The Corruption of Bauhaus Ideology

I came to Weimar in 1999 when it was declared The Cultural Capital of Europe to research the history of its most famous institution. As a homeless kid in Depression Detroit (1930-45), I was eager to explore what I had learned in graduate school about Walter Gropius’s attempt to bring Good Design for “the working classes”. Both he and Mies van der Rohe came out of the horrors of World War as “lefties”. That ideology would haunt both of them as the rightist ideals of Naziism gradually took over in 1933. Gropius’s  Denkmal was for the Victims of the March Putsch (1923). Indeed the rightists were gradually expanding in the Weimar assembly. (The first minster of education to be a Nazi sounded the warning. But Gropius didn’t like fights. Indeed his first wife Alma Mahler chided him for being too nervous to participate in the Denkmal dedication in the Weimar cemetery.
 

Similarly, Mies' (theoretically the third and final director) first famous work was a Denkmal for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg (1926) in the Berlin Cemetery.) In 1930 as Mies started to take over what was left of the Bauhaus, Alfred Rosenberg wanted to know why he had so honored the founders of the German Communist Party. (Mies tried to smile affably and dropped all the Communist students. But it was too late. He became a Nice Nazi until 1937 when Gropius got him a summer home in Yellowstone.) 

I had a  serendipitous encounter in 1970 with Bertrand Goldberg (1913-97) who was Mies’ Azubi until the school finally closed. He became my architectural mentor every time I visited Chicago. Indeed he was  easily the greatest architect to attend the school, still in Dr. Annette Seeman’s standard history (2010) only his name is listed with thirteen other American Bauhaus students.. Period. In our last meeting, August 1987, the day after Timothy Dwight blew up the government center in Oklahoma, we were in a very gloomy mood. Bert sadly criticized the way the current Bauhaus had betrayed the working class ideals of Gropius which the Chicago architect implacably followed to his dying day. 

There has never been a Goldberg exhibition in Germany, partly from total ignorance of his work and partly from the distorted hagiographical version the current Bauhaus promoters use to hide their shame at the real Nazi and DDR truths about his aborted ideal.  When I discovered these contradictions in the true history, I was removed from press contacts.   

The only exception has been Omar Akbar, the Afghani engineer who ran the Dessau part of what the Bauhaus brass have just re-named the Bauhaus Triennale (June 2013). Their plans include new teenage (12 and up) seminars to combat “Bauhaus Hate”! (I think they’re talking about me! Their latest, greatest lie: I only report objectively their betrayal of Gropius idealism!) I wish they would remind themselves of that bad old Nazi habit of Beruf Verbot.

My first surprise was to discover how minor an architect Gropius was. He cried to his mother in lettrers,”I can’t draw. I can’t draw!” Why for heaven’s sake did he aspire to be an architect?. A recent exhibition in Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau gave me a satisfying answer. His grand uncle Martin Gropius was regarded, excluding Schinkel,as the greatest pre-modern Berlin architect. So he asked Adolf Meyer to be his secret partner. No wonder the first architecture course didn’t come until 1927 . And then he gave that absolutely central post to Hannes Meyer, the Swiss Communist! The Dessau city politics was fast running faster and faster to the  right. And indeed they canned the Swiss Commie in 1930. Mies would stumble for three years to no avail, and then became a Nice Nazi until 1937. bugging Albert Speer for commissions that never came so poisoned was his Denkmal  past when he left for America.

But the biggest error in official Bauhaus history was that it ended in 1933. It really ended in 1928 when Gropius gave up and moved to do Siemenstadt in Berlin. His life was more and more miserable. A Dessau journalist was trying to create a career for himself by harassing Gropius for “double dipping”—a Bauhaus salary plus extra pay for consulting in the creation of the Junker suburb, Törten.And his pretentious star faculty was fighting against pay cuts, not to mention their contempt for his medieval Master concept when they argued for good old Patriarchal Professor! (They lost on the money and won on the status!) There was even scuttlebutt that Herbert Bayer was making moves on his second wife Ilse. So he talked Marianne Brandt to join him for interior designs and off they fled to Berlin. Meyer soon went to Moscow with  many Commie dropouts and their work there is admirable. And man newly motivated students went to Palestine where they created a lush White City in Tel Aviv.

