The Left, Old and New

...In short, while Howe's importance as a defender of humane values and an arbiter in the arena of liberal-Leftist politics is indisputable, he unnecessarily sets limits to the kind of influence intellectuals can have...

...But Howe seems old-fashioned also in a more fundamental and significant way...

...Where Howe has missed the mark, I think, is in his blanket rejection of the young radicals' assaults upon the sensibilities of their respectable elders...

...Representing a kind of Leftism increasingly rare in this country, he is an unabashed believer in decency, generosity, and in the value of men working collectively for goals which would otherwise remain remote...

...Such charges do not merit a serious response...

...You argue, you let some heat come through, you don't pretend that gentility is the ultimate virtue...

...Certain of Howe's emphases, though, will meet with less than universal approval...

...But then, a little later it rolls over like a happy puppy on its back, moaning, 'Oh baby, epatez me again, harder this time, tell me what a sterile impotent louse I am and how you are so tough and virile.' " Such behavior by the young, however, does not necessarily reflect a conviction that they cannot affect the course of events...

...None the less, intellectuals cannot help feeling depressed about the way things are...

...By many standards, Howe is an old-fashioned man...

...To be sure, many of the most gifted artists of our time have been assaulting readers and audiences, only to have their precious insights and enthusiasms absorbed into the anemic sensibilities of the culture-hungry bourgeoisie...

...This is wishful thinking, I am afraid, and it is not what one expects from Howe, whose somewhat Utopian optimism is rarely generated by ignoring realities...

...he is almost always of two minds on such broad questions...

...As he writes in response to critics of the occasionally blunt severity of his essay "New Styles in Leftism": "For what is the use of telling people who feel strongly about an intellectual matter that they should keep their voices low and sweet...

...He sees the inclination of the young to create sensations and shock as politically disastrous, since the rebel "must keep raising the ante...

...Unlike many Left-intellectuals, Howe was never awed by the Kennedy dazzle and the canned rhetoric of academic ghosts...

...Marcuse envisions a "drift toward a bureaucratic, nonterrorist and prosperous authoritarianism," where no one really gets very excited about anything, where everyone feels the same way about himself and desires more or less the same things out of life...

...He is impressed by the substance of a man's programs and positions rather than by his personal style, which may conceal an insensitivity to what is most urgent...

...Becoming virtually at one with this grotesque propensity, mass-man himself is mass-produced, an object which is endlessly pliable, marvelously manipulatable...

...To this end, Howe employs a lively critical intelligence to reveal what has been lacking in the liberal analyses of society and politics which have been most influential since 1953, the starting point of this collection...

...Typical of his responses to a wide variety of problems is his insistence that Harlem, Watts, and other slums are not essentially problems of technique and administration...

...Howe is a man of the democratic Left who continues to believe in the fundamental value of his tradition, in its vision of human freedom and fraternity...

...No political radical in a society like ours can afford to overlook the role of comfort as a political tranquillizer...

...The young radical is not entirely unjustified in asking why it should continue to matter that we can proceed to the polling places imagining that the ballot we intend to cast will make a substantive difference in the quality of life people will lead...

...Howe has no heroes, knowing too well what tin gods most potential candidates are, and that even the most charming fellows must be examined in the light of the concrete realities they represent...

...True, Howe is not especially original when it comes to suggesting specific programs that might replace those we have in the "Great Society...

...And later: "[You] expect one's opponent to reply in kind...

...He attempts to demonstrate, in his own words, "from which premises, by which methods, and in behalf of which values can such specific analyses of American society [as are necessary] be undertaken...

...Suggestively, the title of his latest collection is taken from an episode in the legendary chronicle of Chelm, the mythical East European village which has for so long fascinated the imagination of Jewish writers...

...All of his writing, whether literary or political, betrays a profound absorption in Yiddish folklore...

...He demonstrates the many ways in which Stevenson fell short of liberalism, and surely one need not rehearse the specifics of an analysis which most of us were able to make only when Stevenson had reached the end of his disappointing career...

...No doubt, we should be grateful for the comforts available to the average man for whom existence had previously been so difficult, but such an obligation should not promote indifference toward the crucial problem: the inability of mass-man to function as a subject rather than an object, despite his advantage...

...One wonders how rational appeals can be made to this sort of creature, what kind of self-interest he can possibly have that is not "looked after...

...If this were all there is to the problems of Harlem, it would have been torn down long ago...

...It is to the ex-radicals that Howe directs some of his sharpest attacks in this book, indicting their self-righteous abstention from political struggle as severely as he attacks the self-imposed alienation of the young Leftist who is too pure an idealist to remain within the society and work to reconstruct it...

...But he instinctually leaps to its defense: "even in decline, [it] remains precious, a concrete embodiment of freedoms...

...Why the infatuation...

...Howe tells us that liberal intellectuals were captivated because "he so vividly symbolized their mixed feelings toward politics itself...

...If esthetic assault and simplistic rhetoric are vulgar and blatant, there may be no way to avoid them...

...Though a judicious man, Howe refuses to pretend gentility when his subject fires him with urgency...

...Howe recognizes the problem as a real one, and berates liberals for their insensibility to such dire prophesies as Mar-cuse's...

...He acknowledges the validity of the prophecy and then proceeds as if it were not true...

...But they are far less sanguine than Howe about the prospects for an economic reconstruction that would affect the property rights of the middle class...

...But we wait in vain for him to engage the unpleasant possibility that the number of people genuinely committed to such values may be diminishing even as the population at large expands...

