(3) I suppose that we do not need to speculate very long over the point that what for the ancient world carried the connotation of choice, the application of will to morals, has become for us a violation of law, incriminating will and morals alike. That is simply apt to happen in history when will loses supremacy as an instrument of moral choice: law replaces will; legality replaces choice; both replace morals. But it is true that we think in and act from symbols of language, and perhaps equally true that a symbol dies out in language when the act it symbolizes dies out in life. If heresy has lost the older connotation of choice, it may wel be because the the possibility of heresy as a choice has receded from us. At any rate, I assume--and it is the assumption underlying most of the essays in this book--that some such recession has taken place and that we have suffered the effects in nearly all the arenas in which some purpose beyond that of blind survival is required for the successful conduct of life. I do not know how to make this real to those who have not already discovered it for themselves or who prefer to remain oblivious of what they have discovered.... Alfred North Whitehead gave one of the simplest illustrations when he observed that the modern housewife, unable to buy cloth in a particular shade of blue and obliged to content herself with whatever shade happens to to be mass-produced, is experiencing at the most immediate level the effects both of enforced democratization of taste and of infringement upon the democratic right of free choice, the two together consituting one of the deranging paradoxes of life in the modern world. ... American democracy can scarcely be said any longer to constitute a dogma (a fact which has crippled our best efforts to propagandize it abroad), nor can its conformism be called an ideological position (a fact which has not at all crippled the worst efforts of some of us to confer upon it the dignity of one). It is a feature of our democracy that it has no dogma to enforce, but neither does it enforce its conformism. It does not need to because it produces conformism by leaving open to the mass of people no alternative to conformism and, therefore, by removing from them the possibility of choice. This, I suspect, is at the heart of that paralysis of will, that derangement of the sense of future, which appears to be so prevalent today, especially among younger Americans. Our democracy in its current form gives them neither a dogma which might provide a basis for heretical action nor an opportunity to discover and choose a politics or faith or way of life which would represent a heresy of democracy. That is simply the shade of blue which our political mass-production does not supply. ( from the Introduction: p. 1, 2, 3, & 4)

(4) In the case of the American intellectual, this condition asserts itself as a threat to morale and action alike, for it has traditionally been the intellectual's task--assigned and condoned by no one but himself--to monitor the culture of his time, to exercise within it his right of free choice, and upon it the reprimanding influence of his dissent. But standing between him and the performance of this task today are certain obstacles sufficiently distinct from those facing the culture in general as to be called particularly his own. The American intellectual has first of all suffered the loss in recent years of the older sustaining ideologies and platforms of dissent: he became disaffected long ago with the revolutionary ideal of communism, which afforded him an angle of critical vision into politics during the thirties, and he has outgrown the naïveté which once enabled him to shout down on the head of American materialsim from one of the posts of romantic disaffiliation like that of the Artist in Exile. One can in fact say that he has been uprooted or evicted from just about all the positions which formerly justified and ennobled the isolation of his role and which held out some respectable alternative to the state of being merely cooperative and pleasant required by mass society. ( from the Introduction: p. 4 & 5)

(5) In fact the situation with which they were now confronted was such as to invalidate entirely the system of accession to (NE: "literary") power and prominence, the very possibility of reputation in the old sense, which had been the feature of the decades just past and on which, in the excitement of the immediate post-war years, they had come to pin their hopes. The modern literary movement had, in those years, lost nearly all its potency as a reproductive and energizing force and had been slowly absorbed into the universities, where its massive indignations had cooled down to small fastidious tics experienced by graduate students in the damp undercaves of libraries, and where its great seminal ideas had been frozen and crystallized into churchly authoritarian dogma. (The Situation of the American Writer p. 17)

(6) ... Literature now was a corporate body, official, institutionalized, and closed: the appearance of a new writer , the creation of a new work outside the canon was not only irrelevant but irreverent, at best a willful and rather nasty breach of etiquette, at worst very nearly an act of heresy. (The Situation of the American Writer p. 17)

(7) There was something suspect and vulgar now about a writer who worked up his own materials or who retained more than a speculative interest in the experience of his own time. To the literary men of the academy he seemed to inhabit some distastefully fetid underworld of subintellectual intrigue, a kind of retarded bohemian cellar, where the cold, clear light of (Van Wyck) Brooks and (Robert Penn) Warren never penetrated. But the independent writer had what was, from the academic point of view, the still more crippling defect of being unable or unwilling to keep abreast of the current developments in his field. he thought of himself, for example, as belonging to the avant-garde and as carrying forward a tradition of free creative inquiry into the spirit of the age; while the truth was that his entire conception of the avante-garde--the conception of a community of intransigent, revolutionary talents--had long since been outmoded by the rise of a new academic avant-garde conceived in the name of orhtodoxy and dedicated to the principle that all writers are created equal provided they conform to the rules of the canon. (The Situation of the American Writer p. 18)