May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time?
May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time?
By Russell Kirk
The Heritage Foundation
Lecture #377
Lecture given: December 11, 1991
(published at 7 pages)
This year my Heritage lectures have been concerned with American political errors during the closing decade of the twentieth century — errors of the Republican party, of the Democratic party, and general blunders in foreign relations. This evening, ladies and gentlemen, I conclude my lecture series for Anno Domini 1991 with some desultory remarks on the possibility of redemption from error — and, in particular, whether our rising generation in these United States may find it possible to “redeem the time, redeem the dream” — to borrow T.S. Eliot’s line.
First, a few words about this concept “generation.” To generate is to beget; to bring into existence. In popular usage we mean by a generation a large number of persons brought into existence about the same time; in the same year, perhaps, or possibly in the same decade. Thomas Jefferson promulgated the somewhat vague concept of every “generation” of people making its own choices; of the generation of the living not binding the generation which soon would come into existence.
Yet, this notion cannot be sustained logically or pragmatically. For really there exists no line of demarcation parting alleged generations of men and women. Every minute, as I address you, babies are being born somewhere; and during the same minutes, old people are dying in every land.
Actually, society is an intricate continuity of lives, not a mere succession of human beings resembling the flies of a summer, generation unable to link with generation. It is possible for me to say truthfully that six generations of my family have lived in our house at the village of Mecosta, in Michigan; but those alleged “generations” have much overlapped; at no time over the past twelve decades has only a single generation lived in our family home. The notion of distinct generations, then, each generation monopolizing the earth during its brief span of existence, is merely a convenient fiction.
Nevertheless, we employ that useful fiction frequently, particularly with reference to literary and political movements. Thus Spaniards refer to the “Generation of ‘98,” made up of literary movers and shakers whose convictions were formed at the time of Spain’s naval and military defeats that caused the loss of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Thus, in Britain, Wyndham Lewis referred to the “men of 1914″ — certain innovating writers who began to appear in print about the beginning of the First World War: Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and Lewis himself. And thus, a very few years ago, here at The Heritage Foundation, Mr. Ben Hart introduced the concept of three generations of American conservatives that have exercised influence since the late 1940s, say. Tonight, I address especially the third of those hypothetical generations.
By the First Generation, I take it, Mr. Hart means men and women of politics and letters who began to come to public attention about the end of the ‘Forties and the beginning of the ‘Fifties; who, most of them, had grown aware of the sunken state of the world about them, some time between, or during, the First World War and the Great Depression. Among such persons who grew up with a conservative inclination were Richard Weaver, Francis Wilson, Robert Nisbet, Daniel Boorstin, William Buckley, and your servant; one might add William Yandell Elliott (a little older) and William McGovern, and others who were active so early as 1933, say. There would be regarded as belonging to an earlier “generation,” both in point of years and of thought, such persons as T.S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. Among public men, Senators Robert A. Taft and Carl Curtis, say, would be classified as members of the pre- conservative generation, I suppose, their activity having occurred mostly during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman; while Senator Barry Goldwater, a relatively late conservative champion in arms, would be classed with the First Generation conservatives, I suppose, in Mr. Hart’s scheme. You will perceive, ladies and gentlemen, that membership in a hypothetical generation does not necessarily coincide with the date of one’s nativity.
The Second Generation of conservatives, in Mr. Hart’s categories, consists of persons of varying ages who were attracted to conservative causes, or began to style themselves conservatives, sometime after 1953, in which year The Conservative Mind was published. Thus Mr. Irving Kristol, almost so old as is your servant, is classified as Second Generation; so is my wife Annette Yvonne Cecilie Courtmanche Kirk, the first secretary at the organizational meeting of Young Americans for Freedom, twenty-one years younger than myself. I take it that Dr. Jeffrey Hart, Mr. Ben Hart’s father, is Second Generation — although very nearly meeting the requirements for Generation I; that Mr. M. Stanton Evans, despite his many years of active duty in the conservative array, is a Second Generation legionnaire; while Mr. Ben Hart himself, and his spouse are field marshals of the Third Generation.
But, more subtle distinctions and classifications I leave to Mr. Gregory Wolfe, now engaged in preparing an Encyclopedia of the Right. So far as public men go, permit me to suggest merely that such conservatively-inclined gentlemen as Senator Richard Lugar, Governor John Engler, and Mr. Patrick Buchanan seem to fall within the Second Generation fold. In brief, nowadays First Generation conservatives — such of them as have not passed unto a less troubled realm of being — usually are people in their seventies or their sixties; Second Generation conservatives, most of them, in their fifties or forties; Third Generation conservatives, in their thirties or their twenties — or even in their teens. Pass we then to these ladies and gentlemen of the Third Generations.
Few of the Third Generation folk retain personal memories of the Disaster of 1964 — that is, the defeat of Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, the centralizing follies of President Johnson’s “Great Society,” the foretaste of ruin in Vietnam, the loathsome and destructive antics of the crazy black militants and the crazier young white radicals. The present members of the Third Generation were reared when the hearts of our great American cities already were dismal and rotten; when addiction to narcotics plagued every social class; when public schools, with few honorable exceptions, offered next to nothing for mind and conscience; when Demon TV offered something for every taste but good taste; when promiscuity and sexual perversity demanded recognition as normality; when it was unwise to walk the streets o’nights; when shrieking mobs dominated what had been the grove and halls of Academe; when altercations in Washington made it almost impossible to conduct the regular business of government; when American life seemed confusion worse confounded; when one came to appreciate the mordant aphorism of Albert Jay Nock: “American society is like German beer; dregs at the bottom, scum at the top.”
In short, the conservative Third Generation have not known a tranquil and pleasant and confident America. They scarcely can imagine a time, not many decades past, when it was the happy evening diversion of families or couples to stroll in New York’s Central Park of Detroit’s Belle Isle Park. They have little knowledge even of the neighborhood grocery or butcher-shop, the corner drug-store with its soda-fountain; for them is the leviathan shopping-mall, commercial collectivism. They have experienced little of continuity; the expectation of change has been greater far. Yet, they know that much remains to conserve, and that much ought to be restored.
In one respect, but in that respect only, the task of the conservative of 1991 looms less oppressive than was the task of the conservative of 1951, when my first book was published. I mean that the grim menace of the Soviet Union no longer hangs over us. Seventy years were required for the Communist ideology to work its own ruin, so that it fell to pieces at a good-natured push, quite bloodless, from Mr. Ronald Reagan. Always will there be wars and rumors of war; yet from the Soviet terror we have been saved, so that the Third Generation conservatives may address their energies to something more fundamental than resisting the armed doctrine called Marxism.
What, then, is the mission of Third Generation conservatives, young men and women who seek to preserve the Permanent Things, those elements in human existence that were not born yesterday? It is not to promulgate a “conservative ideology”: for conservatism is the negation of ideology. Ideology is an attempt to govern all life by political slogans; while American conservatives believe that no mere political formulas can make a people content. Conservatives take for their guide in politics what Edmund Burke called “the wisdom of the species”: that is, the experience of human beings in community, extending over many centuries. Thus, American conservatism is a cast of mind and character, not a neat body of political abstractions. Ideology is political fanaticism, an endeavor to rule the world by rigorous abstract dogmata. The dogmata of an abstract “democratic capitalism” may be mischievous as the dogmata of Marx.
It is possible to describe certain attitudes that make up America’s conservative mentality, even though not all Americans could express coherently their belief in such general principles, and although some conservatives would dissent from one or more of the general assumptions or principles I now mention.
First, belief in some transcendent order in the universe, some law that is more than human: a religious understanding of the human condition, if you will; a belief in enduring moral norms. As the national pledge of allegiance puts it, “One nation under God…. “
Second, opposition to totalist ideology and the totalist political order. The American conservative rejects the notion of a future earthly paradise — which the ideologue promises to attain.
