The intellectual foundations of cultural decline
Dana
THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURAL DECLINE
An Inquiry
Stephen B. Young
Center of the American Experiment
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Foreword
My colleague Stephen B. Young doesn't waste any time getting to the tough
heart of the matter in this philosophical grand tour of cultural decline in
the United States.
"A powerful, corrosive force," he begins, "has been at work in American
culture since the mid-1960s." Its origins, he says, predate that
often-crazed decade, but its "power is a contemporary phenomenon." This
dismantling force, he contends, has caused an "American tradition of freedom
and liberty under law" to lose out to a "new social code of personal license
under a protective mantle of moral relativism."
Our society, he quickly understates, has "not gained from this experiment
with deconstruction of traditional norms and institutions."
"The Intellectual Foundations of Cultural Decline" is a challenging study in
several ways, starting with the fact that few writers are as inclined and
skilled as Mr. Young in drawing on centuries of difficult scholarship.
In the essay in hand, he traces current problems in American society
generally, and American higher education more specifically, to what he
describes as a latter-day victory of a French ethic, founded by Rousseau,
over that of a more enlightened English ethic best identified with Bacon,
Locke, Hume and Adam Smith. Kant, Hegel and a few other Germans also get
into the act.
Mr. Young's strictures, moreover, can be sharp and local. "True leadership,"
he writes, "has become impossible in universities and colleges." Closer to
home: "The effort to improve the University of Minnesota has dragged on for
a decade with no signs of significant success." And, "Those outside the
[American] university must assert leadership by imposing on the university
accountability to the wider society."
Mr. Young is likewise not hesitant about rekindling arguments about American
involvement in Vietnam which many folks (myself included, frankly) would
just as soon keep dampened. For instance, he writes that: "College-educated
American males of the Baby Boom generation . . . and their sympathetic
parents constituted the social base for a political movement of protest
opposing the founding ethic of this country. The protesters [of whom I was
one back then] looked for a political philosophy with which to oppose
traditional claims of the American state."
But it's precisely because it is demanding -- intellectually certainly and
emotionally quite possibly -- that this essay makes the serious contribution
it does. It's a paper of large ideas and unusual sweep, and I'm pleased to
disseminate it broadly.
Steve Young, as friends of American Experiment likely recall, was the
Center's first chairman, and happily for us, has continued his service on
the Board. A former dean of the Hamline University School of Law, a former
administrator at Harvard Law, and a veteran of State Department service in
Vietnam during the war, Mr. Young -- as I've been fond of describing him
since his arrival in the Twin Cities in the early '80s -- is one of
Minnesota's most creative social theorists.
He also has been known to practice on the stump what he preaches on the
keyboard.
American Experiment members receive free copies of almost all Center
publications, including "The Intellectual Foundations of Cultural Decline:
An Inquiry." Additional copies of this essay are $4 for members and $5 for
nonmembers. Bulk discounts are available for schools, civic groups and other
organizations. Please note our phone and address on the previous page for
membership and other information.
Thanks very much, and as always, I welcome your comments.
Mitchell B. Pearlstein
President
March 1996
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Introduction
A powerful, corrosive force has been at work in American culture since the
mid-1960s. Its origins predate that decade but its power is a contemporary
phenomenon. As the civil rights movement changed course from seeking
equality of individual opportunity in a color-blind society and grew,
instead, into a new program advocating equality of results for individuals
emancipated from traditional normative constraint and responsibility, an
American tradition of freedom and liberty under law lost out to a new social
code of personal license under a protective mantle of moral relativism.
Our society has not gained from this experiment with deconstruction of
traditional norms and institutions.
Our Center of the American Experiment has published many papers describing
the decline. And William Bennett, among others, has written of the
consequences following upon the loss of faith in core American beliefs.
In 1965, America began a cultural war between its founding conceptions of
knowledge, education and politics which derived from an English ethic -- and
rival conceptions sired by an ethic imported from France and Germany. The
battle over which intellectual framework would govern America opened first
in academia and related institutions of intellectual commentary and then
spread to politics. The protagonists of change were Hippies of the Woodstock
generation, student protesters of SDS, leaders of the effort to demonize the
war in Vietnam as immoral and impossible to win, and the Robert
Kennedy-Eugene McCarthy-George McGovern faction of the Democratic Party.
They popularized a Bohemian ethic of earlier decades.
That Bohemian ethic had emerged in New York City's Greenwich Village as a
meeting place of the avant garde in art, those who rejected bourgeois social
conventions, and the socialist left in politics. The American-Bohemian creed
may be summarized, as literary critic Malcolm Cowley has suggested, in a few
articles of belief:
The idea of self-expression: Each man's and woman's purpose in life is fully
to express himself, to realize his full individuality.
The idea of living for the moment, the rejection of the puritan ethos of
deferred gratification: One should burn one's candle at both ends.
The idea of female equality: Women should be the economic and moral equals
of men and should have the same opportunities for making a living, smoking,
drinking, and taking or dismissing lovers.
The idea of psychological adjustment: We are maladjusted because we are
repressed; the removal of repression liberates the true man.
The idea of salvation by the child: If children are encouraged by new
educational methods to realize their full personalities, they will bring
forth a new and freer world.
The idea of liberty: All laws and conventions that hamper free expression
should be abolished, for puritanism is the great enemy.
And the idea of cosmopolitanism: The rejection of American cultural
provincialism.
Opening salvo
The opening salvo in our current culture war was fired by the 1964 Free
Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley, where Mario Savio
and students exposed the older, white, male administrators as hollow
authority figures. After student takeovers of university administration
offices at Columbia and Harvard in 1968 and 1969, the power structure of
American colleges and universities was fragmented. Trustees, presidents,
deans, senior professors capitulated to the new counterculture without
serious resistance.
