Prejudices: A PhilosophicalDictionary
Nisbet, Robert
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...PREJUDICES: A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY Robert Nisbet /Harvard University Press/$17.50 Aaron Wildavsky 27 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 Each person has direct communication with the ideal, whether it be God or nature...
...At the base of this manifestation of enthusiasm...
...no one should be subject to control either by direct coercive authority, as in hierarchies, or by indirect submission to market forces...
...As the political left realized by the end of the 1960s a nature Utopia could enlist a much larger and more diversified following than could have been reasonably predicted in the first century for the cult of Christ or in the 19th century for a proffered workers' paradise...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983...
...I can still see him swaggering into a downtown Washington restaurant one Saturday evening, tie at half mast, beer can in hand, surrounded by a blown-dry and bouffant coterie of good of boy sycophants and their ladies...
...great deal of the inflationary engine that lies in the contemporary social system...
...Or & r your ct+pti- til Chi% 12, page re por t and make up your own mind ;iIn,1i 1 SoviL' l in Eli ra tion of I he freeze m+a+'c mrnl...
...There is always the President's, of course, telling us of his ordeal of power, loneliness of decision, awesome responsibility, etc...
...Vic Gold, author of PR as in Presi- More to the point, is anything he has dent, lives in Washington...
...makes them susceptible to redistributive measures...
...With Jordan in print and Jody Powell in galley proofs, can Cyrus Vance's cri de coeur be far behind...
...Here was Flem Snopes come to the nation's capitalsmug, truculent, a political hustler enjoying if not his White House job, then its perquisites...
...In its way, the dream of a perfect physical environment has all the revolutionary potential that lay both in the Christian vision of mankind redeemed by Christ and in the socialist, chiefly Marxian, prophecy of mankind freed from social injustice...
...the first quote from Keats on fanaticism), we come better to understand the consequences of the sectarian social vision: in order to live a life without authority, it is necessary to destroy what cannot be perfected...
...And that's fine for them, but not for me...
...It is not hierarchy or markets, I maintain, but sectarian culture whose growing strength leads to the pattern of observations reported in Nisbet's dictionary...
...FANATICISM By the early seventeenth century religious sects, cults, and groups of every kind were seen in most of Europe, all of them . . . attesting to the iniquity of established churches, to the need for not only breaking free of them but also planning for their destruction at whatever cost to civil order...
...Boa 1%'4_ 81twminguon...
...Nisbet views egalitarianism as the handmaid of collectivism...
...that is,-in the time frame covered by Jordan in his selfserving memoir of the terminal year of the ministry of the Parson from Plains, when the author was serving as point man in both the Iranian hostage negotiations and White House efforts to meet the Kennedy presidential primary challenge...
...The overwhelming commitment of sectarians to equality (how else could people live together if their foremost desire is to reject authority...
...seems to become weaker and more confused...
...Single-issue groups, concerned with making demands rather than reconciling preferences, increase in importance...
...My chalk Far 3 is pnskrwd...
...No publisher was heard to bid, for example, on Crisis: The Last Year of the Benjamin Harrison Presidency...
...It is not only God but the past that is dead and disowned, disinterred only to show how horrible American institutions have been all along...
...As government grows in response to demands for redistribution, "the children of the bureaucratic welfare state...
...Other than small-gauge po litical gossip, what could Jimmy Carter's erstwhile chief of snuff pos sibly contribute to anyone's under standing of our national body politic...
...As Nisbet is aware, Environmentalism is now well on its way to becoming the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism...
...then the First Lady's...
...What Nisbet wishes is an intermediary position between hierarchy and equality...
...then the Alter Ego's...
...Liberals...
...incessant demands on government for action but lack of support when trouble ensues-which is where Nisbet's book and this review end...
...The individual can be free only when hierarchies and markets have been destroyed, thereby doing away with the forces of inequality...
...I shall try to serve my apprenticeship with this master of erudition by doing something that is denied the author of a dictionary, namely, to tease out one of its strands of thought...
...El Once, in a tasteful past, we were spared first-hand accounts of our presidential embarrassments...
