A Mind's Turnings

...And all will be happy, all the millions .. . How much "translation" is required to see that this vision, though expressed in the terms of Dostoevsky's anarchist Christianity, anticipates the dominant trend of bureaucratic society, the Communist version primarily but surely not alone...

...He stresses the values of community and fraternity...

...At some moments, it may even help make him more popular, since it can lend him a certain individuality, a flavoring, that sets him apart from the bleached liberalism of the American scene...

...Still, no matter how much the intellectual may admire and envy the scholarly specialist, he cannot emulate him...

...William Dean Howells rush to embrace it...

...What Williams apparently meant was that some DISSENT writers had pushed to a dubious and even self-comforting extreme their sense of alienation in a mass society...

...This possibility arises not, as radicals once thought, because there is an immediate likelihood that the human race will create for itself a free and humane order, but largely because of the sheer cascading growth of technology...

...For an intellectual to defend freedom is no particular cause for self-congratulation: it ought to be as instinctive with him as for a child to reach for food...

...The weapon of criticism is undoubtedly inadequate...

...Through bitter experience they had learned the value of freedom...

...The Grand Inquisitor, anticipating his reign on earth, tells Christ: We shall give them the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such as they are by nature...

...Our main difficulty is that we are not related to a living movement about which we could steadily and with loyalty complain, and that no such movement is in sight...

...Another possibility for resistance is the scholar's kind of specialization...

...But perhaps still more, we envy their situation: the fact that they are in some relationship, even a critical one, with a living and significant political movement...

...If, as now seems likely, there will not be a war within the next few decades, and if, but this seems less likely, ways are found for controlling the birth rate, it becomes possible to envisage a world in which material wants will be moderately satisfied...

...But there is something else, so utterly commonplace that by now it needs to be cried from rooftops: an intellectual is a man who, by the very fact of his existence, is pledged to freedom...

...Though there is a tendency for the two to move closer to each other, the differences remain enormous, crucial, a matter of life-and-death...

...Not because, God knows, we are wiser than they, but simply because the trend toward the "massification" of society has gone further on this side of the Atlantic than the other...

...In such instances the judgment of their relationship to the dominant power cannot be made on a priori grounds, but depends on a series of specific historical estimates...

...We have, so to speak, to summon up an hallucinatory as if in order to scratch away at what is...

...We may assume that large numbers of ordinary people, fed regularly and diverted by the mass media, would be satisfied—as, by comparison with their previous condition, they might have good reason to be...

...The struggle between East and West has brought obvious catastrophic consequences for modern life...

...a progressive flattening of personality takes place, irrespective of salary categories, standards of living, bureaucratic rank...

...In some limited circles, now that Cold War chauvinism is dying out, radicalism seems again to be taking on a sickly sort of popularity...

...During the past few decades the most remarkable trait of American culture has been neither conformity nor conservatism, not even its truly astonishing dullness...

...There are grey moments when I charge myself with some small responsibility for the endless chatter about "conformity" that has swept the country...

...Some people even suggest they know what such a voice should say, though they tend to be chary of providing examples...

...they could hardly have imagined what might happen when, for ends of its own, society learned to "adapt" those ideas...

...One idea seems as good as another, since none seems to matter very much —this amiably nihilistic version of chacun a son gout is the most authentic sentiment of the age...

...We can be responsible only for what we say, not for what "happens" to it later— though, aware of likely "happenings," we ought to try hard to throw up safeguards against subsequent corruption...

...Within this half-formed world of real spectres, Marx's criticism of modern industrial civilization as centered on the proletarian void offers at least a conceptual foothold...

...Oh, we shall persuade them at least not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud...

...Instead of the self-creating revolt of nothings at the base of society, history appears to hold out a horror-Utopia of universal de-individualization headed by leaders who are their masks...

...We shall show that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all...

...Much of what appeared there still seems to me true, but I could not then know that, unintentionally, I was helping to make the outcry against conformity into a catch-word of our conformist culture...

...That this possibility will not be realized in the next several decades, for a variety of reasons having to do with our political and social arrangements, seems almost certain...

...And it is a speculation which rests upon grossly simplified ideas, partly on the kind of technological determinism which I have repeatedly attacked...

...1...

...In turn, however, when reviewing Williams' splendid book Culture and Society I found myself saying that his "organic" vision of socialism seemed to me "a bit too harmonious and, if I may risk being misunderstood, a bit too wholesome There is lacking in his out...

...And there seems no way of escaping it...

...X Abstract man multiplies...

...Besides, the glory of the socialist movement at its best was that it did teach people to think, not merely in general terms rising above their immediate desires, but also of freedom as a value in itself, as the only condition in which man might find his humanity...

