I cannot quite remember whether Miss Earhart undertook her flight with some practical purpose in mind, say, to demonstrate something or other about aviation which will make it a little easier for commercial passengers to move more quickly around the world. There are those who seem to think that an enterprise like hers must have some such justification, that without it there was no good reason for taking such grave risks.
But in truth Miss Earhart needs no such justification. The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing. They help to offset the much larger number who are ready to sacrifice the ease and the security and the very lives of others in order to do what they want done. No end of synthetic heroes strut the stage, great bold men in bulletproof vests surrounded by squads of armed guards, demonstrating their courage by terrorizing the weak and the defenseless. It is somehow reassuring to think that there are also men and women who take the risks themselves, who pit themselves not against their fellow beings but against the immensity and the violence of the natural world, who are brave without cruelty to others and impassioned with an idea that dignifies all who contemplate it.
The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart's adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.
Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighed by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints and the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.
No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.
Among the many big questions posed by the steel strike, perhaps the most important is what should be the role of the federal government. For there is much confusion about this. The strike is taking place just as Congress is working on a law for the regulation of labor unions, a law which calls for comprehensive and far-reaching federal intervention in the internal affairs of the unions. Yet on the steel strike there are many, including now the President himself, who want no federal intervention and wish to see the issue settled by the test of economic power ...
Last week, at his press conference on July 15, the President had had the matter studied. He had learned that ""as far as a fact-finding board is concerned, I believe that all the facts are pretty well known In all our reports, in the labor statistics and the commerce and other figures that are published, some quarterly, some monthly, they are all there ...
Whoever did the studying of the question for the President did not understand the question, or he did not want the president to understand it. For while it may well be true that the ""facts"" are ""all there"" in some of the many reports that are published, how is the public to know, how is Congress to know, how are newspaper editors to know which of the facts are important and relevant? The task of finding the facts in that matter and of judging how they matter is a semi-judicial function. It cannot be done without a specialized inquiry by trained minds.
If there is no impartial tribunal to find the facts, then there can be no such thing as an enlightened public opinion. And if there is no enlightened opinion that can be brought to bear upon it, a strike of this magnitude must become a test of power in a whirl of propaganda and of prejudice.
When the President rejected the idea of a ""fact-finding"" which he had thought rather well of a month before, he affirmed a new doctrine: ""I believe that we have got thoroughly to test out and use the method of free bargaining."" Where great and vital interests are involved how much free bargaining do we really believe in?
In the steel controversy today, the companies happen to have the stronger bargaining position, their customers have large stockpiles, public opinion is stoutly opposed to another round of wage and price increases. The union appears to be far from solid within itself.
But this favorable balance to the companies will not always be the case, and I wonder whether it is wise and prudent for them to set it up as a principle that in these great controversies involving the national interest the issue shall be decided by a contest of power?
I do not believe it is true, as has been said recently, that this is ""one of the ways in which freedom functions."" If freedom is to function it must insist that the struggle of powerful interests be regulated by rational and just procedure. Freedom does not mean that the powerful interests shall fight it out as best they can.
We live in a time when the vital industries and services of the nation are in the hands of giant companies and giant unions. We cannot entrust the interests of the nation to a combination of the companies and the unions, which is what we have had for some years until recently in the steel industry. Nor can we entrust the interests of the nation to a power struggle between the unions and the companies, however much this struggle be prettified by calling it "free bargaining."
In these great conflicts the national interest must be represented and asserted by the federal government. The place to begin this is by a clarification of the contending claims. This alone may be enough to provide the basis of an opinion on which the government can exert its influence, and to which the public can rally."
While no one will grudge relief in the emergency, the question is bound to be raised in many minds as to how far the government can and should go in assuming the burdens caused by natural and by man-made calamities. The traditional view is, of course, that farmers must take the weather as it comes; relying not at all upon government devices, they become the self-reliant independent stock from which the nation renews its vitality. In this view a paternalistic policy for the farmer is undesirable, not so much because it costs money, but because it softens him as an individual.
