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in the "American way of life." True, there was, and is, a great deal
of blabbering about the religious foundations of Western civilization on
the one hand and "godless Communism" on the other, as though the
conflict between the democratic West and the totalitarian East were
at bottom a struggle between faith and atheism. But the most energetic
intellectual impulse of the period was pushing toward the idea that the
main enemy, both in culture and politics, was the "true believer," the
fanatic of whatever complexion, the prisoner of ideology. This being so,
the loss of values could be seen as a positive virtue, a symptom of our
progressive liberation from rigid systems of belief. What we in the West
stood for was the skeptical empiricist temperament, the very tempera–
ment that makes for a healthy political system (since it discourages
fanaticism), a prosperous economic life (since it is the basis of tech–
nological efficiency), and a flourishing culture (since concreteness is
the soul of art). Something of the elation you find in the early defenders
of natural philosophy like Bacon and Spratt was in the American air
for a few years at the discovery that the whole liberal-humanist com–
plex contained within itself an answer to those who were attacking it for
being incompatible with the good life. And Lionel Trilling was there to
tell us that the progressives in our midst had betrayed the liberal tra–
dition by perverting it into an ideology. The old battle between the ra–
tionalist and the empiricist philosophers was lustily being fought again,
and thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Hans
J.
Morgenthau, Mi–
chael Polanyi, and George Kennan were providing (in some instances
inadvertently) arguments from every corner for a crusade against the
rationalists of today (i.e. the ideologists). The upshot, so far as Ameri–
can youth was concerned, was not that we had lost our values, but only
our taste for ideology, and good riddance to it. Our values were
im–
plicit in the complexities of our behavior from day to day; they were
not the kind that could easily be systematized and translated into slogans
to compete with the slogans of the Communists for the "uncommitted
minds" of the world: here lay the source of our weakness in the Cold
War, but also of the moral superiority of our position.
It
was because
the sociologists, led by David Riesman, were doing more than anyone
else to confirm this proposition, to uncover a coherent pattern in our
daily behavior, that sociology became so prominent a field of study in
those years.
Only one major literary effort was generated by the ethos I have
been trying to
describe-The Adventures of Augie March-and
if
we
want to understand why the hot-blooded love affair between the in–
tellectuals and America cooled off before it ever got to the altar, we
