OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
287
seemed to be in question during those years; as they recede into
history, however, it will surely be clearer all the while that the
polarity was not really destroyed after all. That period, at any
rate, is over, and the habit of rejection, of repudiation, of mere
exacerbated alienation, has ceased to seem relevant or defensible–
inevitably, since the culture we profoundly cherish is now disas–
trously threatened from without, and the truer this becomes, the
intenser becomes the awareness of our necessary identification with
it. The negative relation to one's culture has great validity in cer–
tain periods; at others, it is simply sterile, even psychopathic, and
ought to give way, as it has done here, in the last decade, to the
positive relation. Anything else suggests too strongly the continu–
ance into adult life of the negative Oedipal relations of adolescence
-and in much of the alienation of the twenties and thirties there
was just that quality of immaturity.
2.
If
the word "adapt" here is taken to mean something like
"yield," "surrender," or the like, then certainly the intellectual must
not adapt himself to mass culture as we now know it; if the word
is
taken to mean "get into a positive and creative relation," then
the intellectual must make an effort to adapt himself to that cul–
ture. It is an immense question-too immense to be discussed
properly in a few sentences-but one can suggest that almost enough
has been made of the
ominous
aspects of mass culture and too little
of its latent germs of creativeness.
If
the movies count as a form
of mass culture, then a culture which can produce, in one year,
works of such liveliness and truth as
Born Yesterday
or the wholly
different
Red Badge of Courage
is at least not a dying one; if
television counts, then surely some of the things that have been done
by Studio One are hardly evidence of inanition. Ortega to the
contrary (with reluctance), the culture of the modern masses has
not yet "crush[ed] beneath it everything that
is
different," etc., and
there
is
an excellent fighting chance that it never will. It is merely
self-indulgent defeatism to assume that a democratic society "neces–
sarily" leads to a leveling of culture; there are hackneyed examples
from antiquity and modern times that give the lie to any such help–
less prediction, and surely the line for the intellectual to take is not
that of running headlong in panic from mass culture, but that of
consciously attempting to master and to fertilize it. An easier line
to point to verbally, of course, than to follow!
