Paul Hollander and the Anatomy of Discontent

Discontent sustained enough to be operative requires patience, which is to say, content at a deeper level.—Aurel Kolnai

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I

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “discontent” as “dissatisfaction of mind” or “unquiet in mind through having one’s desires unsatisfied or thwarted.” That is true enough as far as it goes, but does it go far enough? Freud, we know, did not think so and neither does Paul Hollander, who has devoted his distinguished career to the clinical dissection of a discontent that reaches the deeper recesses of the modern soul. Though intensely personal, that discontent is often projected outwards into the political and social arenas. A condition of being, it never finds rest; it always uncovers—or invents—new injustices, new moral outrages, to sustain itself.

Not everyone, of course, has experienced discontent of that kind. Hollander, for one, has not. His discontents have always been the result of objective conditions that could in principle be improved or eliminated. He was born in Hungary in 1932 to a family of Jewish origin that, like so many others in the years before 1914, chose to assimilate in response to the Liberal government’s philo-Semitism and a political culture that offered acceptance and opportunity. This inspiring symbiosis of Jewish and Gentile Hungarians did not survive the Great War and the postwar Soviet Republic, the leaders of which were almost all assimilated Jews.

To his discredit, Admiral Miklós Horthy, who became Regent in 1920, did nothing to discourage the virulent anti-Semitism that had broken out in the aftermath of the communist regime’s collapse. Fortunately, Count István Bethlen, the conservative liberal who served as prime minister from 1921 to 1931, did everything in his power to contain a prejudice that he considered unworthy of a great nation. In the midst of the Depression, however, Horthy called upon the national socialist Gyula Gömbös to form a government that fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. And the atmosphere worsened as Hungary allowed itself to be drawn into Nazi Germany’s orbit, a result of the fact that the Führer, almost alone among Europe’s leaders, supported revision of the Treaty of Trianon (1920) that had stripped the country of two-thirds of its territory and three-fifths of its population.

By the time Hungary entered the war in 1941, Gömbös’s successors had pushed through a series of discriminatory measures that aimed at bringing the country’s legal order into line with that of the Third Reich. So dishonorable was this order that even Horthy grew uneasy; in 1942 he called upon a Bethlen protégé, Miklós Kállay, to prevent a further deterioration of the situation. Although faced with mounting pressure from Berlin, Kállay steadfastly refused to implement the “Final Solution” in Hungary; the Germans therefore removed him and occupied the country on March 19, 1944.

Beginning in May, Adolf Eichmann and his Hungarian accomplices began the deportations to Auschwitz that by July, when Horthy ordered a halt, had purged rural Hungary of Jews. And when, on October 15, the Germans installed the Arrow Cross (the local fascist party) in power, Budapest’s Jews knew that they would no longer enjoy relative immunity. Hollander family members went into hiding in full awareness that, if discovered, they would be shot. “In those days,” Hollander later recalled, “I used to converse with my father about what it felt like to be shot since he had been wounded in World War I.”¹When the Red Army liberated the city early in 1945, he naturally felt a sense of gratitude, and despite his father’s opposition to revolutionary politics he sympathized with the Hungarian communists, who by 1948 had established uncontested authority.

It was not long, however, before the young Hollander recognized his mistake. The Hungarian Stalinists—Mátyás Rákosi, Ernö Gerö, Mihály Farkas, and József Révai—held the country in a vise-like grip and took steps to eliminate potential opposition. Among the many whom they identified as “class enemies” were businessmen such as Hollander’s grandfather. That was why, in June 1951, the police served notice to the family that it was being deported to a village 120 miles east of Budapest. There Hollander lived in not so splendid isolation until the spring of 1953, when the army drafted and assigned him to a “construction battalion.”

The work was odious, but in July, following Stalin’s death, the new Soviet leaders installed the reform communist Imre Nagy as Hungary’s prime minister; as part of his “New Course,” Nagy ordered the battalions disbanded. The army then transferred Hollander to the infantry, where he went through the necessary motions until being discharged in the spring of 1955. By then, however, the Soviets had cashiered Nagy, who took his reform mandate too seriously, and renewed their support of Rákosi. Thoroughly alienated from the regime by the time revolution broke out on October 23, 1956, Hollander saw new hope when the hastily rehabilitated Nagy returned to power. But after Soviet forces crushed the uprising on November 4, he crossed the Austrian frontier to a new life.

