It seems clear that the amassing of new knowledge about American civilization in recent years has been accompanied by a general loss of political and scientific intelligence, a new mediocrity of taste and opinion, and a new suspicion of radical ideas and nonconformist behavior. In two and more decades of introspection we have forgotten that the radical ideas of democracy, as well as scientific and literary ideas, must be granted a measure of intellectual autonomy and respect if they are to be made effective in our lives. It has become the custom to ask, not “is this or that idea correct?” but “what will happen to me, what will it reveal about me, where will it place me, if I profess it?” We have saturated and obscured ideas with prestige and power values, or with psychiatric and sociological symbolisms. The mood of sociology has settled on the country like a blight, from Madison Avenue to the “communications media” to the universities to the Pentagon.

To be sure, we have learned a great many facts about ourselves and our culture. Yet the more facts we know about America the more bewildering and unknowable does it seem. (In reply to the social inquisitors and cultural snoops of recent times and their perpetual question, “What is America?” one is tempted to paraphrase Fats Waller, who, when asked, “What is jazz?” said, “Man, if you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.”) These are some of my reactions to Max Lerner’s monumental effort of the higher journalism which he calls America as a Civilization¹—in which, I should add, I read Mr. Waller’s words of wisdom on the subject of jazz.

Strangely, Mr. Lerner says in his Fore word, “Americans are beginning to turn a searchlight on themselves and their civilization, and interpret both to the world. The present study is intended as a trial essay in this direction.” This is not my sense of things. Americans have been turning the searchlight on themselves for a hundred and fifty years, more intensely than any people have ever done, and never with such concentrated and indeed narcissistic attention as in the last twenty years. And I must say that Lerner’s book looks less like a “trial essay” than the gravestone of an epoch—so much does it have the air of stock-taking and summation, so little distinguishable is its intellectual quality from the idols of modern social inquiry, so acquiescent is the author in things as they are.

True, America as a Civilization is an impressive feat of synthesis and exposition. The author’s versatility is great, his general savvyness in whatever field he is surveying is unmistakable, and he retains his usual readability. His twelve long chapters lead us through a thousand large pages of discussion of America’s history and heritage, the concept of “American Civilization,” race and place, the culture of science and the machine, American capitalism, the political system, class and status, the life-cycle of the American, the social matrix of character, American beliefs and opinion, the arts and popular culture, the place of America as a world power.

Despite the weight of his task and the width of his canvas, Lerner’s acknowledgments of assistance from others in “this collaborative work” which “belongs not to me but to the collective of American scholarship” are perhaps over-generous. Still, it is hard really to like a book that has been written, as Mr. Lerner says this one has, with the help of no less than nine assistants, secretaries, and students, and parts of which have been submitted in manuscript to approximately one hundred and fifty philosophers, journalists, publishers, economists, sociologists, editors, foundation officials, music critics, art critics, and so on. Alas, the unfortunate Tocqueville and Veblen, whom Lerner so frequently cites, did not have one hundred and fifty collaborating “key authorities,” as the dust jacket calls the author’s lonely crowd of advisers.

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Although Mr. Lerner makes many references to the past, his subject is the America that has evolved since about 1933, the era of what he calls the “Big Change.” His time-span is the “quarter century during which Americans transformed their family structure, population growth, suburbs, energy resources, mechanization, corporations, trade-unions, class structure, and mass media almost beyond recognition.” He is concerned with how the American “heritage” expresses itself in this new America, the heritage which included “the expanse of space, the mixture of race, the pluralism of region and religion, the fresh start, the release of energies, the access to opportunity, the optimism and pragmatism of a society in motion, the passion for equality.” He wants to discover the “total style” of the American, as well as America’s “inner civilization style.” Nor does he neglect the European origin of the modern man—the mobile, restless, striving man, the amoral man of energy, mastery, and power, the man “for whom the walls have been broken down.” This Faustian type haunts Mr. Lerner’s pages. Also, curiously enough, and despite the “Big Change,” the archaic image of the Horatio Alger man is persistently resurrected. He turns up, for example, in the section called “Growing Up in America,” where we are told that the American youth is made to feel that “anything is possible and everything is fraught with far-reaching meanings. There is a sense of limitless potentials. . . . At home, as in school, the archetypal prizes held up are the big ones and the stories told are the success stories.” The American boy, Mr. Lerner says, is told that he can be President if he works hard enough in our “swaggering society” with its “expanding economy” and its “feeling of unlimited life chances.” (Query: who swaggers?) Lerner has some predictable trouble reconciling the Faustian and Alger man with the new, conformist, “other-directed” type whose caution, mediocrity, and limited goals he describes in other pages. Yet in keeping with his method throughout, he speaks of diversities and contradictions and says (correctly no doubt) that the American’s “dynamism” stems from the interaction of diverse characteristics. The various personality types combine in an “American personality which is mobile, ethnically diverse, energy-charged, amoral, optimistic, genial, technic-minded, power-oriented.”

