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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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49. Mary McCarthy

American writer Mary McCarthy was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1912. She attended Vassar College and worked in her early years as a drama critic. In 1948 she taught English at Sarah Lawrence College.
She now lives in Paris and is married to an American diplomat working at the OECD headquarters.
While best known for her novel The Group, Mary McCarthy has in recent years become known for her criticism of American policy. Her books Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968) were widely acclaimed. Also written recently, The Writing on the Wall (1970) and Birds of America (1971).

To paraphrase Charles de Gaulle on Sartre, ‘Mary McCarthy c'est aussi l'Amerique.’1 How does it feel to live in Europe as an American with the critical world situation as it develops?2

 

I've lived here in Paris for more than ten years. However, I don't think I have a European point of view at all. It has had advantages to be a little detached from the United States during this frightful period of the war in Vietnam, which isn't over obviously. The disadvantage is that if you want to try to take some action, it's difficult from here. If you want to organize opposition, it's very very hard by long-distance telephone. If you want to write a letter, as I have just done, to the Herald Tribune,3 on subjects connected with the war, you know it will only be read by Americans abroad.

 

You could send it to Harrison Salisbury or John B. Oakes of the Times in New York. You'll get your views printed there. You should.

 

Yes, but somehow one is moved to write a letter in the place one lives. Incidentally, living in France seems to create a great deal of envy. Americans are very, very envious of people who live abroad and will

try to put you down because of it. But I'm not an expatriate. I live here because my husband works at the OECD.

 

How did you experience this era, in which on the one hand Mr. Nixon opens bridges to China and the USSR and at the same time organizes Christmas carpet bombardment on a scale the world has never seen before?

 

It's a mystery really. I never believed in Nixon's good faith in these negotiations. I never believed in that October 26, 1972, accord.4 I didn't think he would stick with it.

 

An election gimmick?

 

I don't think that could have played such a big role. He was sure of getting reelected anyway. Still, many people remain hostile to Nixon's policy and believe he was serious about ending the war. They thought it was to his interest to make peace in Vietnam. Once he had opened these lines to China and Russia he absolutely needed, they thought, peace in Southeast Asia. But it doesn't look as if he felt he needed it so badly.

Why the US stays in Vietnam and Indochina in general is a mystery. The only explanation I can come to is a kind of Marxist explanation, and perhaps fundamentally as much economic as political. The crude Marxist reading does not make sense. We don't need their raw materials. We don't need their rice; in fact, we're now exporting rice to South Vietnam. We don't need their rubber. Anyway, we've destroyed the plantations, and much of the trees. We don't need their bananas. Some offshore oil has been found there - but that's fairly recent, 1969, I think - and might help explain our hanging on there now, but not our earlier determination. We can't be sticking with Thieu5 for pure colonialist or even neocolonialist motives.

But I do think that a choice was made by the VC6 and their followers in South Vietnam for a noncapitalist way of life. This was a preference and something quite different from what happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia and so on, where the people really never had a choice. If Poland is communist, it is not a black mark for US-style capitalism, not at all, whereas the free choice exercised by the supporters of the Vietcong...

 

Like in Chile?

Exactly. It's very much like Chile. If they're allowed to win in Vietnam...

 

Carl P. Rogers7 stressed that what made him sad was the spread of what he called ‘a colossal hypocrisy in politics.’

 

Yes, I agree. It's absolutely horrifying, and almost more horrifying than the Christmas carpet bombing were the official lies that were told about it. Lies about that Hanoi hospital8 and so on. And then this awful business of how we're going to help them reconstruct their country afterwards. It is completely mad and allows Americans to feel innocent, to feel good.

But to go back to Nixon's peace brinkmanship. My estimation - I may be wrong - is that Nixon first thought he wanted to buy the October accord. But as soon as Kissinger9 came back with the provisions agreed on, if not actually signed, he suddenly realized, ‘I could have done better. Hanoi agreed to this, and that shows I could have done better.’ This is my analysis. I think he will back away again from another accord....

 

- That's the level of Nixon's mind.

 

Yes. But it has been true of every American President, one way or another.

 

But you have to grant Eisenhower10 that he did get the war stopped in Korea, and fairly soon after his election. When Nixon ran for President in New Hampshire in '68, I was with him. He was saying over and over again, ‘I learned from Eisenhower and I'm going to stop the war in Vietnam.’ But he's still bombing, five years since!

 

I remember that, yes. I remember that was one of his campaign lines. Eisenhower stopped Korea, but it isn't really over. There are still seventy-five thousand American troops in Korea - a thing everybody forgets. On the one hand, Eisenhower pursued a relatively prudent and moderate policy in Vietnam, compared with his successors. On the other hand, he was the President who decided not to have those Vietnamese elections, after the Geneva Conference of 1954. The fact that Washington, which permitted the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, will not politely dump Thieu indicates enough. If we withdrew support from him,

Thieu would no longer exist. As long as Thieu is there, it proves to me that Americans are not willing to get out of the country.

 

But what puzzles me, the Americans should have learned by now that by supporting Chiang Kai-shek,11 who is another Thieu, they harvested Mao Tse-tung. It's like supporting Batista12 and getting Fidel Castro. When will Washington learn?

