Where someone has absorbed tradition ( having "experience, a historical memory, a fastidious intellect and above all an ample measure of satiety," for example, someone whose life was rich with musical experiences, knows its history, takes a critical/analytic approach to it, and finally who feels these in their breadth and depth), that _can_ be proof against falling into such traps. To be sure, these are necessary but not sufficient conditions.
To take the paragraph now from the bottom up, a person of an uncompromising mind would not simply look to third-world movements or (worse) primitivism for an answer to the problems of capitalism. At the same time, don't expect their industrialization to an unqualified or even a net benefit to the people there. The examples adduced of uncritical acceptance of alien cultures (the opposite of the use to which an uncompromising mind puts culture), the end product of which are the two expectations the reader is warned against, stems from exclusion, which causes attraction as much as it does resentment.
There's more, and I could go on, but I won't. Maybe this still will strike some as incomprehensible or banal; maybe others will think I haven't done the passage justice, and I'd have to agree with that, but only because there's a lot here to reflect upon. How do we related to that from which we were once excluded? What must we guard against *in ourselves* when granted entree' to a group or culture or tradition from which we were previously excluded? Someone who gives in to something can be said to be hungry or wanting in some sense; how do we cultivate the satiety necessary to remain critically engaged?
smg
>
> Savages are not more noble. - There is to be found in African students of
> political economy, Siamese at Oxford, and more generally in diligent
> art-historians and musicologists of petty-bourgeois origins, a ready
> inclination to combine with the assimilation of new material, an inordinate
> respect for all that is established, accepted, acknowledged. An
> uncompromising mind is the very opposite of primitivism, neophytism, or the
> 'non-capitalist world'. It presupposes experience, a historical memory, a
> fastidious intellect and above all an ample measure of satiety. It has been
> observed time and again how those recruited young and innocent to radical
> groups have defected once they felt the force of tradition. One must have
> tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. That snobs show more aptitude
> than proletarians for avant-garde movements in art throws light on politics
> too. Late-comers and newcomers have an alarming affinity to positivism,
> from Carnap-worshippers in India to the stalwart defenders of the German
> masters Matthias Grünewald and Heinrich Schütz. It would be poor psychology
> to assume that exclusion arouses only hate and resentment; it arouses too a
> possessive, intolerant kind of love, and those whom repressive culture has
> held at a distance can easily enough become its most diehard defenders.
> There is even an echo of this in the sententious language of the worker who
> wants, as a Socialist, to 'learn something', to partake of the so-called
> heritage, and the philistinism of the Bebels ties less in their
> incomprehension of culture than in the alacrity with which they accept it
> at face value, identify with it and in so doing, of course, reverse its
> meaning. Socialism is in general no more secure against this transformation
> than against lapsing theoretically into positivism. It can happen easily
> enough that in the Far East Marx is put in the place vacated by Driesch and
> Rickert. There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western
> peoples in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself,
> will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of
> rationally improved production and communications, and a modestly raised
> standard of living. Instead of expecting miracles of the pre-capitalist
> peoples, older nations should be on their guard against their
> unimaginative, indolent taste for everything proven, and for the successes
> of the West.
>
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