By the early 1970s colleges and universities became institutions without
authority, but filled with jealous internal competition over individual
status, power, and money. Faculties, protected by tenure, successfully
asserted the power to define the ideals and priorities for their
institutions. Presidents, deans, and boards of trustees were reduced to a
subservient role of finding the funding necessary for higher salaries and
better facilities for tenured faculties and for transfer payments among
students via student aid from wealthier students to less advantaged ones.
Presidents and deans fell as well into the complementary role of
facilitating interaction among the fractious parts of the university for
allocation of resources and coordination of instructional programs.
Minnesota's colleges and universities did not escape this trend.
Access to the establishment for African-Americans as the civil rights
movement won its victory in 1965 grew into race-based preferences in
admissions and hiring under the doctrine of affirmative action, later
expanding to include women, Hispanics, Native Americans, and, grudgingly,
Asian-Americans. A vision of the individual as victim and America as guilty
gained notoriety.
An important goal of education after 1968 became promotion of "self-esteem"
for all students, accomplished by providing them with a "feel-good"
environment. Colleges and universities no longer enforced traditional moral
standards. Dorms became co-educational. Contraceptives were freely
dispensed. Drug use was not stigmatized. This desire to indulge students was
designed to cure the "victimization" felt by psychologically alienated
individuals.
This desire to promote self-esteem combined with affirmative action then
evolved into an invidious kind of "multiculturalism."
Grade inflation set in as professors no longer felt secure in holding to
standards of achievement. Differences in achievement were considered to be
social inequalities. Pass-fail grading had many supporters. The standardized
admission tests such as the SAT could be used to argue that grades had no
meaning for students with previously demonstrated abilities.
In politics, the emerging counter-culture of the left broke into the
mainstream with convulsions over the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic
Party convention in Chicago. Earlier that year, protest had already driven
Lyndon Johnson to abandon his re-election campaign in an abdication of
leadership. Murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had further
eroded faith in America's traditional political habits and structures.
The Vietnam War serendipitously served nicely as the weapon of cultural
aggression undermining America's traditional ethic. The anti-war movement
began in 1965 with campus teach-ins. Leaders of the anti-war movement were
first and foremost professors and intellectuals, not laborers or farmers.
The media became the instrument for dissemination of anti-war critique.
Walter Cronkite with his unjustified pessimism of 1968 about the war turned
more Americans against the war in Vietnam than anyone else. James Reston of
The New York Times wrote that, in the last analysis, it had been the press
which had caused the United States to fail in its promise of protection to
the peoples of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.
Support for the War had been justified by the old English ethic of faith in
liberal bourgeois democratic prospects, even in Vietnam, and opposition to
totalitarian coercion, even of Vietnamese. College-educated American males
of the Baby Boom generation had no wish to be drafted to fight in such a
cause; they and their sympathetic parents constituted the social base for a
political movement of protest opposing the founding ethic of this country.
The protesters looked for a political philosophy with which to oppose
traditional claims of the American state.
They found it in a French ethic set forth by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the
18th century, which ethic first taught that conventional structures of
authority did not reflect a true General Will, promoted illegitimate
hierarchy, and did not deserve respect. Thanks to this French perspective,
for the first time in our history, America was painted as an inherently bad,
guilty, undeserving society. Its claim on the loyalty of its youth was
portrayed as bogus. Past sins against Blacks, Native Americans, the
environment, and women, along with the asserted evils of capitalism, were
seized upon with fervor by the counter-culture as evidence of this newly
perceived truth of America as unjust.
When Martin Luther King joined in this anti-war critique of America as
impure and undeserving, the legitimate righteousness of the civil rights
movement under moral constructs of the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution was grafted onto the inconsistent ambitions of the French
ethic. The tradition of the European left, which had been shaped by Rousseau
and which had emerged in the French Revolution, now stripped respectability
from American ideals.
Hollywood and New York provided homes to a media elite which used popular
entertainment of movies and television to promote -- particularly through
sex and sexuality -- self-indulgent and hedonistic themes of personal
liberty and freedom from responsibility.
A drug practice added reality to a counter-culture of alienation from
authority. Self-expression in this way was illegal, generating more
disrespect for law.
Feminism found voice in the counter-culture and added to the cultural war
its critique of all conventional authority structures, even the family, as
unjustly supportive of men as against women. The feminist critique, as had
the claims for equality of African-Americans, quickly achieved legal
protection through federal laws on affirmative action, no discrimination in
hiring and promotion, and protection against sexual harassment.
Subsequently, the demands of gays and lesbians for protection and validation
of their subcultures followed feminism in seeking social rules consistent
with their cultural preferences.
The dominant theme of the new American culture of the left has become the
will to power of perspectives freed from past conventions by the exercise of
allegedly rational thought and by genuine romantic selfishness. The
expansion of the French ethic in American culture has led to actualization
of the will to power by an increasing number of groups under the banner of
"multiculturalism."
Consequences of following the wrong ethic
With the rise to cultural power of the French ethic, educational quality has
deteriorated. Undergraduate education has been dumbed down. A commitment to
excellence no longer inspires either faculties or students. There is no
canon of greatness. The college or university serves above all else to give
students professional credentials and faculty members professional
recognition. As a result, graduates lack skills for leadership at a time
when we need leaders of genuine quality.
With educational achievement in decline, it is little wonder that incomes
for the average American have stagnated. Incomes reflect the value that
workers can add to the economy. Poorly educated persons add little value to
a highly technological and service-oriented economy.
But the damage done by the cultural left has spread beyond colleges and
universities to the society at large. This originally French ethic has
promoted a cult of victimization in America. Students starting in elementary
school are socialized to see the guilt that allegedly is America and to feel
no pride in their heritage as Americans. The emphasis on self-esteem won
without rigorous achievement leaves students without self-confidence. The
irrelevance of grades to most achievement compounds this state of mind among
students. Women and minorities are given grounds to assert claims based on
group identity, not individual achievement, so works of individual
achievement have less salience. Persons are encouraged to find oppressors.
