iHE
ROotS
01=
MooHN
lASTE
527
italistic society has fallen all over the world is justified by the failures
and injustices of capitalism; but if we want to understand the assump–
tions about politics of the world today, we have to consider the readi–
ness of people to condemn the failures and injustices of that society as
compared with their reluctance to condemn the failures and in–
justices of communist society. The comparison will give us the
measure of the modern preference for the unconditioned- to the
modern more-or-Iess thinking man, communist society is likely to seem
a close approximation to the unconditioned, to spirit making its own
terms.
1
The dislike of the conditioned is in part what makes so many
of us dissatisfied with our class situation, and guilty about it, and
unwilling to believe that it has any reality, or that what reality
it may have is a possible basis of mor,al or spiritual prestige (which
is the most valuable thing in the world to those of us who think a
little). By extension, we are very little satisfied with the idea of
family life-for us it is part of the inadequate bourgeois reality. Not
that we don't live goodnaturedly enough with our families, but when
we do, we know that we are "family men," by definition cut off
from the true realities of the spirit. This,
I
venture to suppose, is
why the family is excluded from American literature of any preten–
sions. Although not all families are thus excluded-for example, the
family of Faulkner's
As I
Lay
Dying
is very happily welcomed. And
on every account it should be, but probably one reason for our
eager acceptance of it is that we find in its extremity of suffering a
respite from the commonplace of the conditioned as we know it in
our families, we find in it an intimation of liberty-when condi–
tions become extreme enough there is sometimes a sense of deep re–
lief, as if the conditioned had now been left quite behind, as
if
spirit were freed when the confining comforts and the oppressive as–
surances of civil life are destroyed.
But Howells was committed totally and without question to
civil life, and when he wrote an essay called "Problems of Existence
in Fiction," although he did include among the existential matters
that the novelist might treat such grim, ultimate things as a lingering
1.
Our feeling about the conditioned may have its connection with our
becoming, as C. Wright Mills puts it, less "property-minded" and more "com–
modity-minded."
