CHRISTOPHER LASCH
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Not until the sixties did Rahv begin to suspect that the "crisis of
modern thinking" had something to do with American society's
"collapse into total permissiveness." Even then, he refused to admit
that the tradition of "critical modernism" bore any share of the blame
for this collapse. When critics like Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling
began to argue that the so-called counter culture represented the
"logical conclusion" of the modernist movement, in Bell's words–
"modernism in the streets," in Trilling's-Rahv resorted to much the
same line of argument that he had earlier used against those who drew
a direct connection between Lenin and Stalin. Bell's contention, Rahv
predictably argued, rested on "the intellectualist fallacy," ignoring
"socio-economic actualities." The spread of pornography, the attack
on high culture, and the celebration of liberated "life styles" originated
not "in any kind of ideology evolved in intellectual circles but in the
overwhelming pressures generated by a social system which for some
time now has abandoned its former psychology of production, with its
correlative internalized restraints and prohibitions, and has gone over
to a psychology of consumption unendingly ravenous and inescapably
sordid." Bell deplored the irrationality of the New Left but wrote about
the American social order, Rahv argued, as if it were "the very
incarnation of reason." In fact, the irrationality and "wild permissive–
ness" of American popular culture grew out of the irrationality of
advanced capitalism itself-the "ruthless logic of business calcula–
tion. "
This argument had the merit of drawing connections between
consumer capitalism and the culture of permissiveness, and of making
it clear that "the rot is so incremental as hardly to be confined to a few
cultural institutions. " "The corporate system as a whole is afflicted,"
Rahv declared. But in absolving the ideology of modernism of any
responsibility for the "rot," he made too rigid a separation between
" ideology" and the "social system," failing to recognize the former as
an important part of the latter. He rejected the "intellectualist fallacy"
only to embrace an economic determinism that extracted from a
complex historical context a single element, the shift from production
to consumption. He did not even concede, as he had conceded in
similar debates about Leninism, that the modernist movement con–
tained at least the potential for a postmodernist attack on mind.
Ostensibly materialist, Rahv's ana lysis of modernism paid too
little attention to the concrete historical situation in which modernism
took root, flourished, and finally in its decomposition, fertilized mass
culture itself. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the intellectuals'
revulsion against industrialism led them to celebrate the "pure cu lture