Even the new men's movement sees white males as an oppressed group.
People without self-confidence and looking for others to blame are
mistrustful, selfish without a moral counter-balance, and suffer from a
social distemper. Public life has become divorced from spirituality. Is it
any wonder that the public is cynical, turns on its political leaders, and
has little faith in America's future?
The basis of social policy under the French ethic tends to stress the guilt
of those who benefit from social advantages and distinctions and the need
for remedial subsidy of these less privileged. An alternative moral ethic of
responsibility based upon individual character regardless of social status
is not often employed. Social policy therefore exists more to assuage the
guilt of the elite than to empower the poor, who, naturally remain dependent
and angry.
The rise of the French ethic has undermined the work ethic. The focus of
liberty and equality tends to be on immediate ends. It takes more of a
concern for social duties and interests to focus on self in the long term.
Yet the present justification for savings and hard work is future reward.
With less value placed on the future, consumption takes center stage. In any
given moment, consumption is more gratifying than saving and enjoyment more
fulfilling than sacrifice.
The French ethic, with its embrace of self-victimhood, has accelerated the
break up of family structures. Broken families lead to more children living
in poverty. Challenges to conventional authority limit the satisfactions of
being a parent, adding to intergenerational antagonism and divorces.
Advocacy of male-female gender sameness and non-heterosexual marriages have
blurred once clear obligations of family responsibilities. The attention
given to spouse abuse, usually of the wife by the husband, incest, other
forms of child abuse bring traditional family ideals into disrepute. When
families become weak or dysfunctional, they fail in their primary function
of socialization. Children are permitted to reach adulthood more alienated
from society than ever before. Rousseau's vision of the human as victim is
thus given increasing credence. The French ethic has set us on a path of
cultural decay and systemic decline as a nation.
Our intellectual elite, the product of our best colleges and universities,
has lost faith in the culture and institutions of the English ethic which
made America successful and the envy of other peoples. In Minnesota,
reporters and editorial writers frequently beat the drum for
self-victimization, "multiculturalism," and enlightened bureaucratic rule.
Charles Colson has referred to these consequences as a crisis of character:
A loss of those inner restraints and virtues that prevent civilization from
pondering its own darker instincts. We have lost the values of citizenship,
valor, honor, duty, responsibility, compassion, and civility.
Robert Bellah's survey of American values, Habits of the Heart, revealed
that, as of the 1970s, most Americans had two overriding goals: vivid
personal feelings and personal success. What has happened to the dedication
required for excellence?
What explains the polluting power of the left? Where did it come from? What
can we do about its detrimental consequences?
As argued at the start, two different traditions, one arising in England and
the other in France, have each offered an ethic to inform the goals and
ideals of law and public power. The original American ethic was the English
one. After the Civil War, the rival French ethic, however, began to provide
a basis for modernized and professionalized colleges and universities. After
1968, the French vision finally overthrew its English antagonist and came to
dominate our culture.
From institutions of higher education and from intellectuals, the French
vision reached out to convert others and so accumulate political power.
I believe that the post-modern vision of culture, derived from the French
tradition, is dehumanizing and destructive of the best in civil society.
Accordingly, I value the older, English alternative. As justification for a
program of cultural reform, this paper will proceed to summarily trace the
intellectual origins and evolutions of both traditions. This will permit
thoughtful reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of each ethic and
so open a dialogue as to which ethic should govern what Minnesota will do in
public higher education. If the English ethic can recapture citadels of
higher education, a better balance of cultural patterns can be established.
Origins of the two ethics
The two traditions developed separately from the two forms of human
knowledge posited by Aristotle, who distinguished scientific knowledge from
practical wisdom. The English ethic valued practical wisdom while the French
ethic asserted the claims of pure reason, of scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge unfolded from the operations of a pure reason, a unique
human capacity. Aristotle preferred this form of knowledge, as had Plato
before him, as the best, most complete, most infallible form of human
knowing. The metaphor for this kind of knowledge is mathematics, especially
geometry, where absolute proof (so it was believed) could be had of a
proposition; proof so inerrant that the proposition would be true under all
conditions of time and space. Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle
has been an effort to infuse this pure reason into the real world; to bring
the certainty of scientific knowledge to the contingent experiences of
living. Many philosophers ("lovers of wisdom") and famous thinkers have
sought the certainty promised by this Holy Grail of human reason.
But sensibly, Aristotle also recognized that such scientific knowledge was
ethereal. It existed in an unreal ether in the sense that only reason within
the mind could comprehend such knowledge. Such reason did not exist in
physical things which had contingent existences, presences true today but
not necessarily tomorrow; such scientific knowledge existed only in words
and concepts manipulated by the mind. In an important way, the pure reason
supporting scientific knowledge lives and works outside of time and space,
outside of what we think of as reality.
Human knowledge of what is contingent, of what is sensuous reality,
Aristotle called practical wisdom. This was an alternate form of human
knowledge. Pure reason and deductive logic did not apply to this realm of
knowing. Statements incorporating practical wisdom, propositions about
politics and other human affairs, for example, could not be proved, only
argued about.
The process of argument used for practical wisdom was rhetoric -- slippery,
and susceptible to crass manipulation. On the contrary, rigorous logic
existed to prove or disprove the truths of scientific knowledge.
After the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation challenged the thought
patterns of medieval Catholicism, the English developed an ethic of
knowledge distinct from simultaneous trends arising in France and the
European continent.
To oversimplify but without distorting the record, it can be said that the
English kept education and culture within the scope of practical wisdom
while thinkers on the continent, such as Descartes, aspired to obey the
dictates of scientific knowledge.
