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conditions the social essence of religion, and it may well be
said that except for this sentiment of wretchedness the present appeal
of supernaturalism has quite literally no other objective content.) It is
worth noting that Koestler, who in
Arrival and Departure
summarily
announced that "a new god is about to be born," has now changed his
course somewhat, refusing to join the "exotic hermitage fit for Yogi
exercises." "Neither the 5aint nor the revolutionary can save us; only a
synthesis of the two," he concludes. This is perhaps good enough as an
abstract formula, but it tells us next to nothing about the possibilities of
realizing any such synthesis in the world as we know it.
In the essay entitled "The Intelligentsia" I appreciated most the
contrast drawn between the historical roles of the Russian and Western
intellectuals. In the intellectuals Koestler sees a social group driven by
"an aspiration to independent thought"-a group now declining in all
countries, debilitated by its political experiences and gradually penned
in by the growing power of the State.-''Thus the intelligentsia, once
the vanguard of the ascending bourgeoisie, becomes the lumpen-bour–
geoisie in the age of its decay." This last seems particularly applicable
to America. Not so long ago a good many of our intellectuals were eco–
nomically no better off than lumpen-proletarians, a position which al–
lowed them to assume attitudes of bohemian intransigeance toward so–
ciety, whereas of late, what with war-prosperity and the proliferation of
government jobs which began even earlier, with the New Deal, the once
impoverished intellectuals have been converted almost to a man into
lumpen-bourgeois. And government-employees, occupied as they are with
the bureaucratic struggle for status and revenue, are notoriously feeble
in their aspirations to independent thought.
When it comes, however, to Koestler's imputation of neuroticism
to the
intelligent~ia
as a group, one cannot agree with him quite so easily.
In his view neuroticism is the "professional disease" of the intellectuals
because of the pathological pattern produced by the hostile pressure of
society. Koestler may be right, but I cannot say that I found his argu–
ment convincing. Precise etiological data are missing; without a con–
trolled Freudian analysis the Freudian assumptions hang in the air; and
in general the kind of observation that Koestler brings to bear is literary
rather than scientific. It seems to me that he assimilates the intellectuals
far too readily to the artist-types among them, who are after all but a
minority within a minority. The personality-structure of the artist is quite
different from that of most members of the intelligentsia, whose connec–
tion is with the more technical and less estranged forms of culture and
who are not noted in any special way for the vulnerability, complication
or perversity of their subjective life.
Eqtfally schematic, to my mind, are the arguments advanced in some
of the essays that deal directly with literature. In "The French 'Flu,"
while attacking our tendency to make too much of French literary cui-
