Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

The Heritage of a Free Choice in an Organized Society

HE never saw American suburbanites driving home wearily, bumper to bumper, or the same Americans taking off for a weekend clear across the continent. He never saw a junior executive in a glass-caged office, agreeing, or the same junior executive at a school board meeting, disagreeing. He never saw people living and dying under the care of one big organization, their epitaph a punch card. And he did not hear people insisting urgently on the need to be themselves in the midst of impersonal bigness.

He did not speak in terms of individuals and individualism; the words he used were men and freedom. But he knew about Organization Man. In a sense he was one himself, and a good one. He knew that the central problem of democracy is to reconcile the claims of the individual with the claims of society. He has become a figure half out of folklore, half out of schoolbooks, as worn and familiar as the coin that bears his likeness. A century ago he carried out the most dramatic act of liberation in man's memory. However cogently historians may insist that the Civil War was not "about" slavery, the world will always see in it one overriding issue: whether any man is fit to hold permanent power over the life and liberty of another. He was certain that both Emancipation and the Union served universal causes. He said: "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free."

Tolstoy called him "a universal individualist." In a doctrinaire sense, which reduces man to the subject of an ideology, Abraham Lincoln was not an individualist at all. But he is the greatest, the classic, the archetypical individual in the American imagination.

One & Many. In Lincoln's mind, the American cause was "to e1evate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all." The human condition today is more elevated and yet more perilous, the weights on American shoulders are lighter as well as heavier, the people's pursuits are more confusing but also more stimulating than was dreamed of in yesterday's utopias.

The situation is symbolized by the astronauts. In orbit, they are living the greatest adventure in history, and much of the outcome depends on the soundness of their minds and the stoutness of their hearts, whose beat is heard over loudspeakers around the world. Yet even more depends on thousands of people on the ground who control the spacemen's ascent, their course, their return or their death.

As man asks more of himself, he must also ask more of others. To carry out his dreams, he needs organization, vast and complex. He is at a point of greater freedom as well as greater dependence. He seeks a new balance between the one and the many.

The Divine Spark. "The lonely crowd" is part of the language, and the new burdens on the individual are discussed and decried on all sides. Not only by angry, narrow sociologists (the late C. Wright Mills) or sociology's cheap popularizer (Vance Packard), or a Marxist culture quack (Erich Fromm). Speaking for more serious observers, Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich fears that the pressures on the individual to conform and adjust may mean a drift toward collectivism and "authoritarian democracy," that man may become