America is culturally bankrupt

When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are 2 courses it can follow:

1. They can evade the reality of their situation

They can act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment expediency

2. They can identify the situation, check their premises, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.

America, at present, is following the first course.

I declare that America is culturally bankrupt.

A culture is judged by:

• its dominant philosophy
• the trend of its intellectual life as expressed in morality, politics, economics, art.

Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

America’s intellectual leadership has collapsed.

Her virtues, values, enormous power are scattered in a silent underground and will remain private, subjective, historically impotent if left without intellectual expression.

America is a country without voice or defense—a country sold out and abandoned by her intellectual bodyguards.

Bankruptcy is defined as the state of being at the end of one’s resources.

What are the intellectual values or resources offered to us by the present guardians of our culture?

In philosophy, we are taught that man’s mind is impotent, that reality is unknowable, that knowledge is an illusion, and reason a superstition. In psychology, we are told that man is a helpless automaton, determined by forces beyond his control, motivated by innate depravity. In literature, we are shown a line-up of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, neurotics and psychotics as representatives of man’s soul—and are invited to identify our own among them —with the belligerent assertions that life is a sewer, a foxhole or a rat race, with the whining injunctions that we must love everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except greatness. In politics, we are told that America, the greatest, noblest, freest country on earth, is politically and morally inferior to Soviet Russia, the bloodiest dictatorship in history—and that our wealth should be given away to the savages of Asia and Africa, with apologies for the fact that we have produced it while they haven’t.

If we look at modern intellectuals, we are confronted with the grotesque spectacle of such characteristics as militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful self-abasement and self-righteous depravity—in an atmosphere of guilt, of panic, of despair, of boredom and of all-pervasive evasion. If this is not the state of being at the end of one’s resources, there is no further place to go.

Everybody seems to agree that civilization is facing a crisis, but nobody cares to define its nature, to discover its cause and to assume the responsibility of formulating a solution. In times of danger, a morally healthy culture rallies its values, its self-esteem and its crusading spirit to fight for its moral ideals with full, righteous confidence. But this is not what we see today. If we ask our intellectual leaders what are the ideals we should fight for, their answer is such a sticky puddle of stale syrup—of benevolent bromides and apologetic generalities about brother love, global progress and universal prosperity at America’s expense—that a fly would not die for it or in it. One of America’s tragic errors is that too many of her best minds believe—as they did in the past—that the solution is to turn anti-intellectual and rely on some cracker-barrel sort of folksy wisdom. The exact opposite is true. What we need most urgently is to recognize the enormous power and the crucial importance of the intellectual professions. A culture cannot exist without a constant stream of ideas and the alert, independent minds who originate them; it cannot exist without a philosophy of life, without those who formulate it and express it. A country without intellectuals is like a body without a head. And that is precisely the position of America today. Our present state of cultural disintegration is not maintained and prolonged by intellectuals as such, but by the fact that we haven’t any. The majority of those who posture as intellectuals today are frightened zombies, posturing in a vacuum of their own making, who admit their abdication from the realm of the intellect by embracing such doctrines as Existentialism and Zen Buddhism.

After decades of preaching that the hallmark of an intellectual consists of proclaiming the impotence of the intellect, these modern zombies are left aghast before the fact that they have succeeded—that they are impotent to ignite the lights of civilization, which they have extinguished—that they are impotent to halt the triumphant advance of the primordial brute, whom they have released— that they have no answer to give to those voices out of the Dark Ages who gloat that reason and freedom have had their chance and have failed, and that the future, like the long night of the past, belongs once more to faith and force. If all the manufacturers of railroad engines suddenly went irrational and began to manufacture covered wagons instead, nobody would accept the claim that this is a progressive innovation or that the iron horse has failed; and many men would step into the industrial vacuum to start manufacturing railroad engines. But when this happens in philosophy—when we are offered Zen Buddhism and its equivalents as the latest word in human thought—nobody, so far, has chosen to step into the intellectual vacuum to carry on the work of man’s mind.

Thus our great industrial civilization is now expected to run railroads, airlines, intercontinental missiles and H-bomb stock piles by the guidance of philosophical doctrines created by and for barefoot savages who lived in mudholes, scratched the soil for a handful of grain and gave thanks to the statues of distorted animals whom they worshipped as superior to man. Historically, the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries.

In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists— were men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood. Intellectual pursuits had to depend on the accident of inherited wealth or on the favor and financial support of some wealthy protector. And wealth was not earned on an open market, either; wealth was acquired by conquest, by force, by political power, or by the favor of those who held political power.

Tradesmen were more vulnerably and precariously dependent on favor than the intellectuals. The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism—and if they perish, they will perish together. The tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.