The saddest Chapter is the one created by the erratic gay fellow Philip C. Johnson (1900-2005). He dropped out of Harvard several times before he got his B.A.—not in architecture, but antiquities! His architecture period began in 1926 when he cruised Europe looking for new modern buildings to gain a post at the MOMA/New York. When he visited Dessau in 1926, he was so impressed he phone the projected MOMA director Albert Barr,Jr. that he had to come and see the greatest modern building—that Gropius claimed to design but Ernst Neufert probably did all the heavy lifting. Except he should have asked the professors and student how lousy the Modernoid structure really was: They fried in the summer and froze in the winter. It made great black and white photos with the new Leicas.  

That spread the falsities of Modernoidism throughout the civilized world. Call it International Style and ignore function as you relish form (aka ART). Peter Blake (the English pseudonym he used after fleeing Nazi Germany) the greatest American architectural critic of the last century argued in his obit of PCJ that he had totally corrupted the world conversation about architecture. He glibly referred to himself when anyone disagreed with him as the “whore of architecture.” 

His greatest sin was writing nasty letters about his Harvard dean Gropius (1938) mocking him for his obsession about working housing. So MOMA and the AIA sunk into the pit of Starchitecture from which he has barely begun to emerge. Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity and Millard Fuller’s Habitat for Humanity have provided civilized alternatives to PCJ’s dead end architecture.

Yet it was  no joke being gay and a parvenu in Cleveland in the 1920’s. His German nanny made him fluent. So he partied in gay Berlin on his architectural searches. He returned to America in 1928 a Not So Nice Nazi politicizing for Huey Long before that Louisiana was assassinated. Then he started touting the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin who sneered over the air at FDR’s “Jew Deal”! Mies was his first fave. He made the first modern house in Houston in 1950 for the deMenil family, the greatest art collectors of the era. He insisted they use Miesey furniture deployed the way the master would. They told him to get lost and never talked to him again! Their children thought the frequent visitor was PCJ. It was only builders repairing the leaky roof!

Later they quarreled and Mies sneered that PCJ’s vaunted Glass House in Connecticut (1970) looked like”a hot dog stand at Night”. Never mind. It’s a Visitor’s Center now, celebrating his architectural genius, at $150 a shot. Meanwhile the excessively glassed weekend house(1950) outside Chicago Mies had made for his one-time girl friend Dr. Farnsworth was uninhabitable. It’s now a Visitor Center celebrating his genius. Hmm.

But PCJ’s grossest aberration were the hateful letters he wrote in 1938 about his Harvard Dean Gropius, sneering about his obsession about worker housing. But his days of regard are almost over. Fresher voices like Cameron Sinclair’s Architecture for Humanity and Millard Fuller’s cooperative Habitat for Humanity are the thoughtful idealists of the future. PCJ was just a Modernoid aberration.

From Tiny Acorns...

Mighty oaks do grow! I’ve just been reading for the first time the British business daily,”Financial Times”’s annual “Urban Ingenuity” magazine (July 24, 2013)in which it awards commendations for the most creative innovations to improve global urban life. The most “inspiring” concept in this issue was the creation of a network of bicycle repair shops in Namibia which has “helped marginalized people return to the employment mainstream.” (Andrew Jack, “Back on Track”, pp. 8-11.)

The inspiring story starts with a young woman named Mary (a pseudonym) who six years ago was scraping a living as an HIV-positive sex worker. She’s chatting with a customer who has just brought in a bike to see how much it would cost to repair.  Her “office” is a converted shipping container located in a dusty car park in the Soweto district of Katakura, a shanty town on the outskirts of Namibia’s capital Windhoek. Inside are donated bicycles awaiting renovation and sale. Outside she has posted a price list for eggs and other snacks she is selling!

In the six years since she abandoned sex work, she has picked up basic business skills, learned how to repair bikes, and run a small business that provides employment to marginalised people as well as earn a surplus to fund social projects. Her modest salary helps support a brother and sister.

Another similar outlet in Windhoek as well as more than 30 across the country is known as the  Bicycle Empowerment Network (BEN!) an expanding chain of bike shops-in-a- box. This outfit has tapped western donations “to create local enterprises designed to be sustainable, aid social projects and promote environmentally friendly and affordable transport.” (P. 9.)

