Witness to an Extreme Century by Robert Jay Lifton

Author:Robert Jay Lifton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books

Deeper Intellectual Divides

I had conflicts with other intellectuals who were antagonistic to many of the currents of the sixties. In that regard I had a revealing encounter with Irving Howe. We were together at a small meeting in 1971 at the Greenwich Village apartment of William Phillips, editor of the Partisan Review. William was a stubborn survivor of the New York intellectual wars and called the meeting for the ostensible purpose of recreating an influential group of “New York intellectuals” (I learned later he had called a number of such futile meetings, mostly involving people who were connected with or had written for the Partisan Review ). I had long admired Howe as an unusually articulate social democrat who stood mostly for the things I did. But during earlier conversations I had with him on Cape Cod, he always seemed irritable, especially so about young rebels. From Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden, former sixties student leaders who became friends of mine, I learned of Howe’s continuous conflicts with younger-generation radicals. While some of his criticisms of their excesses were undoubtedly justified, he emerged as something of an Old Left curmudgeon, denouncing some of the qualities I found appealing in young rebels, including their mixture of protean experimentation with political commitment.

At that New York meeting a personal conversation with Howe did much to clarify our differences. I mentioned my admiration for his writing and agreement with most of his political stands but wondered why he was so consistently critical of student rebels and so uncritical of much of American Cold War behavior. He told me that for him communism, and its betrayal of the ideals that led so many people to support it, was the great issue of our time. The students had to be confronted on their failure to take a stand on communism. And Cold War policies that resisted communist goals should be supported. I told him that I understood what he was saying but for me the great issue of our time was Hiroshima and the general threat of nuclear annihilation. So I believed strongly that we should join the students in their opposition to belligerent Cold War policies. Our exchange was quietly civil and did little to alter the thinking of either of us.

There was something generational here, though Howe was only four years older than I was. But he, like many other New York Jewish intellectuals, had been drawn very early into passionate communist or Trotsky-ite affiliations, and experienced the brutal betrayal of that idealism in a direct and highly personal fashion. I had never invested idealistic energies in communist visions. Those energies were to be claimed by Hiroshima and nuclear threat. It was a matter of the particular traumatic historical involvement one has survived, and the meaning and mission one derives from that survival. Howe’s views on nuclear weapons undoubtedly had many parallels to my own, and my sense of communist brutality (strengthened by my study of Chinese thought reform) undoubtedly resembled Howe’s. But inevitably our strongest political and ethical passions went in different directions.

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