From Language to Cant
Beichman, Arnold
"From Language to Cant" THE CRISIS OF VALUES in the United States arises, in large part, from the erosion of the authority of language. Until now we have maintained a high level of civilization and an unembarassed sense of...
...One can be sure that the editor who published the statement that America is "perilously close to collapse" never asked the writer for proof or even for his definition of the word "collapse...
...Is it emerging in all polities...
...Many of their statements are non-falsifiable: any data whatsoever, no matter how inconsistent and contradictory, are interpreted as supporting evidence for them...
...The liberal weekly even justified fascist violence as necessary to end internal strife and disunity...
...Ideology and the Abuse of Words How did it happen that we came so close to possible subversion of the American democratic system...
...A university's greatness is not measured only by endowment, by library volumes, or by buildings, nor is it measured by the number of hours that teachers spend on burdensome, wearying committee meetings...
...although I firmly believe that :fiance does nothing that has not been pre3ared beforehand...
...The answer to this and other questions will not come from those who confuse experience with knowledge but rather from those who seek fusion of the two through conscious inquiry...
...Is a revolution against a functioning democracy good or bad...
...Is there deep, or nonshallow, "elitist expertise...
...and so to advocacy of authoritarian government...
...The "proletariat...
...Chomsky makes it out...
...Is terror morally acceptable...
...What is essential is less the creation of enlightened masses than the creation of geniuses and of an audience capable of understanding them...
...Poland and Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—against the USSR...
...35 A belief in moderation and civility implies an attitude of skepticism towards millenarianism and utopianism, an appreciation of the limits of politics coupled with a continuing testing of those limits...
...The authority of at university, the authority of a culture and a civilization depends on men and women who, like Socrates, stand in awe of ideas, who not only respect language, but also protect it from those who would destroy its meaning...
...It is gravely to endanger one's own rationality by not admitting one's own fallibility...
...If the ignorance of the masses is a necessary condition for that, so much the worse...
...Collapse into what—revolution, anarchy...
...Is a violent revolution ever justified and how much violence...
...And how would dissent be dealt with under Dr...
...24 I want to make clear that my argument with so many intellectuals is not because they seem to believe in "socialism...
...I am not talking about political lying, which, in the nature of political debate in democracies, helps engineer compromise into social design...
...Senator Joseph McCarthy by himself weakened our common moral language for a short time...
...Few of us would claim that until now the American university was without fault or flaw...
...But to foreclose on tolerance is precisely to cut oneself off from criticism and refutation...
...And if it doesn't, why not...
...Nature does not stop before such concerns...
...bachelors inevitably are unmarried men...
...Today the threat to the university, its authority, and its freedom is dishearteningly from those whose demands are not as limited as those of past opponents of academic freedom...
...For example, Professor Noam Chomsky simply inserts the word "libertarian" before socialism—and all is forgiven.12 The "socialism" of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao rather quietly becomes nonsocialism with no questions asked...
...Since the people themselves do not understand their own good, thus what is truly good for them must be forced upon them.' "22 In fact, Tkachev, who had an enormous influence on Lenin, wrote: "The very difference between a violent revolution and a so-called "gradual revolution" lies precisely in the fact that the revolutionary minority is no longer willing to wait, but takes upon itself the task of forcing consciousness upon the people...
...It turns out that the answer is not an examination of the facts but rather the use of an adjective...
...For let none doubt that had the Watergate conspiracy succeeded we should be living today under a form of presidential tyranny comparable to that of the Lincoln administrations, without remotely enjoying the justification of trying to save the Union that Abraham Lincoln could claim during a civil war...
...What "people" are they talking about...
...Other American backers of Mussolini included Bruce Bliven, Alvin Johnson, Robert Little, George Soule, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, Irving Babbitt, Charles Beard, Horace Kallen, William Lyon Phelps, George Santayana, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens...
...Political lying—one can call it "campaign oratory," "the broad view," or some other euphemism—is tolerable and sometimes even amusing so long as we all, more or less, live by a common moral language...
