The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition
East, John P.
"The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition" Finally, whether our other allies lose confidence in our keeping to our half of mutualsecurity agreements could depend upon whether we let China have only...
...Or the frequent seeming meaninglessness of the play: 18 The Alternative April 1972...
...In contrast, in keeping with the great tradition of the study of politics, Kendall and Carey are concerned with the "ought-to-be," that is, with values, ethics, morality, the qualitative and in general with the problems of articulating and achieving the political "good" life...
...Trager and Henderson have produced an informative book...
...Maybe they don't do that anymore in this country, but if they do, then I'm probably not wrong in thinking that for most Americans, theatre is still something one is taken to, a t a tender age, and then abandoned like spinach...
...They have combined the "text analysis" method of Leo Strauss with the "symbols" approach of Eric Voegelin...
...It has no conception of "sin," "evil" and "tragedy," nor does it concede the imperfectibility of the human condition...
...One understands the desire to use the threat of a Sino-American alliance to offset somewhat Russia's increasing strength, yet such an alliance has its problems, one of which is that much of the Sino-Soviet hostility originally arose from the reluctance of the Russians to commit themselves lo armed intervention against the American paper tiger" on behalf of foreign communist governments such as China...
...rather, it argues that human nature is wholly malleable, and that the perfected good life is attainable through institutional and environmental manipulation...
...Driven on with this mind's eye view of the perfected egalitarian utopia, the liberal tradition becomes restive, anxious and on occasion fanatical when society seems impervious and indifferent to its hortatory, and when its Tower of Babel begins to reveal cracks and imperfections...
...In effect, twentieth-century American liberalism is the contemporary expression of that tradition which doggedly pursues equality...
...It commenced by wrenching the equality symbol from the Declaration of Independence and perverting that symbol into an instrument for constructing the egalitarian New Jerusalem...
...Granted, the theatre does not reach large masses of people, surely not like the movies, that cultural form (aside from books) with which I'm most concerned...
...Among other things, this distortion has produced a series of ."strong" Presidents who envision themselves as Great Leaders and the messiahs of leveling...
...It is those who do not go to the theatre - - the anti-culture police, blue-nose judges, among others - - who today threaten the theatre in America, and their threat is a rear-guard action and but delays, rather than impedes, the advance of just about any manifestacloth, $4.95 paper tion of theatrical whim imaginable (I think of the reception Hair received in Boston: closed by judicial order, with police connivance, because of some nudity and flag- disrespect" business, but eventually reopened with complete victory for the producers and defeat of the censors...
...Is the reason that those of us who feel uneasy about and confused by today's theatre that we are not amused by cannibalism on state...
...But more than film, more so, in fact, than any other art form, the modern theatre reflects the new sensibility, and, created by just such small coteries as Dr...
...When confronted with the failure to attain instanter the worldly City of Man, instead of reappraising the soundness of their secularism and their view of the nature of man, the exponents of the liberal tradition double their efforts and attribute their continued failures to the ignorance of the populace ("more education is needed"), to the sinister machinations of reactionaries and recalcitrants ("greater political organization and effort is needed"), and to the general failure of society to appreciate the clarity of insight and vision of egalitarian utopianism...
...garde, is on the verge of triumph...
...Statistics are unreliable here, but I'd guess that we could say in two entire years and not be far off the mark...
...the other, an older one, which holds that our supreme symbol is to rule (by) the deliberate sense of the community...
...Mao's government signed a joint declaration of like five principles of peaceful coexistence" with India in 1954, and then violated a few of them eight years later to carve out a bit more turf from India's borders...
...These remarks are occasioned by the appearance recently of The AmeriCan Theatre 1969-1970, a well-designed anthology containing some excellent, frank essays and a wealth of fine photographs and cartoons (Hirschfeld and others...
...The book doesn't answer all my questions about why today's theatre is as it is, or why I rarely see plays...
...Surely not the nudity--the players are almost invariably nice to look at...
...Kendall and Carey contend that the two traditions are incompatible...
...As always, "knowledge puffeth up...
...Where, in its zeal to create now the Worldly Paradise, the secular egalitarian tradition sometimes sees its querulousness and impatience erupt into an unseemly fanaticism, the conservative tradition, by rejecting the reconstruction of society from wholly new cloth, holds steady on course with confidence in the viability of organic growth through "the deliberate sense of the community," which community is composed of a "virtuous people...
