History Askew

...They didn't know, it appears, about the "darker side of man's nature...

...All this, of course, is pretty much old hat by now...

...But this is emphatically not so, as botanists learned long ago...

...Berman dislikes the Enlightenment, rationality, secularism, and all that the philosophes stood for...

...Both title and subtitle are misleading...

...What is even worse, upon the few occasions in which concrete events are mentioned in some detail, the author resorts to a crude distortion of the issues...

...The whole mood of the book reminds one of that of ten years ago with its "Atheists for Niebuhr" and the belated discovery of the Burkean virtues...

...Like botanists in the pre-scientific age, the author seems to have felt that if only he went into the field with a large enough net to catch all the butterflies he would be able to promote knowledge...

...This is not an intellectual history of the sixties—it does not even mention major works in the humanities or the social sciences and history that have been of marked influence in the last few years...

...Professor Berman, writing from his university at San Diego, seems to have had almost no contact with the intellectual milieu he is trying to describe...

...Ideas are reduced to quotes, and quotes seldom rooted and located...

...From time to time he commands an apt and telling formulation, as when he writes of Lionel Trilling that "his essay on Freud praises those biological instincts which resist culture while his essays on culture attack those instincts which refuse to shape themselves to acceptable political forms...

...And one may doubt that BOOKS the foibles and fashions of the preceding decade provide a good vantage point for critical judgments about the next...

...They emit a slightly moldy smell...

...Professor Berman dislikes liberalism, radicalism, and the intellectual atmosphere of the sixties...

...It is, rather, a collection of literally hundreds of quotes, mainly from the periodical literature of the last few years, with particular attention to publications of the Old and New Left...

...Finally, the appeals of morality of both sides have resulted in acceptance of the idea that morality is positively served by acting against Communism...

...If there is any principle of selection, it seems to follow from the author's strange fascination with the most outrageous and inane products of the New and Far-out Left...

...He smells corruption everywhere and seems to feel that modern intellectuals are the major source of that corruption...

...Though politically conservative, Professor Berman is guided by very liberal principles of selection...

...I wouldn't know...

...This is chutzpa, not intellectual history...

...But, alas, such pleasures are infrequent...

...Berman seems to be as fascinated with their hysterical outpourings as Anthony Comstock used to be with pornography...

...There are only the faintest echoes of the major social and political events of these years, though it should be fairly obvious that many, if not necessarily all, of these ideas can be understood only in response to these events...

...The author quotes liberally from a wide gamut of journals ranging all the way from Commentary and Dissent to Studies on the Left and Fuck You, a magazine of the Arts...

...Given this democracy of quotes, it is impossible to sift the significant from the merely curious...

...A dreary failure as intellectual history or a critical assessment of the sixties, this book may be handy if you need a reference to some of the inanities of what passes for thought on the Far-out Left...

...American intellectuals have ceased to be impressed by Michael Oakeshott's whistling in Anglican churchyards...

...The profusion of quotations points to a major weakness of the book—it lacks clear criteria of relevance...

...The last part of the book, where the author deals at some length with fiction and comments on some characteristic failures of recent literary writings, are better than the rest...

...His present guide to the intellectual life of the sixties, however, is not of much use...

...Berman is clearly much more at home in literary criticism than in intellectual history...

...These hundreds upon hundreds of quotes, once transcribed on Berman's file cards and then aligned on his pages, become stale...

...But to assert that such methods help "to transmit the tone of a decade" is nonsense...

...Having abandoned religion, they are adrift on the sea of modernity, hanker after power and lack a proper sense of balance, moderation, and respect for the eternal yesterday...

...PROFESSOR BERMAN'S EARLIER A Reader's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays may have been helpful...

...He can sum up the debate on Vietnam in these words: "the failure of the anti-war left to counter the strategic arguments of its opponents has been instrumental in its failure to exert opinion...

...The facts never speak for themselves, in botany or intellectual history...