BOOKS
615
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The Age of Happy Problems will I fear require more complex
solutions, and above all they will have to
be
political as well as personal.
When Mr. Gold tells us in his opening essay that culture has become a
consolation for the sense of individual powerlessness in politics among
other things, we expect that he will go on to investigate-and thereby
attack-the sources of that powerlessness, rather than simply to meander
no matter how irreverently through the many forms of consolation.
To fail to do so is finally the sort of fatalism that was so widespread
in the fifties.
If
this is an age of happy problems, one of the reasons is
that few have dared to translate those other Unhappy problems into
political terms, that is, into terms of active choice. To realize the pos–
sibilities of the self we must first understand and question vigorously
the institutions through which the self is forced
to
seek its fulfillment.
Certainly it is valuable to show how potentially thinking and loving
individuals have failed to summon their best energies, and to insist that
they are free to do so, but
if
we take all problems as soluble only
through a more strenuous-exertion of the private moral will, this too is
politics, by default, and in the end a politics
of
default.
Morris Dickstein
