Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  It was a recapitulation in the New World of the history of nineteenth-century European philosophy. The standard textbook progression was reenacted, in mini-terms. “From Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche” became “from Dewey to Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse.”

  The men and women growing up in the 1920s and ’30s, the first large-scale group of Americans to be reared in Progressive schools, had been rendered incapable of offering their future children any intellectual guidance. As it happened, their children, growing up in the postwar years, were the first generation to be exposed to the new irrationalist trend. These children became the rebels of the sixties.

  Brought up in an age when the masks were being dropped, the rebels denounced the traditional hypocrisies and cover-ups. For the first time in a century of American history, ideas—the ideas that had been increasingly in the ascendancy among the intellectuals since the Civil War—did not remain discreetly semihidden in the background of events, but moved forthrightly onto center stage.

  The cultural manifestations which resulted could not be dismissed as the theoretical projection of an alarmist; they were actually happening. They could not be dismissed as an old-world nightmare; they were happening here. They could not be dismissed as the accidental product of a single clique, political or otherwise; they were obviously the expressions of a philosophy, because they were showing up in every area—in the art galleries, the theaters, the elementary schools, the research laboratories, the colleges, the streets. In every area, with the clarity of a textbook, one impulse stood out to define the goal of the new spirit.

  In the visual arts, according to critic Harold Rosenberg, an admirer of the trend, the

  revolutionary phrase of ‘doing away with’ was heard with the frequency and authority of a slogan. The total elimination of identifiable subject matter was the first in a series of moves—then came doing away with drawing, with composition, with color, with texture; later with the flat surface, with art materials.... In a fervor of subtraction art was taken apart element by element and the parts thrown away.6

  The “theatrical principles” of Absurdist drama, explains a guide written for college students,

  are primarily reductive (not only anti-Aristotelian like Brecht but anti-play): characters are reduced almost to non-entities ... plot is minimal if there is any, place and time are often reduced to any place and any time, language or dialogue is minimized, made absurd, close to being eliminated....

  The new playwrights, said the Dean of the Yale School of Drama approvingly, “have been attempting to repeal the fundamental law of cause-and-effect which had been an unquestioned statute at least since the Enlightenment—the law that rules the linear, logical, rationalistic world of litera ture....”7

  The new educators attempted a similar repeal. Completing the work of their Progressive predecessors, they dispensed in their “open classrooms” with tests, grades, dress rules, spelling, grammar, arithmetic, student attendance, teacher “interference” and/or any organized subject matter—which left their students free to choose, for credit, from an array of “relevant” offerings, including (these are actual examples) Hip Lit, Things Russian, Ecology, Weaving, and Treasonable Activities. Parents in one New York school protested that their children would not learn to read or write under the new policies; “[t]he teachers,” says Charles Silberman, author of Crisis in the Classroom, “gave them a lecture on not being so uptight about basic skills, told them the kids’ feelings were all that mattered.”8

  “[N]othing less is required,” wrote a professorial admirer of the new attitude, “than the subversion of the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness.”

  The avant-garde scientists did not need further subversion. “We will study physics as an example of many of the contradictions of life,” said an announcement put out by the Department of Physics of New York University, describing a course to be taught by a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia.

  “What the hell are you studying anyhow?” an interviewer asked a junior at Harvard, who had just declared his belief in astrology, tarot cards, and the I Ching. “Physics,” replied the student. “You’re kidding!” “I’m not kidding. I’m studying physics, and there’s a lot in elemental particles that’s weirder than astrology.” Judging by recent developments in particle physics the student’s last statement is true; what it indicates, however, is not the nature of the universe, but of the student’s teachers, and of the theoreticians who taught them.9

  There was also the new trend of the period in the study of man and society. “Subjective Sí! Objective No!” the Times titled a piece by Robert Nisbet, a sociologist alarmed by “the very recently begun, fast-accumulating nihilistic repudiation in the social sciences of the ancient Western ideal of dispassionate reason, of objective inquiry....” (Among other symptoms, Nisbet cited the growing belief by younger social scientists in “the necessary ethnic roots of science,” a belief which he compared, correctly, to the theory of “Aryan science.”)10 And there was the new journalism, which deliberately blurred the distinction between reporting and fiction; the new music, which was atonal and arrhythmic; the new dance, which dispensed with meaning, music, and even movement; the serious novels, which dispensed with seriousness or values, specializing instead in “put-ons” and “black humor”; and the modern movies, which offered spectacles of Satanic cults or obsessive gore-spilling or wriggling genitalia or the deliberately unintelligible or filthy language spewed by ratlike actors scratching themselves lazily and urinating onscreen.

