Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [152]
“The times favor new ideas. Old dogmas and ideologies are losing their power to inspire or terrify,” Mr. Cousins’s lead editorial continues. (I know how Hercules felt when he grappled with Proteus, or was it the Old Man of the Sea—some monster of imprecision, and persistence.) As a veteran observer of what Mr. Cousins would call “the world scene,” I cannot, alas, agree. But as a writer, I find old dogmas and ideologies preferable to his formulations: they’re definite, at least. You know where you are. “Compartmentalized Man is giving way to World Man. The banner commanding the greatest attention has human unity stamped upon it.” No comment; I’m getting tired. “The century of Marx and Engels has ended. Marxian doctrine is breaking up, both outside and inside the Soviet Union....” A truth, at last, but long since a truism. The calendars are out of date in Cousinsland (the better name might be “Cousinsville”). My two-part essay “The Root Is Man,” published in Politics in 1946, was far from the first study of the obsolescence of Marxism as a revolutionary ideology.
“The end of the isolation of China, one of the great events of the 20th century, removes a great wall of separation and exposes the largest single human grouping to the new winds of change sweeping the globe....” The great event is the admission of the real China to the UN as a result of the Nixon Peking Ploy, already rather faded; I predict that the Nimzo-Indian Defense will outlast it (a smaller game, of course). Cousins often confuses the UN with the real world, perhaps because it is as empty yet portentous as his prose style, perhaps because it’s as safe a cause as motherhood except to a few difficult oddballs: “The U.N. is not a parliament of peace-loving peoples,” I wrote in 1946; “it is not an arena of history-in-the-making....It is, quite simply, a bore.” The first two reactions, by the way, of the unwalled Chinese delegation to the new winds of global change have been (1) to insist, successfully, that the UN eliminate Taiwan not only from membership but also from all its statistics henceforth, which will make the same curious distortion—Taiwan is more populous than many UN member nations—that Stalin’s similarly magical-paranoiac erasing of Trotsky from the textbooks (except as a secret agent of British Intelligence) had on Soviet historiography; and (2) to use its veto in the Security Council to deny admission to Bangladesh.
“Old ideas of separatism and group identity don’t move men as much as new perceptions of human solidarity.” See The New York Times, July 11 last: “PAKISTANI TOLL 47 IN LANGUAGE RIOTS....At least 47 persons have been killed since Friday night in clashes over the choice of Sindhi as Sind province’s official language....The demonstrators want equal status for Urdu.” By “men” Mr. C. must mean his S.R. “family,” who, to a man—and woman—are, I’m sure, not moved by “old ideas of group identity,” at least not to the point of murder. But they are not mankind any more than the UN is the world. Maybe he doesn’t see the Times.
“We are excited by the prospect of publishing a magazine with a world purpose,” Mr. C. gamely concludes his fight-talk. There’s a cadenza about how the editors “do not regard this [first] issue as a definitive expression,” but since Number 7 looks and reads about the same as Number 1, I take this as only a graceful arabesque. That Mr. Cousins and his family might ever arrive at anything “definitive” is improbable.
I do hope that Cousins is correct in his confidence that “print will endure,” but a careful reading of the first two issues of World and