A CASE STUDY
235
This is an empirical question and only empirical inquiries can an–
swer
it.
Let us ask ourselves who the individuals have been who have
rallied the conscience of the world against the great moral outrages
of our era. Call the roll of the cases and places. Sacco-Vanzetti, Scotts–
boro, the Reichstag Fire, the Moscow Trials, Guernica, Munich, War–
saw, Katyn, down to the latest infamous Communist frame-up. Make a
list of the causes which ought to raise the sharecroppers, the sweatshop
workers and every other exploited group to the level of human existence.
How does Mr. Vivas account for the fact that the value-blind naturalists
have been in the thick and almost always in the lead of the struggle?
How does he account for the fact that in every good fight believer arid
non-believer, men of all and of no religious faith, are found? And where
were Mr. Vivas and so many other of the latter-day tribe of self-desig–
nated saviors of civilized values? Where, indeed? Safely out of fire,
denouncing naturalists as the wreckers and saboteurs of civilization. Or
charging, as Mr. Vivas says of Dewey in the volume, that they have
"undertaken to soften us up for the Red push," and at the same time
pretending to be above the vulgar struggle between Stalinists and anti–
Stalinists--a struggle on whose outcome the free institutions of the
West depend.
How sensitive the twice-born Mr. Vivas is to actual values in ex–
perience
is
tellingly revealed in a comment he makes on a passage from
my book
Education tor Modern Man.
Urging a study of the present
as well as the past, I had written that students could learn as much from
"the heroic tragedy of Warsaw" as from the last stand at Thermopylae.
Mr. Vivas lashes himself into a fury about this. How, he asks, can any–
one compare the qualities displayed by the Greeks, as recorded by
Herodotus, with what is "one of the merely
(sic!)
sordid minor butch–
eries of history." It is like saying that the New York
Times
is as good
as Herodotus.
The tragedy of Warsaw was a double one. First, the battle of the
Jewish Ghetto against the annihilation corps of the Nazis reversed al–
most a millennium of Jewish history. Against the greatest odds, these
humble scholars, peddlers, and secular socialists, fought the most des–
perately lost battle in recent history not only for themselves but for
Western Christendom which stood idly by. The second act of the tragedy
of Warsaw took place when the remainder of the city, encouraged by
the Soviets, rose against the Nazis while Stalin's armies waited out–
side until the Poles were destroyed. Whoever cannot learn from events
like these, about how men live and die in extreme situations, about
ul–
timate values and disvalues, about the meaning of totalitarianism and
political neutrality in a world aflame, is not likely to learn anything
