OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
593
to yield to the former, they strive at least to escape from the latter.
But I contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may
produce, there is only one effectual remedy-namely, political free–
dom."
Tocqueville could not have been more right; political freedom
is the indispensable preliminary to any effective defense against the
leveling of culture. That is why McCarthyism seems to me as much
a cultural as a political problem. I cannot go along with those who
profess a belief in cultural freedom, on the one hand, and refuse to
condemn McCarthyism, on the other- those who argue, apparently,
that McCarthyism is
.a
genial excess of political zeal, a Washington
matter with no larger reverberations in our culture. The real
trahison
des clercs
lies, in my judgment, with those who collaborate with the
foes of the mind-whether they are the demonic foes of the mind,
like Hitler and Stalin, or the gangster foes, like McCarthy and
McCarran. We cannot hope to preserve cultural freedom and cul–
tural pluralism in a society where political freedom and political
pluralism become impossible.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
During the worst part of the depression, a well-known and
very gifted critic, having just arrived at the home of a Southern
friend for a visit, had hardly put down his suitcase when he asked
his host: "Where are the share-croppers?"
If
we take this incident as a representative caricature of in–
tellectual consciousness between 1929 and 1939, the present is
equally typified in a recent argument between two literary critics.
The subject of the argument does not matter except that it involved
fundamental assumptions. When one critic had said all he had to
say in condemnation of a point of view he abhorred, the other
said : "I agree with you entirely, but how do I know I .am right?"
The two incidents show clearly to what a desperate extent the
intellectual is a prisoner and a creature of the
Zeitgeist.
Yet by com–
paring these incidents and by like comparisons, we can achieve a
little historical objectivity. The reply of the second critic-"How do I
know I am right?"--expresses perfectly the uncertainty and the
groping which dominate the present. And the certainty implicit in the
