The Decline of Our Civilization

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1938]

Joseph Dana Miller was during this period Editor of Land and Freedom. Many of the editorials published were unsigned. It is therefore possible that Miller was not the author of this article, although the content is thought to be consistent with his own perspectives as Editor.

It is comparatively easy to draw a picture of what appears to be on its face the ebb-tide of a civilization. What goes to embellish life is founded on the well-being of the people. Poverty is the foe of all social advance, of spiritual and intellectual as well as material progress. Its benumbing influence extends not only to the lower intellectual strata but reaches up and strikes at every manifestation of genius, at every attempt to enshrine beauty in literature and the arts.

At first the influence is not recognized. We are so much the slaves of conventional thinking that the last thing to be perceived is a decline in our own artistic and spiritual life. Presumably because we are a part of it we cannot look either in or out, so it comes upon us and passes at least to most persons all unnoticed.

Suppose we take account of the signs of decline which are most obvious and will be most readily admitted. Let us start with literature. We have many clever books, clever but little more, the sensations of a few months. Not a single work of genius among the lot, none that can compare with Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Eliot, or Reade. Poetry, some of it clever, too, but not a single poet deserving to be compared with the masters. Markham writes no more, Edna St. Vincent Millay, not so good as she was, the current magazine verse almost incomprehensible.

Art almost dead save for the outrages committed by pen and brush that make one shriek. Music bidding farewell to its last great conductor, Toscanini, to whom his country fed castor oil on his refusal to take part in a cheap patriotic production that degraded his art. Self-banished from Italy he might say in behalf of his fellows, "We who are about to die salute you." This despite Mussolini's belated apology for his over-zealous local Fascist official.

It will be generally agreed, we think, that there has been a marked decline in journalism. It is difficult to feature William R. Hearst as a successor to Dana, Greeley, Watterson, et al. And in the field of statesmanship Carter Glass and Cordell Hull stand almost alone. Do we not recall the time when the old parties could summon outstanding leaders, Democrats like Grover Cleveland and Carlisle, Republicans like Senator Hoar and Congressman Reed, with all their limitations, and many others who might be named. Here the decline is most obvious and will be most readily admitted.

It may seem like over-simplification to say that this decline springs from poverty. Yet general poverty in material goods inevitably determines the kind of poverty that manifests itself in mediocrity in literature and the arts. There is no escape from it.

What is the hope, if any? We think it resides in the enquiring nature of the young now gradually awakening. We think the system is cracking under their criticism and questioning. The success of the Henry George School is partly due to this new spirit. Ours is a tremendous responsibility. If it be not too late the forces working for the destruction of civilization may be arrested and overcome. We are living in great times. No such opportunity has ever confronted mankind, no such hope has ever blazoned the sky with rainbow promise. The alternative is a future where darkness reigns, and beauty and art and culture decline.

In the philosophy of freedom is the germ of a new renaissance. Perhaps it is not too late to sound the tocsin call to the struggle that must be waged for liberty. Not merely is it material poverty that must be abolished but that intellectual and spiritual poverty so plainly obvious in every social group, from the lowest to the highest. It is no mere pessimism that impels us to this picture of modern society. Not to recognize it is to walk blindfolded in a world where tragic things are happening and where no great voice is raised to call us back to reasonableness. The skies are very dark. All that has been promised by prophets and seers seems to have come to naught. And to it all political economy as it is taught, religion as it is preached, statesmanship as practised, seem to have no answer.

But there is hope, and that is in the questioning spirit of the young, as we have said. This questioning may increase in volume and intensity. If this is to be the system is doomed. Ten thousand graduates of the Henry George School do not seem very formidable in a nation of one hundred and thirty million. But ten thousand who think straight and who are animated by spiritual conviction are to be reckoned with. And as the years go this group will be multiplied many fold. Then something will happen.