality, or an individual, which all are just, as you know, shades of the same proudness, that my private existence and my public existence can be made coherent, that what goes in -- into -- in my own mind means also something in the end to the community, that I prepare myself, so to speak, with my inner thought and eloquence to what I'm going to be in the eyes of the community in the end. You take the Negro college boy who then later becomes an elevator -- or a bell- -- a bellhop in a -- in a hotel for the rest of his life, and you see how his private and his public existence just don't go together.
This is the real problem of the whole world today. It is very poignant in this country, because here the dogma of the individual has of course been taken more for granted than in any other country of the world. In any other of the -- country of the world, the people have always had some doubts about the power of every man to be himself, and to give him a public opportunity to be himself, you see. Here it has never been doubted. All our system has been explicitly based on the assumption that if you make everybody into an individual, he can take care of himself.
When a man comes -- comes to himself, as Woodrow Wilson expressed it,
was the definite answer. Of course, even Mr. Wilson had to experience the fact when he went to Paris, that very often this sentence, "When a man comes to himself," means that "when a man comes to a woman."
We don't come to ourselves by -- under our own steam. Nobody does. That's one of the heresies of the age. Take it, then, that the great paradox of the American Constitution and way of life is that the dream has been that everybody comes to himself. But if we don't come to others, we can't come to ourselves. We never come to ourselves directly. We can't.
The reason is, gentlemen, if you take stock of yourself, if you become selfconscious, you are paralyzed. You look into the mirror, and you think you know yourself. But the person who knows himself is a split personality. Here is his mirror image, and here is he himself. He stands on one side, and he says to himself, "I'm this and that." Only he can be a sa- -- healthy person who takes his -- his bearings from the love of others, or the hatred of others, or what other people think of him, and what he thinks of them. We never know ourselves. Don't believe it. That's a pagan, that's a Greek idea. Now this -- we are riddled through with this heresy that at your age you should know yourself. What you will find is very unpleasant, and always wrong. You are always better than you think you are; or you are always worse than you think you are. We never shall know before we are dead who we are. Other people must find out who we are. You are not meant to know yourself.
You can imagine what happened to a people of immigrants, of -- of -- of juvenile delinquents, of orphans, of blind, and deaf, and mutilated people, of Indians, of Negroes, of lonely people who had to live under this taboo that man made himself, that self-reliance and self-knowledge were the only thing that would lead from rags to riches.
And we have to trace now in this second half of my lecture course this strange wave of the gradual discovery that there are chapters in any human being's life in which he must not be treated as an individual, because otherwise he's wronged. He's -- stil- -- he's stultified in his growth, you see. There are phases in any man's life where he can only be rescued from self-destruction, for example, from suicide, if he is not self-reliant. The rate of businessmen in this country who commit suicide at the ripe age of 45 is staggering. They blow out their brain, because they are fed up. They are entering their second half and they have nothing to live for. And they have no friends. Obviously their wife isn't strong enough to hold them. Their -- children are- -- they are individuals. An individual at 45 had better commit suicide. That's not accidental. Or they break down and have their schizophrenia.
So this is the very serious historical issue of the 19th century, gentlemen, that the end of the road is not to turn the people into a public. But the end of the road has been to discover beneath the glamor of the individual the fact of our interdependence, of our incompleteness, of our dovetailing, and of our teamship, that without forming teams--that's the most general term I'm using now, you see--we cannot form the -- remain the people of God. It may be that we cannot form this self-supporting homestead or farm of 160 acres in New England, as we did in 1750, you see, but that the constant forming of mutually supporting teams means something much more important than the stressing of our individuality.
Please?
(From what I understand, the difference -- the major difference between people and public is in that the people would change integrity and -- integrity, whereas the public doesn't. But if we look at our group, and say a group maintains integrity, then it really is a public. So therefore, the people must be a group of individuals with integrity.)
