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P.JRTJS.JN
REYIEW
Europe in order to determine what have been its contributions to humanity.
Why then "European"? Why not "American," or "humanistic," or
"liberal," or anything else than European?
The term "European" is chosen by Mr. Krutch as a counter-idea
to communism for the same reason, though with perhaps less conscious
intent that it is used by Spengler and other doctors of fascism, in
ord~r,
that is, to set the U.S.S.R., the exploited colonial civilizations, and the
whole movement of the proletariat and poor peasants of Europe and
America, outside the boundaries of civilization; to be non-European is to
be outside the concerns of European and American justice and progress.
Thus, under the mystical claims of a European Style, he seeks to isolate
European and American thought from the whole history of human values,
and so to cover the depredations of one element of humanity as the expense
of all others:
"But humanity as Europe knows it cannot be imagined
apart from the social order which Europe has created.... "
No cultured European, thinks Mr. Krutch, will lay hands upon the pres–
ent Eu-ropean social order and risk the loss of freedom, individuality, and
contact with knowledge merely for the sake of "non-European" barbarians
to whom these things are nothing.
The real inheritors of European culture are not, however, these
"cultured European&" whose sole role is to attempt to defend their crum–
bling values at any cost to humanity.
If
Mr. Krutch wishes to learn intJ
whose hands European culture has actually entrusted its life, let him
read the address of Lenin to the 3rd Congress of the Communist Youth:
"It would be
a
serious mistake to suppose that one can be–
come a communist without making one's own the treasures of
human knowledge....
Communism becomes an empty phrase, a mere facade, and
the communist a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his
consciusness the whole inheritance of human knowledge."
If,
on the other hand, he wishes to learn who are the automatons
of
abstraction, not in some remote Utopia but today in this living, critical
epoch of man's history, let him meditate upon his own definitions
of
individuality, freedom and disinterested speculation, his "European heri–
tage," and then read the works of the man who in the desperate first days
of revolutionary conquest urged the Russian youth to acquire communism
"in such a way that communism will not be something learned
by heart, but something which you have thought out yourselves,
something which forms the inevitable conclusion from the point
of view of modern education."
That communists are not as culturally dislocated as he imagined, should
reassure Mr. Krutch as to the prospects of European civilization, or
perhaps, as the representative of a class, it should alarm him still more.
HAROLD
RosENBERG
