Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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The problem goes far beyond business. Unions are full of Organization Men. Nobel prizes these days are awarded to entire teams, because the individual's contribution is increasingly merged with others'. There is a kind of intellectual welfare state: poets and novelists spend their lives in the sheltering arms of universities. Men with ideas may not ask, like their "commercial" brothers: "Will it sell?" But they do ask: "Will it get me a Guggenheim?" Foundations pour their fertilizing funds over the landscape, doing a great deal of good, but not necessarily for the individual: it costs too much to give small amounts to individual applicants, while it is much easier to give large sums to organizations. Scientists, although they often think of themselves as individualists, actually tend to be highly cultish.

Britain's C. P. Snow, who has paid more attention than most writers to modern organization, believes that the threat to the individual is vastly exaggerated. "It is a cliche to think that persons in organization society are much less interesting than romantic rebels," he says. "That is a superficial, early 19th century concept of Rousseau-ish man. Variety of temperament and experience within organization seem to me quite as large as anywhere else."

In the Woodwork. Artists in particular are the guardians, or victims, of the Rousseau romanticism that Snow deplores. They see themselves as the champions of the individual against the Philistines. The stance, however, is no longer true. There will always be Philistines, but right now they are hiding in the woodwork, behind the De Koonings and the Klees. If there is any limit on the surge of artistic creativity, it is imposed not by the George Babbitts but by the "Gaylord Babbitts," a name coined by Peter Viereck to denote the arbiters of taste who run in packs and judge in cliques.

The situation is familiar in other fields. Scientific innovators encounter no resistance; they are eagerly embraced. The number of condemned heresies is shrinking all the time. "When I was young," recalls Philosopher Sidney Hook, 60, "certain positions on smoking by women, birth control, easy divorce and labor unions were considered dangerously radical. Not now. What we suffer from today is not fear of ideas so much as a dearth of ideas." Disagreeing for its own sake, says Hook, is simply synthetic individualism. "A man can conform or not conform and still be an individual, as long as he uses independent judgment."

The best (and worst) of causes do not necessarily make for independent judgment; on either side of the battle for Negro equality, positions are ritualistic rather than individual. Liberals are wedded to the notion that dissent is being silenced everywhere, because it gives them that desperately needed feeling—so rarely available since McCarthy—of being oppressed. Actually, nothing could be less individual than the standard causes to which most liberals are unquestioningly loyal, as one is to a fine old club even if the service is bad.

One emphatically unsilenced, and fashionable, heretic is Author Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), a jolly intellectual anarchist who wants to break up the government and the public schools,