Ominous Parallels (39 page)

Kant described his denial of reason as a defense of “pure reason.” Rawls, who is a follower of Kant, calls his viewpoint “a theory of justice.”
²⁴

To a casual observer, the “humanitarian” worship of weakness might appear to be the opposite of the Nazi worship of muscles. In fact, these are two superficially varied manifestations of the same philosophical essence, leading to the same political result.

The immediate victims of today’s trend—business, labor, and the other productive groups—have never known the philosophical issues at stake and have no answers to offer. Neither do the liberal intellectuals and politicians, purged of ideas, shaken by the sixties, and reduced to the status of short-range, gingerly lobbyists for the poor. Neither do the so-called “neo-conservatives,” who urge a return somehow to the allegedly more civilized statism of the New Deal era. Neither do the traditional conservatives, who seem to be abandoning the last vestiges of Americanism in its original sense, and who are becoming in effect lobbyists for the churches. All these groups know that something is fundamentally wrong with the world, but none knows what it is, and all are pursuing a weary quest to find some piecemeal action or remedy that “works.” The quest is weary because, as a British editor has observed in another context: “Now nobody believes anything will work.”
²⁵

Pragmatists not out of rebellion or reformism, but out of exhaustion; pragmatists not at the beginning of an era, but at its dead end; pragmatists who believe that nothing will work—such is the shape of today’s leadership and of today’s paralysis.

In October 1976, three hundred philosophers met in New York City to participate in a Bicentennial symposium on the topic: “Philosophy in the Life of a Nation.” According to
The New York Times,
their consensus was that philosophy is a technical subject of no practical significance. “Wasn’t it extraordinary, [one professor] suggested, for philosophers to convene and solemnly discuss ‘Philosophy in the Life of a Nation’ when ‘they have nothing to do with that life....’ ”
²⁶

The profession most responsible for today’s collapse knows nothing about any part of it, including its cause.

Here are the ominous parallels.

Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs).

Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely
ad
hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science.

Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship.

In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version.

Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now.

We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide.

We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

16

“A Republic-If You Can Keep It”

There are essential differences between the United States and Germany.

The hope of the United States lies in the philosophical
breach between the American people and the intellectuals.

By the “intellectuals” in this context I mean those whose professional field is the humanities, the social sciences, education, or the arts, i.e., the study and/or evaluation of man and his actions. By the “people” I mean the rest of the country, including physical scientists and businessmen.

The German intellectuals and the German people—in the empire, in the Republic, under the Nazis—shared the same view of the world, the same fundamental values, the same political goals. Hence the staunchly pro-German attitude of the great majority of the German intellectuals (including most of the Weimar Communists and even many of the dissident culturati): the intellectuals felt philosophically at home in Germany; they were proud to embrace a heritage, a Fatherland, and finally a Führer that embodied all of their essential ideas.

The same ideas which led the intellectuals in Germany to chauvinism have led their counterparts in the United States to
anti
-patriotism, i.e., to anti-Americanism. In the nation of the Enlightenment, the irrationalist intellectuals are and know themselves to be displaced persons, alienated by the basic premises of the country, hostile to the essential character of its institutions, its tradition, and its people.

The American people do not accept (or often even know) the ideas of the Enlightenment in explicit terms; but they do accept a significant philosophic remnant from the American past. They accept it largely by implication, in unidentified form; as a result they are often inconsistent, inadvertently contradicting their own deepest beliefs. And there are many groups today, especially among the affluent young, the college educated, and some of the newer immigrants, who have openly rejected or never discovered the American legacy; such groups are indistinguishable from the kind of malleable, favor-craving, state-worshiping masses one sees in Europe or elsewhere around the globe.

There is still, however, an implicit American view of man and life, embodied in the character and fundamental attitudes of most of the people, a view which sets Americans to this day apart from other nations, and on a collision course with their country’s intellectual leadership.

The people, as a rule, respect common sense, think that science can solve men’s problems, and believe that answers to basic questions can be found. The intellectual leadership regards these attitudes as superficial, naive, and “simplistic.”

The people admire material wealth, practical success, technological innovation. The intellectuals dismiss such values as “middle-class” and say that machines are destroying the globe. The people admire self-reliance, productiveness, and the other virtues of the so-called “work ethic.” The intellectuals say that these virtues are impossible, unnecessary, antisocial, and/ or “Puritan compulsiveness.” The people feel goodwill toward the human race, believe that men can achieve their goals on earth, and hold that happiness is possible. The intellectuals regard this as self-deception, as a refusal to face the impotence or ugliness of man and the “tragic” nature of life.

The people approve of personal ambition, are eager to pursue their own happiness, think that a man should not live on handouts but should earn what he gets, and reject the insistent demands for self-immolation. The intellectuals denounce this—every element of it—as selfish and therefore vicious.

The people, despite some increasing lip service to religion, are still fundamentally secular in their ideas and concerns. The intellectuals either describe this as “vulgar American materialism,” or claim that unthinking, “Bible-belt” mentalities are the real indicator of the nation’s essence. The people reject the Marxist view of life and do not spend their time cursing “class enemies.” The intellectuals regard the people (including organized labor) as exploiters of a neo-proletariat: “the young, the poor, the black, and the women.” The people (like all people on earth) reject “modern culture.” The intellectuals explain this as “philistinism” and “tradition-worship.”

The people hotly reject the proliferating manifestations of the welfare state, from soaring welfare rolls to forced busing to sexual quotas. The intellectuals condemn this as unfeeling, racist, “sexist.” The people respect the Founding Fathers and want less government interference in their lives. The intellectuals dismiss this as an anachronism, while explaining that the Founding Fathers were really religious mystics at heart (the conservative interpretation) or “communitarians” who valued society above liberty (a recent “revisionist” viewpoint).
¹
The people love the United States, are proud of its historic achievements, and insist that the country he able to defend itself against Communist aggression. The intellectuals equate American patriotism with sordid nationalism, American history with “imperialistic greed,” and American self-defense with “paranoia” and/or with warmongering militarism.

