The U.S.A.-A European Appraisal
Valois
FOR ITS COMPETITION OF 1782 THE ACADEMY OF LYON posed the question: "Has the discovery of America proved useful or harmful to the human race?" I do not know how the contestants dealt with this...
...That which frightens the European most in his image of American Iife is the projection upon it, as upon a panoramic screen, of the present tendencies of his own civilization and of his very "fear of freedom" itself...
...The Korean War, which so exercised the fears of Americans, has in a certain sense reassured the Europeans: the Cossacks stayed at home...
...This state of affairs, writes Piovene, contributes to the formation of that internal unity toward which the United States visibly tends...
...By directing his attention to the religious life or, better still, to what one might call religious feeling, the author has possibly provided us with new "keys to America...
...Europe has never loved mechanization...
...Interests always compromise, passions never," wrote Alain...
...He Is, Piovene writes, "a Christ whose Passion is left in the shade, whose Resurrection alone is brought into light, a Christ completely Healer, completely Redeemer...
...Jean Cocteau sets the tone for the esthetes in pleading with America not to deliver herself to "the fatal madness of radio and television...
...The hour would seem to be at hand for that "meeting of civilizations" foreseen by Toynbee...
...Faith in Redemption through well-being naturally assumes faith in an economic system which alone, it is believed, makes this welt-being possible...
...The Opponent is mocking Christopher Columbus, of whom he says, "He didn't know what he had discovered...
...the European borrows his vocabulary, which more often than not becomes empty verbiage...
...Will she slide downhill into "national democracy...
...The problem is the same for a Communist or for a Jean-Paul Sartre, who in a recent interview declared that protest against Stalinist injustice was useless since it was ineffectual...
...I do not mean to label it "anti-Americanism...
...We will end up thinking ourselves as "effective" as the Americans without being in the least so...
...The Rosenberg case made it possible for them to pass from jokes on the American way of life to a new slogan, "The American way of death...
...In 1948, at the close of a trip to the United States, Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most talented representatives of Sartrian existentialism., wrote, "To like or not to like Americans, these words have no meaning...
...It grows tiresome...
...Most ridiculous of all is Jean-Paul Sartre, who forbade the presentation of his play "Red Gloves" 176 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 at one Viennese theatre because a Stalinist troupe was staging "Partisans of Peace" at another hall in the city...
...The Communist intellectuals today aim to create an image of the United States corresponding, trait for trait, with that which the fascist intellectuals purveyed yesterday...
...TRANSLATED BY LEONARD PRAGER 180 • DISSENT • Spring 1954...
...A religion so conceived necessarily affects the secular aspects of life...
...He wants to say something nice about them...
...Their production of material goods is highly efficient...
...It is not yet time to say as did Shakespeare's John of Gaunt, "Convey me to my bed, then to my grave...
...Eschewing all sensation, Piovene, in "De America" (Carzanti, Milan), thoughtfully and judiciously describes his trip...
...it is not humanity, for the American is humane...
...America's crusading spirit can only distress the European...
...Their need was auspiciously met in the person of a Republican Senator from Wisconsin...
...In the name of efficacy (not according to the principle of "the end justifies the means" — a principle, the Americans would be surprised to learn, which they are constantly applying), Krupp was set free, his capital returned to him, war criminals amnestied, former Nazis pensioned, and purse and heart opened to all affirming their anti-Communism...
...In the eyes of Europeans attached to the idea of peace, the militaristic evolution of America no longer gives it any moral superiority over the Communist aggressor...
...but for the Russian masses it is certainly no more laudable than the pages of a breviary are for a canoness...
...Their farm is well administered," he writes...
...Europe, a museum...
...B. Drury) . In an article which appeared in Figaro for February 1952, Andre Siegfried said of the American, "Something is missing in him...
...This is equally true for Americanism...
...If Americans were simply "materialists," as Communist propaganda claims, they would have started " ,talking business" with Moscow and Peking a long time ago...
...The religious nature of efficacy demanded forthright condemnation of the new peril...
...The European bourgeoisie, to whom the intellectuals are attached in one way or another, lacks the confidence of the American middle class...
...More reasonable minds...
...it feels itself overwhelmed by its own doubts...
...We would like to subordinate everything to this non-existent effectiveness without at the same time possessing America's self-defenses against fascism...
...Crozier tends to see this fear exalted in America into anti-Communist hysteria and "the manipulation of minds...
...to touch them is to fight religion, to get in the way of God...
...I do not know how the contestants dealt with this subject, but I can relate a more recent, non-literary reply murmured from the gallery of the Marigny Theatre where the Jean Louis BarraultMadeline Renaud Company is presenting Paul Claudel's Christopher Columbus...
...Yet do we not need more than moralizing about America if we are to survive and to create...
