Criterion

Unlike its namesake and predecessor, the Yale version of Criterion has neither the polish nor the significance of Eliot's bauble. Unsophisticated, often trite, frequently ill-though-out, and almost never really original, it is still potentially one of the best things to happen to Yale since godandman departed.

The magazine is in essence a vehicle for the expression and criticism of moral beliefs, and the important thing about its first issue is not that the three student articles say anything of particular importance, but that there is an attempt to present three relevant statements of belief by and for a group which should be most especially concerned with such matters--the university community. The contemporary college student seldom accedes to any firmly established ideology. He is taught that all ideologies have weaknesses and fallacies, and is reluctant to admit those tendencies in himself which demand belief at this price. Under the influence of the academic he maintains that dishonesty is too much to pay for a credo and before abandoning his scruples about such self-deception he allows separation in time and space to remove his institutional superego.

There are a few, however, who cannot delay making their peace with life until a more convenient time. They seek immediate resolutions, attempting to evolve a synthesis of academic skepticism and personal insignificance, an ideology for those of little faith. Such a system is, of course, not readily accessible, the evolution or comprehension of a catholic system having been one of the notorious problems of the last few centuries. The existence of any belief seems at the moment almost inevitably contingent upon some sort of parochialism, temporal, cultural, or temperamental. But a secondary difficulty, at least among students in Eastern universities, has been the fact that the conscious expression of any belief which is accepted is regarded not as realism but naivete or weakness. The tough anti-systematic skeptics have so poisoned the air in our better educational institutions that credos tend to be considered as a symptom, with all the pejorative connotations of that word. But if there is no overt expression of belief, if we are indeed what Van Wyck Brooks ('08) calls "the silent generation," then the task of formulation becomes doubly difficult for the eccentric minority not adapted to anomie. Criterion can hope to eliminate this secondary problem, although it is not likely to have much success with the first, better minds having already spent their better years in better journals with the problem.

"Criterion", according to its statement of purpose, "provides an open forum where students at Yale can learn how their contemporaries are attempting to formulate values for living." Unfortunately, it is just as methodological as the words indicate. Of three articles in the first issue, only one--by a divinity student--professes any belief. The other two are rather ineptly devoted to the arguments for belief, and analysis of techniques used in arriving at it.

And yet this is probably for the best, because by leaving gaping holes in their arguments, by failing to document assertions of dubious validity, or making assertions totally incapable of such documentation, by committing themselves to logical and verbal inconsistencies, the authors have made response on an undergraduate level quite likely. A smoothly executed series of analytic studies would have effectively curbed the students' desire to either read or respond to the articles, and would have made the magazine's becoming an accepted mechanism for exploring or asserting belief extremely unlikely. While a plea for badness is not easy to support, a plea for the expression of bad thinking, as opposed to its repression in favor of silence and vacuity, is perhaps tenable. The academic presumption that silence is preferable to mediocrity hardly applies in the moral realm. People do have moral attitudes, even if they are untenable, and only in articulation is there hope for revision of these attitudes into more realistic and consistent form.

Yet Criterion will be a good thing only if it arouses violent criticism, and stimulates the expression of anatgonistic conceptions. If Criterion induces the Yale undergraduate (or anybody else) to spend a little less time in his blue sweater and a little more in introspection and verbalization, it will be a good thing. If, however, it leads the contributors to the self-satisfied assurance of "having been published," it will be a real misfortune, for the material as such warrants no such conplacency on the part of either authors or editors.