What Really Mattered?

By Roger Rosenblatt

In Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, the fortuneteller unfurls her skirts, hoists her bodice, strolls downstage and heckles the audience. Oh, she can tell the future, all right. "Nothing easier," she says. "But who can tell your past, eh? Nobody! You lie awake nights trying to know your past. What did it mean? What was it trying to say to you? Think! Think!"

Think, indeed. The only action one can take toward the past is to think about it. This may be the one way the past is ever changed, by the mind's reviewing all the historical laundry that blizzarded down in an undifferentiated heap when the past was taking place, then sorting it out in chaste, clean piles. It never makes sense, even when considering years as recent as the past 60. What really happened? History relies on memory, and memory on will. An 11th century Chinese emperor possessed a newly invented clock, which his people knew about, though no one owned a clock but he. When the emperor died, the imperial clock was allowed to fall apart, and everyone forgot that such a device had ever existed. Five hundred years later, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest, arrived in Asia bearing a new Italian invention called a clock. The Chinese marveled at the thing.

What clocks have we forgotten in the past 60 years? Which among the clocks preserved ought in fact to be forgotten, set aside on a distant shelf like a porcelain dog? This midsection

chunk of the 20th century presents the problem amply, with its abundance of wars, villains, scientific miracles, remappings of the earth. Six decades of speeches, treaties, books, bombs, pills, screams and rockets. What will have mattered in the long run? And what does "mattered" mean? There is the fact, and the idea, and the person who has the idea.

The fact was that Rosa Parks got tired of being told to give up her seat on the bus to any white man who happened along, so she got off that bus, to be followed by almost all the blacks in Montgomery, Ala. Thus began modern American civil rights legislation. Or did it start instead with Martin Luther King, who saw where boycotting segregated buses might lead, or with Gandhi, whose example taught King the tactics of civil disobedience? Or rather were the civil rights laws of the 1960s passed because of a general and amorphous sense of national shame to which Parks and King served merely as goads? U.S. civil rights legislation mattered very much to Americans; will it have mattered to the rest of the world? Will America have mattered to the rest of the world after a hundred more 60-year periods have vanished, and will we stand in regard to the curious nations of the future as the Etruscans or the Titans do to us?

The difficulty in assigning historical significance lies in two places: one is never entirely sure how or why something big happened, and one is no more sure how big it was, or in what way. We can say now that the stifling terms of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I and the ensuing inflation of the German mark may be blamed for Hitler's ascendancy. But what was Hitler's significance? That he devastated Europe with a massive war that concluded with a partition of the world? That he was responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews, and thus instilled in the survivors a determination to found their own nation, which in turn stirred the wrath of its neighbors? If a massive war begins in the Middle East, will Hitler have caused that too? It is quite possible, though, that Hitler's career was not the most important event of the past 60 years, which saw as well the splitting of the atom, the rise of television, the discovery of DNA, the construction of "thinking machines." If one's standard is quantitative, the question is no less complicated. Which event of the 1940s will have affected more lives: World War II or the development of penicillin?

At least one may say with confidence that it has been quite a time. Ride through these 60 years as through an amusement park tunnel. They're playing Gershwin, Stravinsky, I Want to Hold Your Hand. From hidden cabinets in the dark lurch Stalin, Nixon, De Gaulle, Ben-Gurion, Mao. Initials cover the walls:

W.P.A., P.L.O., F.D.R., I.R.A., NATO, O.A.S., L.S.M.F.T. Observe the tableaux: Gandhi on his salt march, Einstein in his study, the bodies in Auschwitz, the bodies in Biafra. James Joyce complaining that World War II will interfere with the reception of Finnegans Wake. John Kennedy riding in an open car. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself; "We shall fight on the beaches"; "We shall overcome." Lucky Lindy. The Lindbergh Law. Guernica is bombed. Guernica is painted. Cuba si, Yanqui no. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Charlie Chaplin, Dr. Jonas Salk, Mr. Joe McCarthy, Mr. Al Capone. Oppenheimer staring at the desert. "One giant leap for mankind"; "Oh, the humanity."