 

Yes, but maybe there really are not any middle people nowadays. That's the liberal line: One should have supported some nice social-democrat, rather than Batista, then one wouldn't have any of these middle people who are viable, so far as the US is concerned. To them ‘middle’ is already too far to the left. I come to think this more and more by looking at the disastrous developments happening in Chile. Allende was a perfect marvel of this nice social-democratic type.

 

But to return to our subject. How do you feel about what Jean-François Revel has called the Americanization of cultures?13

 

I think my answer is that I don't know. I think that some of the current forms of it are simply fashions, modes, and may well not last very long. Even I would hope that the drug culture may not last very long. I don't know. Americans are terribly, terribly susceptible to swings in fashion, and when they may set styles the styles spread. I also think the consumer-society mentality plays a curious role in all this. With the music, the clothes, jewelry, love bands, macrobiotic food, there are new commercial opportunities there. There are counterculture shops. Hippies work in shops that sell dropout clothes. This means a new youth market which has turned into a world market.

 

It's amazing how Japan on one hand is totally Japanese still and on the other hand has imitated the Americans on a scale as probably no other Asian country has done.

 

My feeling, I must say, about all this is very, very pessimistic. One only has to look around to see that really Notre Dame de Paris cannot cohabit with the Tour Montparnasse. It cannot. And of course I infinitely prefer Notre Dame de Paris. But you can't have both, and if you try, you get dead, preserved cities, museum cities surrounded by those ghastly housing developments, these cynical... habitations for workers and

on the whole for poor people. Inside that ring is a petrified museum city that can be visited by tourists. It's impossible.

 

Paolo Soleri14 tries to design new cities through miniaturization. Are you familiar with that?

 

Yes.

 

Jean-François Revel has written that either world government must come into being or nothing else will remain in being.

 

I am against world government myself. Especially with these dangerous and totalitarian tendencies of modern society. I think world government could be infinitely worse than what we've got now. Revel imagines a nice democratic world government. It might not be like that at all. Supposing there had been a world government headed by Hitler!15 The advantage of the present plural system is that there are still places that people can escape to. During World War II, it was Switzerland or Sweden, or eventually the United States. I am opposed to any tendency towards world consolidation which would mean that there would be no place to escape to in the event of a new totalitarian world tyranny.16

 

Yes, but on the other hand, Limits to Growth very much warns that we are reaching the ceiling in resources, in pollution and in population. I don't even want to talk about a more just distribution of wealth between rich and poor nations. How then to come to a better management of this planet, without having a more effective political apparatus to work with than the United Nations?

 

I don't believe that any of that is going to happen.

 

Don't you feel it should happen? After all, there are United Nations and institutions like the OECD.

 

Yes, but they have no power. I simply do not believe that any of that is going to happen. If we do get a world government, it will probably be a world government imposed by a tyranny.

 

Toynbee17 reminded me that the Romans reverted to temporary dictatorship in times of crisis and then returned to democracy afterwards.

That's possible, but if a world government comes, it will not come about, I think, through agreements and round-table discussions. It would come about through force. If it does come about through force, then at some distant time in the future this force may be somewhat softened, modified, that is possible. But it's the only way that I can see this ever to happen. I also feel that it's quite possible that we're on the verge of some global peace, semipeace, at least between the three big powers, between China, US and the Soviet Union, and that a kind of semiauthoritarian, semitotalitarian society, with lots of consumer goods, will prevail in all these countries, with different accents.

 

Including Russia and China?

 

Yes. My sense is that these countries are moving closer together, especially the US and the Soviet Union. The US is becoming more reactionary, more totalitarian, and there is some slight adoucissement,18 at least for the consumer in the Soviet Union. Some people put more hope in China, partly because it's newer and partly because, I think, we know less about it. We know the Soviet Union all too well. Too well to hope much from it, in the way of change or development. I've never believed that the US was fascist, but I think it might slide towards some new form of general oppression.

 

Repression also of the press and television?

 

Authoritarianism is very likely to develop in the United States, and in some ways it will be a kind of nonidentical twin with the Soviet Union, with different history, different life-styles, and so on.

 

Actually that would then bring them closer together.

 

Yes, I believe it.

 

Do you feel with the Club of Rome that there's reason for deep concern in these areas?

 

Oh, yes, indeed I do. So far as I know the thesis of the Club of Rome, I agree with it. But again I don't see that much of this will be done. Perhaps it is worthwhile if even some of it is done.

Through public opinion, pressure could be exerted on politicians and decision-makers.

 

Well, look at the pollution issue in the United States. The US is much the most polluted country in the world, even allowing for the Rhine -

 

- The sewer of Europe.

 

Yes, I think the US - if you combine noise, air pollution, river and lake pollution - the US is by far the worst. There has been enormous publicity about it. People have worked for it. There has been a whole ecological fashion. And it accomplished zero.

 

Nixon has just recently withdrawn money even to achieve some limited goals in this area.

