Out of Step

...Still, there is a tendency to take the failure to prove God's existence as proof of his non-existence...

...We hear similar things from alumni in medicine and politics, from those called to religious life, and others in the vocation of homemaker...

...Indeed, the most puzzling aspect of Out of Step is the author's continued affection, quite unlike him, for a socialism that does not now work anywhere and never has (with the possible exception of voluntary organizations like Christian religious orders and Israeli kibbutzim...

...In most other men it would be enough to leave it at that...

...outside California: 1-800-634-9797...

...Instead he alternates between acknowledging the shortcomings of socialism and sniping at those who extol the virtues of capitalism...

...Early experiences with churchmen, particularly Roman Catholic hierarchy, who used their influence to block teachers like Bertrand Russell, evidently convinced him that faith is not compatible with intellectual freedom...

...To be sure, this does not constitute a logical proof...

...Unfortunately, in the case of a man whose hallmark was a courageous day-to-day commitment to freedom at the most trying times, focusing on areas of divergence can distort the entire picture...

...Moreover, though religion is not logically essential to morals, it has a better track record than most anything else...

...A philosopher by trade, Hook naturally tends to attribute his successes to reason...

...And, we might add, that faith in the alternative seems far less reasonable...

...he seems to take that as the only model of Christianity: Protestantism never gets a hearing...

...At one point he notes that "the very meaning of socialism changed once we [socialist intellectuals] abandoned serious advocacy of collective ownership of all social means of production, distribution, and exchange...

...erhaps the most glaring reluctance of Hook and others is the failure to come to grips with the socialism of Nazi Germany, which most of them try to fob off as a product of the market in a confusion of big business with capitalism...

...In the end he makes an uneasy peace with a free-enterprise system that includes Ronald Reagan's "safety net...

...At the outset, for example, he admits to two main errors that distorted his vision for some time: a lack of appreciation for Zionism, and an, underestimation of the regenerative powers of American capitalism...

...The subject holds more than theoretical interest for Hook, in that a few years back he suffered a heart attack, the treatment of which triggered a stroke...

...In the political and intellectual arenas, he has distinguished himself as a champion of freedom, a mature thinker who tolerates the inevitable distasteful excesses such freedom entails to preserve the precious core ("heresy, not conspiracy" is the good rule of thumb he proposes, the title of a book he wrote on the subject...

...The wonderful fact is that we achieve these things without aiming directly at them...

...Although fascism and corporatism are different from the Soviet or Chinese versions of the collective, the former are equally far away from the free market philosophy Hook seems to find so abstract and antihuman...

...True, Hook does at one point allude to Hitler's claim to socialism, but a more explicit reference talks of both Roosevelt's America and Hitler's Germany as "capitalist powers...

...Besides," as he admits, "critical articles and reviews are more interesting as a rule than purely expository or interpretive ones...

...He explained this at a 1949 conference in Paris, where he characteristically described himself as a socialist and just as characteristically paid homage to the higher value of human freedom: I have more in common with a democrat who differs with me on economic questions, but who firmly believes in civil rights and a peaceful method of resolving his differences, than with any professed Socialist who would seize power by a minority coup, keep it by terror, and take orders from a foreign tyrant...

...Obversely, as the Times piece attests, he has also been William McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...

...Let OUT OF STEP: AN UNQUIET LIFE IN THE 20TH CENTURY Sidney Hook/Harper & Row/$29.95 William McGurn 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 the market decide" is one typical phrase, as though there were an identifiable "thing" as the market making that decision...

...Perhaps that is why, sensing he is on weak ground, he shies away from outlining a specific economic arrangement...

...But then so are our political choices, at least in democracy...

...For example, despite all his disagreement with Roman Catholicism, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 37 large holds himself...

...That's what Robert Orellana, who holds a sought-after clerkship with the U.S...

...He argues, for example, that "men create God in their own image," whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition holds just the opposite...

...Our alumni tell us so...

...And living in the truth is the best path to happiness in this world and in the next...

...Like the Aquinas who maintained that a sense of humor was logically incompatible with a deity, Hook might be better off not always taking things all the way to their logical conclusions...

...If these "failures" seem to loom large it is only because Hook's achievements are likewise disproportionate...

...It is simply the record, which shows Hook "prematurely antiwar in 1917-21, prematurely antifascist, prematurely a Communist fellow-traveller, prematurely an anticommunist, prematurely, in radical circles, a supporter of the war against Hitler, prematurely a cold warrior against Stalin's effort to extend the Gulag Archipelago, prematurely against the policy of detente and appeasement, prematurely for a national civil-rights program against all forms of discrimination, including reverse discrimination...

...At another congress, his cooperation with East European Catholic priests in support of a resolution in favor of philosophical freedom earned him an attack from Irving Howe on the unlikely charge that he had sold out to Rome...

...Our alumni succeed by all the standard measures in graduate schools, in the professions, in every sort of career...

...he recounts an almost touching argument with Jacques Maritain over the mechanics of baptism that suggests a preoccupation with religious ritual, religious practice, and religious people that never quite gets to the strange but central claim of religion itself...