Although Mr. Lerner tends to speak slightingly of moralists (liking, as he does, the “amoral” American), he is himself a fairly consistent moralist. The lesson he teaches is (to exaggerate a bit): Woe to whatever does not square with the American Personality; woe to the contemplative or lazy man; woe to the fastidious intellectual; woe to the man of conscience and the man of puritan will; woe to the “unadjusted” man and other such “marginal Americans” who “have not yet found themselves within their new setting.” (Can these words have been written by an author who professes a debt to Walt Whitman? With Whitman it was not a matter of finding oneself within a setting, but of making the setting answer better to the self.)

I should add that Mr. Lerner, being genial throughout his book, is not really angry with nonconformist types. He is merely contemptuous of them (“contemptuous” is not too strong a word, I believe) because they are so frivolous or perverse as to set themselves against Necessity. Mr. Lerner does not say “Necessity” or “History” or “Economic Fate,” as he might well have done twenty years ago. He says “plurality,” “dynamism,” “mobility,” “mediation,” and “emergence”—words which suggest the new idols of power in American social thought.

As for his general method and assumptions, Mr. Lerner says that “we have moved beyond both political and economic man.” Not that politics and economics are unimportant, but they give us distorted images of America if we try to see it from their point of view. Nor is the moral and intellectual approach now fruitful. Thus we find the author who once told us that “ideas are weapons” now suggesting that ideas are irrelevant (and we find the author who once told us that “it is later than you think” now suggesting that America is exempt from the tragedies of time and of history and exists in a timeless dimension called—apparently after Toynbee—“extended genesis”). Mr. Lerner says that he is not looking for “causation” but rather for “relation” and “interaction.” He is looking for the “inner civilization style” at the point “where cultural norms in America shape personality and character, and where in turn the human material and the energies of Americans leave their impact on the fabric of their culture.” This general procedure has a two-fold result, aside from the fact that it allows the author to assemble a vast collection of data. First, it breaks down nearly all contingent determinisms and presents us with a pluralistic, formless, intangible, fluid culture in which a bewildering variety of polarities are brought into balance by a sort of Emersonian law of benign compensation. Second, it erects the Goddess Mobility as the new determinism.

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As for his guiding image of American civilization, Lerner writes:

my own tendency throughout this book is to approach America in terms of its nature as a richly pluralistic society. The pluralisms I find in American stock and regions, in American loyalties, in the American character structure, in religion and the sects, in political and economic life, I find also in the class system and even in the ruling groups.

Within the frame of this pluralism there are what may he called power and prestige clusters, which include the social elite (“Society”), the intellectual elite, the big-wealth and big-income elite, the top church leaders, the opinion industry elite (press, radio, TV, movies, advertising agencies, public relations men), the government managerial elite, the corporate managerial elite, the labor managerial elite, the military elite. Merely to list them thus conveys a sense of what I have said in my discussion of power in American life—that the whole of American society is power-saturated.

I would certainly not claim that this list does not correspond with reality or that, given all these data, it is easy to make sense out of American society or to define the inner workings of so pluralistic a culture by means of any given dialectic. But you can’t say anything that is both concrete and generally significant unless you bring to bear on your subject some clearly delineated procedure, as did Tocqueville with his political method, Veblen with his “polysyllabic” categories, Beard with his economic bias, C. Wright Mills with his “power elites,” or Riesman with his character types. America as a Civilization more or less rejects all such approaches on the ground that they are too rigid, intellectualistic, or pessimistic.

What Mr. Lerner does notice over and over again, whether talking about politics, capitalism, racial groups, regional influences, or class differences, is the forces that make for mediation among contradictions. Of this one might quote dozens of examples. Having, as it would seem, very much overestimated the diversity of American life, Lerner looks always for the kinds of cohesion and harmony which will assuage differences and make contradictions benign. Thus the hero of America as a Civilization is the great new middle class with its “broadly mediating function” and its heroine is the American woman, who is “the converging point for all the pressures of the culture.” These two mediators are to be found at their most characteristic in the new suburbs, in which the tendencies of small-town life and of city life are mediated. With all this mediation going on, one wonders what in the end there will be left to mediate.