Third, confidence in the American Constitution — both the written national Constitution and the intricate fabric of custom, belief, and habit that makes up the underlying “unwritten” constitution of a nation-state. Many decisions of the Supreme Court in recent decades are bitterly resented; nevertheless, attachment to the Constitution itself remains strong.
Fourth, maintenance of the rights of private property and of a free or competitive economy, as contrasted with a directed or socialist economy. This healthy prejudice persists despite the increasing consolidation of business and industry into large conglomerations or oligopolies.
Fifth, suspicion of central political direction, and preference for state and local powers: insistence upon private rights.
Sixth, a deep-rooted patriotism, joined to uneasiness at “entangling alliances”; this latter attitude, nevertheless, modified by determination to resist totalist powers that menace the American national interest.
Seventh, an awareness that change is not identical with healthy improvement; a relish for the American past; a genuine preference for the old and tried.
Such is the consensus of that very large body of Americans who choose to call themselves conservative in their politics. Within this crowd of conservative citizens exist various factions, each emphasizing some aspect or another of the general conservative attitude. There exists no “party line” to which conservatives of one persuasion or another are compelled to conform.
Retrenchment and Reform. With such assumptions as those I outlined just now, America enters upon an age of retrenchment and reform in economic concerns. If American prosperity is to endure, public expenditure and taxation must be kept in check. Conservative economic measures must be employed to prevent inflation of the currency and to reduce the national deficit — a hard necessity of which the general public is becoming aware.
In this present era when the Soviet power fades away, the majority of the American public seem disillusioned with social experiments and with the rapid pace of change; with excessive governmental regulation; with cities fallen to ruin and tormented by crime; with subsidized abortion, with judicial usurping of power, with a permissive indulgence of license and criminality, with the blight of pornography, with the whole liberal climate of opinion. For the next half-century at least, I suggest, the American democracy will tend to reject those politicians who still indulge dreams of Lotos-land. Liberalism has undone itself.
There have been ages when custom and inertia have lain insufferably upon humankind; and such an age may come to pass again; but such is not our age. Ours is an era when the moral and social heritage of many centuries of civilization stands in imminent peril from the forces of vertiginous indiscriminate change. Resistance to the folly of such change is the primary duty of the Third Generation conservative.
The continuing American conservative movement, if it is to be carried on tolerably well, must work within the minds and the consciences of a good many young men and women. I do not think that this work of conservation can be accomplished by any particular group; certainly not by any idealizing of “business rule.” I trust that Americans will conserve a market economy and all the better features of an economy marked by volition. But Americans will conserve such advantages only if they conserve something higher and older: that is, a society of tradition, diversity, and the life of spirit.
The critic Eliseo Vivas wrote once that “It is one of the marks of human decency to be ashamed of having been born into the twentieth century.” Spiritually and politically, the twentieth century has been a time of decadence. Yet, as that century draws near to its close, we may remind ourselves that ages of decadence often have been followed by ages of renewal.
What can you do to commence redeeming the time, to conserve the Permanent Things, to raise up the human condition to a level less unworthy of what Pico della Mirandola called “the dignity of man”? Why, begin by brightening the corner where you are; by improving one human unit, yourself, and helping your neighbor.
You will not need to be rich or famous to take your part in redeeming the time: what you need for that task is moral imagination joined to right reason. It is not by wealth or fame that you will be rewarded, probably, but by eternal moments: those moments of one’s existence in which, as T.S. Eliot put it, time and the timeless intersect. In such moments, you may discover the answer to that immemorial question which now and again enters the head of any reflective man or woman, “What is all this? What is this world that surrounds us, and why are we here?”
Yes, what is all this? Why, this present realm of being, in which your consciousness and my consciousness are aware of reality, is a divine creation; and you and I are put into it as into a testing- ground — into an arena, if you will. As the German writer Stefan Andres put it, “We are God’s Utopia.” You and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world.
The Roman Stoics taught that some things in life are good, and some are evil; but that the great majority of life’s happenings are neither good nor evil, but indifferent merely. Wealth is a thing indifferent, and so is poverty; fame is a thing indifferent, and so is obscurity. Shrug your shoulders at things indifferent; set your face against the things evil; and by doing God’s will, said the Stoics, find that peace which passes all understanding.
True Authority. How do we know such postulates, religious and philosophical, to be true? Why, by the common sense and ancient assent of mankind — that is, by hearkening to the voice of true authority, the voice of what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” I think of what John Henry Newman wrote about Authority in 1846: “Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories; such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.” Believe what wise men and women, over the centuries, have believed in matters of faith and morals, and you will have a firm footing on which to stand while the winds of doctrine howl about you.
This counsel that I offer you, conservatives of the Third Generation, will not guarantee your winning any of the glittering prizes of modern society; for those too are among the things indifferent, and some of them are among the things evil. Yet, this advice from a conservative of the First Generation who has seen a good deal of the world conceivably may help you on the track toward certain eternal moments, when time and the timeless intersect. What happens at such timeless moments, such occurrences in eternity? Why, quiet perfect events, usually; among them the act of telling stories to one’s children, or of reading aloud to them.
What is all this — this confused American world of glittering material things and of appalling personal and social decay? I have found it to be a real world, sun-lit despite its vices; a real world in which one may develop and exercise one’s potential virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice; one’s faith, hope, and charity. You will take your tumbles in this world, which can be rough enough in our age, Lord knows; but also you may enjoy your triumphs. It is a world in which there is so much needing to be done that nobody ought to be bored. For young Americans especially, this is still a world of high opportunity.
All this creation about us is the garden that we erring humans were appointed to tend. Plant some flowers in it, if you can, and pull some weeds. If need be, draw your sword to defend it. Do not fancy that a sorry policy of Looking Out for Number One will lead you to Heaven’s gate. Do not fail to remind yourselves that consciousness is a perpetual adventure. Do not ignore the wisdom of the ages, the democracy of the dead. Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the counsel of this survivor from the First Generation.
Those of us who aspire to conserve our inherited order and justice and freedom, our patrimony of wisdom and beauty and loving- kindness, have a hard row to hoe nowadays — that I confess. But, I am heartened from time to time by a stanza from Chesterton’s long poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton is describing the prophets of doom, who tell us that nothing in life is permanent; that all is lost, or is being lost, in our culture; that we totter on the brink of an abyss. Such prophets of doom think themselves wise. Chesterton has in mind the typical intellectuals of the twentieth century, but he calls them the wise men of the East. Here I give you Chesterton’s lines:
The wise men know what wicked thingsAre written on the sky,They trim sad lamps, they touch sad stringsHearing the heavy purple wings,Where the forgotten seraph kingsStill plot how God shall die.
Such despairing souls, though possessed perhaps of much intelligence, in truth are not wise. In our time, ladies and gentlemen, many voices have been declaring that life is not worth living. A multitude of writers and professors and publicists and members of the class of persons commonly styled “intellectuals” gloomily instruct us that we human beings are no better than naked apes, and that consciousness is an illusion. Such persons insist that life has no purpose but sensual gratification; that the brief span of one’s physical existence is the be-all and end-all. Such twentieth- century sophists have created in the murky caves of the intellect an Underworld; and they endeavor to convince us all that there exists no sun — that the world of wonder and of hope exists nowhere, and never did exist. Plato knew just such sophists in his age. Those doctrines of despair, the rising generation of conservatives must confront and refute.
My counsels so far may have seemed somewhat ghostly, no doubt. But, I have learned from life in various regions of the world, and under differing circumstances, that it is the life of spirit which truly matters; and that the Permanent Thing most worthy of preservation is an understanding of the human soul. The conscious conservative defends the soul of humankind against the corrosive materialism and sensuality of twentieth-century will and appetite.
Let me turn, however, to the art of worldly wisdom. I can offer, too, some practical advice. How, for instance, you may ask me, does one contrive to forge ahead in practical political life in this sprawling American democracy, with the intention of conducting a conservative defense of the Permanent Things?