...It is precisely this abiding fairness that allowed him, time and again, to rise above particular disagreements to unite with others to address the larger issues...

...It does not have the virtue of seeing life whole, but the part that it does see takes us further than most...

...We think it's worth it...

...He notes that few of his friends really considered socialism on its economic merits...

...One smiles inwardly when contemplating the withering reply Hook would deliver to an adversary who tried to squeeze out of a problem by changing the definition...

...As also might be expected for those familiar with Hook, the gist of his article was to disagree: the doctor, he insists, ought to have let him die...

...nor, for that matter, does it have to do much with intellect...

...They think they've gained the intellectual edge...

...By thesame token, a religion that bases itself on a "hidden God" has no claim to be indignant when some fail to find him...

...It was the gift of perspective...

...Whatever the merits of the particular case he might have been advancing at any given time, Hook has never stood accused of an unwillingness to put principle above self...

...The "magic of the marketplace" is another, conjuring up a mysterious system based on economic hocus-pocus...

...Hitler and Stalin (both of whom invoke the term socialism) have written in letters of fire over the skies of Europe this message: Socialism without political democracy is not Socialism but slavery...

...And like all ideas, that of being created in God's image has profound consequences for how we may treat our fellow man...

...It costs something to spend four years studying the great books at Thomas Aquinas College...

...This is not to deny that the decisions of men and women at the bottom of this system are constrained, sometimes severely so...

...The author's life, therefore, has been a constant testing of principles against reason and experience, and it exhibits a concomitant willingness to amend an initial assessment when that is the upshot of the exercise...

...In his defense, the language of free market partisans—this writer is no exception—often does not help...

...But it does go a long way toward establishing that "preponderance of evidence" the author suggests as a guide to conclusions...

...For Hook is no ordinary atheist, no bigot...

...When it comes to religion, Hook's powers of discrimination fail him...

...In the gray pages of the Times he described how, during a lucid moment, he pleaded with the doctor to end the agony...

...T o score Sidney Hook on such 1 points is not an indictment of his character...

...From Morris Cohen, whom he criticizes for a ruthless teaching style, to Albert Einstein, whose views on the Soviet Union he found absurd, to the Partisan Review crowd, whom he dismisses as "revolutionary comedians," to Ronald Reagan, whom he deems too irresolute in foreign affairs and too attached to ideology in domestic ones, neither friend nor foe escapes...

...From the first, one senses, Hook was saved from the philosophic pitfall of a personal reductio ad absurdum by an ability not only to see problems but to discriminate be-tween them and act accordingly...

...The outcome of this gift is an absence of black-and-white condemnation of even his enemies (and, for that matter, black-and-white praise for his friends...

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...And although he clearly regarded Whittaker Chambers's digressions about God as bizarre, he credits Chambers with courage, even attributing it to his religious conversion...

...The alternatives propounded by philosophers over the ages have failed miserably, generally because they require populations of Marcus Aureliuses and Sidney Hooks to make them work...

...Without ever endorsing the free market for its positive contributions, he confesses that the idea that extending such power to the state threatened freedom did not occur to these early socialists...

...This is not to deny that Hook's particular grievances vis-a-vis religion arevalid...

...When Newman wrote that no man would be a martyr for a conclusion, he did not reckon on Sidney Hook...

...The incident is mentioned in the author's just-published memoirs, Out of Step...

...In his case, for example, he was "drawn to socialism on ethical grounds," attracted by its "apparent rationality," its "sense of human fraternity," its "heroic element...

...To be sure, Hook's continued socialism is more implied than stated, and in the one part of the book where he does make his positive vestigial beliefs explicit he says he is "an unreconstructed believer" in "the welfare state," a far cry from the socialism that led him to vote Communist in 1932 or to help found the American Workers Party a few years later...

...even Delmore Schwartz "alarmed" Hook by confessing an attraction to the Church of Rome...

...Court of Appeals, tells us: "Having read the work of the masters, instead of textbooks, you come to cases in law with all the skills you need to understand and analyze them...

...How capitalism became confused with mere bigness is a paradox, given its kerproposition: that the ability of those on the bottom to enter into the market acts as a wedge to prevent the abuses of the giant...

...either position may be intellectually entertained but neither can be logically refuted...

...Later he recalls one of his high school students, a young tough who couldn't bring himself to repeat in the classroom an obscene comment about his mother even though he had engaged in a knife fight over it...

...These were not mere words...

...All are measured by their devotion to freedom, and, not surprisingly, all fall somewhat short...

...It can only aim to show, via, for example, the Aquinate proofs that so fascinate and repel Hook, not that we can "prove" God's existence, but that it is not repugnant to reason...

...willing to stick to his beliefs in the absence of any new objective evidence to the contrary...

...Without using himself as an example (which example would be eminently justified), he insists that morality can be constructed outside religious faith...

...Of course (as he would be the first to concede), this can have disastrous consequences if the principles themselves are not sound...

