CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
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criticize anyone without offering them, on the same tray with the
poison that is supposed to kill them, a chaser and a three-thousand
word memo describing the kind of world you would modestly suggest
that they substitute for the one in which they have been living so far.
Now, with all due respect for the democratic intentions of those who
advocate this type of debate, article or lecture, it would seem to us
that nothing expresses more clearly the childish arrogance of a certain
type of mind than this distortion of the function of criticism. Why
should the poor devil who discovers that something does not make
sense to him strive to become an expert before he can say so? Does
he have to be an expert to trust his healthy instinct? Or does one grad–
uate in instinct, and since when?
The fact is that this typically modern hatred
of all criticism based
on common sense
is just another aspect of the current prejudice that
all human activity should be specialized.
The common man, to use
for once with concreteness the most outworn cliche of our age, has a
right to declare that things as they .are don't please him, from the
point of view of his ignorance alone. His ignorance may of course
exclude him from a meeting of experts (in ballistics, bacteriological
warfare, propaganda, counterpropaganda, etc.), but it cannot pos–
sibly exclude him from the number of the living, because, beyond all
the knowledge that man may (and, alas,
does)
acquire, there is still,
even if not for too long, man himself, with the unexplainable fact of
his existence.
If
magazine editors or forum moderators cannot allow anyone
who is not an expert to speak, he may call himself an expert in smell
and say that certain things to him smell badly. Here we see how the
principles of democracy .are not invoked at all by the defenders of
constructivism at all costs. In fact, a real believer in democracy would
put it this way: "The President may be the greatest man in the
world, but the one thing he will never be able to see is the shape of
the White House in the frame of his own windows. Being in there,
this is his limitation; if he wants to hear the White House described
from the outside, he will have to rely
all
the description of the man
sitting at the window atop the drugstore on Seventeenth Street and
Pennsylvania Avenue."
But those in politics are quite aware of this. They know per–
fectly well that they may always be called to task by the famous com-