...Watergate has shocked people of all political faiths because it was directed to a revolutionary alteration of the American polity by men—the only participants in Watergate were males as far as I know—whose sense of social outrage led them to seek, conspiratorially, to subvert political debate into revolutionary channels...
...Among writers who supported antidemocratic doctrines were: William Butler Yeats, D. FL Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, T.S...
...If the technocracy is totalitarian, who rules and how did they get there...
...As Professor Nisbet writes: "No community, no association, no culture can exist above the most primitive level without language and all the complex judgments and prejudgments as well as words and syntax which compose it...
...A month later, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who was invited to give a lecture on Vietnam at the University of Sussex, was prevented from doing so by "mob action," as it was described by Richard Crossman, former Oxford don and Labour Cabinet Minister...
...The criteria for competence and capability are at• tenuated through the lowering of standard: and the raising of grades with little or nc regard for achievement...
...Or he talks about "stultifying parliamentarianism...
...It has been a retreat led by academicians who seem to have lost faith in themselves and their disciplines...
...A later meeting of university vice-chancellors, said Cross-man, had given him the hope that when they met "they would collectively proclaim, that, if academic freedom is to mean anything, no one can sign such a letter and remain a member of a university staff...
...5 The second part of my thesis is that those who most endanger our hopes for a better world are those intellectuals who, in the tradition of Robespierre, have so transformed language as to create confusion in the minds of millions of Americans and inhabitants of other Western democracies about what constitutes change and social progress...
...It is a new form of scientism, a belief that all meaningful problems may be resolved with "scientific methods, that their susceptibility to such solution properly defines the meaningfulness of problems and that we must not profess any convictions which fail to keep this condition...
...Superficially what appears significant about this defection from democracy is that the outstanding intellects of the twentieth century were men of the Right, as well as of the revolutionary Left...
...There are to be sure exceptions...
...If America is close to "collapse," what about these other countries...
...The authority of the university comes from scholarship, not from administrators...
...Chomsky, an impossible concept, why use the adjective at all since capitalism subsumes predatoriness...
...Normal cleavages among races, religions, classes, sects, and groups then become impassable chasms...
...Totalitarian" is a specific political term which has some empirical content...
...Chomsky's misuse of words is even more noticeable in his predilection for the adjective "inevitable...
...If it is "emerging" where from...
...And today's enemies are not outside but inside the gates...
...17 There isn't a page of a contemporary political or critical literary journal which doesn't abound in what Professor Nisbet has called "linguistic corruption . . . sabotage of all that is authoritative in language...
...Yet the quest for the Ultimate Answer is unending among our present-day system-builders, those who base their cosmopolitics on Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, or some new variant of the Corporate State...
...23 How reminiscent of the French fascist, Drieu de la Rochelle, who said: "Saving France means saving the French, all the French, even those who do not want to be saved, who let themselves go, who ask only to be left alone...
...I submit that in the highest echelons of government and among those social critics who served the White House, the meaning of words had been so corrupted that everything became permissible in the interests of some unilaterally defined Higher Truth, some Ultimate Answer...
...The new elites...
...Alexis de Tocqueville dealt with this problem in his post-1848 memoirs: "For my part, I detest these absolute systems, which represent all the events of history as depending upon great first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from the history of the human race...
...But it's not so simple as the political alchemy of Dr...
...What does "totalitarian technocracy" mean...
...1 The crisis of values also arises from the enduring question in politics, which became the focus of nineteenth century debate and continues to this day: as formulated by Bertrand Russell, "How can we combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress with the degree of social cohesion that is necessary for survival...
...Behind the words I've just quoted is a rhetorical trick—paint a neutral event in such apocalyptic imagery as to make retributive justice not merely desirable but somehow inevitable...
...The fact that these doctrines were antidemocratic made them particularly appealing to an extraordinary number of leading artists and writers...
...No matter what happens in America, it is a proof to them that the end is not far off...
...Such capitulation, failure of nerve, and self-abnegation before a nonexistent "revolutionary situation" created out of the tenets of "scientific socialism," have been exploited by would-be revolutionaries in the academy in an endeavor to impose a new partiinost, a party spirit, dictating what may or may not be discussed, and who may or may not be allowed to speak on college campuses...
