Will we presently behold an exodus from the suburbs back to the city? Such a development would do more to save our urban life than could any amount of urban-renewal and model-cities subsidies. It is not impossible.

Many suburbanites are finding their existence not only monotonous—and exhaustive because of the long daily expedition to work and back—but morally unsatisfactory. Some friends in Manhattan have six children, all of them enrolled in private schools, their tuition varying from $500 to $1,000. Despite this and other financial burdens of Manhattan life, my acquaintances are resolved never to move from the city “because there are so many more temptations for young people in the suburbs.”

Odd enough it may seem in our affluent age, it has become quite true that life in the city core may offer more to conscience and sense of community than does the moral atomism of the typically prosperous suburb. Perceiving this, some intelligent people are moving back toward the center of town.

Despite widespread urban degeneration into slums and devastation by urban “renewal,” nearly every American city still retains neighborhoods near its heart which could be regenerated and made good places for people to live. We are just beginning to spend a little money on this.

Recently I spent several hours strolling old Toledo (Ohio, that is—though I know mostof the streets and lanes of Toledo, Spain, too). Whole streets I once knew have been demolished in recent years, and others are doomed; it is astonishing, nevertheless, how much good and interesting 19th-century architecture survives in Toledo, both domestic and mercantile.

Within a few blocks of the Civic Center I came upon a dozen solid old houses which are far more commodious and handsome than anything most people can afford to build nowadays. The old neighborhood churches are fine, too—but one of the most interesting of them, with a round tower, is now a car-wash.

Toledo’s Old West End, a really big quarter built mostly between 1870 and 1900, remains potentially one of the most satisfactory neighborhoods in America. The houses are large and imaginative, the streets are tree-lined, and Toledo’s splendid art museum is situated there. Although the retreat of the affluent to the outer suburbs has afflicted the Old West End—which now experiences its own rent strikes—some rehabilitation has commenced. How much better to live here, within easy reach of everything important in town, than at the extreme limits of the commuter sprawl.

A principal reason why our city cores have become so terribly slummy is the retreat, especially since World War II, of the most people with energy, qualities of local leadership and some money.

Backward, turn backward, pioneers of affluence. Your new frontier is downtown.  

(Copyright 1967, Gen.Fea.Corp.)

For the present generation continues to consume natural resources at a terrifying rate. Petroleum and natural gas cannot last forever, no matter how many new fields prospectors discover. Coal already has become a relatively costly fuel for domestic heating; inthe 19th century, it was dirt cheap. And electrical heating really is the most wasteful form of all, even if temporarily convenient; the problem of providing more electric power already is acute.

People talk of future heating from atomic piles: But that’s not practicable yet on a grand scale, and may never be: for the exhaustion of sources of energy by atomic fission is colossal, and we don’t yet know how to dispose properly of atomic wastes.

We are wasteful with our fuels for heating. Nowadays 75 degrees is a common winter temperature in American houses, though a good many folk like it still hotter. (Did they experience such room temperatures in summer, they’d turn on the air conditioning, if they have such.) Such warmth is quite unnecessary; a temperature of 68 degrees is healthier for nearly everybody. Indeed, we keep most rooms in our house around 62 degrees—and wear clothes.

Keeping warm was a principal problem of man in northern regions from his first appearance until our century. We’ve not really solved that problem—we’ve only indulged ourselves by consuming fuel resources that cannot be replenished. Future generations may denounce our prodigality.

Arnold Toynbee remarks that the advance or retardation of civilized institutions is closely connected with fuel supplies. If a people must spend a great part of their time gathering winter fuel—as they had to depend on brush from the steppes of what now are the plains of Soviet Russia—they have that much less time for other activities. The high degree of creature comforts that modern Americans enjoy must depend, in part, on ready supply of efficient fuel.

So fuel conservation is one of the most important aspects of ecological planning, We need to think about that right now. Most of us could be perfectly healthy without overheated rooms.

Until less than a decade ago, my old house was heated solely by cast-iron stoves; we burned wood, which is plentiful in our parts, and that kept the wood lots in good condition, rather than exhausting them. One piled quilts on the beds at night, and though it was rather like camping out, habit made the chilliness almost painless.

