4
PARTISAN REVIEW
integrity of thought. But to what end-if we, ourselves, should
be
indifferent to the truth, however faintly it stirs, and however great
may be the cost of our speaking up?
Measure and Value*-this
is Mann's intellectual program. It may
sound exotic to ears accustomed to the blare of simple, rousing slogans.
Is this some new cult-post-dada? On the contrary, Mann's program
is an indictment, for, according to Mann, it
is
the indifference to
measure and value which marks the collapse of Western culture. "The
truth is," says Mann, "that measure and value are lost in our time.
Whole countries, groups, parties, and party dogmas to-day assert and
pursue unrestrained their subjective values; every universal criterion
has been frightfully done to death in the mad, destructive struggle
which is tearing our world in pieces."
The morality, art, and humanity of European civilization, which
placed man at the center of human affairs, which made of the mind
a balance in which all events are weighed, are being swept aside by a
new barbarism of power and utility.
If
the crimes of the totalitarian
regimes are justified as useful to the maintenance of power, still it
is
only the maintenance of power which has made them necessary.
An infamous pragmatism, Mann calls it: "An infamous pragmatism
has been set up in the heart of Europe to-day. It refuses to make
distinctions between truth and lies; it denies mind and spirit in favor
of interest; it unscrupulously commits or condones crimes if they for–
ward its interest--or what it conce}\'es to be so; it
shrin~
not at all
from falsification, rather it calls falsification truth, provided it is use–
ful, in its interpretation of the word. . . . There is nothing more in–
famous than it, it is infamy itself and the source and fount of all that
is infamous ... it is barbarism.... The barbarous is to us not only
the esthetically but also the morally worthless and base. It is first and
foremost the lie-in the boundless scorn for which artist and moralist
are one."
Is there a political solution for this intellectual plight? Mann pro–
fesses to see none. In addition to his bias against politics-a "non–
political man" he has called himself- there is the plain fact that the
dominant parties of revolutionary pretensions have substituted organ–
ized for individual demagogy. "Even the revolutionary terminology,"
says Mann, "is hopelessly discredited and compromised, it is utterly
worn out, having served these ten years and more to persuade the
herd-minded citizen to think of himself as a revolutionary." Has the
• A programmatic statement by Thomas Mann, in a new antifascist magazine of
the same title, edited by Mann in collaboration with other German exiles. It is
reprinted in the Winter, 1937, number of
Lite and Letters Today.
