Living With Books

...There are many examples of this adaptability...

...This isn't the first time, of course, that an intellectual has made a foray into the hinterlands of our mass culture, but I can't think of an expedition that has had more rewarding results...

...After a searching analysis, he says boldly: "Our standard of personality is on the whole much more mature than that of any European country...

...You will find a TV aerial on practically every house in my town??except my own house and the houses of two professors and an engineer...

...The process of adjustment, of which David Riesman has given an account in The Lonely Crowd, has its ugly aspects, but perhaps we ought to marvel at the adaptability of the species instead of despairing of the future...

...It is that drive, greater than any idea of progress or party of resistance, that moves the world today, and we call it democracy...

...Intellectuals sometimes talk as if people were compelled to look at all the silly programs on television...

...Even the golden rule, as Shaw once pointed out, is not a perfect guide to behavior in a democracy, for you always have to stop and think that other people may have different needs and desires from yours...

...From under the lid??everybody, from under all the lids??kings, churches, aristocracies, landlords, the military caste, the burgher class, the lawyers, the lesser nobility, the petty bourgeosie??the piles of subclasses on top of subclasses that formed the structure of old Europe...

...though in existence now for a hundred years, has only just begun...

...The everlasting surveys of the social scientists, wrong-headed and unimaginative as they often are, do tell us things that we need to know about the people with whom we live...

...He can say, as some of us would scarcely dare to, that these critics make up a lot of fairy tales about European culture...

...Barzun also worries about our preoccupation with technique, which he attributes to our blind worship of science...

...Barzun speaks affectionately of the rocks and rills, the woods and templed hills, he is more concerned with social organization than with landscape...

...There is a serious loss here, as Baker Brownell and the other partisans of the face-to-face community are constantly warning us...

...He then points out that, though nobody has rights that everybody doesn't have, there are rights that everybody does have, and he mentions specific ways in which these rights are commonly disregarded...

...Barzun speaks of the impact of the machinery with which we are surrounded: "The threat of every machine compels us to dance in tune with it, and the steps are so complicated we jiggle all day long...

...Barzun admires American ingenuity and efficiency, and he complains only when business and government are less ingenious and efficient than they might be...

...Though he may not always be right, he is always perceptive, and much of the time he is extremely witty...

...Barzun not only finds a great deal to admire in contemporary America...

...In The American Anarchy, Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Lionel Gelber makes the point even more sharply than Barzun...

...Although Mr...

...Fashion and science bring you this modern marvel," he quotes from an advertisement for a brassiere...

...Precisely so...

...He begins by accepting the basic idea of a democratic society: "We must not forget that what we have undertaken, no other society has tried: We do not suppress half of mankind to refine part of the other half...

...he finds a lot to enjoy...

...And it is in the United States that the industrial revolution has advanced far enough so that we may gain some impression of what it has in store, of good and of evil, for mankind...

...What the American people need is more discrimination, but it is just as undiscriminating to act superior about gadgets in general as it is to rush out and buy everything that is advertised in Life...

...Barzun defends "our combined industrial and emotional democracy" against the criticisms of those he calls the "professional Europeans," and he can do this all the more effectively because he himself was born in France...

...The ability to satisfy a great variety of tastes is, he sees clearly, one of the principal virtues of our society...

...There are people, as he admits, who are enslaved by gadgets, but all good things can be abused...

...The increase in man's span of life, for example, which has already been achieved will mean more in the long run than any religious or social fluctuation...

...Obviously, in a society in which we must reckon with far more people than we can know personally, we have to treat many of them as numbers...

...But nobody has to look at TV, least of all the intellectuals...

...He writes well, for instance, about the depersonalization of life in a mass society??about what he pointedly calls "statistical living...

...New York City, and sex...

...The subtitle is "A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words," which gives an excellent idea of the temper of the book but doesn't quite indicate its scope and method...

...The problem of standards in a mass society is far from simple...

...From under what...

...Furthermore, as Barzun takes pleasure in pointing out to the professional Europeans, what America has is what Europe is beginning to get...

