OUR COUNTRY
ANO
OUR CULTURE
303
of democratic liberty in the name of devotion to it, which we have
witnessed in this nation in the past five years.
In this situation, appeal to the courts is of less moment than
individual courage in every relationship of life. What
is
wanted is
the courage and the ability to resist the tide, to fashion satirical
weapons against the demagogues, to defeat the fools with the wea–
pons of both scorn and laughter.
There is another reason why the intellectuals of America must
refuse to sheath the sword of criticism but rather seek for the sword
most likely to pierce the present armor. American sanity is threat–
ened not only by the combination of power and insecurity which
has become our fate. Our culture is also threatened from within
by the preoccupation of our nation with technology. The resulting
crudities are much more serious than those of which our fathers
were ashamed. The cultural and spiritual crudities of a civilization
preoccupied with technics compare with the pastoral and rustic
crudities of a frontier civilization as a neon-lighted movie palace
compares with a cow-barn. Our problem is not merely the synthetic
and sentimentalized art of Hollywood or the even lower depths to
which television has reduced this art. It is also the problem of cheap
technocratic approaches to the tragic historical drama in which we
are all involved. We have wise men who think they can find a way
out of our present distress by establishing clinics all over the world,
which will cure children of "aggressiveness" and thus make future
wars impossible. Thus life in its grandeur and misery, and history
in its tragic and noble proportions, are reduced to biological lives,
in order to encourage the hope that the same engineers who mastered
"nature" will soon achieve the mastery of this vast historical drama.
The contemporary French have become so critical of us that
their criticisms are hardly fair. But when the French daily
Le M onde
complains that our technocratic approach is not too different from
communist technocracy, we must acknowledge a measure of truth
in the indictment. We must admit, at any rate, that it will require
ages of the most sophisticated and the most rigorous and vital kind
of criticism to save our American culture from destruction by tech–
nocratic illusions, even if it should be saved from physical destruc–
tion by atomic explosions.
