Portraits and Profiles-a Foreword
Coser, Lewis
This issue of DISSENT is devoted to reports and interpretationsmostly reports-of the American scene. We have asked a number of writers to describe those aspects of our national life with which...
...And even, if only a few human beings suffer genetic damage each year from these explosions, is that not also an outrage...
...THERE HAVE BEEN other social gains...
...The issue contains rather little on presentday power relations...
...never before has this eaten into the secret depths of human consciousness...
...If we were pressed to say what there is in common between the articles by, say, David Williams and Norman Mailer, the answer would not come automatically or easily...
...Still, no one can approach a body of raw data without some organizing assumptions and hypotheses...
...the portrait drawn here is fragmentary, unfinished and, at some points, contradictory...
...That may mean someone in your family, someone you know...
...Some of our orthodox Marxist friends may accuse us of by-passing the major economic and political issues of the day...
...And it is desirable because any socialist who is intelligent and honest with himself cannot simply keep hauling out an old schematic diagram of "capitalism," which no doubt continues to have many important points of connection with American life in the fifties but also fails to connect at other and equally important points...
...There is no basis for the premature "mellowing" which has become the informal mood and sometimes the proclaimed ideology of a good many intellectuals...
...And David Williams' report from Washington, written as it is by a leading figure in the ADA, presents a picture of life in the nation's capital that few radicals would care to draw in stronger colors...
...We are not so naive as to suppose that mental problems would fail to arise in any society...
...Frank Marquart tells us of the gnawing anxiety, the frightful competitiveness and the fear of speed-up that eat into the lives of Detroit auto workers...
...Those who, in all sincerity or as part of their job, participate in the "American celebration" can afford, in these complacent days, to paint with broad strokes...
...It is desirable because there is an inherent value in any description of social life that is done by a man who really tries to see, regardless of whether it confirms or damages his intellectual preconceptions...
...Toys are more attractive, but they are also less durable: the art of cheating the consumer has become more rationalized...
...To say nothing of the fact that all of our lives must now be lived in the shadow of the bomb...
...they can assume that few people will trouble to look very closely at the texture of their portrait...
...One can acquire so strong a vested interest in the critical task that one becomes unfitted for recognizing any positive aspects in the society one analyzes...
...Can we really grant much credit to the idea that we live in a healthy and sane society-a society needing only occasional improvements, not basic changes-when we read that in 1956 there were consumed in this country $150,000,000 worth of tranquilizers, as against $85,000,000 in 1955...
...Never before in human history have men consciously faced the knowledge that the mass extermination of the race is a distinct possibility...
...But that seems to us eminently desirable...
...And that both approach these problems with the assumption that even in this age of well-advertised (and vastly exaggerated) prosperity, there remain in America severe social difficulties...
...David Carper writes intriguingly of the trade unions, suggesting that the racketeering of a Dave Beck has become a form of social obsolescence and that even in the unions without Becks there are arising new problems of far greater depth and difficulty...
...According to the National Association for Mental Health, one out of every twelve children born today will require treatment in a mental hospital at some point in his life...
...In the nature of things, the picture that will emerge from this issue cannot be said to be "well-rounded" or "balanced...
...By and large, most Americans eat better, are better housed and clothed than in the thirties...
...But it certainly provides ground for feeling that much remains to be done in our domestic social and political life, and much remains to be understood...
...but here we would simply refer the reader to our friend C. Wright Mills' Power Elite...
...Michael Harrington presents a quiet, subtle picture of one of the best-known American small towns-Granville Hicks' Grafton-and does so in a way that hardly warrants a surrender of the critical capacity...
...The position of the trade unions is today stronger than ever before in America...
...No reader will fail to notice that the contributors to this issue vary in perspective, style, emphasis and attitude...
...We deliberately choose these unrelated and incongruous examples, to indicate that others can be found all along the spectrum...
...Morally and intellectually, the need for social concern and political awareness remains an acute one...
...PERHAPS, THEN, it is more revealing to focus on the private nightmares of the American people than on its public daydreams...
...One out of every twelve...
...The toys made for children these days are more attractive and interesting than in the past...
...Whether such improvements in the standard of living are permanent gains or only temporary effects of a permanent war economy is still a matter for discussion and dispute-and hardly a question that can be settled with a pat phrase...
...The "America" of this issue is not the whole truth...
...In a word, whatever may be said about the standard of living (and we would not breezily shrug it off as an unimportant matter), there remains the fundamental problem of the standard and quality of life...
...And this, remember, at a time when a doctor's prescription is still needed for them, and when the knowledge of tranquilizers has surely not yet reached large sections of the non-urban population...
...but surely it is sheer wilfulness not to recognize some deep and important relationship between the high incidence of mental troubles and the competitive, mechanistic, bureaucratic society in which we live...
