Ominous Parallels (36 page)

The New Dealers never offered a fixed definition of “opportunity” as they conceived the term. From their actions, however, it was apparent that the word could be extended beyond the issue of jobs, to cover a series of “economic rights” and of government powers which never stopped growing. Two swelling streams poured out of Washington: the stream of Federal favors and the stream of Federal controls.

The “experimenting fingers of the New Deal” (in one admirer’s phrase)
²²
were everywhere, providing funds or programs for every major group, including the unemployed, the young, the writers and artists, the workers, the businessmen, the farmers. The biggest beneficiaries were the unions; as a result of laws such as the Wagner Act, organized labor was converted from the status of voluntary association to that of quasi-official, government-mandated spokesman and bargaining agent for the worker.

The “experimenting fingers” also repudiated the gold standard, moved to regiment agriculture, imposed new controls on the banks, created a commission to supervise the stock market, pressed a more vigorous antitrust policy, and tried to force businessmen into a system of industry-wide, government-regulated cartels (the National Industrial Recovery Act). The NRA was the New Deal’s attempt to bring to America the substance of Mussolini’s corporativism.

Some of the New Deal measures, such as the NRA, did not last; the essential policies underlying the measures, however, did last. With the passage of the Social Security Act, which provided for compulsory old-age and unemployment insurance, the United States caught up with Europe: by 1935, five decades after Bismarck had inaugurated the idea, America, too, had become a welfare state.

The New Deal measures had to be conceived, guided through Congress, rammed through the courts, administered, enforced, financed. Thus the appearance of some corollaries of Bismarckianism: the leap in executive power, the growth of the bureaucracy, the mounting debt, the skyrocketing taxes. Since each group’s benefits required some other group’s sacrifice, there was a further corollary: the rise of nationwide pressure-group warfare.

To compare the New Deal with any European version of statism, its champions said at the time, is ridiculous. This administration, they said, is not wedded to a particular ideology; Roosevelt’s concentration of power in government hands is not doctrinaire, but pragmatic. Such concentration, they added, is no threat to liberty, because the government here is using its power to cut down “economic royalists” and thus promote the welfare of the common man. In fact, said President Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign, the purpose of government restrictions is “not to hamper individualism but to protect it.”

“It was this administration,” the President told a Chicago audience in 1936, “which saved the system of private profit and free enterprise....”
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The conservatives of the period, furiously opposed to Roosevelt, attacked every feature of the New Deal, except its ideological essence. They decried its breach with tradition, the tradition of Herbert Hoover. They denounced it as unconstitutional, but stopped short of offering any defense of the Constitution’s principles or philosophic base. Some denounced the Democratic innovations as a product of science or the sin of pride, while affirming that the foundation of America was faith and the virtue of humility. All of them attacked Roosevelt as a menace to individual liberty, while stressing that their own ideal was the Christian ethics of service and duty to those in need. It was a spectacle of rage laced with appeasement, a combination not calculated to swell the conservative ranks.

[E]very person who lives by any useful work, should be habituated to regard himself not as an individual working for his private benefit, but as a public functionary; and his wages, of whatever sort, not as the remuneration or purchase-money of his labour, which should be given freely, but as the provision made by society to enable him to carry it on....

The author of this statement—more extreme a collectivist utterance than any Democratic politician would permit himself in public—was not a New Dealer. It was John Stuart Mill, a philosophic hero of the conservatives of the time.
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As in the 1890s, so in the 1930s: both sides in the political battle held the same
basic
ideas; and so the conservatives were helpless.

By the later thirties the conservative attacks on Roosevelt began to peter out, and the debate, such as it had been, was over. The Republican leadership, bowing to the trend, adopted a permanent policy of “me-too’ing” the Democrats.

Judged by the standard its leaders publicly set themselves—the restoration of employment and prosperity—the New Deal was a failure. At the end of the thirties there were still ten million people unemployed, about two-thirds of the number without jobs in 1932. The problem was not solved until the excess manpower was sent to die on foreign battle-fields.

Once again, a period of rising statism in the West was climaxed by a world war. Once again, the American public, which was strongly “isolationist,” was manipulated by a pro-war administration into joining an “idealistic” crusade. (On November 27, 1941, ten days before Pearl Harbor, writes John T. Flynn, “the President told Secretary Stimson, who wrote it in his diary, that our course was to maneuver the Japanese into attacking us. This would put us into the war and solve his problem.”)
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The result of the first crusade had not been a “world safe for democracy,” but the emergence of modern totalitarianism. The result of the second crusade was not the attainment of “four freedoms,” but the surrender of half of Europe to Soviet Russia.

From the founding of the United States through the 1920s, the “private sector,” as it is now called, was the nation’s dominant element; the state and the principle of statism were always encroaching, but always peripheral. The New Deal, including its progeny of wartime controls and its Fair Deal successor, ended this historical relationship.