There are few persons who would not feel that while there is something in this view, it is infected with a kind of moral blindness. Is the modem American farmer the same kind of farmer around whom there has grown the ideal of complete self-reliance? The traditional view is an ancient one based upon the experience of farmers working their own land for their own needs and for a neighboring community. But the wheat farmer in the Dakotas and Kansas and Nebraska does not live that kind of life. He produces for a world market and he supplies his own needs out of a world market. He is no longer even approximately self-sufficient. Can he then be expected to be wholly self-reliant?
In earlier days if his crop was bad, he suffered and accepted his lot. But today if his crop is bad, his competitor in another region makes a big profit. In earlier days, because he supplied his principal needs at home or in the neighborhood, his standard of life was relatively independent of the consequences of political and economic policies. Today his real income fluctuates spectacularly due to causes which he cannot control by his own prudence, thrift, or industry.
These are the underlying reasons why we now recognize that to protect the farmer against great natural calamities or economic convulsions is a social duty. If he is to be self-reliant, he must be more or less self-sufficient; in so far as he is not, he must either be led back to self-sufficiency or insured against those forces of nature and of society which self-reliance alone cannot deal with.
The difficult aspect of the matter is to know where to draw the line and then to have the political courage to draw it. The farmer, being only human, will expect more protection than society can afford or than he is really entitled to have. But the rule which ought to govern in these affairs is reasonably clear, however hard it may be to apply it in many particular cases. Taking into consideration its resources in the light of its obligations to other groups in the nation, society ought to attempt to insure men against those risks which a reasonably prudent man cannot be expected to avert or to deal with single-handed...
If the virtues and values of individualism and self-reliance are to be preserved, we must not put upon the individual person burdens that are greater than he can by self-reliance carry. This is the surest way to kill individualism: by making it intolerable. In the misery of the past few years the individual burden has been greater than individuals could carry. That is why the very word "individualism," though it is the name of a noble conception of life, has suddenly fallen into such disrepute. To restore men's faith in it, and ail that it means in the preservation of liberty and of the free growth of the human spirit, individualism has to be made safe for reasonably prudent men.
For that reason it can be said that those who are laboring to distribute justly the social risks of our immensely complicated society are the true defenders of individual liberty against the diseases of paternalism and the dangers of tyranny.
In the life and death of Mahatma Gandhi we have seen reenacted in our time the supreme drama of humanity. Gandhi was a political leader and he was a seer, and perhaps never before on so grand a scale has anyone sought to shape the course of events in the world as it is by the example of a spirit which was not of the world as it is.
Gandhi was, as St. Paul said, transformed in the renewing of his mind, he was not 'conformed to this world.' Yet he sought to govern turbulent masses of men who were still very much conformed to this world, and have not been transformed. He died by violence as he was staking his life in order to set the example of non-violence.
Thus he posed again the perennial question of how the insight of the seers and saints is related to the work of legislators, rulers, and statesmen. That they are in conflict is only too plain, and yet it is impossible to admit, as Gandhi refused to admit, that the conflict can never be resolved. For it is necessary to govern mankind and it is necessary to transform men.
Perhaps we may say that the insight of the governors of men is, as it were, horizontal: They act in the present, with men as they are, with the knowledge they possess, with what they can now understand, with the mixture of their passions and desires and instincts. They must work with concrete and with the plainly and generally intelligible things.
The insight of the seers, on the contrary, is vertical. They deal, however wide their appeal, with each person potentially, as he might be transformed, renewed, and regenerated. And because they appeal to experience which men have not yet had, with things that are not at hand and are out of their immediate reach, with the invisible and the unattained, they speak and act, as Gandhi did, obscurely, appealing to the imagination by symbolic evocation and subtle example.
The ideals of human life which the seers teach--non-resistance, humility, and poverty and chastity--have never been and can never be the laws of a secular society. Chastity, consistently and habitually observed, would annihilate it. Poverty, if universally pursued, would plunge it into misery and disease. Humility and non-resistance, if they were the rule, would mean the triumph of predatory force.
Is it possible that the greatest seers and teachers did not know this, and that what they enjoined upon men was a kind of suicide and self-annihilation? Obviously not. Their wisdom was not naive, and it can be understood if we approach it not as rules of conduct but as an insight into the economy and the order and the quality of the passions.
