Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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writing (current project: a new book on The Philosophy of Law). The rest of the time, he paints portraits, putters with surveying instruments (he likes maps because "they last for all time"), and receives a stream of visitors. Yet his style of thought owes much less to Thoreau than his style of life. "The tightest of organizations depends on individual creativity," says Hocking. "When that creativity is limited to a few at the top, we have despotism. But organization as such does not crush the individual. Most of us spend time under a master, and if he tells us to do some thing that is morally wrong, we must refuse. Creativity exists as long as the servant has any moral initiative of his own. Individualism grows and spreads with responsibility. You can only make men free when they are inwardly bound by their own sense of responsibility."

There are signs that the U.S. is increasingly recognizing this, particularly among the no-longer-silent younger generation. Their education has ceased to be a kind of finishing school for "life adjustment," and they seem tough-minded, earnest and determined, without being dull.

New Ecumenicity. The West has undoubtedly entered a new phase of its history. Between the Renaissance and the 19th century, its great drive was toward more and more individual autonomy, to make man in the Kantian sense an end rather than a means. In this century the ideal of unity, of ecumenicity, has strongly reappeared. There is no denying that this diminishes the individual's feeling of freedom, his sense of controlling his own destiny. Much has been lost since a simpler, freer day. But no one can turn back. The U.S. cannot break up the organization any more than the 19th century could break the machines, even though the Luddites tried it. Nor is a return possible from much-denounced "mass culture" to the "folk art" of old (which, as it happens, is largely a sentimental invention of later critics). Such individualist yearnings, as David Riesman points out, really imply "that several hundred million people must disappear to make the world less crowded."

None of which means that the indi vidual today should fail to fight; but he must know the right battle. He must start with the present reality of the organization world and make it, and himself in it, free—through courage, imagination and intelligence.

There is a growing, impatient sense that in this situation, a new kind of individuality is needed. But perhaps what is needed is also something of an older kind. Modern man lives in many overlapping groups; in each, he must find his place, must have his say, must leave his mark, if he can. In a way, this requires him to be a politician in the highest meaning of the word. Politics is the real means of mediation between the individual and the group. This was Lincoln's genius. Today's Americans, enmeshed in community, can only wish for Lincoln's qualities—he was politic without being unprincipled, patient without being resigned, flexible without being opportunistic, tough-minded without being brutal, determined without being fanatical, religious without being dogmatic or unworldly, tender without being sentimental, and devoted to man without worshiping him.

These qualities, along with the country that bred them and the civilization that nurtured them, are