Modern men and women, both older and younger, form a generation which we can be adequately describe as a lost generation, and the cause of it, the reason for our mental wanderings and emotional gropings, is the loss of our understanding and hold of a common or universally accepted ethical and intellectual standard. This is shown by the bable of voices surrounding us everywhere, by the hunger of human hearts, and even by the eager human minds searching for truth and not knowing where to find it, nor its guidance: human minds searching for a sufficient and satisfying inner light, for something that will guide us in solving the problems facing us. We are, indeed a lost generation, and it is not youth only who are lost; in fact it is the elders who are even more perplexed than are the youth of today. Our whole generation is blind, walking in darkness, not knowing whether to turn for the light or not; and the babel of voices that arise from the immense human crowd is something frightening and significant in its clamor and confused insistence upon panaceas and schemes of various kinds, political and other wise.
One hearkens vainly while lending an ear to this turbulent babel, in order to find constructive suggestions which are of universal applications. It is rare to hear voices speaking with authority of knowledge; and venture to suggest the reason of it all.
If there is a common struggle or fight in progress and you go down into the arena of turmoil intending to fight those already fighting there and to out shout them, the chances are small that what you have to say will receive attention; the probability is that you are going to be hurt. This is because the would-be reformer simply descents to the level of the shouting squabblers. Such is not the manner by which to bring about anything that is universally and definitely constructive ideas, or attractively new or helpful, or that will explain and solve the problems causing the universal disturbance. You are simply descending into the battle yourself, trying to overcome violence with violence, force with force; and this procedure never has succeeded, and it never will. This does not mean to imply that force is always to be ignored in human relations. Sometimes it is necessary but always without violence, to use force, and in order to overcome an evil. Such employment of force or power should always be a merely temporary event or procedure, and should never be used save in an impersonal and upright manner, and for good cause, and for the common weal. Justice to all is never gained by descending into the arena of battle and "fighting it out" there. Justice is rarely wholly of one side of a question.
Our generation is lost, intellectually and morally, because it has lost its vision. Without a vision the people perish---an old Hebrew saying based on a comprehensive view of human psychology as demonstrated in history, and therefore a saying which is full with truth. It is invariably a vision or an idea, or a body of ideas, which guides men upwards to glory or downwards to the pit. Plato was fully right; it is ideas which make or unmake civilizations, build up or overthrow established institutions; and it is grandly universal ideas, and the will to follow them--ideas which all men feel to be true---which men today lack. It is just because we today lack vision, and inner knowledge of the right thing to do, or a clear way out of our troubles, that as nations' we are where we now are.
We are presently at the end of one form of civilization which, like the Roman Empire in its time, has reached its term, its breaking up, and we are facing the opening measures of the cosmic drama which is now coming in. It will depend upon the innate wisdom and sense of high justice inherent in men's hearts and minds, or whether our present civilization will go down in blood and despair, or whether it will take a breath and time in order to recover itself; whether, with the dawning of a new intellectual and moral perception of justice and reason, it will stop its decent down violence of justice and reason it will stop its decent down the declivity and begin to rise to new heights over topping the finest that as yet racially we have attained. This latter can be done; and it is man's higher nature only, his intuitions and instinct for justice and reason, nothing else, that will bring it to pass with surety: man's innate sense of justice and of right, and the common recognition that reason and not violence is the way out---and upwards to safety, peace, and progress.
History with its silent but tremendously powerfully voice shows that there is absolutely no other way out for us; that there is no other complete solution, nor one which will be satisfactory to all types of minds, to all types of human character. Freedom for all; each people seeking its own salvation on its own lines, but in ethical directions accompanied by reason and desire to do justice. Even an enlightened self-interest, with its always keen eye for individual advantage, must see the universal benefits and securities of such a plane. All the stable intuitions are founded on these intuitions, and instincts, and upon naught else; for were it otherwise, then our sense of order and law, our very respect for our courts of law, international or national, were collectively a monstrous deception, and an ignominious and miserable farce; and all sane men realize that our laws are based on rules of justice and impersonal mercy.
Let us be reminded that man has the capacity to solve his problems adequately if he bends his will to the task. We are approaching the end of our civilization, and are fascinated and hold our breath as we watch the phenomena of its breaking up; but all too often we forget that this has been a civilization of matter almost wholly, where things of matter are often counted as the only ones permanently worth while. There are no longer new lands to which we may send our young people to colonize, for they have been preempted almost universally, rather than the rules of international justice and common human rights. For eighteen hundred years, more or less, it has been the rule: let everyone grab what they may; let everyone hold what he or she can. The conduct of the peoples has been largely based on this purely materialistic and selfish foundation. We sowed the wind; we are now as a body of spiritually bankrupt peoples reaping the whirlwind.
