8
PARTISAN REVIEW
we came to Marx, to .Lenin, to Trotsky.... The Russian revolution
was guided by certain principles of history, and we now tum to those
principles to find the causes for its degeneration. We aim to be scien–
tific socialists, having learned that private property is the instrument
of man's alienation from his hopes and ideals, and that the curve of
socialism is plotted not only by the laws of production but also by the
intentions of men. We have learned so much about the sciences of
economics and politics that we can no longer accept political rhetoric
as evidence of political leadership. We can check political programs
against social realities.
More than that, we have learned that the fertility and animation
of European culture were nourished by science.
As
Europe was trans–
formed from an agricultural community into a vast factory for pro–
ducing the most complicated machines of life, the ambitions of its
mind grew until it now produces the most subtle visions out of the
most solid knowledge. Before Shakespeare we had to have the new
merchant and his bustling market-place and his young science to chart
his new explorations. Before Goethe we had to have the industrial
revolution and Robespierre. So the imagination of modem art bursts
through the world-culture of Einstein and Freud and teems with the
multitude of ideas and events that fill our days. We dream of social–
ism, but we do not come empty-handed to the threshold of a new
world. We come with the riches of science.
Above all, science is the avenue to the concrete observation of
our surroundings. Hence, in omitting science from his image of the
European psyche, Thomas Mann has cut himself off from the
data
of modem existence.
In
this sense he is our metaphysical rather than
our historical contemporary. A bold critic of our tragic moods, our
moral corruptions, our intellectual and esthetic barbarisms-of
all
the
symptoms of decay, he is, however, indifferent to the actual sources
and sponsors of decay. Alive to our spiritual maladies, he never
in–
quires into the plot of our profane history. What has brought us to
the edge of the precipice? We are surrounded by political shepherds
who would lead us into new pastures: who are the true and who are
the false ones? Are the democratic pieties to guarantee our intellectual
fate? The
lie
has entered the marrow of our lives- but who are the
liars? How can we restore
measure
and
value?
True, Mann is out–
spoken in condemning fascism, but we have seen that indignation
is
not enough, for it does not lay bare its causes. We cannot accept
Mann as our historic contemporary because he is not concerned with
contemporary history.
To-day, even more than at any other time in the past, we must
unmask our false prophets.
This
is a period of
masquerade.
Rogues