...lay one simple conviction: that of the goodness and divine nature of the individual prior to his corruption by the conventionalities of established Christianity...
...But what about their increasing reliance on state power...
...Along the way (viz...
...have come, in true Freudian fashion, to hate their father...
...Beginning with the main building block of society, Nisbet finds that "the family...
...Moving to the regulation of social behavior, Nisbet believes that the American "community of crime and punishment is being destroyed today...
...been Lhw 'W hjecl of a White House press corderence, as x-elI as numeraus national newspaper articles and telesi.Lon sham's...
...The United States," Nisbet remarks, "is without doubt in one of its periods of rampant effrontery in government and in society . . . " The lack of civility today reminds him of "the habitual insolent manner of the Quaker George Fox whenever he was in the presence of an officer of the government, even the King himself or a hierarchy of the Church of England...
...Thus the same configuration of social forces at one time may produce similar consequences at another time...
...The personal initiative Nisbet prizes cannot come without individual entrepreneurship and the social institutions he respects cannot come without hierarchical authority...
...For as liberty encourages differentiation, so the free flow of differentiation in a social body puts a premium on liberty...
...Pie anw rush me reprints of "The CounleFfe it Nikcemikem: Ararnle Freerr...
...Obviously, time and technology change...
...And while yrw sr`4' a t it_ send (+7r adithl i.,naLI...
...And let us take as our text the three quotations from his dictionary, from the last to the first...
...It's a city filled with people who are trying to make a comeback...
...Hamilton Jordan Quoted on tour, October 1982 Let me tell you about those grapes: they were sour anyway...
...Envy, which "proliferates during periods or in societies where equality has come to dominate other values," is the vice of our age...
...American history becomes a history of atrocities...
...No king, to paraphrase venerable advice, no bishop...
...From the family to the church to government, integrative and hierarchical institutions lose legitimacy...
...The nature that Americans have despoiled becomes by contrast to its economic markets and social hierarchies the only benign aspiration...
...Na me The Counterfeit Praeemakers...
...CRISIS: THE LAST YEAR OF THE CARTER PRESIDENCY Hamilton Jordan / Putnam / $16.95 REAGAN Lou Cannon / Putnam / $18.95 Vic Gold Read I he American Spectator re pwrt tho.1 has the ti B Nightly News Today Show New York Times and many olhcrs in a pother...
...No, the sole remedy for this pathology is the introduction and diffusion of individual liberty as a sovereign value...
...cr,Picx fLw Y L ur Eric rxh-ar1d cmcmirs...
...Though bureaucracy grows stronger, "Political government...
...But he must choose...
...But in this Supermedia Age of overcommunication, apparently every administration, however irrelevant, is geared to produce, at a minimum, half-a-dozen additions to the devalued literature of American political science...
...In sum, authority is in decline...
...Nevertheless, Santayana's overworked maxim about the lessons of history to the contrary, can anything truly be learned by examining the burned entrails of American presidential history, circa 1976-80...
...Atomic Freer-e," by Rat L Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac_ The Iss-acs in•deplh feature docurntnts the Sovrci invulvemeni its the nuclear Freeze r' 'ement, and firsi appca red in the J u nc I '?IQ i s *ue oI The A m 4'rir Fr _Spi•c:carrot_ Since then 4 he arl iclti' ha...
...is fragmented and the range of its authority is slight...
...It is society, not the sinner, who is found guilty...
...They are opposed to hierarchy...
...then the Children's...
...weep for the killer instead of the slain . . . " At the institutional level, Nisbet observes, membership in the mainstream churches declines, while those in the fundamentalist and evangelical religions increase...
...Modified to suit Nisbet's social analysis, we can say that what matters to people is how they deal with other people and how other people treat them...
...On the contrary, confined to its proper sphere, bureaucracy is essential for fulfilling state functions...
...From what moral perspective, our historian of ideas asks, can we make sense out of the concomitant rise of bureaucracy and decline of authority...
...From Nisbet's account and from everyone's personal experience, hierarchical authority is on the decline in the United States...
...This potential contradiction explains the perennial split among sectarians between social democracy and decentralization, between accepting some authority as the price for reducing inequality or choosing the route we now call "small is beautiful," thus tolerating some competition in order to avoid further restriction on individual behavior...
