OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
from without, is also having its freedom encroached upon from within.
Our first question in America today must be "Are you against Com–
munism?"; but our second ought to be, "What else are you against?"
-or "What are you for?" And
in
the exact
s~me
way that we oppose
regimentation of thought on political grounds, we must oppose
regimentation of taste on cultural ones; aware that regimentation
of a kind threatens highbrow levels quite as any other. The masses,
duped by slogans, may warn intellectuals that they have their slogans
also: thus a phrase like The American Past can become as grandiosely
hollow with them, .as The American Way with the masses. Conformity
inside one's group can be deadening, too.
'As a platform)
"critical nonconformism" is perhaps too self–
willed an attitude, and at any rate too self-conscious a one. A reason–
able adjustment to American life needn't for a moment imply agree–
ment with its prevailing tenets; nor need anyone be "alienated"
from the life about him-any more than from the literature about
him-simply for being intensely critical of it. Where non-conformity
is concerned, perhaps we are all best off being M. Jourdains, suddenly
discovering that all our lives we have been failing to conform. What
America needs, at every level, is a re-emergence of simple individual–
ism.
It
needs people no more swayed by the set defiances of Bohemia
and the rigidities of avant-gardism than by the shibboleths of bour–
geois living and philistine culture. The ordinary bookshop today, stock–
ing almost nothing that isn't current or surefire, is only a little more
depressing than certain avant-garde bookshops-which are just like
highstyled 57th Street dress shops, where one asks in vain for any
writer who is not properly modish, and where (for all that) there is
seldom any changing of the garde. We need many quiet, unruffled
individualists (who won't make individualism, in turn, the fashion) ;
we could do with a fair number of eccentrics who are yet not cranks;
and perhaps most of all we might wish for a few children who should
cry out, from time to time, "But the Emperor has no clothes on!"
