The Wave of the Future

This is one of the most controversial books to appear in recent years, and one of the most difficult to appraise. In substance, Mrs. Lindbergh's thesis is that the great fact of history, the law of life, is eternal and inexorable change, that we are now in one of the great periods of rapid and profound change, and that it is therefore the better part of wisdom -- for Americans as well as for all other peoples -- to accept this process, whatever it may be, and not to fight against it. The "wave of the future," as it presents itself to Mrs. Lindbergh, is totalitarian, and in her eyes there is no use in our trying, Canute-like, to stem it. The net effect of Mrs. Lindbergh's book, perhaps unintentional, is even more destructive than the mechanistic approach to life expounded by her husband because it furnishes a sort of vade mecum for the defeatists. One of the most disturbing things about this sincere, and in some respects courageous, little volume is its evasion of some of the real issues, particularly the moral ones. It carries the subtitle "A Confession of Faith," but it is precisely faith that the author seems to lack.