362
PARTISAN REVIEW
to the Roman Empire, were not Greek ideas still very important? The
political or economic decline of the West need not be accompanied by the
decline of our cultural tradition . After all, many of the leaders of the
so-called Third World did study at our Western universities, and have
taken back to their homeland ideas from the Western tradition. Can one
seriously say that Dakar, Beirut, Cairo,Jakarta, Peking are really centers of
cultural creativity, much less a new world culture? Another heralded
alternative, Latin American culture, has always struck me as a variant, an
interesting provincial variant ofEuropean civilization-rather like Russia in
the nineteenth century.
Perhaps I am wrong and it is merely my ignorance , provincialism, or
ethnocentrism which lead me not to see it . You 're the historian, though.
What do you think about this generation of American intellectuals and
their relationship to their culture and to their historical possibilities? Is our
experience different from that of the intellectuals of the late twenties and
early thirties?
Lasch:
The twenties and thirties were different. Not only did the political
possibilities seem to be much better, but in this country at least there was an
exhilarating sense that the country had culturally come ofage, in Van Wyck
Brooks's famous phrase. While intellectuals found plenty to criticize in
American culture and in American life as a whole, even those who
expatriated themselves or, later , turned to revolutionary political solutions
had the sense of contributing directly to cultural and political renewal.
Perhaps the present mood in the United States is more like the
pessimism of certain European intellectuals in the years between the
Franco-Prussian War and World War
1.
I wouldn't want to argue that this
pessimism was very general, but the sense of cultural disintegration, for
which Nietzsche is still seen as the most important spokesman, seems to
have more in common with the current mood than anything one can find in
the cultural history of the United States.
Birnbaum:
Wasn't Nietzsche more than a negative critic? Didn't he propose
a new model: man reconciled with himself? That's precisely the kind of
model that is not now available with any conviction or with any program.
Lasch:
Yes, that's the difference between Nietzsche's time and ours. What
survives today , not only of Nietzsche's work but of the whole tradition of
social thought he stood in, is only the negative and critical side, without any
of the hopes that in part provoked this criticism of modern society. And
even to uphold the negative side is becoming increasingly difficult without
inviting charges of elitism and political irresponsibility.
Birnbaum :
It 's true that much of the populism of the American New Left , in
particular, was of a breathtaking degree of simplemindedness and
