Jaded philosophies

PERHAPS it is unfair ro review a single issue of the journal Daedalus in a collection of book reviews. A group of essays should not be treated on the same textual level as a novel or a work of non-fiction. But Daedalus, as its authors would have you believe, is no ordinary journal. In his preface to the fall 1976 edition, The Editor explains that the work is arranged thematically and integrated logically so as to provide the unity of a book-length treatise. Maybe it is that prefatory buildup which makes the 12 essays contained in this issue entitled "American Civilization: New Perspectives" seem so disjointed and singularly irrelevant. The veil of pretension that Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, casts by claiming to have arrived at novel perspectives, does a great deal of the initial spoiling.

Strung together under that '60s rubric are two series of papers from a couple of different conferences staged by the Academy. The first half of the journal presents papers from a conference on adulthood, the second on problems of public policy. Unfortunately, none of these articles really comes to terms with or provides any new visions of American civilization. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of re-hash, unoriginal thinking and just plain shoddy workmanship by many of the dozen authors involved in this issue.

Several of the authors are stars in their own right. Robert Coles, Kenneth Lynn, Roger Rosenblatt and Nathan Glazer have at one time or another written enlightening pieces on their subject matter in this issue: work, American literature, television and ethnicity. But perhaps these writers' familiarity with their topics led to the chief drawback in this issue of Dadalus. No one seems to have expended much energy or given any new thought to his or her topic.

Coles's article is an obvious example of this old-wine syndrome. In his ten-page essay entitled "Work and Self-Respect," he attempts to define the term "grown-up" by the working man's or woman's standards. He arrives at the legitimate conclusion that it means "responsible, hard-working, dedicated and, not least, self-sacrificing without demonstration of self-pity." To prove his thesis Cole relies on a few random interviews conducted "out there," as he describes the field. But, at the risk of throwing doubt on his opening assertion that he is in the tradition of George Orwell, James Agee and Simone Weil, Coles goes no further in briefing us on work and adulthood than any New York Daily News man-in-the-street piece would. And he does so in a more awkward fashion. The grammer is so loose that sentences tend to lack verbs. He tosses in choppy parenthetical phrases that serve as stage directions for his prose, a trick which good writing does not need. The essay is an interesting tidbit and nothing more.

Roger Rosenblatt's short piece "Growing Up On Television" suffers from different problems. Rosenblatt, literary editor of the New Republic, does not commit Coles's stylistic abuses. But he provides so little analysis and arrives so infrequently at conclusions about television's actual role in adult life that the piece seems ill-fitted for an analytical journal. Instead of coming to terms with the crucial role television has played, Rosenblatt adopts the posture of those television critics who prefer to deal with the subject from on high. Thus, instead of a focused critique of the cult of money in Let's Make a Deal, we get an ugly description of the audience's civility or lack of it. He settles for an utterly superficial treatment of television newscasters: "There are no more grown-up looking or sounding people on television." And Rosenblatt's discussion of the image of the newsman in American life is misguided, for it is an image which has been created by film and not, as he assumes, by television.

In "Adulthood in American Literature," Kenneth Lynn considerably raises the level of prose in the issue with some nicely turned phrases describing maturity in writing. But this feat is accomplished at the expense of any relevance the article may have to the issue of literature generally. One gets the feeling that Lynn did not want to write about Dadalus's topic of adulthood and anxiously strayed into personal idiosyncracies. His essay expands into a kind of literary dumping ground for odd reflections on random groups and individuals: teenagers, Margaux Hemingway, the frontier. When he does attempt to make a point, as in his discussion of the recent film version of The Great Gatsby, he hardly strays from the fold of conventionalwisdom. Of Fitzgerald he asserts, "How many novelists in any age or in any country, can claim to have influenced an entire nation's perception of the life cycle?" I'm not sure Fitzgerald did this, but apparently Lynn expects one to take it on faith.

The econd half of Daedalus leaves the theme of adulthood and leaps into the future of the U.S. in general and public policy in specific. Overall the writing falls down, but the essays pick up in substance. Few articles could be more topical or crucial to the discussion of present day issues than Glazer's "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--and Ethnicity." The article serves as a vehicle for Glazer's oft-propounded thesis that liberal policy-makers who insist that differences between races result only from discrimination will eventually polarize the nation at the expense of fraternity. He criticizes those who blast away at independent-minded attempts to counter this theory of discrimination. He tells them to take off their blinders and realize that liberty, specifically meritocracy, will always produce inequalities no matter how much people persist in attributing that inequality to discrimination. As usual, Glazer does not take into account the basic reason for the common belief that differences in equality are caused by discrimination: given the premise that the races are equal, how else can you explain the great disparity in income, education, and quality of life?

What is disheartening about this particular piece is that Glazer does a much better job explaining the same thesis in his longer work Affirmative Discrimination. Daedalus is simply a distillery for Glazer. We get his essence without getting any of the facts to attempt to back his contention. This shortcoming is a function of length; he cannot monopolize the 250 pages or so that he needs to explain and defend his thesis. Barring that, we must settle for an abbreviated historiography of discrimination and the naked conclusions he draws.

The affliction of writing at short lengths on all-too-familiar topics pervades the entire issue. The effect is profoundly negative. It reduces Daedalus to the status of a trade journal for intellectuals in the same fashion that Sporting News, which excerpts routine pieces by the best baseball writers in the country, is a trade journal for baseball nuts. The intrusion of sports similes is usually read as the utmost rebuke, but this analogy should not be taken that way. Both Sporting News and Daedalus can be purveyors of valuable information--although Sporting News is so in a much less pretentious manner--when these publications offer their contributors the time and space to provide something new or original. "American Civilization: New Perspectives" does not transcend those limitations.