...It's no secret, either, that the study of ethics today tends to undermine belief in a rational framework for morals, just as Hook's own memoirs bitterly attest to the lack of what he concludes is the pre-eminent virtue—moral courage—in the academy...

...At the outset, for example, he mentions that the Irish gangs who beat up the Jewish boys in his neighborhood were nonetheless "chivalrous" in their fighting (the Sicilians score less well on this point...

...such .a memory seems to heighten the outrage Hook felt when some NYU students disrupted a faculty meeting and one, pointing to the hat still on his head, said it remained there as a deliberate sign of disrespect for the teachers in the room (remarkably enough, the teachers applauded him for that...

...Ask our alumni They know...

...But Hook is smart enough to realize that letting the market decide means no more than to leave it to the free decisions of men and women to enter into agreements with one another...

...to the contrary, dissent for dissent's sake he forthrightly labels "mindless...

...That Hitler's party was called the National Socialist Workers Party does not seem to have discredited socialism in the least...

...All in all, Hook's objections to God appear downright, well, scholastic...

...Of course, many of those who have been directly involved with Hook are no doubt bound to be rankled by the unsentimental dissection of past events and personalities...

...In taking stock of his own life Hook subjects himself to the same standard...

...Yet this same champion of freedom only grudgingly acknowledges similar arguments—and evidence —about the economic dimension...

...Indeed, if he weren't so dogmatically opposed to dogmas and so intent on forcing them into his own framework, he might find that many of the West's moral assumptions trace themselves to these dogmas, assumptions he by and G od is quite another matter...

...Equally important is his opposition to the philosophical premise that only religion provides a basis for morality...

...There is no problem in conceding this point, as any number of faithful do...

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...oupled with an old-fashioned sense of fair play, Hook's immoderate reasonableness makes easy criticism of his positions impossible...

...Although he contends that "faith in the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving god has no more intellectual justification than faith in the existence of a cosmic Santa Claus," he equally holds that "the questions of God, freedom, and immortality are the most important of all questions that human beings can face...

...In fairness, he was not alone in these misjudgments and, when events proved him mistaken, he more than most displayed a willingness to reexamine his assumptions to find out where he had gone wrong...

...That Hook is so far off base here can be seen in a reference to a "reliance on laws that operate under ideal conditions," a charge more befitting centrally planned economies...

...Nor did he permit disagreement in one realm to lead him to denigrate an-other's achievements in other areas...

...Financial aid program • Bachelor of Arts degree • Coeducational Fully accredited, Western Association of Schools & Colleges Or write: Thomas J. Susanka Director of Admissions Box 104 THOMAS AQUINAS COLLEGE 10000 North Ojai Road Santa Paula, CA 93060 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987...

...Over the course of eight decades it has even pushed its main proponent up to its outer boundaries, leading him to shift intelligence to second place after moral courage in his pantheon of virtues, as well as to deduce something suspiciously close to the concept of original sin to explain the rationally inexplicable...

...nor does he turn his attention to any religious aspect of Judaism...

...Nor is this nonconformity the outcome of any desire to Opater le bourgeois...

...The treatment of Catholicism itself is odd, using as he does the positions of Mortimer Adler—a nonCatholic—and the church almost interchangeably...

...It comes to this: I laving basic truths is the key to finding more truth...

...As might be expected in an article of this genre, the good doctor refused, the patient went on to make a satisfactory recovery, and, as he notes, the case is used as an argument against honoring requests by other patients in extremis...

...But the cause of freedom in our time has been advanced largely because he has, and it is the reason we can apply to Hook the same assessment, quoted in these memoirs, that Lionel Trilling gave to Whittaker Chambers: he was a man of honor...

...Certainly Hook cannot be unaware of the arguments, especially having now taken shelter under the roof of the Hoover Institution...

...It is merely an argument about evidence, what we accept as evidence and what weight we attach to it...

...But Hook is so far above other men in both intellect and honesty that he ought to be pressed for a more exacting account...

...Although Hook does not flinch at the eternal silence of these infinite spaces, many of his erstwhile colleagues did, ultimately coming around, to Hook's great distress, to a deity...

...This was the fate of, among others, James Burnham, William Barrett, Whittaker Chambers, and Will Herberg...

...But Hook rarely addresses religious propositions on their own terms...

...Now, a being in which the author clearly does not believe might not be expected to play much of a role in his memoirs, but the almighty, despite his nonexistence, nonetheless manages a remarkable, one might say miraculous, number of appearances...

...We aim for the truth, the source that makes them worth doing...

...In light of this willingness, Hook's judgments in two other areas—God and socialism—are all the more incongruous...

...In nearly any other writer such a title would be an expression of vanity, but in the case of a man who indicts his doctor for having kept him alive it is an understatement...

...For capitalism, like democracy, sees the perfect as the enemy of the good...

...But his memoirs suggest he underestimates his own horse sense, especially in light of the shameless causes so many other men of reason attached themselves to...

...Having lived, by his own account, a happy and fulfilled life, marked by what he confesses is not a small measure of luck, he's almost even moved to prayer—but for the realization that this is impossible, because "a world of chance rules out an author of nature...