...The current success of the former Nazi von Salomon's "The Questionnaire," a novel which ridicules American investigation methods, is not without significance...
...This dogmatism has yielded strange results: it is highly moral to sign an agreement with Franco—although he took power through violence...
...The criterion of effectiveness is substituted for that of morality...
...Piovene writes, "the need to multiply contacts with life has serious consequences," such as the widespread diffusion of drugs...
...It was impossible to deny that American military organization permitted, at least provisionally, the frankest freedom of speech...
...The danger for the Europeans, closer at hand than is thought, is to adopt the American belief while lacking the substance upon which it is based...
...however, have understood that the real danger resides not so much in mechanization, American style, as in the tendency of America to abandon herself to a state of civilization "in which men in general are not intellectually ambitious" (H...
...It follows from this, according to Piovene, that concepts and nuances are disappearing...
...This "compulsion for well-being," for continual betterment, is of a moral and religious nature and is comparable to the famous "white man's burden," the European justification for colonialism...
...There is too much anguish, its heart beats too strongly...
...They would long ago have rid themselves of 'Syngman Rhee and Chiang-kai Shek whose corruption only Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 179 means additional expenditures for Uncle Sam...
...Thus we see that certain intellectuals are more interested in evading than in replying seriously to questions posed by American policy and American life...
...The phantasmagoria of too many doctors, too many pills, too much chocolate candy, too many ways of making life easier, though apparently harmless, impress and disturb the foreigner...
...Europe can examine itself as to its own hopes, its own heritage...
...Constant emphasis on increased production brings us again to the doctrine of effectiveness...
...American style, American fashions, a mass of attitudes which correspond to no reality— these are the dangers...
...Fear of Communism has become fear of anti-Communism...
...American civilization has from the beginning shunned the notion of original sin and is incapable of adhering to such an idea...
...One could feel quite happy in a Europe where the factory continued to tolerate the workshop...
...Not that he is incapable of grasping abstractions as such, but that the vehicle of his thought must borrow a form which can be adapted to practical life...
...One could cite endlessly the "Ballads of Yesteryear" composed by the Villons of the Industrial Revolution, products of a nostalgia nourished equally by bourgeois and worker...
...Although many contemSpring 1954 • DISSENT • I77 plative religious communities are to be found in America, there is a revealing difference between the attitude of the American public and that of Europeans...
...America, disfigured by its own propaganda, has thus ceased to be taboo...
...American civilization is everywhere defined as the civilization of "TV," of the "sensational," of "comics" and "digests...
...Perhaps," Piovene continues, "America is lacking in certain pagan aspects so abundant in Europe...
...America is a battlefield and one cannot but take a passionate interest in the struggle waging within her, a struggle, whose stakes exceed all bounds...
...If their propaganda often seems to elicit a response in the European consciousness, it is because in many ways America does symbolize a frightening future...
...All the intellectuals who toured the United States between 1945 and 1948 were soon seeking a target for their arrows...
...Anti-Communism does not offer great possibilities for regeneration...
...FOR ITS COMPETITION OF 1782 THE ACADEMY OF LYON posed the question: "Has the discovery of America proved useful or harmful to the human race...
...This may partially explain that abruptness of American political declarations which leave Europeans completely abashed...
...The writer is sympathetic toward the monks...
...The audience broke into smiles...
...It is fantasy such as this which underlies all fascist systems...
...The cry of "wolf" is soon unheeded...
...I do not think so...
...A Europe grown old is trying to understand and not to hate youthful America...
...For these intellectuals, it is not in the long run either a matter of adherence to Communism or of courageous opposition to Americanism in its repugnant and dangerous aspects...
...American spirituality finds expression in a kind of belief in material accumulation...
...Years have been spent in denouncing Communist crimes, waxing in dignant over the wrongs toward others for which Communist regimes were responsible...
...Another observer of American life, our principal "witness" here, is the Italian novelist and essayist, Guido Piovene, who spent ten months visiting the United States...
...A newspaper, Piovene relates, devotes an article to a Benedictine community...
...He does emphasize, however, that antiCommunist and anti-Socialist conformity, growing chauvinism and American neo-messianism have brought about "a democracy of lesser quality...
...To the French historian, Edouard Dolleans, this future is a "march towards the unconscious...
...American civilization, he believes, has taken a refractory if not hostile attitude toward the contemplative life and toward contemplative pursuits generally...
...Piovene notes, as even a cursory study of American publications will reveal, that the American has more and more difficulty using and understanding abstract words which do not evoke in him the idea of immediate, useful, efficacious action...
...Even where the American tries to return to European humanism, the effort, as Dolleans has noted, ends in "human engineering...
...The American's belief in effecr tiveness is progressively demonstrated...