 

Which shows, it seems to me, that public opinion cannot influence anything, not on a big scale. You have to keep on trying to stir up public opinion, but I am more and more coming to the belief that what is known as public opinion does not exist anymore.

 

You think of the fact that sixty-eight percent of the American people voted for Nixon while most of them are against the war actually.

 

As a writer - not when I write novels, but in those three books about Vietnam - I try to address myself to public opinion. But I have slowly come to realize that I'm addressing a vacuum. There's nothing there. Public opinion was probably based on the newspaper, rather than on television and radio. Perhaps newspaper readers, and masses of newspaper readers, constituted a thinking public that reacted to events. TV spectators do not.

 

Marshall McLuhan19 tries very hard to find what on earth television does do to our minds.

 

Yes, but he is for it, and I am against it. I am completely against television, I think it could be abolished.

 

You think it pollutes and corrupts the mind?

 

Yes, I do mean it. I haven't had my television set out of the closet since General de Gaulle withdrew from politics, not since he died.20 Yes, I did have it out once for a friend, a writer friend who was on French television. No, I really am against television. It's no sacrifice for me to keep that set in the closet. I forget it is there.

 

You slipped in the word French television, but French television is rather controlled; are you also against the CBS, NBC and ABC news?21

 

Those people are such fudge really. The idea that they represent any kind of radicalism is to me absurd. To me the best argument for television would be the BBC, British television in general. Also your Dutch television. I've seen it, I was in Holland over Christmas. We watched a certain amount of it - and it seems good. They have wonderful color, the best color in the world, I think, the Philips TV color. Anyway, I am against television.

I noticed - speaking of this question of public opinion - an effect on myself. When I happened to be in New York, coming back from Japan to Paris at the time of the Kent State murders, just after the Cambodian invasion. I saw it all on TV in New York, like everyone else in America. We were kept glued to TV for at least a day, maybe two days, every hour when there was news. We kept seeing the same thing over and over. The same sequences every hour just like with the Kennedy assassination,22 when you kept watching Kennedy get shot, the funeral, Oswald23 get shot, the same scenes over and over and over. I realized that by the end of the first day, I had no more feeling about Kent State.

 

Immunization -

 

This image had completely destroyed itself like some strange chemical reaction, it no longer had any power.

 

TV watchers don't know the difference any longer between John Wayne24 and My Lai.25

 

No, I wouldn't take such a moralistic line. The deadening happened to me, and I am not in danger of confusing John Wayne with My Lai. I think it's an effect of the medium itself. The effect is just anesthetizing.

People first used to say it was wonderful, a very positive thing that everyone, in every American home, saw the horrors of Khe Sanh26 and Hamburger Hill.27 No doubt, this Christmas they must have been watching the carpet bombing of Hanoi, around the Christmas tree. I don't know. But I'm sure all feeling had died. I don't think that reading the newspaper has that numbing effect. In fact, it stirs one to want to do something, if it is only to write to the editor of the paper. The press creates around it an informed body known as public opinion, which after all didn't exist in the Middle Ages when the image predominated and rumor spread by word of mouth. There were waves, paroxysms, of emotion in the Middle Ages. It spread through whole countries. Just before the year 1000, people were terrified that the millennium was coming and the world was going to end. If only the Club of Rome could whip up waves of panic like that! But there was no such thing then as public opinion. It is a modern bourgeois phenomenon, and I think it's disappearing together with newspapers.

 

When I met with Professor Lévi-Strauss28 at the Collège de France, he seemed sad about the state of the world and said that he would have preferred to live a hundred or two hundred years ago.

 

I agree with him. Yes, absolutely. A hundred years ago certainly. That was a very interesting time. Or even two hundred years. I might have lived in the sixteenth century. I also feel sad about the world. I particularly feel sad, not for young people, but for people who are babies now, and the future that is in store for them. After all, we won't see the worst, we won't live that long. Even our children, I don't think, will see the worst. But our grandchildren, my grandchildren, the grandchildren of people my age.

 

That's what the Club of Rome is so concerned about, Aurelio Peccei29 has seven grandchildren. He feels after building Fiat factories in Latin America that he should spend the rest of his life in trying to work very hard for the improvement of conditions on the planet for all babies.

 

Of course one should keep trying, but I am not very hopeful that anything will be done in a large way. I think that is chimerical. Perhaps small initiatives may be taken, yes.

 

But globally?

 

I don't see it. Realistically I don't see it. If we can't even outlaw atomic weapons! If that happens, I will have some faith in the possibility of global agreements on population control, environment control, food resources. Arms should be easier, in principle, since agreements can be negotiated by governments and don't require citizens' cooperation. But so far as I can tell, nobody in power is offering even a distant hope of bilateral atomic disarmament (not reduction - disarmament), let alone a global accord. At the same time everybody knows about the danger of the spread of nuclear weapons. It will soon reach the point when any nation can manufacture its own bomb, like kids making LSD in the family kitchen or growing marijuana in mother's herb garden. The next step will be bootleg nuclear stuff.

My advice to anybody who cares about the future is to stop thinking big, thinking ‘global,’ and try to create free socialism in individual countries. Here in Europe small countries have the best chance of that. Not that that is easy either.


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