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PARTISAN REVIEW
But the reality that he conceived was abstractly conceived-he
never quite saw that it was conditioned by the local circumstance
in which the discipline to deal with it had been developed. The
"society" which the American intellectual learned about from
Europe was in large part a construct of Marxism, or a construct of
the long war of the French intellectual with the French bourgeoisie.
Ideas, of course, are transferrable; there is no reason why the
American intellectual might not have transferred what he had
learned to America, why he should not have directed the impatience,
the contempt, the demand, the resistance, which are necessary ele–
ments of the life of the critical intellect-and, as I think, of a large
part of the creative life as well- upon the immediate, the local, and
the concrete phenomena of American life. I do not say that he
did not display impatience, contempt, demand, and resistance, but
only that he did not direct them where they should have gone, that
he was general and abstract where he should have been specific and
concrete.
The literary mind, more precisely the historical-literary mind,
seems to be the best kind of critical and constructive mind that we
have, better than the philosophic, better than the theological, better
than the scientific and the social-scientific. But the literary intellec–
tuals, possibly because they are still fascinated by certain foreign
traditions, still do not look at our culture with anything like the
precise critical attention it must have.
If
we are to maintain the
organic pluralism we have come to value more highly than ever
before, it is not enough to think of it in its abstract totality-we
must be aware of it in its multifarious, tendentious, competitive de–
tails.
For example, it is a truism that universal education is one of
the essential characteristics of modern democracy and that the
quality and tendency of the education provided is a clear indica–
tion of the quality and tendency of the democracy that provides
it. What, then, is the condition of American education? The ques–
tion has been allowed to fall into the hands of reactionaries of the
most vicious kind, and of progressives and liberals whose ideas may
evoke sympathy and whose goals are probably right in general but
who live in a cave of self-commiseration and self-congratulation
into which no ray of true criticism ever penetrates. Who among
