Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  As government controls and the power of political pull have soared, many Americans have come to feel—some reluctantly, others righteously—that survival requires identification with a group, which can serve as one’s refuge in an uncertain world, one’s protector from the other groups, and one’s lobbyist in Washington. The easiest group to form or to join is one defined by race.

  Thus the fading of the New World’s legendary “melting pot,” which had once demonstrated that men from around the globe could live together in harmony; the harmony had followed from the principle that group ties did not have to matter, because in America self-reliance was possible and individual accomplishment was the source of rewards. Instead, we see the oldest kind of social splintering and sectarian hatred. We see the “unmeltable ethnics,” the “hyphenated-Americans,” the “roots”-seekers through genealogy, and all the others eager to define their identity in terms of ancestral tradition and/or brute physiology, i.e., blood.

  This is the emergence in the United States of the most primitive form of collectivism, the form endemic to backward cultures (and to controlled economies): tribal racism. Racism is what takes over anywhere—wherever the knowledge of the nature and possibilities of man, man the individual, has not yet been grasped, or is being battered into oblivion.

  The batterers state their viewpoint clearly.

  There is not now, there never was, there never will be, a solitary autonomous self, apart from society [writes an intellectual defending the ethnic movement]. The human being is a social network, necessarily dependent and psychically interrelated, a social organism, a political animal. The self is not an ‘I’ but a ‘we.’

  (The author of the above, Michael Novak, is not a Communist or a political radical, but a Catholic and a moderate.)20

  If some voices today urge a return to tribalism, others are working to ensure that the tribes subsist on an appropriate level. These voices demand that material progress be limited, that economic growth be ended, that living standards be lowered, that the unprecedented achievements of Western technology be fought, cut back, swept aside.

  This is the phenomenon that first erupted in the romanticist circles of nineteenth-century Europe: the war against the Industrial Revolution. The war has the same underlying motor here. Industrial wealth is a product of human ingenuity, of painstaking thought, of the faculty of reason dedicated to the improvement of man’s life. The attack on such a product has only one meaning: the attack on its source, i.e., on man’s mind.

  The European romanticists identified their theoretical base openly. Today’s ecologists and environmentalists are less philosophical; acting apparently on the idea that the public in an age of uncertainty will accept anything, they claim to speak in the name of science. If one can judge by their cognitive practices, “science” to them means the methodology of the punch-drunk modernists; it means unanalyzed statistics and undigested data dressed in Rube Goldberg formulae, spun into arbitrary projections, and culminating in a series of contradictory “scenarios” predicting the end of the fish, of the balance of nature, or of the world.

  What moral theory underlies the fight to return whole nations to the agony and the life expectancy of subsistence in raw nature? “It is hard to even begin to gauge how much a complication of possessions, the notions of ‘my and mine,’ stand between us and a true, clear, liberated way of seeing the world,” says a member of the Berkeley Ecology Center.

  We must transcend the selfishness inherent in “making man the center of attention,” according to a professorial nature-champion at Claremont; the West has gone too far in upholding “the absolute value of every human individual.” “As Christians we need to develop a new asceticism based not on economics but on ecology.”21

  For generations, American statists had insisted that they were the defenders of science and technology, which, they said, require socialism. Now, in a historic reversal, many are admitting the opposite. They are explaining that what their viewpoint requires is the rejection of science and technology.

  When cultural trends reach so extreme a stage, corollary signs appear. Increasingly, people shrug off as irrelevant to their lives not only science and secular philosophy, but even theology, the subject that attempts to give order and definition to the tenets of supernaturalism. Instead, men start to turn to mankind’s primordial source of guidance: religion. They turn not to a sophisticated religion such as Roman Catholicism, or to any definite, structured creed, but to plain religion, i.e., an inarticulate, pre-philosophical mix of myth, ritual, freewheeling mysticism, and uncomplaining obedience, without concern for definition, consistency, or understanding. Thus, among middle-class American youth, such portents as the Jesus freaks or the Moonies or the chanting, skull-shaven, glassy-eyed Hare Krishnas. Thus also, in the larger society, the spread of the oldtime Fundamentalist and evangelical and Pentecostal movements, with their hot-eyed converts eager to speak in tongues or hurrying to be “born again”—while Billy Graham (or his equivalent) admonishes them “to oppose self, to abase self .... Smash pride, step on it, crush it, mash it, break it ... break down and thresh out and destroy every mountain of self.... Deny yourself.... To deny self is to disown self.”22

  There have been mystic revivals before in the United States, as there have been racial antagonisms and back-to-nature movements. But in earlier years these were comparatively isolated manifestations, cut off from the nation’s intellectual leadership, in conflict with the country’s dominant trend. Such is not the case today.