Pardon me. I haven't made myself quite clear with regard to the notion of people. People take in death. That is, a people exists only when there is the power to succeed into offices created, you see, by the past, as a son becomes a father. You can look at your father, you see, as a despot from whom you run away. You can look at him as a sugar daddy who pays your bills. But you can also look at him as the example into whose shoes one day you have to step yourself when you have children. This is people. If you are -- however treating your daddy as your contemporary, who has to play football with you -- I knew a man in my college who said he had to get married at 21, otherwise he wouldn't be able to play football with his son. Well, I think you better don't play football, but become his father. That's a different thing. If you feel that you have to play -- be able to play football with your children, then you have of course to commit many tomfooleries, and will nev- -- can never become their father. If this is important; it's an aside, so to speak. But this was the reason for this boy to get married too early.
So "people," Sir, always mean that there is a pattern of life, there's an order of life, behavior, you see, in which it is worthwhile to follow, to succeed into. Not in a routine way, but in re-creating these great offices of father and mother, children must be reared. They aren't reared this way today at all. They are told that they must become themselves, which they cannot, because there is nothing except carnality, and most interesting nervous -- muscles and nerves, and just brute animal nature in -- in a -- in a way of being that is cut off from its greatest spiritual influences as parents are.
A son who becomes a father, that's the problem of a people, a daughter who has to become a mother. There, you see, this transformation of a passing biological chapter in your life to the full person, who is represented by people who have already lived before you the full life, can be -- your grandparents can be, an aunt, I told you. You understand, parents I only mentioning here as the -- as the outstanding pressure types upon your imagination. But they demand your transformation. People are always there where I do not care for what I am at this moment. Where I do not boast before the mirror, "That's me." Because I have to go on to another phase, which is still ahead of me, you see. And I'm not satisfied with -- that I get an A in my exams, and I have a Ph.D., and what-not, you see. I know that there are many vocations ahead of me whose purpose, whose meaning I have not even -- have fathomed so far in my own life.
So that my own -- in a people, my own ends, my own purposes, my own aims, my target, so to speak, is always less important than the destiny into -- to which -- towards which I am led. And that only reveals itself as I live longer than today. Today I know only one-quarter of what I should have to fulfill. But you -- we are told in a public that my aim to get rich is my aim. And I can then get rich, and be the most unhappy person on earth, because I've only ful- -- you see, reached my own ends. Now I only can tell you only one thing: that man, or that woman who reaches her own ends is the most unhappy creature on earth. She'll get her man, but what a marriage! Because she is not led to believe that the aims which she has at this moment are very small compared to her destiny.
So people are led into bigger things than any man's mind knows, you see. There are -- its -- people live beyond any individual member's mind. Is -- this makes sense? We change our mind all the time. And that's contained in "people." But "public," "individuals," you see, always think that their mind is an end in itself. That's very fleeting. Mind is fickle.
I hope you'll change your mind very often during your life. You have to, if you want to keep alive. The mind therefore is not the basis of our integrity. The power that, you see, can leave corpses, mental corpses behind--shells of former ideas--is called the human soul. The soul is the power to survive death. And nobody belongs to the people who cannot survive in his heart either hi- -- other people's or his own tem- -- I mean, partial death. That's the power of a -- of a -- of the human soul. Now, as I know today, you are told there is no such thing as a soul. So you all break down with your own mind's harness around you; and when your mind gives out, you are found with a nervous breakdown in a lunatic asylum, or you go to the analyst on his couch. Which always means that your mind has come to its end. But I hope that your mind will come very often to its end. That's perfectly healthy. As long as you do not rely for the integrity of your -- of your life on your mentality, you see, you are perfectly safe. Dismiss your
mind. It's just been wrong, that's all.
But in this country, people have been told to rely on their mind, on their will, on their feeling. That's why I tried to show you that people are not coherent because they have the same thoughts, or they have the same will, or they have -- purpose. There's a great example: General Motors has an -- has an ad -- ad in the papers, which will show you the problem very clearly. There is a family of four: father, mother, daughter, and son. And they discuss the buying of a new car. You know the ad? Sir, you laugh.
(No, I'm listening.)
No, the other -- your -- the man in front of you. You look -- you keep smiling.
(I've seen something like it, but I didn't -- I'm not acquainted with the ad { }.)
