The City of Man: Mr. Agar's Plea for World Citizenship

A TIME FOR GREATNESS. By Herbert Agar. Little, Brown and Company. $2.50

HERBERT AGAR is one of the new Americans who, in 1939, rose to the challenge of barbarism and gave themselves up wholeheartedly to the task of rousing our country from its puerile dream of successfully committing treason against the human race by deserting it.A Time for Greatness is a summary of his faith and his reasoned convictions: Mr. Agar wrote it just before joining the United States Navy as Lieutenant Commander. Because the nature of his duties will probably silence him till the war is over, these pages have a special significance. This book has the weight of a Last Testament.

The main thesis of A Time for Greatness is that the seeds of the war lay deep in our whole civilization. They were sown by the belief that economic operations were the automatic source of our moral values and our intellectual achievements. If we were industrious, we should be prosperous; if prosperous, we could be secure, provided we minded our own business; if we minded our own business, we should not suffer any evil consequences from our intellectual stupidity or our moral paralysis. By withdrawing to our isolationist hole and shamming dead we should escape the attention of the beasts of prey that were at large in the world.

This philosophy, Mr. Agar points out, denies the essential nature of civilization: first, that every man’s fate is bound up with the life and death of all mankind; and second, that “civilization means rules and promises which are kept. It requires, not only the conquest of the material environment, but the discipline and the standards with which to judge the value of acts and thoughts and passions. Without such disciplines and standards, victories over the forces of nature may be more disastrous than defeats. We know now that a people can be heir to all the techniques and knowledge of the ages and still behave pathologically, like hordes of vicious and sadistic children.”

Here, Mr. Agar points out, lies the ground for action in the present war. Our task is to rehabilitate civilization, not merely by opposing the poisonous barbarism of the Nazis on the battlefield, but by recovering possession of our own fundamental faith in human values. If we are in the present war as the result of an external attack alone, our actions are without moral value: the whole affair becomes a mere farce, as lacking in significance as would be a death that followed a fall from slipping on a banana peel. Actually the present crisis is not a farce but a tragedy: it is a fate we have brought on ourselves by our ignoble beliefs and our evasive cowardly actions. We can redeem ourselves only by dedicating our actions to the welfare of mankind. Our democracy must deliberately choose high politics or become the deserving victim of its own degradation.

No one else has painted the moral background of the war with surer strokes or greater eloquence; and no one else, on the basis of his tireless campaigning during the past two years, has a better right to be heard. Even at this late date, the lessons that Herbert Agar has been teaching up and down the country have not been learned. The fact that open apologists for our enemies’ actions, like Hamilton Fish and Burton Wheeler, dare to ask for political support is a sign of this country’s profound moral callousness.

Because of its sound ethical core, therefore, A Time for Greatness deserves earnest reading by every American. Unfortunately, Mr. Agar’s practical devotion to the cause of democracy has not given him the leisure to establish any fresh lines of thought on the concrete political and economic issues opened up by the war. Hence the chapters on the role of business and labor after the war are both superficial in their analysis and a little highhanded in their dismissal of less traditional views than Air. Agar holds.

As a loyal colleague of the City of Alan group, Air. Agar more than once cites statements from its Declaration on World Democracy; but the meagerness and conventionality of his own political and economic proposals demonstrate the wisdom of that group’s original program — defeated by lack of funds—to devote a period of two years’ study to a searching examination and restatement of the problems raised by capitalism, communism, and democratic cooperation in both the economic and the political spheres. Mr. Agar’s moral intuitions remain most useful, therefore, as criticism rather than as construction.

LEWIS MUMFORD