In December Hollander was flown to England where he enrolled as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics. Although he chose sociology as his field of study, his work could as easily be characterized as social psychology or intellectual history. From the first he was fascinated by ideas and beliefs and convinced that they had historical consequences. Marx may have insisted that material existence determined consciousness, but communist Hungary had placed particular emphasis on propaganda and correct thinking. Moreover, as Hollander knew, Lenin “was fully persuaded of the utility of ideas as weapons in the political struggle.”²In England, therefore, the Hungarian felt an immediate affinity with Isaiah Berlin, the famous intellectual historian who took it for granted that ideas mattered.

Unlike many sociologists and historians, then, Hollander never believed that vast impersonal forces governed human events. In a 1995 piece he wrote for Modern Age, he made his credo explicit:

It soon emerges that as soon as we abandon the emphasis on ideas as influences over our lives we are led to some deterministic scheme: it then becomes the material or physical environment, or the mode of production, or genes, or some combination of heredity and environment, all of which severely limit our freedom of action. If we take ideas seriously as sources of our behavior, there is no end to where this may lead—it is a virtually open-ended perspective on human lives, on human destiny. To believe that ideas are powerful is to believe in freedom, in endless possibilities.3

With this belief in human freedom, and hence human responsibility, Hollander arrived in the United States in 1959. After earning an M.A. degree at the University of Illinois, he began doctoral studies at Princeton. In 1963, with Ph.D. in hand, he accepted a position as assistant professor at Harvard. Five years later, while rebel youths tested the United States and Western Europe, he joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, where he taught until his retirement in 2000.

Innoculated against the revolutionary virus, Hollander did not follow the students and faculty members who, at the time of his arrival in Amherst, took to the streets in the belief that “Amerika” was the successor to Nazi Germany. Without turning a blind eye to instances of injustice in his adopted land, he knew that the hatred driving the protesters was out of proportion to the moral failures alleged to be its source. It was as though, as former Ramparts editor David Horowitz has put it, “there are not merely particular injustices to be remedied by particular reforms but . . . injustice in general—in the very structure of mankind’s being in the world.”⁴Thus the critical assault could, and often did, become nihilistic in its destructive impulse.

Something deeper, something very personal, Hollander concluded, must lie at the heart of the “refusal to come to terms with the imperfections and conflicts of the world, human nature, and social existence.”⁵Why did critics so hate the society in which they lived? Because, he came to think, of what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world,” the process of secularization that has been the dominant theme of modern Western history. Once at the forefront of the movement for secularization, intellectuals found intolerable a world without God, one that left them staring into the abyss. Modern life offered them comforts, securities, and “options,” but it did not provide them with meaning or purpose. “The distress and indignation of the critics of America,” he wrote in Anti-Americanism, “remain nurtured by the continued frustration of their determined efforts to find meaning in life.”⁶

Because the hunger for meaning is unlikely to be satisfied in post-Christian societies, Hollander sees clearly that the radicalism of the sixties is not a thing of the past and that it is a mistake to believe that with the election of Ronald Reagan America entered a new era of conservatism. Radicalism has in fact achieved what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called cultural “hegemony.”

The evidence is everywhere. Mainstream churches now preach an almost purely secular, even a pagan, gospel and substitute “community,” “love,” and “social justice” for God; the mass media—CNN, NPR, CBS, NBC, ABC, The Washington Post, The New York Times—serve up propaganda that is distinguished only by its unswerving fidelity to the Party line; government agencies regulate the lives of citizens and confiscate a large percentage of their income; the courts legislate judges’ political opinions and extort money from companies the media have first pilloried; and institutions of higher education indoctrinate students with a semi-official ideology while anathematizing what little opposition there is. Aware that the Left dismisses all such reports of “political correctness” as “anecdotal,” Hollander has produced mountains of evidence to prove that anti-Americanism as a crisis of meaning is deeply ingrained.