Well, perhaps too -- it may help you to understand what "people" are. The father says, "This car," General Motors, of course, "is economical. Let's buy it."
The mother says, "It's safe."
The girl says, "It looks stylish."
And the boy says, "Has speed."
Now there are four languages. If you enlarge on these four languages of these four people, you see that the boy stands for technology and science; the girl stands for art -- the arts; the mother stands for the Church; and the father stands for the state, or for the worldly government. And so in every family there are these four worlds united. State, Church, art, science. And arts, science, Church, state are nothing but the family written large. That's all there is to them. If there was not a mother in every family, we couldn't have a Church. If there wasn't a father in every family, we couldn't have government. If there wasn't a young man in the family, we wouldn't have sci- -- scientific progress. And if there wasn't a girl, we wouldn't have beauty and the arts.
This means that we all, you and I, contain this cross of reality, this crucial situation, that you are at all times of your life able to understand a father's, a mother's, a son's, and a daughter's thinking. Therefore, any man who comes to his senses, and who is of your age--as you are seated here, gentlemen and ladies--you already represent four different branches of the human family, four
different ways of looking at things. Because you can understand the argument of your father, you can understand the argument of your mother. You can understand the argument of your sister. And you can also hold your own with regard to your own interest in a racing car.
And therefore, when the courts say that a man can be punished for his deed, that Mrs. {Duncan} is not insane, we mean that she can hear the other three voices opposing her bent. And therefore she is responsible. That is, any human being that comes of age is supposedly, in this country at least, supposedly has been living in a family in which state, Church, arts, and science have made themselves heard. And as long as this is true of the individual, he is a human being. He is not a human being because he is born in a cradle, or because he's just young, or because he's a male or a female. That doesn't make you more than an animal. But you are a -- an -- a person, an individual if you have been -- what's the matter? Sit down, please.
As soon as you have been able to understand the most opposite members of a pe- -- in a people -- within a people--now father, mother, daughter, and son represent of course only a little cell, so to speak, of this tremendous body of humanity which goes from Adam to the last judgment day, the father, of course, hears all the laws. He hears the Declaration of Independence. He quotes the Constitution if his boy is tomfooling with the law, you see, and warns him that he can't do this. So of course, this living father speaks from everything that has gone on before. The mother speaks for all the eternal usages and customs of the human race, for hospitality, for example. She knows how a guest should be made welcome in the house. The daughter has all the desires of the most -- latest future. She is not just for abstract art. But by being for the new art, and interested in it--or a new dress--she also represents the necessity that there should be novelty to the last judgment day, that we should go on changing our dress with the springtime. And the boy, of course, he is now interested in this new car, with its high accelerator. He is representative of the change of technology, in the means of production, you see, that this is only one little example of what has to happen all the time on a -- on this globe.
So any family, gentlemen, is a glorious cosmos or example of the fullness of time. There are two ages, but the living age of the father points to all ages behind his time. And the living age of the young man should point to all progress through all future ages. And in the same sense, the girl points to all the improvements in beauty, and -- and embellishment in the future, and the mother to all the dignities, and all the honors due to merit and tradition.
Sir, there was a question?
(I just was { } my last question. I feel that by this segregation, you are seriously imperiling the individual.)
I am -- not I am, but history is like this. You are already imperiled, because you defend it. You see, that's why the -- in the Christian tradition, St. Paul has always said that man is at the same time free and a slave, because this paradox, that our individuality may at any moment -- break down, is the only defense of regaining it. If you do not tremble that you may not be a person, you will never be one. All these proud, arrogant boosters, shysters, and however -- whoever they are, these stars in Hollywood, they are no persons. They have to be divorced 17 times for all their personality. That's what they have to do. The mar- -- breakdown of a marriage is the proof in the -- you see, of the whole matter. You see, they are not able to give themselves, so they don't know themselves. Tomorrow they are somebody different. They say, "Oh, this was yesterday." They have no integrity.
I can assure you of one thing, that a man who thinks he is a personality has ceased to be one.