To be sure, Mr. Lerner is right to say that the flexible middle class and the American woman are in large part responsible for the energy and stability of our civilization. But what impresses me is his apparent assumption that mediation and the breaking down of contradictions are good things in all departments of our civilization. This strikes me as a disastrous form of cultural mysticism.

The magical power or mana of mediation, and also of variation, is “mobility.” Of course, by this word Lerner means initially “social mobility,” more specifically the continuing invasion of the middle classes by new groups from below. But mobility is “the overmastering fact about American society” as a whole, and in Lerner’s imagination it takes on more and more meanings, becoming somehow the inner principle of our political and economic flexibility and of the American’s physical, moral, psychic, and language styles. (All that is left out is a presentation of Moby Dick as an archetype of mobility.) Mr. Lerner even sees mobility in the efforts of sexual partners to achieve orgasm at the desired time.

The myth of mobility in America as a Civilization is perhaps derived in part from Toynbee’s idea of the “élan” of successful civilizations. Sometimes it is rather like Henry Adams’s Virgin, with her humane, emanating, cultural force. Sometimes it seems to be akin to the Life Force, as imagined by some of our early naturalistic novelists, a force which makes for both uniformity and diversity but remains indifferent to human intervention and to individual desires.

As a literary critic, it interests me (odd as the comparison may seem) how much akin Lerner is to the younger “new critics,” who read literature for the myths and symbols it may be made to yield. They are generally intent on an epistemology rather than a sociology of symbols, yet they tend to read literature as Lerner reads culture. And what the symbol, the myth, what incarnation and catharsis are to the critics, mediation and mobility are to Lerner—namely, they are ways of absorbing contradictions and objective truths into a mystic centrality.

It is no surprise that America as a Civilization misinforms us that Faulkner is “anti-naturalist,” deals largely in symbolism and allegory, and that his world is “drenched with a sense of sin and the fall from grace which was at once religious and classical.” (This reminds me of Mr. Lerner’s statement that “the journey of the personality in any culture is like walking under water, or struggling past heavy obstacles in an enveloping dream”—which sounds like someone trying to look at social realities through the symbolist atmosphere of some of Poe’s tales or of the late novels of Henry James.) The Faulkner Mr. Lerner has in mind is not the writer who wrote what he wrote. It is Faulkner as interpreted by certain literary critics. It is also Faulkner the idol, the cliché as presented in the pages of Life magazine and as imagined by many troubled souls who have never read him.

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In the chapter called “The Arts and Popular Culture” the author says many interesting and true things. Yet taking an over-all view, he seems even less able to differentiate himself from conventional opinion in this chapter than elsewhere. Mr. Lerner asserts the general health of the popular culture and the cohesive and unifying force exerted by the shared symbols it furnishes through the mass media. The assumption is that although the “elite arts” can have no beneficial effect on the popular culture, they must under penalty of death constantly absorb the energy, and apparently the forms and values, of that culture. It would be tedious to cite all the passages in which the author contradicts himself as to whether the artistic and intellectual life is split in America, as compared with Europe. His theory about mobility dictates that in America the elite and the popular should be close together if not entirely amalgamated, and that in traditionally class-ridden Europe there should be an irremediable cleavage. The trouble is that on the whole the facts, many of which Lerner notes, destroy the theory. Traditionally, it was Europe where the same art forms were enjoyed and appreciated by whole communities, and America where from the beginning every cultural critic had to recognize the split between highbrow and lowbrow, elite and popular.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Lerner, so foreign is it to all his predilections and ideas, that, not only by historical fate but as an instinctive measure of cultural health in an equalitarian society, America made and preserved a cleavage not only between tastes but between forms of intelligence. Thus we have always had highbrows and lowbrows, and there has always been a split between theory and practice, knowledge and experience, disinterestedness and practicality. In keeping with his belief that mediation and the middle way are beneficial everywhere in a civilization, Mr. Lerner is against cultural cleavages in art and thought. In this he agrees with the triumphant middlebrow opinion of the Eisenhower Age. And in this he is certainly wrong.