Why, ordinarily it is fairly simple to make one’s way in the American political structure. American political parties could not function without volunteers. Volunteer, and you will be gladly accepted, such as you being urgently needed; you will find, indeed, that a number of your fellow-volunteers are rather peculiar people, almost Outcasts of Poker Flat, but welcome in a local political organization (if not welcome in many other circles) because, whatever their peculiarities, they are willing to work for the common cause.
If you are an intelligent and adept volunteer, you will be made much of by the party leaders and faithful, and will be advanced in your responsibilities. You may be asked to be a delegate, whether elected or appointed. If chosen delegate, arrive early at caucus or convention. When the meeting proper commences, endeavor to sit at the chairman’s right hand; then others may take you for his right-hand man. There are many little arts by which one may gain ascendancy over the minds of one’s political colleagues. But, the great necessity is to have acquired previously a fund of knowledge and some mastery of rhetoric — and honest principles. That is why I sometimes advise undergraduates not to expend their time in street demonstrations, but instead to study. If Karl Marx, instead of reading books within, had spent his days parading round and round the outside of the British museum, a placard “Down with the bourgeois!” tacked to a sandwich- board over his shoulders — why, had he been so foolish, the world would be so much better off today.
Redeem the time, redeem the dream — in ways mundane as well as ways spiritual. If you should resolve really to take a vigorous part in restoring the American Republic, choose your vocation accordingly, so that the work by which you gain your livelihood, and the work by which you help to redeem the time, may coincide. Take to the law — if you can endure the boredom of our law schools nowadays. Or, take to serious journalism — or, for broader and more immediate influence, to television and radio. You may accomplish some reform of the American mind through book-publishing. Or, supposing you possess fortitude sufficient to fight your way through our PC graduate schools, aspire after a college professorship that might enable you to counteract the freaks who appear to dominate the typical campus nowadays. Or take to pedagogy, if you can surmount the dull obstacles to certification as a teacher. If you feel a religious calling — why, in no way might you accomplish more to restore meaning to lives in the twenty-first century. And, the best way to insure a Fourth Generation of intelligent young conservatives is to beget children, and rear them well: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, “We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.” The institution most essential to conserve is the family.
If we aspire to redeem this age of ours, so far gone in decadence — well, we have no time to lose before commencing our endeavors. Fixed to the walls of the entrance hall of my house are masks of the archaic god Cronos, in his role of Time the Devourer; his half-leonine, half-human face bares his fangs, which the ancient Greeks dreaded. Those masks serve to remind me daily that the night cometh when no man shall work, and that I had best turn back to my productive typewriter.
Yet, Time is not a devourer only. With proper use of the life- span that is allotted to us, we may accomplish our part in redeeming our era from its vices, terrors, and catastrophic errors. With Demosthenes, ladies and gentlemen, I beg of you to think. For only if you think soundly at this juncture in your lives will you be enabled to act decisively in those years when you have achieved some influence.
I conclude with an exhortation which Orestes Brownson, that redoubtable conservative reformer, scholar, and journalist, delivered at Dartmouth College in 1843. His topic was “The Scholar’s Mission.” He concluded, as follows, his charge to the rising generation:
Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs, not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty, and above all in the reflection, that you have been accounted to suffer somewhat for mankind.
In the later ‘Sixties, many of the rising generation thought it amusing to pull down what earlier generations had patiently built up; their zeal extended even to the burning of university libraries. In the early ‘Nineties, I hope and trust, many of the rising generation will find it satisfying to restore and redeem their patrimony from earlier times — and so save the world from suicide. That labor will require cleverness and courage. Some of you present here tonight may choose it for your vocation.
Frank Meyer: The Godfather Of American Conservatism
The Godfather Of American Conservatism
John B. Judis
Story in .rtf
Today, whether the issue is arms control, school prayer, or tax reform, the most heated political battles are being waged among conservatives rather than between conservatives and liberals. There are as many factions of conservatives–new right, old right, neo-conservative, movement conservative, moderate conservative–as there used to be factions on the left. But beneath these divisions does there lurk a common set of assumptions which is conservatism?
The most concerted attempt to discover these assumptions was made by Frank Meyer, an ex-Communist who from 1957 until his death in 1972 was a senior editor of and columnist for National Review. Meyer was the ideological godfather of the conservative organizations and politicians who got their start in the late ’50s and the ’60s, from the Young Americans for Freedom to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Meyer communicated many of his ideas through countless phone calls emanating at all hours of the night from his Woodstock, New York home. But he also tried to create a philosophical synthesis of American conservatism in his writings. Meyer set out, he explained in his book, In Defense of Freedom, to “vindicate on theoretical grounds the native belief of American conservatives.”
In the minds of many conservatives today, Meyer succeeded admirably. Conservative columnist M. Stanton Evans said of his work, “In the perspective of time, we shall rank his libertarian-conservative writing among the principal achievements, not only of modern conservatism, but of political thought in general.”
David Keene, now the chairman of the American Conservative Union and in 1969 the chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), said “YAF and the young conservative movement really looked to Frank Meyer of National Review as their philosophical leader.”
Yet neither Meyer nor his philosophy is known outside the conservative movement.
Meyer was a small, pale, gaunt man with high cheekbones, a long thin nose and protruding lips. Former New Republic editor Michael Straight, who knew Meyer as a Communist in London, described him as looking like “an Aztec priest.” He paid little attention to what he wore, except for his red suspenders, which are now fashionable on the right. He was passionate and excitable: an avid conversationalist and stirring orator. He was also a notable eccentric.
For the last twenty-five years of his life, Meyer lived in Woodstock, in a house dominated by books. Distrustful of the public schools, he and his wife educated their children themselves. Meyer was a night person. He went to sleep at seven in the morning and awoke at two. He would volunteer to perform wakeup calls for his unfortunate friends who had to keep normal hours.
Through the telephone, he kept very close track of national conservative politics. For instance, when Robert Bauman was the head of Young Americans for Freedom in the early ’60s, he recalled hearing from Meyer as many as four or five times a night on the eve of an important board meeting. He also extended coveted invitations to young conservatives to visit him in Woodstock.
Like many prominent right wing intellectuals, Meyer began on the political left. Meyer joined the British Communist Party in 1931 as a student at Oxford, to which he had transferred from Princeton. In 1932, he went to London School of Economics for graduate work and ran successfully for student president as a known Communist. After a blowup with the school’s president in 1934, he was expelled from LSE and deported from England.
Back in the United States, he rose quickly to become Educational Director of the party in the Indiana-Illinois region. Known in party circles as a “Marxist theoretician,” Meyer was responsible for educating party cadre in the latest directives from the leadership and in the most recent interpretation of the Marxist classics. “He was always able to quote what the latest line was,” William Sennett, a party comrade, recalled.
Meyer became an enthusiastic proponent of the party’s pro-New Deal Popular Front policies, epitomized in the slogan “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” Unlike many other Communist intellectuals, he stuck with the party through the Moscow purge trials of the mid 30s and the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. It was only in 1945, when Moscow replaced Communist leader and popular front proponent Earl Browder with hardliner William Z. Foster that Meyer began to draw away from the party.
Meyer never formally resigned from the Communist party, but by 1950, he had become both an ardent anti-Communist and a proponent of free market economics. In the early ’50s, he was an expert government witness at Smith Act trials in New York and Chicago; and he was writing articles condemning the Soviet Union and praising the free market for the American Mercury and The Freeman, the two right-wing journals of the time.
Meyer later credited F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom with turning him to the right, but Hayek’s book cannot account for the speed, intensity, and extent of Meyer’s transformation. Most other former Communists or Trotskyists became liberals. Most of those who became conservatives took their time in doing so and retained, even on the right, elements of their former belief. For instance, James Burnham took almost 15 years to journey from Trotskyism to conservatism. And Wilmoore Kendall and Freda Utley both remained Keynesians.
