OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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the way of personal interestedness, to the growing isolation of his
country amid the hostility which is directed against it. He has be–
come aware of the virtual uniqueness of American security and
well-being, and, at the same time, of the danger in which they
stand. Perhaps for the first time in his life he has associated his
native land with the not inconsiderable advantages of a whole
skin, a full stomach, and the right to wag his tongue as he pleases.
He also responds to the fact that there is now no longer any
foreign cultural ideal to which he can possibly fly from the Amer–
ican stupidity and vulgarity, the awareness of which was once
likely to have been the mainspring of his mental life. The ideal of
the workers' fatherland systematically destroyed itself some time
back. Even the dullest intellectual now knows better than to look
for a foster-father in Thyestes. Nor can he any longer entertain the
idea of the bright cosmopolis of artists and intellectuals. The
political situation, the commanding position of Stalinism in French
cultural life, does not prevent our having the old affinity with certain
elements of that life, but it makes the artistic and intellectual lead–
ership of France unthinkable.
For the first time in the history of the modem American
intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as
a priori
the vul–
garest and stupidest nation of the world. And this is not only because
other nations are exercising as never before the inalienable right of
nations to be stupid and vulgar. The American situation has changed
in a way that is not merely relative. There is an unmistakable im–
provement in the present American cultural situation over that of,
say, thirty years ago. This statement is, of course, much too simple
and I make it with the awareness that no cultural situation is
ever really good. Yet as against the state of affairs of three decades
ago, we are notably better off.
The improvement is manifold. I shall choose only one aspect
of it, and remark the change in the relation of wealth to intellect.
In
many civilizations there comes a point at which wealth shows a
tendency to submit itself to the rule of mind and imagination, to
refine itself, and apologize for its existence by a show of taste and
sensitivity.
In
America the tendency to this submission has for some
time been apparent. For assignable reasons which cannot here be
enumerated, wealth inclines to be uneasy about itself. I do not