Consider also the fact that for Mr. Lerner the “brow” terms refer merely to matters of taste and to “prestige values.” When Van Wyck Brooks used these terms about forty years ago in America’s Coming-of-Age, they were recognized as referring to different kinds of cultural animus, but, more important, they were seen to be intellectual categories and were used with a polemical and reformist intent. Mr. Lerner, being interested primarily in cultural symbols, has performed a de-intellectualization of these as of all other categories. To put it another way, as Brooks used the term “highbrow,” it meant basically “an intellectual”; as Lerner uses it, it means basically “a snob” or a member of an “elite.” This blotting out of intellectual qualities, this castration of effective ideas by prestige values and consumption tastes and by the mystique of cultural power, is at the root of our modern failure of mind.

Let me note at this point what Lerner has to say about the popularity of Hemingway and Faulkner. Because of paperback books we have become, he says, a “nation of readers” (hard to square with the statement some pages along that paperbacks reach “something less than 10 per cent of the American population”). In the fact that Hemingway and Faulkner are known to “millions of readers” Mr. Lerner finds evidence of a salutary healing of the split between elite and popular culture. He has to admit, however, that Hemingway and Faulkner reach millions of people, not as writers who have written to be read, but as “popular figures who could not maintain their isolation even if they wished to.” Now the implication of this is inescapable: our great writers are most valuable as shared commodity or culture symbols, such as our civilization, aware of the necessity of wholeness and cohesion, turns out in quantity through the mass media. Only intellectual carpers and moralists, Mr. Lerner seems to say, will wish to point out a distinction between what Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s books mean and are, and what the popular images of Hemingway and Faulkner are—or will wish to deplore, one might add, the bad effect on the quality of some of the books of these authors consequent on their having themselves succumbed to the image the public has of them.

Hemingway and Faulkner could become idols of the tribe, by the way, but not Freud. “Such key ideas of the Freudian school as the Oedipus complex and castration fears made their appeal to a narrow group but could not hope for a wider appeal in the commonsense atmosphere of American popular thinking.” This suggests that ideas are not assertions to be judged right or wrong but commodities that must “appeal.” I doubt very much indeed that Mr. Lerner would say that the ideas of Norman Vincent Peale are right because they are popular, even though he strongly implies that Freud’s are wrong because they aren’t. The intelligence in Mr. Lerner that recognizes the greatness of Freud (as we can see in other passages) disapproves of Norman Vincent Peale. But he has got it in for the highbrow and the intellectual, and so his intelligence will not defend Freud against the adverse judgment of popular thinking.

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Which is only to refer again to Mr. Lerner’s middlebrowism. His middlebrowism in the 1950’s is what his radicalism was in the 1930’s—the unexamined, almost unrecognized habitat of his mind, where (as he will see twenty years from now) he makes some of the archetypal errors of conventional thought. Thus, one of the blind spots of America as a Civilization is that, although it speaks of the highbrow and the lowbrow, it says next to nothing about the middlebrow. Is this not astonishing in a book which purports to comment on the cultural scene at the present time, when middlebrowism complacently rules our intellectual life? It cannot be simply that Lerner’s method impels him to look only for forms of cultural power and not at the (pusillanimous) world of ideas, because in fact he constantly looks at both. All the more striking then is his failure to cast a critical eye at or even to discuss middlebrowism, which has been made by publishers, editors, and professors the main “power center” in matters of taste and opinion, insofar as these are articulated as ideas. The question to test Mr. Lerner’s analytic prowess would be, why, despite the energies of mobility, is the middle way of our cultural life so conformist, so smug, so dead on its feet, and so rich in power over opinion? Criticism is meaningless if it cannot detect the place of cultural power in the life of intelligence. But instead of confronting the reigning middlebrowism, Mr. Lerner is content, on the one hand, to warn us about certain potential shortcomings in popular culture, and, on the other, to snipe away at “the intellectuals.”

In fact, one of the things that most persistently haunts the reader of America as a Civilization is the animus against intellectuals—an animus the reader is genially invited to approve and share. We are all supposed to be against powerless malcontents such as “moralists, traditionalists, religious absolutists, bourgeois-baiting Marxists . . . professional cultural pessimists,” “class-obsessed radicals,” “fearers and doubters,” and “the blinkered critics of American life.” May the shades of the blinkered critics of yesteryear—Whitman, Henry Adams, Veblen, Randolph Bourne—rise up to haunt us all!

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¹ Simon and Schuster, 1036 pp., $10.00.