A Calm Look at the Present

No one notices the thin black lines that divide one news story from another in a newspaper. But they stand as symbols of the disconnectedness of world events as they come to modern man in the course of a hurried day. Boxed off in their separate compartments, news stories only acquire a relatedness and significance when the black lines are crossed by a human mind.

In this, American have been handicapped by the anti-historical bias of the American character. To help make some of the connections more clear H. Stuart Hughes, assistant professor of History here, has boldly attempted to put contemporary events in their historical perspective.

To set this tumultuous moment in its proper largeness, Professor Hughes has called to his aid those seemingly incompatible philosopher-historians, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. For intuitive insight into the mood of our time he has consulted the novelists: Proust, Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Sartro, and Camus. This seems to be the century of feeling rather than reason, and the writers were better able to feel the tenor of their time than the professional philosophers have been able to intellectualize it. The novelists were intensely subjective, relativistic, and often, like Kafka, gave a sense of the little man being enmeshed in incomprehensible forces. Also, they agreed with Spengler and Toynbee that our's is a decaying civilization. Added to this, the world has grown increasingly incomprehensible to the average citizen during the last century.

It is out of these elements that political events have been developing. Hughes traces "The Transmutation of Marxism" as the theory came to grips with the tough realities of Russian culture and turned totalitarian. Fascism developed as it learned to manipulate the mob to its own uses. He is careful to point out that force put down the power of fascism, the people did not themselves turn against its spirit.

Third Force Weak

In postwar Europe Hughes finds the "Third Force" movements in France, Germany, and Italy losing strength to the conservatives; only the possible disapproval of American public opinion holds off a swing to the right. Meanwhile in the United States there may be a tendency for the "sophisticated conservatives" of government, labor, and business to coalesce in the direction of corporateness.

Such a bold venture as setting the fleeting moment in its perspective is bound to run afoul of fast changing events on some points. But the broad analysis on which Professor Hughes bases his essay is both provocative and gives a long-range, sober base from which to view the headlines.