There was an eerie confirmation of Weber’s thesis in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s musings about a “politics of meaning.” Neither she nor others who took up the phrase can begin to explain what that politics might be, but it is clearly the mood of politics as religion, the mood, therefore, of Sixties student radicalism. In 1969, Hillary Rodham gave the student commencement address at Wellesley in which, speaking for her class, she said that “for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible…. We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction.” She said her class had “feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode[s] of living.” She spoke of dissent and protest as “unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.”6 The themes of the Port Huron Statement are there: a politics that accomplishes the impossible (i.e., creates Utopia); the remaking of human nature; opposition to capitalism; flight from the mundane; and dissent as a means of finding an (authentic) identity.
A lot of people, and not just students, talked that way back then. It would be unjust to criticize a person today for speaking the nonsensical language of political religiosity that was typical of that generation. Twenty-four years later, however, speaking at the University of Texas, and now the wife of the President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton said that “remolding society certainly in the West is one of the great challenges facing all of us.” She mentioned alienation, despair, and hopelessness, and said we are “in a crisis of meaning.” She called for “a new politics of meaning” that would answer questions such as “What do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today’s world mean? … What do all of our institutions mean? What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be a journalist? What does it mean in today’s world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human?” She wanted “a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”7 Nobody knew what that sort of blather meant in the Sixties and nobody knows now. We do know what it is about, however; it is about self and the attempt to give life meaning through the quest for a vaguely imagined Utopia. The religious impulse is obvious, but it is only an impulse, a religious feeling without structure.
According to journalist Michael Kelly, Ms. Clinton agrees that she is searching for a “unified-field theory of life.”8 He notes that her Wellesley and Texas speeches “share all the same traits: vaulting ambition, didactic moralizing, intellectual incoherence and the adolescent assumption that the past does not exist and the present needs only your guiding hand to create the glorious future.”9
There is in the politics of meaning, at least as expressed by the inventor of the phrase, Rabbi Michael Lerner, a tinge of totalitarianism. Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, as a student headed the Berkeley chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, roomed with Jerry Rubin, became part of a network of young activists that included Tom Hayden. Lerner now says things like: “For any of his [Clinton’s] programs to work, he must explicitly and consciously confront the ethos of selfishness that has been dominating this country in the 1980s and generate in its place an ethos of caring, an ethos of social responsibility, an ethos of community, an ethos of connectedness to each other. That view of the world must replace the old ethos.”10 The “ethos” Lerner describes is consistent with his youthful radicalism’s coercive phase. Lerner has suggested such things as having the Labor Department order “[e]very workplace” in America “to create a mission statement explaining its function and what conception of the common good it is serving and how it is doing so.”11 No doubt self-criticism sessions in every workplace will follow.
Ms. Clinton is by no means unique. She is discussed here because in 1969 she was representative of the Sixties generation just as today she is typical of the intellectuals of modern liberalism, and because she is a highly visible illustration of Weber’s thesis.
If Ms. Clinton shares one other characteristic of modern liberalism…hostility to bourgeois culture and society…she has not said so recently, though it often seems implicit in her words. Modern liberalism forms what Lionel Trilling called an “adversary culture.” The components of that culture, according to Stanley Rothman and his coauthors, are alienation from the American system and lack of concern about threats to the regime.12 “Radical egalitarians are likely to take a more relaxed view of foreign adversaries and crime than are adherents to other political cultures. It is not that they necessarily regard the threats as less significant. Rather, given their hostility to the system, such threats do not concern them.”13 They may even welcome them.
What I have called radical individualism, Rothman calls “expressive individualism”: “In the 1920s, expressive individualism became the ideology of the American intellectual, serving as a debunking tool for disassembling the status quo…. Part and parcel of the good life for the intellectual strata thus became the free expression of individual desires and pursuit of individual passions. The core of this concept is the priority given to free, unfettered expression of impulses, assumed to be good in and of themselves.”14 I suggest that the attitude described went back well before the Roaring Twenties, probably into the 1890s, and that its explosion in the Sixties was delayed only by two world wars, the Great Depression, and the smaller size of the academic community prior to the Second World War.
Rothman documents with answers to questionnaires, tests, and extensive interviewing the attitudes he reports, such as that “American intellectuals, however, are overwhelmingly adversarial towards the American system. The dominant institutions that transmit their values are predominantly liberal, and often also adversarial. In any case, conservatives in these occupations are vastly outnumbered.”15 Hatred of America and the West is seen most clearly in American universities, which, as sociologist Paul Hollander remarks, “have since the 1960s become the major resources or reservoirs of the adversary culture.”16 When Yale proposed a program for the study of Western civilization, a professor of English exploded: “Western Civilization? Why not a chair for colonialism, slavery, empire, and poverty?” while a history professor said: “The major export of Western Civilization is violence.”17 Their opposition prevailed. In order to defeat the remaining traditional values in today’s culture, it is necessary to attack the roots of those values in the history of Western civilization.
