OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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"his" ideas and tastes. For some, however, it may still be necessary
to go through a novitiate of emotional expatriation in order to
es–
tablish securely a claim to the intellectual's function-as we can
see in a somewhat analogous case when we
ask:
how soon can the
descendants of immigrants again eat garlic and other savory foods
after a bland, self-inhibited period of "Americanization"? As we
get second- and third-generation intellectuals, these problems may
for many become less intense.
I am saying that an endless process of discovering ourselves,
our burgeoning audiences, and our country may prove life-giving;
it may also help us avoid the recurrent error, in a rapidly changing
culture, of entrenching prejudices while still thinking of ourselves as
heretics. Yet this is only possible if we are not too frantic in our
search for originality, for sure conviction, and for good conscience.
We will often find that our discovery has been made by others.
We will often find that we need to take a stand against being
forced to take a stand; that we have a right to be vague, confused,
and indecisive. And if we are too concerned with making our views
appear incorruptible and intrepid, we will .be victims of those
among us who can always manifest a stance of even greater right–
eousness and severity. The thinker who takes the outre position,
the violent posture, the contemptuous one, still, in this country as
in Europe, carries moral suasion; he mayor may not, depending
on the concrete details of his view, deserve it.
This hegemony of the self-styled extreme is not unrelated to the
problem of the intellectuals' attitude toward America.
If
we con–
fuse complacency with contentment, we will fail to appreciate many
qualities of American bourgeois existence. We will continue- in our
literature, in our erotic dreams, in our romantic admiration for
upper-class insouciance and lower-class uninhibited aggression-to
pay homage to the cult of violence.
Yet it is particularly hard for us as intellectuals to change our
view of America at the very moment when our country has risen to
world predominance. Germans, Frenchmen, and Jews can testify
that it is hard to detach one's loyalties from a weak, threatened, or
defeated nation; it is perhaps even harder to attach one's loyalties
to a newly powerful one.
It
is hard for us not to feel we are selling
out when our views (let us say, our discovery of the virtues of our