...The "artificiality" of industrial society—what would an industrial society that is not "artificial" look like...
...Until now we have maintained a high level of civilization and an unembarassed sense of mission because, as a people, we spoke and understood the same moral language...
...The public utility lobby was quite modest about its demands on the schools: say nice things about private electric companies, bad things about government ownership...
...Taylor has written: "The liberals, the moderate men, shirked the problem of authority...
...Is the American university today more...
...The line is taken that insanity is directly related to the malign structures and forces of society, not as a mere passive effect but, rather, as an active and significant response to society's destructive will...
...4 Speaking before the Constituent Assembly at the height of the Terror, Robespierre declared: "The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny...
...All governments, by definition (one could easily say that it is "inevitable") create "inevitable limitations" on democracy...
...Alas, Dr...
...There are some 140 other countries in the world...
...25 In fact, this Left-Right continuum is significant only in the sense that most intellectuals were reluctant to concede the legitimacy of autonomous decision by the people whose liberation they had sworn to achieve...
...What is "shallow elitist expertise...
...To be specific: a spokesman for South Vietnam, a critic of liberal policies toward the ghettos, a scientist who claimed that intelligence is largely inherited and a corporate executive who denied that his firm was morally responsible for the regime in South Africa have all been harassed and in some cases forcibly denied an opportunity to speak...
...The underlying reason for seeking to corrupt and to dissolve what Robert Nisbet has called "the authority of language" is that this corruption of language leads to the weakening of authority in a democratic society...
...In May 1973, Professor Hans Eysenck, an eminent British psychiatrist, who has studied the genetic base of intelligence and who is a Nazi refugee, was beaten up by Communists while he was speaking on the platform of the London School of Economics...
...The position is argued on grounds which are quite overtly political...
...The expanding victory over humanisticknowledge by the votaries of scientism continues because academicians, mistrustful of this victory, are even more mistrustful of their own legitimacy and the legitimacy of their once cherished culture...
...Much of what these intellectuals say about politics sounds convincing until one recognizes that their statements lack any empirical basis: their statements are metaphysical, and can be neither verified nor falsified but only exemplified...
...Or what kind of civilization is it which dared to threaten a Nobel Prizewinning writer like Alexander Solzhenitsyn with exile and which finally did exile him...
...Chomsky doesn't say...
...In the United States, there was a surprising amount of support for Italian fascism among leading American intellectuals...
...Instead, he reported, "the statement they put out was so vague and woolly that it will probably provoke another outbreak of the blind militancy it was designed to prevent...
...2 Today the commonage of political language is disappearing...
...20 What can the word "collapse" mean...
...she sacrifices entire species so thatothers find the essential conditions of their life...
...A belief in moderation and civility implies an understanding of what Edward Shils calls "the complexity of virtue . . . that every virtuous act costs something in terms of other virtuous acts, that virtues are intertwined with evils and that no theoretical system of a hierarchy of virtues is ever realizable in practice...
...And it produced what we now refer to as the crisis of authority and, in particular as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, the crisis of authority in relation to mind...
...My primary thesis is that our scientific and technological achievements, even as they become more wondrous, make more difficult and problematical the possibility that we may achieve a state of human affairs in which mankind will be able to create that glorious brotherhood Schiller rhapsodized in his "Ode to Joy...
...I have in mind the political novels of Flaubert, Conrad, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, poetry of great modern poets like Yeats, Eliot, Pound...
...33 The spread of intolerance at our universities was at one time attributed to the reactionary Right but that was long ago...
...As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse . . . . Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...
...Daniel Bell has described for us the needs of an emergent post-industrial society and its concomitant communal ethic which demands identification of a still unidentified community.37 What will be the role of culture, education, and authority in the postindustrial society and in this new community...
...19 Now what does all this mean...
...In other words, it mattered little tomany of our leading intellectuals whether the doctrine they espoused or adopted was intended to further democracy...
...as it breaks up, so does society...
...The German philosopher Martin Heidegger supported Adolf Hitler...
...Sometime in the 1920s, a spirit of anti-intellectualism arose among intellectuals themselves, a spirit intended to discredit democracy, to discredit intellect and mind, and to establish personal feeling as the ruling force in human and political relations...
