The Fear of Error
NORWITCH, BERNARD E.
The Young Generation — 17 THE FEAR OF ERROR By Bernard E. IS or witch According to the contributors to the "Young Generation" series, there are more things wrong with the intellectuals born in...
...We are suffering from a failure of imagination...
...That priority is not as clear today...
...For reasons not entirely clear to ourselves or our elders, we are ashamed of the generation of liberal intellectuals who did, as we see it, make the dreadful errors, both political and literary, with which the history of the left-wing movements in the Thirties is full...
...a newspaper reporter in St...
...And we are naturally disappointed at the results of those reforms which had been made for us...
...There are opportunities to make them aplenty in every sphere of intellectual and artistic activity...
...Without minimizing our national needs or national problems, both of which are many and complex, America's mood is business-as-usual...
...Ours is an age of refinement, and we continue to change and grow in ways in which that refinement can be exercised...
...Thus are we fearful, and rightly so...
...and the dream of a different concept of society was not our dream...
...It is here our problem lies...
...which so strongly motivated our parents and grandparents, is much more subtle now and in the process of inheritance has shifted the direction of its activity...
...still beckons, still challenges us with as much force and as much inspiration as ever...
...But it is natural in a society as fluid as ours, yet so lacking in status Since this series started on March 11, we have heard from national magazine editors (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Anatole Shub) and book editors (Arthur Cohen, Ned Polsky...
...of course, had placed upon us by those who taught us literature and politics—and resume our capacity to wonder...
...The "last and greatest of all human dreams...
...He is 30 years old, holds degrees in political science from Temple and Columbia Universities, and has also worked in advertising and public relations...
...Bishop Sheen has replaced Father Coughlin...
...There was surely never a time in history when the intellectual was so sought after—when beneficent institutions, foundations, universities and governments were so anxious to help him with scholarships, grants, fellowships...
...We do it in our clothes and our food, in our travel, and in our literary criticism and politics...
...Those who complain that the intellectual in America today must go begging with his wares are, in my view, very much mistaken...
...We say we have lost faith in progress because we take for granted the real progress we have made, as a society, and meanwhile we busy ourselves with trying to make progress in that place where, indeed, probabilities are against us -with ourselves in relation to our culture...
...Those people have a right to crow: they sailed through dangerous waters to a port without quarantine...
...It is no less natural for young people not to be particularly interested in politics nowadays than it was natural for them to be interested in politics in the Thirties...
...While I commiserate with my colleagues for the hard times that have overtaken us all, I would like also to voice at least a partial dissent and underestimate our problems in order to look at our good fortune...
...We, in turn, have exercised the right to accept their views as our own without having endured the experience...
...His place in American society is somewhat ambivalent, of course, but we have never known what position in society is best for nurturing creative and intellectual talent, and history offers little help...
...studies, gifts and subsidies...
...this time with the knowledge that our responsibilities begin in dreams, 1 have no doubt that we will re-conceive those dreams and meet those responsibilities...
...We have, to be sure, lost some of the political force of that drive, but that was inevitable...
...What is wrong with this...
...Moreover, what we take to be conformity nowadays is often rather superficial...
...We are overconcerned with these symbols, perhaps, and there is a great deal of meaningful comment to be made about that overconcern, but such comment has to do with problems of America and society older than ourselves or our elders and would not prove that we have ceased to be as different as we formerly were from one another...
...We fight, therefore, not the large battles of political and social reform, but the individual struggle with our culture...
...We may be reasonably sure, however, that more than "sympathy, understanding, admiration"—as a recent contributor here recommended—the intellectual needs independence and a clear conscience...
...Is it a wonder, then, that we appear timid, that we tend to accept without question the answers handed down by our approved list of intellectual mentors...
...What would those who chastise us have us do...
...The fact that middle-class dress and manner, for example, have so successfully imitated the upper-class mien should not fool us into believing that there are no longer real differences between us and them, and among ourselves...
...We have indeed skipped a generation, and where we go from here we go together—that older generation and ours...
...We are letting sociologists, psychologists and political journalists write the books that should be our novels...
...What troubles us is nothing less than having absolutely unprecedented numbers of people with enough money, leisure, education and opportunity to make living the good life their principal intellectual occupation...
...Then, political solutions were demanded by the times, and if those solutions did not (because they could not) solve the total problem their priority was clear...
...when they are not dead —as in the cases of Orwell or D. H. Lawrence—their names can be found among those on the roster of the now defunct Committee for Cultural Freedom...
...We still measure ourselves, as Americans have since the beginning, according to the ideal, the perfect...
