SYNTHETIC SUICIDE

Four American undergraduates have in the last month committed suicide. Not one of them died without leaving behind some sort of explanation of his act, ranging from the extreme lassitude and disillusion of one to the boundless curiosity of another. Not content with the motives of the actors themselves, the American audience has already begun to psycho-analyze their individual and collective decease.

That it points to frustration, to some deeply-seated malady in either our educational or else in our entire social fabric, is premised by almost everyone. That anyone of them should have taken his life because of financial troubles, or because of mal-adaptation to his physical or his social environment, does not seem to have occurred to any commentator on the phenomenon. Novalis, who in reality died of sheer nostalgia because he was not born a Greek, has been said to have been the victim of a mal de siecle, and the four undergraduates in question, who probably had at least equally valid reasons for departing this life, must be found to have died from a social cancer that is eating the heart out of our civilization.

President Daniel Marsh of Boston University indicts a philosophy of the tragedies. It is materialism, he declares, that drives students to take their own lives, materialism that is, among other adjectives that the Boston sage applies to it, "mechanistic, behavioristic, analytic, naturalistic, and humanistic." It has brought about "a recrudescence of the jungle," and not until man finds again in his scheme of things a place for "a personal, self-conscious God," will the American undergraduate be safe.

The Princetonian, on the other hand, part of whose comment is reprinted in another column, places the blame upon "under-education." This criticism strikes much nearer to the heart of the matter. Rendering unity out of chaos is a salutary process for the individual, and a necessary operation for the educational institution. It is hardly to be denied that the synthesis of life of which the Princetonian speaks is too often submerged under the mass of analytic facts and information with which education is today encumbered. It is a situation which has been recognized increasingly in recent years. The "civilizational" education of Dr. Meiklejohn is one proposal that has been made to remedy it. A general course in philosophy to round out the Platonic man has been much discussed in Cambridge.

The Princetonian has at least evolved a tenable diagnosis of the ill, and the suggestions that have been made are honest attempts at its cure. But much is still to be said, that will probably, for many years at least, remain unsaid. The yearning after synthesis, the desire for some more all-inclusive faith than the multiformity of modern science and modern knowledge allows, bears an affinity to romantic nostalgia that is at times a little hard to stomach. The urge that leads so many romanticists to the Catholic Church has been called the desire of the jelly-fish for the rock. God has become the rage among the younger intellectuals in Europe. "La jeune France" has deserted almost en masse, under the leadership of Cocteau, to Rome. Synthesis and escape from this world's harsh disillusionments and an all-pervading peace come with incense and liturgy.

That this is one and the same problem must be evident. The pressure of life, of civilization, of the machine, of the group, of science, of any one of the bugaboos which are our modern dragons and goblins, upon the individual, has become immense. That the Verlaine of absinthe and pomegranites should make a pilgrimage to the Holy City cannot seem entirely unrelated to the somewhat sordid suicide of four promising American undergraduates within the space of a few weeks. The only explanation that is sufficiently vague to be true is that of failure to adapt oneself to an inevitable, remorseless environment, an environment of natural hardship and of social horror. The biologist would claim it to be the elimination of the unfit in the struggle for existence, and as such a natural and beneficial part of the law of life. The theologian must interpret it in different terms, no less valid. It is an integral problem of modern life, and those who seek its solution in terms of death are at least hungering for a vital truth.