Challenge to Intellectuals

Is the U.S. anti-intellectual? Father Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger, a vigorously pro-American French Dominican and author of the perceptive One Sky to Share, answers no. The fact is, says he in the current Harper's Magazine, the U.S. is not so much anti-intellectual as the intellectual is anti-U.S. But Father Bruckberger is not one to be satisfied with mere accusation. His chief point is a challenge as the world needs America's example to follow, so America needs its intellectuals to explain what America is all about.

Historically, says Father Bruckberger, the American intellectual has played a major role in shaping his country. "The American Revolution is the only one in modern history which, rather than devouring the intellectuals who prepared it, carried them to power. Most of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were intellectuals . . . Thanks to them there is in America a living school of political science. In fact, it is at the moment the only one perfectly adapted to the emergencies of the contemporary world, and one which can be victoriously opposed to Communism . . ."

But into what role has the U.S. intellectual cast himself today? "The American intellectual often tends to say that his country has failed him . . . Perhaps [he] has failed his country, and perhaps he is more deeply missed than is at first apparent . . . [He] is failing his duty, the duty to which he is called. For there is no one, or at any rate almost no one, to understand and explain to the world the universal significance of the current American experiment.

"The rights of man are at stake today throughout the world . . . Absurd and dangerous as socialism and the Russian experiment may be for mankind, allies and defenders for them have been found everywhere among intellectuals. The same is not true of freedom and the American experiment. This is a very serious situation, serious in view of the destiny of man, and so grave that one wonders . . . whether the world's intellectuals have not already cast their vote against freedom . . . "If the American intellectual were clearly aware of the reservoir of hope which his country represents for the entire world, would he not carry his country's conception of man to a waiting world? . . . Would it be fanciful or absurd or unjust to imagine that certain intellectuals might feel themselves touched to the quick, personally insulted or personally revolted by the stupid calumnies brought against their country every day throughout the world? . . . Is it fanciful, absurd, or unjust to imagine that these intellectuals might some day take up the defense of their insulted country? . . . The world needs America, not so much her money or atomic bombs as the wisdom and courage of her people, the example of her institutions, her jealous regard for the freedom of the individual, and her social equilibrium."

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