Straight Shooting

...Who could ever forget the notion, expressed in that period, that America might well be the first powerful nation in history to move from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization...

...The monstrosity of government, the impotence of Powers, the separation of races, the conformity of nations, the purposelessness of society, the fiction of prosperity, the dissolution of learning, the meaninglessness of letters, the senselessness of the arts, the destruction of nature, the decay of science, the faithlessness of religion, the mutation of morality were, all, at hand...

...That is, they are busily engaged in the equivalent of creating new diseases and in applying themselves as leeches to the body politic...

...In any case, such declamations would be more appropriate in a lecture to a Rotary or an Optimist Club than in a serious book...

...Unlike physicians, who employ their skills in trying to cure patients, lawyers, "through their dominant role in legislatures and regulatory commissions, are engaged in creating new rules, torts, and crimes, new occasions for litigation...

...He stops well short though of arraigning "higher education" in general for what in fact it now is: a business, like any other,whose primary concern is the making of money...

...Happiness is within the reach of anyone, for some of the poorest are happy...

...We must find it possible to live happily in an imperfect world with self-confidence and joy, for there is stern reality [my italics!] to be faced and much hard work to be done [still my emphasis...

...In "The Litigious Society," by far the most incisive chapter of his book, he takes a hard look at our legal system, and how that system has encouraged, even made inevitable, the enormous growth of the number of lawyers in the country...

...As their numbers increase—and we have four times as many lawyers per capita as any European nation, and the number of lawyers in Japan is smaller than the number we graduate from our law schools each year—so too will the number of rules, regulations, codes, and laws increase...

...In any case, the odor is not offensive...

...In more recent studies, Lukacs, a prolific writer who deserves a wider audience than he has got, has told us a great deal about the contemporary world—always the hardest age to see clearly—in such volumes as 1945: Year Zero (1978) and Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the 7iventieth Century (1984...

...Americans were beset by the fatal flaw of their mental habits, their tendency to state human problems wrongly...

...I can argue, however, that Silber is playing fast and loose with logic in such sentences as these: "Virtue is within the reach of us all, for some of the least educated are good...

...Incidentally, Silber's interest in running for governor of Massachusetts, on the Democratic ticket, may explain his unwonted temperance, his refusal to be as harsh as one might expect, in Stmight Shooting, which, now that I think of it, gives off the odor of a campaign book...

...And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows...

...Suffice it to say that Straight Shooting falls far, far short of fulfilling the promise of that humorless subtitle...

...Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy...

...Which remindsme of a conversation I once had with Malcolm Muggeridge in which he noted that he looked forward to the day when the entire national budget would go to education—at which time we would have succeeded in attaining total illiteracy...

...By no means a great book, not the sort to make the judicious sing hallelujah or shout eureka, but a tome that has its moments, that steers a steady course, that does a good deal more than mouth the current platitudes (though it has a few of those, too) about the various and sundry ailments afflicting the body and soul of the Republic—or of what was once a republic before going down the inevitable William H. Nolte is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Carolina...

...He concludes his somber assessment by offering, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, a modest proposal in the form of a simple constitutional amendment: Admission to the bar of any court of the United States, or to any bar of any of the several states, shall be an absolute disqualification for candidacy for election to either branch of the legislature of the United States, or to either branch of the legislature of any of the several states, provided, that no sitting member of any of the several legislatures when this amendment shall be ratified shall be removed from office or prohibited from standing for reelection...

...And money can be made only so long as the myth, a myth peculiar to this century, that everyone is educable is kept alive...

...They were preoccupied with the persistence of violence whereas their problem was the re-emergence of savagery...

...In the work of Henry and Brooks Adams there was gloomy prophecy—and some very bad guesses as to specifics...

...Rather, he laments the absence of moral instruction in today's schools, and reminds us, somewhat platitudinously, that "if there is to be effective moral education, it must begin in early childhood...

...As he shows with examples, the best schools are those funded by local taxes, as in New Hampshire, where students score well above the national average in SATs despite the fact that the average salary of teachers in that state ranks forty-second in the nation...

...With those conditions in place, he readily (and logically) concluded that it would be impossible for a man of his "general weaknesses, vanities, appetites, prejudices, and aversions" to live in These States and not be happy...

...T n the second of the book's three major divisions, Silber concerns himself with university affairs, and is hence on home territory and can speak from practical experience...