The stories about hostility to America in the universities are legion, but universities are by no means unique. That same hostility is to be found wherever intellectual modern liberals go…into museums, art galleries, publishing houses, Hollywood, all of the places where ideas and symbols are manufactured and manipulated. Moreover, all intellectuals are aware of their affinity with all others. Frederick Lewis Allen, the popular historian of the 1920s, referred to “[A] newly class-conscious group. The intellectuals of the country…. Few in numbers though they were, they were highly vocal, and their influence not merely dominated American literature but filtered down to affect by slow degrees the thought of the entire country.”18
This “filtering down” is not a mechanical process in which ideas of intellectuals just happen to come to the attention of the general public. It is instead a conscious effort on the part of intellectuals to alter Americans’ perceptions of the world and of themselves, an effort, among other things, to weaken or destroy Americans’ attachment to their country and to Western civilization. A major weapon employed in that attack on Western civilization is the fantasizing of past Utopias destroyed by whites. Thus, the myth of the noble native Americans who lived peacefully and in harmony with nature but who were corrupted and destroyed by Europeans is everywhere about us today. (Actually, there are no native Americans. The Indians are immigrants who simply arrived well be
fore the Europeans did. A better name for them might be senior Americans.) This version of Utopia may sometimes be merely sentimental nonsense; more often it is a weapon in the moral assault on this society and its institutions.
Not too long ago the Smithsonian Institution mounted an impressive display of paintings and sculptures depicting America’s western expansion. The title gave a warning: “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920.” The texts that accompanied the art were an extended diatribe about the greed and evil of whites. For example, Frederic Remington’s painting The Fight for the Water Hole, showing five cowboys defending a water hole against Indians, must be interpreted according to the world of those who purchased such paintings, “wealthy industrialists uneasy about social change in the urban East. The industrial era they had created required the importation of foreign labor, which frequently reacted to miserable living and working conditions by challenging the owners of industry. Substitute immigrants or laborers for Indians in Fight for the Water Hole and one has revealed a very different kind of frontier than the one these paintings have been thought to represent.”
The bashing of whites, capitalism, and American history was so relentless that historian and former librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in the guestbook,” A perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive exhibit. No credit to the Smithsonian.”19 There was so much adverse commentary that the museum arranged a panel discussion of the exhibit. The participants were almost all art historians from universities, which is a little like asking Damon for an evaluation of Pythias. Their view was that the commentary was justified. One of them said, “This was a war between two cultures and the inferior culture won.”
Political correctness is rampant at the Smithsonian. It planned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the atom bombing of Hiroshima that brought the Pacific war to an end by displaying the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb. But the commentary to accompany the exhibit said, “For most Americans … it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.” No doubt that explained, to the satisfaction of the museums staff of social historians, why Japan had been waging a bloody war of aggression against China for years before its surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. There was no mention of Japanese atrocities in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The commentary was scrapped when congressional hearings were planned, but the two episodes revealed the degree to which the corruption of the universities has moved into other institutions dominated by intellectuals.
The Persian Gulf War brought into view the anti-Americanism of church intellectuals. Many church leaders and their organizations opposed the use of American troops to force Iraq out of Kuwait and, not so incidentally, prevent Saddam Hussein from controlling a large fraction of the worlds oil. Some of this might have been religious pacifism, but that fails to explain why so many religious leaders remained silent about Iraq’s use of force to conquer another nation but condemned the U.S. use of force in response. Distrust of U.S. power and intentions are shown as well by the frequent call to put our armed forces under United Nations command rather than under American control. The preference for the United Nations over the U.S. is characteristic of modern liberals. That is probably today’s manifestation of the Sixties belief in the moral superiority of the Third World.
Mainline churches often display double standards. Paul Hollander notes that the concern churches expressed for Third World nations and groups allegedly harmed or threatened by the United States is to be contrasted with “the relative indifference these activist and globally involved churches have shown toward Afghanistan and the suffering of its people [under Soviet attack], perhaps because those sufferings did not offer possibilities for holding the United States, the West, capitalism, or the multinational corporations responsible.”20
It may be objected that many or even most persons on university faculties or other intellectual class institutions do not hold the views or display the fanaticisms described. But for liberalism to do its work and win its victories it is not necessary that they should. Institutions are regularly politicized by minorities within them. “Morson’s Law,” framed by Slavic scholar Gary Saul Morson, puts the tipping point at no more than 20 percent.21 Activists are willing to spend much more time and energy politicizing than others are willing to spend resisting, and much of the faculty will “fall in line with the activists out of sheer conformist fear of being deemed retrograde.”