A local community organization supervises each outlet. For example in Soweto a faith-based group called the King’s Daughters formed by six former sex workers seeking a new way of life joined the church in 2006, to kick the drug and alcohol habits that emprisoned them. In 2009 BEN offered them one of its shops. Surplus income enabled the King’s Daughters to fund support groups and nutrition programs for families with HIV, pay school fees for children and underwrite a jewelry workshop. 68 people so far have profited!

As its reputation grew, they were able to negotiate free places drugs and alcohol rehab. The US Embassy and other government kicked in more support. BEN’s founder, an Aussie named Michael Linke, enthused over how his group was doing good better and better—stopping blood pressure medication because cycle riding kept A BENNIE fit, finding another selling fresh meat with a BEN bike. Linke had always been interested in bikes—but not for sociological solutions. But in Hamburg, he found an old bike chained up in a bunch of weeds. He thought there must be a better fate. He started working for a charity shipping donated bikes to developing countries! He focused his ideal working for a similar group in London, cleverly called Re-Cycle. Before he knew it he was delivering abandoned bikes for them.

He received e-mail from health care workers in Namibia, asking for supplies. Soon he was in Windhoek. It was a puzzle. There wasn’t enough management skills. So he set out to provide them. At first he concentrated on providing health workers with bikes to reach far away patients. He modified some bikes as pedal-powered ambulances to reach villages far from main roads or clinics. Namibia’s rough road wreaked hell on the tires so he urged donors to send bikes with mountain tires. Last year he received more than 7000 from Canada, Australia, and Europe.

He finally also realized: The hardest thing to teach is not how to fix a bike but how to run a business! Then he realized how important were groups like the King’s Daughters in advising on business management. BEN outlets have concentrated on spin-off businesses, such as peddling lunches or selling biomass “bush bricks”. It is clear that no matter how difficult it is to help poor developing countries modernize themselves, as long as there are idealists like Michael Linke and his ilk, the future looks hopeful. And Business Journalism can take pride in so creatively publishing the good news.

Another version of this essay is published by Broad Street Review. 

Is Detroit Beyond Redemption?

Gulp, my hometown (1930-51), when I moved, newly married, to East Lansing to finish my doctoral courses with the cheaper in-state tuition of Michigan State. I worried about its future as early as 1949 when I won the Jesuit Midwest Province annual essay contest. “Needed: More Red-blooded Americans” was my first published essay. I argue that Detroit Catholics should approach the racism that crippled Detroit after World War II, when thousands of blacks had moved from the South for defense jobs with their religious ideals. Local Communists indeed were more Christian in their support of those blacks than most Catholics. (My girlfriend and I upset most of my fellow students when we double-dated with a black couple to the Senior Prom at Eastwood Gardens: integrating their leading dance spot was upsetting.)

It wasn’t my first such move: for my term paper in Father John Culkins. S.J.’s sociology course I had explored the sociological contradictions of the new “Life”-like “Ebony” which simultaneously supported A. Phillips Randolph promotion of his union of Railroad Porters as well as touting “white” hair straighteners in its ads. Culkins liked it so much he tried to get me to become a sociology major! 

I later learned that he was the leading American critic of the Radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, orating just up Detroit’s main street Woodward Avenue in suburban Royal Oak. He had disgraced Culkins’ Church by mocking FDR’s leadership as a “Jew Deal.” I later would realize that Philip C. Johnson returned from his preMOMA audit of modern architecture by supporting both Huey Long and FDR foes like Coughlin in 1936. Coughlin was of course accelerating racism in Detroit with his anti-Semitic conservatism. The more I mulled my unsuccessful early ant-racism, the more despondent I became.

Saved again, I proudly report, with the Internet Radio that keeps me in contact with my favorite Philly NPR station, WHYY. Why? Sunday mornings I go to my kind of Church by informing myself through responsible FM. (Afternoons, it’s Fareed Zacharia and “State of the Union” on CNN and “Meet the Press” on NBC.) 

Today’s “On Being” (7/21/13) was my introduction devoted to Detroit’s 96-year-old philosopher Grace Lee Boggs and her description of “Feed ‘Em Freedom”, their urban farming scheme. Despondent because of all those abandoned yards? Would you believe there are now 1600 vegetable gardens happily blooming there now. (Hit their podcast at “on being.org” to savour a credible savior.

