REVOLUTION AND THE SECULAR ETHIC OF LOVE
North, Gary
"Love" in the Streets Revolution and the Secular Ethic of Love Gary North Revolution: the word is everywhere. On the surface, it would seem that Marx's dream of a revolutionary age is being...
...candidate at the University of California at Santa Barbara...
...Since revolutionary activity does involve some degree of risk and personal commitment, most students are not revolutionaries...
...In fact, the new morality is just the old sin, and parents should not be deluded...
...Love must conquer all...
...The hippies and the fascists have been monistic in orientation, i.e., willing to accept all things in principle (except opposition...
...In short, adults tolerate or even encourage these students' provocative actions because they have swallowed the line that these students are exponents of both a higher morality and a non-morality...
...And the outcome of the Berkeley unrest...
...Anyway, this is how the argument tends to run...
...seems straightforward enough...
...It is at this point that the hippie subculture is undergoing its owr revolution...
...In any case, students should not be too disheartened...
...The usual answer to the question of why students revolt makes reference to "youthful idealism...
...They have not compromised with the Establishment out of fear...
...We are becoming accustomed to campus riots and ghetto riots, and the time of the rioting hippie is about at hand...
...non-Marxist revolutionary humanists...
...Gary North is a Ph.D...
...Such ingredients make the chaos total...
...Both philosophies take their stands against traditional and especially Christian societies that are founded on the idea of differences among men, but which seek to make possible certain kinds of voluntary cooperation in those spheres of life common to all members of the society...
...Parents and taxpayers are asking themselves a basic question: Why should college students turn against the very society which makes possible their education through its taxes and gifts to educational institutions...
...In the absence of some establishment institution to oppose, I suspect they would turn into political cannibals-as did the Jacobins in 1793-but until that time, they can work within a common bond of chaos and revolutionary activity...
...Ironically in the year 1968-the University's centennial-the age of Mario Savio had just dawned...
...They are determined, most of all, to destroy those most fundamental principles that divide men, religious principles...
...So if anyone should happen to ask you for a one-sentence summary of what took place on the outstanding campus of the largest, richest, and finest state-supported university in America, just tell him this: it is a century of secular, liberal relativism coming home to roost...
...Within the academic community-if we can still call it a community-relativism has become the intellectual creed which governs all endeavors...
...Nevertheless, 'there are some definite similarities between the hippie movement and the more radical students, and the source of that agreement is seen in their attitudes toward standards of any kind, especially moral standards...
...The secular love ethic proclaims the unity of all life, and above all, the unity of humanity...
...The hippies,'in what Robert Nisbet has called their quest for community, are likely candidates for seduction by some charismatic, totalitarian figure who will lead them in their struggle against "straight" society...
...the sanctity of interpersonal relations is foremost...
...Certainly they are easier to understand than the masochistic whites advocating perpetual tolerance and apparently unaware of or unconcerned with the destructive forces tearing down their own society...
...The basically pacifistic framework of the earlier "drop-outs" is rapidly passing...
...a university, to a grinding halt...
...In any culture where relativism is the dominant philosophy, culture's will to maintain itself must evanesce...
...In short, both relativism and the secular love ethic can lead (and are presently leading) to moral and political nihilism...
...It is being replaced by a more strident activism...
...Revolution is simply relativism made explicit and consistent...
...Now professors have to spend even less time with their alienated students...
...Even the domestic war is based on their idea of love (a less obvious fact which I hope to explain in this article...
...The hippie subculture is not directly linked to the campus, except insofar as members of both groups rely on the same drug pusher or the same pornographer for their supplies...
...These nihilists have no understanding of the fabric of civilization...
...In recent months, the former hippie haven, Haight-Ashbury, has been depleted, as the migration to Berkeley has become pronounced...
...Privacy becomes a barrier to the "full development of the individual...
...There must be no obstacles to the full personal interaction among men and "women...
...Bearing this in mind, the reader may now have greater insight into the increasing militancy of the hippie movement...
...This fact would not have discouraged Marx-the Paris Commune of 1871 was hardly a Marxist affair and Marx welcomed it in his Civil War in France...
...This is the fusion which the various revolutionary minorities want to weld...
...and fragmented "New Left," which draws from all these groups...
...it can do little to arm itself against a religion of revolution...
...Any faculty member who audaciously enters a classroom announcing that he has discovered some permanent truth will be regarded as utterly unprofessional and dogmatic...
...The link supposedly bridging the gap is "love...
...For several centuries, relativism has been eating away at the foundations of western culture...
...Students learn this very quickly, through a whole series of insti-' tutional controls...
...Black Nationalists of various description...
...The lust for change overarches the fragments, magnetizing them together...
...In the United States, the base of "revolutionary" operations centers in the university, the urban ghetto, and the hippie subculture...
...Such institutions and societies are written off by both the radical monists and the radical dualists: these establishment structures-to quote Trotsky-are fit only for the "garbage pile of history...
...The Chicago riots brought this into the open...
...They act more openly and consistently within the revolutionary tradition, and as a result they are not so difficult to understand...
...As the nihilistic tendencies in the campus and hippie communities grow more pronounced, the means are increasingly available for establishing a common cause in revolutionary activity...
...They seem to accept both the idea of youthful idealism and the idea of youthful promiscuity...
...Institutions that might promote such standards must also be abolished...
...The open revolution broke out in Berkeley in 1964 during the Free Speech movement...
