COMMUNICATIONS
Hausknecht, Murray & Macdonald, Dwight
If Dwight Macdonald's "America!—Americal" [DISSENT, Fall 1958] were read by the European audience for whom it was intended, would it satisfy their curiosity about this strange land? What...
...European societies tend to be "orderly social structures" with each person "differentiated by status and function...
...just as he would be painfully aware, as Macdonald seemingly is not, of the implications of emphasizing such ideas as "persons differentiated by status and function" and "orderly social structure" when comparing Europe and America...
...I should even have been grateful for some hint as to whether he agrees with my own impressions...
...What European needs to be told that there is a "cult of youth" in America...
...Any adequate description and interpretation demands the application of reason as well as sensibility...
...And is not the absence of brain-work, superb or not, just what one misses in the proliferation of statistical data in American sociology today...
...If so, he is wrong...
...I am a little uncertain as to who might appear on Macdonald's calendar of American saints...
...Certainly, to American ears this is so familiar a refrain that it has ceased to have even shock value...
...By stopping short of rational analysis the journalist becomes merely a trickster who gives us the illusion that he has engaged in social criticism, but who, in reality, has only distracted our atten tion by conducting us either through the best of all possible worlds or a chamber of horrors...
...it is in itself a morality...
...Or does he mean the Army psychiatrists' report is a fake...
...Hausknecht seems to prefer...
...Similarly, when faced with the problem of the behavior of American prisoners in Korea Macdonald has no more meaningful concepts to use than "floating collectivism...
...What European is not aware that Tuscany has an "orderly social structure" in which each person is "differentiated by status and function," and that in the United States respect for others depends upon a force majeure...
...But Macdonald's essay does not even have this saving grace...
...The repetition of the known and trite need not be a fatal journalistic defect if it is presented in a way that allows for new perceptions, or if it forms the background for an interpretative statement...
...Dwight Macdonald replies: Since I was giving my impressions of this country after being away a while, I wrote impressionistically...
...The paradox disappears when one realizes that both fail to recognize the fact that American society poses a problem in meaning which demands something more than the cultural cliche and mere impressionistic reporting...
...Of course I agree that "something is basically wrong with the social structure" and, in fact, had thought I'd said just that in my observations on the absence of a sense of community...
...Nor do I see why a report becomes "politically and ideologically irrelevant" (what frightening jargon...
...The "I got mine screw you, Jack" attitude is a cultural phenomenon in the technical sense of the term...
...To say that individuals create their own culture and morality is literally meaningless: What culture is created by our Faulkners and Oppenheimers by their lonesome...
...Should one not add that, beside the poring and the tables, there was a superb brain at work...
...The reliance on an intellectually uncontrolled impressionistic observation of society and culture can be characterized as a type of mindlessness...
...Hausknecht has some evidence to this effect, it is a pity he didn't give it...
...One possible interpretation of all this is that in America persons are not differentiated by status and function...
...THIS is journalism at its worst, because it relies wholly on a "sensibility" only tenuously related to "sense...
...I'm sorry that Mr...
...While ours is not as "orderly" a society as more rigid class societies of Europe, it is still not a Hobbesian jungle...
...Or does it exist on some fourth-dimensional plane inaccessible to us both...
...This is patently ridiculous, since there is no society in which this does not occur...
...Macdonald's inability to think in social terms, despite his use of the sociologist's jargon, is not a major crime, but it makes his report politically and ideologically irrelevant by obscuring the fact that something is basically wrong with the social structure as well as the individuals this structure produces...
...I should have liked to have his intellectually controlled, untrite, unglib analysis of the American social structure...
...Our own society is a "jungle" in which each individual "makes his own culture, his own morality...
...Does he mean that the appalling facts in the report somehow become irrelevant because of the alleged propagandistic intent...
...because it is descriptive rather than analytical...
...I must confess I hadn't thought of that possibility, but if Mr...
...If Dwight Macdonald's "America!—Americal" [DISSENT, Fall 1958] were read by the European audience for whom it was intended, would it satisfy their curiosity about this strange land...
...Macdonald, for example, in the course of his polemic against Harold Rosenberg in the same DISSENT, derides "statistical tables and other instruments of academic torture...
...Since this mindlessness is the salient feature of most bad journalism it makes Macdonald with his "downbeat" version of American society a blood brother of the Life editorial writer who is busy celebrating the same society...
...I wasn't writing Das Kapital and not even an article for DISSENT, where things are usually ordered with the sobriety Mr...
...This is a paradox only if we think that the important issue is which version is the "correct" one...
...Does he think the truth lies halfway between us...
...What European does not know that American automobiles are abominations, symbols of a vulgarity that pervades our entire life...
...A journalist who allied "sensibility" with "sense" would be more alert to the implications of the official Army line which stresses the "softness" of Americans (shades of Hitler and the "decadence" of American society...
...Mr...
...a fact is a fact let the source be the Devil himself...
...Assuming this last statement to be true—and it has a certain glitter about it which automatically leads to doubts—the stated causes are no more than cultural cliches...
...However, the statement itself represents a fantastic misunderstanding of the crux of the problem...
...The piece, as stated, was written as a New York Letter for a London magazine...
...At the end he triumphantly paints himself into a corner by proving that, though my view of America is the opposite of that of the editors of Life, it's really just the same because we are both irrational tricksters...
...One can pick up practically any issue of Life and find the devil masquerading as John Dewey or Sigmund Freud...
...This same glibness is evident when Macdonald compares Europe and America...
...If it is only force which controls social relationships here, then we are experiencing a "war of all against all...
...But is it enough...
...From Alexis de Tocqueville to Simone de Beauvoir this has been the raw material out of which the European has woven his image of America...
...He tells us, for example, that "progressive education and Freudian theories" have caused parents "to lose confidence in their right to rule...
...It is a journalism which tends to reject anything which would force the journalist to thing in terms of a consistent intellectual framework...
...As a result of this orientation we find Macdonald attributing the "decline of a ruling class" to an ideology, and, therefore, parent-youth conflict explained solely as a result of the influence of progressive education and Freudianism...
...Hausknecht writes,' apropos my sneer at "statistical tables and other instruments of academic torture": "To grasp the essential puerility of this attitude, it is enough to recall that a work like Das Kapital is a result of many hours of poring over statistical tables...
...I'm also curious about his remark that I should have, in summarizing the Army psychiatrists' report on the Korean war prisoners, been "more alert to the implications of the official Army line which stresses the 'softness' of Americans (shades of Hitler and the 'decadence' of American society...
...Hausknecht fails to practice what he preaches...
...He might at least have given a hint...
...But Macdonald does concede that as this is taking place, "our individual saints and savants don't compare unfavorably with those abroad—but its all on his lonesome...
...If we take Macdonald seriously, then the problem this morality poses is a problem of individual psychology rather than one involving the social structure...
...To grasp the essential puerility of this attitude it is enough to recall that a work like Das Kapital is a result of many hours of poring over statistical tables...
...They give us plenty of tables but damned little to eat on them...
Vol. 6 • January 1959 • No. 1