I have lived much in Britain, afflicted in this century by a permanent fuel shortage—only temporarily relieved by electric (and costly) heat in the new houses. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, Britain’s climate is mild in comparison with northern America’s, despite latitude.

Still, British winters are wet and raw. But one dresses in tweeds, keeps a peat fire (delightful smelling but low in heat) smoldering on the hearth in the remote Orkneys or Shetlands or Hebrides, and manages well enough. The cities of England cannot be heated by peat, of course, any more than the cities of America could be heated by firewood. But my point is that one doesn’t need a subtropical domestic climate in winter; the human body soon adjusts to what the typical American nowadays would consider extreme discomfort.

I have wintered in Avila, the coldest town in the mountains of Spain, vast snowdrifts shutting in the ancient city-with only charcoal braziers to warm—even the dining room. Though proud of their sobriety, in winter the people of Avila drink remarkable quantities of brandy—and don’t grow tipsy, the alcohol warming the body rather than befuddling the brain. That’s why, incidentally, whisky first was distilled in the highlands and islands of Scotland.

If we don’t reduce our consumption of fuel, we’d best prepare to increase our consumption of strong drink; either that, or build igloos and bundle up Like Eskimos. 

TO THE POINT newspaper column with General Features Corp. For release: Wednesday, March 15, 1972

We moderns still are uncovering the tremendous remains of the Roman Empire, which extended from what is now Iraq to what is now Scotland, and from what is now Morocco to what is now West Germany. What modern man cannot accomplish with all his mighty and swift inventions, the Romans did: they gave common laws and common culture to three continents.

Recently this commentator visited archaeological work in progress at two ancient sites, far distant from each other: Split, in Yugoslavia, and York, in England. At both places, picturesque old towns stand on the site of Roman settlements. And at both places, discoveries of Roman power still are being made.

The oldest quarter of Split is within the walls of the immense palace built by the Emperor Diocletian for his retirement, which occurred in AD 306. Thousands of people are living inside what really was a fortified villa for one man; the Palace has been a town ever since the frontiers of the Roman Empire broke under the barbarians’ pressure.

And today, here under Diocletian’s Palace, archaeologists still are excavating the immense cellars, filled with the rubbish of 1,500 years. No remarkable works of art have been discovered, but many curiosities are on display. One can walk from the harbor of Split straight through the cellars, mount a flight of ancient stairs, and find himself in the Peristyle of the Roman palace—converted into the square of a medieval city. There one sips Turkish coffee at a café facing Diocletian’s tomb, for many centuries the cathedral of Split. What a civic continuity!

In York, thousands of miles northwest, a massive Roman building probably of the same period as Diocletian’s Palace has been discovered in recent months beneath York Minster, that vast Gothic cathedral. The foundations of the Minster having become unsafe, the cathedral chapter set to work shoring up the church by a system of steel beams; and in the process, they came upon the bones of empire.

This heavy Roman structure, so long hidden and forgotten, was the administrative headquarters of the Roman military establishment in the north of England. At York, in the year 306, Constantine—later Emperor and protector of the Christian Church—was proclaimed Augustus; and the Roman building probably is of his reign, and so almost as old as Diocletian’s Palace, though much inferior in style. A fallen Roman column is to be re-erected in the precincts of the Minster.

Although now and again I am invited to lecture or write on the future of civilization, I know that I am playing a game when I engage in that exercise. For no man can know the future: the event is in the hand of God. We cannot know even tomorrow. For all we can tell, our civilization might terminate in 1970; having acquired the secret of atomic fission, we have it in our power to extirpate ourselves.

But the past is knowable, even though history is an art, rather than a science. Through a fuller understanding of vanished civilizations, we may do something to avert our own destruction. Roman achievements and Roman errors, signified by the subterranean rubble of places like Split and York, are “relevant” to our condition as no amount of speculation about the future can be.

“We learn from history that welearn nothing from history,” Hegel wrote. He meant that the lessons lie there, but we ignore them, more’s the pity. Had I leisure to meditate for years at Split and York, I might grow wise—far wiser than any Futurist.  

(© 1969, Gen.Fea.Corp.)