...Bertrand de Jouvenel has written that "As this common moral language extends, so does society...
...Eliot, Ezra Pound, Paul Claudel, Celine, Henri de Montherlant, and George Bernanos...
...From individual madness, its heartbreaking pain, isolation and distraction blithely ignored, is to be derived the principle by which society may recover its lost reason and humanity...
...The intellectuals...
...Under Stalin there is little doubt that we had predatory socialism, and for that matter Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was hardly libertarian...
...3° According to Professor Wilson: "In the last two or three years, the list of subjects that cannot be publicly discussed there [at Harvard where he teaches] in a free and open forum has grown steadily, and now includes the war in Vietnam, public policy toward urban ghettos, the relationship between intelligence and heredity, and the role of American corporations in certain overseas regimes...
...it was faced by the radicals...
...But it is a remarkable fact that the literary imagination since the French Revolution has been more often than not skeptical or conservative or outrightly reactionary in relation to radical or revolutionary claims—in politics, if not in art...
...The editor Probably believes it on one level and ignores it on another, his daily existence...
...Professor Trilling continues: "This view is advanced not only by speculative laymen but also by a notable section of post-Freudian psychiatric opinion with wide influence in the intellectual community...
...9 My earlier reference to dissident intellectuals as embodying the traditions of Robespierre the Incorruptible was an endeavor to relate latter-day criticism of democracy to "the ways of Jacobinism," which have been characterized so well by Matthew Arnold as: "Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up in black and white for elaborating down to the very smallest details a rational society for the future...
...I am speaking now in the spirit of Oliver Wendell Holmes when he said that it is sometimes more important to emphasize the obvious than to elucidate the obscure...
...Another characteristically Bolshevik concept is that there is such a thing as "scientific truth" in social analysis.6 Karl Marx himself was a great student of socioeconomic trends and, like any good analyst, sought to predict what might occur given certain environmental conditions, both social and physical...
...34 This kind of scientism is really a contempt for humanistic knowledge and tradition, a repudiation of democratic values, an endorsement of the adversary culture and its anti-intellectualism...
...They found a substitute for tradition in 'the religion of humanity,' just as their nationalism took the place of the decayed loyalty to kings...
...In the fifty-seven years since the Russian Revolution, no Communist state has permitted free elections on any level...
...The revolutionaries of 1848, as A.J.P...
...Why did it turn out that the USSR became the concentration point of nonlibertarian socialism...
...therefore only those elements who desired change were democratic [and] since movement and democracy were synonymous, only those who desired socialism were the people...
...To achieve high status as a dissident intellectual one need do little more than to denounce "imperialism" and to demand the immediate overthrow of the "capitalist system" and a swift transition to "socialism...
...Does it exist...
...Chomsky refers to "Russian unwillingness to permit free elections in Czechoslovakia...
...How in this new world shall we find the balance between the demand for limitless freedom and the resistance to consensual authority, between the antinomianism of the wandering intellectual and his occupation of some hierarchical role as resident scholar...
...What we have not become accustomed to is the "ideological lie," the objectification of an innocent act into guilt, unintended perhaps, but guilt nevertheless...
...They seem narrow, to my mind, under their pretense of broadness, and false beneath their air of mathematical exactness...
...Take the phrase, "all power to the people...
...Or what kind of unifying ideology is "socialism" when the most serious war threat in the world today is not between capitalist powers but between the USSR and China...
...16 Is there nonstultifying parliamentarianism...
...In its place would come a vague, boundless something called impulse, life style, feeling, stance...
...Insanity is represented as a true perception appropriately acted out—society itself is insane, and when this is understood, the apparent aberration of the individual appears as rationality, as liberation from the delusions of social madness...
...The authority of a university rests upon those who have faith in the educational enterprise and, therefore, faith in their vocation as scholars...
...As R.S...
...What in heaven's name are the "plastic pretenses of Disneyland...
...The greatest abstraction of this century is the word "socialism," but not because of its ideals, which may well exemplify man's most noble aspirations...