The English ethic of practical wisdom
The English style was pragmatic, as many historians have noted. The great
modern thinkers of England -- Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Adam
Smith, David Hume -- were empiricists, looking to facts measurable in the
real world to support intellectual conclusions. Such facts were contingent;
therefore, English investigations into the substance of knowledge required
experimentation with tangible substances. Reason alone was an insufficient
guide to truth. Legend has it that it took a falling apple to provoke
Newton's mind into formulating a proposition about gravity.
In this English approach to knowledge, reason was an aid to reflection, but
reflection could not be contained exclusively within the ambit of abstract
ratiocination. This English approach elevated the process of accepting or
formulating a hypothesis for subsequent experimental verification. What
worked in practice was often accepted as having sufficient truth value. As a
result, the English tradition left room for ideas drawn from intuition and
custom regarding how reality worked.
This tradition from the British Isles also left a prominent role for faith
and religion in the search for meaningful beliefs, a role for the emotive
side of human nature. Such dispositions, unscientific and unprovable, were
nonetheless part of an existing practical reality. They, too, could give
rise to testable hypotheses.
Reason did not replace religion for the English. Political thinkers tempered
their optimism about human potential with a belief in the operative,
existential fact of original sin.
On the optimistic side, Francis Hutcheson and his student Adam Smith could
believe in the capacity of persons spontaneously to have moral sentiments.
This capacity made them trustworthy.
This fusion of experimental science, Old Testament religion, and Roman
republicanism gave birth, first, to the English Whig political movement
favoring democracy and, later, to its American revolutionary progeny. A Whig
constitutional scheme emerged of checks and balances and of government as a
public trust and not as a personal dominion. People could be trusted to
rule, but not too much.
From this tradition arose constitutional government under law, economic
well-being achieved by free markets, freedom of religion, private property
regulated by the common law, judges held apart from political machinations,
and legal rights protecting individuals and minorities from any tyranny of
the majority and fleeting mob passions. This pattern of political
organization was institutionalized in the American Constitution and
elaborated upon with wisdom and eloquence in the Federalist Papers written
by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. This tradition resonates in the writings of
Washington and, later, in the speeches of Lincoln.
This empirical English ethic was not afraid of self-interest. As a practical
fact, individual self-interest was an unquestioned, empirical given. So John
Locke spoke of the ends of government as promoting the life, liberty and
property of individuals. Such acceptance of individual interest was the
understanding of David Hume, William Blackstone, and Edmund Burke, great
thinkers who shaped the modern British commonwealth. Nor was Adam Smith put
off by the selfish aspects of his free-market economic theory, Wealth of
Nations. Not only did Smith see how the self-interests of individuals
magically interacted (through a market as if moved by an invisible hand) to
produce a common good, he also wrote in his companion work, Theory of the
Moral Sentiments, how in a free society a moral capacity would be at work to
counter-balance the excesses of selfish individualism.
The doctrine of character, of the mastery of self-interest, became important
to the education of English citizens. Locke's theory of education stressed
character and common sense as the goals of parents for their children.
For Locke, the true foundation of future ability and happiness is a mastery
over inclinations, a temper to resist the importunity of present pleasure or
pain. Education was therefore, above all, to inculcate virtue as an
incentive to the mind. "Virtue is harder to get than a knowledge of the
world," said Locke in the 1690s. Character, not abstract analytical ability,
was the aim of this practical vision of human achievement. "Long discourses
and philosophical reasonings, at best, amaze and confound but do not
instruct children," said Locke.
Emphasis on moral character provided Whig political institutions with
another important benefit -- religious tolerance and an end to sectarian
wars between rival theologies. Moral character provided a common ethic for
persons of different faiths through which they could enjoy mutually
respectful joint participation in public affairs. Respecting each other's
moral characters permitted each to have comfort in the other's reliability
and reduced society's need to rest social cohesion on a common theological
doctrine or creed. John Locke therefore could write an important essay of
Christian theology on toleration, which later justified the religious
freedom clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This ethic of knowledge as practical wisdom resting in good character was
the guiding light of English colleges and of the preparatory schools
training young men for such colleges. The deans, tutors, and readers of
Oxford and Cambridge and the dons of Eton all understood knowledge in this
practical tradition and provided a general education in the liberal arts to
shape a student's character as much as his faculty of reason. Skills in
rhetoric, use of good judgment, and common sense kept the graduate in touch
with his society and grounded in practical wisdom. The student in this
tradition was tolerant, responsible, and part of a larger social order.
The first professors of Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton and the
founders of Exeter and Groton built similar educational institutions in
America.
The English ethic directly informed Minnesota's first institution of higher
learning: Hamline University. Founded by the Methodist Church in Red Wing in
1854, Hamline taught its students in keeping with (Methodism's founder) John
Wesley's vision of reason united with the vital piety. This was Wesley's
formulation of the mingled fields of reason and moral character. His
standard was the sensible English one of "reasonableness" in using either
the mind or the heart.
Out of similar religious traditions, Carleton, Macalester, St. Olaf,
Gustavus Adolphus, Augsburg, Bethel, and the Concordia colleges were founded
by different ethnic and religious collectivities.
The Catholic Church founded the colleges of St. John's, St. Benedict's, St.
Thomas, St. Catherine's, St. Scholastica, and St. Mary's in the tradition of
Catholic teaching that the play of reason was subordinate to revelation and
church doctrine. Again, though not of the English educational enlightenment
tradition, Minnesota's Catholic colleges had a religious orientation in
keeping with the mixed character of the English preference for practical
wisdom.
In its early years, though publicly funded, the University of Minnesota took
its standard of excellence from such universities as Harvard and Yale. The
University of Minnesota then grew to prestige and earned world-wide respect
with its rigorous research and high standards of scholarship. It was neither
provincial or irrelevant to its times.