After the two Roosevelts, America was no longer an essentially capitalist country with a sprinkling of controls. Nor was it a socialist country. It was, and still is, a modern “mixed economy,” with the philosophic base and the political future that this implies. In a mixed economy, one of the two elements gradually withers away. That element is not the state.

America had beaten the Fascists. It had stamped out Hitler. But it was turning into the Weimar Republic.

15

Convulsion and Paralysis

Since World War II, America has been following a course of passive drifting. It has drifted from crisis to crisis, at home and abroad, without policy, leadership, or any large-scale political initiative. For decades now, despite the public’s growing restiveness, the United States has moved but not acted. It has moved by the power of inertia and in the direction of disintegration.

A country’s action is directed by its intellectuals. The cause of its inaction (when it has the material means to work its will) is the collapse of its intellectuals—their abandonment of ideals, ideas, programs, and hope. This collapse is the central fact in recent American history. It is the fundamental development of the present era throughout the West.

Three generations of crusaders, moved by the power of German philosophy, had fought to refashion America’s political institutions in the image of Europe’s. By the end of World War II, it seemed that the reformists were on the verge of achieving their goal. At this point the crusade petered out.

When the liberals saw the results of their ideas in worldwide practice, the conviction and the moral zeal went out of the reformist cause.

During and after the war, the intellectuals of the West saw the meaning of a “planned society.” They saw it in Germany, in Russia, in Britain, in variants around the globe. They saw that the consequences of collectivism ranged from impoverishment to starvation to mass slaughter, with the degree of a country’s agony a function of the degree of its collectivization. The result, in the minds of the more honest observers, was the death of socialism.

If World War I marked the close of the individualist era, World War II marked the end of collectivism, not as the West’s dominant practice, but as its leaders’ social ideal.

The collectivist practice continued by default, as the lobbyists endemic to a mixed economy continued routinely to demand more controls. This routine was not disturbed by the intellectuals, whose policy was not to consider any alternative to their onetime ideal. The ethics of altruism, which they still accepted, eliminated in their eyes the possibility of a political direction which was not collectivist.

Unable to choose or approve any direction, the intellectuals chose to turn away from principles as such. They decided to dismiss long-range programs and confine themselves to dealing piecemeal with the problems of the moment.

It is
The End of Ideology,
said sociologist Daniel Bell in his 1961 book, accurately subtitled
On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties.
Ideology, Bell said, “which once was a road to action, has come to be a dead end.” As a result of “[s]uch calamities as the Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the concentration camps, the suppression of the Hungarian workers,” the ideologies which ruled the first half of the twentieth century “have lost their ‘truth’ and their power to persuade. Few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down ‘blueprints’ and through ‘social engineering’ bring about a new utopia of social harmony.”
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Like “philosophy,” the term “ideology” is a broad abstraction, which subsumes many different concretes; it designates any set of principles underlying a social or political institution or movement; in effect, it means social or political philosophy (as a rule in simplified form). The modern liberals, however, equated the abstraction with a specific movement, i.e., with a single one of the possible concretes, and the calamities Bell cites indicate which one: communism. The failure of communism, therefore, led the liberals to reject the entire field of social thought. The failure of “blueprints” —which means: of totalitarian planning—led to the downfall in their eyes not of statism, but of political philosophy as such.

The liberals did not understand what had gone wrong. They did not know why, by its essence and moral base, communism had to fail. They knew only that it had failed and that they did not intend to get caught a second time. They resolved never to crusade again for an ideal society. “What is left for the critic,” said Bell, “is the hardness of alienation ... which guards one against being submerged in any cause....”
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The alienation of the postwar years pervaded every area of American culture. In art and science as in politics, the new trend was weariness, skepticism, and a vacuum.

Naturalism in America had reached its climax in the social-protest literature and painting of the Depression years. Thereafter, drained of its crusading passion, the school began to fade. About a generation later the same fate befell its Kantian successor: by the fifties the modernist movement, too, was starting to run down.

When the message of apocalypse had become routine, there was not much left for the horror-mongers to say. When the essentials of every art form had been destroyed, there was not much left for the nihilists to do (except to carry the job of destruction out to the end). Even the movement’s rationalizations were crumbling. After decades of rehashing European rehashes of primitivism and the like, it was difficult for the avant-garde to go on claiming “innovation.” After years of being safely entrenched in the universities, the museums, the theaters, the press, and the government funding offices, it was impossible to claim “revolt against the establishment.” In the arts the modernists had become the establishment, a tired establishment that was losing its power to shock and therefore its lease on life. But, as in politics, no new movement arose to challenge or replace it.

Science, by its nature, is an undertaking based on reason, and therefore on a rational epistemology. This is why modern science arose in an Aristotelian period. It is why scientists have relied (in their professional work) on the remnants of Aristotelianism for a longer time than men in areas such as art or politics. And it is why, when those remnants dwindle past a certain point, the spirit of a scientific method begins to disintegrate.