Ms. Boggs studied philosophy at the University of Chicago when it was at the peak of the Hutchins regime. She happily reported her basement room where the rats were uncongenial boarders and she survived on her $10 weekly income. She talked with the verve of a twenty year old about her first hero, A. Phillips Randolph, founder of the railroad porters union. He had the chutzpah to hit FDR (and his wife when he was reluctant!) for an executive order forbidding segregation in defense industry. They grumbled, but he persisted, and in March 1941, Executive Order 8802. Heh, setting a good example for Truman who abolished segregated defense forces in 1948.EO 9981!

Our heroine clearly explained how Hegel taught her to turn problems into solutions. Detroit’s current malaise gives those who haven’t abandoned the city an opportunity to abandon old values for more persuasive solution. To summarize her articulate ideology is absurdly complex. That’s why podcasts were invented. 

There is something encouraging about the way idealists like Dr. Boggs can turn a dead end into a flood of gardens raising eating standards for the poor of Detroit. “On Being” is truly Philosophical. It moved me to send WHYY an annual payment of $120. Tune in and see if you become as hooked as I am on American Public Radio, an indispensable Minneapolis based supplier of fresh ideas “On Being”. 

Another version of this essay is published by Broad Street Review.

Black Military Heroes

Re "Celebrating black military heroes, in art" by V. Chapman-Smith--

As a Philadelphian for 50 years, I’m ashamed to admit that I had never made the connection between the Union League and the Civil War! That conflict so rattled the racial issues that led to a very destructive war that it has taken more than a century for us to duly honor the black soldiers for their sacrifices.
    
As a resident of Germany for a decade, I’ve found an analogous reluctance of the locals to think logically about Nazism and its belated effects on the natives.

On Gated Communities

Dan’s critique of the gated community tradition is much more important than the not so spritzy Pritzker Prize. If Americans were taught about the history and achievement of our national and regional architectures, then regular annual proclamations might be more culturally significant.

(I’ve always silently sneered at the Pritzker Prize as a cheap plug for their Hyatt hotel chain.)
    
More crucially, I think the entire scandal of our insane non-police violence is not resolved, because most Americans fear well-deserved black retribution.

Glass Houses

Re "People who live in glass houses"--
Susan E. Washburn’s pun about not stowing thrones is memorable. Our first house (1954) was a National Home Cape Codder. At $4,000 (with $400 down, $40 a month) it was ideal for a new couple with three kids. (I’d still be there if I hadn’t snared a Ford grant to study media in New York.)

When I was offered a job at Trenton State, we rented in Levittown, Pa., until we moved to Greenbelt Knoll and bought a Louie Kahn ($29,000, sadly sold in 2010 for $119,000!). Most of that went to buy the third floor of a 1783 villa in Weimar, Germany.
    
All were well designed and affordable. And I’m finally skeptical of showplace modernoid architecture for its energy wasting ways and lack of permanence. After 50 years of romancing that defective modernoidism, I’ve fallen in love again with gables and the idiosyncratic pizzazz of Van de Velde Moderne. I know what I dislike!

Another African Country Heard From

Mukoma wa Ngugi, in spite of his Kenyan monicker was born in Evanston, Il in 1971 where his already famous novelist father, Ngugi wa Thion’go was teaching at the University of Illinois. Nonetheless Mukoma grew up in Kenya before returning to the United States for both his undergrad and graduate education. (I see this double life in more and more un-American writers.) Currently he is a professor English at Cornell University.

That accounts for many aspects of the book. For example, the narrator Ishmael became a cop in Madison Wisconsin, much like the state university in Ithaca where he now teaches. His pals are O (the Kenyan family name is underpronounceable and easily forgotten) is a Kenyan policeman who has escalated to keeping terrorism in check, and Muddy, a good looking Ruandan who has survived that current horror to be O’s wife to be.

The action opens with their discovery a black man who has been nearly consumed by wild animals in the forest they were making their rounds. They think it Al Kaida they tracking but in disintegrating Kenya nothing could be so simple. As they return to Nairobi to investigate the explosion of a major hotel, The town is alive with an empathic celebration of that son Barack Hussein Obama. Yes, It’s 2008.

