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PARTISAN REVIEW
bourgeois "capitalism") not only keep us out of trouble but open
up jobs or audiences for us. Indeed,
it
is our bad luck as intellec–
tuals that we have had to recognize our country's growing intellec–
tual and cultural differentiation and emancipation at the same
moment that our world role has grown and Europe's lessened–
especially as we have such a long tradition of mindless or defen–
sive boasting to live down.
For there can be no doubt that the job of the intellectual-to
some extent of anyone-is to remain in some tension with his au–
dience and his immediate milieu. As every sect tends to become a
church, so our new stance toward America even before it is well
launched should take account of the risks of engendering new com–
placencies. Here the great variety of American audiences may aid
us in maintaining a continuous self-scrutiny and renovation. We
will find, for instance, that the attitude of the "new highbrows"
who are curious about and sympathetic to industry, business, and
popular culture will offend both the "old highbrows" and their
pupils, the self-emancipating middlebrows who have been taught
to despise commerce, the middle class, and television as vulgar. Once
aware of these shifts, we intellectuals must speak in such a way
as to challenge our friends while refusing comfort to our enemies–
still telling the truth. And this requires us to search for the shad–
ings and ambiguities, the cross-currents and diversities, which
are
the truth about America.
There is an obvious danger in this course, namely that we
will mistake shock on the part of our audiences for evidence that
we are telling the truth-and we may form a tropism for the shock
rather than for the truth. But I see no way of avoiding the moral
and intellectual complexities of communication to an audience not
all of which is at the same level of sophistication, complacency, or
receptivity; and only by listening for this ambiguity and what it
signifies can we flexibly protect our cultural role as Socratic ques–
tioners and skeptics.
So far I have spoken as if the problem of cultural evaluation
were special to the modern intellectual. But as with most problems
of moment, the roots lie in existential dilemmas. Every gossip who
tells a story on a close friend faces an issue akin to that of "na–
tional loyalty." The writer, whether he is a social scientist, a novel-