Meyer’s commitment to communism had been philosophical rather than organizational. He did not seek the security of the party cell, but the metaphysical security of a total system of ideas. When he abandoned communism, he sought certainty in a new American conservatism. “He was the ultimate ideologue,” said John Leonard, who worked with Meyer on National Review.
Meyer’s quest for metaphysical security was borne out by his deathbed conversion from secular Judaism to Catholicism. According to his son Eugene Meyer, his father’s conversion to Catholicism did not reflect an experience of Jesus’ divinity but rather the conviction that the evil of communism had to be balanced by the goodness of Christianity. Like Whittaker Chambers, Meyer had come to identify Christianity with civilization.
As Meyer was dying of lung cancer in 1972, he consumed his last hours feverishly debating whether the Catholic prohibition on suicide and the phrase the “communion of Saints” violated his libertarian ethic. His final conversion to Catholicism consummated his journey from Communism to conservatism.
In 1955, journalist Ralph de Toledano, who had known Meyer on the left, introduced him to William F. Buckley Jr., who was then starting a new magazine. Meyer began writing regularly for National Review, and in 1957 became a senior editor. In his column, “Principles and Heresies,” Meyer began to develop a “correct line” for the conservative movement just as he had once done for Midwestern Communists.
In 1957, however, there was no conservative movement as such, but rather diverse and often fractious movements and organizations, loosely identified with the right by their common opposition to the New Deal, Communism, and federally-imposed racial integration. Nor was there a common intellectual approach associated with the right; instead, there were two principal intellectual currents, individualism and traditionalism, neither of which, in their pure form, had any embodiment in the political realm.
The individualists or libertarians, led by a young economist Murray Rothbard, hearkened back to Albert Jay Nock, the editor of the original Freeman, and to his disciple Frank Chodorov. They were right-wing anarchists who identified freedom with the free market and rejected any government intrusion upon individual rights, whether in the form of antitrust law, social security, or military spending. Many had been isolationists; and after World War II, they became vigorous critics of the America’s burgeoning military budget and Cold War policies.
The traditionalists or conservatives, typified by Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, viewed society as an organic whole the health of which was more important than the health of its individual parts; they regarded the inculcation of virtue rather than freedom as the supreme goal of politics; and in the name of Christianity, Tory England, or the Plantation South, they upheld tradition and prescription over ideology and reason. They abhorred socialism, communism, and liberalism not because they destroyed freedom, but because they encouraged an unnatural egalitarianism. While preferring capitalism to its rivals, they blamed it for the commercialism and materialism rampant in society.
The proponents of individualism and traditionalism had little patience or even respect for each other. Kirk once confessed to historian George Nash that “he, felt closer to socialist Norman Thomas than to anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard.” But Frank Meyer set out in the ’50s to incorporate elements of each philosophy into a new conservative politics that would be not only valid, but also relevant to the emerging movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Because Meyer’s new philosophy fused elements of both individualism and traditionalism, it was called “fusionism.”
Meyer shared the individualists’ identification of freedom with the free market. He viewed liberalism, socialism, and communism as steps on a ladder leading to the extinction of any freedom. But Meyer was also a militant anti-Communist who thought nothing should be spared in fighting the international Communist conspiracy, and a man of straight-laced morality who thought virtue rather than happiness or pleasure should be the end of existence. According to Meyer, individualism threatened to sap “the foundations of belief in an organic moral order.”
Meyer maintained that the individualists were correct in positing freedom as the “primary end” of politics, but he rejected the view that freedom was an “absolute end.” “In the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue,” Meyer wrote.
But Meyer was equally, if not more, critical of the traditionalists. In reviewing Russell Kirk’s highly acclaimed The Conservative Mind in 1955, Meyer charged that Kirk, by preferring tradition to reason, had enshrined “the maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right,’ as the first principle of thought about politics and society.” According to Meyer, Kirk’s society that stressed “authority and order” over “freedom” and “status” over “contract” “would only move inevitably toward totalitarianism.”
Meyer maintained that virtue was not possible without freedom. “The simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil,” Meyer wrote.
But if the state could not impose virtue, how could a free society hope to inculcate it? Meyer rested his hope for virtue on a model of society quaintly similar to what the Soviet Communists initially claimed to be their ideal. “A good society is possible only,” Meyer wrote, “when the social and political order guarantees a state of affairs in which men can freely choose, when the intellectual and moral leaders, the ‘creative minority,’ have the understanding and imagination to maintain the prestige of tradition and reason and thus to sustain the intellectual and moral order throughout society.”
Meyer claimed that his ideas not only replicated everyday conservatism, but also the historic beliefs of Americans. Just as Meyer’s political economy dated from Andrew Jackson’s affirmation of the frontier’s free market, his morals reflected Puritan America’s solitary quest for a virtuous polity. The two conceptions belonged, of course, to different eras–the Puritans’ views of government was far closer to that of Kirk than Meyer–but they had co-existed in the American psyche since the early 1800s. Meyer elevated their co-existence from homily to philosophy. And in doing so, he sought not merely to ground conservatism in philosophy, but to ground conservatism in the peculiar philosophy of Americans.
Meyer did succeed in providing at least the appearance of a theoretical underpinning for the conservative movement of his time. Meyer himself wrote or helped write the founding statements of both the American Conservative Union and the New York Conservative Party, and the authors of the Young Americans for Freedom’s founding “Sharon Statement” credited him with that statement’s attempt to combine individualism and traditionalism.
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Frank Meyer |
Meyer used fusionism to justify the political stances of the emerging strands of the conservative movement. Meyer invoked his concept of freedom from government interference on behalf of Southern segregation, as well as Northern resistance to the enlargement of the welfare state. And Meyer’s insistence on virtue as the moral end of existence dovetailed with popular dismay at the drug counterculture and ghetto violence of the ’60s. When Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964, or when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, it was substantially on Meyer’s fusionist platform. The first book of neo-conservative politics, Irving Kristol’s On the Democratic Idea in America, was virtually a gloss on Meyer’s fusionism.
Once he had worked out the central idea of fusionism in the mid-1950s, Meyer himself never budged from it. It occupied the same place in his thought as Stalin’s version of Marxism once had. It became the basis for denouncing suspected deviations from the correct line, from Rothbard’s anti-war stand to the pro-marijuana stance of the Libertarian faction of the Young Americans for Freedom.
Young conservatives found Meyer looking over their shoulder as they plied their trade. “Frank Meyer really was the conscience of the right wing,” recalled David Keene. “If you were a movement conservative, and were in a position somewhere, and were doing something that you knew you shouldn’t be doing, Frank Meyer would know about it, and he would call you on the carpet for it.”
Like Stalin’s Marxism, fusionism also became for Meyer on overarching theory in which even seemingly contradictory facts were fitted. Thus Meyer could defend Southern segregation and become an outspoken apologist for South Africa’s “apartheid” system, praising it as an attempt to develop “the black nations within South Africa to an eventual equal status with the white nation.”
Since Meyer’s death, no alternative philosophy has supplanted fusionism among conservatives. The only attempt to provide an alternative was made by columnist George Will, who in Statecraft and Soulcraft tried to revive Kirk’s traditionalist approach to the state. But Will’s book was rudely received by both National Review and Human Events. Fusionism is still the unofficial philosophy of American conservatives.
The acceptance of fusionism among the great body of conservatives does not, however, validate its theory. Viewed according to the canons of logic rather than according to the requirements of politics, fusionism does not really amount to much as political philosophy.
The most telling critique of fusionism was made two decades ago by traditionalists. In a 1962 essay, Brent Bozell, Meyer’s close friend who later became the editor of the right wing Catholic journal Triumph, challenged Meyer’s root assumptions. Meyer’s argument rested on the premise that freedom was a precondition of virtue, but Bozell demolished this premise simply by noting that a Soviet political prisoner, severely restrained by his government, was as capable of leading a virtuous life as an American businessman. “The freedom necessary to virtue is presumably a freedom no man will ever be without,” Bozell concluded. Meyer’s argument unraveled from there.