The French ethic of scientific knowledge
Between the work of Plato and his student Aristotle and the much later rise
of the French ethic of knowledge was the majestic intellectual effort of
Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas did not renovate Aristotle's concept of practical
wisdom. Aquinas strove rather to bring the revealed religious truth of his
Holy Roman Catholic Church within the bounds of scientific knowledge.
Reason, pure reason, uncontaminated by contingent empiricism, was his tool
for vindicating the truth of his religion in the eyes of all persons.
Aquinas's thought provided a guide for subsequent European philosophers.
The exciting actual progenitor of the French ethic in education was
Descartes, who, as he said in an aphorism, was because he thought. Catholic
priest as well as a mathematician, Descartes used formal propositions of
symbolic logic and language, both disconnected from experimentation, to
establish truth.
What followed from this technique was a belief in the perfectibility of the
human, a rejection of original sin, and an idealism regarding human
circumstances constructed out of faith in the power of scientific knowledge.
With faith in reason, mystery drained from the experience of living. The
cosmos became a predictable machine; religion became useless obscurantism,
fit only for undeveloped minds. The great project of humanity became a
vigorous campaign to enlighten all persons with the power of reason.
Rousseau, in my judgment, then set in motion the intellectual effort which
over two centuries turned Descartes's faith in reason step-by-step into the
pernicious doctrines of cultural deconstruction and the wrong kind of
"multiculturalism" which vex us this day. Rousseau's intellectual
descendants now dominate the counterculture of left-liberalism which has
undermined so effectively our national self-confidence.
For politics, Rousseau banished self-interest and called for all to live
according to the dictates of the General Will. Rousseau's General Will was
only the stuff of linguistic definition, possessed of no more substance than
any other construct of words. Reason thought its way to the General Will and
then the state, according to Rousseau, had the duty of imposing the General
Will on individual particular wills. In his Social Contract, Rousseau wrote
that the more common mores differed from the General Will, the greater the
force was required to repress common mores. Sic Semper Tyrannis. Thus did
Rousseau invent the modern totalitarian state and cloak it with the superior
claims of scientific knowledge.
Rousseau not only gave hope to a vicious political tradition of coercive
bureaucratic tyranny, he gave prominence to a divisive scheme of education.
In his Confessions and in Emile, Rousseau blended a naive vision of persons
as inherently simple, pure, and good prior to socialization with an intense
belief in the individual as victim looking for oppressors to blame. For
Rousseau, society was the enemy of the individual.
Rousseau's scheme of education was permissive -- to let innate potential
grow in individuals and to minimize their socialization. Reason, he
believed, would prevent distortions from arising within people and reason
would make all things well in a better world to be built by governments
guided by the General Will.
Rousseau wrote that people are born free yet everywhere society keeps them
in chains. With pure reason as their guide, Rousseau thought that men and
women would break the chains of social convention and revolt against
inequalities of status and opportunity. There was no authority recognized by
Rousseau for God, the King, the Church, fathers, families, or any social
position not justified by the General Will. Only distinctions justified by
reason would stand as part of the General Will. Persons were free, equal,
and only bound together through fraternal ties of one free individual
voluntarily associated with another.
Sadly, since individuals always come to be through, and live in, social
situations, individuals are always in a condition of Rousseauist
victimization under social pressures, a sorry state demanding, from
Rousseau's perspective, constant vexation of mind and spirit. Rousseau's
bleak vision prevents its adherents from acquiring much self-confidence.
They are constantly seeking to undo the damage inflicted on them by society.
Rousseau himself lived with a guilty conscience, caused by his mother's
death while giving him birth. He then spent his life at odds with those more
fortunate than he.
From Rousseau came the vaunting ambitions of the French Revolution, not a
modest contest to modify absolute monarchy with constitutional restraints,
but a grandiose project to build a just society according to the dictates of
reason. The French Revolution's creed was "liberte, egalite, and
fraternite": the triumph of reason over social authority. Religion was to be
replaced with the worship of Reason; every aspect of the ancient regime,
legitimated by no more than custom and convention, was replaced by a
centralized state bureaucracy governing according to rational civil and
criminal codes, using metric measurements of universal application.
Under Rousseau's disciples, the Jacobins, the guillotine stood tall to
enforce revolutionary truth on unbelievers and eliminate those whose past
had defiled them in revolutionary eyes. Many aristocrats followed their king
and queen to a speedy death.
Napoleon then took this new French system by arms to other nations of
Europe.
Over in England, Edmund Burke saw the underlying evil in the turmoil and
pretension of revolutionary change in France. Burke's book Reflections on
the Revolution in France sharpens -- perhaps better than any work except
Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies or Thomas Sowell's A Conflict
of Visions -- the differences between the rival approaches to truth of
Britain and France.
On the other hand, the French ethic had some impact in Great Britain. Jeremy
Bentham rejected the conventions of the common law as glamorized by
Blackstone and promoted law reform based upon rational analysis. Government,
argued Bentham, could improve society by using its powers to order
relationships as reason requires. William Godwin, taking up French
Enlightenment ideals, wrote for the emancipation of women and advocated
other radical rejections of traditional British social order. His daughter
married the romantic poet Shelley and wrote Frankenstein, blending the
French ethic with English artistic romanticism.
Unfortunately, over in the newly independent United States, Thomas Jefferson
was more credulous of French theories than was Burke. Jefferson (who was not
a founder of our constitutional structure) lent dignity to the claims of
reason alone as the foundation of justice and to reason's insistence on
leveling social conventions and distinctions. Jefferson, a Deist, argued for
a thick wall between church and state. Also, it is not coincidence that
Jefferson wanted to be remembered most as the founder of the University of
Virginia, a state university and a temple to reason.
