Evening star., 1933-06-04

the dreaming spires OF Oxford and think
the world well lost for poetry. philos-
ophy and science. Not infrequently,
indeed, the most imaginative and the
most intellectual students had a rela-
tive scorn for economic and political
subjects and felt college precisely the
place to escape from contemporary af-
| fairs to eternity.
1t Is a striking fact that now even
| the most eSthetic and intellectually de-
voted Of students feel something trivial
and irrelevant about the nineteenth
century ideal of sweetness and light,
and for several good reasons Current
approaches to philosophy and litera-
ture, as expounded to him by his
these flowers of the spirit have their
roots and their life conditioned by the
particular economic and social prob
| lens of a particular age. And quite
apart from any theoretical considera-
tions, the reading of the daily newspa-
per, conversation in the dormitory or
letters from home make it painfully
clear how pressing are those basic eco
nomic and political issues which in a
secure epoch the absorbed student
might have dismissed as negligible. To
concern with books and ideas is too
much like fiddling while Rome is burn
ing. Finally, there are relatively few
students who can face their own fu-
ture with equanimity. The future of
our society is not for them merely a
theoretical, but an intensely personal
affair.
Testing Ideas by Fruits.
It is not for nothing that students
read of unemployed doctors driving
taxicabs and Phi DIS who would be
glad to have that much to do. One
of the things youth, and not in its
least-gifted instances, Is revolving
against is the old drawing room ideal
Of education. They are testing ideas
by their fruits, and many who 10 years
ago would have been dreaming, ado
lescent esthetics are looking at their
studies now with an eye to the light
they cast on the problems and posi-
bilities raised by our confused If not
desperate plight.
In surveying these problems, all stu
dents at all alert, the playboys, aware
that they may not be able to play all
their lives; the scholar and poet, aware
that he will not be able to dream,
brood and study forever, and the pre-
professional student, realizing that his
professional chances are tragically linn
tied, have come to realize that in a
changing society the old formulas will
not serve and that the methods until
! recently held both useful and noble
| have led only to disaster.
Young people now in college were in
their cradles when the World War be-
gan; they we're playing marbles when
we entered it. But they are living now
in the midst of the Great Depression
and amid the rumors of another war
lowering over Europe and over the
world. They illustrate the paradox
that the youngest generation is the
oldest in the way Of the funded ex-
perience of the race. They will have
no traffic with the exploded efficacy
of war as way to end war. They
have read too much recent history and
lived too much in the midst Of it to be-
lieve so easily in either the efficacies
or the virtues of the martial spirit. 1t
may be true, as it is often said, that
were the bands to begin to play and
the flags to wave, for all the anti-war
meetings and resolutions, they would be
there, and willingly. But rather
think not For this revolt against the
cliches and conventions connected with
war has symptoms Of deeper break
with the past.
For it is not only war that has come
to seem to the minds and imaginations
of these young men and women dan
gerous and out-worn method OF solving
question the whole pattern Of religious
and moral fundamentalisms which have
continued to be mouthed as archaic
truths in the face of changing society
whose new problems these old formulas
have done nothing to solve. There was
more intelligence in bowling before the
wisdom of the old when that wisdom
was clear and decisive. and not so con-
fessedly bankrupt as the traditional pat
terms of life are in our society. The
young are merely revolving against what
their elders themselves no longer take
quite seriously.
Faith Is Cropping.
A lapse of faith in the traditional
patterns of life, of economics and OF
society is not a symptom OF want OF
faith itself in the young. There Is
faith enough and to spare, but it Is
cropping and experimental. Because
great many young men and women in
the colleges over the land cannot &C
cept the formulas of God and religion
to which their parents were early ha-
bituated, it does not follow that they
have an incapacity for religion. For
many of them the vision of new social
order, more equitable and rational than
our own, is itself a religion. For some
Communism is an orthodoxy about
which they are as intranSigent and as
ascetic as their parents might have
been about hell fire.
Many of them have rebelled beyond
recall from the moral fundamentalisms
connected with sex. 1t does not follow
that they are not looking for some code
or faith by which they may reasonably
and humanely live. Precious few of
them, I believe, will listen with much
earnestness, though they may listen
with polite patience, to any conven-
conventional virtues of thrift and in
dustry. and success.
1t Is not that Cor not simply that>
they are disillusioned by the picture of
the world around them. They simply
have come to realize, as have some of
their elders, that the whole question of
faith and virtue must be thought
through In terms of a world whose
morals and religion will have to reflect
the transformations in its economic and
political life. They are interested, many
of them passionately, in finding or con-
structing some picture of the good life
and the great society. What they are
rebelling against Is archaic mumbo
Jumbo, moral emptiness and the theo-
logical echoes of once living faiths.
They wish to make faith of their own.
And in it the elements of cooperative
ness rather than acquisitiveness, sci
ence rather than mythology, realism
rather than ritualism, will, I suspect.
have large part. They wish to start
fresh. And the generation just ahead
of them has not so much to be proud
of in what it has made of the world
that it should wish to gainsay them in