Is it not time that the more farseeing and superior minds of the world should see to it that calmness and reason and impartial justice shall henceforth prevail? Is there any other and better way out of our troubles and difficulties than by solving them wisely? If men refuse to wish or to will to do justice, then it seems certain that down we shall go, and our civilization, our great cities and manifold works and labors of millions of hands through the years, shall be dust and ruined heaps. No good will step into the arena of human pain and willful ignorance and pull us wretched mortals out of the world mess that we have created for ourselves, mostly through rabid self-interest and through our willful turning away from the paths of justice and peace. We alone must save ourselves; and when we begin to do this in a manner pleasing to the higher powers, then we shall make an undeniable appeal for their aid and guidance; and we shall receive it. Hercules helps the wagoner, but only when the wagoner begins to help himself---and in the right way.
It is the sheerest of foolishness and the most blatant of all ethical and intellectual poppycock to aver that men's destiny, now that the waste places of earth have been taken, that there is no future for those who were not in it at the beginning. Such an attitude is contradicted by every page in the annals of universal history. We must remember that no thing, no institution, is unchangeable, eternally the same, and that the shifting and continuously varying scenes of human history in the past---a certain fact of truth--- promise that the future will be as full as the past has been with the shifting of cosmic scenery, and the changing of human interests and fields of activity. The greatest peoples of the earth have not been those possessing the greatest extent of territory, but precisely those who have been foremost in the reception of ideas and in the application of progressive ideas to the up building of human institutions based on and usually proclaiming, if not always following, the ideals of impersonal justice and trained reason; for these are spiritual qualities---which in fact are universal.
Let us fill our hearts with eternal gratitude to the watching of though silent cosmic powers, that extent waiting horizons that the now before us in all parts of the earth, and without distinction of race or creed, are spiritual and intellectual horizons, beyond which there are for us unknown regions of infinitely vast extent waiting by human genius, when we shall give rein to the instincts and intuitions of the soul. Look then at what lies before us if we will to bring justice unmotivated by self-interest and the love of honor and truth to work amongst us!
One of the main causes, and perhaps the foremost, of our troubles both national and international is that men commonly---with many grand exceptions---are still holding to the belief in force, in violence, as being the way to solve our troubles. Such procedure never has succeed permanently, and never will. Hatred breeds hatred; selfishness breeds other selfness.
It is to show men the simple precept of reason; that life should be governed by the grand ethical instincts of the human soul, which are based on no human conventions but on orderliness of nature's own structure and processes. Out of these ethical instincts spring the directing precepts of reason and our will to do justice, teaching us that the way out lies within ourselves: not in our armies or in our navies, or in all the dreadful methods of mutual destruction which man's evil genius has invented. These last are not even temporary remedies and bring no satisfactory adjusting of troubles. At best, the machinery of defense should be used as police machines; for then their use becomes justified, then they would be employed in a cause of justice and used with reason only.
Our problems will never be solved by our mad rush in competitive armament, bringing about universal distrust, fear, anxiety and crushing the peoples with taxation which threatens to grow beyond their power to meet, and almost making them hate the conditions under which they live their lives. It is the old folly, now recognized by all, to arguer that by piling up armaments and inventing new devices of horrible destruction, and by increasing the use of violent force, by war will shrink in the fearsome terror from it. Of all fallacies and stupid arguments, this is the worst that has ever been inflicted on the suffering minds of mankind.
You will never succeed in stopping war by organizing yourselves into associations, or society generations swearing to refuse service to your government, and defying it in case of war. That procedure, is abominably wrong. We may admire the idealistic and thoughts young men and women who it seems, are doing this. But they over look the face that they are merely announcing their declaration to declare war of a kind upon their government and country, if war should come, thereby introducing disorder and strife among themselves.
Let the youth of the different peoples of whatever country set the example of fidelity and loyalty, each youth to his own government, thus proving the strength and worth of the moral idea of citizenship; yet on the other hand, as the world badly needs idealism and chivalry resident in the younger generation, let youth express these likewise by raising its voice loud and insistent, powerfully declaring itself for universal justice and reason, and do so by the measures of established law. In this manner, the voice of the world's youth will penetrate into all places, closed and open; for their insistence upon their rights as a coming generation soon to shoulder the burden of the older, will reach sympathetic ears too numerous to count.
One may hope that the prominent men in the world today, those who hold the destines of the people more or less in their hands, will hear the heartbeat, the unexpressed and growing will of the peoples for a solving of their troubles. If they do so down in history; they will be remembered not so much by statues and monuments in stone, but their names will be emblazoned by the fabric of human hearts. Their memory shall remain for ages to come as the fire of love and gratitude burning in human hearts. Way not therefore lay the foundation of it Now.
Thank you G.D.P. One truth, many paths. Be good, do good.
Louis DiVirgilio
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