...Fascinated by the penitential ritual of the liberal imagination's pitiless examination of itself and its past, we have identified ourselves with a past and a guilt not our own...
...Our cultural heroes are either those who were right all along, or who were right in time...
...The Young Generation — 17 THE FEAR OF ERROR By Bernard E. IS or witch According to the contributors to the "Young Generation" series, there are more things wrong with the intellectuals born in the period from the mid-Twenties to the mid-Thirties than were dreamt of by Horatio—or anybody else...
...Sooner or later—and let us not worry, there is time enough—the tradition of the American Dream and its peculiar reality in our intellectual life will reassert itself...
...What holds us back—from enthusiasm, from action, from commitment—is, as Leslie Fiedler and others have pointed out, our fear of making a mistake...
...If we are more masochistic than is good for us, we are, nevertheless, still idealistic enough to want to be better...
...We have swept our minds clean of Marx and persist in misunderstanding Freud, and we have achieved no imaginative understanding of ourselves or our society...
...We are not staking out new positions or attacking the hell-defended fort, because the fort has been taken...
...We do not, then, lack opportunity, but we do not, either, according to Leslie Fiedler, found new journals, discover a new voice, or explore new themes in which to invest our "carefully nurtured sensibility and technique...
...And what is not wrong with them is wrong with America...
...To a certain extent, the complaints we have, and those we make against ourselves, seem to me to be a healthy sign...
...Rest assured, we will make our own...
...This week's contributor, Bernard E. Norwitch, has worked in Philadelphia and Washington since 1952 on the staff of former Philadelphia Mayor, present U. S. Senator Joseph S. Clark Jr...
...Some of us may deny this and pretend or actually be as disenchanted as our elders over the recent discovery of evil-in-the-world...
...What we are doing is, after all, what the times permit us to do—what, perhaps, they demand of us...
...writers of fiction in New York (Wallace Markfield, Jascha Kessler, Alfred Sundel) and Paris (John Hunt) ; college teachers in Los Angeles (Morton Cronin), Minnesota (Leslie Fiedler) and New York (Robert Lekachman, Robert DeMaria) ; a TV story consultant with Hollywood experience (William Robert Yates...
...The focus on the inner life has become proportionately greater as the need to focus on the outer world has diminished...
...Certainly there is a greater acceptance of variety and difference within our general culture among second- and third-generation Americans today than there was among our parents...
...It is his business to be in some degree in conflict with his society, not "adjusted" to it...
...What we must do is free ourselves from the restrictions of imagination we have placed upon ourselves—and...
...And why do we constantly forget that we are actually achieving on a scale hitherto impossible the very social goals and possibilities which men have always dreamed of and which we as a nation specifically set out to accomplish...
...There are...
...It is to our credit that we want to learn from their experience—and their ready answers—without having to make the same mistakes...
...Louis (Richard Rose) ; and a political scientist and mother in Washington (Jeane J. Kirkpatrick...
...The preoccupation with ourselves (which this series certainly attests) is the fruit of our ciders' labors, and here we are, the heirs of all the ages, with the time and the means to ask ourselves who we arc and where we are going—without any readyanswers...
...The immigrant generations were anxious to see an America which more closely conformed with their ideal image of it, and they willingly supported those reforms designed to make of the somewhat disappointing—though they would never admit this —America they found a better place for their children...
...as Fitzgerald called it...
...When we berate ourselves for being the way we are, and having the cultural heroes we have, we are accepting more guilt than we are responsible for and claiming more, indeed, than we have earned...
...When we respond to it...
...We of the younger generation found America more or less as it is, the liberals everywhere in charge, the larger battles over...
...The Spanish Civil War was not our war...
...We have developed no sense of our own self, no need to revolt, and no dreams of our own...
...This has no more made young people all alike because they are not socially or politically "conscious" than it made them all alike when they were...
...I would suggest, in fact, that conformism among young people (and those young people now middle-aged) was greater a generation ago than it is today...
...True, we have all, as Lionel Trilling has said, agreed together to be non-conformists, but the restricted area of non-conformity seems to me to be somewhat larger than it used to be, when political dissent was the sine qua non of the intellectual...
...But surely the fact that we are so determined not to be duped or fooled by notions of progress, the lengths to which we go to prove that we are not naive, indicate that we are not easy in our quick maturity—and that somewhere in the back of our minds there linger doubts about our disillusionment...
...symbol, that that imitative process should be taking place...
...It is an ambivalent privilege at best, for their success includes failure, while we have not yet dared either to fail or to succeed...
...There is no emergency—or, rather, the emergency has become permanent, and the effect is the same...
...The energetic drive to be an "American...
Vol. 40 • July 1957 • No. 27