...Only one major institutional change has been made either at Columbia or Berkeley since the outbreak of violence: teaching loads have been dropped again...
...Karl Mannheim set the tone for all academic investigation in the social sciences back in the thirties, when his Ideology and Utopia raised total relativism to the status of a productive blessing in disguise...
...The black revolutionaries are not motivated by the contemporary love ethic, nor do they claim to be...
...The schools are committed to a broad, supposedly neutral search for truth, but the search, not the truth, is foremost in professors' minds...
...As a result, the culture is left to the mercy of nihilists, who adopt one of relativism's key ideas-that no concept and no institution has any validity apart from the fleeting present-and conclude that no institution has any right to exist...
...Both parents and college administrators (with a few exceptions) now stand back in horror, confused and helpless in the face of the product their ideas have wrought...
...A precedent-setting defeat of a quarter of a billion dollar bond measure- which we can perhaps view as a positive good, for perhaps it indicated that the public is finally taking a critical interest in its university...
...In any case, he will find it difficult to maintain a C average at a Berkeley or a Columbia if he lives consistently with a philosophy of total departure...
...Though it may not seem immediately evident, the love ethic is not far removed in principle from the activism of the fascist movement or the Soviet and Chinese brands of revolutionary ferment...
...Here Charles Manson comes to mind...
...it can be converted into the most rigorous kind of revolutionary action...
...But enough of them are, for it does not take many dedicated anarchists to bring a highly interdependent and specialized institution, e.g...
...The youthful enrages are taking the implications of their parents' moral flabbiness and permissiveness to their ultimate conclusion: total lawlessness...
...Perhaps this has already taken place...
...Berkeley has been the symbol of the "movement," and it is no accident that the little city of Berkeley houses both the University of California and the hippie subculture of Telegraph Hill...
...The marxists are dualists who see all progress as a clash of irreconcilable opposites a clash which will some day destroy the capitalist world and create a harmonious, peaceful, creative monistic world of proletarian happiness...
...They have read too much Georges Sorel and not enough Georg Simmel...
...Under these circumstances, idealism is cheap...
...Let us remember that the vast majority of college students are not revolutionary...
...To be at the mercy of the nihilists is to be abandoned...
...they are not cowards...
...Thus-insulated by a number of obliging institutional buffers-it is easy to criticize the prevailing scheme of things...
...often, they are the same people...
...The race question and the problems of the Negro ghetto are important issues, but I am not so concerned with them at this point...
...Perhaps the students will learn a lesson Edmund Burke offered us in 1790: revolutions seldom accomplish their ends, but they do make the earlier evils worse...
...Christian concepts of morality have sustained our civilization for many years, but now there is very little moral capital left to sustain the sons and daughters of the Enlightenment...
...It is an idealism financed by unsuspecting, blinded and careless parents, in cooperation with deceived and coerced taxpayers...
...A more baffling problem for most Americans is the question of revolution on the campus...
...He has to leave...
...On the surface, it would seem that Marx's dream of a revolutionary age is being fulfilled, although the various revolutions which we are presently facing are not all strictly Marxist in content and structure...
...In these areas any number of "operators" are trying to control or direct the irrational urge for destruction: old-line Communists and innumerable "splinter" factions...
...The Berkeley-Oakland complex manifests the fusion of the real "triple revolution "-the ghetto, the university, and the hippie subculture...
...But this is a cause for rejoicing only in part...
...they are not submissive to evil vested interests...
...The result was inevitable, and it should have been foreseen: a generation raised on permissive educational philosophies, is now rebelling against the "bourgeois morality" which has nurtured both the students and the philosophies...
...Get Whitey...
...Relativism posits a world in which whirl is king...
...At present, it would appear that the New Leftists stand on the brink of success, though their movement is incredibly fragmented...
...What we are witnessing is the triumph of relativism...
...The love ethic is not passive in nature...
...The ethos of the new morality leads those same students to abandon the old patterns of courtship and romance...
...This implies that traditional moral standards must be abolished, since they act as inhibitions to the unity of mankind...
...Yet the public is simultaneously expected to accept this fact along with another: that of the "new morality...
...The slogan is "make love, not war," unless, of course, the war happens to be domestic...
...nia at Santa Barbara...
...A true hippie has dropped out of the establishment world, and this means the university...
...frightened college administrators compromised by revolutionary faculty members, their own relativism, a desire to appear "liberal" and a frantic unwillingness to admit to legislatures or alumni that anything is fundamentally wrong...
...If the administrators fear the loss of their budgets more than they fear the irresponsible students and faculty, there will be less"love" on the campus...
...they cannot grasp the fact that humans need certain social and personal barriers in order to exist...
...Unfortunately most are deluded, or at least confused enough to remain silent...
...How proud Clark Kerr must have been...
...Students supposedly have a higher standard of morality than do their elders...
...The heart of the new situational ethics is the idea that "love conquers all," especially all moral standards and restraints...
...And make no mistake about it, these are buffers: parents captivated by the concept of higher education and unconcerned by the content of that education...
...students are not conservative out of principle, but out of apathy...
...A new kind of freedom has been substituted-a freedom supposedly involving whole new vistas of human responsibility and concern...
...The student may have given more thought to the intellectual justification of his moral relativism, but the hippies' "love ethic" is fundamentally the same as his...
Vol. 4 • November 1970 • No. 1