...T FI F A N1 ER IC'A N SPECTATOR I.k print Dcpari nit-nl...
...Moving up to the next of our quotations from Nisbet under his dictionary designation of "ENTHUSIASM," we find a classic description of sectarianism: people are good but are corrupted by evil institutions...
...To do justice to this extraordinary volume would be quite impossible...
...to say on the subject credible...
...It should also be evident, with exceptions for monopolies, that the growth of state regulation would not be the primary preference of a market culture...
...S I _75 tnr Qne $1 O.1X for ie 575.0D for one hundred f.150,(N) for rive hu rrdred 1 C'~tti 5i i Zip X3 MW Consider the case of Hamilton Jordan...
...Other hierarchical institutions are less likely to be respected when government is reviled...
...Darwin says that the processes operating in the past are still exerting their full force today...
...Alas, poor Ham, we knew him all too well...
...In this way, for a time at least, rejection of authority and use of government to secure equality may be reconciled...
...Amused at being instructed, we learn while laughing...
...B O O K R E V I E W S "Fanatics have their dreams," observed Keats, "wherewith they weave a para dise for a sect...
...Respect for individual liberty makes it possible for human beings to live in and be aware of differentiation...
...Bureaucracy grows on the grounds it is necessary to increase equality but this selfsame desire to diminish differences in society is employed to deprive gov ernment of authority...
...As for current passions, Nisbet argues that "the rage to political entitlements alone is sufficient to explain a Aaron Wildavsky teaches political science at the University of California, Berkeley...
...Reluctant to make painful choices, sectarians adopt a recognizable strategy-building up the state bureaucracy to secure redistribution while simultaneously denying it authority...
...And if the answer is, Yes, let me ask: is it worth more than a footnote...
...Belief in liberty rather than equality cannot help but make acceptable the differences of strength, talent, and will which are as natural to the social as to the biological order...
...on the other, they can weaken the market forces to which they are opposed...
...On one side, they can hope to achieve greater equality in society...
...The nonexistent growth of hierarchy cannot be responsible for contemporary complaints...
...What Americans call liberalism, Nisbet asserts, represents a "blatantly schizoid . . . condition," seeking to extend individual liberty and even license on one hand and embracing state intervention on the other...
...And the scene just described, mind you, occurred in the period after Jimmy Carter's eminence grits was said by the news media to have cleaned up his act as a rustic smart-ass...
...I never want to go back...
...Public feelings are dominated by the "rust of memory" called nostalgia or, better still, "what the French call nostalgie de la boue, literally nostalgia for the mud...
...Nowadays, one could not make a credible charge invoking witchcraft, but the same sort of thing (see today's newspaper or this evening's television news program) may be found in the endless accusations of secret, harmful external forces invading the human body or the natural environment to wreak destruction on unconsenting adults...
...Let us call on Robert Nisbet, the historian of ideas and social movements, to aid Robert Nisbet, the acute observer of the contemporary scene...
...Fearing that state power will overturn weakened sources of social support, he argues that [t]he only remedy for the poisons created by egalitarianism in a society is emphatically not ever-greater dosages of political redistribution of wealth in state, for such dosages worsen the disease, producing fevers of avarice and envy...
...They don't have any identity anymore, other than "She was a member of the Ford administration, " or "He was a member of Nixon's Cabinet...
...IN 114,O2...
...To say that there is too much bureaucracy is not necessarily to say that hierarchy is inherently evil...
...Carried to its extreme, sectarianism becomes hyper-pluralism The saddest thing about Washington is all those people who live there in the past...
...ENTHUSIASM The whole of the evolutionary epic can be explained, Darwin further insisted, by study of contemporaneous processes in nature, for the processes which were instrumental in the remote past are said to be still instrumental in the present...
...DARWINISM A combination of playfulness and learning make this philosophical dictionary irresistible...
...then the Press Secretary's...
...not to forget the anguished memoirs that spin from the ghost-writers and word processors of disenchanted ex-presidential advisers...
Vol. 16 • February 1983 • No. 2