...We are assured by scientists of the Atomic Energy Commission that the increase in radiation produced by H Bomb explosions is so insignificant that those scientists who raise the alarm are creating unnecessary worry...
...Can one measure responsibility for the killing of a child, born or not yet born, in terms of probability tables...
...William Newman and Maurice Stein probe into a relatively new problem: American life in the suburbs, its patterns and its psychological cost...
...Norman Mailer, in his brilliant portrait of the hipster, is likely to disturb some readers...
...It is desirable because there is, in this country, more than enough selfcongratulation and a wilful turning away from unpleasant facts...
...Even with the tranquilizers, millions of human beings break down -perhaps because they live not as human beings but as overstrained robots...
...But we also wanted that they not allow their ideologies or political biases to get in the way of their vision...
...We, of course, do not slight their importance or interest...
...More people than ever before have begun to break away from constricting "Puritan" attitudes toward the human body and sex...
...But he also describes the collapse of Southern liberalism, such as it was, and the hardening of white Southern opinion...
...But suppose-we would ask the gentlemen of the AEC-suppose you are mistaken...
...What they say is very grim indeed, but it smacks of the truth and it can be ignored only at our common peril...
...We are convinced that this issue of DISSENT is a useful contribution toward shaking people out of their political slumbers, that it reports things on the other side of the moon which our official astronomers never trouble to see...
...What dulling of public sensibilities must already have taken place if the morally outrageous statements of the AEC can be accepted with equanimity by the public at large...
...But those, like ourselves, who feel that there remain the most serious and fundamental grounds for social criticism and political opposition, must try to use a finer brush and a more hesitant stroke...
...And yet what hidden guilts must accumulate among the men who issue and the men who read such statements-since man, if lie can be made to function like a machine, cannot forever be treated merely as a machine...
...As never before, dissenters-whether they capitalize the "d" or not-are needed in American life...
...But we feel that it focuses upon remarkably important problems-problems that, in a way, present the reverse side of what is described in our studies of the suburb...
...The trade unions are stronger-but they are also less idealistic...
...These are the dangers that all of us face, and we have tried to avoid them...
...Seldom has so much depended on the hubris of so few...
...Yet it does not easily fit into anyone'sincluding our own-preconceptions...
...Surely no one will readily dismiss his report as mere agitation...
...The predispositions of our contributors were clearly critical, which was what we wanted...
...It does not explicitly record the considerable progress that has been made in recent years...
...It would be absurd to suppose that the mere recording of these things in itself provides an argument for socialism: that is another matter, for another time...
...As we were putting the issue together, we became aware that there can be a kind of conformism of dissent just as there is a conformism of acceptance...
...But even if one grants the existence of irreversible improvements, there still remain millions of American families that live below minimum standards of decency -and what is perhaps as bad, an intellectual community that pays only the faintest attention to this fact, systematically avoiding knowledge or observation that would disturb their notion of a brimming prosperity...
...Nothing in his report warrants relaxation or complacence or self-congratulation...
...Are they really happy...
...Many significant areas of American life had obviously to be neglected...
...Do they do useful and creative work...
...Or to change the image: the apologist can pretend to be aware of all the answers, the dissenter must slowly and painfully feel his way to new questions...
...Today one can hardly imagine a more radical approach to American life than that which asks seemingly naive and "non-political" questions such as: "How do people live...
...So, we repeat, this issue is not a "balanced" portrait of America...
...It highlights the shortcomings, the flaws, the tensions and injustices of American society...
...This is exactly as it should be...
...That is why we felt it useful to include in this issue a number of articles that emphasize the private sense of desperation behind the public mask of complacence...
...There is no need to run through the whole list...
...But we are also convinced that one needs new strategies of access to the problematic issues of our time, strategies of which older generations of radicals neither dreamed not had occasion to dream...
...THE COMPOSITE PICTURE presented by this issue is, basically, a critical picture...
...Perhaps it would simply be that both are trying hard, each in his very different way, to cope with new problems that neither the tradition of socialism nor that of liberalism has quite prepared us for...
...Here, then, are the ways in which some DISSENT writers see aspects of American experience...
...It gives no easy comfort to liberals or radicals...
...We have asked a number of writers to describe those aspects of our national life with which they are most familiar...
...On certain levels (mostly quantitative) there has been an increase in cultural activity...
...L. D. Reddick speaks of the new courage and strength among Southern Negroes: that is good news...
...What they wrote, we have printed...
...Yet they also suggest that with each apparent material improvement there has come a severe social and psychological problem...
...There is more cultural "activity," but less cultural boldness and spontaneity...
...Sexual "Puritanism" is less prevalent, but uncertainty and anguish about the role of the family seem more common...
Vol. 4 • July 1957 • No. 3
