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Ethical Cynics. The quest, says John C. Schroeder, professor of religion, is partly a religious one—a reclaiming, as Niebuhr put it, of "the ancestral ground on which previous generations were nurtured but which they abandoned." Yet, "if students 25 years ago were shallow in their disdain of theological speculation, they had ethical verve in believing that they had to do something about their world. The religious problem of this generation is that they do not see that the price they have paid for intellectual maturity is a loss of ethical commitment. Paradoxically they have become religious believers and ethical cynics . . . They may smile at the moral naivete of their fathers, who were too ready to mount their ethical horses and ride off rapidly in every direction; but nevertheless they lack the conviction that they ought or that they can significantly affect their world . . ."
New Mentality. Perhaps, says Thornton Wilder, '20, the reason for youth's apparent lack of conviction is that the silent generation is actually "fashioning the Twentieth Century Man. It is not only suffering and bearing forward a time of transition, it is figuring forth a new mentality. In the first place, these young people will be the first truly international men and women ... In the Twenties and Thirties one felt oneself to be one among millions; these young people feel themselves to be one among billions . . . On the one hand the individual has shrunk; on the other, the individual has been driven to probe more deeply within himself to find the basis for a legitimate assertion of the claim of self . . .
"Some of us in the previous generations hurled ourselves into social reform and social revolution; we did it with a personal passion that left little room for deliberation ... To correct one abuse we were ready to upset many a benefit. It was of such crusaders that the Sidney Webbs were finally driven to say, 'We hate moral indignation.' The emerging International Man will move less feverishly in his enlarged thought-world. This generation is silent because these changes call not for argument but for rumination. The mistakes of the previous generations are writ large over the public prints."