In the Age of the Thing
ROSE, RICHARD
The Young Generation —16 in the The younger generation today, at least as it has been speaking in the current New Leader series, seems a generation of young Alexanders, weeping because it has no...
...And slowly creeping upon the horizon is the heathen Chinee...
...If this sounds less than Utopian, it is...
...In art, the revolution begun with cubism has left little shocking that the younger generation can put on canvas...
...So our own series will go merrily (or seriously) on, with Richard Hose of the St...
...We have the peace that passeth into suburbia, untroubled by the soul-searching that can take place in the canyons of New York...
...For us, Stalin was dead before we were delivered into political consciousness...
...By Richard Rose age of the thing whites, except for a few revered patrons, are on the sidelines...
...The media give the culture of the masses a pervasiveness that makes intellectual activity appear marginal...
...Since Podhoretz's opener in our March 11 issue, we have also heard (in consecutive weeks, with the exception of May 13) from Wallace Markfield, Arthur A. Cohen, Daniel Bell, Jascha Kessler, John Hunt, Alfred Sundel, Morion Cronin, Leslie A. Fiedler, Ned Polsky, William Robert Yates, Robert Lekachman, Robert DeMaria, Anatole Shub and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick...
...The sitdown strikes of the Thirties have been replaced by hearings on labor racketeering...
...Characteristically, instead of trying to work out our individual problems alone, we have plighted our troth to the corporations—both the profit and non-profit v ariety—in the intellectual equivalent of marrving for money...
...Yet, young Alexanders frustrated in searching for an all-purpose, economy-size, do-it-yourself Panacea would do well to junk their dreams of a deal for the Absolute...
...Such a tendency is quietly muffling the voice of the aberrant individual...
...Yet, we would be wise to ask: Who are these indecisive young men who have been soliloquizing in The New Leader, cursing the time that is out of joint and their inability to set it right...
...Yet, the problems that remain with us are not attractive challenges, as the battles of the Thirties seem in retrospect...
...In either case, we have sold our birthright as yea- and nay-sayers for a mess of airplane tickets and Skira reproductions...
...For them, America is the land of opportunity...
...While novelists may deprecate the state of their art, aeronautical engineers can burn with a pure, gem-like flame in contemplating the state of theirs...
...his defeats have made their point...
...The issues of yesteryear are where the veterans of yesteryear are—over the hill...
...In music, the twelve-tone composers have squeezed what is probably the ultimate out of our present harmonic system...
...It demolishes the reasonableness of faith in the Absolute, at the same time giving us a sense of caution and maturity...
...They are writers, editors and teachers, almost all litterateurs with an interest in salvation of and by the group...
...Religious absolution within an institutional framework is suspect...
...With their talents, they are often in a position to dictate terms to the system, rather than accept them...
...In closing our ears to the siren calls of the Absolute, we will free ourselves to start doing the possible...
...To us falls the task of harvesting them in accord with history...
...Few have the equipment for this...
...Instead, we rejoice in our foundation grants or put another LP on the gramophone...
...It lives in a world in which the big decisions have already been made...
...Yet, its spokesmen continue to believe that youth wants to gain a new world, even if there may be times when circumstances fairly shout the wisdom of acceptance...
...But in a world of Grand Old Men— Eisenhower, Truman, Churchill, Adenauer...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, our regional correspondent and an earnest student of British politics, this week's communicant...
...Rather, they are repulsive nuisances that find us empty of sympathy, too wise too soon to commit ourselves to struggles we cannot (or do not care to) win...
...Even if one wanted, like Huck Finn, to turn his back on civilization, the radioactive clouds make clear that there's no place to go...
...These writers do not rejoice that the times now leave them free to concentrate on the ageless conflicts of the human heart, nor do they wish to adapt themselves to our present age, the age of the Thing...
...The scientist is able to see it in binocular perspective...
...The great debate on testing the H-bomb is an opportunity for the two great breeds of intellectual—the scientist and the humanist—to join forces in a battle which may become Armageddon...
...In the Middle West, Marxism, Trotskyism ancl Socialism are equally irrelevant, although young New York City intellectuals may continue to chase the chimeras their elders let loose...
...The equilibrium of the cold war will not remain indefinitely...
...In literature, the success of Joyce and Eliot in forcing our vocabulary to the limit indicates withdrawal, rather than further exploration, as the next step...
...Since liberalism no longer offers an absolute formula for reforming society, there is certainly nothing wrong in turning to individual needs, as Morton Cronin pointed out in his earlier contribution [NL, April 29], Yet, Original Sin, which defeated liberalism, will also defeat any attempt to secure complete individual salvation...
...Stevenson, our hope, preached the virtues of experience, not of youth...
...We must find our own issues, suited to the new environment that technology has quietly built around us, or return to a concern with the timeless troubles of the human heart...
...Physicists, biologists, engineers and architects all work with things...
...As a professional, it represents to him the possibility of tremendous discoveries in his field, although as a private person he may protest about the use of some of them...
...After assuming the burden of Original Sin at an unusually early age, we could seek peace through contemplation...
...The proletariat is sometimes indifferent to proffered salvation...
...The house the old men have built without our consent is nearly complete...
...This youth sees little prospect of a new world for conquest replacing the worn-out battlegrounds of the Thirties...
