THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
15
one hears these days about "the need for roots" veils a desire to com–
promise the tradition of intellectual independence, to seek in a nation
or religion or party a substitute for the tenacity one should find in
oneself. Isaac Rosenfeld's remark that "the ideal society ... cannot
afford to include many deeply rooted individuals" is not merely a
clever
mot
but an important observation.
It may be that the issue is no longer relevant; that, with the
partial submission of "wealth" to "intellect," the clash between a
business civilization and the values of art is no longer as urgent as
we once thought; but if so, we must discard a great deal, and mostly
the best, of the literature, the criticism and the speculative thought
of the twentieth century. For to deny the historical fact of "alien–
ation" (as if that would make it any the less real!) is to deny our
heritage, both as burden and advantage, and
also,
I think, to deny
our possible future as a community.
Much of what I have been describing here must be due to a
feeling among intellectuals that the danger of Stalinism allows them
little or no freedom in their relations with bourgeois society. This
feeling seems to me only partly justified, and I do not suffer from
any inclination to minimize the Stalinist threat. To be sure, it does
limit our possibilities for action-if, that is, we still want to engage
in any dissident politics-and sometimes it may force us into political
alignments that are distasteful. But here a crucial distinction should
be made: the danger of Stalinism may require temporary expedients
in the area of
power
such as would have seemed compromising some
years ago, but there is no reason, at least no good reason, why it
should require compromise or conformity in the area of
ideas)
no
reason why it should lead us to become partisans of bourgeois society,
which is itself, we might remember, heavily responsible for the Stalinist
victories.
III
"In the United States at this time liberalism is not only
the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." This sentence
of Lionel Trilling's contains a sharp insight into the political life of
contemporary America.
If
I understand him correctly, he is saying
that our society is at present so free from those pressures of con-
