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PARTISAN REVIEW
religious experience; I'm tone-deaf when it comes to God. So many
of my fellow-men, past and present, have felt at home with the idea
of God that I must admit it is a deep and apparently permanent
human trait. Yet I'm sure that, if they had not, the idea would
never have occurred to me at all. Not even in adolescence, when
many Americans' personal experience seems to parallel the experience
of the race (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) did I experience the
slightest quiver of religious feeling. Nor do I now, although the
brutal irrationality of the modern world has made me understand
and sympathize with others' religious beliefs, and although in sur–
prisingly many ways I find myself agreeing more with contemporary
religious-minded people than with the "secular radicals." God, at–
tractive though the idea is from an intellectual standpoint, simply
does not engage my feelings or imagination.
This is all the more a pity since I have lost confidence in the
dominant non-religious social tendency in this country today: the
Marx-cum-Dewey approach represented by Sidney Hook (pure),
the liberal weeklies (debased), the Reuther brothers and Senator
Humphrey ("grass roots"), the Americans for Democratic Action
(official), and
Partisan Review
(highbrow). This seems to me to
have failed politically, culturally, and even scientifically.
Politically: It has either failed or, where it has won power, has
produced the horrors of Soviet Communism or the dull mediocrity
of the Attlee and Truman governments. Lenin and Kautsky are
the antithetical political types it has produced; both seem to me
unsatisfactory.
Culturally: Its close connection with nineteenth-century philistine
progressivism, wellmeaning but thoroughly bourgeois, has meant
that the creators of living culture, from Stendhal to Eliot, have existed
outside it and mostly opposed to it. As Leslie Fiedler has recently
noted, this split affects
Partisan Review
itself: the editors have had
to rely largely on writers whom they, as ideologues, consider "re–
actionary" and "obscurantist."
Scientifically: Confidence in scientific method, unchecked by an
independent system of human values, has encouraged an indis–
criminate development of technique which now gives us Ford's
monstrous River Rouge plant, the H-Bomb, and the Nazi-Soviet
organizations for controlling and conditioning human beings. This
