Selected Essays

Humanism & Modern Life

There are certain periods that say they have nothing to do with man: that say he should be used, like brick, like cement; that say he should be built from, not for. Social architecture takes its measure from the scale of man. Sometimes it becomes hostile to man and nourishes its own majesty by belittling and deprecating him.

Assyrian captives swarm like chickens under the feet of the immense king; warriors, who personify the state-power hostile to man, kill bound pygmies with their long spears; and the Egyptians and the Egyptian builders dispose of the human mass as if it were inert matter, of which there is always bound to be a sufficient supply, which has to be provided in any quantity that may happen to be required.

But there is another social architecture; and of this, too, man is the scale and the measure. It does not, however, use man as material from which to build, but builds for the sake of man; it does not build its majesty on the insignificance of personality, but on a higher expediency that corresponds to the needs of the individual.

Everybody senses the monumentality of form of the oncoming social architecture. The mountain is still not visible, but already it casts its shadow over us, and we who have grown unaccustomed to monumental forms of social life, having become accustomed to the politico-legal flatness of the nineteenth century, move about in this shadow with fear and perplexity, not knowing whether it is the wing of oncoming night, or the shadow of our native city that we are about to enter.

Simple mechanical immensity and bare quantity are hostile to man, and it is not some new social pyramid we find enticing, but social Gothic: the free play of weights and forces, a human society, conceived as a dense and complex architectural forest, where everything is expedient and individual, and where every part echoes in exchange with the immense whole.

The instinct for social architecture—that is, the structuring of life in majestic monumental forms that would seem to far exceed the direct needs of man—is deeply inherent in human societies, and no mere whim dictates it.

Reject social structure, and even the simplest dwelling, the one most indubitably necessary for all, man’s home, will collapse.

In countries threatened by earthquake, people build close to the ground, and this tendency to flatness, this rejection of architecture, beginning with the French Revolution, runs through the whole legal life of the nineteenth century, all of which passed in the tense expectation of a subterranean shock, a social blow.

But the earthquake did not spare the flat dwellings either. The chaotic world smashed its way into both the English “home” and German Gemüt; chaos sings in our Russian stoves, chaos knocks in our chimney dampers and grates.

How to preserve the human dwelling from these awesome quakes? Where to bolster its walls against the subterranean shocks of history? And who will dare to say that the human dwelling, the free house of man, ought not to stand on the earth as its best ornament and the most solid thing that exists?

The legal thought of the last generations turned out to be powerless to protect the very thing for the sake of which it had come into being, over which it had struggled and on which fruitlessly reflected.

No statutes on the rights of man, no principles of property and inalienability insure the human dwelling any longer; they do not save homes from catastrophe; they provide neither certitude nor security.

The Englishman more than others concerns himself (hypocritically) with legal guarantees of the person, but he has forgotten that the concept “home” came into being many centuries ago in his own country as a revolutionary concept, as a natural justification for the first social revolution in Europe, deeper and more akin to our own time, as a type, than the French Revolution.

The monumentality of the oncoming social architecture is implicit in its vocation to organize world economy according to the principle of a worldwide domesticity to serve the needs of man, extending the circle of his domestic freedom to boundaries that are worldwide, blowing the flame of his individual hearth to the dimensions of a universal flame.

The days to come seem cold and frightening to those who do not understand this, but the inner warmth of the days to come, the warmth of expediency, economy, and teleology, is as clear to the contemporary humanist as the heat of the kindled stove of our own day.

If an authentically humanistic justification is not at the base of the coming social architecture, then it will crush man as Assyria and Babylonia did.

The fact that the values of humanism have become rare now, as though removed from circulation and hidden, isn’t at all a bad sign. Humanistic values have merely gone underground and hoarded themselves away, like gold currency, but, like the gold supply, they secure the whole ideational commerce of contemporary Europe and from their underground administer it all the more authoritatively.

Switching to gold currency is a matter for the future, and in the realm of culture it will mean the exchange of current ideas—paper issue—for the gold coinage of the European humanistic heritage; and it is not under the spade of the archeologist that the excellent florins of humanism will ring; but they will see their day, and as sound current coin they will start circulating from hand to hand, when the time comes.