44
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
It's true that some intellectuals, especially literary intellec–
tuals, did try to maintain an adversary stance. Delmore Schwartz,
for example, ever faithful to the modernist mentality, contributed
to the symposium a defense of "critical nonconformism" as
against the new spirit of accommodation. But the whole brief, like
the term itself, is lamentably abstract and typically confined to
the cultural sphere: a defense of highbrow values against the
incursions of mass and middlebrow taste. This was the usual tack
of "adversary" intellectuals of that day; it suggested a strict
hierarchy of cultural values with you-know-who at the top. (Even
Harold Rosenberg accused sociologists of "mass culture" of secret–
ly
liking
the stuff! Gasp!) Only the smallest handful of indepen–
dent intellectuals effectively focused their criticism where it was
most needed: on political decisions, on aggregations of social and
economic power, on questions of civil liberties which then af–
fected so many lives.
Thus it would be fair to say that the residual intransigence of
some (mostly literary) intellectuals and the newfound, American–
ism of other (mostly political) intellectuals amounted to the same
thing. The political intellectuals sang the virtues of American life,
with its pluralism and pragmatism, its procedure by consensus and
its presumed freedom from ideology and moralism -- this in the
age of John Foster Dulles! -- and excoriated the illusions of
liberals, radicals, Popular Front types, and strict constructionists
of the Bill of Rights (like Justices Black and Douglas). The literary
intellectuals, while maintaining the cult of alienation, simply aban–
doned politics to pursue private myths and fantasies, to devote
their work to the closet intensities of the isolated self or isolated
personal . relationships. The concept of alienation lost its social
content and took on an increasingly religious and metaphysical
cast. European existentialism and crisis theology became an incal–
culably great influence on the mood of the fifties -- shorn,
however, of their political matrix. The moral and psychological
Sartre of the forties was admitted. The political Sartre of the
fifties was ignored or ridiculed -- then replaced by Camus, whose
emphasis on the absurdity of the human condition and nostalgia
for a lost simplicity of being were more painlessly assimilated, and
answered to the dominant mood.