(Is there a point in intellectual honesty, though, where I'm sure -- a point of mine about my misunderstanding. You can't mean to disallow intellectual guidance and thought from life { } to say --)
The problem is -- to become an individual, Sir. But since when you -- say, "I am born an individual," you are wrong. It's a -- tremendous struggle to become one.
(I understand this.)
And all the phases before then must not aim at the individual, must -- must take people as they are. They are people, you see. And they may have to become at the end -- when we die, we are unfortunately frozen-out personalities. You can then build a monument to General Grant. But the man is dead. It is not such -- you see, to end as a personality is a great blessing, because you leave a good name, or a -- unified name behind. People know who you have been. But the price of this is that all times you have been -- well, I won't use terms which you may not understand. You have to remain in this fear and trembling, in this in-between position, that you do not know whether you sink or swim.
(I { }.)
Wie? Why -- if you -- I have practically no time. My watch { }.
({ }.)
May I go on with two minutes? Or are you -- have you no time? Can I go on for two more minutes?
I want to give you a strange explanation of the word "individual," which perhaps may show you in what a strange tradition we live. Every Latin word which you use in the vocabulary, like "person," or "individual," has a twofold origin, which is in our college education unfortunately today obliterated, because it is purely secular. In other words, it is Greek. All what you are told in this college is simply the Greek branch of spiritual influences. All the Jewish tradition is left out.
Now Christianity is the blend of Greek and Jewish thought, and knowledge. And this is true of the word "individual." In Lat- -- in Greek, the word "individual" is the word "atom." Both means that which cannot be divided. "Atomos" means without a cut. And "individual" means -- is a translation of the Greek word "atom." Now you should prick up your ear, because we have seen the fission of the atom. And therefore perhaps this word is a very dangerous word, because what had been thought of as being unable to be divided has been divided. There is another tradition of this same word "individual," which is unknown to you, and which I have to remind you of. This same word "individuus" is written on the top of the Peace of Paris in 1783. This was the peace which has established the independence of the United States. And it reads on trop -- on top, "In the name of the Holy Individual Trinity." And there the meaning of the word "individual" is the opposite from the Greek. It means "that which must not be divided." Because you can divide the people of God into warring nations; but when peace is concluded, we bow again to the fact that God has created many nations, and just the same, we have to keep peace. It must not be divided.
We have no peace today, because nobody can invoke this formula. There can be no peace between the Russians and the Americans, because we cannot say, "In the name of the indivisibility of God, let's make peace among His image, among His children." Since they -- we don't believe practically in this country as little as in the other country in the individual trinity--we are all Unitarians at best--therefore, the whole problem that the Son of God can be as little divided as His Father has no meaning for all of you -- just has lost all its meaning.
Therefore, what -- I assure you, the -- peace of mankind has only been kept as long as the people in both -- on both sides of the warring battlefield have believed that there was one god governing both, and asking them to unite, and telling them that you must not divide.
So you see, here is the word "can." And you believe -- all Americans believe that they can do as they please. But must they? You must not do as you please. And here is the religious connotation of the people: the girl can elope from her fa- -- parents' home, but must she? She must not. She must give to the individuality of this family that it must not be divided more than lip service. She must sacrifice some years of her life to per- -- persuade her parents to allow this, because in this process, she will also mature and see whether she really has to marry this man. If she doesn't give them a chance to interpose their objections, then she may elope of course; but -- she will have divided something that should remain united: the peace between the generations.
So can -- of the name "individual" and must -- are at war. In people, it is acknowledged that the "must not be divided," you see, is more important than the "can be divided." In a public, who wants to see tricks, who wants to see chemical -- chemicals divided, and analyzed, and who wants to have technical progress, and wealth, gold, and what-not, he only problem is "can" be divided. Yes, we can, but must we?
[tape interruption]
Because we have learned that it doesn't. It consists of subatoms, of electrons. Now, you may be a very interesting number of electrons, Sir. But I cannot talk to electrons. I can only talk to people and to persons. And to electrons, people can give tranquilizers, as they do. And this whole country is now -- in the majority consists of people who can no longer stand on their own feet, have no mind of their own, have to look at the Oscar award, 87 million of them, and we'll all be cheated.