Black on White

A good many American intellectuals are getting an emotional kick out of accepting "orders" and yielding themselves swooningly to a "rigid discipline."

Their art will no longer be a self-willed hoyden. It will be utilitarian, propagandist, organized. Temperament, they say, is an indulgence of petty bourgeois minds. As for themselves, the only inspiration they need is a commandment from the Mt. Sinai of proletarian art. In a world of chaos and uncertainty they can at last stop worrying and thinking—inspired dialectic leaders will tell them exactly what to write or paint and what to do with the stuff.

I do not doubt their earnestness. But neither do I doubt that their self-abnegation is at bottom an emotional amusement. In taking orders in the new church of dialectic art, they are aware in their nerves if not consciously in their minds that the bond is not so binding after all.

Should it begin to cut into their flesh, they can always throw it off. Of course, when they decide to play another, more titillating game, they can always find words to explain their change of heart—dialectic disputation is swell training for that sort of thing. They will be vilified by certain little magazines of the "disciplined" brotherhood, when the change comes, but what of it?

Their yielding to dictation has the dignity of being voluntary. It is a slap in the bloated face of smug, self-centered bourgeois art. It puts them among the revolutionary elite, a narrow and high-minded brotherhood pledged to live and die for a cause. In fact, it’s a little like joining a proletarian Freemasonry, with a ritual of beliefs, a ceremonial of action, passwords for themselves, cusswords for those in the outer darkness.

I happen to know these intellectuals fairly intimately, not individually but as a type. It seems to me that the chief element in their new dedication, in their acceptance of dictatorship, is not discipline but rebellion—rebellion against the present American scene. But rebellion is the one element that is most dangerous and least tolerated under a functioning dictatorship.

How many of them will remain in the fold when the ritual and the "social orders" are no longer voluntary but are enforced by an American G.P.U., an omnipotent censorship with police powers? When the dialectic arguments to keep them in line will no longer consist of sophistries but of concentration camps and exiles and the loss of food cards and total ostracism? When petty writers with a gift for toe-licking, ward politics and sycophancy will be the taskmasters of the sacred discipline?

This does not mean that I am ignorant of the restraints upon any artists implicit in any social order. The freedom of an artist often does come down to a freedom to lie, or a freedom to die. The fact that some chains do exist, however, seems to me a very inadequate reason for enthusiastically pulling them tighter and locking them with locks of police decrees and excommunications. On the contrary, the existing restraints and economic bludgeons which destroy sensitive artists should serve as a warning against restraints that are a hundred time more rigorous and against intellectual systems that are infinitely more rigid and limiting.

Whatever influence American intellectuals can exert would be much better invested in loosening discipline and encouraging honesty and independence of mind. There is still time to fortify notions of freedom—even relative freedoms—as insurance against the day when there will be no choice, when the discipline will be enforced by a real iron dictatorship.