SOURCE: Harris, Michael R. “Irving Babbitt: Civilized Standards and Humanistic Education.” In Five Counterrevolutionists in Higher Education, pp. 49-79. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1970.

To repudiate the traditional Christian and classical checks and at the same time fail to work out some new and more vital control upon impulse and temperament is to be guilty of high treason to civilization.

—Irving Babbitt, 1932

Preeminent among the New Humanists, Irving Babbitt opposed educational innovations made in the name of operational utility. He denounced the notion that universities should function in response to immediate societal needs.¹ He did not want institutions of higher learning to provide advice to men of affairs, initiate extension programs, or adjust their internal educational programs toward matters of operational utility. He wanted universities to discover cultural standards and colleges to inculcate them. Thus he opposed any phase of undergraduate education or faculty research which did not relate to the humanistic standards he proposed.

Although born and raised in Ohio, Babbitt spent virtually all his professional life at Harvard as a professor in the French Department.² During his years there he wrestled with one central problem: the development of the cultural standards which could lead twentieth-century man, stripped of his faith in traditional Christianity, to a balanced, happy life. He himself had begun life with a firm belief in Calvinism but had lost it. He kept his faith in certain tenets contained in Calvinism, but he believed they needed a new form. He thought that the rest of society was losing its values and that it needed new formulations of the truths embodied in the older traditions. He believed that education could help supply the new forms needed for living the good life, and he devoted his own professional life to the search for them.

Babbitt led a scholarly life, spending his career within the confines of his classrooms and his office in Harvard's Widener Library. He published widely, and his students carried his message across the land into the lecture halls of universities and onto the pages of literary magazines. One of his acknowledged followers, for instance, Norman Foerster, initiated reforms as director of the School of Letters at the University of Iowa in accord with Babbitt's basic assumptions. As Babbitt's former students gained prestige, they drew attention to him and his teachings. They brought interest in his ideas to a climax in 1930 with the publication of a collection of their essays, Humanism and America.³

The book brought a flurry of comment, capped by C. Hartley Grattan's 1930 book, The Critique of Humanism.⁴ During the 1920's, earlier critics of Babbitt had included an odd variety of people. Some of Babbitt's friends thought that Sinclair Lewis had used the word Babbitt in his 1922 book of the same name purely to spite him. H. L. Mencken in 1924 had vilified Babbitt as the personification of the sterile Puritanism which Mencken believed plagued America. T. S. Eliot had acknowledged Babbitt as perhaps his greatest teacher but differed with him when Babbitt refused to insist upon a supernatural basis for humanism. In 1928 Howard Mumford Jones offered bitter criticism that was soon outmatched by the reviews of Humanism and America. Walter Lippmann, in a short, vitriolic article in the Saturday Review, labeled Babbitt and New Humanism as pure dogma and nothing more. Only a Communist named V. F. Calverton outdid him: the New Masses printed Calverton's article entitled “Humanism: Literary Fascism,” which characterized Babbitt as a lackey of the capitalist classes. Edmund Wilson's accusation of Puritanism seemed mild in comparison.⁵

The deepening of the depression turned men's attention from the New Humanists, but the movement did not die. Even today intellectual figures such as Nathan Pusey, the president of Harvard, and Russell Kirk, the literary and political writer, acknowledge the central influence Babbitt exercised upon them. In 1960 Harvard posthumously honored Babbitt with the endowment of the Irving Babbitt Professorship of Comparative Literature.

Interestingly enough, Babbitt did not approve of the Harvard of his day. He entered Harvard as a student in 1885 and joined the faculty in 1894. Thus he knew well the new university ideals initiated by Charles W. Eliot, and he detested them. The free elective system, in his opinion, was destroying the humanistic education which he believed necessary for regenerating society, and the scientific approach which characterized even literary research did not relate to the creation of new cultural values. He felt the University was neglecting the central question of cultural and individual standards in its efforts to be of operational utility to society. Thus it was failing on two counts: it was not educating its own students so they would develop proper values; and in attempting to serve society, the university was not helping society to establish social goals corresponding to the needs of man's basic nature.

Essentially then, Babbitt was not objecting to a university's being of social significance. He was condemning current university practices because he thought they were concerned with the mechanics of running a technical society rather than with the cultural values necessary for shaping mankind's destiny. His criticism of the idea and practice of higher education for operational utility rested upon this distinction between the ends of society and the means to attain them.

THE STANDARDS OF NEW HUMANISM

Babbitt believed that a university should exist for the sole purpose of discovering personal and cultural standards and passing them on to its students. Hence an understanding of his humanist standards is necessary in order to understand his position on higher education.

ÉLAN VITAL AND FREIN VITAL

At the basis of Babbitt's thought lay two concepts: the élan vital and the frein vital. More psychological than sociological in nature, these concepts resembled the tenets of his Calvinist forefathers who had believed in a struggle within each individual between God's spirit and man's natural carnality.

Babbitt's élan vital, a concept which he consciously adopted from Henri Bergson, is similar to the Calvinist notion of the unregenerate man. It refers to the impulse or the subrational intuition supposedly within each man which lusts after knowledge, sensation, and power. This urge knows no limit and impels every man to expand his dominion without end. Conditioned by this concept, so widespread in Protestant America, Babbitt thought that the élan vital would impel men to clash in their unlimited drives for domination.

