Philosophy and Public Policy

...This apologia is far from uncommon...

...There is a p r e c e d e n t for such a book from such a tender shoot...

...Nisbet perhaps intended, I think we may find one...

...This is not good history...

...The population exploded and settled half a continent in a single g e n e r a t i o n . Almost overnight a corrosive populism spread throughout American politics...

...I am referring, of course, to Sidney Hook, who has been a towering moral figure in American intellectual life for half a century...

...Hook's allegiance to socialism may derive from his penchant for dividing Marxist " t h e o r y " from Marxist "practice...

...And how about trade unionists...

...it is not even good psychology...

...P a r a - noia," "schizophrenia," "madness" are all thrown about with abandon...

...20005 S-2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 41...

...Having won the hypocrisy contest hands down, Mr...

...In his essay, "The Social Democratic P r o s p e c t , " Hook says the difference between Republicans, Democrats, and conservatives and social democrats is that for social democrats "democracy is not merely a political concept but a moral one...

...But while one can readily agree with the first half of that sentence, one must wonder at the second...

...He recognizes that "there is a totalitarian potential in any economy which is completely centralized and nationalized" but capitalism remains for him an unacceptable alternative...

...Recently Robert Nisbet despairingly asked what he thought was a rhetorical question: "Who at this moment would have the s l i g h t e s t interest in what a living philosopher has to say on any subject, cosmological, moral, political or social...

...Paley, the winner of the Stellar Stonewall Award in 1979 for his skill in refusing to answer shareholder questions, rose to a higher level in this year's competition...

...CBS subsequently admitted that the plaintiff in this case, Garn Raum, had hired numerous lawyers to pursue his case, a fact not revealed in the %0 Minutes" program...

...In reality, An Invitation to Our Times is a quirky intellectual autobiography more often entertaining than enlightening...

...Yet is not Leninism the logical outgrowth of Marxism...

...He enjoys this position because, from the 1930s on, he has been one of the intellectual communit y ' s most courageous fighters in behalf of freedom...

...Ross is also a first-class aphorist: "Fundamentally, after all, the reason for sending children to school is similar to the reason for domesticating cats: it is b e t t e r than listening to them go shrieking through the alleys...

...In The Twilight of Capitalism Michael Harrington argues somewhat along the same line by saying that Marxism has been taken over by Communist dictatorships so that what exists in Communist countries is not the socialism of Karl Marx...

...I must confess, then, that I have never really understood Hook's socialism, unless I may be said to understand by agreeing with Max Eastman's remark that Hook "is defending his logical right to 'believe in' democratic socialism rather than declaring his allegiance to any practical effort to produce it...

...Ross returns now, still under 30, still as fractious as before, offering what seems at first like a connected series of essays on American schools, politics, morals, religions, sexual ethics, and social customs...

...Since CBS claims that the Illinois Power Company s videotape, "60 Minutes/Our Reply, "' inaccurately charges CBS with serious errors that have not been corrected on he air, why had CBS refused to send a representative to show0n~,s of this highly damaging expose of CBS errors to debate the issues raised...

...The theme was that it was difficult for a person suing the church to obtain competent legal counsel or justice in the courts in Utah...

...CBS had refused to submit a resolution favoring implementation of the Kemeny Commission recommendation to a vote of the shareholders...

...Certainly for the millions of people who have chosen to immigrate here over the years the democratic ideal as represented by the United States is not without a moral component...

...Perhaps then we would have another book by America's leading philosopher, entitled "The Twilight of Socialism," which would explain why capitalism seems to be indispensable to political democracy...

...And yet there are few school-teachers, good or bad, who do not imagine that they are engaged in a noble task: the creation of souls...

...What does a moral approach to democracy mean...

...Nevertheless, Hook has been my leader in many crusades: He is a skilled tactician, an uncompromising f i g h t e r against totalitarianism, and a superb political polemicist...

...Beverley Nichols, British aesthete and gardener, and now 80 years of age, wrote his first autobiography at the age of 25 and called it, not endearingly, Twenty-Five...

...An equality of concern for all human beings, "exArnold Beichman, a political scientist, is the author o f Nine Lies About America...

...By that time Nichols had published his first novel and interviewed and published sketches of most of the leading public figures in Michael C. Brown is an editorial assistant at the San Francisco Chronicle...

...Paley went on to give a masterful display of haughty highhandedness...

...Paley had taken all the CBS directors and a large number of CBS officials all the way to New Orleans at considerable expense for this meeting...