With Jefferson the French ethic gained a foothold in American political
culture. Where Washington, Hamilton, John Marshall, and the Federalists felt
sympathy for the English ethic, Jefferson and his rising Democratic Party
stood for emancipated France and against privilege of any sort. The
Jeffersonian approach led to the War of 1812 against England.
On its side of the Atlantic, the French ethic rejected two capable French
thinkers inspired by the British/American alternative. In the early months
of the French Revolution, Lafayette, influenced by Washington and the
American Revolution, attempted to craft for France a moderate course of
pragmatic constitutionalism, but he was passed over as those more radical
pressed for the execution of the king and abolition of old ways. Forty years
later the wise observations of Alexis de Tocqueville on American democracy
and the excesses of the French Revolution were similarly ignored by his
compatriots.
German development of the French ethic
The cause of scientific knowledge and the superiority of reason picked up
impressive advocates in Germany. Following on after Rousseau, Immanuel Kant
wrote on pure reason and practical reason. His formulation of the General
Will had individuals separately will to do that which could be of universal,
that is non-contingent, application. But since reason was taken by Kant as a
transcendent universal, in exercising their wills, all individuals would end
up in agreement on the same coercive principles of right conduct. Reason
would democratically lead to moral order, believed Kant.
Following Kant, Hegel took reason to great complexities of analysis. He
looked at the mind and its ability to comprehend reality. By creating
concepts, what Hegel called "begrift," the mind, according to Hegel, could
be master of its empirical surroundings. Thus arose from Hegel's influence
the modern German university where conceptual classification and
specialization brought studies of various disciplines to professional
exactitude.
Karl Marx used dialectical materialism to ground reason in the real world
and so save its title to intellectual stature. Max Weber blended a practical
Hegelian faith in reason with prescriptions for bureaucratic rationalization
of economic and political organizations. The arguments of Marx and Weber
have guided the creation of the modern, bureaucratic, welfare state.
The French ethic grows in America with help from Germany
After the American Civil War, the tradition of reason as elevated by Kant
and Hegel, but not yet challenged by Nietzsche, came to the United States.
The German vision of the professional university was imported to train a
cadre of experts to modernize and improve everything in America. The first
university with departments and specialized teaching was Johns Hopkins. Then
Harvard under Eliot followed. Reason and the application of reason to
society defined the nineteenth-century culture of progress. Social
engineering, the deployment of expertise to remedy social ills, the creation
of bureaucracies with public funding to step in where the free market
stabilized at a less than optimal equilibrium were made possible by the new
confidence in rational planning.
The new university was to find through thoughtful analysis a common good, a
public interest arrived at dispassionately through expert study. Sciences of
human nature, law, politics, and society were thought possible as well.
Schools for the scientific study of law and medicine were started.
The mission of the new professional, rational, and scientific university was
to serve society by changing it for the better. As Karl Marx wrote in the
Communist Manifesto, "Up to now philosophers have only interpreted the
world. The point, however, is to change it." The results of this
intellectual effort then had to be transferred to daily life through the
medium of government and learned professions, often working in tandem.
In the 1880s and 1890s, professional associations were started to improve
systematically the standards of professional fields. Lawyers, doctors,
nurses, historians, and social workers formed the unions which, ever since,
have monitored knowledge-based occupations.
While professionalism grounded its self-confidence in good measure on the
French faith in reason, the personal codes and habits of professors and the
new professionals still drew inspiration from the undergraduate colleges
following the English approach to knowledge. But a tension had been
introduced between the new graduate schools with their vision of
professional education and the older English ethic residing in liberal arts
colleges.
The University of Minnesota grew to prominence in this era of confidence in
scientific study from 1870 to the 1950s. It built graduate schools of law
and medicine. Its graduate faculties in many fields became nationally known.
Its scientific research in agriculture had worldwide implications. The
University and its supporters in the Legislature believed more and more in
the power of scientific knowledge to guide, benevolently and rationally,
organized society to even higher levels of prosperity and happiness through
planning, regulation, and bureaucracy.
Carleton and Macalester Colleges broke away from their denominational
orientation to follow the new ethic of higher education.
Preconditions for the final triumph of the French ethic in American higher
education were laid during this rise of professionalism. The professionalism
of university graduate schools and departments increasingly became a narrow
pursuit of sub-specialization and technical achievement. Granting of Nobel
Prizes, peer recognition, journals for publication of investigations and
research results combined to create a career structure rewarding focused
technical accomplishment. As the number of professionals increased, the
areas of their individual expertise multiplied in total but shrunk in scope
of individual attainment.
Having large views on culture, religion, history did not lead to
advancement. Being a teacher was less important than being a published
scholar. As a result, those successful in higher education increasingly lost
capacity for moral leadership. They became technicians, qualified for
advancement only by a limited expertise. Professors each knew more and more
about less and less. Vision evaporated as higher education became ever more
bureaucratized. This, however, was inevitable under the hopeful
French/German model of rationalism as the apex of human achievement.
This evolution of universities towards a narrow professionalism swept over
the University of Minnesota as well. Recruitment and advancement of
professors fell in with the norms of the professional establishments
governing the different educational disciplines and related academic
societies. Publish or perish became the rule for professional achievement.
After World War II, the United States entered an era of rule by experts as
government and corporate bureaucracies grew to deploy the talent pool of
professionals provided now in increasing numbers, thanks to the GI Bill, by
institutions of higher education. As part of the professionalism of higher
education, recruitment into the expert professional elite was changed to
emphasize mental ability rather than any social criterion of preference such
as wealth, religion, or family status. Admitting students into college and
university became rationalized with the use of the SAT, a formalistic device
to measure all students on a common scale of intellectual ability. Only the
best and the brightest would be selected for professional training as
experts. By the 1960s colleges and universities were filled with young men
and women selected on these rational, meritocratic grounds.