Just as Calvinist theology had also perceived a spirit of light within certain men, Babbitt saw a force operating in opposition to the élan vital. Babbitt's frein vital stood for an inner control which can check the power of the élan vital. While Calvinism considered this control a gift of God, Babbitt believed that men acquire it from their civilization.

Rejecting all theological formulations for his belief, Babbitt asserted the existence of the élan vital and the frein vital as immediate facts of consciousness obvious to any perceptive observer. He realized the similarity of his dualistic view of man to the Pauline doctrine of the spiritual and depraved man and believed that Christians might accept his views on religious grounds. He himself, however, thought that the humanistic bases of classical higher education provided sufficient premises.⁶

As Babbitt looked at the world of affairs, he interpreted everything in terms of his concepts of the élan vital and frein vital. The struggle between the two constituted the battle between good and evil, and they constantly opposed each other within each man individually and all mankind collectively. Since these forces made up the inner life of every man, no one could escape this conflict. Since every society was ruled by men in whom either the élan vital or frein vital was dominant, no society could escape acting in the manner characteristic of the dominant vital.

He thought that the triumph of the frein vital brought men cooperation, peace, and happiness. On the other hand, when the élan vital had broken the check which the frein vital had imposed upon it, the strong would seek domination over the weak, and conflict would break out. Contemplating World War I, which he saw as the result of an uncontrolled élan vital, he feared that the élan vital would consistently overwhelm the frein vital.⁷

Babbitt thought that the American literary college had disciplined the student and helped to check the élan vital by strengthening the frein vital. Therefore he believed that the destruction of the old curriculum had removed a powerful cultural force working for peace in the world. He argued that higher education for operational utility was neglecting the undergraduate education necessary to strengthen the frein vital which alone could peacefully check man's natural impulse to destroy his higher self and conquer his neighbor.

The research of universities also failed to relate to the real problems posed by contemporary civilization. Babbitt maintained that the frein vital should not smother the expansive desire of the élan vital, but rather channel it in a right direction. The problems of what constituted a right direction, however, required careful investigation, for since the demise of traditional Christianity among thinking men, Western civilization had arrived at no new consensus of values. The university should be searching for those values.

In developing this line of thought, Babbitt did not oppose a tie between the needs of contemporary society and the programs of American colleges and universities. He simply maintained that the problem of establishing proper cultural standards for society overshadowed all other possible educational concerns. His advocacy of the study of man's subjective life contrasted sharply with the ideal of operational utility, which tended to focus upon science and the world of affairs.

If men are to attain peace and avoid conflict, they indeed have to devise a means of establishing standards by which they can live. If careful observers such as university professors would give the attention to the study of human nature which they have to physical nature, they might be able to work out cultural patterns which would enable men to live dynamic and progressive, but peaceful, lives. Babbitt correctly saw the need for attention to the values sorely needed by Western civilization. Man should expand his control over himself as he extends his control over nature.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STANDARDS

Babbitt worked out a system for university professors to use in approaching the problems of cultural standards. He first distinguished man's imagination from his reason and his will. These categories resembled the faculties of the brain which were used as a rationalization for the curriculum of the classical college, but he did not intend to defend the old system. He conceded that faculty psychology was outdated. He realized that all divisions of men into powers or faculties were more or less arbitrary, but he felt them inevitable, if only as instruments of thought. In them he saw the expression of “certain obscure and profound facts of experience.”⁸ Through the correct use of them, Babbitt claimed, men could arrive at standards.

Imagination can reach out and seize likenesses and analogies. Although Babbitt never mentioned his contemporary, Carl G. Jung, his doctrine of the imagination paralleled Jung's idea of the collective subconscious. Both held that a man can transcend his own time and place and arrive at concepts totally unlearned through his own environment. The virtually magical powers of the imagination enable it to grasp matters common to the entire human race. The highest use of the imagination permits one “to grasp the abiding human element through all the change in which it is implicated.”⁹

Babbitt thought that without the use of reason, however, the imagination would function in the realm of fantasy instead of in reality. He urged the use of analytical reason to test the activity of the imagination by reference to the actual data of experience.¹⁰

He believed strongly that by examining all possible historical and contemporary human experience, university professors and others could find a huge array of facts about human nature as revealed in men's actions. Reason based not upon abstractions but upon these facts of human nature could eliminate everything from the products of the imagination which would not harmonize with them.

Besides affirming the necessity of imagination and reason in the creation of standards, Babbitt posited the existence of an almost mystical higher will which opposed the natural man expressed through the élan vital.¹¹ By asserting that this higher will could guide reason, Babbitt assured himself that the higher will would assist man to use his reason to reinforce the frein vital.

If university investigators would conduct research along these lines, Babbitt maintained, new standards would result which civilized men could transmit from generation to generation. Acting consciously, men in and out of the universities could discipline themselves and their children to act in accordance with the new standards. Their actions would then form new habits. In this manner, according to him, men could develop civilized traditions which would satisfy the needs of human nature because they would conform to the observed facts of that nature.

Unfortunately for the spread of Babbitt's ideas, he never linked his doctrines of the higher will, reason, and imagination to the psychological thought current in his day. In fact in all his writings, he never mentioned anything which would indicate he was aware of them. Instead of cooperating with or gently criticizing scholars like the psychologists, he attacked them and American higher education in general for neglecting the study of human nature. He felt that they were failing to look for the facts of human experience needed to establish the new standards required for the progress of civilization. He should not have dismissed the efforts of his contemporaries, for many scholars in the humanities and social sciences were studying human nature and society. Not only might they have become interested in his specific work, he might also have had a check on his own scholarship.

