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PARTISAN REVIEW
scope which neither I nor any of my contemporaries would have
dared undertake alone a decade earlier. It would have seemed to
us sentimental, conformist, even chauvinist. Happily we are freeing
ourselves from these paralyzing inhibitions. We may not yet see our
country and our culture steadily, but we are at least making the
effort to see them whole. It involves considerable arrogance in the
face of complexity, but in this area no arrogance of the writer is
possible without a large measure of love for the subject. And finally
the love, long repressed,
is
being released.
It is striking that very few contributors to the symposium have
shown any contempt for its concern with America not as a
capitalist
culture
but as
our country's culture.
I respect such truculence when,
as in the case of Wright Mills, it flows- as does his powerful study,
White Collar-from
a passion for icy social analysis and the certi–
tudes of an appeal from the suffrage of the present to the suffrage of
history. Yet I wonder how much of it (whether in Mills's case or in
several others) derives from the anti-patriotic tradition of Marx and
Sorel- the doctrine that the intellectual, like the worker, has no
fatherland . This doctrine has less hold today than it had in the
thirties, but it has left its residue.
For example, when I am asked my book's title and answer
America as a Civilization,
a number of friends who are more less
"Left" (and, of course, the Europeans) consider it a bad joke. "Do
we have one?" they ask, with an obvious astonishment that I should
go off on so doltish a chase. I suppose it gives them the consoling
sense of being knowing and unfooled.
But the chase has a beast in view. Each generation must not
only re-write for itself the history of its country: it must also re-assess
itself and its culture on the scales of its own consciousness.
If
I have
found myself writing in an
odi et amo
mood it is not only because no
American can wholly heal the scar of the psychic split of our time,
but because by its nature the theme cannot be treated in the spirit
either of the French Age of Reason nor of German romantic
nationalism.
Consider, as an instance, the problem of American poverty. We
cannot blink it as a fact, nor the spread between that poverty and
the Babylonian living at the other extreme of the scale. It is the
darker side of our moon. Yet it is also a fact that we are farther
