ABSTRACT
In political discourse, one expects lies, half-truths, and credibility gaps. Politicians and statesmen are not, after all, philosopher-kings, nor do the authors expect them to be such. In culture, however, when lies begin to be accepted as worthy of discussion—not refutation—by our powerful social critics and literary intellectuals, a crisis in values must follow. Culture cannot long withstand perversion of truth because culture is truth. When culture becomes politics, revolutionary politics in particular, there can be no criterion for truth and its inseparable companion, rationality: for then every man is his own judge of truth with the right, if he so chooses, to enforce his version of truth on refractory. As Andre Malraux once wrote, “the path that leads from moral reasoning to political action is strewn with our dead selves. To praise acommunist or totalitarian “socialist” revolution as a significant modernizing force is to be a realist and a scholar; to be doubtful is to be “blind” to reality.