AN ELITIST SOCIETY OF STANDARDS

Babbitt condemned the direction undergraduate education had taken since the demise of the nineteenth-century literary college because of its lack of attention to the reinforcement of the frein vital within the students. Babbitt doubted that the men of character who were needed to assume positions of leadership in business, government, and the professions would emerge if American colleges and universities did not prepare them.

Babbitt maintained that only the few could ever live by good standards. In the vein of his Calvinist forebears, he believed that most men cannot control their lower nature. Adopting Matthew Arnold's phrase, he stated that civilization depends not upon the average man but upon the “saving remnant,” that small number in which the frein vital controls the élan vital.¹² Since in his framework only those who have accepted the discipline of the higher will can restrain the expansive urges of the natural man, only they will be able to prevent society itself from running amuck. If the Remnant were to disappear, civilization would collapse because “… barbarism is always as close to the most refined civilization as rust is to the most highly polished steel.”¹³

Babbitt further emphasized the need for men of standards in the twentieth century because of the decline of dogma and authority, which acted as checks upon the élan vital of a society. With the rise of a civilization in which the critical spirit prevailed, primitivists were attacking convention. The morality evinced by naturalists like Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser only convinced Babbitt that primitivism was overwhelming civilization. He believed that the Remnant had to create new conventions if the ordinary people were to be saved from barbarism.

Babbitt believed that a great civilization in a sense is only a great tradition, but his great civilization would not be sterile and rigid because it would continually change its standards.¹⁴ He stated that no convention is final and incapable of improvement. Through the use of will, imagination, and reason to create new standards, a society could avoid outmoded and burdensome traditions. As he put it, a “law of universal relativity” or a “oneness that is always changing” affects human life.¹⁵ Babbitt's standards were to oppose the flux of popular, unrestrained impulse but retain their relevance by being based upon institutions and not upon abstract theories of any absolute. “Standards are a matter of observation and common sense, the absolute is only a metaphysical conceit.”¹⁶ Modern man needs not absolutes but an authority to which he can turn when all else is flux.

Surprisingly for a person who usually deprecated American institutions, Babbitt held up the United States Constitution as an example of the political authority he favored. In checking the élan vital of a democratic, expansive people, the Constitution does for the nation what the frein vital does for the individual. Corresponding to the dualism within each man, American constitutional democracy reflects a sound concept of human nature and thus works well. It allows for expansion but has the checks of a traditionalist society. He heartily approved of the conservative, formalistic interpretations of the Constitution rendered by the Supreme Court during his lifetime.

Babbitt continually emphasized that a nation needs men of tradition and character, not scientific intellectuals—or any intellectuals, including university professors—to rule if it is to prosper. Leaders who act in accord with standards serve as the counterpoise to the expansive urges within society. Even within a legal structure of checks and balances, only such leaders can limit and direct the people's sheer will to power which leads to the disruption of civilization.

Babbitt displayed, basically, a distrust of the people. Such political reforms as the direct election of senators, the referendum, and the initiative increased the power of the people over their government, and Babbitt decried these changes. Parliamentary government would not find new strength through such devices; it would become impossible. The people would place too much faith in themselves and lose respect not only for their leaders but for any authority.

After surveying the history of Greek and French democracy, he concluded that democracy becomes, practically, “standardized and commercialized melodrama.”¹⁷ He believed that the progressive American leadership was putting too much faith in the common man and would “pass through disillusionment to a final despair.”¹⁸ If America were not to reverse the trend represented by progressive legislation toward direct majority rule, its version of democracy would lead it to destruction. He feared the unrestrained impulses of the populace.

He predicted that the drift in America toward unchecked democratic control would eliminate the leader loyal to sound standards.¹⁹ Babbitt approved of the democratic desire of equal opportunity for all only as long as it implied “that everybody is to have a chance to measure up to high standards.”²⁰ Then a democracy could produce individuals who look to standards above themselves. If it does not, Babbitt feared that American democratic society would become an especially unpleasant way of returning to barbarism.²¹

As he viewed twentieth-century America, he did not see ethical leaders in possession of humane standards dominating the scene as they had in the early days of the Republic. Ignoring Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, he stated that the new leaders like Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge lacked the moral gravity and intellectual seriousness of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams.

American education was to blame for the decline of standards, Babbitt lamented. In attempting to satisfy social wishes, it was mistakenly educating students in techniques which would give them control of their objective environment but not over their own subjective needs. He fervently believed that contemporary educational practices were merely increasing the student's power to destroy civilization since it gave him control over nature but not over his own temperament.

Typically, he never brought forth evidence to indicate that the classical colleges actually had been more effective in developing character. He simply relied upon his intuition and criticized contemporary higher education without any firm empirical evidence. He never followed his own plan for arriving at valid positions by testing intuitive knowledge with hard facts. He did not even come to grips with the extent to which formal education is responsible for personal standards and to what degree other personal forces are responsible. He frequently mentioned that in the past Puritanism had provided the indispensable check on the American. Yet he failed to deal with the question central to any consideration of the relationship between education and society. To what degree had education influenced society, and to what degree had society influenced education? If in the past Puritanism had provided the needed check upon the élan vital of the country, what role had education played in the process? Could formal education of any variety be expected to substitute for the loss of general beliefs among the population at large?

