| Английски оригинал | Перевод на български | |
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Chapter 6 | ||
A Conflict of Visions | ||
THE LEFT-RIGHT DICHOTOMY | ||
Conservatism, in its original sense, has no specific ideological content at all, since everything depends on what one is trying to conserve. In the last days of the Soviet Union, for example, those who were trying to preserve the existing Communist regime were rightly referred to as “conservatives,” though what they were trying to conserve had nothing in common with what was advocated by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or William F. Buckley in the United States, much less Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a leading conservative in the Vatican who subsequently became Pope. Specific individuals with the “conservative” label have specific ideological positions, but there is no commonality of specifics among “conservatives” in different venues. | +2 | |
If we attempt to define the political left by its proclaimed goals, it is clear that very similar goals have been proclaimed by people whom the left repudiates and anathematizes, such as Fascists in general and Nazis in particular. Instead of defining these (and other) groups by their proclaimed goals, we can define them by the specific institutional mechanisms and policies they use or advocate for achieving their goals. More specifically, they can be defined by the institutional mechanisms they seek to establish for making decisions with impacts on society at large. In order to keep the discussion manageable, the vast sweep of possible decision-making mechanisms can be dichotomized into those in which individuals make decisions individually for themselves and those in which decisions are made collectively by surrogates for society at large. | +1 | |
In market economies, for example, consumers and producers make their own decisions individually and the social consequences are determined by the effect of those individual decisions on the way resources are allocated in the economy as a whole, in response to the movements of prices and incomes—which in turn respond to supply and demand. | ||
While this vision of the economy is often considered to be “conservative” (in the original sense of the word), in the long view of the history of ideas it has been revolutionary. From ancient times to the present, and in highly disparate societies around the world, there have been the most varied systems of thought—both secular and religious—seeking to determine how best the wise and virtuous can influence or direct the masses, in order to create or maintain a happier, more viable or more worthy society. In this context, it was a revolutionary departure when, in eighteenth-century France, the Physiocrats arose to proclaim that, for the economy at least, the best that the reigning authorities could do would be to leave it alone—laissez-faire being the term they coined. To those with this vision, whether in France or elsewhere, for the authorities to impose economic policies would be to give “a most unnecessary attention,” in Adam Smith’s words,27 to a spontaneous system of interactions that would go better without government intervention—not perfectly, just better. | ||
Variations of this vision of spontaneous order can also be found in other areas, ranging from language to the law. No elites sat down and planned the languages of the world or of any given society. These languages evolved from the systemic interactions of millions of human beings over the generations, in the most varied societies around the world. Linguistic scholars study and codify the rules of language—but after the fact. Young children learn words and usage, intuiting the rules of that usage before they are taught these things explicitly in schools. While it was possible for elites to create languages such as Esperanto, these artificial languages have never caught on in a way that would displace historically evolved languages. | ||
In law, a similar vision was expressed in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ statement that “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”28 In short, whether in the economy, language, or the law, this vision sees social viability and progress as being due to systemic evolution rather than elite prescription. | ||
Reliance on systemic processes, whether in the economy, the law, or other areas, is based on the constrained vision—the tragic vision—of the severe limitations on any given individual’s knowledge and insight, however knowledgeable or brilliant that individual might be, compared to other individuals. Systemic processes which tap vastly more knowledge and experience from vastly more people, often including traditions evolved from the experiences of successive generations, are deemed more reliable than the intellect of the intellectuals. | ||
By contrast, the vision of the left is one of surrogate decision-making by those presumed to have not only superior knowledge but sufficient knowledge, whether these surrogates are political leaders, experts, judges or others. This is the vision that is common to varying degrees on the political left, whether radical or moderate, and common also to totalitarians, whether Communist or Fascist. A commonality of purpose in society is central to collective decision-making, whether expressed in town-meeting democracy or totalitarian dictatorship or other variations in between. One of the differences between the commonality of purposes in democratic systems of government and in totalitarian systems of government is in the range of decisions infused with that commonality of purpose and in the range of decisions reserved for individual decision-making outside the purview of government. | ||
