The new image of the earth’s surface, completely transformed and recast in just a few decades, and the enormous changes manifest in every city and every landscape of the world since industrialization, correspond to an upheaval in the human mind and soul.  This development has so accelerated in the years since the outbreak of the world war that one can already, without exaggeration, identify the death and dismantling of the culture into which the elder among us were raised as children and which then seemed to us eternal and indestructible.  If the individual has not himself changed (he can do this within two generations no more than any animal species could), then at least the ideals and fictions, the wishes and dreams, and the mythologies and theories that rule our intellectual life have; they have changed utterly and completely.  Irreplaceable things have been lost and destroyed forever; new unheard-of things are being imagined in their place.  Destroyed and lost for the greater part of the civilized world are, beyond all else, the two universal foundations of life, culture and morality; religion and customary morals.  Our life is lacking in morals, in a traditional, sacred, unwritten understanding about what is proper and becoming between people.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818

Self Portrait by Otto Dix, 1920s

One need only undertake a short journey to be able to observe in living examples the decay of morals.  Wherever industrialization is still in it beginnings, wherever peasant and small-town traditions are still stronger than the modern forms of transportation and work, there the influence and emotional power of the church is quite essentially stronger as well.  And in all of these places we continue to come across, more or less intact, that which were once called morals.  In such backward regions one still finds forms of interaction—greeting, entertainment, festivals, and games—which have long since been lost to modern life.  As a weak substitute for lost morals, the modern individual has fashion.  Changing from season to season, it supplies him with the most indispensable prescriptions for social life, tosses off the requisite phrases, catchwords, dances, melodies—better than nothing, but still a mere gathering of the transitory values of the day.  No more popular festivals, but the fashionable entertainment of the season.  No more popular ballads, but the hit tune of the current month.

 Now, what morals are to the exterior shaping of  a life, the agreeable and comfortable guidance of tradition and convention, religion and philosophy are to more profound human needs. The individual has not only the need—in customs and morals, dress and entertainment, sports and conversation—to be ruled and guided by a valid model by some kind of ideal, be it merely the daily ideal of fashion.  He has as well in the deeper recesses of his being the need to see meaning attached to all that he does and strives for, to his existence, his life, and the inevitability of death.  This religious or metaphysical need, as old and as important as the need for food, love, and shelter, is satisfied in calm, culturally secure times by the churches and the systems of itinerant thinkers.  In times like the present a general impatience and disillusion with both received religious creeds and scholarly philosophies grow; the demand for new formulations, new interpretations, new symbols, new explanations is infinitely great.  These are the signs of the mental life or four times; a weakening of received systems, a wild searching for new interpretations of human life, a flourishing of popular sects, prophets, communities, and blossoming of the most fantastic superstitions.  For even those who are superficial, not at all spiritual, and disinclined to thought still have the primal need to know that there is meaning to their lives.  And then they are no longer able to find a meaning, morals decay, and private life is ruled by wildly intensified selfishness and an increased fear of death.  All of these signs of the time are clearly legible, for those who care to see, in every sanatorium, in every asylum, and in the material reported everyday by psychoanalysts.

 It is proper that we meet the longing of our time—this yearning search, these experiments, some blinded with passion, others coolly bold—with respect.  Even if they are all condemned to failure, they nonetheless remain serious concerns with supreme goals; should none at all of them survive our time, they fulfill an essential function while they live.  All of these fictions, these religious elaborations, these new doctrines of faith help people live, help them not only to endure this difficult, questionable life but to value it highly and hold it sacred.  And if they were nothing but a lovely stimulus or a sweet anesthesia, then even that perhaps would not be so little.  But they are more, infinitely more.  They are the schools thorough which the intellectual elite of our times must pass.  For every intellectualism and culture has a twofold task:  first to give security and encouragement to the many, to console them, and to bestow meaning on their lives and second the more secret but no less important task for the few, for the great minds of tomorrow and the day after:  to make it possible for them to mature, to lend protection and care to their beginnings, to give them air to breathe.