RADICAL QUESTIONS
183
culture" begun in the thirties and forties have run into a dead end,
and none of them seems fully applicable at the present moment. The
militant zeal of the critics of "mass culture" has cooled; a few find
themselves quite at home in the atmosphere and institutions they
were among the first to attack. And meanwhile, perhaps in con–
sequence, there has arisen a new school of sensibility which denies
the relevance of esthetic discrimination, insisting that the Beatles
are as "good" or "important" as Stravinsky, and priding itself upon
a capacity to submit to every variety of cultural or pseudo-cultural
experience.
The last few decades have been characterized by a quick,
often facile, sometimes exciting shift in cultural fashions; by
a quantity of stylistic and temperamental display; and by a
drive toward personal distinction as an end in itself, such
as must surely always be present in intellectual life but has
seemed especially strong since the end of the war.
At no point in the life of American intellectuals during the
twentieth century has the
idea
of an intellectual community been
weaker than
it
is today. Yet at no point has the life of the intel–
lectuals been more clearly or fully structured into a compact, minia–
ture society than it is today.
The picture is bleak, but in the last few years there have been
changes, though not yet changes strong enough to reverse the gen–
eral
drift of American intellectual life. People seem more inclined
to question and speculate than they were ten years ago; radicalism,
as a mood if not a movement, is beginning to revive; at the very
least, we are done with the suffocating complacency of the fifties.
Poverty was then mentioned nowhere but in the radical press; today
it
has become a theme for national discussion, if not yet sufficient
national action. A decade ago, merely to suggest that there was a
problem of power in the United States-a concentration of re–
sources, wealth and "decision-making" which undercuts the formal
claims of democracy-would call down scorn for clinging to "Marx–
ist
cliches"; today the matter is seriously discussed even among
moderate analysts. In the fifties American foreign policy met with
little sustained criticism; now a portion of the academic world is
pressing its criticisms with great vigor. Why this shift in political and
intellectual attitudes? A few reasons can be suggested:
