148
PARTISAN REVIEW
Given this conception of God as the helper in our daily affairs,
that is,
in
our .attempts to overcome or abolish limits which are
considered given and insuperable by other civilizations, the field of
social ethics must present a picture entirely different from what
we find in other countries. In the more traditional civilizations we
find a popular morality which is based on the experience of com–
mon limits which cannot be removed: we are all in the same boat,
we are slaves to the same misery.
This
leads to a sense of pity and
charity which is completely unpremeditated, a spontaneous reaching
out toward the neighbor. But while in the older countries there is at
times a deep concrete morality of the heart, the American social
ethics is to a considerable extent of the mind or, rather, a consequence
of a social contract which is, of course, the product of man's intellect.
In the one case, there are the thousand spontaneous acts of charity
on the part of a people who show little concern for the written laws
of a government in which they believe they have no stake; in the
other, the well-considered expressions of a social education which
aims at social responsibility on a level of fairness and mutual regard.
Further, the idea of liberty is interpreted differently in America
and the traditional countries. A society that lives outside the con–
sciousness of history cannot easily have a dynamic conception of
liberty. In fact, there are few Americans who conceive liberty as
the immanent end of history, the supreme good that man acquires,
losing it and reconquering it in the thousand episodes of life. Most
Americans will feel instead, that, living within the framework of
their Constitution which guarantees various kinds of liberty, they
are in definitive possession of liberty. Thus the American attitude
toward liberty is pre-eminently a defensive one; for the American
the problem is not so much to .acquire freedom and in acquiring
to enrich it, but to defend it as one defends a most precious good.
For the European, freedom in its active, creative sense is pre–
dicated upon an acceptance of certain limits. The objects of the ar–
tist, the problems of the moralist, are felt as something given, some–
thing that cannot be physically removed or overcome. On the other
hand, the objects and problems that have to be accepted can be
transformed. One can accept in such a way as to make them one's
own, transform them by absorbing them into one's own spirituality.
l\nd it is in these acts of personal appropriation that freedom
consists.