Reason becomes anti-reason
Ironically, reason has produced limitations on itself. Reason is a murderer
of other thoughts, killing its own creations with new twists and turns of
conceptual manipulations. It turns out that Aristotle's scientific knowledge
is something of a plaything for agile minds, and not an unyielding ultimate
truth.
Nietzsche challenged the optimism of Kant and Hegel, and used aesthetics to
expose reason. Nietzsche saw, and asserted without using formal, logical
argument, that reason was both cannibalistic and capable of infanticide.
Reason could be turned against itself and could destroy its own certainties.
The inevitable end result of reason, Nietzsche believed, was not truth but
rather uncertainty -- nihilism. Reason can be an acid, corrosive of
confidence and conviction. Far from being a source of ultimate truth, reason
was destined to continuous manipulation of concepts, a constant shifting of
understanding and meaning with no basis in empirical reality or moral
values. The intellectual harvest to be gathered from the fields of reason is
radical indeterminacy, not scientific knowledge, argued Nietzsche.
The hope, kept alive since Aristotle, of scientific knowledge leading to
truth was thus dashed by Nietzsche, who first formulated the intellectual
techniques now called post-modernism and deconstruction.
Nietzsche proposed that individuals assert their will to power, to construct
meaning as they want it to be without providing compelling proof for their
propositions. Truth-making thus becomes an art form guided by aesthetic
principles of pleasure, form, and proportion. But Nietzsche's new
philosophic project contained the same thrust as Rousseau's vision: Society
is to be attacked in order to free the individual. Only Nietzsche was
certain that the will of the individual was to find free expression; it was
not a rational faculty which would blend a free individual with others
voluntarily through acceptance of the transcendent truth of the General
Will.
Some of Nietzsche's insights were taken over by racists and the Nazis, thus
discrediting his brutal but unrefutable delegitimization of the superiority
of scientific knowledge.
Martin Heidegger, a Nazi to some degree, reformulated the French and
Hegelian traditions of scientific knowledge, without, however, rejecting
Nietzsche. But it took subsequent non-Nazi French scholars -- Jacques
Derrida, Michael Foucault, Pierre Bourdreau, and Jacques Lacan -- to restore
intellectual prominence to the nihilistic consequences of reason, having
first washed Nietzsche's insights clean of fascist perversion. These
post-World War II French thinkers produced the school of deconstruction or
post-modernism which now dominates academic American thinking about
education. But, ironically, what has triumphed is not the scientific
knowledge of Aristotle, but its unfilial descendant -- reason attacking
reason.
A program of reform
While we should encourage a revival of religiosity and spirituality, the
post-modern world will not permit a complete return to the credulous
certainties of traditional faiths. Reason is here to stay; it has
accomplished its work of deconstruction. Damage to our culture has been
done. Like Humpty Dumpty, a culture, once broken, is impossible to
reassemble as it once was.
We should supplement a new respect for religions with a return to primacy of
the English ethic as our guide to education, culture, and politics.
Practical wisdom, not scientific knowledge, should once again govern our
understanding of what is best in life.
In the post-modern society, as described by Charles Murray and Richard
Hernstein in The Bell Curve, those educated in formal institutions will
constitute our elite. They will manipulate the values, beliefs, and images
which drive our culture. Their ethos will have more power over our public
policy than other subcultures will. We will not regain a culture of common
sense until we tame the power of the French ethic in our educational
institutions.
Little can be done to improve our culture if we leave higher education to
its own devices under the influence of the French ethic. True leadership has
become impossible in universities and colleges. Power has been dispersed too
widely. Faculties are no longer guided by a common vision of the good.
Professionalism has divided and sub-divided faculties into interest groups
and cliques. Claims of preference and position based on gender, ethnic
origin, or sexual orientation further complicate decision making. Ideals are
most noted for their absence. A circle of opposition to authority based upon
principles of deconstruction and "multiculturalism" forces deans and
presidents to administer even details through broad-based participation of
constituencies and consensus-building. This political structure, often
useful to be sure, gives the power of veto to everyone in the institution.
The result is a species of lethargy and an inability to rise above a
comfortable mediocrity.
With this leadership mode reigning in colleges and universities, including
Minnesota's public institutions of higher education, little can be done to
assert standards of cognitive excellence. Only a return to the English
tradition of practical wisdom can foster a pattern of leadership which will
get results and improve the stature of our universities and colleges.
The effort to improve the University of Minnesota has dragged on for a
decade with no signs of significant success. What other conclusion can be
drawn from the controversy over pay equity between men's and women's
basketball coaches of the University of Minnesota than that fealty is owed
to gender preferences over other standards and values? Even a new procedure
for electing regents to govern the University has succumbed to the politics
of special interests and the political correctness of "multiculturalism." A
suitable candidate for provost was nearly rejected by the Regents because he
was of an inappropriate gender and race.
Those outside the university must assert leadership by imposing on the
university accountability to the wider society. Citizens must not be
intimidated by claims of professional expertise asserted by the professional
faculty to legitimate its autonomy and self-interest. The arguments of the
English ethic of knowledge stand ready to rebut the pretensions of
deconstruction and divisive "multiculturalism."
The current establishment thinking in higher education, with its adherence
to the French ethic of abstract reason and with its influence reaching down
through high schools and even in elementary education, is ripe for
dis-establishment and deconstruction.
From its own perspective of deconstruction, we can insist that the French
ethic is a relative intellectual construction, not an absolute truth. There
is nothing in the French ethic of scientific knowledge which compels our
obedience from the standpoint of pure reason, once we manipulate reason as
suggested by deconstruction theory.
Consider as an example of deconstructing the French ethic the following
observation: reason as conceived by the French ethic ends up as
anti-reason -- dismantling rigorous intellectual effort in order to advance
standards based, not on reason, but on race and gender.
