538
PAl~TISAN
REVIEW
among the humanistic disciplines - as the best way of apprehending the
contingency of all cultural arrangenlents, and therefore of appreciating
how absurd it is to take any of them too seriously. The essays of Clifford
Geertz, for instance, which came to exert considerable influence on liter–
ary studies in the 1970s and 1980s (but for which Geertz did the field–
work in the late 1950s), can be howlingly funny - as in his famous ac–
count of the Balinese cockfight (published in 1972) as social ritual.
It is not, I think, too much to call this shift toward playfulness and
the deliberately outrageous
(Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22)
a revolution in
sensibility. It marked a very considerable change from the moral urgencies
of the thirties and forties, when intellectuals like Trilling (along with
spiritual counterparts like Reinhold Niebuhr and the young Arthur
Miller) had been permanently chastened by the political obscenities of
Nazism on the right and Stalinism on the left - and a phrase like Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr.'s title
The Vital Center
could be issued as a fervent battle
cry of liberal democracy. By contrast, the writers and young teachers of
the 1960s were offended by moderation. They had had enough of liberal
centrism. They were drawn to books like Herbert Marcuse's
Eros and
Civilizatiol1
and Norman
O.
Brown's
Life Agail1st Death
-
books that
dreamt of a universal end to repression.
What they got instead were the disasters of Vietnam, Watts, and a
series of soul-killing assassinations. There is no need to rehearse here the
impact of these years upon my generation, except to say that I think the
spiritual devastation of that war has been deeper and more abiding than
even its closest students tend to think. To academic historians, the heroes
of Beard and Parrington Oefferson, Jackson, Lincoln) were now revealed
as dissembling villains; and all of American history was rewritten in the
light of a national penchant for violence and racist brutality.
For intellectuals in general, the war provided an occasion for the
convergence and crystallization of ideas that had previously been in–
choate: a sense that the middle-class myth of American life hid the reality
of class antagonisms; that we had accepted the mantle of exhausted
European empires and were acting out the imperial script Marxist theory
had prophesied for us; that the whole morality play of the Cold War
had to be rewritten - not the way Schlesinger had proposed it, but with
our part made much more sinister and disingenuous. It was not too far
from these indictments to the propositions that the Enlightenment
premises upon which our culture is based were a sham: that individualism
did not mean rights, but was merely a pretty name for greed; that the
endemic racism of our society meant that its founding principle of
equality was an expression of base hypocrisy. The sixties generation, in
short, became permanently estranged from the political traditions of the
