PARTISAN REVIEW
421
corners and tapped the most unexpected sources. Fiction, painting,
poetry, and music went to draw at the well of pop ; genres dissolved,
merged, cross-fertilized each other; the nation went to war and outdid
its writers' most paranoid black-humor fantasies; intellectuals went out
into the streets, and into the undisciplined subjectivity of their own
heads. Such a transforma tion is no more likely to be undone than can
our new social consciousness be abolished by the break-up of the move–
ment. What we need now is criticism, thinking: a stocktaking of the
wrecks and triumphs of the sixties, a sorting of achievements and experi–
ences, a charting of new standards and new courses.
What have the new "conservatives" to offer us at this critical
juncture of cultural and personal redefinition? At best a message of
caution, an attention to principle, but from some only nostalgia for the
fifties, the world before the fall, before our destiny defined itself so
clearly in political terms; harsh and bitter words for every attempt to
alter the status quo and reshape our institutions to human needs; con–
tempt for the young, fear of blacks, the misanthropic wisdom of books
like
Mr. Sammler's Planet,
with its
eye
scanning the timeless verities
and its feet planted in misogyny, disgust, a curse-on-all-your-houses at–
titude toward contemporary life.
This is not advice that will get us through our present pass. We
need to get beyond the sound and fury of
Kulturkamp/,
the superficial
and misconceived debate between Tradition and the New, to renew our
commitment to social change and social decency, to take works of art
as they come, not as grist for the mill. What was once experiment is
now tradition, perpetually alive and available, still subversive of the
same complacencies and inhumanities. Radicals and conservatives alike
should stop fostering an end-of-culture hysteria and renew their at–
tention to both contemporary reality and its historical sources and
precedents. As Marshall Berman has put it, our traditional values,
taken seriously, are far more unsettling than either their defenders or
detractors care to acknowledge, while the boldest of our experiments
in both art and society can be shown to have deep roots in the rich
and still uncharted underlife of the Western tradition.
Thomas R. Edwards
What the editors call "the new cultural conservatism" seems
to me an understandable and significant reaction to the events of our
recent political and cultural history, though I find its style distasteful
and its intentions mistaken. Certainly anyone who thinks, as I do, that
the last ten or twelve years have effected a decisive and salutary revolu–
tion in America's sense of itself should remember that this revolution
was crude, painful, wasteful, even tragic, that a great deal was lost in
its accomplishment, that its
practical
benefits are as yet very am–
biguous, to say the least. But I'm not as sure as they seem to be that
I need the new conservatives to remind me of these ironies. What's
