My cold war

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993

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BUT WHAT was I, then? When, after the war, I joined the editorial staff of Commentary, I accepted, for want of a better term, the designation of "liberal." After all, members of the New York intellectual community were all "liberals," with not a conservative (not one!) among them. It didn't matter that much to me because, in the immediate post-war years, I wasn't particularly interested in politics. My own writings, in that period, encompassed religion, philosophy, and literature. I was a member in good standing of the anticommunist segment of that intellectual community--Commentary, after all, was one of its major organs--but I do not recall writing anything about communism. It was a period--it lasted almost five years--during which, as a liberal editor, nonliberal thoughts germinated in my mind and soul. I was far from being a conservative, had no interest in "market economics," and the notion of voting Republican was as foreign to me as attending a Catholic mass. I suppose that, in today's terms, I could be fairly described as a premature "neo-liberal"--with the emphasis most emphatically on the "neo."

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The two intellectual godfathers of my neo-ism were Lionel Trilling and Reinhold Niebuhr. It was Trilling who, as early as my college years, and even while I was a Trotskyist, pointed to liberalism's dirty little secret--that there was something basically rotten about its progressive metaphysics that led to an impoverishment of the imagination and a dessication of the spirit. It was he who pointed out that among all the modern novelists and poets we admired, and which he taught in his Columbia University course, there was not one who could properly be called a liberal. This theme Trilling went on to develop and deepen in the decades that followed, and I greedily seized upon every word he wrote. Oddly enough, he never ceased to think of himself as a liberal, albeit a disturbed and dissident liberal, and while always respectful of religion, he was irredeemably secular in his sensibility. His mission as he saw it, apparently, was to liberate liberals from the confines of liberalism. But toward what, he could never say.

Reinhold Niebuhr could say. His twovolume Nature and Destiny of Man was the first theological work I had ever read and it pointed me beyond liberalism. To be sure, I had always had a vague, positive feeling about religion and was especially fond of religious poets (Donne, Hopkins, Eliot). Indeed, it may have been through poetry that my predisposition to religion was formed. But I had neither the intellectual vocabulary nor the intellectual grammar with which to think about religion. It was Niebuhr who introduced me to the idea of "the human condition" as something permanent, inevitable, trans-cultural, trans-historical, a transcendent finitude. To entertain seriously such a vision is already to have disengaged oneself from a crucial progressive-liberal piety. It also enables one to read the Book of Genesis with an appreciation that approaches awe. After Niebuhr, I plunged into theological literature with an ecumenical enthusiasm. By the late 1940s, religious thought was my most passionate interest--though, in the secular-liberal milieu in which I lived and worked, it was an interest to be revealed with prudence. The fact that Niebuhr, like Trilling, was generally regarded--and regarded himself to be--a member in good standing of the liberal intellectual community was reassuring to me. Perhaps it was possible, after all, to reject liberal metaphysics while remaining, to some degree and in some way, politically liberal. The following decades were to reveal to me how utterly impossible it was.

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My cold war

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993

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