...Noam Chomsky have become specialists in non-falsifiable statements in which the right adjective substitutes for rigorous political analysis...
...What does it mean when it becomes the cri de coeur of the New Left or the Old Left...
...32 The Tragedy of Our Universities What is frightening is the acquiescence of academicians, not only in America but, lately, also in Great Britain, in the suppression of academic freedom...
...It will not come from the wild surmise of an uprooted intelligentsia asserting its right, as a self-ordained arbiter elegentiae, to define for itself the life of an entire society while denying the same right of definition to other sectors of society...
...31 Among the consequences of a liberal education, he writes, "is a set of sympathies which lead many, though not all, persons in a university to acquiesce in the uncivil acts of a small minority...
...The writing of English or the simple spelling of words, the attention to grammar, syntax and rhetoric are arts lost among teachers and therefore among students...
...Taylor described them, believed in "movement...
...And whom does Marshal Tito fear most—his capitalist neighbors or the Soviet Union...
...It is nothing new that politicians and statesmen tell lies or, more commonly, half-truths, nor is it so unusual for intellectuals on occasion to desert their vocations as seekers after truth for the taste of power and the pleasure of special status...
...Why, of course,' he answered...
...39 The authority of scholarship and learning is in retreat and has been for almost a decade...
...What the Americar academy has long fought against—the politicization of the university—has COME about rather quietly and, in the interests of avoiding controversy, unobtrusively...
...In discussing the origins of the revolts in Europe in 1848, A.J.P...
...Contempt for the Masses Those who cry "all power to the people" remind me of a passage in the memoirs of a pre-Revolution Russian socialist, Paul Axelrod...
...It was not merely prediction...
...On the contrary, despite their seeming dedication to socialism, libertarian or nonlibertarian, intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have willingly accepted any doctrine which might establish their preeminence as custodians of morals and culture, as part of the divine right of intellectualdom...
...I believe . . . that many important historical facts can only be 3xplained by accidental circumstances, and :hat many others remain totally inexplica)le...
...The words have, I submit, utterly no meaning because indignant metaphors are no substitute for clear thought...
...They don't mean those people who believe in change but not in instant, overnight overthrow of traditions and institutions in order to achieve the Ultimate Solution...
...Far more serious than the "mob action," however, was the fact that seventeen Sussex faculty members signed a letter supporting the students who prevented Huntington from speaking...
...For example, one can cite the Khrushchev expos0- of Stalin in his famous speech at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress, a most damning indictment...
...In his brilliant critique of Marcuse, Professor Alasdair Maclntyre has written: "It is a necessary condition of rationality that a man shall formulate his beliefs in such a way that it is clear what evidence would be evidence against them and that he shall lay himself open to criticism and refutation in the light of any possible objection...
...Chomsky's system if not by some kind of stultifying or non-stultifying parliamentarianism...
...Or one can ask why the only significant revolutions in Europe since the end of World War II have occurred in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe—East Germany in 1953...
...36 Our prime task is to restore that delicate balance between the needs of modern democracy and the values of democratic tradition...
...In fact, nothing is "inevitable" except within tautologies: bald men inevitablyhave no hair...
...The uprising by students and some faculty members against the American university was not intended to make the university a better place in which to pursue truth...
...Many of our leading intellectuals exemplify that capitulation of mind before the attack on mind, so eloquently described by Dr...
...Did the uprising make the American university a better place or a worse place in which to study the humanities...
...7 This lesson of what happened to Marx has been lost upon many of America's alienated intellectuals...
...He recounts his conversation with a follower of Peter Tkachev, an early Russian revolutionary: "I asked him, 'Do you, as the member of a minority, consider it right that you force the people to be happy?' The question greatly amused my co-debater...
...The ideological lie based on the idea of a Single Virtue characterizes the Bolshevik mind...
...Would Marx recognize modern capitalism and Soviet socialism as what he really had in mind...
...Critics like Dr...
...It had to come to pass...
...Trilling...
...I am not talking now as an editor reading bad prose...
...This attack on mind and "the right exercise of its mental powers" has been part of the insatiable attack on authority.28 It has reached the point where "it has become possible to claim . . . credence for the idea that madness is a beneficent condition, to be understood as the paradigm of authentic existence and cognition...
