II0b
PARTISAN REVIEW
will fight tor the right, it he would live even tor a brief space, must
have a private station and not a public one."
And a little bit later in the same breath of eloquence, "Now do
you really imagine that I could have survived all these years if I had
led a public life, supposing that, like a good man, I had always main–
tained the right and made justice, as I ought, the first thing? No
indeed, Men of Athens, neither I nor any other man."
Thus Socrates.
As
for Voltaire and Dean Swift, two of the
greatest political minds that ever lived, they were just as constructive
as sulphuric acid. It is only in our time that the idea of constructive–
ness has taken on such a hold
in
the business of criticism. Indeed,
constructiveness today has become typical of this country and is
considered a symptom of American youthfulness and fighting spirit.
On the surface it may well appear that constructiveness is really a
symptom of these fine things, but a slightly closer observation reveals
in it obvious symptoms of decay and utter indifference to everything.
The constructiveness of the
Reader's Digest,
for example, so
readily accepted by many millions in so many countries as typically
American, is nothing but a polite way to tone down the discussion
and turn out of doors the inquisitive spirit of the philosopher always
behaving like the elephant in the China shop.
It
is too bad that all
those millions cannot read and study carefully the only good analysis
of the
Reader's Digest
in existence:
Little Wonder
by John Bain–
bridge, a great classic of critical journalism.
For the.
Reader's Digest
you must be constructive because it is
bad manners to leave )lour audience with doubts after they have read
your articles and heard your lecture. They don't want intellectual
hangovers. Constructiveness is, in other words, the political or philo–
sophical equivalent of the happy ending in the movies or in magazine
stories, and if there is now a trend away from it, that is because there
have been so many happy endings everywhere on paper, on the screen
and through the microphone, that the editors, producers, forum mod–
erators and whoever else supervises these things, have begun to feel
that perhaps it was a little more in keeping with the times if they left
their customers with a vague feeling of uneasiness about the fate of
the world.
Another current prejudice about this kind of constructiveness is
that it expresses the very core of the democratic spirit. You never
