Exporting freedom has unforeseen outcomes, warns Louis Menand

By Linda Myers

Exporting the American idea of freedom is at best a compromised goal that we pursue at our own peril, said literary critic and cultural historian Louis Menand in his Olin lecture April 22 on campus.

Louis Menand

Menand delivered his free-ranging talk, "Love and Duty in the Cold War," to a full house in Goldwin Smith Hall's auditorium D. The lecture series is endowed by the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation and is sponsored by the Graduate School.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and is a faculty member at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. His lively talk touched on art and censorship and put in perspective the current rift between France and the United States by recounting the mutual admiration society that existed between France's intellectuals and U.S. writers and moviemakers from the late 1920s through the 1960s. He also looked at such seemingly disparate subjects as the Cold War, 20th century American literature, film and popular music, modern French history and philosophy and the war in Iraq, and he asserted that Americans seem to need to have their culture digested and reinterpreted by foreigners before they can fully appreciate its riskier offerings.

In the first phase of the Cold War, the United States was culturally insecure, Menand said. Fearful of being "outbrowed" by its European allies, it "made the conquest of elite opinion in Europe a priority," by exporting "the culture of freedom" through films that purportedly reflected American tastes with universal appeal. Although it attempted to control how Americans were perceived abroad, said Menand, the unexpected result was that Europeans, the French in particular, embraced the censored, darker aspects of American culture, gangster movies, for example, and the antihero who acted but never reflected on his conduct, personified by Humphrey Bogart in such wartime films as "Casablanca" and "The Maltese Falcon."

"The French interpretation of American culture was reimported in a different form. It came back as philosophy," Menand reported.

Citing a famous lecture on existentialism as humanism by Jean Paul Sartre in 1948, Menand discussed Sartre's philosophical conundrum about choice and freedom known as the student's dilemma. In it a student must choose between duty -- joining the forces of the French resistance -- and love -- staying home to protect his widowed mother. Bogart's character had to make a similar decision in the two wartime American films, Menand noted, likening the dilemma to the philosophical problem known as the rational donkey, in which a donkey placed between two equidistant piles of hay of equal size, is unable to choose -- presumably because neither choice is better than the other -- and starves to death.

"Sartre's story of the student's dilemma had resonance because it could easily be made to stand for a choice, in the beginning of the Cold War, between East and West," said Menand. But in the post-Cold War era "the separation of love and duty into two separate haystacks does more than split loyalty; it splits identity."

The American government had two aims in the Cold War that cannot be pried apart: to resist totalitarianism in the name of freedom and democracy and to open the world to capitalism, said Menand. "One feels the same perplexity today. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Who could be against that?" But while the freedom belongs to the Iraqis, the United States wants it on U.S. terms, he pointed out.

Liberal interventionists who support "George's Bush's war, Dick Cheney's war," he went on, "believe that they can turn their backs on the haystack of imperial prerogative and economic exploitation and death, and choose the haystack of freedom and democracy, instead. But there is just the one haystack, as there is just the one world."

Early in his talk Menand had referred to the 1960s French film "Breathless" by Jean-Luc Godard in which a free-spirited American in Paris played by U.S. actress Jean Seberg turns in her French gangster boyfriend to the police, who shoot him.

"The girl who seemed the promise of freedom proves, in the end, to be the friend of authority," said the author and critic. If Americans are not vigilant in the aftermath of the war in Iraq, the consequences might be similarly chilling, he suggested.