Their search for terrorists is unending. Failing to stop terrorism in Kenya, they scheme to examine their hidden foes in California, Berkeley no less. They get there by flying to Mexico where they tangle with the longest border line in America. Oakland displays its radical face and the involvement of their international studies reveals more aspects of the sneaky terrorists.

Back to Nairobi where they display their skills in uncovering deceptions culminates in their preventing the demolition of a huge Kenyatta monument decorating the Kenyan International Conference Center. It was a fascinating adventure, spiced up with descriptions of Kenyan life.

But a strange coincidence intervened. As I connected with my daily internet with the BBC. One Catherine Fellows was exploring with fascinating detail the defects of the Kenyan prison system. There are very few pro bono lawyers in Kenya and the few who work for almost nothing hesitate because they don’t pick up their pittance at the end of the process.

Until Ms.Fellows interviews an “ex con” who never committed the crime he served 13 years for. He started studying law so he could defend himself. He did, and he was discharged! He persuaded other convicts to join his Law behind Bars program. 3000 prisoners are soon to be discharged thanks to his (and her)idealism. That’s a much greater story than the simulated attack on terrorism. Google it by the BBC interviewer’s name to relish her podcast.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi, “Black Star Nairobi” (London, Melville House, 2013) 288pp.,Amazon.de, 12 Euros.

Another version of this essay is published by Broad Street Review.

The So-called Decline and Fall of the English Major

The New York Times OpEdifier Verlyn Klinkenborg is looking in the wrong place to understand the crisis of the humanities. Let a quick curriculum vitae qualify me as an analyst, or not. After two years in the Navy, I spent three years as a philosophy major at the Jesuit University of Detroit in my hometown. I won the annual essay of Midwestern Jesuit universities with a rant entitled “Wanted: More Red Blooded Americans”, by which I meant citizens who fought poverty and racism like the Communists who were then agitating the community. The Jesuit head of the Sociology Department asked me to major in sociology when I submitted an essay on the split personality of the new Negro “Life” called” Ebony”: It  surrounded its integration pleas with ads for hair-straightening jells. Oh yes, and I double-dated with a black couple to integrate the Junior Prom at Eastwood Gardens.

But I went for an American Studies Ph.D. at Western Reserve University in Cleveland because they offered an interdisciplinary degree: Two prelims on American Lit, others on American philosophy and its European antecedents, American economic history, and American art and architecture. (My own formulation of the humanities in USA 1949). Alas, my proposed dissertation on Marshall McLuhan (I learned about his media ideas in the lay Catholic weekly, “Commonweal,”was bluntly rejected.) “Who?” My allegedly up-to-date committee asked me skeptically! So I wrote on John Fiske, the Harvard humanist who popularized Herbert Spencer. I tested his professional life against Emerson’s “American Scholar” (1836). Fiske flunked, but I learned how the humanities worked, or didn’t, in a fast changing America.

I moved to Michigan State (cheap in-state tuition) for two years preparing for my prelims. Married in 1950, I needed a job to finance the Catholic children born every second year! I became the janitor of the East Lansing State Bank. I slyly found an English slot at E.Lansing High, whose highly motivated students were the children of GM execs and Michigan State professors, with a few blue colors to clean up. They were the brightest, most articulate students I ever had in thirty years of teaching, from a blue collar commuter Trenton State (1956), Penn (1957-60), East-West Center, Honolulu (1961), and Arcadia University (1962-82), with  years off  in 1975 in Santa Rosa, CA, and 1977 to circle the Mediterranean in 90 days, celebrating my 50th year! In 1982 my school teacher mother May died, freeing me to fulfill my stronger and stronger wish to comprehend the humanities throughout the world, the scheme I called International English Literature, expanding to Commonwealth Literatures as quickly as I soundly could.

My global adventure began in Shanghai where  I studied Mandarin and looked carefully at the Chinese. It was full of pleasant surprises. For example, when some literary scholars learned I came from Philly, they asked me if I had ever visited Walt Whitman’s grave in Camden. They were thrilled to learn that I had discovered it was falling apart and coaxed English teachers to donate almost a thousand dollars to repair it. And I had my first journalistic scoop: Shanghai’s Art Museum (they had taken over a gorgeous Art Deco bank!)was making its first foreign exhibition—in San Francisco, where I was living. I had the front page essay (May 83) in KQED-TV’s monthly guide! (The curator grilled me on what works of art would most please San Franciscans. I pretended to be clairvoyant!)  While the rest of my fellow students went to walk China’s most famous wall, I dropped in unannounced to the offices of their newest newspaper “China Daily”! They grilled me mercilessly on how much baseball coverage I would recommend. I was hooked by the glorious serendipitousness of daily journalism.