...In the West he is a corporation official, in the East he belongs to the Central Committee...

...I suspect that in their stress upon the working class neighborhood and its indigenous culture men like Williams and Hoggart are turning to something that is fast slipping away, perhaps because it is fast slipping away...

...111 An intellectual, Harold Rosenberg once said to me in an amusing improvisation, is someone who turns answers into questions...

...it is to assume that even in a country like ours, where memory is notoriously short, experience does matter...

...In turn, we admire their efforts to give substance, through their close analysis of English life and culture, to the generalities of socialism...

...If nothing else, it helps suggest that we do not wish to be accepted as members of the Establishment, not even as members who by their frolicsome nay-saying make it easier for the rest to stay comfortable and cool...

...No one has yet found a way of popularizing silence, and for many people it must have a genuine value, which we should not scorn...

...IX To what I have just said about the Europeans there is one major exception: the Polish "revisionist" intellectuals...

...But the possibility remains worth considering in its own right...

...They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever...

...In the past, to be sure, this has seemed an excessively abstract and apocalyptic view, since the actual choices were seldom as total as Dostoevsky assumed...

...I mean the Dostoevsky who foresaw a situation in which the movement of history would drive men into a fearful choice between the risks of freedom and the security of a false collective...

...Six years ago, when McCarthyism was at its worst and the response of many intellectuals somewhat less than heroic, I wrote a sharp polemic for Partisan Review called "This Age of Conformity...

...But the intellectuals...

...No doubt...

...it has been an unprecedented capacity for assimilating— and thereby depreciating—everything on its own terms, both lavish praise and severe attacks.* Assaults upon mass culture become an indispensable element of culture: the spice for the stew...

...Adulteration may await whatever you say, yet that does not relieve you of the obligation to speak...

...It is true that one mode of resistance, almost never considered by radicals, is silence...

...Whole passages from their work seem almost to evoke or anticipate what we have been trying to say...

...But for the intellectual it will not do...

...Who on that account would choose to surrender it...

...Demoralized by their strangeness to themselves and by their lack of control over their relations with others, members of every class yield themselves to artificially constructed mass egoes that promise to restore their link with the past and the future...

...But the anticipation is there...

...They began by struggling for the right to existence, but inevitably this led them to a struggle for the right kind of existence...

...Would they still feel the force of Dostoevsky's legend with its either-or of freedom and happiness...

...He is friendly...

...A few elements are missing: the role of technology, the growth of functional rationality—Dostoevsky had not read Max Weber...

...That is why one often feels closer to writers like Dostoevsky, Conrad and Melville, whatever their stated views, than to many American liberals and European Social Democrats...

...That is why the flabbiness of spirit which characterized a good many American intellectuals during the McCarthy period, particularly those who were associated with the ill-named Committee for Cultural Freedom and who dominated the editorial staffs of Commentary and the New Leader, is a deep and lasting blotch...

...But that does not mean that one should seek it and * "To make enemies is perfectly easy...

...But if one turns from the immediate political struggle to a kind of socio-cultural speculation by means of which certain trends are projected into an indefinite future, there may be some reason for anticipating a society ruled by benevolent Grand Inquisitors, a society of non-terroristic and bureaucratic authoritarianism, on top of which will flourish an efficient political-technical elite—a society, in short, that makes Huxley's prophecy seem more accurate than Orwell's, except insofar, perhaps, as Orwell's passion and eloquence helped invalidate his own prophecy...

...No one is surprised these days to find a notion or phrase migrating directly from the quarterlies to a cigarette ad, since the man writing the ad may well be an intellectual manqué who sneers at Partisan Review yet dreams of having it accept his story about the spiritual ordeals of Madison Avenue...

...Editors and "opinion-makers" read it to keep up with the latest thoughts and moods of the intellectuals...

...look a touch of anarchist disaffection that would burst out no matter 'who is the State.' For even in societies toward which they can be friendly, intellectuals, if they are to remain intellectuals, will probably have to be critics, irritants, `outsiders' living by the values of minority culture...

...Raymond Williams, in a warm review of Voices of Dissent, felt obliged to say that he found in our book some "sick" voices...

...In anthologies like Conviction, magazines like Universities and Left Review, the books of men like Raymond Williams (Culture and Society) and Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy) one finds a new sense of socialist idealism, undogmatic and humane, though sometimes lacking in political precision...

...Recognizing all this, the intellectual can only maintain his moral guard, nourish his sense of humor, try to avoid needless self-pity, selfrighteousness and snobbism—and keep doing his work...