Decades ago, the exponents of purposefully guided, objective cognition—which is what scientists had once been—began yielding to two newer breeds: the narrow technicians and the punch-drunk theoreticians. The former are intent on amassing disconnected bits of experimental data, with no clear idea of context, wider meaning, or overall cognitive goal. The latter—trained in a Kantian skepticism by Dewey, Carnap, Heisenberg, Gödel, and many others—turn out increasingly arbitrary speculations while stressing the power of physical theory; not its power to advance man’s confidence or make reality intelligible, but to achieve the opposite results. Quantum mechanics, the theoreticians started to say, refutes causality, light waves refute logic, relativity refutes common sense, thermodynamics refutes hope, scientific law is old-fashioned, explanation is impossible, electrons are a myth, mathematics is a game, the difference between physics and religion is only a matter of taste. If all of it is true, what is the future of science?

In February 1950, P.W. Bridgman, an influential physicist at Harvard, gave the avant-garde answer. Writing in the
Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
he declared:

We are now approaching a bound beyond which we are forever stopped from pushing our inquiries.... The very concept of existence becomes meaningless. It is literally true that the only way of reacting to this is to shut up. We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely, that we live in a sympathetic world, in that it is comprehensible by our minds.
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Most philosophers at the time were not available to comment on any of the above developments. The leading movements were writing the obituary of academic philosophy. They were agreeing that “system-building” (i.e., a comprehensive view of existence) is outdated, that the questions of the past have no rational answers, that broad abstractions are irrelevant to art, science, or politics, and that philosophers are irrelevant to life.

The neo-Kantians who reached these conclusions proceeded to hold a series of meetings in order to discuss a new problem: they did not know what to do with their time. They did not know what issues, if any, their profession should be dealing with. “[P]erhaps,” one such thinker said recently, “there are no central or foundational questions in philosophy. There may remain only philosophy as kibitzing.... . ”
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The Kantian spirit had ruled Western culture and politics increasingly since the late nineteenth century. By the 1950s, that spirit had been given every major form of expression, theoretical and existential. In every field the result was destruction and a dead end, a state of affairs soon widely acknowledged, even by those who had no idea of its cause or significance.

The disillusionment of the modern intellectuals is usually described as a reaction to this century’s numbing progression of wars, economic disasters, and the like. But this is not a full explanation; such events are not primaries; they are the products of certain ideas.

The deeper meaning of the widespread disillusionment of our time is philosophical. It indicates the drawn-out ending of an historical development
—the exhaustion of the Kantian tradition.
Adapting a line from Victor Hugo, Kant’s is a philosophy whose time has gone. Men had tried it, they had staked their souls and their rights on it, and they were not able to live, or think, with the results. But they had no other philosophy to guide their actions.

The result has been gradual, protracted disintegration, across a span of bankrupt decades that seems to go on without end. In broad, historical perspective, these decades are a transition period (to whatever comes next). The sounds of the period have been only the sighs, then the screams, that signify the smashup of an era.

The Eisenhower Administration was an eloquent symbol of the start of this period. Although the intellectuals rejected Eisenhower, his Presidency in fact was a monument to their growing belief that thought is futile, and to the consequences of this belief: uncertainty, lifeless routine, drift.

The screams were the next phase. If thought is futile, one began to hear, then a replacement is necessary. If concepts lead to paralysis, there is another source of knowledge: passion. If the mind of the West has failed, there is a superior guide: the religions of the East. The quiet voices of the more civilized skeptics had prepared the way. They began to be drowned out by their natural successors.

The successors included the Existentialists, the Zen Buddhists, and a number of figures inspired by Weimar Germany’s Frankfurt Institute, who sought to fuse Hegel, Marx, and Freud. Typically, the fusers affirmed a nonmaterial dimension, denounced Aristotelian logic, and upheld the cognitive powers of an emotion-oriented faculty, such as “phantasy.”
Time
magazine summarized the trend among American intellectuals eloquently, in a 1972 essay titled “The New Cult of Madness: Thinking as a Bad Habit.” “ ‘Reason’ and ‘logic,’ ” the essayist reported, “have, in fact, become dirty words—death words. They have been replaced by the life words ‘feeling’ and ‘impulse.’ ”
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When Kant concluded that reality was unknowable to the mind, the historical sequel was the open irrationalism of the romanticist movement. For generations, the main line of American thinkers had denied the necessity of this kind of sequel. From Emerson to Dewey and even later, they had sought to accept the conclusions of Kant while continuing to advocate such ideals as science, intelligence, enlightenment, progress. They had observed the rising Continental schools of will-and-doom preachers, and they had said: “It won’t happen here.” In the end, however, the same cause led to the same effect: worn down by successive defeats, the American intellectuals conceded their contradiction and went the way of their European mentors. They began to drop the made-in-America masks. What showed up was the made-in-Germany essence.

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

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

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

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

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

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