BOO KS
123
But reality takes its revenge on ideology, and it has avenged itself
on the Southern mind by denying it the "sense of totality" altogether.
The characteristic defect of Southern writing is precisely its inability to
sustain a large conception: how could it be otherwise under the cir–
cumstances?
But
Southern Renascence
itself should be considered a representative
product of the Southern Renascence. What happened to the concrete,
elemental Southern temper when this book was written? Agrarian con–
servatism hasn't taken a fresh look at the world since
I'll Take My Stand,
and consequently, for all its devotion to concreteness, it has become that
most insidious of all abstractions-an abstract commitment to the con–
crete, a traditionalism basing itself on traditions that never existed, a
conservatism devoid of content. There was, indeed, something elemental
in
I'll Take My Stand.
It
came early enough in the progress of our
thinking on these matters to be relevant as prophecy and exhortation ;
the spirit that drove the great nineteenth-century critics of industrialism
crept into it. But its heir has grown into a pale, timid creature, degener–
ate son of a red-blooded father. No crusading energy animates
Southern
Renascence.
It is academic, serene, well-mannered, and comfortable in
the feeling that no one would dream of disputing either its sociology or
its literary judgments. The anti-industrialism most of these critics sup–
port is so bloodless that one suspects they know how irrelevant it all is.
Nor is there much conviction behind the analyses of individual authors.
The better critics are obviously bored with the jargon they feel con–
strained to use, nagged by repressed instincts of judgment for which
they have no language, bleary-eyed from searching for "significance" be–
hind every image. After all, it's a strain on the eyes, this staring at a
thing that isn't there.
Norman Podhoretz
THEOLOGY AND POLITICS
CHRISTIAN REALISM AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS.
By
Reinhold
Niebuhr. Scribner's. $3.00.
Reinhold Niebuhr's virtues are again evident in this collec–
tion of essays: his mind is powerful and incisive, his scholarship thorough
and digested. Although the essays are either essentially secular or theo–
logical, with little explicit reference of one type to the other, a systematic
view of man and society is implied in all of them. I shall try to state
this view, assuming that Niebuhr's theology is a necessary part of his
social criticism and is itself completed by his theory of history and
civilization.
