OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE'
WILLIAM BARRETT
Do I like being an American? It is a little bit like asking
me whether I like being myself. Obviously, there are a great many
things about myself I don't like and that I would like to change,
but as for really being myself I have no choice, I have got to be
that. And so with being American. Culturally speaking, one might
dream how nice it might be to be a Periclean Greek, a quattrocento
Florentine, or an Englishman, Frenchman, or German of pre-1914,
but such dreams get pretty pallid beside the reality of one's place
and time, which is also somehow the reality of oneself, and which
in .any case one has to start from. Since one is an American, the
fact itself is a fatality beyond one's liking it or not.
Thus, alienated or not, one is still just as much an American;
and the alienated man may
belong
to his time and place just as
deeply, sometimes more, than the unalienated.
If
I quarrel persistently
with certain features of American life and culture, the quarrel itself
is a sign of my commitment to America.
As,
again, the quarrel with
one's own faults need not be a sign of self-hatred but of one's earnest
desire to be better.
It seems necessary to begin with this brief apologia for aliena–
tion because the present period in America is one of widespread
drift toward conformism-a drift which is noticeable, I think, in a
good many contributions to this symposium. We have all been
rediscovering the values of America in recent years, and that is a
very good thing. It is a very good thing, for example, to know that
George F. Babbitt had virtues which the twenties never recognized;
1.
This is the second part of a symposium, the first installment of which
was published in the May-June 1952 issue. The editorial statement on the
subject appeared in that issue.