Half-forgotten names recur as at a class reunion. Nkrumah, Nguyen Cao Ky, Bulganin, I.G. Farben, Lord Beaverbrook, U Thant, Ben Bella, Cardinal Mindszenty. Do you recall that Patty Hearst was known as "Tania"? Does the name Sherri Finkbine mean anything to you? Frank Wills? It is hard to believe that we danced till we dropped, perched on flagpoles, swallowed all those goldfish, streaked, twisted, marched, sat in, dropped out, rioted, fought, wept. The places we have been: Woodstock, Suez, Dresden, My Lai, Beirut, Johannesburg. Keep cool with Coolidge. I like Ike. Brother, can you spare a dime?

To determine what will have mattered in this jumble seems to require a sense of something beyond the particulars. One may say that the Depression mattered, along with the decolonization of Africa, that Communist China mattered, as did the oil embargo and Picasso and the push for women's rights. But was there not something else that mattered by which these things were connected? Hegel thought of history as an idea, "the Idea," which, he said, struggles constantly to become the "Absolute Idea." This Idea has made a pilgrimage from civilization to civilization. It started out in China and, having gone as far as it could go there, proceeded to India, thence to the Greeks and later the Romans. It settled next on the Germans and would, Hegel predicted, go from there to America. Since the Idea always travels west, it may finally land in Japan, where the Absolute Idea will be realized and all problems solved.

Weird and rosy as this vision is, there still is something to be said for an idea characterizing an age. The age in question does not extend exactly from 1923 to 1983, but within that 60-year period emerge oddly recurrent themes. In his recent survey of Modern Times, Paul Johnson sees the main characterizing idea of the period as the domination of the state: "At the time of the Versailles Treaty, most intelligent people believed that an enlarged state could increase the sum total of human happiness, [but] by the 1980s the view was held by no one outside a small, diminishing and dispirited band of zealots." Johnson has a conservative ax to grind, and so may exaggerate a single feature's importance. Still, if one keeps asking what will have mattered in this period, the domination of the state would offer one perfectly sound answer.

Or perhaps the dominating force of the past 60 years has been that of death--not merely the numbers killed, the more than 100 million casualties of wars, executions, assassinations, terrorist attacks, concentration camps, but the rise of violent death as a central presence in the world, as a normal expectation of events. Death has enjoyed great prominence before, in the plague periods and times of other natural disasters. But in this century the primary killers have been people. A subject of the day concerns the "right to die," to choose a firing squad, to pull the plug. There is talk, perhaps exaggerated, perhaps not, of the whole planet dying.

But death seems a specter, not the idea itself. The idea has to do less with what actually happens than with feelings and presumptions about the age in which one lives, a sense of intellectual familiarity that allows one to accept whatever occurs in his lifetime, however terrible, as somehow fitting and proper. The flesh has been heir to some considerable shocks these 60 years. Why were we not more shocked?

In 1941 Henry Luce wrote an article for LIFE called "The American Century," which was partly meant to urge Americans into the war and partly to put forth the apparently Hegelian proposition that the Idea had at last touched these shores. Luce's article, a grand-gesture declaration of American pre-eminence in the world, was as dangerous as it was magnanimous, since it could easily be read (and was) as the rationale for the ensuing blunders of more recent American foreign policy. But the basis of the piece bespoke what most Americans and many others in the world acknowledged, whether or not they liked Luce's formulation. "We have some things in this country which are infinitely precious and especially American," wrote Luce, "a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence."

It is a cultural truism that by the time a major idea is expressed, it has long been thought but unexpressed. Many years before 1941 the 20th century could have been aptly labeled American. This would not necessarily have had to do with American predominance or even with American significance, since before its entry into the first World War, the nation had been largely preoccupied with its own development. Still, the fundamental idea that America represented corresponded to the values of the times. America was not merely free; it was freed, unshackled. The image was that of something previously held in check, an explosive force of a country that moved about in random particles of energy yet at the same time gained power and prospered. To be free was to be modern; to be modern was to take chances. The American century was to be the century of unleashing, of breaking away, at first from the 19th century (as Freud, Proust, Einstein and others had done), and eventually from any constraints at all.

