"Our Reasonable Service"

The Rev. Bernard Iddings Bell, a canon of the Protestant Episcopal Church who serves as a religious adviser at the University of Chicago, has been blasting away at the manners and morals of Americans for the past 40 years. Canon Bell, author of more than two dozen books, pamphlets, etc., is a concerned critic who usually suggests a cure. This week, in an impassioned little book published by Harper ($2), he is out to cure a national epidemic which he calls Crowd Culture.

As Dr. Bell sees it, "The chief threat to America comes from within America . . . While wealth accumulates in these United States, man seems to decay. Corruption corrodes our political and industrial doings ... A pervading relativism, an absence of conviction about what is the good life . . . blunts the proddings of conscience, takes the zest out of living, creates a general boredom . . . Our alleged gaiety is not spontaneous. Our boredom results not only in a reluctant morality but in shockingly bad manners, which most of us do not even know are bad manners."

All this, says Dr. Bell, is the consequence of a culture which "shoots wide of the mark in its estimate of human values" --a culture that imagines happiness can be bought, that comfort is indispensable, and that conformity is the best policy. It is the culture of the Common Man, "whose economic emancipation has gone on faster than he has been able constructively to assimilate it... Ours is a nation of new-rich people, well washed, all dressed up, rather pathetically unsure just what it is washed and dressed up for."

Shoddy Job. Unfortunately, says Bell, the modern school is of no help in providing the answer, for the school is actually contributing mightily to the current cult of childishness. Once, the school's aim may have been to "turn out men and women who could think, confident that those who were trained to think could be trusted on their own to look after problems of adjustment, individual and social; but the more modern schools go on the theory that it is their business themselves to bring about such adjustments, only secondarily to concern themselves with developing pupils in the art of thinking. The older schools, again, founded and run by Christians, encouraged and imparted Christian spiritual entrustments and Christian morals. Today these cannot legally be taught . . ."

All in all, says Dr. Bell, the schools are doing an irresponsibly shoddy job. They refuse to drill in word and number ("Some critics think that the current neglect of these disciplines ... is due to the fact that they are disciplines"), ignore the wisdom of the past, and in the name of a false egalitarianism, force all children to proceed at a standardized pace. "The result is a mediocrity which frets and frustrates the more able while it flatters the incompetent. This mediocrity is making Americans increasingly a set of dull dogs, standardized in opinions, fearful of argument, cliched in conversation."

Substitute for God. While the school is failing so wretchedly, however, so is the Church. For today, says Canon Bell, Americans have come to regard the Church as the "promoter of a respectable minor art, charming if it happens to appeal to you, its only moral junction to bless whatever the multitude at the moment regards as the American way of life ..." Indeed, "the Church has become to most of its adherents a substitute for God," a place for socials and smokers and innumerable Good Causes.

The best way to save America, concludes Canon Bell, is to raise up an elite, "servants of supersensible purpose," who will help the Common Man to perceive "what the good life is." The trouble with the Common Man is that "he has not learned to see life in all its possible richness . . . has lost contact with that which is greater than himself, from which (or Whom) he might gain courage to escape the crowd . . ."

Nevertheless, says Dr. Bell, he can "be saved; our culture can be humanized and human dignity restored; our education can be rescued from those who now emasculate it; the Church can become once more truth-centered, God-centered. All this can happen--but only if we raise up rebels . . . [against] the blather of the crowd. Against the latter we must be rebels, not because we hate the Common Man but because we love him deeply. This is our reasonable service, our religious duty."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.