...Democracy requires a greater degree of tolerance than most moralists have been willing to practice...

...And this, since his erudition and taste have been clearly demonstrated in a series of books, since his highbrow standing cannot be questioned, makes God's Country and Mine a kind of landmark in the history of the American intelligentsia...

...But it is not necessary to give up and say that anything goes...

...Techniques are, at least in part, a necessary substitute for traditions in a period in which change is too rapid to permit the development of traditional responses...

...though the first phrase is bumptious and the second patronizing, each has its measure of truth...

...I know how he feels, but I also know that many machines that are mysterious and terrifying to me seem as familiar as domestic animals to some of my neighbors...

...This is a book that is serious without ever being solemn...

...and he can remind them that, at best, they are comparing a tiny group of privileged Europeans with the great mass of Americans...

...If the country had remained predominantly agricultural," he explains, "the first comers would have taken all the land and kept down the rest of us as men had done elsewhere for seven thousand years...

...It is a book that millions of Americans and practically all Europeans ought to read...

...Barzun begins, as many other writers on the subject have begun, with geography: "What happened here on this enormous expanse of intact wilderness is that mankind got out from under...

...What kind of discrimination can be exercised Barzun shows very well in his discussion of manners...

...More than a century ago, Alexis de Tocqueville saw in America the design for Europe's future...

...Our railroads and our post office, he says, are disgraces, and of course he is right...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Jacques Barzun Examines America??Its Techniques, Its Culture, Its Values Jacques Barzun's God's Country and Mine (Little, Brown, $5.00) is one of the soundest, most suggestive, most encouraging studies of contemporary American culture that I have read...

...In Manes Sperber's Journey Without End, the wise Professor Stetten writes in his journal: "The only true revolution to date is the industrial revolution, which...

...As machines become more complicated and more numerous, the pace grows faster and faster, but we are not left so far behind as we sometimes think...

...But the vastness of America would have meant considerably less if the settlement had come at a different moment of history...

...Europeans," he writes, "like others who have come down in the world, may vent their spleen upon an American benefactor: What they resent is, au fond, the twentieth century...

...and, though nothing has worked out quite as he or anyone else expected, time has proven him essentially right...

...The twentieth century has been called the American century and also the century of the common man...

...In its latter two-thirds, the book is a series of essays rather than a piece of sustained exposition, but each essay makes its contribution to the general argument...

...But every man's idea of escape to personal liberty, before or after he got here, combined with the needs of the industrial system to start an irresistible drive toward equalizing conditions...

...But depersonalization is part of the price we pay for our system of production and distribution, and, to a greater extent than Brownell believes, or even Barzun for that matter, human beings are able to adjust to it...

...In general, Barzun avoids the error, so common among intellectuals, of condemning the whole social set-up because it is not perfectly adapted to his tastes...

...He makes some pointed comments on this phenomenon, but I think that he fails to recognize the importance of techniques in our kind of society...

...To them, machines that I find alarming are actually opportunities for the demonstration of skill, enlarging rather than diminishing the sense of competence...

...Once more a thin, tough crust, with a deep-dish pie of human beings underneath...

...It is foolish to suppose that a revolution of such dimensions can be painlessly achieved, and Barzun does not ignore the painful consequences...

...But the society that permits our neighbors to have television sets enables us to have record players and FM radios...

...He first tries to show what kind of civilization we have and how it developed, and then takes off on a variety of subjects, such as the worship of science, mass entertainment, manners, gadgets, medicine...

...By comparison with that one, all other revolutions are nothing but storms in a teacup...

...Czeslaw Milosz, in The Captive Mind, pities the poor Americans, "condemned to work hard all day and to swallow the poison of films and television at night...

...In the United States, not because of any special moral excellence but for geographical and historical reasons, we are achieving a state of civilization in which material goods are plentiful and are distributed in a roughly equitable fashion...

...It is Barzun's willingness to criticize from inside the system, so to speak, that gives his book its great value...