Jack Newfield
CORPORATION OF SCHOLARS, LTD.
The International Association for Cultural Freedom, last
known as the Congress fo r Cultural Freedom, held its first conference,
last December 1-5, on the campus of Princeton University. The purpose
of the meeting, according to an IAGF press release, was to "discuss
internal and external problems of the United States at a time when
the new administration and its program will be in the process of for–
mation."
To continue to bait the IACF because of its past covert com–
plicity with a secret espionage agency would
be
McCarthyism of the
Left. Besides, by belaboring an obvious point, it would miss a central
one: the current moral and intellectual values of a group of writers
and academics who now hold the franchise for, or let themselves be
used by, the Association.
It
is
these implicit values and the men who believe in them
which need to be scrutinized for their prejudices and presumptions.
To put it simply, they are committed to authority rather than to
change, to abstraction rather than io activism, to elites and tech–
nocrats rather than the needs of masses and minorities. Power rath–
er than pain is what turns them on, and so their stress is upon
optimism rather than dissatisfaction. With a corresponding allowance,
of course, to those voices of dissatisfaction which have guaranteed
to be ineffective but which will give them the newsworthy appearance
of "really caring," really listening to the voices of dissent. They
want to forget the past where it causes any embarrassment, pretend
that the present is merely a passing phase, which technology will
take care of, and that what we should really pay attention to is the
future. To organize the future we need experts who should not
be
distracted from their work by any crying in the wildernesS', particularly
the wilderness of the Third World. It's the Atlantic alliance, and an