...The number of self-declared philosopher-kings who supported the Soviet dictatorship and justified its excesses was extraordinarily large and included some of our most famous writers, artists, critics, academicians, and other intellectuals...
...Had the laissez-faire system of the middle of the nineteenth century persisted, there might well have been the collapse of capitalism which Marx prophesied...
...26 Contempt for the Mind This contempt for the masses, the people, fellow humans, in the name of modernism and avant-gardism, might be endurable if these dissident and alienated intellectuals were to retire to a private world, as many did in the early nineteenth century, "where they cultivated the belief in their superiority to practical life," as J. R. Harrison has written.27 Unfortunately for the Western democracies, this contempt went from privatization into an imperiously apodictic dogma: not only were the so-called masses the enemies of high culture but the social and political institutions, which had been legitimized by democratic practice, were even more to blame for the reluctance of the masses to follow the new political taste-makers...
...Chomsky doesn't say...
...Chomsky's adjectival politics condemns capitalism by inserting the adjective "predator so that we have "predatory capitalism" to contend with.13 Is it possible to have libertarian capitalism and predatory socialism...
...Above all, this way of thinking creates a conviction of infallibility and the apocalyptic fantasy of the modern Sparta, a republic of virtue, ruled by a new intelligentsia...
...Or antilibertarian socialism...
...The radical theorists were led inevitably from belief in the people to belief in themselves...
...Today's enemies of academic freedom are far more total in their demands upon the university and the educational system...
...If the question is raised about the price of "socialism" in those countries which claim to have reached the highest stage of civilization, the word-conjuring begins...
...Or what degree of progress was indicated when a member of the Soviet Presidium in an official Soviet publication revealed that, as late as 1964, there were breadlines in the Soviet Union?ll The Linguist and Linguistic Corruption When these incontrovertible facts are cited to "socialists," the game begins...
...Those who cry "all power to the people" are not suggesting the rule of the majority...
...For example, a book reviewer recently wrote that "this nation is perilously close to collapse...
...Moreover, chance, or rather that tangle 3f secondary causes which we call chance, 'or want of knowledge how to unravel it, ?lays a great part in all that happens on the world's stage...
...The engine of authority, which is what makes existence possible in free societies, was to be smashed...
...This state of affairs has impelled Professor James Q. Wilson to argue that what passes for a liberal education today is inconsistent with liberalism and its traditional values—civility, free speech, equality of opportunity, and "the maintenance of a realm of privacy and intimacy from the constant assaults of the political and the societal...
...it was disclosure of the future as absolute, guaranteed fact, a form of Calvinistic predestination, and the sinner—in this case the capitalist system—could do nothing to avert an awful fate...
...for example, he talks about "the inevitable limitations on democracy under a highly centralized, militarized state capitalist system of the contemporary variety...
...1° What our powerful social critics have forgotten, nr have ignored, is that mankind, not merely tl‘ nocratic national state, is at the 'ercy of the specialists in system building...
...The more outrageous the allegation and the less susceptible of proof, the more credible the allegation becomes...
...Opposition and dissent are still treason...
...Can they be renatured...
...The answer will come from those who see in the university an institution "dedicated to the authority of scholarship and learning and to the transmission of knowledge from those who are competent to those who are capable...
...15 The word "inevitable" has been so overused that it has become barren of meaning in discussing social phenomena...
...As Eugene Goodheart has written: "Any honest view of the political character of the works of literature will have to account for the fact that during the last two centuries there exists an inverse relation between the esthetic quality of a work of literature and radical politics—especially in works of art in which the political content is explicit and central...
...They don't mean the American blue-collar worker whom they have already labeled as a honky...
...Are there "inevitable limitations on democracy under a highly centralized, militarized state" socialist system, say, of the Albanian variety...
...A true revolutionary, like Herbert Marcuse, can and does distinguish between "good" violence and "bad" violence.3 What the Marcuses of the world do not examine, however, is the underlying question: Are there such authoritative findings about human society as to justify political terrorism...
...Where...
