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the less, on no more creditable ground than that the less is nearer.
It is better to wait, and to defer the realization of our ideas until we
can realize them fully, than to defraud the future by truncating
them,
if
truncate them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph
for them in the immediate present. It is better to bear the burden
of impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and pare away prin–
ciple until it becomes hollowness and triviality."
I suppose this is the direction in which I go. In my own think–
ing and writing I have deliberately allowed certain 'implicit values
which I hold to remain, because even though they are quite un–
realizable in the immediate future, they still seem to me worth
displaying. They seem worthwhile in another way too: they sensitize
one to a clearer view of what
i~
,; appening in the world. One tries
by one's work to issue a call
t~
lhinking, to anyone now around, or
anyone who might later cr ;11e into view and who might listen.
There are times when ck al-headed analysis is more important and
more relevant than the most engaging shout for action. I think this
is such a time. Of course, "frank presentation of ominous facts,"
as the late German-trained Joseph Schumpeter once remarked, is
open to the terrible charge of "defeatism," but then, as he pointed
out, "the report that a given ship is sinking is not defeatist," and
" ... this is one of those situations in which optimism is nothing but
a form of defection."
I also believe, as an amateur historian, that one should never
allow one's values to be overwhelmed in short runs of time: that
is
the way of the literary faddist and the technician of the cultural
chic. One just has to wait, as others before one have, while remem–
bering that what in one decade is utopian may in the next be im–
plementable. Surely after the thirties and the forties, we have all
learned how very rapidly events can occur, how swiftly whole nations
can turn over, how soon fashionable orientations, especially as pre–
sented in magazines like yours, can become outmoded.
In the meantime, we must bear with the fact that in many
circles impatience with things as they are in America is judged to be
either mutinous or utopian.
The third and last installment of this symposium will appear in
the September-October issue.
