November 25, 1893

Joseph Wood Krutch (November 25, 1893 to May 22, 1970) was a popular commentator on American culture mid last century. His ideas were outlined by his alma mater in these words:

"Though he may well be remembered most for his remarkable nature writing, it was as a cultural critic that Joseph Wood Krutch gained his earliest recognition.....

"In 1924, after he completed his graduate study here at Columbia, Krutch joined the editorial board of The Nation ...This son of Knoxville—who now enjoyed the urbanity of his Columbia Ph.D. and his Greenwich Village walk-up—was proud to announce in his dispatches that his standards were different from those of his fellow Tennesseans. .... among her sons who know better there is scarcely one who has the courage to stand up for what he thinks and knows.” Krutch was happy to count himself as one of those few.

"For Krutch, the Scopes trial [which he wrote about] was a symptom of the vast gulf which lies between the two halves of our population”—benighted provincials and educated, sophisticated urbanites....

"[In his writing] Krutch compared the development of civilization to that of a child. It is one of Freud’s quaint conceits that the child in the mother’s womb is the happiest of living creatures,” .... Even as an infant, the child finds the world generally compliant to his needs and wants. Soon, however, the child discovers with enraged surprise that there are wills other than his own and physical circumstances that cannot be surmounted by any human will. Only after the passage of many years does he become aware of the full extent of his predicament in the midst of a world which is in very few respects what he would wish it to be.”

"Thus too, Krutch suggested, with civilization: “As civilization grows older, it too has more and more facts thrust upon its consciousness and is compelled to abandon one after another, quite as the child does, certain illusions which have been dear to it.”
...Krutch described the dilemma of modern man bereft of the comforts of poetry, mythology, and religion, and left only—in Krutch’s view—with the sterile knowledge of nature.

"Humanism, he suggested, was inevitably and unalterably opposed to the natural impulses, as revealed by science, which have made the human animal possible. If humanism had been rendered impotent by science, science itself offered no solace to the human spirit ....

"In his essays on the modern temper, Krutch was not only describing—but also in some measure creating—the intellectual currents of the time. ...[The Modern Temper] was a best seller when it appeared in 1929, and Krutch was much in demand as a lecturer. And his book, still in print today, became a canonical text for the understanding of what passed for the advanced thinking of his era....

"In the thirties, however, Krutch’s resignation was replaced by a spirit of resistance in his cultural commentary. Rather than climbing giddily onto the bandwagon of advanced thought, Krutch demurred from the leftist enthusiasms of his Nation colleagues and—now writing with unmistakable conviction—published a series of essays in Harper’s and The Nation that were collected in a small volume, Was Europe a Success?

"Having traveled to the Soviet Union in the late twenties, he was deeply skeptical of the enthusiasm of many of his fellow intellectuals for the Soviet experiment; and the political hurlyburly of the thirties, with its impassioned Marxism, left Krutch distinctly cold. He wrote that in the early thirties he felt much as a cultivated Greek or Roman must have felt in the early days of Christianity when he “discovered with amazement that his most intimate friends were turning, one by one, to the strange new delusion. . . . I, too,” he said, “have now witnessed the process of conversion. I too have now found myself faced with friends whose mental processes have come, overnight, to be quite incomprehensible and to whose vocabularies have suddenly been added words obviously rich with meanings which elude all my efforts to comprehend them.”

"To his rhetorical question, Krutch responded that—warts and all—Europe was a success and was not to be readily exchanged for a mess of revolutionary porridge. He insisted “upon the right to value some things which have no bearing upon either production or distribution” ....

"... And he insisted that there was little reason, even in the midst of an economic depression, to hope that a postrevolutionary America—divorced from its European roots—would be a better place. It is odd,” Krutch noted, “that the only government which claims to have the good of its citizens at heart should also be the only one (except for fascist Italy and Nazi Germany) which finds it necessary to prevent them from escaping its jurisdiction. Surely,” he concluded in the epigrammatic way that characterized his writing, “it is an odd Utopia which finds it necessary to lock its citizens in every night.”

"Not long after the publication of his commentaries on the political enthusiasms of the thirties, Krutch left the editorial board of The Nation and took his position on the Columbia faculty in 1937. His writing now was not that of the periodical journalist but rather that of the university professor. And it was not until he retired from Columbia to Tucson in 1952 that Krutch once again turned his hand seriously to cultural commentary. But in his intense engagement during his Columbia years with the lives and works of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau—two men about whom he wrote masterful critical biographies—Krutch found confirmation of perspectives that would powerfully inform the two decades of social commentary that, along with his nature writing, would distinguish the final phase of his career.
...
"[F]rom Thoreau Krutch gained confirmation of his temperamental apoliticism, of his conviction that man had freedom of choice and was not a victim of determinism—and, of course, that the natural world was charged with far more human meaning than Krutch had allowed in The Modern Temper.
"Many of these convictions came together in his book, The Measure of Man, which received the 1954 National Book Award for nonfiction. The book was conceived as a reassessment of the modern temper Krutch had described 25 years before; and it was, in the end, Krutch’s repudiation of the anguished defeatism that marked the earlier study. Now informed by his patient observations of the non-human natural world of plants and animals, Krutch insisted that two of man’s distinctive human characteristics were his ability freely to choose one thing over another and his capacity to create and act upon values.

"The social sciences, he insisted, took at best a partial measure of man. “The methods employed for the study of man,” he said, “have been for the most part those originally devised for the study of machines or the study of rats, and are capable, therefore, of detecting and measuring only those characteristics which the three have in common.” Human consciousness may not lend itself to quantification in the laboratory or examination by questionnaire, but the commonsense evidence of experience shows it to be “the one thing which incontrovertibly is,” Krutch insisted. “To refuse to concern ourselves with it is to make the most monstrous error that could possibly be made.”
.....
"Looking back in the fifties on his earlier career, and thinking of The Modern Temper, for which he was best known, Krutch commented:

“I thought I was an intellectual because of the number of things I did not believe. Only very slowly did I come to realize that what was really characteristic of myself and my age was not that we did not believe anything but that we believed very firmly in a number of things which are not really so. We believed, for example, in the exclusive importance of the material, the measurable, and the controllable. We had no doubts about what science proves’ and we took it for granted that whatever science did not prove was certainly false. . . . The trouble was not that we were skeptical but that we were not skeptical enough.”
.....
"As in his nature writing, where he found unexpected implications in familiar but unexamined natural phenomena, Krutch in his later social commentary addressed himself to random, quotidian specimens of contemporary life and asked us to join him in examining their implications."

Let us quote Krutch himself from the nature writing mentioned above. He said
"Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most."

And elsewhere: "If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers."

The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch (1969) contains this domestic picture:

"Like the cactus flower I am a hot house plant. Even my cats gaze dreamily out of the window at a universe which is no longer theirs. How are we to resist, if resist we can? This house into which I have withdrawn is merely an expedient and it serves only my mere physical existence. "

Krutch, who also said, "Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence," rewards rereading today.