20
PARTISAN REVIEW
that no human being can, or should, entirely accept or reject the
moral and social modes of his time. And he is right in adding that
there are occasions, such as the crisis of the Weimar republic, when
the non-conformism of a Stefan George or an Oswald Spengler can
have unhappy consequences.
But Professor Hook seems to me quite wrong in supposing that
his remark applies significantly to present-day America. It would
apply if we lived
in
a world where ideas could be weighed in free
and delicate balance, without social pressures or contaminations, so
that our choices would be made solely from a passion for truth.
As
it happens, however, there are tremendous pressures in America that
make for intellectual conformism and consequently, in this tense and
difficult age, there are very real virtues
in
preserving the attitude of
critical skepticism and distance. Even some of tlle more extreme antics
of the professional "Bohemians" or literary anarchists take on a cer–
tain value which in cooler moments they might not have.
2
What one conforms to most of all-despite and against one's
in–
tentions-is the
Zeitgeist,
that vast insidious sum of pressures and
fashions; one drifts along, anxious and compliant, upon the favored
assumptions of the moment; and not a soul
in
the intellectual world
can escape this. Only, some resist and some don't. Today the
Zeitgeist
presses down upon us with a greater insistence than at any other
moment of the century. In the 1930s many of those who hovered
about the
New Masses
were mere camp-followers of success; but the
conformism of the party-line intellectual, at least before 1936, did
sometimes bring him into conflict with established power: he had
to risk something. Now, by contrast, established power and the dom–
inant intellectual tendencies have come together in a harmony such as
this country has not seen since the Gilded Age; and this, of course,
makes the temptations of conformism all the more acute. The carrots,
for once, are real.
Real even for literary men, who these days prefer to meditate
upon symbolic vegetables. I would certainly not wish to suggest any
direct correlation between our literary assumptions and the nature
2 It may be asked whether a Stalinist's "non-conformism" is valuable. No,
it isn't; the Stalinist is anything but a non-conformist; he has merely shifted the
object of his worship, as later, when he abandons Stalinism, he usually shifts
it again.