...Howe is extremely self-conscious about his role as a spokesman...

...Their necessary belief in secular transcendence, their vision of man as an autonomous thinking reed open to the elements but inclined to play its own tunes, is belied by the sight of the creature modern technology has wrought...

...They can see that calmly worded appeals to the reasonableness of people who are too comfortable to have to be reasonable cannot bring about the kind of qualitative changes in this society that they believe it requires...

...Howe traces the failure to ameliorate slum conditions to "moral indifference, social timidity, and racial meanness...

...He does not pretend to be a Paul Goodman, or even a Michael Harrington, for he sees his purpose as distinct and important in its own right, and we cannot but agree...

...Indeed, it is this faith in a genuinely fraternal collectivism oriented toward politically reasonable ends that has particularly estranged those young radicals in whom Howe would like to find the beginnings of a meaningful new Left in this country...

...Even his pursuit of greater affluence is essentially joyless and without passion...

...And here was this remarkable man . . . charming and cultivated . . . and so . . . well, somewhat weary . . . come to represent and speak for them...

...The sophisticated middle class responds with outrage, resistance, and anger—for upon these initial responses its pleasure depends...

...Yet so many intellectuals were taken with Stevenson, saw in him the possibility of a new day, when in reality he had no new programs to offer, and when he waxed less than enthusiastic over the progressive goals many intellectuals thought he would embrace...

...At the very least, one must applaud Howe's courage in speaking out, when it was not fashionable to do so, against the liberal's sterile addiction to postures of rectitude while sacrificing his characteristic commitment to political activism...

...Many of those intellectuals whom he can presume to represent on various cultural matters or in specific public contexts are not Socialists or radicals at all...

...Yet year after year the election returns roll in, reflecting no continuity of conviction in the electorate, no clear commitment to coherent values...

...They were bored with crusading accents yet still enjoyed a mild idealistic lilt...

...The average American citizen has lost the ability to feel deeply about anything...

...He wants to be entertained, to forget his dread of impotence and aim-lessness...

...Because he is affluent and comfortable, he tends to grow passive...

...Naturally, the entire situation is open to the kind of parody at which Howe excels...

...One of his avowed purposes in collecting the essays in Steady Work is to build a bridge to those young ideologues and desperadoes of the New Left who have so meanly rejected him and his work without making any real effort to come to grips with the challenges it presents...

...Reviewed by ROBERT BOYERS Editor, "Salmagundi" What is most remarkable about Irving Howe is his unflagging sense of purpose and optimism while confronting the diverse spectres that haunt modern Western society...

...Howe acknowledges that our party system has become less than vital, more a ritual than a useful structure in which significant conflicts can be argued and positions tested...

...Yet his response is, I think, inadequate...

...Marcuse paints an elaborate picture of the mass-man of the 20th century, whose most salient characteristic is his ability to consume an extraordinary number of objects, many of them useless...

...Chief among these is his treatment of the young radicals in the political and cultural spheres...

...When he complains in "This Age of Conformity," a brilliant and often explosive essay, that "the whole idea of the intellectual vocation??the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization??has gradually lost its allure," we listen attentively, and are moved...

...Philip Rieff, in his recent book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, has also drawn attention to this phenomenon, as has Hannah Arendt in her portrait of Adolph Eichmann...

...Of course, Howe is right??many of us are intolerably snobbish in our disdain for such welfare state accomplishments as tva, pensions, Medicare and so on...

...He condemns the good-natured liberal assumption that practically everyone is well-meaning if a bit muddled or misguided...

...His portraits of the late Adlai Stevenson are crucial documents in his progressive chronicle of dismay over American liberalism...

...But as Howe would be the first to agree, perpetual failure need not impose resignation and acquiescence...

...Under the circumstances it hardly mattered to the intellectuals what he said, just as to the bulk of the middle class it hardly mattered what Eisenhower said...

...Though frustrated and angry, the young radicals feel they can move the solid burgher somehow...

...As usual, he presents both sides of the argument...

...The problem of esthetic assault and rhetorical extravagance is closely related to, and in many ways indistinguishable from a more fundamental question to which Howe might have paid greater attention...

...If intellectuals are to defend the values that validate their existence, and make them vital for masses of men, they must first embrace the task of unsettling those who no longer suffer for such things ??that generation of therapeutics, as Philip Rieff has called them, for whom tranquillity and consensus have become the major constituents of a satisfying experience...

...Indeed, Howe is as much a liberal as he is a radical??he is no less at home in the pages of the New Republic than in a magazine like his own Dissent, and he frequently publishes "position papers" in Partisan Review, which may perhaps be generally characterized as the highbrow publication for ex-radicals who maintain a nostalgic affection for their earlier radicalism and a condescending tolerance toward those continuing to function as radicals...

...He represents a species of political radicalism at once humane and outspoken, and a style of political journalism which treats large public issues as matters of immediate concern for both writer and reader...

...What Howe most deplores in contemporary liberalism is its abdication of the critical function which originally gave it its contours and raison d'etre...

...While the young radicals lack a system, a theoretical framework like the Marxist critique of capitalism, in which to develop a coherent analysis of American society, they have eyes...

...He rightfully stresses the necessity of maintaining an anti-totalitarian posture, for which he has been vilified as a Red-baiter, a finicky liberal, and a fink...

...They wished for liberal humaneness but felt that to identify with any social class or group was outmoded, deficient in tone...

...I speak of the phenomenon known as one-dimensional man that Herbert Marcuse has explored in his book of that title...