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positions. Both Mr. Barzun and Mr. Kronenberger are well known for.
wit, grace, urbanity, erudition lightly borne, etc. Both inoculated by
a knowledge of history against the temptations of current modishness,
each in his own way has maintained a high level of individual vivacity
and of critical independence against highbrow and lowbrow rages alike.
They are, in short, free-spirited and genuinely humane critics, operating
out of much the same cultural and temperamental prepossessions. Yet
they could hardly have come to more contradictory conclusions
a:bout
the
prospects of American civilization.
Mr. Barzun subtitles his book, with fair accuracy, "A Declaration
of Love Spiced With a Few Harsh Words." It is a warm-hearted, shrewd,
generous and voluble book, based on the assumption that modem indus–
trial society is here to stay, and that, in time, people will make the
best of it. America, in a sense, becomes for Mr. Barzun the archetype of
mass society-possessed by the mass, civilized by the mass, run by under–
dogs, refugees and nobodies, dedicated to the abolition of differences
and the equalizing of conditions. Much is lost, Mr. Barzun readily con–
cedes, in the transformation to a mass society; but more is gained–
not only the immense productivity of the machine, which for the first
time gives everyone the hope of a decent life, but the release of human
energy and aspiration which comes from a society that includes every–
body. "We must not forget that what we have undertaken, no other
society has tried: We do not suppress half of mankind to refine part of
the other half."
These achievements-the gains in material abundance and in hu–
man dignity-are on no account, in Mr. Barzun's view, to be sacrificed.
Nothing exasperates him more, and rightly so, than those critics who
do not understand that what they complain about in our culture is
so often inseparable from our ability to produce goods and our deter–
mination to maximize human opportunity.
If
we want the benefits of
industrial democracy, we must pay a price;
if
we consider the price
intolerable, then let us not think that we can carry the benefits on our
journey to Utopias of our own.
It is within this premise of general acceptance that Mr. Barzun
examines the issues of our culture. He does not conceal his distaste for
much of our mechanized mass civilization. "The threat of every ma-.
chine compels us to dance in tune with it, and the steps are so compli–
cated we jiggle all day long." The machine that feeds us so well denies
us our life; modem urban civilization is "the piling up of a crushing
load of trifles"; we are condemned to the leading of "statistical lives"
which drain us of thought and feeling. Such a civilization tends, in the