The free market, for example, is a huge exemption from government power. In such a market, there is no commonality of purpose, except among such individuals and organizations as may choose voluntarily to coalesce into groups ranging from bowling leagues to multinational corporations. But even these aggregations typically pursue the interests of their own respective constituents and compete against the interests of other aggregations. Those who advocate this mode of social decision-making do so because they believe that the systemic results of such competition are usually better than a society-wide commonality of purpose imposed by surrogate decision-makers superintending the whole process in the name of “the national interest” or of “social justice.” | ||
The totalitarian version of collective surrogate decision-making by government was summarized by Mussolini, who defined “totalitarianism” in the motto: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”29 Moreover, the state ultimately meant the political leader of the state, the dictator. Mussolini was known as Il Duce—the leader—before Hitler acquired the same title in German as the Führer. | ||
Democratic versions of collective surrogate decision-making by government choose leaders by votes and tend to leave more areas outside the purview of government. However, the left seldom has any explicit principle by which the boundaries between government and individual decision-making can be determined, so that the natural tendency over time is for the scope of government decision-making to expand, as more and more decisions are taken successively from private hands, since government officials constantly have incentives to expand their powers while the voters’ attention is not constantly focussed on maintaining limits on those powers. | ||
Preferences for collective, surrogate decision-making from the top down are not all that the democratic left has shared with the original Italian Fascists and with the National Socialists (Nazis) of Germany. In addition to political intervention in economic markets, the democratic left has shared with the Fascists and the Nazis the underlying assumption of a vast gap in understanding between ordinary people and elites like themselves. Although both the totalitarian left—that is, the Fascists, Communists and Nazis—and the democratic left have widely used in a positive sense such terms as “the people,” “the workers” or “the masses,” these are the ostensible beneficiaries of their policies, but not autonomous decision-makers. Although much rhetoric on both the democratic left and the totalitarian left has long papered over the distinction between ordinary people as beneficiaries and as decision-makers, it has long been clear in practice that decision-making has been seen as something reserved for the anointed in these visions. | ||
Rousseau, for all his emphasis on “the general will,” left the interpretation of that will to elites. He likened the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid.”30 Godwin and Condorcet, also on the eighteenth century left, expressed similar contempt for the masses.31 Karl Marx said, “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing”32—in other words, millions of human beings mattered only if they carried out his vision. Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the “detestable” people who “have no right to live.” He added: “I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.”33 As a young man serving in the U.S. Army during the First World War, Edmund Wilson wrote to a friend: “I should be insincere to make it appear that the deaths of this ‘poor white trash’ of the South and the rest made me feel half so bitter as the mere conscription or enlistment of any of my friends.”34 | ||
The totalitarian left has been similarly clear that decision-making power should be confined to a political elite—the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the leader of a “master race,” or whatever the particular phrase that might become the motto of the particular totalitarian system. In Mussolini’s words, “The mass will simply follow and submit.”35 | ||
The similarity in underlying assumptions between the various totalitarian movements and the democratic left was openly recognized by leaders of the left themselves in democratic countries during the 1920s, when Mussolini was widely lionized by intellectuals in the Western democracies, and even Hitler had his admirers among prominent intellectuals on the left. It was only as the 1930s unfolded that Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s violent anti-Semitism at home and military aggression abroad made these totalitarian systems international pariahs that they were repudiated by the left—and were thereafter depicted as being on “the right.”n | ||