At the summit of their wisdom what they teach is, I think, not how in the practical issues of daily life men in society can and should~ behave but to what ultimate values they should give their allegiance. Thus the injunction to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's is not a definite political principle which can be applied to define the relation of Church and State. It is an injunction as to where men shall have their ultimate obligations, that in rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, they should not give to Caesar their ultimate loyalty, but should reserve it.
In the same manner, to have humility is to have, in the last reaches of fonviction, a saving doubt. To embrace poverty is to be w~thout possessiveness and a total attachment to things and to honors. To be non-resistant is to be at last non-competitive.
What the seer points toward is best described in the language of St. Paul as the creation of the new man. 'And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.' What is this new man? He is the man who has been renewed and is 'no longer under a schoolmaster,' whose passions have been altered, as Gandhi sought to alter the passions of his countrymen, so that they need no discipline from without because they have been transformed from within. Such regenerated men can, as Confucius said, follow what their hearts desire without transgressing what is right. They are 'led of the spirit' in the Pauline language, and therefore they 'are not under the law.'
It is not for such men as them that governments are instituted and laws enacted and enforced. These are for the old Adam. It is for the aggressive, possessive, carnal appetites of the old Adam that there are punishments and rewards, and for his violence a superior force.
It is only for the regenerate man, whose passions have been transformed, that the discipline of the law and of power are no longer needed, nor any incentive or reward beyond the exquisite and exhilarating wholesomeness and unity and freedom of his own passions.
Many men who live far beyond the Commonwealth and Empire have come to feel, as the coronation of the Queen drew near, that though they have no part in the gorgeous ceremony, they do participate in the solemn rite. For the British have made out of the forms and usages of their own unique history a great work of art which celebrates the saving truth about the government of men.
It is the truth that in every good society there must be a common center, known to be legitimate, to which the loyalty and the public love of all men are bound. That center of allegiance may be incarnate in an actual person or, as in a republic, it may be disembodied and have its being in the idea of the constitution and its ideal meaning. But always and everywhere, if a government is to be good, a center of men's allegiance must be recognized that is above the diversities and conflicts of their interests, and that is invulnerable to the pressure of party, faction, class, race, and sect.
And since this center of men's worldly allegiance must be beyond the reach of their worldly passions, it must be founded in, it must be consecrated to, the realm of the spirit. It must be bound to the truths that are more than the private and passing opinions of persons and of crowds, and to the laws that are above their wishes and their impulses.
This is the universal essence which Queen Elizabeth II represents for all mankind when she is recognized, is sworn, is anointed, and is crowned. In the course of the centuries, the British people--the most gifted in government since the Romans and with their genius in poetry--have invested monarchy with the meaning that must be recognized somewhere and somehow in any state--whether or not it has a king--if it is to be governed well.
The ritual itself is an eloquent record of how this has been done, so often against the will of the reigning monarch himself. The ritual looks back upon and sums up the centuries of struggle and of inspiration in which the British have brought all earthly powers--kings, nobles, and all the commoners no less --under the laws. It is a great art to have woven about their hereditary and not always very royal and admirable kings, a web of usages and symbols and ceremonies which--though they are unique for the British people in their concrete and historic circumstance--are none the less true and significant for ail peoples and all states.
The truths of this rite are most timely for our day. Our generation would, in any circumstances, be more sensitive and receptive to them than those that have preceded us, even if by great good fortune the central figure were not the young and beautiful Queen attended by her great Prime Minister, so undoubtedly the chivalrous and dauntless champion of freedom and good hope. This is a moment to reaffirm and to celebrate the essential truths. For the future of the free democratic society hangs in the balance because, confronted with the challenge of their adversaries, they are so weakened by the conflict and confusion within and among themselves.
If the free world is in this great peril, it is not because the adversaries of freedom are so strong or so attractive but because so many, indeed most, of the large democratic states are at the moment so badly governed. In many of them, our own alas included, good government is undermined by the usurpation of the sovereign power by the popular assembly. In the crisis of our Western society this usurpation has brought about a paralysis and panic fear which threaten to wreck the position of the whole free world, and to destroy the freedom and the kindly community of men with one another at home.