THE EVIL OF HUMANITARIANISM

In the midst of a progressive America passing laws to remedy social ills, Babbitt condemned the reform movement as not only futile but actually destructive. Reformers, he maintained, failed to recognize that the struggle between good and evil best takes place within the heart of each individual. Transferring this battle to society, he observed, blinds men to the realization that wars and social injustice stem from the unharmonious relationship within each man between the frein vital and the élan vital.

He reasoned that contemporary legislation came from a sympathy divorced from a realistic appraisal of human nature. Babbitt approved of the social pity which gave rise to much of the reform movement but lamented that the conflict between the élan vital and the frein vital within each man had been forgotten.²² He did not want the Christian virtue of love for one's neighbor as seen in many reformers to find expression in impersonal policies and thus take the place of individual repentance and regeneration. Christian stalwarts like Paul or Augustine, he commented, would call social reformers “weaklings and degenerates.”²³ The two saints would not have mistaken easily implemented state reforms as an adequate substitute for the hard task of individual conversion to correct principles of living.

After reflecting upon the reform movement, Babbitt pronounced it a “monstrous legalism” resulting from the attempt to deal with evil socially rather than at its source in the individual. He held that political reforms actually result in more rather than less injustice because they detract attention from the crucial issue: the balance between the élan vital and the frein vital. Moreover, every form of social legislation undermines moral standards because it substitutes force for them.

Giving expression to his elitism, Babbitt stated that if he were called upon to remedy the social evils of American life, he would place his faith “in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and the successful, and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the underdog.”²⁴ Only the beneficence of properly educated leaders would bring justice into the world. Only the moral realist, as he classified himself, comprehended that the struggle between good and evil within each man could not be shifted to society. Not reform, but humanistic education of the elite, provided the key to the solution of society's ills.

Babbitt believed that submission to the discipline of humane standards would lead to a fulfillment of the dream of human progress.²⁵ In his opinion, endless schemes for uplifting the common man would fail. Only the increased power of men of standards would bring justice. He reiterated that the humanitarian legalist passes innumerable laws for the control of people who refuse to control themselves.²⁶ Those in control of the nation seemed to be enjoying the illusion of reforming society instead of setting to the sober task of strengthening individual ethical standards.

A paradox, however, existed in this desire for elite leadership and Babbitt's condemnation of the reformers. On one hand he called for the restrictions which his leaders, in conformity with higher standards, would impose on the population. On the other hand, he bitterly condemned regulations to control antisocial behavior. He criticized Supreme Court rulings upholding legislation on working conditions of women and children, and he opposed Congressional legislation on white slavery. To be sure, Babbitt did not condone the exploitation of women and children or the existence of prostitution. He believed such conditions were evil. Yet he failed to explain why national leaders, even if they were not his elite, should not impose proper restraints upon the people. Wouldn't his elite have to take similar action?

STRENGTH OF GIANTS AND INTELLIGENCE OF CHILDREN

Although not condemning technological power itself, Babbitt did not believe that scientific findings had given mankind answers to supreme moral issues; they had only intensified the importance of such matters. America, he feared, was in danger “of combining the strength of giants with the critical intelligence of children.”²⁷ He warned that efficient megalomaniacs would not only destroy one another; they would also do the same to the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth.

Years before the First World War, Babbitt was convinced that the material power of men had moved ahead of their wisdom. Americans, he lamented, appear ignorant. Although they were not fools, they were reading just the things fools would read: comics and cheap magazines. Indeed, he thought he had witnessed the substitution of the comic book for the Bible.²⁸

The breakdown of traditional Christian values, combined with man's increased control over the forces of nature, was creating madmen who could order the use of terrible means of destruction.²⁹ With some prescience, he predicted in a vein reminiscent of Henry Adams that man might well succeed in releasing the power of the atom only to destroy himself. Higher education shared part of this blame, for it had helped to increase man's control of his environment.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

One is at all events safe in affirming that the battle that is to determine the fate of American civilization will be fought out first of all in the field of education.³⁰

As Babbitt reflected upon the American scene, he concluded that education was crucial for the future of the country. He believed that a nation uses education to create and transmit its values. He personally held that colleges and universities are the prime institutions for accomplishing this. Therefore he warned that the degeneration of institutions of higher education, even more than that of the theater, press, and popular novel, posed the greatest danger facing American civilization. The desire to make colleges and universities operationally useful to contemporary society spelled disaster for the country. Because of his negative view toward governmental reforms, he viewed the efforts of faculty members to provide advice to civil government as misdirected and ill advised. He worried more, however, about the shift within colleges and universities from concern with the subjective value structure within the individual to the concern with the objective, contemporary world.

Babbitt feared that the voluminous mass of information in American academic disciplines might well be burying the imagination, reflection, and inner energy necessary to create values. Since the rise of Germanic scholarship, scholars in all fields appeared to him to be grubbing for facts rather than searching for the cultural standards so badly needed by Western man. He thought these facts had no relevance to humanist standards and hence had nothing to do with true education. Education in his view implied the possession of standards and their transmission to the young. Scholarship was to serve as its handmaiden.

GENUINE POSITIVISM AND THE PAST

Babbitt felt that German scholarship with its emphasis upon factual research and specialization had worked against moral progress primarily because it had diverted attention from human values. According to him, the adherents of German scholarship like Charles W. Eliot looked upon man not as an end in himself but as an instrument for attaining other goals. They had idealized progress in objective knowledge without regard for man's need for values. Babbitt therefore opposed research into areas unrelated to cultural standards.