For Bozell, who was already moving toward a Franco-inspired authoritarianism, the point was that freedom is not merely irrelevant to virtue, but perhaps even detrimental to its realization. But regardless of his motives, Bozell succeeded in showing that Meyer had not theoretically reconciled freedom and virtue, but merely placed them side-by-side in the same theory. If virtue–and particularly Christian rather than Classical virtue–is the proper goal of humanity, then other justifications for freedom must be sought.
Bozell also objected to Meyer’s contention that economic freedom was a condition of political freedom. Noting the case of Great Britain, which remained a political democracy while nationalizing part of its industry, Bozell argued that its citizens could “exercise their political freedom against their economic freedom.” Meyer could only respond by circularly defining the problem out of existence. Political freedom, Meyer wrote, was “the limitation of the power of the state to the function of preserving a free order.”
Russell Kirk’s objections to Meyer were more down to earth but no less telling. Kirk pointed out that the free market whose preservation Meyer had made the goal of political society could itself encourage vice rather than virtue: whether in the form of suburban shopping malls, prostitution, television advertising, or the hunger for material success. Kirk accused Meyer of simply replacing an uncritical anti-capitalism with an equally uncritical pro-capitalism. “There was a tendency among the ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists to go from one extreme to the other,” Kirk recalled. “Frank Meyer is the clearest example of that. Having been turned away from ideology they seek another ideology which becomes a kind of ideology of capitalism.”
Bozell’s and Kirk’s objections undercut the philosophical validity of fusionism, but in politics, as James Burnham pointed out in The Machiavellians, the usefulness of a philosophy is not necessarily related to its theoretical soundness. Rather, it is related to the degree to which the philosophy resonates with popular mythologies. Meyer’s philosophy did precisely that: invoking both the frontier free market and John Winthrop’s City on a Hill and reconciling the Chamber of Commerce’s economics with the Sunday sermon against the evils of pornography.
Political movements rarely possess coherent unified world views; instead, they are concatenations of conflicting Weltanschaungs, whose unity is predicated on common but sometimes fleeting fears and interests. Thus, both urban blacks and rural Southern whites were integral to the old Democratic majority; while “country club Republicans,” the “born again Falwellites,” and disillusioned ethnic Democrats conspired to provide Reagan with his two landslides.
The practical unity among these groups is fleeting. For instance, a serious recession under Republican rule could send the disillusioned Democrats in the North and South scurrying back to the fold. But in the absence of long-term practical unity, Meyer’s philosophy provides the appearance of long-term philosophical unity.
Meyer’s fusionism was more rationalization than theory. It is not likely to stand with the works of Jefferson, Calhoun, or Croly in the anthologies of American political thought. Nor is it likely to survive the political coalition that it helped to sustain. But for the moment it does provide a banner in which those interested primarily in school prayer or segregation and those interested in lower taxes and less regulation of their businesses can march together.
©1986 John B. Judis
John B. Judis, senior editor on leave from In These Times, is exploring the development of American conservative politics.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY LEONARD LIGGIO
BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY LEONARD LIGGIO
Human Action, Ludwig von Mises
Socialism, Ludwig von Mises
The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek
Capitalism and the Historians, F. A. Hayek
The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek
Law, Legislation and Liberty, F. A. Hayek
Freedom and the Law, Bruno Leoni
Federalism and Freedom, Felix Morley
Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock
The Birth of the Modern, Paul Johnson
Modern Times, Paul Johnson
The Myth of the Good and Bad Nations, Rene Wormser
The Great Powers and Eastern Europe, John Lukacs
Genesis of the World War, Harry Elmer Barnes
America Goes to War, Charles C. Tansill
Back Door to War, Charles C. Tansill
Mohammed and Charlemagne, Henri Pirenne
Economic and Social History of Europe, Henri Pirenne
The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Michael Rostovtzeff
Some Twentieth-Century Historians, S. William Halperin
Six Historians (Thucydides, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Ranke, Henry Adams), Ferdinand Schevill
Visions of Culture (Voltaire, Guizot, Burchkardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset), Karl J. Weintraub
The Dawn of a New Era, 1250-1453, Edward P. Cheyney
The Catholic Reformation, 1560-1610, Robert H. Lord
The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660, Carl J. Friedrich
The Triumph of Science and Reason, 1660-1685, Frederick L. Nussbaum
A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900, Carlton J. H. Hayes
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Jonathan D. Spence
Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France, Robert R. Palmer
The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Robert R. Palmer
Beyond the Enlightenment, Historians & Folklore in Nineteenth-Century France, Charles Rearick
The Servile State, Hilaire Belloc
The Reformation, Hilaire Belloc
Belloc: A Biographical Anthology, ed. Herbert van Thal
History of the Church of Christ, Henri Daniel-Rops
Making of Europe, Christopher Dawson
Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson
Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy
For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory, Henry B. Veatch
Two Logics, Henry B. Veatch
Thomist Realism & the Critique of Knowledge, Etienne Gilson
Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, Etienne Gilson
God and Philosophy, Etienne Gilson
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Etienne Gilson
The Cypresses Believe in God, Jose Maria Gironella
The Intellectual History of Europe, Frederich Heer
The Road of Science and the Ways of God, Stanley Jaki
Enthusiasm, Ronald Knox
Now I See: Autobiograpy, Sir Arnold Lunn
Integral Humanism, Jacques Maritain
Ethica Thomistica, Ralph McInerny
Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White, Jr.
The Levers of Riches, Joel Mokyr
Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton
We Hold These Truths, John Courtney Murray
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novack
Natural Law, Heinrich Rommen
Law and Revolution, Harold Berman
The Life of Christ, Fulton J. Sheen
Christianity and History, Herbert Butterfield
War and Human Progress, John U. Nef
Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization, John U. Nef
The Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries, William Thomas Walsh
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
The Virgin and the Dynamo, Henry Adams
Mont St. Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams
The American Language, H. L. Mencken
Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
Selected Essays, T. S. Elliot
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi
Robert E. Lee, Douglass Southall Freeman
The Twilight of Authority, Robert Nisbet
History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet
The Wisdom of Catholicism, Anton C. Pegis (ed.)
Force and Freedom: Reflections on History, Jacob Burckhardt
Lord Acton, Gertrude Himmelfarb
Lord Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History, William H. McNeill (ed.)
Lord Acton, Essays on Church & State, Douglas Woodruff (ed.)
The Conquest of the United States by Spain, William Graham Sumner
Prophets on the Right, Ronald Radosh
Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking, William F. Buckley (ed.)
Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson
Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone
The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro
American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (Sumner, Field, Carnegie), Robert Green McCloskey
Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, John Neville Figgis
Reunion and Reaction: Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, C. Vann Woodward
Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses
IC’s Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books
No. 19 – Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses
by Dr. Enrico Peppe
20 February 2004
Four clear conceptions of Ortega’s thinking, as reflected by the book under review, can be found in the writings of Albert Jay Nock, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.
Ortega (1883-1955) was born in Madrid within a journalist-political milieu.
His father was a popular newspaperman and novelist. In his mother’s family were many politico-ideologues and ministers of sundry Spanish government agencies.
He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Madrid in 1904, and subsequently continued his studies in Germany, when the philosophic emphasis was Kantian analysis.
Eventually he secured a post at Central University in Madrid. He became an exile during the Spanish Civil War, finding teaching refuge at the University of San Marcos in Lima. After World War II, he returned to Spain where he founded the short-lived Institute of Humanities. He lectured frequently during his later years (including a stint at the Center for the Humanities in Aspen). He died in 1955. At the time of his death, he could quite accurately be described as Spain’s premier thinker.
His genre was the essay. His Castilian was vibrant, and as such he is considered one of the great writers of the 20th century, regardless of language. As a philosopher he is considered neo-Kantian and existentialist.
