Eric Hoffer, The Preface

 

I am writing out the 3-page Preface (Pages ix, x. xi) of Eric Hoffer’s 4^th book, The Temper of Our Times, published in 1967. Here it is:

 

Hoffer (H after this): “To know the central problem of an age is to have our fingers on a thread of continuity through the welter of willful events and unforeseen crises. It is my assumption that the main difficulty and challenge of our age is drastic change—from backwardness to modernity, from subjection to equality, from poverty to affluence, from work to leisure.”

 

My response: It seems that drastic change, or the relentless march of beings, humans, the world itself through time as existence keeps going on an on, as natural history, supernatural history and artificial human history ceaselessly unfold, turns out to be Hoffer’s major presupposition, that it drives humans to react, and how they react bodes well or ill for human survival.

 

Hoffer never clarifies if drastic change is a supernatural force, but he definitely would define it as a natural and social force. It seems that this presupposition is his metaphysical take on the world, and it is not a bad one to assume.

 

H: “These are all highly desirable changes, changes that mankind has hoped and prayed for through the millennia.”

 

My response: Hoffer adds a normative element hear, that some trends in history are progressive and desirable, going from backwardness to modernity, from subjection to equality (and liberty I add), from poverty to affluence, from work to leisure (We need leisure but we need to work more.). There is rough progress ethically as history unfolds, though there are backward sliding trends all the time, and ultimate reversal of all human gains can still happen, no guarantees.

 

H: “Yet it is becoming evident that, no matter how desirable, drastic change is the most radical and dangerous experience mankind has undergone.”

 

My response: Boy, this that a mouthful. Hoffer knows human essence, or its nature, naturally is quite conservative, really being averse to and detesting ay change, let alone drastic change.

 

My goal would be to raise up a generation of citizens as individuating supercitizens, so in love with change, so habituated to constant change, and rationally and quickly grasping what is underway, so they can be adaptable, versatile without losing their self-esteem, hope or sense of equilibrium.

For such a population, so self-esteeming and in love with themselves, they would understand that whether historical change in their generation is drastic, moderate but steady, or very little changes, they would agree to work together to modulate the change so that they had time to absorb it, and still sharing as a community and people a meaningful, reassuring grand narrative which would provide them with a value system to hold onto, so they can weather all that is being tossed at them by existence and history itself.

 

It would be better to have a traditional grand narrative, and old way of living which satisfied their need for holding onto the past and their heritage, all while gently, steadily, incrementally changing all the time, and this allows drastic change, most of the time, to be absorbed by a people without causing social turmoil and unrest.

 

As Hoffer warns, drastic change can be most difficult and dangerous for a people not equipped to deal with it.

 

H: “We are discovering that broken habits can be more painful and crippling than broken bones, and that disintegrating values may have as deadly a fallout as disintegrating atoms.

 

The essays in this volume try to make sense of some of the happenings of our time, and they are all concerned with aspects of change. Most of the writing  also deals with the role of the intellectual, and in one place I suggest that our age is the age of the intellectual.”

 

My response: By 2015 in the West, so many young people had college degrees, that they took over the institutions, pushing their woke DEI and socialist agenda upon everyone. These intellectuals are ruler-wannabees, or desperate graspers after elite ruling status over the masses. It seems that millions of young people being college educated does offer credence and evidence to Hoffer’s claim that this is the age of the intellectual.

 

H: “Actually, it can now be seen that the intellectual who during recent decades aspired to ride and command the process of change in various parts of the world is one in a line of aspirants waiting to take their turn in the arena.

 

Just now in Africa and elsewhere the intellectual is being elbowed out and supplanted by soldiers who will use armies rather than mass movements as instruments of change. It is significant that the American Negro’s passage from inferiority to equality is proceeding more equably and effectively in the U.S. Army than anywhere else. The Army is at present the only place where the Negro is a human being first and only secondly a Negro. So, too, in Israel the army has been an unequaled agency for the conversion of polyglot immigrants into self-respecting Israelis.”

 

My response: It seems to me that we live in time of remarkable change,  when American blacks have gone from being the descendants of slaves, held back legally, economically and socially, to have full equality and equal opportunity.

 

With some optimism and imagination, I confess to the reader than if we can teach our citizens, especially to young, to maverize and conduct themselves as supercitizens, then change will be so progressive and transformative, it would almost seem as if human nature was not fixed and mostly unalterable, which it is, but our powers of reason and good moral habits, can allow us to learn to act other than we naturally would, if we try hard and stay at it.

 

H: “It is conceivable that eventually other agencies powered by other human types are going to have their turn. The actors will come and go, but the arena and the menacing problem will remain the same. E.H. San Francisco, California July, 1966.”