272
PARTISAN REVIEW
future politics and social questions reveals itself in our passion for
"Mostly Mozart" and "Basically Bach" festivals, for antiques, old
paintings, collectibles of all sorts, for popular biographies and
presentatons of high culture - from Carl Sagan and Julian Jayne–
and in our passion for books on personal health and sports. Ours
may be the first culture that consumes with marked preference high
culture from earlier ages as opposed to the work of its own time, the
success of a few lesser novels and the economic worth behind the sale
and valuation of new works of the plastic arts notwithstanding. Even
there, between auctions and the rapid ascent in value of the work of
dead masters, the past dominates .
This pattern of smug and self-satisfied cultural sophistication in
the midst of political hopelessness and national mistrust and
boredom constitutes the real Vienna analogy . Even if one contests
the picture sketched here of the apparent innovators of fin-de-siecle
Vienna as perhaps less forward-looking than backward-looking and
traditional, we cannot fail to see ourselves (we who are certainly no
Hofmannstahl, Freud, or Schoenberg) as latter-day Viennese . We
absorb ourselves in a culture of the past and immerse ourselves in
our private lives. We feel and act without hope when it comes to
politics and social questions . Idealism has become the vocation of
fools who fail to see the end of American power, the scarcity of
resources, the final bankruptcy of science and technology, the
corruption of business and bureaucracy. We live, as did the fin-de–
siecle Viennese, with a sense of the dissolution of past values, in
what Hermann Broch called a "value-vaccuum." We surround our–
selves with artifacts of art and culture; we seek to enjoy ourselves,
despite our nagging sense that despair and doom will rapidly
overcome us.
The tragedy of the Vienna analogy, of our fascination with that
period, is not visible in the simple awe we feel for the giants of that
culture . Rather it lies in the possibility that the generations ahead of
us, much like those that followed fin-de-siecle Vienna, will grow up
under our tutelage not as mere esthetes, comfortable middle-class
culturemongers, and political illiterates, but as potential victims of
the extreme political domination and the demise of freedom which
may follow. The lesson of the current romance with Vienna and the
Vienna analogy - if there is one - is that we must assert the future,
regain control of our politics , and rededicate ourselves to the tasks of
politics and society .
It
may be, as one historian has noted, perhaps
