OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
lOI
life. It
is
worth something to remind ourselves that the great artists–
certainly the moderns--are almost always in opposition to their
society, and that integration, acceptance, non-alienation, etc. etc.
has been more conducive to propaganda than art.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
The critical attitude of American intellectuals toward
American culture in the nineteenth and the early part of this cen–
tury was rooted in an adolescent embarrassment. It was
akin
to the
discomfiture of a young man in viewing the social crudeness of
rustic parents in urban surroundings. Henry James's attitude toward
our American culture, despite the sophisticated psychological in_7
sights of his novels, was not free of this adolescent immaturity.
The intellectual was a cosmopolitan who was ashamed of the crude–
ness of our American frontier culture. Frequently he failed
to
recog–
nize that a new culture, such as our own, had qualities of robustness
which compensated for its lack of the highest refinements of art
and life. It
is,
in any event, not very mature to be ashamed of an
inevitable character. A young nation, developing and expanding on
a frontier, will naturally have different characteristics from those
of old nations, steeped in the past and enriched by the spiritual
treasures of many ages. We may therefore be complacent about
the tendency of modern intellectuals to be free of this kind of
adolescent embarrassment about their nation.
In the period after the First World War another form of
criticism arose among our intellectuals. Whatever the shade of their
political convictions, they tended to
be
ashamed of the complacency
of our nation about the real and alleged evils of the capitalist
sys–
tem. This "social criticism" was prompted, and partly justified, by
the fact that social theory in America was about a half-century
be–
hind the social thought of the great industrial nations of Europe.
While it is still difficult (and incidentally inadvisable) for an in–
telligent man to bear the social theories of the National Manufac–
turers Association and of Senator Taft with patience, this type of
social criticism does not have quite the relevance which it once pos–
sessed. For meanwhile our nation, without a consistent social phil-