The facts Babbitt wanted scholars to study were those of human nature. More specifically, he wanted scholars to study the manner of men's actions as revealed in the past. Man can observe the manner in which his ancestors actually lived. Then he can compare what he has found to the creative findings of the imagination. Babbitt's standards would consist of those creations of the imagination which corresponded to man's past actions. Babbitt pointed out that most so-called positivists are actually incomplete positivists because they reject the greater part of mankind's experiences when they repudiate the study of the past.

Babbitt's subjective approach to knowledge separated him from the main body of contemporary American scholarship. Most professors studied the subject matter of the natural sciences, the social sciences, or even most phases of the humanities in an objective fashion. Babbitt's use of the imagination, on the other hand, made his scholarly approach radically subjective. In emphasizing the importance of studying the past, Babbitt was not setting himself apart from all other academic men. His proposals about the use of imagination to discover constants in man's nature, however, differed sharply with the main currents of twentieth-century American academic endeavor.

He strongly attacked his highly regarded fellow Harvard faculty member, William James. James' relativism denied the importance of such constants. To relativists like William James and John Dewey, Babbitt replied that no one had disproved the existence of characteristics common to all men regardless of time and place. He admitted that local and relative circumstances influence the human condition and make all cultural patterns appear relative. On the other hand, he countered, no one had shown that the conventions prevailing in the past actually had conflicted with one another.³¹ They might indeed not be relative. He himself never spelled out these enduring principles of man's nature but instead implored scholars to turn their attention to the search for them. If America failed to establish a viable civilization, he said, the blame would rest in scholarship's failure to search for new cultural standards which could serve as an expression of the constants in man's nature.

If this experiment shows signs of breaking down, the explanation is surely that it has failed thus far to achieve adequate equivalents for the traditional controls.³²

TO PRODUCE MEN OF QUALITY

In commenting upon higher education, Babbitt pointed out that the college had the special responsibility for perpetuating the humane standards necessary for the continuation of civilization. The secondary school would deal with preparatory training and the university would search for cultural standards, but the college was to develop a balance between the élan vital and the frein vital in its students. The proper general education could do this. Babbitt thought the American college could instill in its students the goal of liking and disliking “the right things.”³³ To do this he wanted it

to supply principles of taste and judgment … to give background and perspective, and inspire, if not the spirit of conformity, at least a proper respect for the past experience of the world.³⁴

The college should realize, Babbitt insisted, that its task is to produce men adhering to standards. By concentrating on this goal it could act as a check upon what he believed to be the basically expansive nature of a democracy.

Instead of focusing upon the establishment of standards, however, most programs of undergraduate education were structured toward operational utility. Most curricula did not deal with humanistic standards. Generally, they gave students the opportunity to acquire knowledge which would be useful later in life. As is clear from Babbitt's social views, he could not conceive that a curriculum designed for operational utility would result in the acquisition of standards by the students.

The new education (I am speaking, of course, of the main trend) … suggests rather a radical break with our traditional ethos. The old education was, in intention at least, a training for wisdom and character. The new education has been summed up by President Eliot in the phrase: training for service and power. We are all coming together more and more in this idea of service. But, though service is supplying us in a way with a convention, it is not, in either the humanistic or the religious sense, supplying us with standards. In the current sense of the word it tends rather to undermine standards.³⁵

In his philosophy not utility or service but humanistic standards poised an effective counter to the pursuit of unethical power.

In part he was correct, too, in voicing his concern for the fate of subjective values. As Rush Welter has aptly observed, the American faith in education was shifting during Babbitt's lifetime from an assurance that education would produce men capable of defining laudable social goals, to one of confidence only in education's ability to increase a man's technical efficiency.³⁶ If a good life does exist and standards can help men reach it, education should assist men to establish those standards.

Babbitt admitted that training for service has incidental advantages, but he wanted collegiate education to center upon personal values, not service. In the light of late-twentieth-century political history perhaps he was not altogether wrong, for he stated that:

The eager efforts of our philanthropists to do something for the negro and the newsboy are well enough in their way; but a society that hopes to be saved by what it does for its negroes and its newsboys is a society that is trying to lift itself by its own boot-straps. Our real hope of safety lies in our being able to induce our future Harrimans and Rockefellers to liberalize their own souls, in other words to get themselves rightly educated. Men of heroic capacity such as Messrs. Rockefeller and Harriman have in some respects shown themselves to be are, of course, born, not made; but when once born it will depend largely whether they are to become heroes of good or heroes of evil. We are told that the aim of Socrates in his training to the young was not to make them efficient, but to inspire in them reverence and restraint; for to make them efficient, said Socrates, without reverence and restraint, was simply to equip them with ampler means for harm.³⁷

Unfortunately Babbitt failed to perceive that future men of heroic capacity, like the Rockefellers, Harrimans, and Kennedys in the 1960's, would become heroes of good by using state power. And they would use it in just the way he condemned: by substituting legal force for individual inner restraint. His position would be represented by men like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and George Wallace, hardly conforming to his ideal of the educated man.

SPECIALIZATION

In Babbitt's view, the old classical education had assumed that men need to be disciplined to humanist standards. He lamented that the complexities of twentieth-century society demanded specialists to deal with them and thus reinforced tendencies toward specialization within the academic world. As a result, not study of the values needed for good living but fact grubbing in esoteric fields had become the way to academic promotion.

