Politics & Power Quote by Irving Babbitt

The line lands like a scalpel disguised as a mild complaint. Babbitt opens with the schoolmasterly "Furthermore", then pivots to a harsher diagnosis: the problem isn’t simply moral laziness (a lack of standards), it’s moral vertigo (a confusion or inversion of standards). That second clause is the real knife. He’s not arguing that Americans have no compass; he’s arguing the needle points proudly in the wrong direction, and we call it progress.

As a critic associated with the early 20th-century "New Humanism", Babbitt was writing against what he saw as the era’s runaway faith in impulse, sentiment, and mass democracy’s appetite for slogans. Industrial modernity had sped up everything except judgment. In that environment, standards become less like shared measures and more like marketing: whatever flatters the crowd, whatever sells, whatever feels liberating in the moment. The subtext is that America doesn’t merely tolerate mediocrity; it can elevate it, mistaking noise for vitality and transgression for depth.

The phrasing "not infrequently" is its own kind of cultural commentary: a dry understatement that implies the condition is common enough to be predictable. Babbitt’s intent is corrective, almost disciplinary. He wants an internal check on appetites, a return to restraint as a civic virtue, because in his view a society without a stable hierarchy of values can’t even argue coherently about right and wrong. When standards invert, critique becomes impossible: the very tools for calling something corrupt are rebranded as prudish, elitist, or "out of touch". That’s the trap he’s naming.