52
PARTISAN REVIEW
bility to feel anything. The human catastrophes visited upon our
generation by totalitarianism seem too great to understand, to de–
scribe, to cope with. History has become meaningless to them, and
private life a search for sensations-either of unprecedented orgasm
or of God-that may make them feel real to themselves.
This pervasive sense of unreality is authentic, and as usual, the
writers-those whom Ezra Pound saluted as the "antennae of the
race"-see ahead of everyone else. For the middle-class world which
all of us have depended on so long has itself, as a value system,
ceased to exert any real authority, to arouse real respect. The sense
of unreality that I have been describing arises naturally out of the
bewilderment of people who recognize that history has taken still
another turn, and that the solid middle-class virtues on which so
many of us depended, so that we could meaningfully oppose them,
are no longer believed
in
seriously enough for opposition to mean
anything. The real tragedy of our time, as Nietzsche correctly fore–
saw, is a nihilism so total, so pervasive, so defeatist even in the midst
of the greatest luxury the world has ever known, that it is no wonder
that unimaginative people try to turn back the clock of modern
science, to blame Marx and Darwin and Freud for robbing us of the
illusion of our omnipotence in the universe. These people are hope–
less, yet there is one element of tragic truth in their indictment of the
modern spirit: more and more people lack the sense of tradition with
which to assimilate the endless shocks and changes of the twentieth
century. Just as Marx could not anticipate heirs who would com–
pletely lack his culture and tradition, who in the name of his great
insights into capitalist society would create a society far more tyran–
nical and unjust, so Freud, himself so rooted
in
the Hebraic tradi–
tion, the English tradition, the nineteenth-century tradition, the sci–
entific tradition, could not have predicted the destruction of Western
civilization at Auschwitz, Maidenek, Belsen. He could not have im–
agined a psychoanalytically oriented psychiatry divorced from the
humanistic and moral tradition, a psychiatry that would be used for
market research in consumer motivation and even for the manipula–
tion back to "normal" of political deviants. Psychoanalysis has de–
pended so much on the intellectual and literary tradition out of which
it arose, and of which it is an essential part, that now that this tra–
dition of cultivation and intellectual freedom no longer commands