...The new sensibilities," writes Daniel Bell ("The Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism," in Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, eds., Capitalism Today 1971...
...As Seymour Lipset's recent study for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education reveals, only nine per cent of the American college and university political science professors will accept the label "conservative" to describe their political leanings -- even with the addition of the modifier "moderately" conservative...
...The conservative loves and reveres man as the creature and child of God, but he has no illusions about the erection of a worldly utopia, for basic human nature precluaes it -- Man is not GOd...
...Just what separates the sensibilities of the traditional theatre-goer from those of people who now appreciate the new theatre and, in addition, from those who lap-after rock but shun the theatre, is hard to determine...
...Unfortunately, this book will not receive the currency in academic political science that it deserves...
...It's a bother that few Americans are willing to undergo, although hundreds of thousands endure much more inconvenience to attend Woodstock or Altamont...
...As they see it, the "derailment" commenced with the erroneous insistence that the egalitarian premise is the basic one in the Declaration of Independence...
...A second reason for probable neglect by contemporary political science is that this book is in the great tradition of normative, traditional political theory...
...Onany given night in America, more people s e e a prime-time TV show than attend all the theatrical performances performed across the land in an entire year...
...Moreover, by inoculating against utopianism, this religious temper produces a continuing political mood of moderation, restraint, conciliation, civility, and thereby contributes immeasurably to the deliberative process, and the pursuit of consensus, which are, according to Kendall and Carey, the foundation materials of the American political tradition...
...From this examination, they are able to detect the "derailment" of that sound, viable and durable tradition, rooted in the order of being, which Publius knew so well...
...The secularist has to be satisfied with Descartes's, "I think, therefore I am?') Along with such modern Augustinians as Reinhold Niebuhr, the conservative appreciates the relevance of such concepts as "original sin," "evil "and "the...
...President Nixon will have to be wary while in the Flower Kingdom, bringing Kissinger and more to the man born the day after Christmas...
...the antibourgeois, masquerading as the avant...
...John P. East The Play's the Thing, Maybe The American Theatre, 1969-1970 Scribners, $9.95 B OURGEOIS culture we're told, has been touted...
...Where once people were shocked even to rage, as happened at early performances of Ibsen (A Doll's House, Enemy of the People, and others), now in the West at least, those who frequent the theatre are tolerant of anything...
...and because the new has value in and of itself, and meets with so little resistance, the new sensibility and its behavior styles diffuse rapidly, transforming the thinking and actions of larger masses of people...
...In contrast, the conservative tradition in the American experience, which .is the older of the two traditions, draws its nourishment from strikingly different roots...
...A tradition of the new, Harold Rosenberg's neat oxymoron, encourages art to be unfettered, breaking down all genres...
...The authors set forth their thesis concerning the American political tradition in this fashion: "We have come to have two traditions: one which holds to a rather extreme view of equality...
...Perhaps as a monstrous generalization one could say that the traditionalist demands linearity, the play's the thing," beginning, middle, cfimax, denouement...
...We live in a time witnessing a breakup not only of genres but of rational cosmology as well...
...Kendall and Carey have fused the approaches of two distinguished political theorists...
...Is it the themes or the forms that most unsettle us...
...tragic sense of life...
...As opposed to the secularism of the liberal tradition, it is undeniably religious in temper...
...the two traditions are not compatible with one another, and the manifestations of this are quite apparent in our contemporary world...
...The liberal academy was never known for its generous and tolerant treatment of Willmoore Kendall, and its potential for ignoring this final important work is considerable...
...Contrary to popular myth, as a result of these distinctions, the conservative is congenial (including a generous dash of humor), warm, humane and human, while the secular egalitarian is more often aloof, cold, harsh and abstract...
...The Alternative April 1972 17 As this hook is highly innovative methodologically, it is particularly lamentable that the behavioralists, in their preoccupation with "method," should ignore it...
...We did Time Out for Ginger when I was a budding and quite untalented thespian in school in the late fifties...
...This book is political theory at its best, for the authors, with a keen appreciation of concretes and realities, have through the process of distillation discerned a broad theoretical overview of the essence of the American political tradition...
