The Protracted Conflict

What familiarity breeds more usually than con tempt is indifference or simply inattention. We gradually stop noticing what has been around a long time. This inattention and indifference amount to a passive acceptance, and we thus come to accept and disregard what we may have apprehended originally as wondrous beauty, fearful threat or unspeakable horror. Of all species, man is the most adaptable; this reduction of realities to the ordinary is one of his primary means of adaptation. The human soul could not long endure reality raw, either the beauties or the horrors.

I started meditating on this adaptive process the other day when I happened to read, in succession, a letter—a very simply written letter—from two Soviet Jews asking why they were not permitted to leave the Soviet Union, and a dispatch from Bucharest reaffirming the refusal of the Rumanian government to let any of Rumania’s 400,000 ethnic Germans leave that country.

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James Burnham

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What familiarity breeds more usually than con tempt is indifference or simply inattention. We gradually stop noticing what has been around a long time. This inattention and indifference amount to a passive acceptance, and we thus come to accept and disregard what we may have apprehended originally as wondrous beauty, fearful threat or unspeakable horror. Of all species, man is the most adaptable; this reduction of realities to the ordinary is one of his primary means of adaptation. The human soul could not long endure reality raw, either the beauties or the horrors.

I started meditating on this adaptive process the other day when I happened to read, in succession, a letter—a very simply written letter—from two Soviet Jews asking why they were not permitted to leave the Soviet Union, and a dispatch from Bucharest reaffirming the refusal of the Rumanian government to let any of Rumania’s 400,000 ethnic Germans leave that country.