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PARTISAN REVIEW
(4) The "non-conformism" tradition, to which you make
reference, has faded, and in my opinion, will continue to fade. Who,
as a group or even as a clique, publicly represents it today? Nobody
who isn't so genteel and muted about it that it is practically a
secret set of beliefs, or
so
mechanical and untalented about it that
it
is
publicly irrelevant. Besides,
I
certainly
am
not aware of any
"reaffirmation and rediscovery of America" going on, outside the
Voice of America. The attempt to
understand
"America" has, in my
opinion, been largely given up by many intellectuals.
Of
course it's
possible, especially for those who have given up the attempt, to "re–
affirm" at
will.
Two
The Englishman, John Morley, in his profound essay
On Com–
promise}
distinguished deference to the existing state of affairs in (1)
forming opinions, (2) in expressing them, and (3) in trying to
realize them. With him, I believe there is no reason for such def–
erence in the first and at least not yet in the second of these three
spheres. The third is another matter: choices are often necessary,
even if they are morally corrupting. What
is
happening is that many
intellectuals have had to give up some of the ideas that made their
impatience for change palatable, and moreover have lived under
conditions that affect their freedom in the first and second spheres.
What
is
happening in the United States is that three is out of the
question (no movement), so two tends to dry up (no audience), and
so in one, people adapt (no individual opinion). Without a movement
to which they might address political ideas, intellectuals in due
course cease to express such ideas, and so in time, shifting their in–
terests, they become indifferent.
They can no longer take heart by functioning only in the second
area (that is, as intellectuals
per se)
because they no longer believe,
as firmly as Morley did, that in the end opinion rules and that
therefore small groups of thinkers may take the lead in historic
change. They no longer believe that existing institutions and policies
are held provisionally-until new and better ideas about them are
available as replacements. They no longer believe that the prosperity,
or even the chance of an idea, depends upon its intrinsic merits, but
rather that its medium and conditions are usually more important to
its fate. And they now know that ideas and force do not "belong
to different elements"-as nineteenth-century liberals were wont to
