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PARTISAN REVIEW
then, could Gandhi mean so much to him? I decided that the
young man must be faking, but I now find this an ungenerous
judgment on my part, and as mistaken as it would be to pronounce
the simpleminded midwestern appreciator of Lloyd Douglas to be
hypocritically Christian. Both are examples of the great generosity
and naive good will of the American Character wishing to show
that it approves of any genuine manifestation of spirit, however
different from its own. The young man wanted, after all, only to
show Mr. Nehru that his heart was in the right place, and that he
wanted to be friends- even with an ascetic saint. I suspect that a
good deal of this generous, but vague, aspiration toward "the spirit–
ual" is behind the current revival in America.
But it won't do for a religion. Religion is total or it is nothing,
and I will begin to believe that a new leaven is working when I see
the Catholic faithful walking barefooted through the streets of our
cities on Good Friday, or climbing the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral
on their knees. Nineteenth-century materialism offered the theory
that the religious sense of mankind would weaken and disappear as
the material level of the masses rose.
It
is very easy to sneer at this
as an over-simplification; as a real solution to the religious problem
it is indeed a gross over-simplification; but as a sociological hypothesis
it seems very apt, and certainly describes what has happened to the
American masses, who, immersed in their gadgets, radios, television
sets, automobiles, . know nothing of the religious passion that once
characterized the peasantries of Europe.
Currently, of course, the A-bomb and the H-bomb are causing
some tremors in this self-confident and spontaneous irreligion of
Americans: for the first time they are beginning to doubt seriously
that man is sufficient to himself and can solve his own problems. But,
again, the reaction seems typically American: religion is clutched at
like another tool or instrument, as if it might solve the international
problem of the atom when all else has failed. The H-bomb has merely
brought to a head a sore that has been festering in Western Civiliza–
tion for some time: the doubt whether man is capable of mastering
the technological environment he has produced. One has only to
walk anywhere in the streets of New York, with their snarl of traffic
and swarm of harassed humans, to feel that man has got himself en–
tangled in something of his own making that he cannot manage. A
