Critical Thinking as Cold War Weapon: Anxiety, Terror, and the Fate of Democracy In Postwar America

Abstract

In the years following World War Two, American intellectuals set out to salvage what they could from the heritage of liberal-democratic western thought. In the wake of destruction, atomic peril, and holocaust central assumptions about rationalism, progress, science, and communications had eroded, all to be replaced by general sense of fear and anxiety.2 Scanning the dusk of world war and the dawn of cold war, it was difficult not to see that something terrible had happened to humanity. As one historian elegiacally observed, Never before had progress seemed so fragile, history so harmful or so irrelevant, science so lethal, aggregations of power so ominous, life so full of contingencies, human relationships so tenuous, the self so fragile, man so flawed (Graebner xi).Eager to identify the roots of the devastation, pierce the hovering dread, and take measures to prevent recurrence, authors and academics from across the political spectrum believed they had found culprit in Enlightenment philosophy and remedy in modernist culture. The eighteenthcentury faith in reason and human nature, its demystification of social norms, religion, and tradition, and its leveling of hierarchy seemed to mark tragic turning point in the history of civilization. No longer beholden to eternal ideals, the common man fell victim to ephemeral ideology; belief in the inherent goodness of the noble savage and the onward march of progress had led to a new kind of barbarism (Adorno and Horkheimer xi). Tracing direct line from Rousseau to Hitler and Stalin, these scholars and writers lamented that liberal architects of political philosophy had placed too much weight on cognition and creature comforts rather than souls and sensibilities. Rootedness, recognition of sin, and respect for eternal principles better served the needs of individuals in the modern world.3From CIA offices in Foggy Bottom to the garrets of poets and groves of academe came strikingly similar strategies for protecting freedom and democracy from the kind of turmoil unleashed by World War Two and from the onward march of communism. They entailed creating cultural stability: fostering works of the imagination; cultivating an aesthetic sensibility; and imbuing sympathy for fellow citizens that complemented, rather than corroded, the republican civic virtues of thrift, modesty, self-discipline, and industry. They translated those hopes into plan to reground moral values in political philosophy inflected with the transcendent values of literature, creating an undercurrent in American intellectual and cultural life. In their endeavor to rebuild critical moral foundation for American society, they took part in trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas that welcomed into the fold Warsaw bloc poets. These anti-communist, staunchly individualist writers argued that the road away from totalitarianism-one that led to the liberation of captive minds-lay in wrestling with complex literature and developing interpretive depth.Elite high culture, which valued ambiguity, complexity, irony, and nuance-in place of simple-minded platitudes or politically engaged social novels-promised to tease out meaning in morally tangled postwar world. Public intellectuals, writers, artists, academics, and even national security leaders across the political spectrum became convinced that, in order to save democracy from totalitarian terror and dogma, Americans had to develop critical thinking skills, read widely and deeply and, in the realm of culture, privilege difficulty, and complexity. This conviction welded with other developments in postwar American intellectual life to fuse new attitude toward thinking itself.4Indeed, interest in the mind's functioning was everywhere in art, academia, and literature during the Age of Anxiety (as W. H. Auden's 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume branded the era). Reading between the lines and working to strengthen your mind became best practice, whether literary critic's explication of text, psychologist's Rorschach test, Scientologist's auditing session, or Holden Caufield's ferreting out of phonies. …