The detailed specialization of twentieth-century scholarship, he complained, threatened to turn erudition into pedantry and encouraged pure dilettantism in the field of values. He pointed, for example, to the German Ph.D. degree. Too mechanical and specialized, it rejected the broad traditions of man. According to his observation, one might satisfy the requirements for it with brilliant, narrow research but still lack the insight and reflection requisite to unify subject matter so important for the humanistic studies. In short, he did not see how it could supply the training necessary for the development of the teachers needed to strengthen the frein vital.

He suggested that a new degree requiring broad reading and understanding be substituted for the Ph.D.

Such distinctions as a First Class in an Oxford honor school or the French agrégation would not in themselves be suited to our needs; but they at least illustrate how a degree that stands primarily for reading and assimilation may be made as severe and searching as a degree that stands primarily for research. … Who can doubt that a teacher of French who had thus widely read in the ancient and modern classics would be of more use to the average college than the man who had demonstrated his “originality” by collecting examples of the preposition in Old French from Godefroy's Dictionary? Or that the classical scholar who knew his Plato and Aristotle both in themselves and in their relation to the humane tradition of the world would do more to advance his subject than the man who had devoted painful vigils to writing a thesis on the uses of dum, donec, and quoad?³⁸

To a great extent, Babbitt had just cause to complain, for the new doctoral recipients coming forth from the graduate schools of the country were neglecting broad reading and good teaching in favor of specialized research leading to publication. If need be, all too many of them would slight their students in order to cultivate the regard of their colleagues who might read and hopefully praise their books and articles. Babbitt, however, failed to devise an alternative program for training collegiate instructors. He could only assert that the search for standards would create a civilization which would produce the needed leaders of the modern age.

Babbitt's feelings on this matter were perhaps intensified because of his own position. He himself had refused to work for a Ph.D. At Harvard, he fought with the philologists oriented to esoteric factual research and ridiculed their scientific approach to the study of literature. In turn, they disapproved of him. At the beginning of his career, they had prevented his receiving a desired appointment to the classics department, and only the support of some distinguished students prevented his removal from the university altogether.

Not possessing an especially endearing personality, Babbitt had given his colleagues cause for animosity. He said that they did not possess the wisdom necessary to impart values to their students. He had maintained that the humanities should be interpreted by men of broad reading, not by specialists in fields he felt inappropriate to specialization. Declaring that Harvard faculty members did not lack humanistic traits, he asserted that those traits simply did not predominate in them. The academic men around him could not use imagination and reason to penetrate facts, organize them, and relate them to the present. In spite of the important work which Harvard faculty members like Josiah Royce and William James were doing, Babbitt remarked that professors were neglecting the formation of the minds and characters of young men who should be leading all segments of society.³⁹

With perhaps more justification, Babbitt observed that the specialists about him like George Lyman Kittredge, chairman of the department of comparative literature, were too absorbed in attaining eminence in their academic disciplines to relate their findings “to the total harmony of life.”⁴⁰ Kittredge, for example, devoted much attention to esoteric philological subjects. In a sense American scholarship in the humanities did indeed depreciate reflective scholarship, disregard the broad historical approach to literary analysis, and rely instead upon novel ideas.

Not only specialization on the professorial level disturbed Babbitt. If the colleges were to strengthen the frein vital in a humane leadership, they would have to concentrate upon a small number of subjects of no operational utility. Instead, in an effort to allow their students to acquire knowledge of operational utility, they generally had adopted various forms of the elective principle. Babbitt, thinking that no form of elective system provides the necessary restraint upon the student's élan vital, observed that at Harvard many students simply took the easiest courses.

Having provided such a rich and costly banquet of electives to satisfy the “infinite variety” of youths of eighteen, President Eliot must be somewhat disappointed to see how nearly all these youths insist on flocking into a few large courses; and especially disappointed that many of them should take advantage of the elective system not to work strenuously along the line of their special interests, but rather to lounge through their college course along the line of least resistance. A popular philosopher has said that every man is as lazy as he dares to be. If he had said that nine men in ten are as lazy as they dare to be, he would have come near hitting a great truth.⁴¹

Thus Babbitt objected to the elective principle because it did not conform to his view of human nature: i.e., men need discipline. Possessing no frein vital, most students would follow the impulses of the élan vital and have a good time.

Elective systems would not discipline the student with the proper subjects. Babbitt wanted material illustrative of the constants in human nature to be the heart of collegiate education. He thought that the Greek classics fused reason and imagination, the ingredients of humanistic standards, better than any other subject. Hence, the bulk of the curriculum should consist of them. They would provide the proper education for American youth.

… it is the Greek writers who best show the modern mind the path that it needs to take; for the modern man cannot, like the man of the Middle Ages, live by the imagination and religious faculty alone; on the other hand, he cannot live solely by the exercise of his reason and understanding. It is only by the union of these two elements of his nature that he can hope to attain a balanced growth, and this fusion of the reason and the imagination is found realized more perfectly than elsewhere in the Greek classics of the great age.⁴²

As he looked back upon the classical curriculum of the American literary college, he reasoned that it had embodied the seasoned and matured experience of a multitude of men, extending over a considerable time. The Greece of Plato, Socrates, and the Sophists remains an excellent object of study for the modern world. Losing its cultural standards, it followed the course which he feared America to be treading.