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II

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote that if Christianity were to be cast aside, “we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take the place of it.”⁷He would not have been surprised by the appearance and appeal of secular religions, including the communist utopia. Nor is Hollander. He recognizes that utopianism is the reverse side of critical nihilism—both informed by undying hatred of the world as it is. In his classic study, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, he pointed out that “social criticism must rest on a vision of alternatives. Hence, estrangement from one’s society invariably precedes or accompanies the projection of hope and affirmation upon other ones.”⁸

One can imagine abstract utopias, in the manner of, say, Fourier, who predicted 8,000 years of Perfect Harmony during which the sea would turn to lemonade and every woman would have four lovers. Better, though, one may, as Hollander remarks, “idealize abortive revolutions or social movements which were not given a chance to go stale or become oppressive”⁹—“republican” Spain, Salvador Allende’s Chile, and various “council” movements come to mind. Best, however, to fasten upon an existing utopia such as the Soviet Union or China or Cuba or Nicaragua—or even Enver Hoxha’s Albania (the will to believe is that strong).

Hollander’s account of the effort made by Western intellectuals to find in communist societies the meaning and purpose that their own denies them proves that Burke had reason to be concerned and that Weber was right when he cautioned those who seek personal salvation not to do so in politics. It was, we recall, Soviet Russia in the 1930s, the darkest years of Stalin’s tyranny, that appealed most to political pilgrims. Having checked their critical faculties at the frontier, many intellectuals—including such luminaries as J. D. Bernal, Edmund Wilson, John Dewey, and Harold Laski—contrived to see only a new and incalculably better world, a land of social justice and equality, of dedication and purpose. They persuaded themselves that in Soviet society the loneliness resulting from Western individualism had been overcome—one could be a member of a community (Gemeinschaft) in which values were part of the fabric of shared life, not the private preferences of isolated individuals.

No contradictory evidence could shake their faith for they had mastered the art of interpreting facts “dynamically” rather than statically. Living standards might be higher in the West, but they were deteriorating, while in Russia they were improving; words such as “poverty” they did not utter when speaking of what to the untrained eye were appalling Russian conditions. And when, at last, they did resolve to look elsewhere for utopia, it was not because they had awakened to the fact that Stalin’s Russia was a totalitarian police state, but because they had become disappointed by the regime’s loss of revolutionary élan; Khrushchev may have ended the Terror, but precisely for that reason he was neither an inspiring nor a visionary militant.

On then to China, where the deified Mao Zedong was establishing new records for mass murder. Those who were in universities in the late sixties will recall with what enthusiasm radical students and faculty members pored over the “Red Book of Chairman Mao” and cheered the chaotic terror that was the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Since Mao’s death, however, revolutionary élan has fled Beijing and the very people who once viewed the bloodbath as a necessary, if regrettable, cleansing now complain vociferously about the “human rights” violations of a far less tyrannical—but less revolutionary—regime. The iconic Ché Guevara having suffered martyrdom, they are now reduced to rekindling their love affair with Cuba’s aging and verbose jefe.

And a passionate affair it was, as Hollander has shown. “So Fidel Castro,” Norman Mailer’s valentine read, “I announced to the City of New York that you gave all of us who are alone in this country . . . some sense that there were heroes in the world.” Senator McGovern all but swooned: “The reality of the man matches the image. He was, as always, dressed in freshly pressed military fatigues. Youthful in appearance at the age of forty-eight, hair and beard still black, cigar constantly in hand, he was poised, confident, and questioning. . . . He responds knowledgeably on almost any subject from agricultural methods to Marxist dialectics to American politics.” And according to Julius Lester, the black writer, “Fidel is Cuba, Cuba is Fidel,” a slogan that could only have been penned by someone blissfully unaware of Rudolf Hess’s Party Day oratory: “Hitler is Germany, Germany is Hitler.”¹⁰

But not even Fidel excites as he once did—word having leaked out that he frowns upon homosexuality—and Marxism has had to reinvent itself after its failure in Russia and East Europe. Fortunately for the seekers after utopia, the ideology is chameleon-like, able to change its colors in order to survive. The Marxist philosopher István Mészáros, who, unlike Hollander, left Hungary legally in 1956, maintains, for example, that the Soviet Union and its East European satellites were not socialist at all; they were post-capitalist but still capital societies and Marx’s critique was of capital not capitalism. So the collapse of communism was good news, not bad, for Marxists. The American Marxist Bertell Ollman agrees: “The collapse of the Soviet Union,” he has opined, “provided a new opportunity for purer Marxist theories to thrive.”

