A Passion for Ideas and Order

The main business of journalism, Henry Robinson Luce once said, "is with the phenomenon, the event, the concrete, here and now . . . But unless we pay attention to the great truths, new and old, we will not do justice to reporting the phenomena." Perhaps more than any journalist of his generation, Harry Luce--who died three years ago last week at the age of 68--was a man in love with ideas. He was not a prophet or philosopher but an editor and publisher constantly engaged with the temporal problems of current journalism. But as longtime LIFE Editor John K. Jessup notes in the perceptive introduction to The Ideas of Henry Luce (Atheneum; $12.50), "his feeling for the continuity of history and for abstract ideas made him eager to impose order on the chaos of the world's daily happenings."

The themes that preoccupied Luce were varied: the need for an aristocracy (of worth, not wealth), the providential course of U.S. history, the civilizing viability of Christian thought, the duty and responsibility of the U.S. in "the American Century." Luce's occasionally forensic manner and his brand of intellectual passion are rarely found today. But the questions he asked--and many of his answers--are still pertinent to the country he loved with an unabashi patriotism. Herewith a limited sampling of Editor Luce's thoughts, drawn from the Jessup volume.

THE PRESS (1937): The department-store theory of publishing, the give-the-public-what-it-wants theory, is the prevailing theory of publishing today. The first and principal danger of the Press-that-gives-the-people-what-they-want is that there is no significant restraint on vulgarity, sensationalism and even incitement to criminality. The second danger, which is perhaps even more insidiously deleterious to the public taste and morals, is the fact that there is in this situation an enormous financial incentive to publish twaddle--yards and yards of mediocrity, acres of bad fiction and triviality, square miles of journalistic tripe.

LIBERALISM (1953): "Liberal is what everybody would like to be." Yes, of course, and why? Very simple; because we are all Americans. Even the reactionaries today call themselves the "true" liberals. If there's anything wrong with America today, it could be summed up in one symptom: that Americans don't quite know what it is to be m liberal--joyously, thankfully, proudly liberal. For America is the supreme embodiment of the Great Liberal Tradition and if, for as much as one generation, America forgets d what it is to be liberal, then America will no longer be herself, but just one more stupid, IF fear-ridden empire ready to be carted to the natural-history museum of human failure.

AMERICA AS A WORLD POWER (1941): America cannot be responsible for the good behavior of the entire world. But America is responsible, to herself as well as to history, for the world environment in which she lives. If America's environment is unfavorable to the growth of American life, then America has nobody to blame so deeply as she must blame herself.

PRAGMATISM AND LAW (1952): In the last few decades, we have incorporated a huge amount of social justice into our legal fabric. But we have no coherent--or generally received--philosophy of government and law to match our actual performance. Here is a classic example of social facts outrunning social theory. This is a strong point for the pragmatist; he may say, with pride, the less theory, the better the practice. But it may also be said that pragmatism has come to the end of its rope.

WORLD ORDER (1958): When America makes the rule of law its No. 1 objective in world affairs--then and only then will American foreign policy express the character of this nation. The example of our country contributed mightily to the worldwide drive for national independence; it is up to us to see that that drive moves forward in orderly channels. The United States achieved a prosperity that stimulates men everywhere to demand more material things; it is up to us to see established the kind of order without which such hopes are illusions, doomed to end in bitterness and anger. We invented the atomic bomb; it is up to us to tame it.

CHANGE (1967): As part of going modern, each nation in Asia and in Africa wishes to establish its identity. Nationalism is one expression of this search for identity--that is a Western concept. The West, having invented nationalism, now seeks to transcend it--or at any rate to moderate its claims. What is certainly true about the West is that we ourselves are going through a period of radical change. The gulf between us today and us tomorrow may be an even bigger gulf than the one between East and West. It is said of today's youth that the gulf between them and their parents is greater than previous gulfs between generations. Young people today must be prepared to find, 25 years from now, that the gulf between them and their children will be even greater.

BUSINESS (1928): Within the last 50 years, business has been jockeyed, especially in America, into a defensive, suspicious, false tory position. Defensive, because business, the great innovator in all else, is popularly conceived of as opposing political innovation. Suspicious, because its distrust of politicians is exceeded only by its contempt for them. False, because a tory businessman is as unnatural as a liberal Dalai Lama. You often hear that silly remark that the least government is the best government--silly because, like the concept of anarchy, it is Utopian. It will come true in heaven, in which time and place it will be equally true that the best business is no business.

CONSERVATIVE RESPONSIBILITY (1934): I think we can define a series of minimum principles which the conservatives must acknowledge before there can be any hope that our heritage of liberty can be conserved by the conservatives. The first is that a livelihood must be guaranteed to every man. Less than a year ago I was talking with one of the keenest and finest bankers I know. He was scandalized by this proposal. In my own mind there is no doubt whatever that if [the banker] could, with a fresh mind, set out to discover what modern America is, he would come inescapably to the conclusion that America can and therefore must guarantee a livelihood to every man. And no qualifications.

BEING AN AMERICAN (1950): A verdict on me as an American might be that I am too much the American-in-general and not enough the American-in-particular. The ideals conflict in me--and perhaps in every American. The ideal of hero (Washington) and saint (Lincoln) on the one hand, and, on the other, the ideal of being a regular guy. Perhaps these are the two conflicting ideals that run through all of mankind. But they are, I think, peculiarly American-ideals-in-conflict. Nowhere is the sweet compulsion to be a regular guy so strong as in America. Yet nowhere, I think, do so many people have so great a yearning to rise above the commonplace and identify themselves with their country in its aspect of nobility.

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