The critical moment of Greek life was, like the present, a period of naturalistic emancipation, when the multitude was content to live without standards, and the few were groping for inner standards to take the place of the outer standards they had lost. The Greek problems were like our own, problems of unrestraint; for what we see on every hand in our modern society, when we get beneath the veneer of scientific progress, is barbaric violation of the law of measure. Greek society perished, as our modern society may very well perish, from an excess of naturalism. … Therefore both in its failures and its success, Greece, especially the Greece of Socrates and Plato and the Sophists, is rich in instruction for us,—more so, I am inclined to think than any other period of the past whatsoever. This is the very moment that we are choosing to turn away from the study of Greek. One might suppose that before deserting the exemplaria graeca it would be wiser to wait until the world has another age that proves as clearly as did the great age of Greece that man may combine an exquisite measure with a perfect spontaneity, that he may be at once thoroughly disciplined and roughly inspired.⁴³

Rather than approve the prevailing trend in American undergraduate instruction toward vocational courses or general education of an immediate, factual nature, Babbitt denounced it. In his mind, the justification for American higher education lay in the strengthening of the frein vital in the students who would become the leaders in a society with no restrictions upon them other than their own sense.

He feared that American colleges and universities were failing in their responsibility.

The older education aimed to produce leaders and, as it perceived, the basis of leadership is not commercial or industrial efficiency, but wisdom. Those who have been substituting the cult of efficiency for the older liberal training are, of course, profuse in their professions of service either to country or to mankind at large.⁴⁴

He did not think that service, in its humanitarian sense, could serve as an effective counterpoise to the pursuit of unethical power. Only the cultivation of the frein vital could accomplish that.

In Babbitt's opinion, college alumni proved his assertion that American higher education was failing to develop men of standards. He thought that they presented a sorry picture. With some correctness, he pointed out that during their leisure, they are indistinguishable from men of affairs without a college education. Looking at their habits of reading, Babbitt concluded that the colleges and universities were as effective as “an immense whir of machinery in the void.”⁴⁵

HIGHER EDUCATION AND STANDARDS

Unfortunately for his case, Babbitt failed to provide evidence that the classical college had indeed functioned as he claimed. He really never grounded any of his theories about man, society, and education in the very facts which he insisted formed the basis of reputable scholarship. In deprecating the collegiate graduate, for instance, he never made any controlled study of American college and university alumni. He simply made his judgment upon the basis of random personal observations. In all his other criticisms of American education, politics, and society, he followed the same method. Essentially a literary critic, he simply referred to the subjective writings of other men which do not in themselves constitute a direct record of the actions of men. He neglected to study the economic and social forces transforming the universities.

Perhaps his basically subjective approach to life itself accounts for his disapproval of higher education for utility. The new education removed the development of individual subjective standards as the raison d'étre of the American college. While Babbitt considered these all-important, the advocates of higher education for operational utility would concentrate the energies of faculty and students upon the objective world, both natural and social.

The new curricular developments thus appeared ill advised to him. The new vocational orientation of much of the undergraduate program at most colleges and universities was of course irrelevant to Babbitt's aims for education. The nature of the curriculum which had been established in response to the changing conditions in American society appeared short sighted and foolish to a man whose central concern lay in the strengthening of the frein vital.

Self-expression and vocational training combined in various proportions and tempered by the spirit of “service” are nearly the whole of the new education. But I have already said that it is not possible to extract from any such compounding of utilitarian and romantic elements, with the resulting material efficiency and ethical inefficiency, a civilized view of life.⁴⁶

Babbitt's basic criticism of contemporary American higher education, then, does not rest primarily in the fact that colleges and universities were responding to societal needs. Rather, his argument rests upon a difference of opinion concerning the real needs of society.

What is wanted is not training for service and training for power, but training for wisdom and training for character.⁴⁷

Essentially the proponents of education for operational utility assumed that man in fact needs more control over his material and social environment. Hence they furthered the role of the natural and social sciences in higher education. Babbitt, on the other hand, did not agree with them.

What is important in man in the eyes of the humanist is not his power to act on the world, but his power to act upon himself.⁴⁸

Unfortunately for Babbitt's whole educational critique, no one knows for sure whether formal education can result in humane standards for either the individual or his society. Who can prove that the graduates of the nineteenth-century literary college in fact acted with more restraint than the graduates of the twentieth-century university? Even if it could be substantiated, how certain can those in charge of educational policy be that Babbitt's vague proposals would actually affect character more positively than a curriculum of operational utility?

In relying upon education alone to develop character, he exhibited a remarkable faith in education. He did not appreciate the role of the family, church, and community. If these institutions are more important than formal education in enculturating the young, the undergraduate curriculum would not have been crucial for the maintenance of societal standards. His concern about a university's responsibility in the creation of new cultural standards is another matter, but nevertheless, his ideas demand a naive faith in the ability of reason to change traditions of belief and value.

These objections should not detract from the importance of Babbitt's central message: the necessity for standards. His criticisms of higher education may or may not be valid, but his concern is legitimate. Without men of character, even the most elaborately structured society cannot function for the welfare of all. Babbitt at least affirmed that men could find and adopt individual and social standards.

Still, all universities should not have to drop their concern for vocational training, reorient all their research toward the creation of standards, and focus their general education upon the inculcation of these standards in order to deal with Babbitt's concerns. The country need not adopt his monist viewpoint about the function of American colleges and universities. America should have the economic and human resources to develop both power and morality. No one has yet shown them to be mutually exclusive.