The gentleman and scholar who shyly dominated the republic of letters in Britain and America—Mr. T. S. Eliot—died a few days ago. Though we met only occasionally, sometimes in London and once in Edinburgh, there subsisted between Eliot and this commentator a deep kinship of sentiment and thought. From time to time, I work at what is to be a big book, The Age of Eliot.

Eliot never sought the popularity which, nevertheless, he achieved. He scorned and opposed mass-movements and the arts of mass persuasion and publicity. He set his face against all sorts of popular fallacies and ideological schemes—against the “planned society,” against socialism, against “the new morality,” against educational leveling, against “pop culture.”

In his first principles, Eliot was a professed Christian, accomplishing more than did anyone else to restore the repute of religious understanding among men of letters. In politics, Eliot called himself a “royalist”—by which he implied that he was an old-fangled conservative, a believer in order and class, having no truck with liberalism old-style or liberalism new-style.

To him, modern society was the “Wasteland” of his most famous poem. Purposeless and lost in its unsatisfying pursuit of pleasure, our civilization can be redeemed, he believed, only through the recovery of religious faith and the restoration of true community. Though these convictions may be discerned in his verse, they are more clearly in two slim books of his: The Idea of a Christian Society, and Notes toward the Definition of Culture.

Gently and kindly and self-effacing, Eliot was a cheerful, sometimes humorous, conscientious man, with none of the unpleasant symptoms of egoism so common among literary people. Much given to Anglican observances, he sent out more Christmas cards than does anyone else I know. He would go out of his way to assist even slight acquaintances, and never forsook a friend—such as Mr. Ezra Pound—upon whom adversity had fallen.

In part, Eliot’s reputation was founded upon the original and peculiar style of his verse, with its wealth of literary and historical illusions, and its susceptibility to many interpretations. Critics were welcome to find what meaning they might in his poems and plays, Eliot murmured with a smile; for an author often expresses truths of which the author is not perfectly aware.

But also Eliot captured the minds of two generations of educated people—many of them young—because he really possessed the intuitive power of the great poet. More than logician or scientist, Eliot perceived the character of modern man; and he brought to bear upon our present discontents the wisdom of our ancestors. With Virgil and Dante, he shared the poet’s vision, which sometimes transcends the ordinary senses.

With Robert Frost, Eliot is one of the two recent poets likely to be read with admiration by readers of English letters in 2065. Uniting in his mind the best of English and American culture, Eliot was a very rare bird indeed. The dignity of seven centuries of English poetry and prose was sustained by this mild, wise man; and no one can say where a worthy inheritor of this trust may be found.  

Miss Ayn Rand is in the news nowadays. She has written two best-selling novels—Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead—and she has gotten up a curious philosophy which she calls “Objectivism.”

Recently she and I, with some other people, were on the same television program, Mr. Eric Sevareid moderating. Ayn Rand’s eyes glow with belief, and she still speaks with something of an accent, though she came from Russia as a child. She hates collectivism and sentimentality, and thinks the modern world ought to get rid of “altruism” and exalt self-interest.

Miss Rand and I argued that the mass-state means a new slavery, and that what often is called “social justice” today really amounts to nothing better than penalizing the able and industrious, through legislation, to reward the slack and shiftless—who do have votes.

But we disagreed thoroughly as to the whole purpose of life and of the civil social order. Ayn Rand literally would put the dollar sign in place of the cross: She does just that in Atlas Shrugged. And I say that life is not worth living without love, sacrifice, charity: we human beings weremade for brotherhood (which does not exclude healthy competition), and if we live only for our own petty little selves, our souls shrivel.

Though I have nothing against free enterprise (which I believe to be a support of other freedoms, as well as the most efficient economic system), one cannot sanely make the accumulation of dollars the whole aim of existence. “Thou canst not serve both God and Mammon.” Mammon is thoroughgoing selfishness, dedication to self-satisfaction. The Cross is the symbol of sacrifice, suffering, heroism. The dollar sign is the symbol of profit, which is all right with me, so long as it is honest; but material profit isn’t happiness, let alone our whole duty. We really can’t live by bread alone.