...The engineer and the chemist are wrestling with matter in varied forms, always trying and sometimes succeeding in creating something new...
...Mass communications are going morally bankrupt while waxing rich...
...The actuarial life expectancy of this generation is at least 40 years...
...We endure, but not like Dilsey...
...American universities (with an assist from Hitler) can boast of scholars matching those in any other country, and foundations are ready to subsidize research in everything from archeology to mass communications...
...Pulling down the roof would only expose our hi-fi sets, culture paperbacks and the other paraphernalia of the intellectual to the unkind elements...
...They feel left out because they are left out...
...Nehru and Pope Pius—what can we plant now for history to harvest later...
...If these are to be the battlegrounds, the battle is hardly worth it...
...Literature is more worked upon than working, with the creative act often appreciated only as the necessary step in the generation of criticism...
...Two wars to make the world safe for democracy have shown us that there is no future in going off on this kick—and there may be no future anyway...
...We are measuring out our prematurely old lives with espresso spoons...
...The helplessness of America in the Hungarian crisis has shown us that the crusades of today can only be fought with paper weapons...
...The biologist has before him the challenge of finding the secret of life itself—not the Good Life, but the biological life, the sine qua non of existence...
...We no longer have confidence in America's role as the savior of the world, having lost what Europeans lost in World War I. In international relations, we find that the shift in the balance of power toward the underdeveloped nations has deprived us of the initiative, because all our actions toward them can be described as creeping imperialism, whether or not the epithet is deserved...
...Paradoxically, while the rest of the world is worried because happiness can't buy money, we stare glumly at the dollars that can't buy happiness...
...No one knows how long it will last...
...The atom bomb has killed peace and made militarism ridiculous but necessary...
...If the litterateurs who have spoken in The New Leader do not wish to come to terms with Things, there is ample plowing that can still be done in the garden of the human heart...
...The personal sacrifices necessary for social welfare work are unattractive to persons bred to a middle-class standard of living and without a buoyant faith in the immaculate conception of the proletariat...
...A void is left, and it aches...
...In making the possible real, we will perform acts of creation...
...Labor-management problems are 110 longer cast in the simple form of medieval morality plays...
...how many can work for a corporation and remain free from identification with it and free from the evaluation of others in terms of their organizational affiliations...
...In either case, all of us must grope along with an awareness of the pit of Original Sin, but without the lantern of the Absolute to show us the way...
...In sweeping the dirt of our individual guilt under the wall-to-wall carpeting of corporation values, the younger generation has once more gone whoring after false gods...
...While watching the last nails being driven in, we are careful not to utter rude doubts aloud...
...The Young Generation —16 in the The younger generation today, at least as it has been speaking in the current New Leader series, seems a generation of young Alexanders, weeping because it has no more worlds to conquer...
...Few would declare with certainty that we will have another 40 years of peace...
...Meanwhile, the June 6 Listener, organ of the British Broadcasting Corporation, published an appraisal of England's younger generation which sounds as if it had been lifted bodily from this symposium on Americans between 21 and 31...
...The aggrandizement of power in the hands of corporations and institutions threatens to squeeze the unattached individual into limbo...
...While we store up treasures that rust can corrupt and thieves break through and steal, economists quietly talk of the possibility of depression, an experience we cannot even imagine...
...money is plentiful, and even the young university teacher is getting his...
...To the horrified humanist or student of politics, the release of nuclear energy represents only a genie to be put back in the bottle...
...While we plant gardens around our ranch homes, the clouds that water them also feed strontium-90 into our bones...
...And creation is as close as we can get in this world to the presence of the Absolute...
...The Negro's position has changed so much that now the fight is primarily one for them, and Northern In its May 19 issue, the Warsaw literary weekly JSoioa Kultura reprinted the first article of this series, by Norman Podhoretz...
...Today's younger generation feels it has been cheated...
...Given the bankruptcy of liberalism, it is their continued concern with the needs of the group that has caused this particular variety of intellectual so much anguish...
...This, however, can be more convenient than dishonorable if this is a time when heroism is quixotic...
...It is rare when an individual like Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama shows what one person can do, and she is well over 40...
...The antics of Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Eden and Sukarno have, one hopes, destroyed the illusion that any foreign leader is blessed with an omniscience denied Americans...
...The brave new world its seniors planned has fallen apart...
...In international affairs, the American Government has accepted the consequence of discoveries from Copernicus to the Wright brothers...
...When we uo to work, instead of to Bohemian seed, we become supporters of this commercialized cerebration, either actively, like the idealists who believe what they write for Time, or passively, like the cynics who don t believe what thev write for Time...
...If it doesn't, there may be world enough and time for a novelist to write A Portrait of the Physicist as a Young Man...
...Churches are scarcely free from sin...
...Prosperity has remained relentlessly before us...
...The decade ending with its coming of age completed the conquest of many of the big problems of the first half of this century...
...It is our California-nurtured elders who have gone the way of no flesh...
...The Republicans and Democrats offer an Alice-in-Wonderland choice...
...Youth doesn't make much distinction between Big Business and Big Unionism...
...One can go beyond Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, but how can one go beyond Bartok or Berg...
...Architects are currently filling in the spaces between billboards and "cheap-and-dirty" with buildings well worth the inspection of a foreign, or even a domestic, intellectual...
...Secure in the uterine protection of the Middle West, many of us never know we have made a deal...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
