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and is consequently deeply hostile to the Communist. The official
liberal runs interference for the Communist with a system of intel–
lectual evasion and subterfuge that results directly from a desperate
attempt to square a superficial and optimistic creed with a bitter
century.
Many contemporary radicals have rejected these sunny medi–
tations. Silone, Koestler, Malraux, Niebuhr, Orwell, Dos Passos,
Hemingway, Macdonald: the very names suggest a range of percep–
tions and anxieties unknown to the columns of
The New Republic.
In this new version, man becomes at once greater and more pitiable,
more aspiring and more frustrated, more hallowed and more doomed.
This image stands up better in the century of Buchenwald. But the
men who are possessed by it are still under official malediction as
tired liberals, judases, and apostles of disillusion.
If
you believe man to be essentially good, you commit yourself
to the endless task of explaining why he does not always behave that
way. A simple way out is to affirm that, in spite of appearances to the
contrary, he really is performing the good. In the course of this solu–
tion the liberal intellectual generates myths which he comes to prefer
to actualities, especially if the actualities are uncomfortable (as they
usually are). The addiction to myth is of course increased by the
fact that the liberal has denied himself such traditional outlets for
credulity as religion.
The susceptibility to wishfulness, the need for the sustaining
myth, the disbelief in man's urge to destroy-all combine to reduce
the capacity for critical judgment which the intellectual's detachment
from social loyalties should confer upon him. This is the real
trahison
des clercs.
Instead of contributing clarity, logic, and rigorous in–
sistence on facts, the liberal intellectual has been more and more de–
voting his ingenuity to laminating his favorite myths. He has failed
wretchedly to live up to his obligation to provide intellectual leadership.
One myth, to which the liberal has clung in,the face of experience
with the imperturbable ardor of an early Christian, is the mystique
of the proletariat. This myth, given its classical form by Marx, him–
self so characteristically a bourgeois intellectual, states that the action
of the working class will overthrow capitalist tyranny and establish
by temporary dictatorship a classle..o:s society. Its appeal lies partly in
the intellectual's sense of guilt over living pleasantly by his wits
instead of unpleasantly by his hands, partly in the intellectual's some–
what feminine fascination with the rude and muscular power of the
proletariat, partly in the intellectual's desire to compensate for his