Fearing such an impulse as "mere anarchy," W.B. Yeats foresaw a Second Coming not long before 1923, in which the world would be devoured by a "rough beast." Yet the impulse was not necessarily anarchic, although things could turn out that way. It was the dream of self-fulfillment. As a goal, self-fulfillment was hardly the 20th century's invention. The European Romantics of the early 1800s had loudly proclaimed the primacy of the individual, the glories of revolution and similar disruptive ideas that have carried forward, with a few halts and alterations, from their time to ours. But in the 19th century there were still too many tugs in antimodern directions, too many elements of life either stifling or civilizing, depending on one's viewpoint, to allow mere anarchy. Form and ceremony were not yet dead. War itself seemed to serve as a civilizing institution, the illusion still holding that war was an ennobling experience, that destruction was good for the soul.

The first World War put away such claims, but hardly put away war itself. One of the deep oddities of the period after World War I, in fact, is that while everyone had come to know and state openly that the delights of war were, as Wilfred

Owen named them, "the old Lie," few periods of history seem to have relished war more, or taken to it more readily. From the array of wars that have ravaged Europe, the Middle East, the Congo, Korea, Malaya, Viet Nam and Central America in our times, with new sites added almost daily, one might conclude that the main characterizing idea of the past 60 years was war itself. (Who could have dreamed up the war in the Falklands?) It follows that what will have mattered most about these years is the apparent universal desire to knock each other off.

Yet an urge for self-destruction has not so characterized the period as the wider compulsions of experimentation and free expression, almost a motor reflex to lurch in new directions. In the years immediately following World War I, Gertrude Stein was offering as much challenge as pity when she branded Hemingway and his contemporaries as the "lost generation." Hemingway took to the bullring, Fitzgerald to the dance floor, where much of his nation joined him. Like Gatsby, most people "believed in the green light" at the end of the dock, despite the disillusionment and damnation around them.

Green was both the color of newness and the universal sig nal for go. To be sure, there were times when the light turned red, but that was almost always after things had already gone too far--after all the money was spent and the stock market crashed, after a demagogue had swallowed a dozen countries, afer the ashes of millions had been blown away. Before then, lands off, wait and watch. In 1934 Cole Porter wrote Anything ties; in 1970 Paul McCartney sang Let It Be.

How free can one be? The question has not seemed rhetorical. The century began with the Russians shaking the world, but he world seemed prepared to be shaken. Hitler was free to conquer most of Europe and to kill most of the Jews. India free; Africa free. In the 1930s scientists sought to free the atom. In the 1960s blacks and women sought freedoms of their own. Free ove. Free fall. Psychologists freed minds from guilt. Vatican II freed the church from its past. Drugs too proffered self-fulfillment. In the 1980s experimental engineers would see if the body could be freed from genetic dictates. With organ transplants, can one be free of mortality? Break the sound barrier, the color barrier, the four-minute mile. Rockets, free of gravity, shoot into space, land men on the moon--a demonstration of both organizational and individual will. The professional athlete becomes the free agent. Free Angela. Mr. Middle Class wishes to free himself from home, wife, children, job. Let it be.

People made machines, and machines set them freer than ever before. The American imprint on this century has been due not only to a spiritual or political conception of freedom but to technology; the country that promoted and thrived on the work ethic was the same that sought from the beginning to reduce human labor to a minimum through inventiveness. So central was this impulse to American history that shortly after the American Revolution, parades held in Boston, Philadelphia and New York to celebrate the ratification of the Constitution gave prominent and revered places to the new nation's artisans, mechanics and craftsmen and especially to the makers of mathematical instruments and scientific apparatus. They were cheered in the streets. Even in the 1780s the nation knew that its strength would eventually rely on its capacity to ensure, in the words of the Horn and Hardart cafeteria ads of the 1940s, "less work for mother." Today's citizens are told to "set yourself free with Stouffer's."

In terms of pure convenience, the world has never experienced such liberation. To our age has been given the freedoms of jet planes, bullet trains, wash-and-wear, Minute Rice; dial long distance (dial-a-prayer, dial-a-joke); automatic windows, automatic doors; the artificial lung and heart; the electric knife, the electric pencil sharpener, the electric eye and chair; instant soup, photographs, copies, calculations; self-starters, self-service; the freedom from small pox, polio, the "heartbreak of psoriasis"; the freedom to worry about freedom itself, to fret about the uses of "leisure time." Killing, too, has been made simpler, thanks to automatic rifles, grenade guns, cluster bombs and guided missiles. In some dark way, the technology of killing may have accounted for death's prosperity in this century: the ease and magic of the enterprise.

