Pusey Decries American Vulgarity, Urges Intellectuals to Lead Reform

President Pusey yesterday decried American civilization as cheap and vulgar in an address to the commencement class of Wheaton College.

Pusey received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at the ceremony. He also watched his daughter Rosemary graduate with the class of 1964.

Calling attention to the tawdriness of American society, Pusey denounced its "widespread, hucksterish use of pornography and its sex-possessed literature."

Human relations are distorted, the President said. "Bigotry and fractricidal strife are endemic in our culture," he continued. "There is an almost universal desire among us to escape responsibility and to have our pleasures at someone else's expense."

The audience stirred visibly when Pusey declared that the "self-deception, irresponsibility, and selfishness" of Americans were characteristic of uneducated men left to follow their natural ways.

To overcome this blight, Pusey urged educated men to involve themselves in the unfinished work of society. "They have seen the captivating moments in human history," Pusey said, "when spiritual quality, imagination, determination, concern, and enterprise have arrested the blight and fostered beauty in human affairs."

"Decency and beauty in human relationships have need of them today," Pusey said.

Quoting at length from Archibald MacLeish, Pusey said that contemporary civilization fancies itself "the first to look at man as he is and to dare to see him." But these claims to primal realism are false. The Greek view of man was equally "realistic," seeing "the defeated hero, Prometheus on the bloody stone."

What is original in the modern view-point, Pusey said, is its paramount concern with man as a victim of predicament--"an anguished, mortal creature in an absurd world."

This bleak doctrine of "writing off life as a brutal absurdity" contrasts unfavorably, Pusey said, with the unwillingness of the Greeks to be overcome by the hideousness of life.