...One wonders with Raymond Aron why "the Western obsession with Marxism" persists when history has failed utterly to vindicate any of Marx's major prophesies...

...Needless to say, 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 by devoting so much time to Hook's essay on social democracy I have overlooked many other essays in this volumc, essays on Alger Hiss, Lillian Hellman, T.S...

...All Smith's crude psychologizing represents in fact a failure of historical imagination...

...Paley closed the meeting before those questions could be asked...

...in which he describes the disillusionment of the Revolutionary leaders with what they had wrought...

...He has an effective later chapter entitlect "Whatever Happened to the Founding Fathers...

...Paley the ordeal of having to respond to additional embarrassing questions about badly flawed CBS programs But before that happened, Mr...

...One can argue, for instance, that the very belief in democracy subsumes a moral ideal...

...According to Hook, "the free e n t e r p r i s e system of Adam Smith no more exists today in the U.S.A...

...It was abruptly adjourned at 11:00 A.M...

...Without wishing to qualify in any way my admiration of Hook, I do want to take up some of the ideas presented in this book in something less than approving tones--in particular, Hook's adherence, however fragile it may appear to be, to socialism or social democracy...

...Abandoning the stonewalling tactic which he used so effectively at the 1979 CBS Annual Meeting, Mr...

...i= = n To: AIM, 777 14th St., N.W., Washington, D.C...

...Despite intensive analysis, Smith in the end cannot understand the class antagonism of the p e r i o d - - ' 'more bitter in the first decades of the Republic than it ever was a g a i n " - - or the thoughts and actions of the F e d e r a l i s t s and the Republicans...

...The meeting was convened at 10:00 A.M...

...Daniel Bell has written recently that " t h e death of socialism is the unrealized fact of this century...

...In these most bewildering situations Smith simply throws up his hands and calls upon some psychological jargon for an explanation...

...In light of those admissions, why hasn't CBS publicly apologized for airing this slanderous program, as well as correcting the other serious e~ors in the program...

...Paley had refused to deal with a similar question at the 1979 annual meeting when he was asked why CBS News had avoiding reporting the evidence of Jones's dedication to the communist cause...

...I only wish he would reexamine his economic philosophy so that it would conform with one of David Hume's conditions of mathematics: that it be concerned only with truth and falsity, not with preferences...

...than the socialism of Karl Marx in the U.S.S.R...

...Defenders of the Marxist tradition always seem to be arguing that what exists in the USSR, or in Cuba, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe, has nothing to do with Marx at all...

...Paley displayed his awesome arrogance by categorically rejecting the Kemeny Commission recommendation that the media employ knowledgeable experts to advise in coverage of such serious technical matters as nuclear accidents...

...And, " . . . the purpose of mass education is to benefit the masses and so it is hardly surprising that this adds up to little more than the provision of an anodyne for the mediocre...

...Marx advocated the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the elimination of democracy, and he posited the inevitability of an irreconcilable class struggle which would end in "the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions," as the final words of the Manifesto claim...

...8.95 Michael C. Brown M i t c h e l l Ross is the bumptious young fellow who made his writing debut several years back by bushwhacking Buckley, Vidal, Mailer, and several other lions in a lively book of literary and personal criticism called The Literary Politicians...

...Eliot, and Arnold Toynbee, among others, which are brilliantly done, in the g r e a t Hook tradition...

...These are words worthy of being tatted and hung on any young educator's office wall...

...Paley curtly declined to even discuss after the meeting, were these: Why did the CBS docu-drama, "Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim )ones," ignore the incontrovertible evidence that Jones had been a dedicated Stalinist-Maoist communist for many years, not the well-meaning believing Christian portrayed by CBS...

...Surely it does not lie in the realm of rationality...

...Sometimes even these Big Ideas are not enough...

...For what does exist in the USSR is the socialism of Karl Marx...

...Whenever the response of people seems out of proportion to what Smith thinks is the ostensible cause, "we m u s t , " he says, "assume a hidden pathology...

...Paley simply adjourned the meeting to avoid having to respond to most of the questions that Accuracy in Media had come prepared to ask...

...The fantasies of both parties," he writes, "seem so bizarre that one gropes in vain for an entirely satisfactory explanation...

...Its dedication "to the ideals of a free society," he says, "has been unsullied...

...He proved himself an adept polemical guerrilla fighter in that book, with the proper killer instinct, even if somewhat lacking in finesse...

...Not only were most of our political institutions established, but the society and culture were rapidly transformed...

...The abrupt termination of the meeting was obviously engineered to spare Mr...