...They don't mean people who vote conventionally for conventional political parties on conventional political issues...
...Peters has written: "What makes nonsense of Marx's picture of the pattern of historical evolution [is that] by revealing the economic causes of social change he also revealed the points at which intervention could be effective to alter its course...
...And what are "denatured human beings...
...Or stated more precisely, is there some political system contrived by man, already in being or possible, which so approaches perfection that any price is worth its establishment...
...No one expressed this sentiment more sharply than the French intellectual Ernest Renan, with what Professor Goodheart has called "Darwinian ruthlessness": "We can hardly conceive of high culture prevailing in a portion of humanity without another portion serving it in a subordinate role...
...So there is a sense in which his prophecies were factors in preventing .. . what he prophesied would happen...
...Is "socialism" the solution...
...His causal analysis had opened their eyes to the points at which there must be state intervention if his prophecies were to prove false...
...18 Here is a sentence from a recent review by David Caute of Theodore Roszak's book, Where the Wasteland Ends: ". . . the present discontents of industrial society, with its emerging totalitarian technocracy, its shallow elitist expertise, its artificiality, and its capacity for manipulating denatured human beings mesmerised by the plastic pretenses of Disneyland...
...We have become accustomed to politicians making large claims in order to further policies or ambitions...
...It has, as a Single Cause, become an excuse for not thinking about society's problems while repudiating the past—scientifically—reprobating the present—scientifically—and outling an inevitable future—scientifically...
...The question, which Dr...
...What is unprecedented is that since the Russian Revolution in 1917, there has been a spate of plain and simple lying by innumerable social critics here and abroad whose chief weapon has been the destruction of the meaning of words without regard to fact, evidence, truth, or simple respect for human decencies...
...If nonpredatory capitalism is, for Dr...
...21 So with those who now cry "all power to the people...
...Mankind lives and dies in abstraction—socialism, capitalism, revolution, counter-revolution...
...Men have died because the Prophet said that some phenomenon was "inevitable...
...The essential thing is that high culture establish itself and render itself mistress of the world...
...But Marx went beyond prediction into the riskier field of determinism...
...It was bad enough when the university was looked upon as a place to hatch both the defense intellectuals (advisers to the Defense Department and the State Department) and the warrior-saviors...
...But when the common moral language begins to disintegrate, the ties which hold a people together are weakened...
...Is violence a meaningless phrase once the necessity of revolution is accepted...
...8 Our powerful social critics have ignored this necessary condition of rationality...
...In fact, no Communist state permits free elections anywhere, anytime...
...In the late 1920s the liberal New Republic was urging "a sympathetic hearing" for Italian fascism because it promoted "national cohesion and national welfare...
...In fact, it isn't prose at all...
...But those who developed the state as an instrument for intervening in economic affairs had learned a good deal from Marx...
...Again we have conjuring with words...
...Chomsky condemns "corporate capitalism" but nowhere does he explain why the "socialism" which was intended to liberate mankind has enslaved its workers by a state domination which would not be tolerated under capitalism.14 Dr...
...In his essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell dealt succinctly with the enemies of clear speech and language: "[their] mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing...
...29 The effect of this attack on mind—which begins with those, like Ernest Renan, who seek a monopoly on culture—is to diminish the possibility that there are values to be cherished...
...History, languages, literature, philosophy, and political theory are fast disappearing from college curricula as subjects worth studying...
...It was not merely that something might possibly come to pass...
...Modern Leninist alchemists seek the hypostatic union between imperfect man and millenarian perfection which is expressed in abstract utterances and metaphysical conjuring...
...Now there has been imposed upon the university the job of reducing inegalitarianism in society, producing urban solutions, turning the university away from its humanistic tradition to creating a new artifact–sociological technology...
...Chomsky fails to answer, is really what kind of limitations...
...The word "socialism" has come to mean, in a secular age, the Single Cause solution to man's eternal problems...
...They don't mean the black middle class...
...Is "stultifying parliamentarianism" inevitable under democratic systems but not under "libertarian socialism...
...He ignores the fact that Russia is also unwilling to permit free elections in Russia itself...
Vol. 8 • November 1974 • No. 2