I then examined Japan and soon found myself interviewing the scion of the last ruler, Osama Tokugawa, at the Foreign Correspondents Club. We discussed why he had given up his job as a banker to study enough art history so he could curate his family’s holdings. There is no more interesting occupation than seeing Global Humanism emerge and help define it. There followed further examinations of Latin America, Africa, more Asia—and the most astonishing humane customs of all, Europe, where I’ve settled down.

My good fortune had first bloomed in East Lansing, when Michigan State opened a UHF TV station, WKAR-TV. Eager for programming, they immediately approved of my proposal, a weekly teenage leisure series, “Everyman Is a Critic”. My first published essay, by that same name, appeared in Scholastic Teacher. Soon a Ford Foundation grant (1956) took me to New York City, where for six years I was their radio-tv editor, until a job in Honolulu made that impractical. On my daily trip from Flushing, where we four Hazards had an apartment, to Manhattan, I relished the new experience of reading the Times every morning. It reported a media conference the next Saturday. I invited myself. 

As I entered the hotel ballroom I saw Ralph Bunche talking with an unknown man. (Bunche had just been a “Time” cover!) I said I was Pat Hazard and I had a Ford Grant to see how we should deal with the newer media in the high schools. “ Well, how is it going, Mr. Hazard”, the unidentified man asked. “Lousey” was my curt reply. “Well,” The stranger identified himself as the publisher of “Time”, Roy Larsen. “I like the sound of what’s you’re doing! And I’m on the Ford Foundation group that gave you your grant. How would you like an office at “Time”. 

Dumbfounded I smiled weakly. He gave me his card and told me to show it at the “Time-Life Building” Monday morning. I did, and called Pat Weaver’s office at NBC, the fifth in my first week. His secretary had gotten colder and colder. I left the magical “Time” number, and hung up. In five minutes there was an announcement, “Is there a Patrick D. Hazard here? Call NBC please.” Weaver was a wonder, expatiating on his TV theory, “Enlightenment through Exposure” which some Dartmouth humanist had drilled in his head. For almost three hours he listened to my plan, described his own, and connected me with all the necessary brass at NBC.

It reminded me of the Daedalus Conference on Mass Culture in 1960. Penn had rewarded me with a two year Carnegie Postdoctoral grant to create the first course in Mass Culture in their American Civilization department. My aim was simple: identify the most creative individuals in today’s mass production and mass communication, and let your students experience their work and describe their opinions. Take Paddy Chayefsky’s plays. I had assigned overnight reviews from my high school students. A fortiori, college students would be ultimately urged to go and do better plays.

At the Daedalus Conference my mentor and Dean Gilbert Seldes at the new Annenberg School that I helped organize  asked me to give the lecture on Mass Culture and the Humanities. Hostility flared. The poet Randall Jarrell ended the lecture by waggling his beard at me and intoning, “Mr. Hazard, you’re the man of the future, and I’m glad I’m not going to be there.” Humane, right? Alas, he committed suicide some years later. Which made me doubly sad since I had relished teaching his poems. In my judgment this rejection of the responsibility of tutoring the ignorant was the betrayal of our humanism. The professors were more interested in succeeding in the Ivy League than in stooping to conquer the undereducated.

It became intolerable to me in the 1970’s when simultaneously professors got 100G’s and their peons who did the hard work had no health insurance and drifted from part time job to job. It was the contemptible 1% /99% pattern of a disintegrating American Civilization. I’d much rather be an alternative journalist living from week to week than such an arrogant inhumane humanist. The problem with the English is not esthetic. It’s moral. Or rather immoral. When I watched the highest Penn “humanists” suck up to Walter Annenberg’s money, I knew why the English major is dieing. He’s caught in a rotten society that fakes adherence to high moral standards but is really criminal, staying with the amoral 1%, as soon and as long as they can. It isn’t that they hadn't learned to write. They haven’t learned to make sound moral judgments about their disintegrating civilization. They are the nearly perfect inHumanists they chose to be!