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PARTISAN REVIEW
economy, circumstances would seem to require us to be predatory, we
do not like predatoriness; we have to learn how to hold our own in the
economic struggle without ourselves becoming grim and grasping. We
live in a culture of free sexual enterprise which is yet a family culture;
we have to learn how to accommodate the enterprising spirit with the
spirit-or force-of family responsibility. Every time we make a
decision in our purely personal lives, we confront extreme possibilities:
we most of us learn to mediate between them. It is just so that we learn,
in the political life, to assert a decent demand for ourselves within the
bounds of what is also best for mankind in general. Thus, we do not
become chauvinists, we continue to criticize our own country as we
must. But we take into account the welfare of our own nation as well as
the welfare of the community of nations. We do not give ourselves over
to the false or mean values of class-our instincts to justice and gen–
erosity remain-but we cherish the privileges we would wish to extend
to a class which does not have them. We do not become intellectual
prigs, but we value our minds; we feel we have as much right to be
heard on our highest level of development as others have on theirs;
we insist that we, as intellectuals, have as much to contribute to civiliza–
tion as farmers or mechanics-and, as a corollary, we accept our duty
to think clearly.
And so it turns out that all I am asking for, as I ask that we
establish a new high ground of motive between the opposing principles
or right and left totalitarianism, between the self-appreciation of the
right and the self-depreciation of the left, is simply pride-a decent
pride as the basis, and guarantor, of our political virtue. To value
ourselves, and then, because we value ourselves, also value others:
what better guarantee can we have,
Of"
want, of our political morality?
What I am suggesting, in other words, is the need in our political
lives for a new respect for the self, and of everything that pertains
to the self, lest we conspire in our own extinction.
