OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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bent on combating all dissent from the bourgeois outlook and
devaluating the critical traditions of modem thought. Thus it has
become fashionable to dismiss ideas of cultural or social insurgence
by relating them, with a facility all too suspect, to the Russian
experience, while at the same time all sorts of heretofore unsuspected
plausibilities-if not profundities- are read into the standard no–
tions of the ideologues of reaction; and a new magazine like
The
Freeman,
with its boosting of laissez faire and hero-worship of Taft
and
M~Carthy,
is by no means an untypical phenomenon.
In our literary culture there is a more complicated play of
forces. The rout of the left-wing movement has depoliticalized litera–
ture-which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself if the political
motive had been not simply abandoned but creatively displaced by a
root-idea of a different order. No such idea having emerged so far,
what is to be observed now is a kind of detachment from principle
and fragmentation of the literary life. Also to be observed is the rise
of a neo-philistine tendency, an oddly belated growth of the mood of
acceptance and of the defensive reaction to Communism, which, if
unchecked by the revival of the critical spirit, threatens to submerge
the tradition of dissent in American writing.
The neo-philistines make an opportune kind of optimism their
credo; they are impatient to assume the unchallengeable reality of
the "world," and while reconciled to mass-culture they are inclined
to deprecate the traditional attitudes of the literary and artistic
avant-garde-attitudes said to arise out of negativism pure and simple
and willful indulgence in "alienation." Now the avant-garde is of
course open to criticism. It has the typical faults of its incongruous
position in a mass-society, such as snobbery and pride of caste. It is
disposed to take a much too solemn and devotional view of the
artist's vocation. Its distortions of perspective result from its aloof–
ness and somewhat inflexible morality of opposition. But to accuse
it of having invented alienation is ludicrous. For what the avant–
garde actually represents historically, from its very beginnings in
the early nineteenth century, is the effort to preserve the integrity
of art and the intellect amidst the conditions of alienation brought
on by the major social forces of the modem era. The avant-garde
has attempted to ward off the ravages of alienation in a number of
ways: by means of developing a tradition of its own and cultivating
