Volume 1, Number 2 · June 1, 1963
America Absolved
By Benjamin DeMott
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
by Richard Hofstadter
Knopf, $6.95
For saints and seers History is all one: they call it terror (Eliade) or nightmare (Joyce) or inertia (Nietzsche), and dream of escape. For lesser men, though, the matter is complicated. Aware of history as an oppressive dead hand on experience, they think of it also as a contrivance, that which historians make or 'do,' and they tend to be optimistic about the doings. Shrewd inquirers can find things out about the past that, as the historian Marc Bloch says, the past didn't know about itself, or didn't wish to know. They also can learn forgotten languages, social or political, which, used with appropriate gingerliness as a means of interpreting the present, win respect for critiques of contemporary dogma that would seem outrageous if delivered in contemporary terms. Neither accomplishment enables the inquirer to get the full weight of the monkey-past off his back; neither offers the audience a ready way up and out of time into eternity—that for which seers have a crying need. But both provide people with release in the form of a glimpse of Now from the outside. And in a faithless age the need for this release is so great that whatever satisfies it deserves regard as a kind of poor man's Grace.
Review, 3433 words
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