This morning I came across an essay he wrote in 1940. It seems that some of the sophisticated folks of the day were throwing America's ways under the bus in favor of Fascism. (Although we aren't embracing Hitler these days it isn't hard to find folks out there who would endorse Islam over Christianity or the 99% over free market capitalism.)
So I think what White has to say here has a timely message today.
Freedom
by E B White – 1940
I have often noticed on my trips up to the city that people
have recut their clothes to follow the fashion. On my last trip, however, it
seemed to me that people had remodeled their ideas too－taken in their
convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and
fitted themselves out in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design
out of the very latest page of history. It seemed to me they had strung along
with Paris a little too long.
I confess to a disturbed stomach. I feel sick when I find
anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad.
Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of
any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of
persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is
boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest
my development and let the rest of the world grow up.
I shall report some of the strange remarks I heard in New
York. One man told me that he thought perhaps the Nazi ideal was a sounder
ideal than our constitutional system "because have you ever noticed what
fine alert young faces the young German soldiers have in the newsreel? " He
added: "Our American youngsters spend all their time at the movies－
they're a mess." That was his summation of the case, his interpretation of
the new Europe. Such a remark leaves me pale and shaken. If it represents the
peak of our intelligence, then the steady march of despotism will not receive
any considerable setback at our shores.
Another man informed me that our democratic notion of
popular government was decadent and not worth bothering about－ "because
England is really rotten and the industrial towns there are a disgrace."
That was the only reason he gave for the hopelessness of democracy; and he
seemed mightily pleased with himself, as though he were more familiar than most
with the anatomy of decadence, and had detected subtler aspects of the situation
than were discernible to the rest of us.
Another man assured me that anyone who took any kind of
government seriously was a gullible fool. You could be sure, he said, that
there is nothing but corruption "because of the way Clemenceau acted at Versailles."
He said itdidn't make any difference really about this war. It was just another
war. Having relieved himself of this majestic bit of reasoning, he subsided.
Another individual, discovering signs of zeal creeping into
my blood, berated me for having lost my detachment, my pure skeptical point of
view. He announced that he wasn't going to be swept away by all this nonsense,
but would prefer to remain in the role of innocent by stander, which he said
was the duty of any intelligent person. (I noticed, that he phoned later to
qualify his remark, as though he had lost some of his innocence in the cab on
the way home. )
Those are just a few samples of the sort of talk that seemed
to be going round－ talk which was full of defeatism and disillusion and
sometimes of a too studied innocence. Men are not merely annihilating
themselves at a great rate these days, but they are telling one another
enormous lies, grandiose fibs. Such remarks as I heard are fearfully disturbing
in their cumulative effect. They are more destructive than dive bombers and
mine fields, for they challenge not merely one's immediate position but one's
main defenses. They seemed to me to issue either from persons who could never
have really come to grips with freedom so as to understand her, or from
renegades. Where I expected to find indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort
of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill. I
was advised of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment by a man who seemed to be
watching the phenomenon of intolerance not through tears of shame but with a
clear intellectual gaze, as through a well-ground lens.
The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself
and tell where he stands. I believe in freedom with the same burning delight,
the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this
continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration
rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a
man a feeling of being pressed for time. Actually I do not believe I am pressed
for time, and I apologize to the reader for a false impression that may be
created. I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with
freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state
to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust
to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such
adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.
For as long as I can remember I have had a sense of living
somewhat freely in a natural world. I don't mean I enjoyed freedom of action,
but my existence seemed to have the quality of freeness. I traveled with secret
papers pertaining to a divine conspiracy. Intuitively I've always been aware of
the vitally important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to
himself, and to be identified with all things, to stand self-reliant, taking
advantage of his haphazard connection with a planet, riding his luck, and following
his bent with the tenacity of a hound. My first and greatest love affair was
with this thing we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous
and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all.
It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every
child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing
herself through the "I." This elusive sensation is moving and
memorable. It comes early in life: a boy, we'll say, sitting on the front stepson
a summer night, thinking of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a
new perception and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets,
overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification with the natural company of
insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the
universal perplexing question: "What is I'?" Or a little girl,
returning from the grave of a pet bird leaning with her elbows on the window
sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part
of the complete story. Or to an older youth, encountering for the first time a
great teacher who by some chance word or mood awakens something and the youth
beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his vitals. I
think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of identity with God－
an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence
as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair
with freedom.
But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive
freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical
liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of
the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently
challenged and discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The
United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and
the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write
plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as
well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education
in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to
compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether
the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the
government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead
of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and
should give every person pause.
To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong
to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic
framework. In Adolph Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we
do not detect either type of sensibility. From reading his book I gather that
his feeling for earth is not a sense of communion but a driving urge to
prevail. His feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that they are
capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellect－ that their
existence suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of
their personalities in the common racial destiny. His very great absorption in
the destiny of the German people somehow loses some of its effect when you
discover, from his writings, in what vast contempt he holds all people. "I
learned," he wrote, ". . . to gain an insight into the unbelievably
primitive opinions and arguments of the people." To him the ordinary man
is a primitive, capable only of being used and led. He speaks continually of
people as sheep, halfwits, and impudent fools－ the same people from whom he
asks the utmost in loyalty, and to whom he promises the ultimate in prizes.
Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the
individual, not contempt for him, the free principle of life has a chance of
surviving. I believe that it must and will survive. To understand freedom is an
accomplishment which all men may acquire who set their minds in that direction;
and to love freedom is a tendency which many Americans are born with. To live
in the same room with freedom, or in the same hemisphere, is still a profoundly
shaking experience for me.
One of the earliest truths (and to him most valuable) that
the author of Mein Kampf discovered was that it is not the written word, but
the spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble
or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which
every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual
standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks. "I know,"
wrote Hitler, "that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than
by the written word...." Later he adds contemptuously: "For let it be
said to all knights of the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of
today: the greatest changes in this world have never been brought about by a
goose quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these changes
theoretically."