If these and other tortured arguments fail to persuade, Marxism can always present itself as a collection of radical causes—feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, “civil rights,” “human rights,” “gay rights,” AIDs research, and so on. Such loose use of the term “Marxism” possesses the added advantage that believers never run short of goals for which to “struggle.” And for many of them the (endless) struggle itself has become life’s purpose and meaning.¹¹

In his fictionalized but convincing portrait of the Hungarian communist artist László (Peter) Péri, John Berger has him explain why he emigrated to England rather than the Soviet Union: “I wanted to go where I would still have to fight for Socialism.”¹²One suspects that Péri and others like him knew that life in a socialist utopia would prove restrictive as well as disillusioning and that they therefore thought it prudent to carry on the “fight” or “struggle” in more hospitable territory.

In fact, as Hollander points out, protesters and dissenters in the Western world never feel “truly and seriously threatened by the system they [call] ‘repressive’ day in and out.”¹³If anything, they are excessively secure, confident that they will never be made to answer for their actions; they and their media comrades can always convince others that they themselves are victims and thus heroes. “Moral and popular credit,” Hollander has observed, “is associated with the underdog status in American culture, with the glory of the ‘uphill struggle’ and the admiration for those who challenge established powers and vested interests.”¹⁴

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III

Fixation on “the struggle” and fear of disillusionment are rooted in the knowledge that some earlier seekers after utopia came to regard communism as “the god that failed,” the title of the famous symposium of confessional essays by ex-communists (including Arthur Koestler, whom Hollander much admires). In one of his finest performances, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism, Hollander has argued convincingly that a similar discontent among Soviet and East European élites played a pivotal role in the collapse of regimes that had rewarded them with power and privilege. As their discontent deepened, their will to power weakened and they lost the self-confidence required for the ruthless use of force.

As a preface to his thoughtful studies of discontented communist leaders, Hollander examined the instructive cases of early defectors, among them such fascinating figures as Victor Kravchenko and Wolfgang Leonhard. Kravchenko (1905–66), a high-ranking industrial administrator, defected to the United States in 1944. In his explosive memoir, I Chose Freedom (1946), he struggled to explain to himself and others why his discontent had finally driven him to desperation. As a young man, he recalled, he had hungered for a faith; it was only thanks to communism that “life had for [him] an urgency, a purpose, a new and thrilling dimension of dedication to a cause.”¹⁵Recognizing this commitment, the regime trained him as an engineer and entrusted him with ever more responsibility, until at last he took his place within the ruling élite.

Kravchenko’s decision to seize his first opportunity to defect “matured so slowly in the depths of [his] being that [he] did not [himself] know when it took full shape.”¹⁶Its origins can probably be traced to his father’s political idealism and his mother’s Orthodox Christian faith. They instilled in him a respect for moral principle and a sympathy for the despised and the injured that Party indoctrination failed to root out. He was shocked and enraged by Stalin’s war on the peasantry and the people of Ukraine, the Great Purge, and the gulf that separated the privileged from ordinary workers and their families. He was sickened, too, by the eagerness with which those who were without hope denounced others: “These people are famished for vengeance, they need a legitimate scapegoat for their various private discontents.”¹⁷

And yet he managed to keep his alienation hidden, particularly after he nearly fell victim to the Purge. To protect himself and preserve his sanity, he buried himself in work and, when war came, in the national effort to repel the German invaders. But he never doubted that Stalin’s incompetence and cruelty were costing millions of lives. He therefore jumped at the opportunity to travel to the United States to inspect metal goods that were being shipped to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act (1941). His death in 1966 was ruled a suicide, but as Hollander points out, there had been earlier assassination attempts.

Leonhard (b. 1921) possessed neither Kravchenko’s intelligence nor his sensibility, but he too eventually grew discontented. German by birth, he emigrated to the U.S.S.R. with his mother in 1935. Over the next decade the regime made him its creature; nothing, not even his mother’s arrest in 1936, could shake his faith in the Party. The Purge occasioned no more than fleeting doubts. He did resent having to exercise self-criticism, but not very deeply. And though he was perplexed by the Nazi-Soviet pact, he did not allow himself to dwell upon it. So disciplined was he in mind and spirit that Walter Ulbricht thought to bring him along when he and a select group of German communists followed the Red Army to Germany in 1945.

In 1948, Leonhard’s mother emerged from the Gulag but he showed no emotion when she spoke of the millions of slave laborers and the horrors of her own twelve-year detention. “My opposition,” he wrote coldly, “still turned only on the question of an independent road to Socialism and equality among Socialist countries.”¹⁸As he watched East Germany become a clone of the U.S.S.R., he began to contrast Stalinism with what he took to be authentic Marxism-Leninism. And when Stalin excommunicated Tito and the Yugoslav party, he defected to Belgrade. Eventually, he settled in West Germany, where he continued the work of loosening his chains.