...dream is substiuted for reality...
...The representatives of "Good" tend to believe and make others believe that all which they do in the name of or for the defense of "Good," has received Heaven's blessing...
...This attitude fosters a kind of negative hedonism: one does not search 178 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 for pleasure, one flees from pain...
...A new collectivity, a new and greater "Kibbutz...
...General Eisenhower, upon being presented with proof of Hitler's atrocities in 1945 was so aroused that he made the entire population of Weimar march through the charnel houses of Buchenwald...
...This language, which we find so ridiculous in Soviet newspapers, corresponds to nothing real among us...
...Then one day we realized that the sole use which the bourgeois intellectuals had made of that freedom of speech and thought Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 175 which they placed at the center of their resistance to Communism, was to defend the ideas of their leaders...
...Quite the opposite is true of the European capitalist for whom profit is an end in itself...
...The Americans who conducted the Nuremburg trials were sincere seekers after justice...
...Efficiency is the criterion which justifies everything and by which everything must be justified...
...One can conclude that certain Americans have launched a crusade not to further a narrow, reactionary "ideal" but to safeguard values which in all good faith they believe "spiritual...
...Mass production and the use of standardized objects having identical terms contribute to the formation of a uniform and necessarily limited language...
...One is afraid of "provoking" the Communists...
...American belief in American effectiveness often has regrettable results, but the effectiveness does exist...
...Thus, a philosophy of wellbeing culminates in a philosophy of production...
...That is Redemption...
...Piovene finds these "self-defenses" in America's prosfound democratic traditions...
...One must avoid pain, make life easy...
...The formation of Europe accus tomed it to diversity, and it cannot therefore long abide with the view that even if one camp embodies all the "evil" the other embodies all the "good...
...For them it is a question of once again exhibiting lofty indepenednce: "I, an intellectual can make the Wall Street business man pay dearly, and if Malenkov opens fire on the Berlin workers I will tell him, several months later of course, that it is not good, not good at all...
...From "formal democracy," America is moving toward "serviceable democracy...
...Today Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends take less and less interest in this "internal struggle...
...Not too long ago, when the Communist writer Claude Roy could declare, "Yes, I delight in the Americans, both for what they are and for what they promise to become," the above retort would not have brought smiles...
...He is Christ Triumphant, the Redeemer rather than the Man of Sorrows who has taken upon Himself the sins of the world...
...Communist intellectuals occasionally employ the language used by Pravda to speak of kolkhozes or production norms...
...It should likewise be noted that a different conception of Christianity creates different points of departure...
...Free enterprise" and profits are instruments of Redemption...
...An "effective" mode of speech feeds the self-delusion that one is as one speaks...
...This, of course, is a trifle...
...Then the climate changed and it was seen that Western values were threatened by Stalinism...
...But how easy it was to make game of quasi-illiterate Senators whose fondest hope seemed to be the submission of America and the rest of the world to detailed interrogation...
...This something is not idealism, for the American is idealistic...
...In the Christianity transplanted to America, in this `anti-pain,' `anti-death' religion, Redemption has the almost exclusive part...
...Everyone, strictly speaking, may give one sense or another to abstract notions but the vocabulary of practical life is the same in New Mexico as in the District of Columbia...
...Reduced to mere anti-Communism, the formally free expression of their thought no Ionger bore that mark of freedom which is non-conformity...
...If this analysis is correct, it helps us understand certain contradictions in the political and moral atttiude of the United States...
...Though inhospitable to contemplation, American civilization is not marked by complete absence of religious feeling...
...He observes that the American Christ is Christ without the Cross, a Christ without suffering...
...It would very much like at one and the same time to be pro tected from Stalinist totalitarianism and to preserve its right to remain a spectator, passing judgment as though its own interests were not in question...
...It was with great joy that European intellectuals, who to a certain degree had remained artisans, discovered a civilization still more mechanized than their own...
...Conformist in behalf of its interests and leisure, it approves the iconoclastic assault upon America led by certain of its representatives...
...Today, however, no one would dream of admiring anything American...
...Compulsion for well-being, the semi-being, the semi-ascetic imperative to become wealthy, these constitute a religious commandment...
...At this point a young man at my side, apparently a student, muttered rather audibly, "If he had known...
...In "De America," Guido Piovene attempts to delineate the essential character of American "religiosity" or, more exactly, of American Christianity...
...but it would be immoral to deal with Mao — because he took power through violence...
...It is rather the absence of an individual life of the mind in a civilization built upon creature comforts and constrained by a too exclusive quest for material progress...
...Modern man fears freedom which imposes upon him the difficult and dangerous task of reflection," writes Michael Crozier in Les Temps Modernes...
Vol. 1 • April 1954 • No. 2