During the 1920s, however, radical writer Lincoln Steffens wrote positively about Mussolini’s Fascism as he had more famously written positively about Soviet Communism.36 As late as 1932, famed novelist and Fabian socialist H.G. Wells urged students at Oxford to be “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.”37 Historian Charles Beard was among Mussolini’s apologists in the Western democracies, as was the New Republic magazine.38 The poet Wallace Stevens even justified Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.39 | ||
W.E.B. Du Bois was so intrigued by the Nazi movement in the 1920s that he put swastikas on the cover of an issue of a magazine he edited, despite protests from Jews.40 Even though Du Bois was conflicted by the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, he said in the 1930s that creation of the Nazi dictatorship had been “absolutely necessary to get the state in order” in Germany, and in a speech in Harlem in 1937 he declared that “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”41 More revealing, Du Bois saw the Nazis as part of the political left. In 1936, he said, “Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world.”42 | ||
The heterogeneity of those later lumped together as the right has allowed those on the left to dump into that grab-bag category many who espouse some version of the vision of the left, but whose other characteristics make them an embarrassment to be repudiated. Thus the popular 1930s American radio personality Father Coughlin—who was, among other things, an anti-Semite—has been verbally banished to “the right,” even though he advocated so many of the policies that became part of the New Deal that many Congressional Democrats at one time publicly praised him and some progressives urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make him a Cabinet member.43 | ||
During this early period, it was common on the left, as well as elsewhere, to compare as kindred experiments Fascism in Italy, Communism in the Soviet Union and the New Deal in the United States.44 Such comparisons were later as completely rejected as the inclusion of Father Coughlin as a figure of the left was. These arbitrary changes in classifications not only allowed the left to distance themselves from embarrassing individuals and groups, whose underlying assumptions and conclusions bore many similarities to their own, these classification changes also allowed the left to verbally transfer these embarrassments to their ideological opponents. Moreover, such changes in nomenclature greatly reduced the likelihood that observers would see the negative potential of the ideas and agendas being put forth by the left in its bid for influence or power. | ||
The kinds of concentrations of government power sought by the left may be proclaimed to be in the service of various sorts of lofty goals, but such concentrations of power also offer opportunities for all sorts of abuses, ranging up to and including mass murder, as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot demonstrated. These leaders did not have a tragic vision of man, such as that underlying what is called “conservative” thought in America today. It was precisely these dictators’ presumptions of their own vastly greater knowledge and wisdom than that of ordinary people which led to such staggering tragedies for others. | ||
YOUTH AND AGE | ||
Given the very different conceptions of knowledge by those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed, it is virtually inevitable that they would have different conceptions of the role and competence of the young. Where knowledge is conceived of as more or less the kinds of things taught in schools and universities, and intelligence is conceived of as sheer brainpower in manipulating concepts and articulating conclusions, there is no inherent reason why the young would not be at least as accomplished in such things as the old, since brain development is said to reach its peak in early adulthood. Moreover, the young, having been more recently educated, have the advantage of the most updated and newly discovered knowledge. As the Marquis de Condorcet said in the eighteenth century: “A young man now leaving school possesses more real knowledge than the greatest geniuses—not of antiquity, but even of the seventeenth century—could have acquired by long study.”45 | ||
This is yet another example of how one conceives of knowledge affects how one conceives of other things, including in this case the relative advantages of youth and age. Views such as those of Condorcet contrast with the views of those with the tragic vision, where consequential knowledge is often mundane knowledge, accumulated by experience, and wisdom is also primarily distilled from experience. Therefore, almost by definition, the younger generation is not usually in as good a position to make wise decisions—for themselves, much less for society—as those who have much more experience to draw upon. | ||
Accordingly, those with the vision of the anointed have for centuries put great hopes in the young, while those with the tragic vision have relied far more on those with mature experience. | ||
The 1960s notion that “we should learn from our young people” had antecedents going back to the eighteenth century. Such subsidiary social phenomena as lowering the voting age, and reducing the deference to the older generation in general and to parents in particular, are likewise very consistent with, if not inescapable corollaries from, the over-all conception of knowledge and intelligence prevalent among those with the vision of the anointed. Where social problems are seen as being consequences of existing institutions and prejudices, the young are often seen as less wedded to the status quo, and thus as hopes for the future. | ||
