Pitfalls & Choices

THE SURVIVAL OF WESTERN CULTURE--Ralph Tyler Flewelling-- Harper ($3).

Author Flewelling, director of the school of philosophy at the University of Southern California, attempts to answer Oswald Spengler's pessimism. His long professorial study of what civilization is and can be is weakened by its diffuseness and strengthened by its Old Testament fervor. Says Professor Flewelling: "We need a wind in the world which shall sweep away our whole refuge of lies." When a society's institutions no longer possess vitality, the life of people within that society becomes false. Contemporary Western civilization, for all its great contributions to human thought in the twin notions of individualism and progress, is dangerously debilitated. Religion has become parochial, philosophy is in shreds and patches, morality is without authority, science is without morals, education has become computation, justice has become a study of technicalities. The soul of modern man is not divided; it is shattered.

The cure, says Flewelling, is in the recognition of man's individual worth and dignity, and the carrying of that knowledge and all the material and spiritual goods which have grown from it, throughout the world. This is the inexhaustible mine of inspiration from which a new world civilization can emerge. The Survival of Western Culture is a civilized and humanizing message on the pitfalls and choices which are now before Western man.

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