OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
321
demic career is now far more attractive to members of
all
classes
than it used to be.
I do not believe that a high incidence of conscious professional
intellect in a society necessarily makes for a good culture.
It
is even
possible to imagine that a personnel of considerable intellectual .
power would have little interest in what is called the intellectual life,
and even less interest in art. But this is not at present the case. The
members of the newly expanded intellectual class that I have been
describing, partly by reason of the education they receive, partly by
reason of old cultural sanctions which may operate only as a kind
of snobbery but which still do operate, and partly because they know
that the mental life of practical reality really does have a relation to
the mental life of theory and free imagination, are at least potentially
suppOlters and consumers of high culture. They do not necessarily
demand the best, but they demand what is called the best; they
demand something. The haste and overcrowding of their lives pre–
vents them from getting as much as they might want and need. So
does the stupidity of the entrepreneurs of culture, such as pub–
lishers, who, in this country, have not had a new idea since they
invented the cocktail party. So does the nature of the commitment
of the people who produce the cultural commodity, that is, the
actual "intellectuals." Yet it seems to me that art and thought
are more generally and happily received and recognized-if still
not wholly loved-than they have ever before been in America.
A country like ours, so big as ours, compounded of so many
elements of a heterogeneous sort, makes it difficult for us to think
that ideas such as might be entertained by anything like an elite
can have any direct influence. And it is undoubtedly true that there
is a considerable inertia that must be taken into account as we
calculate the place of mind in our national life. But we should be
wrong to conclude that the inertia is wholly definitive of our cultural
situation. This is a characteristic mistake of the American intel–
lectual, particularly the literary intellectual, with whom I am
naturally most concerned. He is a man who is likely to be unaware
of the channels through which opinion flows. He does not, for
example, know anything about the existence and the training and
the influence of, say, high school teachers, or ministers, or social
workers, the people of the minor intellectual professions, whose