Deconstruction of divisive multiculturalism can be carried a step further:
The construct of race was intellectually created. If persons of two
different races marry, what race is their child? Should not our standards be
those which embrace and affirm all persons regardless of race? Is that not
the best of the American aspiration as a multi-national community? One can
therefore inquire under the rules of deconstruction logic as to whose
interests are being served when the race construct is employed in argument.
If multiculturalism advances interests defined by race, which clique
benefits and who is hurt?
Should our universities and colleges be breeding grounds for partisans of
this power struggle asserting self-imposed, divisive constructs of the mind?
With special regard to publicly funded institutions of higher education,
those whom higher education purports to serve should inquire if they are,
indeed, being well-served. The proponents of the French ethic of scientific
knowledge should be asked to defend their ethic using the arguments of
practical wisdom. Since their social roles are part of contingent reality,
the techniques of argument appropriate to such reality -- practical
wisdom -- may be called upon for justification of their academic enterprise:
What is the social worth of the French ethic?
John Cooper, formerly of the James Madison Institute in Florida, argues that
we should (1) assess higher education curricula for developing civil
literacy; (2) examine the value system of universities and colleges; (3)
prevent politicization of education by political correctness; and (4)
reconceptualize universities and colleges as civic institutions. Cooper
argues that colleges and universities play a central role in the processes
of "social construction" and "social maintenance" of reality. What social
reality is it best to construct and to maintain? In Minnesota it is time to
evaluate what good is accomplished by public higher education.
If, in fact, the education enterprise comes up short of justification, we
may ask its members and advocates to resign their positions of educational
leadership to others found to be more suitable for our times.
As citizens, we have a right to demand that graduates of our expensive,
publicly financed, educational endeavors will be fit and worthy. We have a
right to know what motives and goals direct these educational enterprises
and, we have a collateral right to question those motives and goals if they
fall short of doing justice to our future.
We, as citizens, should insist that the University of Minnesota and other
public universities and colleges not be organized under the banner of
deconstruction and unjust "multiculturalism." If those ideologies prevail in
our public institutions, we should reduce public funding and force such
facilities to compete in the marketplace for the tuition dollars of
individual students. Those who like the education provided by deconstruction
and our contemporary "multiculturalism" will seek it out and pay for it.
Individual academics who believe in and justify deconstruction and the form
of multiculturalism I object to will still have full academic freedom for
debate to argue the merits of their position. But as the price of admission
to a publicly paid position of great power, professors must demonstrate
competence in cognitive excellence in addition to whatever views they hold
on deconstruction and multiculturalism of any kind. Talent, regardless of
race, culture, or creed, is to be sought out and rewarded. Minnesota should
draw here from around the world the best minds and the strongest characters
so that we may compete with the best in the world economy. No ideology of
group preferences should stand in the way of this objective.
Reform should begin at the root of the problem. If our difficulties arise
from misunderstandings and incorrect perceptions of what is truly important,
then we must change our understandings and perceptions. Intellectual
leadership must precede changes to political, social and economic
institutions.
--
The two factors complemented each another. Clinton's immorality and Gore's
extremism reminded voters that at least since the 1960s liberalism has
represented an ideology licentious, corrupt, distasteful, and wrong.
Steven D. Litvintchouk
>
> http://www.amexp.org/publications/culture/culture23.htm
> THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURAL DECLINE
> An Inquiry
>
> Stephen B. Young
>
> Center of the American Experiment
> Minneapolis, Minnesota
> Foreword
> My colleague Stephen B. Young doesn't waste any time getting to the tough
> heart of the matter in this philosophical grand tour of cultural decline in
> the United States.
I find the treatment of the Vietnam War in this tract to be deficient
bordering on shameful.
The author believes that the left-wing "falsely" claimed that the
Vietnam War was unwinnable, and that they spread "pessimism" about the
war.
That is not so.
The Pentagon Papers, and subsequent declassified documents and
interviews with Johnson Administration staffers, make it CLEAR that the
United States never had a coherent strategy for winning the war in any
fixed amount of time or treasure.
The American Government BROKE its social contract with the American
people by sending 50,000 men to their DEATH for no purpose. For fiascos
like that in other countries, governments have been toppled, and
military leaders have been SHOT. The American "establishment" got off
pretty easy for the crime they committed.
We will never reconcile the deep divisions of the 1960's so long as each
side continues to snipe at the other for being immoral and unethical.
Neither those who supported the war nor those who opposed it were evil.
Only those who continued a war policy past any rational hope of winning,
deserve the blame of history.
--
Steven D. Litvintchouk
Email: s...@mitre.org
Disclaimer: As far as I am aware, the opinions expressed
herein
are not those of my employer.
Chuck Miller
Quite frankly, I see too much slandering of the opposition in these debates.
I believe that all of us here are engaging in this debate because we want to
better our country. We disagree on how to go about doing so, but that's
what debate is for. I have "misguided" :-p friends who are conservatives,
but I can talk to them and even be their friends without calling them
fascist, and they in turn are able to discuss things without labelling me a
socialist. The bottom line is that we are all Americans, and neither side
is "unAmerican" in their views.
The rule should be that the first person in a debate who calls the
opposition a nazi, fascist, socialist etc loses....
"Steven D. Litvintchouk" <s...@mitre.org> wrote in message
news:3AC821FB...@mitre.org...
JD
"Chuck Miller" <triba...@home.com> wrote in message
news:L6uy6.110077$o7.43...@news1.rdc1.sdca.home.com...
> I agree with you completely here.
>
> is "unAmerican" in their views.
>
then the notion of being un-american might be more accurately described as
Clinton supporters being (mindlessly, mistakenly, truely) anti-american.
John