Ten years ago, a handful of U.S. and other intellectuals formed the Congress for Cultural Freedom to combat the Communists’ efforts to mobilize intellectuals in their cause. Last week 221 deep thinkers from 48 countries met in Berlin for the congress tenth anniversary conference. Communism was scarcely mentioned. Whatever its military menace, as an intellectual challenge Communism had lost so much face that nobody bothered to argue about it. Instead, to the bewilderment of the delegates from the new Afro-Asian lands, the spokesmen for the sophisticated societies spent most of their time reproaching themselves or apologizing.
In booming West Germany, growled Berlin Critic Friedrich Luft, imported plays pack 160 theaters nightly, “but [German] culture is dead.” France’s top political theorist, Raymond Aron, apologized because democracy has abandoned parliamentary rule in France, Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer apologized for all the wrongs he said science has done, and U.S. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith seemed to be apologizing because the U.S. is building skyscrapers instead of schools. U.S. Novelist Mary McCarthy moaned: “Western literature is the mirror on the ceiling of the whorehouse.”
Man’s Hope. Dismayed at all this hand-wringing among those they had expected to point the way for them, the Africans scratched their heads and exclaimed that they only wanted some cars and some irrigation ditches and some good technical ideas from the gloomy Westerners. With a few exceptions, like India’s Jayaprakash Narayan, who demanded a government of “direct participation” beyond either democracy or totalitarianism, the Asians and Africans had only one concept of freedom—the very European-invented concept of national freedom that the Europeans now deplored. After hearing the Westerners’ fiercely despairing selfcriticism, one inquiring African asked: “Why should your poison be our food?”
But the fact was that the 1960 conference of Berlin could fret over Western man’s inner freedom only because, as George Kennan pointed out, “the external dangers” to freedom have receded. “So far as ideology is concerned,” said Kennan in a somberly eloquent survey, it is the Communists “who are on the defensive, faced with the insistence of their own youth on the right to knowledge and inquiry.”
Man’s Fate. “Only three weeks ago,” said Composer Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of the U.S.’s bestselling Novelist Vladimir (Lolita) Nabokov, “they held Boris Pasternak’s funeral outside Moscow. Though the newspapers printed no word of it. 1,500 people came [TIME, June 13]. Though nothing of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago has ever been published in Russia, a single unknown young person stepped forward and began reciting a poem from Zhivago called ‘Hamlet.’ As he recited, voice after voice joined in until it seemed the whole crowd was reciting together.” With that, Nabokov wound up the conference by reading the poem, which might have been written for West Berlin’s brooding friends of freedom:
Leaning against the doorpost I strain to see afar in time The fate that waits our present age . . . The Pharisees exult. How hard This life, and long my way of stone.
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