Miss Rand is an atheist, despising religion as “non-objective.” But she burns with a fire curiously religious in intensity. She has aninverted religion—an ideology of efficiency and self-satisfaction—in economics, in politics, in sex. (Ideology, by the way, means pseudo religion, the substitution of political dogmas for religious doctrines.) And that way lies madness.

As Dante knew, it is love that moves this world and all the stars. Babies, though well nourished, can die for lack of love. Sexual relationships without love of spirit are only violent conquests of other human beings—as in Miss Rand’s novels. And the man who loves only dollars, or his own pleasures, loves simply dead things. Only other human beings are truly lovable. By all means, let us get away from sentimentality; but let’s not throw out our hearts when we react against collectivism.  

Did you know that “capitalism” is a term coined by Karl Marx? Like most Marxist terms, it is loaded, and misleading to employ. So I never advocate or defend the abstraction called “capitalism”: rather, I favor a reasonably free economy, honest competition governed by moral principles, and the institution of private property.

Marx argued that capitalists are men who have obtained control of the capital assets of society, and make a profit out of what should be the common wealth, exploiting the proletariat. He thought that capitalism would work its own destruction, for the most part, by excessive profits (making it impossible for the workers to buy), monopolistic consolidation, and wars caused by trade rivalries. By the twentieth century, he believed, society would be divided into two hostile classes; a tiny band of immensely rich capitalists, and the impoverished masses.

But that has not happened. Instead, we have more “capitalists” than everbefore, and less of a proletariat in the Marxist sense. Capital is this: goods used to produce other goods and services. Any civilized society must have capital; even savages must have some sort of primitive capital. Today the ownership of capital, in the West, is more widely distributed than ever before, chiefly through stocks, bonds, bank deposits, insurance policies, and occupier-owned houses. So in America, at least, the average man has become a capitalist.

Yet it will not do to make “capitalism” the symbol of our civilization. A few years ago, two gentlemen published a slim volume called The Capitalist Manifesto, as an answer of sorts to Marxism. Their book did not catch the public’s fancy, nor did it deserve to. For civilized beings cannot live by capital alone. Religion, art, humane letters, and ordered freedom are more important than interest on investment—when one gets above the subsistence-level, anyway. One cannot refute Marx by becoming an inverted Marxist. It will not do to substitute a kind of capitalist-commissar for a communist commissar.

Our American economic system, characterized by private ownership and competition, has been highly successful; yet it is not the great achievement of our civilization. There is no guarantee that a high standard of living will produce happiness or virtue. For Christian orthodoxy, poverty is a state peculiarly blessed, while riches bring temptationand heavy responsibility. Any society which prides itself upon its economic triumph grows complacent, slack, and eventually decadent. The rate of economic growth is no adequate index to the state of a nation.

Marx was a thoroughgoing materialist—the worst aspect of his system. If we are only “capitalists,” then we embrace Marxism without knowing that we accomplish our own downfall.  

Tardily, historians and the intelligent public are coming to realize that the most intelligent, as well as most learned, man ever to inhabit the White House was sardonic old John Adams. Unlike the “advanced thinkers” of his time, Adams knew that the future of civilization would not be all beer and skittles. Also he was a most astute diplomat—and so ought to be studied urgently today.

An admirable book about Adams’ thought now is available in paperback: Haraszti’s John Adams and the Prophets of Progress. This is a painstaking but very readable compilation of the notes which Adams wrote in the margins of the serious books in his library. It is full of hardheaded wisdom, and even of a biting humor. Adams assailed shrewdly the leading philosophers and men of letters of the eighteenth century—Rousseau, d’Alembert, Mably, Turgot, Condorcet, Priestly. And time has vindicated Adams’ “pessimism,” as opposed to the Utopianism of these intellectuals. The man from Massachusetts was, after all, a better judge of human nature and practical consequences.

