Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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"an object, a piece of machinery." This applies not only to ordinary individuals but to the great, of whom there may be a shortage. In the seats of the mighty, there seem to be more personalities than individuals, more preoccupation with image than with individuality.

While optimistic about man's future, Philosopher William Ernest Hocking nevertheless sees the problem. "Corporate officialdoms," he says, "are helpless and barren—the parties, bureaus, departments, cabinets, commissions—barren because of the inner cancellation of each other's certitudes. The composite program, prudentially polished, has every virtue in it but life. Where there is no personal vision, the people perish." And the late Whitney Griswold put it thus: "Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam."

The Dreadful Threat. Only a generation ago, the great plea of social conscience was that unfettered individualism must be curbed for the sake of the community as a whole. Freedom of conscience from religious persecution, political freedom from arbitrary rule, even economic freedom from "capitalist exploitation"—all these greatly troubled past ages, but by and large they are no longer at issue in the U.S. Today's champions of the individual do not worry about religious persecution but about religious blandness, not about outright tyranny but about creeping collectivism, not about economic exploitation but blind and well-paid loyalty to one's job.

In short, the freedom that is supposedly threatened is the freedom of the individual to be fully himself. An ad in a fashion magazine no longer warns of body odor but of a more dreadful threat: "If you're not you, you're nobody."

The belief that the individual is Somebody, that, in Emerson's words, "the private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy than any kingdom," is extraordinary when seen in historical perspective. It is held neither natural nor right in most civilizations.

All the great Far Eastern religions consider created matter, including man, so barbaric that the only hope lies in nirvana, in which the soul—unnamed, unnumbered, unidentified—achieves a blessed reunion with the cosmic spirit. The Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer expressed this Eastern anti-individualism perfectly in his novel The Demons. Looking Eastward, he mused that there "individual life does not rebel; there is too little of it for rebellion. One soul mingles with another like smoke." But in the West, "every life has its own special, if invisible, garden plot. . . . A man stands alone between the tended flower beds and the little porticoes of a house from which no one, by law and equity, is entitled to expel him. He stands alone, by himself; the soft blue air is around him; he is unencumbered on all sides, like a statue. This is the only way he knows how to be; only in this way can he be big or little, crooked or straight, good or bad."

The Triangle. Even where the air is no longer soft or blue, where people are far from unencumbered, this remains essentially the