PARTISAN REVIEW
C. WRIGHT MILLS
Your questions direct me first, to an assessment of changes
in the attitudes intellectuals hold of America, and, second, to my
own attitudes toward this country. I take the questions in this double
way because I do not believe they are answerable on the first inter–
pretation without the second intruding. It's a matter of whether or
not you're aware of their inevitable interpenetration. Nevertheless,
I am going to try to keep them distinct.
One
( 1) American intellectuals do seem quite decisively to have
shifted their attitudes toward America. One minor token of the
shift is available to those who try to imagine "the old PR" running
the title "Our Country ... ," etc. in 1939. You would have cringed.
Don't you want to ask from what and to what the shift has
occurred? From a political and critical orientation toward life and
letters to a more literary and less politically critical view. Or: gen–
erally to a shrinking deference to the status quo; often to a soft
and anxious compliance, and always a synthetic, feeble search to
justify this intellectual conduct, without searching for alternatives,
and sometimes without even political good sense. The several phases
of this development I've recently tried to document and explain
elsewhere.
(2) Of course intellectuals
need
not adapt themselves to
"mass culture" as it is now set up; but many of them have, doubtless
others will, maybe some won't. We must remember that this is a
tricky question to answer, because some might exclude from "the
intelligentsia" those who do "adapt" to these media contents, be–
lieving that they thereby become technicians, maybe brilliant ones,
but technicians.
One key thing about American mass culture, as Hans Gerth
once commented, is that it is not an "escape" from the strains of
routine, but another routine, which in its murky formulations and
pre-fabricated moods (Type one: Hot, Type two : Sad ) deprive
the individual of his own fantasy life, and in fact often empty him
of the possibilities of having such a life. So if your questions mean
should intellectuals adapt to
thal,
I suppose I have to say they can't,