If men continue to extend their control over the physical world without mastering the principles of their own nature, they may destroy themselves as Babbitt warned. The nation desperately needs leaders of wisdom and character, and American colleges and universities should be working to develop them. To a generation threatened with atomic annihilation, Babbitt's premonitions of destruction do not appear foolish.

Nevertheless, he should not be excused from his failure to deal with the issue of meeting society's current operational problems. In his critique of higher education he neglected to consider the relationship between operational complexities and the improvement of society. By objecting to education directed toward operational utility, he implied that operationally useful education is unimportant. Even if his elite came into being, it would have to control effective operational devices in order to create a better society. Faced with contemporary operational problems, could those responsible for higher education ignore the preparation needed to cope with them? In perhaps more practical terms, would those responsible for financing American colleges and universities allow them to neglect education of operational utility? In fact they have not, and Babbitt's warnings go unheeded.

Notes

1. Norman Foerster, at one time a student of Babbitt's, actually wrote more about higher education than Babbitt, but the outline of his ideas is contained in Babbitt's writings, and his thoughts follow naturally from Babbitt's assertions. Likewise, although other New Humanists like James Luther Adams, Seward Collins, George R. Elliott, William F. Giese, Frederick Manchester, Frank J. Mather, Paul Elmer More, Gorham Munson, and Odell Shepard differed from Babbitt in some respects, in general they followed his ideas.

2. Frederick Manchester and Odell Shepard, eds., Irving Babbitt; Man and Teacher (New York, 1941), pp. ix ff. In this memorial written by Babbitt's friends and associates, his wife has written a good biographical sketch.

3. Norman Foerster, ed., Humanism and America (New York, 1930).

4. C. Hartley Grattan, ed., The Critique of Humanism (New York, 1930).

5. H. L. Mencken, “The State of the Country,” American Mercury, III (1924), 123-125; T. S. Eliot, “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” Forum, LXXX (1938), 37-44; Howard Mumford Jones, “Professor Babbitt Cross-Examined,” New Republic, March 21, 1928, pp. 158-160; Walter Lippmann, “Humanism as Dogma,” Saturday Review of Literature, March 15, 1930, pp. 817-819; V. F. Calverton, “Humanism: Literary Fascism,” New Masses, V (1930), 9-10; Edmund Wilson, “Notes on Babbitt and More,” New Republic, March 19, 1930, pp. 115-120. See the analysis of this criticism by Seward Collins, a leading New Humanist, in “Criticism in America,” Bookman, LXXI (1930), 241-256, 353-364, 400-415; LXXII (1930-1931), 145-164, 209-228.

6. Irving Babbitt, On Being Creative (Boston and New York, 1932), p. 261; Irving Babbitt, Spanish Character and Other Essays (Boston and New York, 1940), p. 243.

7. Babbitt, Spanish Character, pp. 213-214.

8. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (New York, 1960), p. 137.

9. Babbitt, ibid., p. 295.

10. Babbitt, On Being Creative, p. xxx.

11. Although Babbitt himself believed in a humanist higher will, he admitted that it might also have a supernatural basis. This accounts in large part for the interest Roman Catholic writers have taken in him. See Russell Wilbur, “A Word About Babbitt,” in Commonweal, Jan. 25, 1935, pp. 364-366; Dom Oliver Grosselin, The Intuitive Voluntarism of Irving Babbitt (Latrobe, Pa., 1951); Francis E. McMahan, The Humanism of Irving Babbitt (Washington, 1931); and Louis J. A. Mercier, American Humanism and the New Age (Milwaukee, 1948).

12. Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Boston and New York, 1924), p. 278.

13. Babbitt, ibid., p. 229.

14. Babbitt, ibid., p. 301.

15. Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (Chicago, 1956), p. 124. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 7.

16. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 306.

17. Babbitt, ibid., p. 242.

18. Babbitt, ibid., p. 261.

19. Babbitt, ibid., p. 245.

20. Babbitt, ibid., p. 312.

21. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 286.

22. Babbitt, Literature and the College, p. 43.

23. Babbitt, ibid., p. 7.

24. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 205.

25. Babbitt, Literature and the College, p. 174.

26. Babbitt, On Being Creative, p. 210.

27. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 282.

28. Babbitt, Literature and the College, p. 43.

29. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 143.

30. Irving Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition,” in Foerster, Humanism and America, p. 51.

31. Babbitt, Spanish Character, p. 202.

32. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 238.

33. Babbitt, “Humanism: An Essay at Definition,” p. 43.

34. Babbitt, Literature and the College, p. 162.

35. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 303.

36. Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought, pp. 325 ff.

37. Babbitt, Literature and the College, pp. 47 ff.

38. Babbitt, ibid., pp. 94-95.

39. Babbitt, ibid., p. 119.

40. Irving Babbitt, Humanist and Specialist (Providence, 1926), p. 7.

41. Babbitt, Literature and the College, pp. 35-36.

42. Babbitt, ibid., pp. 120-121.

43. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon (Boston, 1910), pp. 251-252.

44. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 304.

45. Irving Babbitt, “The Breakdown of Internationalism,” Nation, June 24, 1915, p. 706.

46. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 293.

47. Babbitt, Literature and the College, p. 46.

48. Babbitt, ibid., p. 37.