The recent commendable two-volume biography of Adams by Dr. Page Smith, which even achieved mass distribution (which it richly deserved) by a book club, now makes it possible for everybody to understand a politician and political philosopher and diplomat formerly hidden by partisan abuse or cloaked in obscurity. But also we ought to read Adams himself—for he wrote, much of the time (if in sentences rather long-winded for modern taste) more cogently than newspaper columnists. Take this for a specimen of his style and substance:

“Amid all their exultations, Americans and Frenchmen should remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind. Emulation next to self-preservation will forever be the great spring of human actions, and the balance of a well-ordered government will alone be able to prevent that emulation from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody civil wars.”

Events since Adams wrote have borne him out with terrible accuracy; yet even today we suffer from the errors of people who still think that mere good-will, cheerfulness, and technical progress will alter radically the whole complexion of society and personality.

Governments built upon the abstract principle of “magnanimous disinterestedness,” Adams commented on reading Mary Wollstonecraft, are the work of idiots or madmen. “Such pretensions are false and hollow, all hypocrisy, like Franklin’s Will and his article in the Pennsylvania Bill of Rights.” (Adams detested Benjamin Franklin.) It would be heartening to hear Adams’ rough and fearless tongue in Washington today. 

Rather to my surprise, but considerably to my pleasure, the study of Latin has been reviving somewhat in our better high schools, these past few years. Once upon a time, every properly educated person knew his Latin authors. That day may not come again; yet I trust thatmore and more schools will give students the opportunity to know Vergil, Cicero, and Livy.

A New York high school student writes to me, asking why Latin should be studied. Here, in a few words, is my reply.

Sometimes an inadequate reason is advanced for this study: it is said that Latin “is good intellectual training.” Though this is true enough, it is equally true of any other genuine school discipline. One might say the same of Sanskrit or Chinese.

The real reasons why Latin ought not to vanish from the curriculum are several. First of all, we study any body of literature in order to acquaint ourselves with great thoughts and noble phrases. Latin literature is one of the chief foundations of our culture, and it cannot be perfectly understood in mere translation. Lucretius, Horace, Vergil, Cicero, Seneca, Catullus, Apuleius, Livy, and a half-dozen other Latin authors still matter a great deal. And through acquaintance with these writers, we learn of the grandeur that was Rome; we come to understand Roman order, justice, gravity, frugality, fortitude.

Second, the knowledge of Latin teaches us much about our own English language. Only if one understands Latin roots does one become master of many English words, using them accurately and forcefully.

Third, an acquaintance with Latin is essential for the undertaking of important vocations and professions. The writings of the fathers of the church and of many Christian philosophers are in Latin, and so any competent clergyman or serious layman ought to be able to read such works in the original. Law and medicine must be confusing to any student who cannot grasp the meaning of the innumerable Latin terms in these learned professions. Our natural and physical sciences—physics, botany, and chemistry, to name only three—depend in part upon terms and classifications in Latin.

Fourth, Latin still is an international language. Knowing Latin, one can acquire a mastery of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and some other tongues without great difficulty. In the Catholic Church, at least, Latin remains a direct means of communication among people of vastly different nationalities and ethnic groups. (African bishops are much distressed at plans for diminishing the Latin liturgy of the church, because Latin is the only language which African Catholics possess in common.)

For these and other reasons, it is more important to know Latin than to acquire facility in any single modern foreign language. An American student who becomes tolerably acquainted with Latin is most fortunate; for English is the tongue most widely known throughout the modern world, and also English literature is the richest body of humane letters. Knowing both Shakespeare and Vergil, both Samuel Johnson and Marcus Tullius Cicero, both the King James version of the Bible and St. Augustine, any young American is well on the way to wisdom.  

Having written some books concerned with the history of ideas, I sometimes am asked, “What period of history ought young people to study nowadays, to understand the world we live in?” And I answer, “The history of Rome in the age of Augustus.”

This response surprises some people. What, the history of a dead civilization about the beginning of the Christian era? Yes, precisely. For America today is curiously like Augustan Rome.

Like Rome, America has become the greatest power in the world—without ever quite intending to beanything of the sort. Like Rome, modern America confronts the difficult problem of trying to reconcile its old moral convictions with the luxury and appetites of its new condition. Like Rome during the time of Augustus Caesar, twentieth-century America endeavors to preserve constitutional forms and liberties in a time of increased executive power. Like Augustan Rome, the United States today is troubled by urban confusion and rural decay. And there exist many other parallels.