  If all of it made anybody sick he could consult the new therapists, who promised people inner harmony to be achieved by such techniques as “primal” screaming or Indian meditation or going to “encounter” group-gropes in Southern California or going to bed with the therapist or going mad.

  There was also the political expression of all the above, the heirs of generations of liberal reformists, the new advocates of “love” and of “the people”: the college students of the New Left; the students who blew their noses in the American flag or wore it to patch the seat of their pants, while acclaiming Oriental gurus, French criminals, Russian anarchists, and Cuban killers; the students who rejected physical reality in favor of a superior world to be reached by “tripping out” or parapsychology or UFO’s or witchcraft; the students who demanded, here on earth, the end of the influence of the past: the end of the selfish “performance principle” (i.e., of the need to work for a living), the end of man’s conquest of nature, the end of the Industrial Revolution, the end of the last remnants of “the system,” the American system with everything it implies.

  What kind of society was to replace the American system? What positive goal justified all the negative demands? What was the rebels’ program? “We haven’t any,” declared youth leader Tom Hayden in 1968. “First we will make the revolution, and then we will find out what for.”11

  Some observers at the time criticized the “excesses” of the New Left, if not its principles. They were answered by the head of the English Department of Columbia University. “At this moment in American history,” he wrote in 1970, “the praise of moderation, even of ‘liberal humaneness and rational discourse,’ is just a bit priggish and is a form of aggression against the young.”12

  In every area—from paintings of Brillo boxes to actors stuffing their heads into toilet bowls onstage, to “dances” performed by thalidomide victims, to bloody campus riots, to scholars kissing thugs—the “spirit of the sixties” was a culmination, which had been made possible by earlier trends. It was the consistent, full-fledged expression of the impulse that defines “cultural modernism.” It was “Weimar culture” replayed fifty years later, stripped of any nineteenth-century vestiges and therefore incalculably more degraded in form, with nothing to conceal the hatred at its root or the lust for destruction. It was the field day of nihilism in the New World.

  “From my own very extensive investigations,” wr
ites a Michigan historian, comparing the American youth-culture of the sixties to the German youth movement before 1933, “I can categorically assert that there is not one value, not a single slogan, not a posture or costume, not a technique or political or cultural position which was not manifested in that earlier movement.”13

  In Germany, the nihilist impulse had been unleashed, nourished, and protected by a line of intellectuals and philosophers, a line resting ultimately on the ideas of one figure. Was it the same in America? Here are some voices relevant to the answer.

  The theater of the past, said Absurdist director Julian Beck in New York City in 1967, “is a theater whose presentation and appeal is intellectual.” But the intellect, he went on, is inherently twisted and unreliable: “our thinking, conditioned by our already conditioned minds, is so corrupt that it is not to be trusted.”

  “No serious thinker any longer believes in a verifiable, objective reality,” an Arizona newsman told a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1971. “In epistemology and natural science,” he said, “it’s been pretty well proven that there’s no such thing as objectivity. There are only different patterns of subjectivity....”

  What the “counter culture” undertakes, wrote a historian defending the new youth, “is to attack men at the very core of their security by denying the validity of everything they mean when they utter the most precious word in their vocabulary: the word ‘I.’ ”14

  It is Kant, above all others, who taught that the mind by its nature is “conditioned” and that thinking, therefore, is untrustworthy. It is Kant’s epistemology which replaced objectivity with “patterns of subjectivity.” It is Kant’s ethics which made the attack on the “I” the essence of the good.

  Here is another voice to consider. “Well. he’s [R.D. Laing] one of the only ones in psychiatry that makes fantasy legitimate,” said a Radcliffe girl approvingly, referring to a British champion of insanity as liberation. “He’s not always knocking you over the head with reality.”15

  “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge,” said the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, “in order to make room for faith.”

  Here is another voice.

  Why is the cult of irrationality, the rejection of all traditional norms, strongest precisely in the best universities? [asked a college professor in 1970, writing in The New York Times]. Why are the students readiest for an apocalyptic leap into an inconceivable and unlikely future those who are now most immediately involved in the study of the humanities? ... The answer is not simple .... 16

  The answer is virtually contained in the question. It is what those universities in their humanities departments are teaching the students. The answer is as simple as the fact that the leading Harvard philosopher is Willard V. Quine, who—quietly and for decades—has taught his classes that physical objects are “comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.... [T]he physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.”17 Once one knows that a generation has been subjected from the start to a culture shaped in every decisive area by this kind of teacher, with almost no voices left to offer an alternative, little else is needed to explain a “cult of irrationality” on campus.

  The men who made it possible for Professor Quine and the rest to take over were William James and John Dewey. Behind them stood Hegel. Behind him stood Kant.

