INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
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"Ours a 'twice-born' generation finds its wisdom in pessimism, anxiety,
evil, tragedy, and despair. So we are both old and young before our
time." Two years later we have the "Port Huron Statement," and Amer–
ican intellectual life starts its new journey to everywhere and nowhere.
It is surprising that the SDS statement conveys some of the same
themes of alienation and anxiety as the
Partisan Review
symposium.
But whereas the
1952
symposium acknowledged American intellectuals'
reconciliation with America, the SDS statement expressed a new sense
of disinheritance by a generation faced with the perils of the nuclear
arms race, a racial crisis the country refused to acknowledge, an apa–
thetic citizenry, and student populations more interested in careers than
convictions. "Our work is guided," the statement announced, "by the
sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living."
Yet the document is remarkably moderate in tone and, like the views of
the
Partisan Review
contributors, it is pro-American and calls upon stu–
dents to look to America's heritage for guidance through the troubled
times facing the country. The angry anti-Americanism and the turning
toward the Third World comes much later, after the SDS fell apart at the
end of the sixties and the New Left split into warring factions. The Old
Left of the thirties and forties went from radical hope to weary exhaus–
tion, the New Left of the sixties from patient community programs to
bitter, spasmodic aggressions, even violence and terrorism.
The word "experiment" runs through the SDS document-whose
guiding light was John Dewey. Like Marx and Freud, he too has under–
gone a transfiguration when presented by different generations. The
Partisan Review
intellectuals thought of Dewey as a philosopher of sci–
ence, experimentation, naturalism; the New Left made him into a polit–
ical activist. But it gets even more stretched by the Academic Left of our
time . Now he is regarded as a proto-poststructuralist who showed us
how to live without truth or any theory of reality, a philosopher who,
like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, made us aware that what we think and
believe has no foundations anywhere.
Historically it was assumed that truth is the foundation of all knowl–
edge and that the truth, and nothing but the truth, shall set us free. The
very doctrine of natural rights, without which many progressive causes
would hardly have gained their objectives in American history, rested on
the proposition of "self-evident" truths. But the Academic Left took to
the contemporary conviction that there is no truth like catnip. This has
puzzled me, and I keep asking my colleagues why the absence of truth
seems so liberating to them. Because that's what we see every day, they
answer. Politicians abide by that same conviction, and hence instead of