...we trooped eagerly off to see the Yale Players doing Moliere in the early sixties...
...Finally, whether our other allies lose confidence in our keeping to our half of mutualsecurity agreements could depend upon whether we let China have only Taiwan's U.N...
...This accounts for the fact that we are somewhat schizophrenic today about our tradition...
...Strauss has taught that careful text analysis of significant political works will reap rewards in terms of theoretical traderstanding, while Voegelin has emphasized that the study of political "symbols" can reveal much about a society's underlying theoretical foundations...
...Or is it the nudity...
...In employing both methods, Kendall and Carey analyzed the following key documents of the American political tradition: the Mayflower Coinpact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...
...and, the new styles of behavior associated with them, are created by small coteries which are devoted to exploring the new...
...certainly Taiwan will be mentioned during the President'ssojourn...
...Beyond this is a graver matter...
...This approach is contrary to the behavioral hegemony currently astride academic political science...
...First, both writers are known as prominent conservative scholars, and academic political science is overwhelmingly liberal-left in its political orientation...
...To paraphrase, the conservative understands St...
...But l've the feeling that most who read this will be, like me, irregular theatre-goers at best, and many will have given up on the delights on t h e stage after their high school English teacher dragged them to their last local junior college production of Lear...
...Kendall and Carey offer no easy solution to correct the derailment (probably because there is none), but they do perform an invaluable service in documenting its occurrence, and they painfully remind us of the older and greater tradition from which we have been diverted...
...I can't evaluate The AmeriCan Theatre or tall about trends in theatre with the same ease as I could about a book concerning today's film--that by way of advance warning...
...even the young, who think thrice and usually negatively about shelling out for a theatre ticket, will pay through the nose, and plan far in advance, to see the Rolling Stones, or Tina Turner, or name it...
...Two fundamental reasons account for this neglect...
...Augustine's insight, "I am, therefore GOd is...
...seat or let China have Taiwan...
...The behavioralists contend they are concerned only with the "is" of politics, only with "science," "facts," "quantification " "method " and "value-free" work...
...Theatrical performances are expensive, usually at least twice as expensive as movies...
...Theatre is so changed, even in the heartland where I grew up, that our recollections of it from years ago scarcely square with today's reality...
...Well, like all gross generalizations, this one may best uttered softly and then abandoned quickly...
...happy while avoiding war...
...With Augustine, he understands that "pride" is the irradicable canker contributing to the imperfectibility of the human condition in this earthly sojourn...
...one usually must plan in advance to go, march off to buy tickets, and then appear precisely on time...
...Bell mentions, explores the new and meets with surprisingly little resistance by theatre devotees...
...So I suppose American Theatre 1969-1970 has a lot to offer me, and maybe you...
...Douglas W. Cooper History's Entrails The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition by Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey Louisiana State University Press, $6.00 T HIS IS AN important book by the late Willmoore Kendall and his former student, George W. Carey, currently professor of government at Georgetown University...
...Furthermore, they contend that the balance has been tipped in favor of the egalitarian one and that the older, conservative tradition has been "derailed...
...Although the material probably wouldn't surprise the President, it could be an eye-opener for those with great expectations for his journey to Peking...
...we thought it was the end-all when, on escaping from grad-school for a weekend in New York, my roommate and I went to Genet's The Blacks...
...Unlike the liberal secularist, it is impressed (indeed, awed) with the wonder of creation and the mystery of being...
...Nor does it ease all my doubts about modern drama, although I found it more palatable than would have been the case two years ago, when on emerging from Dionysus in 69~ I mumbled something about the play being subversive of the American value system" and was, I suppose justifiably, hooted at by my companions, both New Yorkers far more sophisticated and understanding of what had of late been happening on stage than I, a hick down from Boston for a weekend in the big city...
...This tradition is secular in its philosophical foundations...
...now they do Fortune and Men's Eyes at one of the colleges a t which I teach, and that's the most conventional offering of the season...
...the new theatre-goer demands at least some thought and a soupcan of content but will contentedly tolerate an absence of linearity, whereas the young who shun theatre but patronize rock concerts demand sensation galore and happily settle for little if any content...
Vol. 5 • April 1972 • No. 7