Professor Mary E. Giles summarizes his conceptions as follows. For Ortega:
Human beings and their circumstances exist in a dynamic interplay (‘Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia’)…How an individual influences his circumstances is his creative action (‘quehacer vital’)…The hero…creates the noble life by exerting his will to go beyond the ordinary…The opposite of the hero, the mass man, is content with his own mediocrity and relies on opinion rather than reason…Though each individual sees truth from a unique perspective, truth itself is absolute.
A synopsis of Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” is in order. This work easily belongs on the IC “Top 25″ list. (For reasons that will become clear later, however, Ortega makes the grade for reasons not in accordance with past ideological emphases as applied to Ortega’s most popular book).
The fifteen chapters are best understood as fifteen essays (Ortega’s thought-pattern tends toward the personal rather than the
thematic).
But a theme emerges nevertheless. Dr Giles sums up part of the Ortegan motif:
(He)…elaborates the theory of two classes, the masses and creative minorities…societies advance…when the creative minority is allowed to govern. Mass man is without direction, self-satisfied, and preoccupied with his own well-being…(he) is identifiable by an attitude opposite of the dynamic man of excellence… (who)…exerts his will in service to values and goals that are larger than himself…
The highly quotable Ortega on themes felt to be the crux of the book:
The multitude has suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society…Before it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now, it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character. There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus.
We are, in fact, confronted with a radical innovation in human destiny, implanted by the 19th century. A new stage has been mounted for human existence, new both in the physical and the social aspects. Three principles have made possible this new world: liberal democracy, scientific experiment, and industrialism. The two latter may be summed up in one word: technicism.
Ortegan excerpts, out of context, like the brief quotations cited above, serve to place Ortega in the long line of aristocratic-metaphysical-Carlist thinking best expressed in European and American traditional conservatism (Frederick Wilhelmsem, L Brent Bozell, and Russell Kirk, the chief spokesmen). Only a pallid case can be made.
The reviewer interprets Ortega’s grand book within a different frame.
It has been customary to read Ortega in bits and then extrapolate for ideological justification. Even George H. Nash in his classic refers to Ortega as a “traditionalist saint.”
Several Ortega claims must be examined:
1. “Ortega was an existentialist.”
A few years ago the reviewer translated Ortega’s “La Rebelion…” alongside Carmen Laforet’s “Nada” in order to analyze the figurative language in both; alongside the hyper-angst emitting from Laforet, Ortega read like a proposition from Bertrand Russell’s “Principia Mathematica.” Part of the problem rests with his “Meditations on Quixote” whereby Ortega cries, “I am I and my circumstance.” But he rejected the “I.” He did not glorify it. For this Spanish empiricist, the “I” refers to one who lives in the world, and works out circumstances (step-by-step) for positive gains. There is great similarity between Ortega’s stance and Misesian (step-by-step) economic analysis (See my IC review #22).
2. “Ortega was a disciple of Burke.”
Burke wistfully looked back to the day of the aristocracy, of the day before the secular, of the day before “progress.” Ortega’s approach is subtle and different. In his words,
No one can imagine that, in the face of this fabulous seething of the masses, it is the aristocratic attitude to be satisfied with making a supercilious grimace, like a fine gentleman of Versailles – the Versailles of the grimaces – does not represent aristocracy; it is the death and dissolution of a magnificent aristocracy. For this reason, the only element of aristocracy left in such beings was the dignified grace with which their necks received the attention of the guillotine; they accepted it as the tumour accepts the lancet.
3. Ortega was anti-science — a regressivist.
Ortega pays homage to scientific and technical innovation. He is totally aware that the Masses enjoy great gains in personal and social development due to the capabilities of highly intelligent individuals. It’s just that the common man doesn’t get it.
…[the mass man]…finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.
4. Ortega blamed liberal democracy as propounded by early classical liberals for the rise of the masses and the resulting consequences.
The problem here has been that critics have discussed Ortega in terms of the symptoms he wrote about, and have not zoned in on what he considered the root cause.
Not that he hid the fact:
…the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention — the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies…This is what State intervention leads to: the peel are converted into fuel to feed the mere machine which is the State. The skeleton eats up the flesh around it. The scaffolding becomes the owner and tenant of the house.
Capaldi interprets the above statement:
Precisely because mass man does not recognize any sense of personal responsibility and does not care to distinguish between the intended and actual consequences of any action, he acquiesces in the control of all social efforts on the part of the state. Deceived into thinking that he is the state, mass man does not see that he will soon be living for the state (or the government), and not it for him.
Nicholas Capaldi, in his magnificent 1988 piece, “Ortega on the Crisis of Western Civilization,” carefully and accurately explicates Ortega on the “liberal democracy” issue. He makes five points that go a long way toward creating a correct Ortegan hermeneutic.
Point #1 — The modern era, the period of rationalist humanism, saw the rise of technicism. While the ascendancy of such was a favorable process for the welfare of mankind, the philosophy behind it was extended to man qua man.
Man consequently believed than he was the center of all things — that he could discover structure itself.
Capaldi: ”Carried into the social and political realm, rationalistic humanism ultimately leads to political radicalism. Utopian social engineering is the social counterpart of industrial technology.”
Point #2 — John Locke’s original conception of freedom and equality, by natural law, had a clear religious basis. In subsequent history, the religious element died. Rationalist humanism took over.
Capaldi: “…rationalist humanism amounts to the attempt to construct civil and political society from an ethical vacuum…Ortega…stressed that a prior normative context was indispensable.”
Point #3 — As rationalist humanism evolved, the pure, “Lockean” concept of liberal democracy did also, into a negative abyss. A paradox ensued.
Capaldi: “The paradox of liberal democracy is that it destroys the foundations on which it itself exists…The danger faced by the society of mass men is that ‘barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.’”
Point #4 – Liberal democracy must be superceded. It should not be destroyed.
Capaldi: “Liberal democracy emerges in the pages of Ortega as a noble sentiment served by a shallow theory.”
Point #5 — For Ortega, there are no viable alternatives to liberal democracy other than superceding it. Certainly the “isms” of history don’t qualify.
Capaldi: “In a prescient remark Ortega lumps bolshevism and fascism together as retrogressive movements based upon failure to take history seriously. Nationalism is dismissed as a ‘passing phase of self-conceit on the part of the least developed of the nations.’”
Thomas Fitzgerald, in a 1996 “First Things” piece, “The Future of Belief,” offers a beautiful arpeggio. Ortega used the term “creencias” to name embedded certitudes and core convictions mankind takes for granted, stuff under your skin, that needs no discussion or elaboration. In what the reviewer feels is one of the best few words ever written on Our Demise, Fitzgerald writes,
The Enlightenment, in breaking with archaic and biblical forms of understanding, had asserted that things are wholly accessible to scrutiny — and hence could be known, described, and explained in direct, comprehensive, and reliable forms. When narrowed into its instrumental uses, however, rationality…fell into the service of a state apparatus and became a means for designing ‘rationalized’ exploitation of man and nature…Dispossessed of our “creencias,” people are left (as Ortega puts it) with a feeling of ’shipwreck.’…Rushing to make new shrines of the natural environment, or computers, or space travel, or ethnicity, or nationalism, we find only ramshackle, one-owner cosmologies offering poor shelter.
The ongoing policy studies and continuous writings associated with the superceding of liberal democracy today, as understood and advocated by Ortega, are only to be found in the libertarian wing of the conservative movement. Even as recently as 20 years ago, Ortegan formulations could be distinguished on the pages of National Review. As William F. Buckley supped with the Kristols, the Ortegan connection waned, and finally ceased. The reviewer does not hold lightly the enormous contributions both NR and Buckley have given to the movement — it’s just a matter of “la vida politica.”
Four clear conceptions of Ortega’s thinking, as reflected by the book under review, can be found in the writings of Albert Jay Nock, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.
Albert Jay Nock, the “forgotten man of the right,” read Ortega correctly as the anti-statist that he was (for a superb article on Nock, IC readers would do well to read Mises Institute’s Jeffrey A. Tucker’s piece.