Behind most of these events lay the assumption, almost a moral imperative, that what was not free ought to be free, that limits were intrinsically evil. Even the act of relying on history might be judged dangerous, since knowledge of the past could exert prior restraint on future actions and decisions; one could not wholly let it be if one believed in history. Science, however, presented a different matter. One of the reasons that science has achieved such stature in the late 20th century is its self-confident autonomy, the freedom of the scientific mind, Prometheus unbound, to go wherever it pleases.

In a way, science has replaced art as the art of the period, precisely because it shows no bounds. The catalogue for the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which for the first time displayed for great numbers of Americans the works of Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh, announced: "Art is a sign of life. There can be no life without change, as there can be no development without change. To be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life." People believed that. The trouble was that science soon proved itself more attuned to the different and unfamiliar than did art. Perhaps in an unconscious response, artists (Capote, Mailer, et al.) became entertainers, and scientists took on the look of poets. There was poetry in outer space and in double helixes, whereas in poetry itself T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men of 1925 seemed merely to breed the self-absorption of Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959. Tragedy shriveled to the Death of a Salesman. Robert Conquest wrote a poem, For the 1956 Opposition of Mars, in which he exulted, "Pure joy of knowledge rides as high as art." Knowledge has seemed to ride higher.

One ought to be free of superstition, of disease, of tyrants, of boundaries, of the earth itself. One ought to be free of ignorance. In 1890 fewer than 7% of Americans aged 14 to 17 attended high school. By 1920 the number had reached one-third, by 1950 three-quarters, by 1970 nearly 90%. Whatever lay in darkness was to be illuminated. Whatever stood whole and secure was to be smashed, indeed was assumed already disintegrated in its essential form. Eliot began The Waste Land bemoaning "a heap of broken images," but wound up shoring "fragments against ruins." Since life evidently lay in pieces, perhaps it ought to remain that way. Rene Magritte drew disembodied noses and nude torsos stuffed into bottles, while Henry Moore sculpted a Two-Piece Reclining Figure, a perfect fusion of leisure and fragmentation.

From such diverse elements has formed the image of the age, at once soaring, shattered, bold, disintegrated and terrifying. The image has incorporated everything that freedom can stand for, all victories and insanities alike. How can the period that encouraged the development of the Salk vaccine have also allowed for the maraudings of the Baader-Meinhof gang? Because the spirit of these years has moved equally through killers and benefactors, each propelled by the same wind whispering the same neutral message: stability is not a natural state; nothing ought to be as it was.

When an idea like that grows prevalent, it hurls a considerable threat at the forces of stability. Henry Adams defined history as "social development along the lines of weakest resistance." Certainly, the major political shifts of the past 60 years support that definition. But if the areas of resistance have looked as vulnerable as the Maginot Line at some points in our history, they have shown themselves exceptionally, even ruthlessly, strong and adamant at others. For nearly every liberation of the period--political, social, cultural--there has followed a limitation backlash or regression. See how the world spins today, for all its unleashings, half of it locked silent under dictatorships and totalitarian governments. Indeed, the central paradox of this period may be that never before in history has the world lived with so much freedom and repression simultaneously. At times, this living arrangement has seemed almost companionable, each cri de coeur begging for the slamming of a door.

The Russians revolt, the Russians repress. So too for the Cubans, the Chinese. Repression in the democracies has taken milder forms--"conformity" or concessions to "the bureaucracy," the drab repetitiveness of life brought on by all those marvelous modern conveniences or by those awful government regulations. Ever since the late 1940s the creature of the times has asked: Where is the sense of self that freedom was supposed to assure? Men in gray flannel suits caught the 7:20 a.m. from Darien, Conn., folded the Wall Street Journal in all the right places, nursed a Gibson at the club and eyed the secretary. "Robots, Smith. Mark my words; we're going to be replaced by robots." How can you tell? Strung out along the airport roads, one Pizza Hut, one Burger King; "We do it all for you." Say, what city is this? The Organization Man, The Double. The Invisible Man, both black and white, is judged by his credit cards ("Do you know me?"), relies on television for his frame of common reference, stares at reruns of The Stepford Wives, Frankenstein and Dracula. "The living dead, Smith. That's what we are. Care to try my Walkman?"

