Anachronistic America
IONESCU, GHITA
Anachronistic America Reflections on America. By Jacques Maritain. Scribners. 200 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Ghita Ionescu Former Rumanian Economic Counsellor in Sofia and Ankara THERE IS one...
...and so is the main question of today's culture...
...But they have left in their wake even greater problems which loom large over the world and over America...
...All of Maritain's impressions and, indeed, emotions originate from his two initial meetings with America: the first on the very eve of the New Deal, the second after the French collapse of 1910, when he himself enjoyed one of his "finest hours" as one of the first representatives of French resistance in this country...
...The "lonely crowd," the "organization men" are overlooked...
...The rest of the reflections, made during three seminars held at the University of Chicago in November 1956, strike the reader as being trivial and, especially surprising, anachronistic...
...The trouble, though, is that there are not very many such good points in this tiny book...
...The New Deal has won and the War was won...
...The continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of Cod...
...But then, surely, one would expect him to evoke the controversial new trends of social life in the contemporary industrial democracies, and especially in the United States...
...Vet this compatriot of Tocqueville does not seem to be intensely aware of such problems...
...as to whether a new conformism is not already curbing it under its weight...
...To take only the latter, Maritain still congratulates America for having no "bourgeoisie," which is taken to mean both the social layer and its conformist, materialistic and narrow-minded attitudes...
...since the War, nor the .new social aspects of "democracy in America," enter his reflections...
...To compensate for their frustration and resentment they need a world-wide scapegoat . . . the nightmare of their America...
...The natural enemies of America," he says, "are the pseudo-spirituals, the false witnesses of the spirit...
...And did this account for the great drift to the New World, the drift of spent souls passing over to the side of Godless democracy, energetic negation...
...Indeed, neither the impact of the accelerated parallel development of Russia and the U.S...
...He takes a rather well-known text from D. H. Lawrence's Plumed Serpent, from one of Kate's soliloquies: "Was [America] the great death-continent that destroyed again and again what the other continents had built up...
...Even if it is not the complete answer to anti-Americanism in all continents, countries and classes (especially the intelligentsia), it is one of its best diagnoses in the sense that it looks at it as to a primary cause of psychological receptivity for some myths and propaganda, rather than the sheer effect of propaganda...
...Theirs is the absolute and irreducible, the mystic hatred of America...
...This, of course, could be dismissed as one of Lawrence's recurrent political trances...
...This is like X-raying a mental abcess...
...This is a great pity, for Maritain especially could understand the American people and their present problems...
...But one knows that Maritain is right when he tries to identify the countless people who think and speak like this all over the world, and when he denounces their misconception...
...But this haze of grateful emotion should not blur his view of present-day America and of the changes it underwent in the last decade...
...Reviewed by Ghita Ionescu Former Rumanian Economic Counsellor in Sofia and Ankara THERE IS one point Maritain makes brilliantly in his Reflections on America...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 5