Kravchenko and Leonhard’s discontents prefigured those of the leaders and intellectuals who were present at the fall of communism. Among the Soviet rulers whom Hollander profiled, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were the most important. Although he shares the general view that Yeltsin made a more decisive break with Marxism-Leninism, he seems to agree with historian Archie Brown’s contention that Gorbachev recognized very early on that reform would not be enough and that the system would have to be completely revamped. In any event, he rightly acknowledges that Gorbachev “made a greater contribution to the unraveling of the Soviet system than any other single, identifiable human being.”¹⁹

Hollander’s analyses of discontented Hungarian communist leaders are of particular interest because his life was changed by Imre Nagy, who before being catapulted into the role of revolutionary had been an NKVD agent in the Soviet Union (1930–1945).²⁰Moreover, he was able to interview András Hegedüs, the Stalinist prime minister who signed the formal (and antedated) “request” for Soviet troops in 1956, and then reinvented himself as a dissident sociologist during the years that János Kádár wielded power. Hegedüs’s disillusionment was closely tied to the system’s post-1956 rejection of him—a rejection that Hollander found to be typical in the cases of discontented ex-political policemen such as Pavel Sudoplatov (who planned Trotsky’s assassination), Vladimir Farkas (son of the Hungarian Stalinist, Mihály Farkas), and Markus Wolf (the self-promoting East German operative).

All of the above were once true believers whose initial doubts can be dated with precision—February 1956, when Khrushchev delivered his Twentieth Party Congress speech and with one blow demystified Stalin and called the entire Soviet “experiment” into question. True, for some the speech resuscitated hope. But a significant number of leaders became increasingly conscious of, and disillusioned by, what they judged to be the gulf between theory and practice, ideals and realities.

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IV

Hollander himself once viewed that gulf as evidence of the system’s failure. But as a result of his researches and conversations with Hungarian intellectuals—including his lifelong friend George Konrád—he seems now to incline to the view that Marxist “theory and practice were congruent, not dissonant.”²¹If so, he is surely right. The goal that lies at the heart of communism and almost all other leftist ideologies is equality, and equality legitimizes war on distinctions of every kind; it mandates coercion. And the more equality that is demanded, the greater the coercion that must be applied. Before long, we know from historical experience, coercion becomes an end in itself.

This shift in Hollander’s views is in part a consequence of his now conscious identification with East European intellectuals. “Unlike many Western intellectuals,” he wrote in the conclusion to Political Will and Personal Belief, “the East European intellectuals whom I interviewed were . . . virtually unanimous in their conviction that there was a link between the theoretical inspiration and the practical results.”²²What is more, their general outlook on life is one he finds appealing:

In the East intellectuals are less likely to complain of meaninglessness and do not expect society to make their life “meaningful”; they have become (with good reason) allergic to the attempts of political authorities to provide them with a sense of purpose. Unlike their American colleagues they are also far more likely to take for granted either the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life and are less disposed to agonize over either possibility. They are more disposed to protest tangible grievances, observable injustices, indignities, and deprivations.23

In other words, secularization has not so far produced in East European intellectuals the kind of discontent that so many Western intellectuals exhibit. Hollander himself seems content to live with meanings if not Meaning, to see concrete injustices removed without demanding moral perfection. The latter is particularly important because as Aurel Kolnai, another (conservative) Jewish Hungarian who emigrated to the West, once remarked, political wisdom resides in a recognition of the inevitability of human imperfection and an ability to distinguish it from evil. “Imperfections resented as evils,” he warned, “will be interfered with too much, and this means that the comparative importance of existing genuine evils will be underrated, and, worse, that new and greater evils will recklessly be wrought.”²⁴It was precisely, Kolnai argued, the refusal to tolerate imperfection or to accept the basic structure of reality that typified the utopian mind.

Interestingly enough, Hollander’s East European outlook and conservatism have led to his increasingly critical attitude toward an America he now believes to be in decline, an America that, with the collapse of communism and the eight-year reign of the Clintons, bids fair to become the new focus of “democratic,” that is utopian, hopes. This is an unexpected turn of events, but it reflects a recognition of the incremental revolution that has transformed the country over the last forty years. It also helps to explain why leftists now demand America’s intervention around the world, an endless crusade for “human rights” (i.e., items on their agenda).

