438
PARTISAN REVIEW
Thus, we have liberal educators who would wish to gear American
education to the lowest instead of the highest intellectual potential
of the population, calling this democracy; we have a liberal weekly
which for a long time could boast that not a word appeared in its pages
which was over the head of a high school student; we send our children
to schools which are progressive in the degree that they treat a love
of .books as
if
it were some form of psychic disorder. . . . One could
extend the list at discouraging length.
The question is, why is all of this so? Why does the idealistic
middle class think so little of itself and of everything that pertains
to it? Well, I am afraid that I have no simple answer to that question,
and no time for conjectures, beyond, perhaps, a single one: could it be
that we have lost our sense of our own worth because we have lost
the sense of our creative power? Certainly our notion of the creative
process has profoundly altered
in
recent decades. We no longer think
of ideas as power-although we are exhorted to think of them as
weapons. We no longer think of creativeness itself as a form of power.
The great spirits of the past, the revolutionary spirits even up to the
turn of this century, all of them-however dissimilar they were-had this
in common: that they considered themselves engaged, not in a work of
reclamation or fortification, but in a work of free creation. They were,
they felt, creating new and powerful ideas-whether it was Tolstoy
creating his own brand of Christian socialism, or Freud creating his
idea of the unconscious, or Lenin creating his idea of the proletarian
revolution. But we today do not create; we submit ourselves to needs.
By idealism, indeed, we precisely mean
not
creating, but serving-and
serving a good which is not our own.
But I say "we"-I say we and our, and whom do I mean by "we"?
I think it is time I redeemed my promise to restore your separateness to
those of you who can honestly claim it and rescued, or at least urged,
the rest of us out of the lengthening shadows of our pasts.
I have been drawing a composite portrait of the dominant political
idealism of our time.
It
is my
propositio~
this evening that the kind
of idealism I have been describing characterizes wholly only that sec–
tion of the intellectual middle class which is in the Communist orbit.
By "we," therefore, I mean ourselves in this room only insofar as the
picture may fit us historically. This is how we were, if we were,
Stalinists.
If
we were never this way, then we were never prey to the
spirit of left totalitarianism-and we were uncommon members of our
particular section of society.
