OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
669
tations growing by accretion, as one might gradually discover an
indefinite number of Chinese boxes within boxes or as one might
ferret out the attributes of God or the components of one's uncon–
scious mind.
If
something like this is true (and the enormous con–
servative influence of our "mass culture" enhances the "Chinese"
analogy), our prospective "higher culture" would be nothing but
what we already have, but rendered more stable and self-aware,
and, quite possibly, more complacent and dull.
It is our odd fate to find both these views (or something like
them) necessary in understanding ourselves, the first to account
for the still turbulent energy and variability which may some day
produce a "higher culture" and the second to account for our
famous conservatism, which is not merely the negative side of our
Promethean energy but is a positive, independent, and in some
ways valuable constituent in our society. All this implies for the
American intellectual a dissidence from within, a flexible skepticism
which sometimes will be nothing more than a heartbreaking, mar–
ginal, cat-and-mouse game with his culture and with its future.
This is not a game for those who insist on purity or perfect ration–
ality in their view of history or of morals. Nor for those who im–
agine that to reject or accept America is still their option.
If
"dissidence from within" sounds like an unheroic mission, we have
only to ask in what other mood has the American mind ever been
creative, profound, fresh, or promissory of the future?
SIDNEY HOOK
I cannot understand why American intellectuals should
be
apologetic about the fact that they are limited
in
their effective
historical choice between endorsing a system of total terror and
critically
supporting our own imperfect democratic culture with all its
promises and dangers. For after all within our culture they are not
compelled
to choose whereas in the Soviet world neutrality or even
silence
is
treason. Surely, this should count for something even with
those who, although dependent upon the protective security of our
relatively free culture for their neutralism and cultivation of purity,
regard its struggle for survival as a vulgar battle of ideologies. Nor
is
it clear to me why an appreciation of the values of American life
is
