Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [151]
There is, for instance, a crucial paragraph on “a new and larger kind of wisdom...needed to keep humankind from becoming inimical to its own survival.” This new (and larger) wisdom is of four kinds: Wisdom One “can deal with basic causes of breakdowns between the national aggregations.” I take these as code words for the Biafran and Bangladesh horrors, the Ugandan racist expulsions, and the Arab guerrilla massacres at Tel Aviv airport and the Olympic Games plus Israel’s eye-for-eye retaliation for these outrages on Lebanese villagers unfortunate enough to live near Arab commando camps. (Jehovah didn’t make fine distinctions either.) Whatever Mr. Cousins had in mind in July, no specific implementations of Wisdom One have surfaced to date, either theoretically in his journal or practically in that United Nations he is hooked on. Unreasonable to expect it: Marx, Lenin, Metternich, and Huey Long combined couldn’t patch up these “breakdowns.” But why pretend there exists such a “wisdom”? Wisdoms Two and Three are, respectively, ecological (“Halt the poisoning of the natural environment...establish a balance between resources and needs”) and what was, until even liberal columnists saw that the problem was more complex, called in the ’thirties “technocracy” (“Apply technology to the upgrading of the whole of human society”). Okay both, but hardly new.
“And, finally,” the editor winds up at Four, rising into the thin air of the heights of noble platitude where he breathes most easily, “wisdom that can help men regain their essential trust in one another and restore their sensitivities to life. It is folly to expect that genuine creativity—whether in the individual or society—can exist in the absence of highly developed sensitivities.” As suggested above, I can see “creativity” only as a much-abused modern code (or cant) word, like “relevant,” and Mr. Cousins doesn’t help: “genuine creativity” implies that there exists a false creativity, but I’d think that that wouldn’t be “creative” but... well, false; I suspect he threw in “genuine” because it’s the kind of enheartening, enriching, positive adjective his “family” responds to. The general sense—if one may use such a noun with the prose of this peroration—seems to me unexceptionable. I positively admire “whether in the individual or society”; a less conscientious stylist might have left it up in the air.
“‘World’ Magazine, therefore, is devoted to ideas and the arts.” I don’t understand “therefore”; no mention of “ideas” or “the arts” up to now, nor what is meant by these grand terms, which he doesn’t define later either. Always apologize, never explain is the Cousins armorial motto. “One may make a distinction between the two, but one cannot separate the two. Both are part of the same creative process.” He’s got the bit between his teeth. “Survival is impossible without ideas, but the arts give sense and excitement to survival.” Oh that’s what he means! “The ultimate adventure on earth is the adventure of ideas.” Whoa! “‘World’ would like to be part of that adventure.”
Norman Cousins reminds me of an earlier heartwarming liberalistic spellbinder in his rhetoric and in his mental confusion; I refer to Henry Wallace. Away back in 1947 I wrote “A Note on Wallese” (“a debased provincial dialect” produced by “the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier”), pointing out that “adventure” was an important word