  Today the religious cultists are at one with the intellectual vanguard in assaulting the essence of the American view of life. They are counting on and working to intensify the feeling of human helplessness. Many of them, who describe themselves as conservative, enthusiastically promote such statist policies as mandatory prayer, censorship, and anti-abortion. The nature-lobbyists are even more explicit. “Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now,” writes one ecologist (Garrett Hardin), “but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment.”

  Today’s statists are not apologizing, but businessmen are eagerly continuing their century-long policy of appeasement. “Free private responsible enterprise?” asked the banner headline of a Mobil ad in The New York Times, with the first two words slashed out. Business freedom and privacy, the text explained, are no longer fully possible or desirable, but this is no cause for corporate concern: “we try to be responsible.... Doing this leaves us no time to fret about being ‘free’ or ‘private.’ ”23

  Marx was wrong: businessmen will not fight to the end to save their property. But Hitler was right: if men have enough “idealism,” he said, they will submit voluntarily, they will beat the dictator to the punch and turn themselves into “dust particles” before he can get around to it.

  Few men in America preach the totalitarian state. What today’s voices, right and left, are fighting for is gradual, successive steps in its direction.

  Germany Puts the Clock Back, says the title of an anti-Nazi book by E.A. Mowrer published in 1933, one of the earliest books to indicate the self-destructive course of the Weimar Republic. We, too, are putting the clock back; back before the era of individualism, before the Industrial Revolution, before the discovery of secular philosophy; and back before freedom.

  One recent development, however, is still worse. The egalitarian movement does not represent a throwback. It represents a demand, mediated by an ethical code that has now reached its climax, for conditions under which men cannot survive at all.

  There must be a new kind of equality in the country, the egalitarians say; not the Founding Fathers’ equality of individual rights, or even the older reformists’ undefined “equality of opportunity,” but a militantly specific “equality of results”; the “results” must be equal for all, regardless of any man’s or group’s efforts, virtues, or merits. Men must be equal in goods and ser
vices, regardless of ability to pay. They must be equal in jobs and promotions, regardless of qualifications or performance (e.g., the quota system). They must be equal in college training regardless of academic preparation (open admissions); in cultural prestige regardless of talent (minority-group art subsidies); in authority regardless of knowledge (Student Power); in moral respectability regardless of behavior (Gay Lib); in credit for achievement regardless of achievement (Women’s Lib).

  A new, modern kind of pressure group is now active in America, defined not by economic function or even by blood, but by a negative, by impotence, inability, deficiency of some kind. We see men who expect special consideration merely because they are minorities, i.e., not numerous or powerful. There are feminist handout-seekers who count on the fact that women are generally thought to be the weaker sex. There are poverty activists, not the poor and the halt of Christian tradition, who asked humbly for alms, but a new breed of militants, who boast that they are not well off and who puff up with resentment that this claim has been ignored. There are homosexual activists who feel righteous because their constituency is not normal, youth activists who feel it because theirs is not mature, old-age activists who feel it because theirs is no longer strong.

  To sacrifice is to renounce or annul a value. Carried out consistently, therefore, the Kantian advocacy of sacrifice had to lead eventually to rule by the losers—by those who, for whatever reason, cannot or choose not to achieve values on their own, but depend instead on the work and effort of others. In a philosophy of sacrifice, the top duty is the negating of values; the top virtue, their nonpossession. Hence the new social conclusion: values properly belong to those who have reached the eminence of not having achieved them.

  As to the non-losers, the men of ability, who do achieve values, such men have no moral claims and deserve nothing, says Harvard philosopher John Rawls, the leading American theorist of egalitarianism. The able, he says, are merely lucky, having been blessed at birth by a desirable social environment and/or by superior natural attributes, such as talent or brain-power. (Rawls, an implicit determinist, does not believe that a man deserves any reward for choosing to exercise his brain; man, he holds, is merely a passive reactor without the faculty of choice.)

  “Earning” a value, in the egalitarian view, does not mean creating a product by one’s thought and action. Rawls requires that a man create the circumstances of his entry into the world, and the organs of his own body, including his brain. He requires that a man create the attributes he possesses at birth—which a man could do only before he had any attributes, i.e., before he was anything, i.e., before he existed. Since no one can do it, Rawls concludes, there is no such thing as “earning” values, and no injustice in draining the producers.

  The fact which Rawls uses to invalidate the claims of the producers, ultimately, is the fundamental law of reality: the Law of Identity. Because man has a nature, because he does not emerge from the womb as a zero, the producers have no rights and are relegated to the status of permanent serfs. This is not merely a political but a metaphysical attack on the men of ability: it disqualifies them from moral standing, not because they allegedly exploit the proletariat, not because they have money or power or any tangible asset, but because man has identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Here are the ominous parallels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  16

  “A Republic-If You Can Keep It”

  There are essential differences between the United States and Germany.

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

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

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

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

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