OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
291
These relationships were not so clear or so desperate a genera–
tion ago. What has happened is not that American culture has
become better in that time, but the world much worse. The new
context, and an understanding hardened by the fierce blows of
these years, justify a renewed political affirmation. But it is neither
necessary nor wise to confuse this with a general evaluation of
American arts and graces. Are we going to imply to European–
and Moslem, Hindu, and Chinese- intellectuals that it is illicit to
prefer American political institutions and politics to Soviet unless
at the same time they are ready to laugh with Berle, honor Thomas
Wolfe, and smack their lips at Coca Cola?
America has, it is true, added something new to history. For
the first time, starvation and physically abject poverty seem to have
been almost eliminated. The average and the median standard of
living are far beyond any precedent. The members of a great nation
have never, I think, been so mobile, both socially and geographic–
ally, and no people has ever been so apt at the rapid technological
transformation of the earth and its products. By some mysterious
and not at all understood genius, moreover, the American political
structure seems able to expand with unusual ease, and to adjust it–
self to a wide variety of social terrain and human types.
It
is the recognized function of American intellectuals, as of
the intellectual everywhere, to raise these new modes of group life
to consciousness, responsibility and explicit form. But these novelties
are, so far, only raw materials. A large further part of the proper
function of the American intellectuals, and to an increasing extent
of European intellectuals also, remains what it has been: to act as
cultural
links
and channels between Europe and America, to apply
the spiritual tools of traditional Western civilization to the finishing
and refining of these raw- both promising and threatening-ma–
terials. We cannot affirm America without reaffirming Europe and
the West. Humans are beings with a history, a past; Europe is our
past; and even God cannot will the past not to have been.