Back in the eighteenth century, William Godwin articulated this argument when he said, “The next generation will not have so many prejudices to subdue.”46 Children, according to Godwin, “are a sort of raw material put into our hands.”47 Their minds “are like a sheet of white paper.”48 At the same time, they are oppressed by their parents and must go through “twenty years of bondage” before they receive “the scanty portion of liberty, which the government of my country happens to concede to its adult subjects!”49 Clearly the young have been seen as candidates for “liberation,” both of themselves and of society, in this view—a view still very much alive among intellectuals, more than two centuries later. Advocates of “children’s rights” are advocating rights that children themselves obviously will not be exercising, so this amounts to another way for third party surrogates to intervene in families, without having to pay any price when they are wrong. | ||
All these conclusions change completely, however, if knowledge and wisdom are conceived as they are conceived by those with the tragic vision. Adam Smith, for example, said, “The wisest and most experienced are generally the least credulous.” In short, the old are generally not as susceptible to heady notions, according to Smith: “It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.”50 The zeal and enthusiasm of the young, much praised by many of those with the vision of the anointed, have long been seen very differently by those with the tragic vision. Burke, for example, said: “It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion.”51 Some have even referred to a perennial invasion of civilization by barbarians, namely the new-born, whom families and social institutions must civilize, because they enter the world no different from babies born in the days of the caveman. | ||
People with opposing visions of the world do not simply happen to reach different conclusions about the young and the old. On these and innumerable other issues, the conclusions reached by each are entailed as corollaries of their underlying assumptions about knowledge and wisdom. The education of the young has long been a battleground between adherents of the two visions of the nature of human beings and the nature of knowledge and wisdom. William Godwin’s notion that the young “are a sort of raw material put into our hands” remains, after two centuries, a powerful temptation to classroom indoctrination in schools and colleges. In the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson wrote of his years as an academic administrator when he felt “I should like to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible.”52 | ||
This indoctrination can start as early as elementary school, where students are encouraged or required to write about controversial issues, sometimes in letters to public officials. More fundamentally, the indoctrination process habituates them to taking sides on weighty and complex issues after hearing just one side of those issues. Moreover, they are habituated to venting their emotions instead of analyzing conflicting evidence and dissecting conflicting arguments. In short, they are led to prepackaged conclusions, instead of being equipped with the intellectual tools to reach their own conclusions, including conclusions different from those of their teachers. In many colleges and universities, whole academic departments are devoted to particular prepackaged conclusions—whether on race, the environment or other subjects, under such names as black, women’s or environmental “studies.” Few, if any, of these “studies” include conflicting visions and conflicting evidence, as educational rather than ideological criteria might require. | ||
Critics of ideological indoctrination in schools and colleges often attack the particular ideological conclusions, but that is beside the point educationally. Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that all the conclusions reached by all the various “studies” are both logically and factually valid, that still does not get to the heart of the educational issue. Even if students were to leave these “studies” with 100 percent correct conclusions about issues A, B and C, that would in no way equip them intellectually with the tools needed to confront very different issues X, Y and Z that are likely to arise over the course of their future years. For that they would need knowledge and experience in how to analyze and weigh conflicting viewpoints. As John Stuart Mill said: | ||
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that... Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. . .53 | ||
One of the remarkable self-indulgences of contemporary educators in the public schools has been the introduction into classrooms of programs which systematically undermine moral principles that have come down over the centuries, and which children have been taught by their parents. These programs have usually been developed by intellectuals outside the field of education, extensively marketed by both commercial firms and non-profit organizations, and are often eagerly embraced by educators who have been taught in schools of education that their role is to be that of agents of social “change,” not simply transmitters of a heritage of knowledge. These programs have a remarkable variety of names and ostensible goals, one of the earliest names being “values clarification,” though other names have proliferated after parents and others discovered what “values clarification” really meant in practice and raised objections. | ||