  In every area, the rebels of the sixties accepted and then carried out consistently the philosophic fundamentals of the establishment they cursed. The “spirit of the sixties” was at root the spirit of the eighties—the 1780s, the decade of the Kantian Critiques and of everything they unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

  It was the climax of the Kantian influence in the United States, and, simultaneously, it was the Kantian movement’s death throes.

  The death of a philosophy does not necessarily mean the immediate fading of its spokesmen or slogans, which may continue to rule a culture and exact the consequences for many years. The death of a philosophy means its withdrawal from the realms that in the long run determine the course of human existence: the realm of cognition and the realm of values. In this regard, what Ayn Rand has observed about the collectivist movement in politics applies equally to the whole Kantian tradition: it “lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud....”18

  When a tradition which began as an alleged expression of “pure reason” and stem morality ends up fooling with LSD, “Saint Genet,” and “polymorphous perverse sexuality,” its breach with cognition and with values is complete. The growing disillusionment of the early postwar years marked the beginning of the Kantian end. The convulsion of the sixties was the next step: the declaration of bankruptcy.

  Most Americans (like men everywhere) do not know formal philosophy or even the name of Kant. In some terms during the sixties, however, the majority did grasp—for the first time—that an alien element had entered their culture, that the basic principles of the nation were under attack, that something fundamental was wrong with America’s course.

  Within the limits of their power, people acted on this knowledge. They rebelled against the new breed of rebels, smashing the political hopes of the New Left along with the Presidential candidacy of its fellow traveler, George McGovern. Some, including thousands of New York City construction workers and longshoremen, even took to the streets to break up mobs of unruly student protesters.

  Support came in “from all over the country” and “from all walks of life,” said the head of New York City’s building trades unions in the spring of 1970, citing calls and letters running twenty to one in favor of the workers’ actions. “I don’t care if a person stands on a street comer and tells everybody ‘I don’t like the [Vietnam] war,’ I don’t like it either,” said an elevator constructor from Brooklyn, explaining why he was taking part in the workers’ demonstrations. “But when they try to ruin the country and desecrate the flag, I can’t stand it.”

  “Communism must be fought every place,” said a black worker from the Bronx. “A stop should be put to all this violence by kids.”

  “I’m scared,” said a college freshman and would-be rebel, eyeing a group of flag-waving workers. “If this is what the class struggle is all about, there’s something wrong somewhere.” 19

  The student’s teachers had miscalculated. They did not know why the country was shoving them and their disciples into the discard heap of history. They did not understand that the American people are not a Marxist proletariat, but the last heirs of the era of Enlightenment left on earth.

  Eager to find a new direction, the people turned to the political right.

  There was no one there. All they found was Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

  The American people may oppose the nation’s present course, but by themselves the people cannot change it. They may oppose the taxes and the bureaucrats, but these are merely consequences, which cannot be significantly cut back so long as their source is untouched. The people may curse “big government” in general—but to no avail if the pressure groups among them, following the logic of a mixed economy, continue to be fruitful and to multiply. The people may “swing to the right,” but it is futile, if the leaders of the right are swinging to their own (religious) brand of statism. The country may throw the rascals out, but it means nothing if the next administration is made of neo-rascals from the other party.

  To change a nation’s basic course requires more than a mood of popular discontent. It requires the definition of a new direction for the country to take. Above all, it requires a theoretical justification for this direction, one which would convince people that the proposed course is practical and moral. Moral considerations alone might not be sufficient to move men, if they believe the course being urged is impractical; practical considerations alone will not move m
en, if they believe the course is immoral. The union of the two, however, is irresistible.

  By its nature, changing the course of a nation is a task that can be achieved only by men who deal with the field of ideas. In the long run the people of a country have no alternative: they end up following the lead of the intellectuals.

  The intellectuals cannot escape ideas, either. They may become anti-ideological skeptics, who offer the country for guidance only subjective feelings and short-range pragmatism; but it is the ideas—ultimately, the basic ideas—they still accept, explicitly or otherwise, which determine the content of their feelings and of their pragmatism. In the long run the intellectuals, too, have no alternative: they end up following the lead of the philosophers.

  If there is no new philosophy to guide and rally the better men among them, the intellectuals will follow one that is old and bankrupt. If there are no living ideas, they will follow dying ones and take the country with them. The shambles of the Kantian movement, therefore, does not necessarily mean an early end to its stranglehold over the nation’s life and institutions. In the absence of any principled opposition, the Kantian ideas by default will continue to rule, and to move us further down the road on which, for so many years, we have been traveling.

  The more brazen elements of the sixties are long gone now. What has endured and become still clearer is the nature of that road.