Politics & Power Quote by Irving Babbitt

A backhanded compliment is Babbitt at his most surgical: praise the scale, then puncture the soul. “Quantitatively” nods to the visible triumphs of early-20th-century America - industrial output, rising cities, mass education, democratic confidence, the whole spectacle of expansion. But “qualitatively” shifts the argument onto terrain Babbitt cared about more than GDP: character, restraint, taste, inner discipline. The line works because it refuses to fight America on its favorite battlefield (numbers) while quietly insisting that the most important measures can’t be counted.

Babbitt’s intent is corrective, not celebratory. As a leading “New Humanist,” he distrusted cultures that confuse bigness with greatness. The subtext is moral: abundance has been mistaken for meaning; efficiency for excellence; novelty for wisdom. “Somewhat less satisfying” is a deliberately cool phrase, almost genteel, but it carries a sharper accusation - that America’s public life is producing power without proportion, motion without a center. He’s not denying achievement; he’s downgrading it from civilization to mere success.

Context matters: Babbitt is writing into an era of mass production, mass politics, and mass entertainment, when “progress” was becoming an ideology. His sentence anticipates a recurring American anxiety: we can build anything, but can we build a life worth living inside it? The sting is that he implies the answer is not yet.