...Christ makes some telling points" they suffer from syntactical confusion and "a woolly pretentious style...

...Saying this, I do not wish to set up a false dualism or to condescend toward non-intellectual socialists: not at all...

...Berdyaev and other Christian commentators see this as a triumph of love over power, Christ's readiness to embrace even his greatest enemy, His wisdom in rising above mere argument...

...No one, to be sure, wants it for himself, but everyone is ready to admit that it might be good to have a "constructive radical voice" in America...

...He has no field...

...And that may be a good reason—surely not the only or main reason—why those of us whose Marxism is vestigial and whose socialism is primarily a commitment to a value and a problem, should continue to regard ourselves not merely as radicals but also as socialists...

...but they leave genuine scholarship untouched, except in those rare circumstances when it promises to yield a tremor of novelty...

...Perhaps Christ's kiss, as D. H. Lawrence thought, is a sign of loving helplessness: He has nothing to say to the Grand Inquisitor, He cannot struggle with him for possession of the world...

...These men, until Gomulka gradually silenced them, were the liveliest political thinkers in the contemporary effort to revive the socialist tradition...

...Suppose, then, that the goal of moderate material satisfaction is reached after the next several decades in large areas of the world and by societies that are not socialist and often not even democratic...

...it serves, also, as one of the sources for which middlebrow culture appropriates serious ideas...

...IV Unexpectedly my mind keeps turning to Dostoevsky—not, as in the past, the novelist of extreme psychic states but the thinker whom radicals used uneasily to belittle...

...But I offer it not as a prediction, only as a conceptual possibility that takes on increasing relevance...

...At the end of Dostoevsky's legend, Christ says not a word but meekly kisses the Grand Inquisitor...

...but, without trying to minimize it, I wonder whether there might not be some truth in the criticism each makes of the other...

...The socialist foresees another order of society: a better one, more humane and creative...

...This vivid sentence suggests all the invited discomfort, the principled worrying at one's own assumptions, that ought to be characteristic of intellectual life...

...Not that we lack clear-cut ideology, nor that we lack power, nor that we refuse cer tain of the latest intellectual fashions...

...Oh, we shall allow them even to sin, they are weak and helpless...

...This enables them to fulfill the job of the socialist intellectual without embarrassment or nail-biting: I mean the kind of nail-biting that one sometimes finds in DISSENT...

...But since I believe that, for most purposes, one's sense of the socialist possibility and one's sense of the intellectual life relate fruitfully to each other, I find it possible also to see the tension between noun and adjective in "socialist intellectual...

...to be intellectuals...

...Intellectuals have often enough allowed themselves to become mere sycophants of ruling power, even a ruling power that was repressive and inhumane...

...Will a magnified reiteration of radicalism protect him from the raids of mass culture...

...Some of these Englishmen have been good enough to speak well of DISSENT, perhaps finding a use in the speculations that have appeared in our pages...

...They remain our true comrades...

...Dubious privilege...

...As with cigarette ads, so with denunciations of conformity...

...There is a real difference here...

...Who on that account would choose to surrender it...

...Or would they comfort themselves by regarding it as a mere dusty remnant of the nineteenth century...

...Vill An interesting dialogue seems to have arisen between ourselves and some of the new socialist intellectuals in England...

...They take on other roles: scribe, publicity man, political adjutant...

...And something else that pertains to us of DISSENT...

...The one advantage we American socialists may have is that the workings of history seem to have allowed us, a few moments before the Europeans, to look at the Medusa face of tomorrow...

...Despite a small circulation, Partisan Review is an influential magazine...

...Snug in their posts and aglow with honors, would they still remember or care about the vision of human freedom...

...When they first began pouring out their ideas a few years ago, one felt an enormous elation: it was as if, from the other side of the moon, voices came to us speaking the same language...

...To advance this speculation at a time when the majority of human beings on our planet still suffer from terrible poverty, may seem irrelevant and even heartless...

...But if you so much as mention socialism, then you are likely to be considered dangerous (by the readers of Life, whose minds seldom change) or absurdly old-fashioned (by the readers of Partisan Review, whose minds have been nourished on a diet of novelties...

...Is it the difference in our situations that causes a certain variance of approach between our British friends and ourselves...

...VI No matter what their formal opinions, all intellectuals, insofar as they are intellectuals, tend finally toward a kind of non-political anarchism...

...VII What is our main difficulty, we Dissenters...

...The main media are quick to grasp phrases about "conformity," and recently have begun to make raids upon literary criticism and discussions of "action painting...

...But now, for the first time, it becomes possible to foresee, in the future just beyond the immediate horizon, a Dostoevskian choice...