So if we are talking about “relevance,” nothing in history is more relevant to our present discontents than the attempt at social and moral reinvigoration which was undertaken by Augustus and his friends. The “Pax Americana” to which President Nixon aspires, for instance, curiously resembles Augustus’ establishment of the Roman Peace.

Then people ask me, “What body of literature has the greatest meaning for us nowadays?” And I tell them, “Latin literature.” It is a great deal more important that some of us should understand Cicero and Virgil, say, than that we should immerse ourselves in those ephemeral publications which make up the best-seller lists. For Cicero and Virgil speak to certain permanent aspects of the human condition.

In American high schools, the study of Latin reached its height between 1900 and 1910, when about half of the pupils studied Latin literature. In recent years, Latin has vanished altogether from a great many high schools: more’s the pity.

Dr. John F. Latimer, executive secretary of the American Classical League, recently published a useful pamphlet entitled “The New Case for Latin and the Classics.”

Latin, Professor Latimer writes, “is the only European language, widely studied and known, that carries in its extant literature the roots of Western civilization. This can be said of no other language, not even Greek, important as that language has been and still is for the development of our culture and civilization.

“Latin’s contribution to English vocabulary and itscommon source of the Romance tongues makes it unique among the languages of the world. Latin and Greek together with Hebrew constitute the linguistic and cultural trinity that is still influencing the destiny of Western man … Advancing technology combined with great knowledge of antiquity and more refined techniques of teaching can make these values and pleasures available to oncoming generations and help to preserve for posterity a continuing awareness of our debt to Greece and Rome.”

Amen to that. My own formal discipline in Latin amounts to no more than two years of study in high school. I could not think now of writing an essay in Latin, let alone delivering an oration in that tongue. And yet my own small knowledge of Latin enables me to understand classical history far better than I could otherwise; it gives me a far better mastery of the English language; and it helps me to apprehend Christian teaching.

If one knows Latin tolerably well, he can learn easily enough French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian. If one knows something of Roman history, he can see our own age more realistically and with less prejudice. Culture is not “dead” unless we kill it.  

Among the numerous vices of American education, one of the silliest is our passion for offering vocational courses and curricula, from high school through graduate school, in occupations that can be learned only through experience on the job. The teaching of journalism may be sufficient illustration.

A good newspaperman or writer for popular magazines needs a lively mind, the power to concentrate and a big stock of general, if ordered, information. He needs to be a genuinely educated man, whether he has got his learning in schools or by self-discipline. He needs especially to know humane literature, history and politics. But enrolling as a Journalism Major is a sad blunder.

When I expressed such opinions at a national conference of editorial writers, one professor of journalism present inquired whether I would approve of “current events” courses in journalism schools, meant to acquaint students with world affairs by discussing daily the background of events in the headlines. I replied that such a method would be even more time-wasting than technical academic studies in newspaper work. For one comes to understand “current events” only through the acquiring of genuine perspective—through study of history, social theory, philosophy and great literature.

Journalists require education—but theirs ought to be liberal education, as wide-ranging as possible. Also they require apprenticeship in their craft. Work on a school or college paper is a very good beginning in such apprenticeship. Then practical reporting or feature writing ought to follow, on a commercial paper. The classroom, however, is a place for liberal studies, not for vocational instruction. The more college-educated newspapermen the better. Yet, such should major in academic disciplines, and then turn their general culture to account when they begin their journalistic jobs.

Most of the influential editors of this country, I think, are not typical products of journalism schools. And the better professors of journalism, even, got their knowledge not by going to classes, but by police-reporting or magazine-editing.

Two fairly successful friends of mine majored in journalism. One is now in the engineering department of an automobile company, and the other is an insurance actuary. So intelligence will tell, despite one’s curriculum. At one big school of journalism, only 16 percent of the graduates become newspapermen; 17 percent get jobs on business and industrial house organs; and the remaining two-thirds turn to public relations (much more lucrative than journalism) or to miscellaneous vocations.

Almost all of these, I suspect, would be better journalists or better non-journalists if they had been liberally educated. Technique comes from experience, not from dull and inflated three-credit courses.