In Our Enemy,The State, Nock points out that…the “state . . . whether primitive, feudal, or merchant is the organization of political means.” Nock on Ortega:
…[Ortega]…gives a good idea of what may be expected when a third, economically composite, class takes over the mechanism of the state, as the merchant class took it over from the nobility. Surely no better forecast could be made of what is taking place in this country at the moment than, [in Ortega's words]…’The mass-man in fact believes that he is the state, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working, on whatever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it —
disturbs it in any order of things, in politics, in ideas, in industry.’
Kenneth Hoover, author (with others) of “Ideology and Political Life,” accurately identifies Ortega with Michael Oakeshott, but fails to gauge the ideological spectrum in which both
properly belong:
In traditional conservative thought the mass man was the conceptual opposite of the individual living in a properly constituted society. (Reviewer’s note: Hoover should have distinguished between the Old Right and Traditional conservatism. For more on rightist distinctives, see my IC review #20).
As Michael Oakeshott suggests,(spirited by Ortega), …the mass man is not necessarily ignorant, often he is a member of the so-called intellegentsia; he belongs to a class which corresponds exactly with no other class.
Hoover goes on to synthesize both men of the right as believing that, “The mass man has no character: a nation-state of mass men would fall prey to tyranny because they could not supply order in their own lives. Insensitive to authority, they would become slaves to power.”
Aynist Gregory Johnson, writing in the “Daily Objectivist,” creates a tremendous case for Ortegan influence on the protolibertarian Rand. Johnson displays two paragraphs from Ms. Rand’s journal for May 16, 1934. Having copied passages from the last chapter of “The Revolt of the Masses,” she then writes in two paragraphs:
The new conception of the State that I want to defend is the State as a means, not an end: a means for the convenience of the higher type of man. The State as the only organization. Within it — all have to remain individuals. The state, not as a slave of the great numbers, but precisely the contrary, as the individual’s defense against great numbers. To free man from the tyranny of numbers.”
The fault of liberal democracies: giving full rights to quantity (majorities), they forget the rights of quality, which are much higher rights.
On her notes for The Fountainhead, she writes, “Until man’s ’self’ regains its proper position, life will be what it is now: flat, gray, empty, lacking in all beauty, all fire, all enthusiasm, all meaning, all creative urge. That is the ultimate theme of the book — Howard Roark as the remedy for all modern ills.”
Gregory Johnson: “It is seldom possible to make an airtight case for intellectual influence, but if Rand first conceived the moral project of “The Fountainhead” (and all of her subsequent works) while writing her journal entries for May 15 and 16, 1934, she did so in dialogue with Ortega.”
The late genius-economist Murray Rothbard nails down the Libertarian-Ortegan connection by melding Mises and Ortega on “The Romantic as Primitive” (how this man could work so well, and exhibit such understanding, within interdisciplinary frameworks is a marvel). First Mises:
Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason, as well as the condition under which nature has compelled him to live. The romantic is a daydreamer; he easily manages in imagination to disregard the laws of logic and nature. The thinking and rationally acting man tries to rid himself of the discomfort of unsatisfied wants by economic action and work…The romantic…imagines the pleasures of success, but he does nothing to achieve them…
Then Ortega:
This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilization which is ours. Civilization is not ‘just there,’ it is not self-supporting. It is artificial…if you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization — you are done.
(The IC reader would do well to read the Rothbard piece in its entirety.)
The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset is a classic in the Old Right-Libertarian-Paleoconservative tradition.
It should be read that way.
Freedom’s forgotten man
Freedom’s forgotten man
By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, December 4, 2004
Albert Jay Nock, a brilliant writer and editor who proudly called himself a “philosophical anarchist” and died in 1945, is revered today as one of America’s giants of individualism.
Links to Nock’s writings — including his 1935 masterwork, “Our Enemy the State” — can be easily found at Internet sites such as lewrockwell.com. But to learn why Nock is still important, I called columnist Sheldon Richman, author of books such as “Separating School & State.”
Richman edits The Freeman magazine, which is published by the Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org), an organization near New York City that exists solely to promote the values Nock held so dear — individual freedom, private property, limited government and free trade. He was at his home in Conway, Ark.
Q: Why should anyone who cares about freedom know about Albert J. Nock?
A: The reason they should know about Albert J. Nock is that he gets to some of the most basic principles that concern the issues of power versus liberty. He was heavily influenced by the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who wrote a book called “The State.” What Nock picked up from that is that there are two ways to organize society, what he called “the political means” and “the economic means.”
The economic means is what we know of as production and trade. The political means is the confiscation or expropriation of economic goods by some superior power. Nock goes back over history and looks at history as a struggle between liberty and power, between the economic means the political means, and that makes a lot of issues very, very clear when you look at things that way.
Q: What’s an example that demonstrates this difference?
A: All of the issues surrounding free trade versus protectionism are examples of this. But open the paper and just about any public issue being discussed can be analyzed this way. What people seem to forget, and this is why Nock is so important, is that anything the government does has to involve the threat of violence in order to take something from somebody who has produced that thing — money, of course, usually — and give it to someone who hasn’t produced it. What Nock does is remind us that the essence of government is the threat of violence. Whether you think government’s necessary and good is a different issue. First of all, let’s get straight about what government is. That’s the first thing Nock does for us.
Q: Can you sum up Nock’s political beliefs — and are they the same as yours?
A: Number one, they’re very much the same as mine. To sum up his belief, he would say that social power — by which he means voluntary cooperation, which is the marketplace — is good, and political power — or what he calls “coercive cooperation,” which really isn’t cooperation when you think about it — is bad. To the extent that society is organized along the lines of social power and voluntary cooperation, you have a good society, and to the extent it’s organized along the opposite principles, you have a bad society.
Q: Do you define this as “libertarianism” or 19th-century “classic liberalism” or what?
A: Classical liberalism and libertarianism are very similar. The way I think of it is that libertarianism is a later evolutionary state of classical liberalism. It’s a much more rigorous philosophy. Classical liberalism is less rigorous, but it certainly is in the same spirit of individualism: that the individual’s life is important, and he ought to be able to run it, and that society more or less runs itself as people run their own lives. Also, that any governance, whether we call it formal government or some other name, ought to have as its only goal, its only function, the keeping of the civil peace, so that free individuals can otherwise go about their business.
Q: Frederick Foer of the New Republic wrote last week that Nock was “a classic conservative who views the values of the past as superior to the present.” Did Foer accurately describe Nock?
A: Some of what he had to say was right about Nock. You need to separate things here. Nock was very concerned about the state of the culture and people’s moral values, and he thought that the New Deal and the growing state had done a lot to erode an older ethic of individualism and self-reliance. I think he was right about that.
He did not call himself a conservative. I think he still thought of himself as a liberal, though he knew that word had been co-opted during the Progressive Era. He called himself an “old liberal.”
Q: William F. Buckley Jr. was heavily influenced by Nock and even knew him. But has Nock been forgotten or repudiated by today’s conservatives, as Foer contends?
A: I think the new generation of conservatives probably don’t even know about him. He would be out of step with the conservative movement as Buckley founded it and as it’s developed. It’s kind of ironic, because in his younger days Buckley regarded himself as an anarchist, which Nock called himself in some places.
Nock wrote an essay called “On Doing the Right Thing,” where he’s very clear that the only way people will gain a moral education is by being free. That is not a very typical American conservative view these days, where they want the state to be the teacher of moral values. Nock would repudiate that. He, I think, would be sick about what’s going on in the name of conservatism.
Q: Is Nock’s greatest legacy “Our Enemy the State”?
A: He wrote some other good things. “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man” is a wonderfully written book and has some beautiful observations about freedom and life. It’s very enjoyable reading. But I think Nock’s monument to political philosophy and history is “Our Enemy the State.”
Q: What would Nock think about the role of government and the mass culture today?
