Fraternity of Man

Though Thornton Wilder is best known as a Pulitzer Prizewinning author of twelve novels and plays (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth), he has also pursued a second career over the course of 30 years. As a teacher, he has Cone from Lawrenceville School to the University of Chicago, and finally this year to Harvard, "continually drawing comparisons, not between institutions, but comparisons between something far more striking and instructive--comparisons between attitudes, tacit assumptions, the thought world of students that I have known throughout the decades of my teachings." At Harvard's commencement last week, dressed in a rumpled blue suit and glancing occasionally at a thin sheaf of notes, Teacher Wilder eloquently summed up what he had learned about U.S. youth today: a sense of the unity of mankind.

Three Assumptions. Wilder found that the graduates of 1951, "living in an age which has variously been called ... an Age of Upheaval, an Age of Anxiety, [have developed] resources that we in 1920 felt no need to call upon. Like species of the animal kingdom, they developed adaptations . . . three tacit assumptions . . . that we could not have grasped:

"First. . . the young person today sees himself in the light of science not as one of many hundred thousands, not as one of many millions, but as one of billions.

"Secondly, a whole new tacit assumption in relation to responsibility.

"Thirdly, a realization that the things that separate men from one another are less important than the things they have in common . . .

"Now I see that we of the class of 1920 were appallingly provincial and parochial."

The Complexity of Man.Today, through the expanding studies of science, the young have become aware of the billions and billions of "souls that have lived, and the presumable billions--billions yet to live and die ...

"In one sense, the individual shrinks in this vast cousinage ... It arouses anxiety, but it is a new kind of anxiety. It is a metaphysical unease; it is not a nervousness. And it drives them to find a new basis for their individual assertion . . .

"The modern student is all alive to the complexity of man in himself and in others. He is profoundly interested not only in good, but in evil, and he assumes that life is difficult, morally difficult . . .

"With this has come a whole shift in the concept of responsibility. [His final] responsibility is to himself and not to systems. He is engaged in responsibly exploring himself as we never were . . . The masters of modern literature speak to [him] as they couldn't to [us]--Kafka about the sense of guilt, T. S. Eliot about the sources of conviction and authority . . ."

Broken Barriers. Along with this sense of man within man, science has added something more. "It has broken down the barriers between race and color, environment and cultural background . . . Those things which all men hold in common are beginning to outweigh enormously those things which separate them ... My young friends here in Cambridge have shown me over and over again that to them it is as simple as breathing that all societies are but variants of one another, that somehow all wars from now on are civil wars, and the human adventure is much the same in all times and all places.

"Now ... it is disturbing to have lost the feeling of belonging to one reassuring community, to New England, or to the United States, or to Western Civilization . . . The scientist and the poet took these away. It is a lonely and alarming business to feel one's self one in a creation of billions and billions . . . but it is exciting and inspiriting to be among the first to hail and accept the only fraternal community that finally can be valid--that painfully emerging unity of those who live on the one inhabited star."

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