QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
The following
Wt2lf
written some weeks ago, before the wage–
price freeze. On proofing it before it went to press, I was struck by the
disparity between the kind of questions we're arguing and those pressing
issues directly affecting the entire nation
-
issues that used to be in
the domain of political theory but have now been appropriated by
politicians.
Here we are still fighting about stalinism and antistalinism, and the
old and new left, while questions most intellectuals seem to think aren't
elevated enough are left to those who play political games in Washington.
One feels particularly frustrated at not being able to do much about the
bungling and inequality of the Administration
in
handling the economic
mess it helped to create. We'v.e confined ourselves so long to abstract
and moral questions mostly concerning the past or the future
-
and to
those which lend themselves to cocktail party agitation
-
that
we
have
cut ourselves off from the means of affecting the present. It's as though
we have specialized in questions having to do only with minorities.
It
seems to me Dennis Wrong's letter in this issue (p. 358)
itself does little more than illustrate the low level of argument today.
Most of his "points" tend to obscure the issues by reducing them to petty
and irrelevant details.
1
Generally, his picture of the New Left and of the
1.
Just to get at least some of the record straight, though, before getting to the
larger questions -
1.)
Maybe I did inflate Wrong's piece by calling it a capsule
of New York intellectual life. But, after all, his argument doesn't make any sense
except as part of his picture of the intellectual scene. 2.) I assume Wrong's crit–
icism of
PR
for printing Newfield and H entoff must have had a political mean–
ing, particularly since he describes them as "doyens of swinging radical journal–
ism," and what they wrote was political, though he doesn't say so. Hentoff con–
tributed to a symposium on the new radicalism; Newfield reported on a meeting
at Princeton of the Association for Cultural Freedom, which claimed to have cut
its CIA ties. 3.) Wrong is disingenuous in citing Muskie and Humphrey as the
center to counter my saying that his politics were vague but right of center. The
fact is that Muskie and Humphrey are centrists on the national scene, while
Wrong is right of center in relation to other intellectuals. (Neither Humphrey nor
Muskie, by the way, harps on the sins of the left, but more about this later.)
