HILTON KRAMER
195
policy? Our intellectuals function , in this respect, the way the
governments of Western Europe often function-in perfect
confidence that they can say or do anything they please to
malign the American defense establishment because that estab–
lishment, with its "nuclear umbrella, " so much despised by
intellectuals, will be there
to
protect them from the Stalinists
who are still, yes still , our enemies in this world.
This political failure is, as I say, also a moral failure, but
there are other moral failures too. What have our intellectuals to
offer the national culture in the way of wisdom about marriage
and the family, for example? Anything but attacks, and often
vicious attacks too, on the most elementary fealties of family life?
That one of our leading intellectual journals should devote
space, in issue after issue, to a commercial writer proseltizing for
the joys of buggery-this, I think, is the measure of the distance
at which our intellectuals stand from the national culture.
In
politics, and in morals, we are something of a disgrace. Out
there, in the national culture, we are allowing the likes of Gore
Vidal and Garry Wills to represent
us
today. And do we have any
values in the name of which their influence can be resisted?
Perhaps that is what a discussion of " New York Intellectuals
and The National Culture" should be concerned with.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS :
Before we throw the discussion open
LO
the rest of
you as we had planned
LO
do, Irving Howe 'wants to make a few
comments.
IRVING
HOWE: No.
I
have a joke. Hilton's called into question whether
New York intellectuals exist and that reminds me of a story about
Morris Raphael Cohen. A student came in to see him and was in a
state of epistomological panic, doubting his personal identity and in
sheer desperation he cried out to Cohen, "Can you prove to me that I