...The ideal construct, so obviously unrealized in many situations, which I here give to the term "intellectual" has itself become part of our history...

...At the same time, I cannot help thinking that there is always a side to the intellectual—the side that makes him preeminently and uniquely an intellectual—which stands apart, as critic and observer, as the man who in the name of freedom casts a cold eye upon considerations of expediency...

...When one is engaged in concrete political analysis which involves firm and immediate political choices, it seems to me both intellectually facile and morally catastrophic to affirm an identity between the societies of East and West...

...Yet there is also some historical ground for doing this, if only because over the past two centuries a whole series of norms and ideals have accumulated around the term "intellectual...

...He was probably right...

...And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a decision for themselves...

...At other times they have performed, reasonably and constructively, a variety of technical or political tasks...

...In the nature of things, the intellectual deals with the kinds of topics that the mass media will want to aggrandize...

...Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game...

...But this may not speak well for us...

...At its best the socialist movement helped transform workers into thoughtful and reflective human beings, to raise them from objects into subjects—perhaps its finest achievement and one that only petty snobs would dismiss...

...Intellectuals used to complain that society ignored or rejected their ideas...

...And more: the struggle between East and West accelerates the technological growth that makes it possible to foresee a life without severe material want...

...the difficult thing is to keep them...

...And at the risk of presumption I can't help wondering whether in just one respect we socialist intellectuals in America may not be a little ahead of our European friends...

...And to be fair about it: as with Partisan Review, so, more or less, with DISSENT...

...And that is why it is so disquieting to hear intellectuals who but yesterday were professional anti-Stalinists now expressing the kind of rationalizations for Communist power that one has become accustomed to hearing from Paul Sweezy and Isaac Deutscher...

...And he feeds the hungry...

...The intellectual is eager to acquiesce in this vision, but partly he does so as an opposition-in-advance, as one who, in reaction to the "cockney dream" and the threat of contentment, will continue unreasonably to insist upon freedom...

...What would the intellectuals say...

...This passage comes from an essay by Harold Rosenberg which appeared a few years ago in DISSENT...

...The intellectual, alas, is a noise-maker: he is the man who keeps talking even after the room has been emptied and the shades drawn...

...There may have been times when our efforts at criticism collapsed into complaints, and our complaints into gripes...

...Probably not...

...And to all our friends who feel that we do not do enough, or do not do it well enough, or do not offer them the conceptual assurances they know we neither can nor should, let me repeat the last two sentences: "The weapon of criticism is undoubtedly inadequate...

...Though some of them were forced to function within the rigid framework of a one party regime, they were really democratic socialists— political marranos—in their outlook and emphasis...

...V Socialist intellectuals: so we like to call ourselves, but isn't there an inner conflict or at least tension in that term...

...In the modern totalitarian state, or in relation to it, intellectuals who become involved with History, Progress and Plans cease, in the special sense that I have here used the term, * When the Polish intellectuals in 1956 started their opposition to Stalinism, they demanded a series of definite and particular rights, which were valuable not only to them but to other sections of the population...

...Perhaps so...

...but one ironic consequence has been that the inner tendencies toward social crisis within both capitalist and Communist society are held in check by the need each has to combat the other...

...To many other things as well: but to freedom above all, to freedom as it manifests itself in a series of definite and particular rights, and, equally important, as it is a commanding and moving idea.* That I am here talking about intellectuals in a special way—by normative fiat more than historical observation—is clear...

...To keep saying such things is not artificially to preserve a grudge...

...It may be an unfortunate part of our tradition, a hang-over from Marxism, that because we have no expectation of immediate political action, we should find it so hard to engage in the necessary tasks of criticism and discussion...

...For in our time the Grand Inquisitor is no longer a withered Churchman: stern, ascetic, undeluded...

...By impulse, if not definition, the intellectual is a man who writes about subjects outside his field...

...11 If Jesus were to deliver His sermon on the mount next week, Ed Murrow would interview Him in His gracious suburban home, Khrushchev would announce that in Russia they have "things just as good," Time would sorrowfully warn its readers against His gnostic heresies, Jean Paul Sartre would publish in a special number of Temps Modernes a 60,000 word preface to the French edition, and Dwight Macdonald—Dwight Macdonald would write that while "Mr...

...The kiss is a kiss of despair, and He retreats, forever, in silence...

...but in a remarkably short time they began to see that their struggle derived from, and could not be sustained without, a general idea or value of freedom...

...He is now a skilled executive who knows how to manage large-scale enterprises and sustain the morale of his employees...

...But perhaps Dostoevsky also meant something else...