Culture from America?

With the courteous horror of the Lilliputians for the oafish Gulliver, British commentators have recently felt obliged to pin down the invading monster of American culture, and examine it at close range. One of them, Sir William Haley, director general of BBC, began plans last fall for a series of talks by qualified intellectuals on the impact of America on European culture. BBC's five lecturers--three Englishmen and an Irishman, with Harvard Professor Perry Miller concluding in rebuttal a fortnight ago--seemed to pull up two stakes for every one they drove, but succeeded here & there in tethering a groping Gullivernian arm or a flailing leg.

Performance. Said Sean O'Faolain: "The influence of the United States on Europe is the influence of a grandchild on his grandfather. This possibly will, if all goes well, be known in time as the Aeneas-Anchises complex, in grateful commemoration of the bravery, or obstinacy, of Aeneas in carrying his purblind sire out of the crumbling city of Troy.

"In America this relationship is honored every 22nd of September on Forefathers' Day; though I fear that they let off many more rockets on June 17 to honor the Battle of Bunker Hill, on which date pious Aeneas is believed to have begun a successful war of independence to get rid of the old man on his back."

Said Publisher J. E. Morpurgo: "America had become Europeanized, and the Europe which she had taken as her model was the Europe of the 19th Century, the Europe of decay. But America had found more efficient means of spreading rottenness than had ever been known to the Europe she copied. America had Hollywood . . . We, in Europe, need to revive the habit of asking questions; Hollywood has taught us to be content with answers."

Martin Cooper, the Spectator's music critic, was almost angrily contemptuous of American creative music and its inability to influence Europe. America's forte, said Cooper, is the "smooth efficiency" of its big orchestras, "that concentration on performance natural among a people preoccupied with means rather than ends."

John Lehmann, editor of New Writing, while deploring the possible influence of a "spiritual emptiness" which he finds in today's American literature, predicted for the U.S. "a new generation of writers who are determined to find positive values not in the exploded myth of endless industrial progress, but in the heart and soul of man."

Inquiry. Bertrand Russell recalled-an older European attitude toward the U.S.: "The Duchess of Cambridge, at a garden party, examined my mother's skirts, saying in a loud voice: 'I want to see if they are dirty, because I hear you only associate with dirty radicals and dirty Americans.' " Of the present-day U.S., Russell continued:

"What is the distinctively American outlook? And what, in comparison, is the distinctively European outlook? Traditionally, the European outlook may be said to be derived from astronomy . . . When the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, He said: 'Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?' The reply was in the negative . . . The conclusion is that man is a feeble creature, to whom only submission and worship are becoming. Pride is insolence, and belief in human power is impiety . . .

"Where life is hard, and the medieval tradition is still strong, as in most parts of Europe, this outlook on life still dominates philosophy, literature, and the feelings of ordinary men and women. In America hardly a trace of this outlook survives . . . To all intents and purposes God is an adjunct of man, a help in church work and in procuring victory in man-made wars. The Power that humbled Job out of the whirlwind no longer finds an echo in American mentality . . .

"From the highest flights of philosophy to the silliest movie, the distinctive feature of American thought and feeling is a determination to have done with the notion of 'fact' . . . Pragmatism ... is the typical American philosophy: there are no 'facts' that have to be passively acknowledged, and 'truth' is a mistaken concept.

"Dewey, the leading philosopher of America, replaces 'truth' by 'warranted assertibility.' This is arrived at, not by merely observing the environment, but by an interaction with it which continues until it has been so modified as to become acceptable to us . . .In old days, a belief might be 'true' even if the government frowned on it; now, it cannot have 'war' ranted assertibility' if the police object to it--unless those who hold it are strong enough to promote a successful revolution. The political consequences of such a philosophy have been worked out with ruthless logic in George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Russell deplores the stunting of the esthetic sense by such pragmatic preoccupation, but finds at last something good which America can give to Europe:

"[In America] the hopefulness and enterprise that circumstances permit increase the success that is achieved beyond what would be possible for men of a different temperament. Obstacles, it is felt, exist to be overcome, and therefore they are overcome. All this is admirable. It existed in Elizabethan England, and to a lesser degree in Victorian England. A little more of this American spirit would do us far more good than any amount of austerity unrelieved by hope . . .

"Above all things, European culture, if it is to remain vital, needs hope and imaginative vision. These things are common in America, as they were in Victorian England. If we can recover them by contact with Americans, there is every possibility of a future no less glorious and no less happy than our past."

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