The phrase “values clarification” is very misleading. When parents tell their children not to steal or lie, or engage in violence, there is no ambiguity as to what they mean. Ambiguity is introduced by programs which confront students with carefully crafted moral dilemmas, such as a situation where a ship is sinking and there are more people than the lifeboats can hold, so that decisions have to be made as to who is to be left to drown, perhaps beaten off when they try to climb out of the water onto a lifeboat that is already so full that it will capsize if another person climbs in. Because received moral principles do not always apply, the implication is that each individual should develop his or her own situational ethics to replace traditional morality—not only where traditional moral principles fail but in the vast range of more ordinary situations where there are no such dilemmas as those in contrived examples. | ||
If such exercises seem remote from the purposes of a public school education, they are not remote from the philosophy introduced into education by John Dewey a century ago and promoted by schools of education to the present day. Nor were they remote from the thinking by Woodrow Wilson. Like so much in the vision of the anointed, this view of education exalts those who believe in it, and so it is not simply a set of testable hypotheses about social events. Also like other aspects of that vision, there is no price to be paid by its promoters for being wrong, however large a price ends up being paid by individual students or by society at large. | ||
“Values clarification” has been just one of a wide range of high-sounding names for classroom programs to re-shape the attitudes and consciousness of the younger generation. Other names have included “affective education,” “decision-making,” “Quest,” “sex education” and many other imaginative titles. Such titles are often simply flags of convenience, under which schools set sail on an “exciting” voyage in an uncharted sea of social experimentation in the re-shaping of young people’s beliefs and attitudes. The ever-changing names for these programs reflect the need for concealment or misdirection, since few parents want to be told that schools are out to undo what the parents have taught their children or to mold those children to be what third parties want them to be. | ||
Enigmatic writing is another way of concealing what is being done. Many people—including many who have respected and agreed with his conclusions—have commented on the difficulty of trying to understand the writings of philosopher John Dewey who, in addition to his other roles, was the leading educational theorist of the twentieth century. William James, a contemporary and fellow leader in the development of the philosophy of pragmatism, called Dewey’s writing style “damnable.” In a later era, Richard Hofstadter said of Dewey, “He wrote a prose of terrible vagueness and plasticity.”54 Yet anyone who reads Dewey’s 1935 book Liberalism and Social Action will find its writing clear as a bell, whatever its merits or demerits otherwise. Nor can the subject matter of technical philosophy be the sole reason for the difficulties of trying to pin down what Dewey was saying in most of his earlier writings. Even books by Dewey with such a familiar and non-technical subject matter as The Child and the Curriculum have a vagueness that sometimes makes trying to grasp his meanings seem like trying to grab a handful of fog. | ||
What Hofstadter regarded as a defect of Dewey’s writings on education—that a “variety of schools of educational thought have been able to read their own meanings into his writings”55—has been a source of the enduring influence of those writings. Moreover, it was a protective obscurity, since Dewey espoused ideas that could have set off more than one hornet’s nest of opposition if expressed in plain words in the early twentieth century. By 1935, when Liberalism and Social Action was published, the kinds of social and political notions expressed in that book were very much in keeping with the spirit of the 1930s and required no camouflage. | ||
Writing in the early twentieth century, however, Dewey’s notion that education should be a means to “eliminate obvious social evils” through its “development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents”56 was a fundamental change in the role of schools. The notion that the school should be run as a microcosm of society—“a miniature community, an embryonic society”57—and as a place for conditioning students to want a very different kind of society, unlike the current society, was not something likely to find approval or perhaps even toleration. In the early twentieth century especially, parents were not sending their children to school to become guinea pigs in someone else’s social experiments to use education as a means of subverting existing values in order to create a new society based on new values, those of a self-anointed elite, more or less behind the backs of parents, voters and taxpayers. |