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Fall of a Hero. In such an age, is there nothing on which American intellectuals can pin their collective faith? Certainly not on the easy "liberalism" of the past, for this has proved completely inadequate. The U.S., says Leslie Fiedler, has passed through "an age of innocence," when the intellectual, in his role as critic, performed only half his function. "It was easy," says Fiedler, "for intellectuals to criticize the black reactionaries and the Ya hoos, but the intellectual's duty was to do more than that—to criticize the en lightened people, to criticize his own side." The dogma of liberalism was that the liberal could do no wrong, and for some the day of disillusionment came only with the fall of Alger Hiss, when it became "impossible any longer to believe that . . . the liberal is per se the hero."
With that hero gone, a few intellectuals like Historian Russell Kirk have tried to rehabilitate the conservative mind. Others have set to work redefining liberalism. Critic Lionel Trilling attacked the liberal idea that the only true reality is "material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant." It was this idea that kept so many liberals at perpetual war with respectable society, that led them to exalt Theodore Dreiser for his apparent social conscience and to forgive that conscience when he joined the Communist Party. "This is the liberal criticism," said Trilling, "which establishes the social responsibility of the writer and then goes on to say that, apart from his duty of resembling reality as much as possible, he is not really responsible for anything, not even for his ideas."
Meanwhile, other men of ideas found other banners to rally around. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr condemned the liberal reformers for having ignored the fact of original sin, and declared that man's destiny is to "seek after an impossible victory and to adjust himself to an inevitable defeat." In his The Public Philosophy, Journalist Walter Lippmann denounced the "Jacobin heresy" of the modern democracies, which insists that the New Man will be born out of his emancipation from authority. What is needed, said Lippmann, is a return to the idea of natural law, for with the disappearance of this public philosophy—"and of a consensus on the first and last things —there was opened up a great vacuum in the public mind, yawning to be filled."
Of all America's men of ideas, Theologian Paul Tillich is perhaps alone in commanding among his fellow intellectuals something that approaches awe. His has been the most systematic effort to prove that faith and doubt are necessary to each other, and that "to live serenely and courageously in these tensions and to discover finally their ultimate unity in the depths of our own souls and in the depth of the divine life is the task and the dignity of human thought."