One can sense Hollander’s shift in outlook in his revised estimate of George F. Kennan, the distinguished American who, thanks in part to long years in Europe, possesses a European mind and sensibility. In an essay of 1985, he was critical of what he took to be Kennan’s eagerness to accommodate the U.S.S.R. “Mr. Kennan,” he wrote then, “seems to share the therapeutic perspective of scholars . . . who regard insecurity, of an almost pathological kind, as the principal driving force in Soviet politics, foreign and domestic.”²⁵He blamed this alleged softness on Kennan’s moral repugnance for self-indulgence and his belief in an almost Spenglerian decline of the West. “What we are defending,” he pleaded for the defense, “are not slums or porno shops but a way of life which leaves us free to determine for ourselves how we wish to live.”²⁶

But are we really left free to determine how we wish to live? Or do we live under a soft totalitarianism that protects the freedom only of those who abuse it? By the late eighties, Hollander had clearly become less certain. While continuing to insist upon the moral and material superiority of Western over communist systems, he acknowledged that there were phenomena in the West “that bring to mind words like decay and decadence.”²⁷Embittered social criticism was only one of the signs, but according to Hollander it was especially significant.

There is, moreover, further evidence to suggest that the decline of the West is now well advanced: the spread of moral relativism (except when it comes to racism, “sexism,” and “homophobia”); the near disappearance of educational and public standards; the cult of victimization and the flight from personal responsibility; the increase in the number of taboo subjects in public discourse; mandatory “reeducation” for businessmen, military personnel, and university professors; the disintegration of the family (now defined as any group of people living under one roof); pandemic crime; the growth of welfare dependency and drug addiction; and the soaring rate of illegitimacy. Hollander might have added the nihilism retailed by mass entertainment and popular music, the slaughter of the unborn, and the steady advance of Faustian genetic experimentation.

In the face of all this it is no wonder that, in the second edition, Hollander changed the subtitle of Anti-Americanism from “Critiques at Home and Abroad” to “Irrational and Rational” and added a devastating indictment of Western decadence. Nor is it surprising that he now views Kennan, America’s most intelligently severe critic, in a far more favorable light. The former ambassador to the Soviet Union is now “impressive and thought-provoking in more ways than is generally realized,” “a genuine conservative in his principal values and attachments,” “an unappreciated loner and outsider”²⁸(a role Hollander also plays). Like Hollander, moreover, Kennan rejects the “politics of meaning”; government, he has written, is “not the channel through which men’s noblest impulses are to be realized.”²⁹As America enters the twenty-first century neither man finds reason to be optimistic about her future, but whatever their discontents, they possess the maturity and inner resources to remain content at a deeper level.

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Notes:

For How Long?

What if the world’s wages for your lifework
Are silence, poverty, and extinction?
What if it deems worthless the gift of yourself
So that your energies are spent for nothing
And the years begin to circle, drawing
A noose—a zero full of hopelessness?
Would you do something else? Or stand fast
And commit your life to a lost cause?

Would you be a martyr? A confederate soldier?
Or one of thousands of native red men
Who died fighting the prevailing culture
From King Philip’s time to Oscela’s?
History is hostile to individuals
And submerges those who will not adapt,
While it calls those who do intelligent.
Why not save yourself by finding other work?

So far you have been stubborn in your belief
That the beauty you approve can help the world
Without noticing how beauty becomes debased,
Becomes a cadillac, or a fancy yacht,
Or a skyscraper, a concrete box
Which piles up the same upon the same.
Size! Speed! Power! Record-breaking sports!
These idols now choke the hearts,

Hearts you have wished to penetrate, but which
Close like fists against the kind of truth
Your experience distills. Even to hear
In the way your scrawlings require is today
A vanishing skill, made more difficult
By the clamor of machines,
And by the way they accelerate life.
Today, haste is life’s great assassin.

Will you then persist? We want to know,
And for just how long. Fear humiliates.
Not fear of failure only, but of sickness,
Of poverty, of friendless old age.
Fear levels off youthful visions of oneself,
And shrinks them to what the world expects.
Whether this will be your fate is unclear.
But we have time. We can wait. . . .

—Mark Christhilf