OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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and no fact is perhaps more important for the interpretation of the
American mind than the central part played by this great art form.
Its dominance is certainly typical of our psychology: our interest in
speed, facts, know-how, our positivism, our extravert and technological
mentality. Journalism happens also to be a mass
art
par excellence,
and one of the themes of this symposium is mass culture-rightly so
in a mass society like America. Just about one hundred years ago
Kierkegaard wrote the complete outline of Ortega y Gasset's
Revolt
of the Masses
in his essay, "The Present Age," and the art form
that he predicted for the era of the masses was precisely that of
journalism. In a journalistic civilization like ours, journalism takes
over everything, novels, plays, movies (which become increasingly
more topical), and eventually everybody's mind. I find it simply un–
canny how the minds of a good many intellectuals I know are com–
pletely permeated by journalism beyond their suspicions of it.
As
a
teacher of philosophy, I also know the backbreaking experience of
trying to lead the minds of even very bright students to that point
where journalism leaves off and philosophy begins. Even a good
many of our "professional" philosophers can't escape journalistic
thinking.
Now, streamlined journalism does make us all more knowledge–
able, but also more superficial, and its greatest danger is that in the
midst of its almost deafening uproar, as it takes over a culture, we
may cease to be able to hear those voices of experience that have
to be heard quietly if they are to be heard at all. The Chinese used
to say, "When the sage is alone and thinks truly, he can be heard for
a thousand miles." Alas, amid the contemporary hubbub, the sage,
far from being heard by others, may have difficulty hearing his
own healing silence. "God is far off," Hoelderlin wrote, and the
irony of a journalistic civilization is that at the very moment we
are living through what is called a religious revival God appears to be
farther off than ever.
I should like to see America succeed in its own terms so that it
might fail totally. Out of that total failure might come something
greater than man has ever known, but certainly not before. It would
be the greatest historical disaster if America did not have its chance
for its own failure but should be defeated by the external enemy of
world Communism.
