The Road to Millstown

Parallel development of mind and body was a central idea in the canons of Greek humanism; it has remained for the self-styled Liberal “humanists” of this century to give the concept a unique dimension, wherein certain calisthenics are performed in the very expression of one’s ideas. In The Causes of World War Three (Simon and Schuster, $3.50)—a discussion of how Americans should behave toward the threat of Soviet Communism—we find the author. C. Wright Mills, strenuously pressing his belly to the floor.

In Mills’ case the “humanism” (he so represents his views) falls something short of Periclean grandeur; in a monomaniacal obsession with animal survival, at the expense of every value peculiar to civilization, there can be little room for the dignity of man. So it inevitably happens that, after a long wallow before the ikon of Soviet might, Mills comes up with a foreign-policy program that might well be described as “massive capitulation.”

MS

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M. Stanton Evans

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Parallel development of mind and body was a central idea in the canons of Greek humanism; it has remained for the self-styled Liberal “humanists” of this century to give the concept a unique dimension, wherein certain calisthenics are performed in the very expression of one’s ideas. In The Causes of World War Three (Simon and Schuster, $3.50)—a discussion of how Americans should behave toward the threat of Soviet Communism—we find the author. C. Wright Mills, strenuously pressing his belly to the floor.

In Mills’ case the “humanism” (he so represents his views) falls something short of Periclean grandeur; in a monomaniacal obsession with animal survival, at the expense of every value peculiar to civilization, there can be little room for the dignity of man. So it inevitably happens that, after a long wallow before the ikon of Soviet might, Mills comes up with a foreign-policy program that might well be described as “massive capitulation.”