OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
581
avoidable penalty for democracy-how do we know? Has either
democracy or genuine culture been fully tried or made sufficiently
available? To look down one's nose at the delights of the masses
is an absurd snobbism; to find in mass culture a vigor and liveliness
no longer present in serious literature is demoralization and be–
trayal. Mass culture appears with the rise of industrialism and
universal literacy; so does democracy-but we must remember they
are known to us only in the corrupting context of capitalism. No
person of intelligence believes mass culture a mere capitalist con–
spiracy to dupe the workers; no person of intelligence should be–
lieve mass culture is the price we must always pay for democracy
or that in a healthy society large steps might not be taken toward
the replacement of mass culture and kitsch by serious art.
Though much of the PR statement is to me unacceptable, I
am pleased that it ends with a call for intellectual non-conformism.
Today, more than ever, what can bind us together, even as we
engage in polemic and dispute, is the idea that an intellectual should
be an independent man thinking and behaving in terms of his
personal integrity, a man who remains free from the dictates of
all state powers, a critic of cant and convention whom the philis–
tines will not cease to find "destructive."
MAX LERNER
The autobiographical impulse has its dangers, but I want
to use myself as an exhibit to buttress the thesis behind this sym–
posium. On returning from a European trip early in 1945 I began
a book which I meant at first as only a longish impressionistic essay
on American culture. But I found myself unable to keep it within
that scope. So many things were changing, in American life itself
and in the minds of most of us including mine, that I found myself
having to argue out on paper the issues and values of almost every
major phase of American experience. The theme grew under my
hand until it began to shape itself as a study of the larger American
civilization-pattern in its moving inter-relations.
It
is an ambitious
project for any writer, and may well prove a failure. But I have found
in it an integrative satisfaction that few other themes could afford
me. Mainly I offer myself as an exhibit because it is a project of a
