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MORRIS DICKSTEIN
living with the consequences. The lure of the fifties hints that
history moves like a pendulum; it speaks to our wish to have done
with these problems; it tells us we can return unscathed to an
idealized time before life grew complicated and we grew older.
What happened in the fifties really matters, not only for what it
gave rise to but for what it seems to offer us, for the way we shall
choose to live.
For that reason it is impossible to limit one's evidence, as
John Mander does in his
Commentary
article, to the often unreal
world of foreign affairs. My own alternative, "what life felt like,"
is precarious but essential, for the culture gives our lives a tone and
quality which may not be reflected by diplomats and presidents,
which may be more truly expressed in the work of artists and
intellectuals. Despite the interminable bloodbath of Vietnam, and
because of it, the great changes of the past decade were ones of
sensibility, awareness, attitude, not of institutions. For all the
alarm of entrenched liberals and conservatives, the political
changes of the sixties -- as opposed to shifts of rhetoric and
mood -- were nothing if not gradual and melioristic.
The cataclysms of the moral landscape are quite another
story, harder to discern because changes in sensibility resist ready
generalization. What is at stake is a network of assumptions and
feelings that link the individual to the wider public realities of his
time. Artists and intellectuals, for all their supposed alienation
from prevailing social values, often articulate these assumptions
most subtly. They are daily awash in a medium of feeling and
opinion, and where they do take dissident positions their resis–
tance to the age may turn out to be crucially
of
the age. Even the
formal concerns of the artist, which, like the quarrels of the intel–
lectuals, often seem parochial to the world at large, usually reflect
that world in intense miniature. The culture of an age is a unified
thing, whatever its apparent contraditions. Touch it anywhere and
it can reveal its secrets: the texture exposed, the part betrays the
whole.
One example
I'll
use extensively here is the Cold War anti–
Communism that predominated among intellectuals of the late
forties and fifties, which weirdly refracted the political tenor of