A: I think he would be appalled by the war mongering that’s going on. He would have been appalled by the decades of U.S. meddling in foreign countries, which in my view, has caused us to suffer the problems we have been suffering. He’d be appalled at the size of the state, and that (President) Bush can use the rhetoric of small government while we have seen spending growth unprecedented since the time of Lyndon Johnson. Nock was a pessimist in 1935 and up until the time of his death, and I think he’d really be in the depths of his pessimism today.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_279542.html
Restraining Democracy
February 15, 2006, 9:49 a.m.
Restraining Democracy
Our love affair with democracy is here and there unrequited. Sixty years ago the essayist Albert Jay Nock remarked that if you freeze a frame on a member of the American clerisy you will find his mouth open having uttered the syllables “demo.” In the second frame, he’ll have closed his mouth on the syllables “cracy.” In a desperate attempt retroactively to challenge the election of January 25, we are now contending that it was not really pure democracy, because voters were confused by the presence of third-party candidates and partnerships, all of which had the effect of augmenting the Hamas vote, etc. etc. etc.
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But the hard fact of the matter is that next Saturday, the new government of Palestine will take charge, and the majority of votes in that Authority’s legislature will be those of Hamas. This is an event of colossal importance in the sinuous path toward livable arrangements in the Near East. Something has to happen. Either Hamas has to be castrated, or it has to be stopped. By military action? God save us, the U.S. and Israel have come up with a military solution in drag.
The idea is to starve the Palestine Authority into undoing the results of its election by declining frontier payments to Palestine from Israel (they yield about $55 million a month). Simultaneously, you suspend all U.S. contributions to Palestine, leaving the Authority with a mere $100,000 in monthly cash from supporters abroad. This is nickels and dimes, and in a matter of weeks, Palestine would not be able to pay the salaries of 140,000 employees critical to the maintenance of civil order.
Where do we go from there?
Well, it just happens that the French and the Russians (they make up two actors in the Quartet of which the U.S. and the UN are members) hove in over the weekend. The rule had been, since the January election, that Hamas would need to reform its charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel. Something less than that, say the French and the Russians: If Hamas will just agree to enter into conversation with the west, without exactly renouncing its pledge to destroy Israel, that will be enough for a start. What we need is jaw jaw, to avert wah wah, as Churchill counseled in 1954.
The hulking monster in the background of all this is Iran. The mullahs there could finance the basic requirements of a Hamas-dominated Palestine with one’s day’s pumping of oil. This development truly horrifies the diplomats. The annexation of the Hamas’s program by the implacably hell-bent Iran would be a long step in the realization of nightmare.
And with only Iraq and Jordan in between, we are in Egypt. And there, lively in the political womb, is a bumptious child bursting to celebrate the birth of democracy in Egypt.
We are dealing with a movement that decades ago was illegalized by the Egyptian government. But the Muslim Brotherhood persisted and in the parliamentary election last fall showed their gathering strength. Accordingly, on the same weekend in which Hamas faced economic ostracism, Mubarak announced a postponement by two years of scheduled local elections. This was a visible sign of fright, that democracy was on the move, and that a religious organization which has engaged in violent activities, and is banned, threatens the plans of Mubarak, which were to hand Egypt over to his son. Observers with minimal liberal sensibilities welcome most moves against Mubarak, but not any move against him, because he has stayed outside the clutches of the Islamic totalists and because his country was the first Mideast power to acknowledge and to respect Israeli independence. The prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood overwhelming Egypt and collaborating with the mullahs’ Iran reminds us of the risks that democracy can bring.
It is a bitter pill to swallow, to see the United States and Israel forthrightly attempting to subvert democracy in Palestine. But the first law in this sermon is that democracy’s fruits sometimes need either to be stillborn or else to be resisted.
Albert Jay Nock news
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The Very Heart and Soul of Conservatism is Libertarianism
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” ~ Ronald Reagan
Read more of Ronald Reagan’s views on Libertarianism from this interview he did in 1975. At that time, Reagan used the term “libertarian-conservative” to describe his political philosophy. Reagan’s record, while generally conservative, was not particularly libertarian, but one’s administrative decisions, constrained as they are by existing laws, institutions, and politics, do not necessarily mirror one’s underlying philosophy (consider Mitt Romney when governing the very liberal state of Massachusetts). This interview gives an interesting glimpse into the real Ronald Reagan.
Another good quote from Ronald Reagan, “I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.”
Snoring as a Fine Art
Here is that passage that explains why Albert Jay Nock called his book Snoring as a Fine Art:
Snoring should be regarded as a fine art and respected accordingly. If this be admitted, I might suggest further that our civilization does not so regard it, as it should, and gives the practice no encouragement, but rather the contrary.
Consequently one might with reason think that there is too little snoring done—snoring with a purpose to guide it, snoring deliberately directed towards a salutary end which is otherwise unattainable—and that our society would doubtless be better off if the value of the practice were more fully recognized. In our public affairs, for instance, I have of late been much struck by the number of persons who professedly had something. The starry-eyed energumens of the New Deal were perhaps the most conspicuous examples; each and all, they were quite sure they had something. They had a clear premonition of the More Abundant Life into which we were all immediately to enter by the way of a Planned Economy. It now seems, however, that the New Deal is rapidly sinking in the same Slough of Despond which closed over poor Mr. Hoover’s head, and that the More Abundant Life is, if anything, a little more remote than ever before.
I do not disparage their premonition or question it; I simply suggest that the More Abundant Life might now be appreciably nearer if they had put enough confidence in their premonition to do a great deal less thinking, planning, legislating, organizing, and a great deal—oh yes, a very great deal—more snoring.
These essays were first put in book form in 1958.
Others esays include: “Life, Liberty, and …,” “Utopia in Pennsylvania,” “Advertising and Liberal Literature,” “Henry George,” “What the American Votes For,” “The Purpose of Biography,” “The King’s Jester: Modern Style,” “Alas, Poor Yorick,” “If Only,” “Epstean’s Law,” “Sunday in Brussels.”
Albert Jay Nock is one of the 20th century’s great writers and essayists, a thinker of immense power who was also a tremendous advocate of liberty. These essays are among his finest work.
Buckley, Nock, and The Nation
From Victor Navasky’s NYT review of two books by or about William F. Buckley (thanks to Scott Lahti for an early link to the piece):
It is probably no accident, as the old-left journals used to say, that both Buckley and Carey McWilliams, The Nation’s longtime editor, were fans of Albert Jay Nock, who after briefly working at The Nation in the 1920s went on to found his own libertarian magazine called The Freeman (the rights to which Buckley sought unsuccessfully to buy when he began National Review). Nock started out as a left-wing anarchist and bohemian, but he metamorphosed into an anti-egalitarian who believed that journals of opinion were aimed at what he called the Remnant, the enlightened few who would influence the many.
“Bohemian” is a better description of Nock’s one-time American Magazine colleague John Reed; Nock was more of an anti-institutionalist than a party animal, and he remained one to the end (just look at the passages on marriage and organized religion in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man). “Left-wing anarchist” is misleading as well: Nock was an individualist anarchist heavily influenced by Henry George. He was far from being an anarcho-syndicalist, which is what “left-wing anarchist” might be taken to mean. Navasky probably doesn’t mean to suggest that, but the contrast he wants to draw between the the early and the late Nock is not accurate. The sharp contrast is between the Tolstoyan sensibility of the pre-World War I Nock and the partly Cram-inspired pessimistic Nock of later years.
Buckley’s relationship to Nock is pretty well known — WFB Sr. was a friend of AJN, and WFB Jr. often paid homage to Nock — but I had not known about Carey McWilliam’s admiration for him.
Postscript: For what it’s worth — we Nock aficionados can be a punctilious lot — Navasky’s dates are wrong, too. Nock worked for The Nation during World War I, not the 1920s, and even got the magazined censored when he wrote critically about Samuel Gompers. Bad for the labor-business-government war effort, don’t ya know. He launched The Freeman, with Francis Neilson as co-editor (in name, at least), in 1920.
http://toryanarchist.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/nockians-left-and-right/