It is not that the age has been bereft of individuals, mad and violent individuals in particular. The list of strange and dangerous national leaders who have arisen in our times makes quite scary reading: Pol Pot, Peron, Arafat, Idi Amin, the Ayatullah, Gaddafi. But for the common run, this has largely been a time when individuals have identified themselves with groups, classes and movements. In the recent past, Americans have seen the emergence of black nationalists, Gray Panthers, homosexuals, the women's movement and ethnic groups by the dozens. By amassing in numbers, the members of such organizations gain political influence and often effect political ends, which is their immediate purpose. Yet there also seems to be some personal value or solace in these group identifications, needs filled beyond the practical.

Is individualism being purposely denied by such associations? One of the consequences of allowing great forces to be unleashed in this century is that the individual has found himself with very little stature or power of his own. Communist hordes overran China; Hiroshima went up in a golden bulb; revolutions flickered and were doused in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland. What place had any one person in such moments? That the individual has lost any sense of his own importance may be due in part to the social conformities, or to the existence of the Bomb, or simply to talk about the Bomb. But it is also due to the forfeiture of individualism that took place at the beginning of this period, the thought that if one were truly to let things be, then individuals must by necessity be overwhelmed by massive sweeps and surges.

A picture forms showing 60 years of hectic freedom leading to powerlessness, ennui and immobility. Yet the picture is exaggerated. It is convenient to think of a time in the thrall of science as absent of religious faith, but one look at the millions of Poles, Guatemalans, Irishmen, Americans and Englishmen drawn to the recent visits of Pope John Paul II suggests that all the mysteries of existence do not bubble up only in laboratories. One reason the martial-law government of Poland so fears the Pope's influence in that country is that he reaches feelings in the people no government can come close to. For all the stark, monstrous visible evidence of our times, the mind still retains a shrine for invisibilities. One can never comprehend a place like Iran without acknowledging as much, although Iran has also proved that faith unleashed may act no more gently than other executioners.

Similarly, one may say that this has not been an era for encouraging individualism, and yet know perfectly well that, powerless or not, individuals make up the world. Every mass unleashing in this century, for good or ill, may be traced to an individual choice. And even when the choice has overwhelmed the choosers, the solitary mind, like a bat in a cave, gropes about for its own directions. "History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience." (Churchill on Chamberlain.) That can be no less true of our time than of others. What may have mattered most about these years is not how close the world came to self-destruction, but that it did not happen, that the individual's claim on survival took precedence over all the wilder forces he let go. "Between the widening and the heightening," wrote Octavio Paz, "be tween the lips that say the Word and the Word itself, there is a pause, a sparkle that divides and claws: I. I'm not finished with myself yet." What is one to conclude then? That the self always prevails over the circumstances that oppose it? It hardly seems likely. One has no guarantees that the self will have prevailed in our time, and in any case no force in this century has so opposed the individual conscience as the individual conscience. The mind unleashed has as often run helter-skelter over its fellows as it has advanced their wellbeing. True, few periods of history have so concerned themselves with moral problems, but few have done so much to create them. It would be heartening to think that as a result of these 60 years the individual finally managed to come to terms with the social consequences of his liberations, seeing at last that the question he posed as the period began-- How free can one be?--was not an exultation but a problem. The trouble all along may have rested with the word freedom, which represents an emotional idea, not a rational one, and thus offers a perilous guide for diverse human beings. In the realm of politics, had the world been inspired by the idea of justice rather than freedom, it might look a good deal healthier. At the onset of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke cautioned an enthusiast who sought Burke's approval of the events: "When I see the spirit of liberty in action," wrote Burke, "I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared and until we see something deeper than the agita tion of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one." Which is to say that when people or ideas are unfettered, they are freed but not yet free. To be free, in fact, seems to require an attitude opposite that which sets one free: a sense of reasonable limitations, of self-governing restraint, the acknowledgment that one is able to escape from anything except his skin. Nothing new in such a lesson, of course. But it will have mattered to learn it.

--By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.