JOURNALISM AND JOACHIM'S CHILDREN

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finding, after all, that it needed the despised "value judgments, and that these could not be extracted from statistics (Kinsey and some other social scientists haven't heard the news of the Positivist decay). Along with the positivist decline has come a revival of the pre-Gnostic views of the world, Mortimer Adler and others have made much more visible the body of Catholic scholastic philosophy resting on Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps more important, for the predominantly Protestant U.S., is the recent movement to restate and strengthen Protestant philosophy and theology. Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr,* a progressive in politics, insistently reminds that man will not progress on this earth beyond his essential imperfection. Niebuhr says that man sensing his superiority to the rest of earthly creation "assumes that he can gradually transcend [his finiteness] until his mind becomes identical with universal mind. All his intellectual and cultural pursuits . . . become infected with the sin of pride."

Niebuhr believes that "it is quite wrong to define Communism as simply the subordination of the individual to the 'state.' . . . Communism is so cruel and so fanatical because it has a completely erroneous conception of human nature. Living by the illusion that the abolition of a social institution [property] will redeem man of all sin, it naturally feels justified in using any means which will attain this end... There is a certain pathos in the fact that these illusions are merely hard variety of the soft illusions [of] Christian and secular sentimentalists . . ." Moral progress for our day begins with acceptance of Niebuhr's limits, with the proverb: "The trees do not grow up to the sky." In man's world that exists, change is the law—growth and decay. But natures, including human nature, cannot be changed on earth. Rational politics consists in applying what is known about man's nature to the facts of the world as they are—not in trying to fit imagined men into imagined facts.

The world's way out of Gnostic confusion depends largely on the U.S. Most nations were set in their present mold by revolutions that came after the great Gnostic triumph of the French Revolution. The American Revolution (like the British) occurred before this turning point, and basic American institutions and attitudes are, therefore, relatively free of Gnostic influence. The U.S. Constitution does not invent rules of morality and try to fit men to them by government fiat. The Constitution assumes that the moral code exists as the substance of society, and sets up a form in which a particular society can pursue its legitimate goal of making sense in politics. The specific terms of the Constitution cannot be applied to all peoples, but the spirit of government limited by moral law can be.

Would moral progress halt or slow down material progress? No doubt the rapid advance of physical science was made partly under the stimulating idea that men were gods who could change nature. But to join Gnostics Anonymous, to swear off that particular stimulus, does not mean that society has to forgo further material progress. Suppose Faust did sell his soul for worldly knowledge; in what court can Mephisto enforce collection of future installments? Provided only that Faust no longer seeks the forbidden