...His point is well taken, but by defining "philosopher" less exclusively than Mr...

...His kind of intellectual courage was and still is a rarity in the academy: He has never taken a sabbatical from the continuing struggle against Communism...

...Indeed, it is not too much to say that what we and the world used to think was our "national character" was created during these years...

...Thereafter in moments of confusion Smith wheels one Consciousness or the other into his larrative, like a deus ex machina, in order to resolve various historical difficulties...

...For Hook to suggest that what exists in the Soviet Union is not Marxism would seem like an attempt to make the Leninist derivative of Marxism illegitimate...

...Paley displayed consumate hypocrisy in banning TV camera coverage of the CBS Annual Meeting, even though the meeting was open to the print media...

...Ultimately he has not been able to enter fully and empathically into this very different past world and to make it comprehensible to us in the present...

...Given even this considerable freight of experience Nichols' book is barely tolerable...

...Its wideranging didacticism and vast selfassurance are oppressive...

...Need they be social democrats in order to claim that for them democracy is a moral, not merely a political, principle, when the very raison d'etre of trade unionism is equality of opportunity...

...Marx's Communist Manifesto foreshadowed the rise of the totalitarian, politically monopolistic Communist Party...

...How the rising "Secular-Democratic Consciousn e s s " gave birth to the revival of Protestant Christianity after 1800 is, however, not explained...

...England...

...In order to deal with the sweep of the period, Smith puts tog c t h e r two great blocks of ideas: what he calls the "Classical-Christian Consciousness" and the "SecularDemocratic Consciousness," which are more or less identical with the ideologies of the Federalists and the Jcffersonian Republicans...

...AN INVITATION TO OUR TIMES Mitchell S. Ross Doubleday & Co...

...Without Marx, would there have been a Lenin...

...HYPOCRITE Mr...

...Paley said that CBS "did not consider it right or fruitful for us to have this kind of expert advice available to us.'" He said "it would be a waste of money, a waste of time to have special scientists of the type you refer to come in and try to interfere with the way CBS is conducting its news...

...Surely Hook will not argue that the workers in the United States are social democrats-or is it all a matter of definition...

...But with a difference...

...Hook himself praises organized labor for its "principled defense of freedom" and for its unfaltering opposition to all forms of totalitarianism...

...Smith is aware of the momentous changes of the period...

...And that is what historians, even popular historians, ought to be doing...

...And an entirely new perception of what it was to be an American emerged...

...By the 1820s, on the eve of Tocqueville's visit, we had already become the anxious, optimistic, risktaking, materialistic, individualistic, highly mobile people that we remained through the greater part of our subsequent history...

...CBS also admitted that it was wrong to imply that Baum's appeal of his suit to the Circuit Court of Appeals in Colorado after it was dismissed for lack of evidence in the Federal District Court in Utah, reflected on the integrity of the Federal District judge in Utah...

...tending the area of equal opportunity beyond the political sphere to all other areas of social life...

...It is too bad that Mr...

...Wells...

...CBS does not accept that as a valid reason for other individuals or organizations to bar TV cameras from covering events open to the press...

...The social democrat, he says, derives the "justif i c a t i o n " for programs of social reform from " a regulative moral ideal": equal opportunity for all...

...Economic e n e r g i e s burst out in every direction...

...But for Hook to jettison socialism as his idle martresse would necessitate his taking up another set of economic principles --something he seems unwilling to do...

...In youth the temptation is to preen as one expounds and the result is most often a painful stridency...

...Typical day: Breakfast with Lloyd George, Lunch with Diaghilev, Tea with Scan O'Casey, Cocktails with George Gershwin, Dinner at the Garrick Club with H.G...

...I think so brilliant and rigorous a political thinker as Hook is led to such a question-begging dilemma, in part, because he feels a need to remain loyal in some way to his early socialist beliefs, which today, as he concedes, are difficult to maintain in the face of Soviet Gulagism...

...But too often he has difficulty getting a handle on the immensity of the transformation and explaining it...

...60 Minutes" aired a segment on an obscure legal case in Utah in an effort to show that the legal profession and the judges in Utah were intimidated by the Mormon Church...

...Among the questions which Accuracy in Media was prevented from asking, and which Mr...

...Even so with Ross...

...over the protests of Reed lrvine, Chairman of Accuracy in Media, who still had several questions he wanted to ask about serious uncorrected errors in CBS programs...

...Paley said that several years ago when cameras had been permitted, they had been "disruptive...

...Now this strikes me as rather exclusionary...