THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
69
French thought has become less provincial: the Western world has
been drawn more closely together. Nevertheless, the preoccupation
with power has meant some concentration upon the more, rather
than the less, troublesome countries; and political thought has often
lost its closet quality but also its detachment, historical scope, and
intellectual generosity.
I think on the whole it must be said that the cold war has
been one factor in increasing the tendency to narrow, if sometimes
productive, specialization among young people in academic life. On
the one hand, the large questions seem politically unsafe; and on the
other and perhaps even more important hand, they seen unanswer–
able. When governments have power to exterminate the globe, it is
not surprising that anti-utopian novels, like 1984, are popular, while
utopian political thought about a more hopeful future nearly dis–
appears. These developments have occurred at the same time that
research has become a large, often vigorous, and well-equipped area
in which to make a career. All this of course is most marked in the
United States; elsewhere, speculation remains less unfashionable–
though it may often be arid because unlinked to any empirical con–
text. Above
all,
the cold war is a distraction from serious thought
about man's condition on the planet. Novelists, poets, and prophets
who are concerned with man's condition find themselves at home
in the private and the unpolitical. Political thought tends to become
the province of men who are often very intelligent, well-informed,
and crisp, but seldom speculative, contemplative, or compassionate.
Among the public at large the effect of the cold war on think–
ing has been to reduce it to a series of fallacious historical analogies.
We are consistently warned against "Munich," for instance, forgetting
that there is not much danger of appeasing Khrushchev, who has no
influential American constituency, while blinding ourselves to the
actual appeasement of Adenauer and De Gaulle, Chiang Kai-Shek
and other dictators who are tied to us by military assistance programs.
By reference to Pearl Harbor we are periodically reminded of the
dangers of surprise attack; and the flight of the U-2 was defended
as a precaution against such an attack when that flight may well
have caused the Russians to fear we knew where their "soft" missile
bases lay and hence to fear surprise attack on their side, thus exacer–
bating the arms race and threatening our own security. So, too, the