The Germans of the Weimar period were increasingly frustrated, angry, disgusted with “the system,” and ready for change. So are Americans. The Germans, following their intellectuals, were disgusted with what they regarded as reason and freedom, and they were ready for Hitler. The Americans are disgusted with unreason and statism; but they are directionless. Without intellectual guidance, they do not know what went wrong with their system or how to prevent the country’s disintegration and collapse.

Thus, by default—despite the profound difference between Americans and the pre-Hitler Germans—the similarities between the two nations, the similarities between their intellectuals and the social trends they shape, are growing.

The most ominous aspect of the trend is that, if it is not reversed, it will ultimately change the character of the American people. It has already begun to do so.

The philosophy that shapes a nation’s culture and institutions tends, other things being equal, to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: by creating the conditions and setting the requirements of men’s daily life, it increasingly establishes itself as an unquestioned frame of reference in most people’s minds. A society shaped by altruism, for instance—a society of chronic, politically enforced man-eat-man policies in the name of “the public welfare”—leads many of its victims to feel that safety lies in flaunting public service, that selfishness (the “selfishness” of others, who are draining
them
) is a threat, and that the solution is to urge and practice greater selflessness. A society shaped by collectivism, in which the only effective means of survival is the group or the state, leads many to feel that the ideas and the personal indepen- dence appropriate to an individualist era are no longer possible or relevant. A society shaped by irrationalism—a society dominated by incomprehensible crisis and inexplicable injustice and the constant eruptions of a senseless, nihilist cul· ture—leads many to feel that the world cannot be understood, i.e., that their own mind is inadequate, and that they need guidance from some higher power.

Thus corrupt ideas, once institutionalized, tend to be continually reinforced (the same would hold true of rational ideas); and unphilosophical men, however decent their own unidentified premises might be, eventually succumb. Across a span of generations they gradually relinquish any better heritage. In part, they are yielding to the explicit ideological promptings of their teachers and their universities. In part, they are adapting resignedly to what they have come to accept from their own experience as the facts or necessities of life.

The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but it cannot withstand this kind of undermining indefinitely.

If the United States continues to go the way of all Europe, the people’s rebellion against the present intellectual leadership will be perverted, and rechanneled into an opposite course.

Nonintellectual rebels cannot challenge the fundamental ideas they have been taught. All they can do by way of rebellion is to accept a series of false alternatives urged by their teachers, and then defiantly choose what they regard as the anti-establishment side. Thus the proliferation of groups that uphold anti-intellectuality as the only alternative to today’s intellectuals; mindless activism as the alternative to vacillating “moderation”; Christian faith as the alternative to nihilism; female inferiority as the alternative to Women’s Lib; racism as the alternative to egalitarianism; sacrifice in behalf of a united nation, as the alternative to sacrifice in behalf of warring pressure groups; and government controls for the sake of the middle class, as the alternative to government controls for the sake of the rich or the poor.

The type of mentality produced by these choices—activist, religionist, racist, nationalist, authoritarian—would have been familiar in the Weimar Republic.

If it happens here, the primary responsibility will not belong to the people, who still reject such a mentality and are groping for a better kind of answer. The responsibility will belong to those who banished from the schools all knowledge of the original American system, and who would have finally convinced the nation that men’s only choice is a choice of dictatorships.

No one can predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed. No one can know what concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, would finally break the nation’s spirit and system of government. No one can know whether such a breakdown would lead to an American dictatorship directly—or indirectly, after a civil war and/or a foreign war and/or a protracted Dark Ages of primitive roving gangs.

What one can know is only this much: the end result of the country’s present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural-political signs for many years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular. The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism.

If the political trend of the world remains unchanged, the same fate—collapse and ultimate dictatorship—is in store for the countries of Western Europe, which are farther along the statist road than America is, and which are now obviously in process of decline or disintegration. (The Communist countries and the so-called “third world” have long since fallen, or never risen to anything.) A European dictatorship need not be identical to an American one; dictatorships can vary widely in form, according to a given people’s special history, traditions, and crises; in form, but not in essence.

Most of the East is gone. The West is going.

The following statement was made by a German intellectual after the Nazis fell from power. In the early days of Hitler’s regime, he recalled, anyone troubled by the Nazi practices and concerned about Germany’s future was shrugged off as an alarmist.

And you
are
an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.
²

One can “know, or surmise, the end” by knowing what cause produces what effect, i.e., what factor determines the fate of nations.

Today, the only nation still capable of saving itself, and thereby the world, is the United States. It can do so by only one means.

The Constitution cannot stop the trend. A constitution, however noble, cannot withstand the death or eclipse of its animating principle.

Religion cannot stop the trend. It helped to cause it.

The demonstrated practicality of the original American system cannot stop the trend. Practicality as such does not move nations.

The profound differences between America and Germany—the differences in history, institutions, heroes, national character, starting premises—cannot stop the trend. After a century, a crucial similarity began to develop between the two countries, the similarity of basic ideas; and this one similarity is gradually overriding, subverting, or negating the differences, and consigning their remnants to the dead end of the unappreciated, the undefended, the historically impotent.

There is only one antidote to today’s trend: a new, pro-reason philosophy. Such a philosophy would have to offer the nation for the first time a full statement and an unbreached defense of the fundamental ideas of America.

“Most of us,” said the German intellectual quoted above, looking back at the Hitler years,

did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
³

Do
you
want to think about “fundamental things”? In America, there is still time.