Generation of Vipers

Philip Wylie

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9781564781468
• eBook ISBN: 9781564788634
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Perhaps the most vitriolic attack ever launched on the American way of living - from politicians to professors to businessmen to Mom to sexual mores to religion - Generation of Vipers - ranks with the works of De Tocqueville and Emerson in defining the American character and malaise.

CHAPTER XVIII

Conclusion

IT HAS BEEN FAIRLY FANCY OF ME, I KNOW, TO WRITE SO LONG and noisy a book just to say that if we want a better world, we will have to be better people.

That’s all I’ve said, of course.

All the founding fathers said.

All Christ said.

All there is to say.

But it would not be fair if I failed to follow my own rule and reveal in this miscellaneous Jeremiad a glimpse of its opposites.

That I shall do. Balancing the evil, the stupidity, the rapacity and the foolishness of men is the goodness of men. All the goodness there is reposes in them. But goods are incidental to goodness; they cannot be identified with goodness; a dominant concern with goods always blights goodness and leads the way back to despair.

I should like to review that theme before I turn over the coin on which I have etched so much viperishness of the generation that now is rolling toward limbo.

America began with the idea of giving to every man an equal chance. The noble thesis that the majority of common men, properly informed, will judge every problem rightly was the philosophy which prompted that definition of liberty. It was another way of saying that a knowledge of the truth would set men free: each man, and all men. In action, it meant that individual human beings would strive incessantly to become more conscious of reality and would put obligations to others ahead of their own ambitions.

That is democracy.

The idea is so fundamental to man’s psychology that any compromise of it, or any deviation from it, is necessarily a backward step. A step, that is, toward less individuated men, less informed men, less civilized men, men less aware, men in bondage to whatever notion caused the backward step.

The apparent handicap of democracy is inefficiency. The inevitable accompaniment of democratic living is the struggle of every sort of minority against the majority to force particular judgments. But, according to the philosophy which I have just discussed, there can be no advantage without cost.

The uproar in our free press, the fumbling of our Washington bureaucracy, the conflict of our laws, and the disagreements of our leaders are results of democratic behavior. They can be regarded as handicaps, however, only by those men who have forgotten, or never knew, or willfully abandoned the concept of democracy. To relieve organized society of contradictions by fiat, as has been done in Germany, is to create genuine handicap: a society in which the valid feelings and ideas in minorities are driven into silent places. There they eventually become autonomous. They turn into worries—and then into fears. They establish such mechanisms as I have listed: the bully contains the potential coward; the conqueror is obliged to fight the inferior knowledge of his guilt as hard as he fights his physical enemy; the whole people, exulting first in the efficiency of their paranoid method, at last becomes lost in what was always mania.

Another way to regard social organization is to realize that the philosophy of the state is only a magnification of the philosophy of the person, and the philosophy of all states only a magnification of the philosophy of one. To the man and the woman who understand the philosophy of democracy and live by it, there is never any confusion about how to feel or what to do. Such people know that the confusions are superficial, that a thousand democracies could perish, but that democracy would prevail everywhere in the end. Such people are occupied in the spread of an understanding of democracy. Patriotism, therefore, is to be concerned about your country—not necessarily to adulate it.

Too many of us have lost sight of the single, simple truth by which we were first associated and by which alone we can continue in any lasting association. Too many learned men—and too many fools.

A new corollary of truth is never evident at once to the masses. That is why minorities must remain vocal. Only through freedom can they educate masses to enlargements of the fundamental concept. The danger opposing that is the chance it gives minorities to embrace lies—new and old—and to force them upon unwatchful masses or to put them in effect through the political default of masses.

That is why a person who does not vote is betraying himself.

That is why a person who does not do everything in his power to find out about both sides of a question, and all candidates, is digging the grave of his liberty.

That is why a person who does not consult his own decision rather than the political predetermination of a bloc is chaining himself link by link to the old mobism ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I Catastrophe, Christ, and Chemistry
• II Subjective Feudalism
• III A Footnote to Chapter Two
• IV A Psychology Lesson, a Study, and a Sermon
• V A Specimen American Myth
• VI A Specimen American Attitude
• VII A Specimen American Institution
• VIII Common Man: The Hero’s Backside
• IX The New Order for Common Man
• X Uncommon Men
• XI Commom Women
• XII Businessmen
• XIII Statesmen
• XIV Professors
• XV Congressmen—with a Footnote on Mecca
• XVI Military Men
• XVII The Man on the Cross
• XVIII Conclusion