So uniform is the antagonism of the intellectual class to the United States and the West that it calls for explanation. Intellectuals, after all, have not always expressed hostility to the societies in which they lived. This fact is sometimes taken to mean that something in the nature of intellectuals has changed, that the sheer perversity of modern intellectuals is to be contrasted with the healthy integration of past intellectuals into their societies. That may not be the correct interpretation. It may be in the nature of intellectuals to oppose, but prior to the closing decades of the eighteenth century, open opposition was often not safe and certainly not prudent. Schumpeter makes the point that prior to the Enlightenment intellectuals were few in number and dependent upon the support of the Church or some great patron: “the typical intellectual did not relish the idea of the stake which still awaited the heretic.” They preferred honors and comfort which could be had only from “princes, temporal or spiritual.”22 What freed them was the invention of the printing press and the rise of the bourgeoisie, which enabled intellectuals to find support from a new patron, the mass audience. Schumpeter places the decline of the importance of the individual patron in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.23 James Gardner, art editor for the National Review; says that artists began to direct their anger at the bourgeois state three generations after the French Revolution.24 The modern universities, foundations, museums, etc. have provided patrons for tens of thousands of disaffected intellectuals. Perhaps, then, intellectuals were always potentially hostile to the social order in which they lived but were held in check by self-interest until the public relieved them of their dependence on private patrons and the bourgeois state lost the will to suppress.
It is notable that today intellectual and moral attack on the bourgeois state and culture comes almost entirely from the left. Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset states that over time the political and cultural stances of intellectuals have shifted. Much of intellectual criticism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was aimed at crude materialism and the vulgar taste of a democratic society. “Increasingly, however, during the twentieth century, the critical stance of the intellectuals, including first the social scientists and later the humanists within the university, took the form of a predominant sympathy for antiestablishment, liberal-left positions…. They have lent disproportionate support to atheistic, antiwar, civil rights, civil liberties for deviants, liberal Democratic, and third party causes.”25
There are several more or less plausible explanations for that shift. One is, of course, that the steady progress of the egalitarian passion eroded what was essentially an aristocratic disdain for this society so that it became more comfortable to attack the bourgeoisie from the left. Equality is always the cry of the Left. It must also have become increasingly obvious that an aristocratic pose would cost intellectuals any possibility of widespread influence or popularity and, undoubtedly, would diminish material rewards. An assault from an egalitarian position would be far more acceptable.
Schoeck thinks the intellectual’s leftism is often due to envy avoidance. Not only do people feel envy, they fear being envied. The more distinguished a man is, the more reason he has to fear envy, which may account for the number of intellectuals and artists who have been not only leftist but have dallied with communism. The substitute for religion is apparent.
As in a Christian world where all shared the same belief, anyone, regardless of his worldly status or position, could regard
himself as connected with his neighbor and reconciled with him through the transcendent God, and, furthermore he might not even envy him because to do so would reflect on God’s wisdom; so the agnostic twentieth-century intellectual seeks a new god, promising the same protection as the Christian God’s against the next man’s envy (often only suspected) and the same freedom from the consuming sense of guilt engendered by his personal superiority. This substitute god is progressivist ideology or, more precisely, the Utopia of a perfectly egalitarian society. It may never come true, but a mere mental pose of being in its favour helps to bear the guilt of being unequal.26
Intellectuals will not like that explanation of their liberalism, just as they will not like any of the others offered here. That may be the reason, Schoeck suggests, that envy is so little mentioned in the social science of this century, particularly in the United States. He thinks that blind spot is not accidental, and he notes the common resentment of this society by social scientists.
The common denominator for this discontent, this unrest, is the egalitarian impulse; most of the problems experienced or imagined by such minds would theoretically be solved in a society of absolute equals. Hence the constant and strangely tenacious preoccupation of Anglo-Saxon social science with models and programmes for a society of absolute equals. The Utopian desire for an egalitarian society cannot, however, have sprung from any other motive than that of an inability to come to terms with one’s own envy, and/or with the supposed envy of one’s less well-off fellow men.27
There are other possibilities, of course. Perhaps the movement to the left was due to a combination of the intellectuals’ hostility to bourgeois society and their well-known tendency to admire power and even brutality. We tend to forget that there was burgeoning sympathy for fascism of both the Italian and German varieties among intellectuals until that became a dangerous sentiment to express during World War II. The most powerful influence on intellectuals came earlier and lasted longer. The Russian Revolution of 1917 exemplified brutal power attacking traditional and capitalistic societies from the left. Communism being the only effective enemy of bourgeois society, and being Utopian and egalitarian into the bargain, intellectuals moved left. That many of them became not merely sympathizers or fellow travelers but Party members, a few even spies for the Soviet Union, testifies to the enormous pull of the rhetoric and ideals of the left upon intellectuals. That phase is over but we still face the active hostility of much of the intellectual class to traditional culture. The results of that hostility are partially spelled out in the remainder of this book.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 11
