THE DOUBLE
CRISIS
in Mexico, Central America, and Pent, there existed in the rest of
America no civilization, in the proper meaning of the term, before
the coming of the Europeans, who brought with them the culture of
the West as their only luggage of importance. The attempts of some
American writers, during the past two generations, to manufacture a
uniquely "American culture" are a combination of provincialism and
imperial growing pains. It is tme that certain of our institutional
forms, our technology, and some modes of our rhetoric are peculiarly
our own; and the distinctions should not be blurred. Nevertheless,
our deeper cultural streams-our religion, painting, morality, litera–
ture, philosophy, music, and our determining political concepts–
have without exception European sources.
There is perhaps here a cause more profound than political
expediency or humanitarian sentiment for the unanimity with which
Americans (even in the once isolationist West) today agree in the
aim of European recovery. In a reversal of a kind that has not a
few precedents in history, the power and material resources of the
child have grown far beyond those of the parent. But we seem to
sense that the death of Europe would be at the same time the wither–
ing of our own roots.
As
for Russia: if the reality of Europe is inseparable from the
will that Europe should exist, then certainly the Kremlin is not of
Europe. Russia's present rulers intend evidently to excise, by the
usual NKVD methods, those elements of her culture that have spmng
from Europe. During the past two years, the purge of "Western
influences," which began more than fifteen years ago, has been given
a new intensity. Soviet art, writing, and even science have been feel–
ing the whip. Our own musical circles, where fellow-traveling has
long been a safe and noncommittal occupational hobby, were sent
spinning by the recent blows against Shostakovitch, Khatchaturian,
and Prokofieff.
Let me suggest, however, that we turn from the idea of Europe
to the present geographical reality. It seems to me certain that
France cannot solve even its internal problems in isolation from
the rest of the European Continent, or, indeed, from the world as
a whole. The question of a federated Europe is no longer a subject
for high-school debates: it has been placed on the order of the day.
I will go further: either western Europe puts in action, at both the
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