...Romantic Christendom—picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode—may be coming to an end...

...He began his famous essay "On Being an American" (1922) by explaining why he remained at home when so many of his compatriots were fleeing theshambles for fairer lands, intent on throwing off the curse forever...

...And once more, driving the nail out of sight: "The genius of democracy is found in this paradox: that we are all a dime a dozen and that we are all magnificent...

...Quite simply, he remained "on the dock, wrapped in the flag, when the Young Intellectuals set sail" since only here could the conditions for his happiness be so fully met...

...Above all, I wish that Silber had said something about the obvious fact that we have far too many students in our colleges and universities...

...He rests his optimism on the growing dissatisfaction "with hedonism and materialism as a way of life" and on the growing awareness that our schools are ripe for reform...

...In the next chapter, Silber lectures us on the need we all have for heroes as models (and in the lecture I hear Walt Whitman singing...

...But then he is a university president (of Boston University) and hence cannot be expected to be candid about that fact...

...His delirious indictment of that delirious time needs hardly the change of a word to suit our own generation of swine, to borrow Hunter Thompson's apt phrase...

...A bit hyperbolic, to be sure, but still a point worth considering...

...In Europe there reigned cynicism and calculation, something that to many people of the Old World was at least not entirely unfamiliar...

...We must join with one another to build a sounder foundation than pleasure, a foundation of enduring happiness that . ." But enough, God help me, before I sprout wings and take flight from earth altogether...

...Here he also places himself on the right—that is, the publicly approved—side of the demos when he argues that in a democracy the lower orders (my term) are all "a dime a dozen, and they are magnificent," and then adds for effect: "The great fact about human beings is that we are both dime a dozen and magnificent...

...De gustibus non est disputandum...

...In the preface to his Character and Opinion in the United States (1921), George Santayana said serenely what others tended to say in anger and dismay: "Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time...

...In all cases of law, no matter how frivolous, the lawyers, and as often as not only 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 the lawyers, stand to benefit...

...There Silber expatiates on five "crucial issues," one after the other: the decline of the family, loss of respect for teachers, loss of "moral understanding and of moral focus in teaching young people," misguided programs of bilingual education, and the assumption that money will solve these problems...

...But such a catastrophe, he added, was no reason for despair, given the fact that "even if the world lost its memory it could not lose its youth...

...In the next chapter, "Teachers in a Troubled Society," there is, alas, more of the same...

...John Silber should never have al- lowed his publisher (I assume the blame should be placed there since publishers are notorious for their lack of probity when it comes to merchandizing their wares) to use as subtitle to Straight Shooting such an inanity as "What's Wrong With America and How to Fix It...

...Moving forward half a century to The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), John Lukacs, a Hungarian-born historian, described the spirit of the age in a way that now seems almost fashionable: By the middle of the 1960s most people of the Western World, even in America, felt the prevalence of despair...

...Still, he admits to being "deeply optimistic" about the future...

...After proposing various solutions to this problem, Silber finally admits that, short of a major political upheaval, nothing much can be done: "Why should the lawyers who make the law throw away a good thing...

...Silber is at his best, it seems to me, in further exploding the myth that spending more money, especially federal funds, on education will lead to better schools...

...The examples Silber gives of lawyers at work—i.e., engaged in picking the pockets of the rest of us, and of institutions in particular—will cause any reader to question the notion that we are a nation of laws...

...In more and more places American civilization was succumbing to the temptations of a motorized and drugged witches' sabbath, at the edges of which reappeared the impassive savage ghost of the Indian...

...c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste...

...0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 41...

...I happen to disagree, but then it's disagreements that make for horse races...

...How does he support, qualify, or refute such ballyhooed tomes as, for example, The Closing of the American Mind and Cultural Literacy...

...Oddly enough, since the first half of his book concerns education—more specifically, what's going on in the schools at all levels—he never mentions either of those books, and barely touches on the problems they explore...

...In addition, no lawyer shall be the director of any regulatory agency...

...I confess that I have not seen enough such dissatisfaction to cause me to hope that any change for the better is near at hand...

...b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men...

...22.50 William H. Nolte THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 39 only civilization that some of us have known, began to set in...

...Not much is said about any of those issues that doesn't verge on the obvious...

...All of which in turn creates a need for more lawyers...

...He concludes that first chapter: "We must quickly come to terms with our unavoidable imperfections and with the unavoidable imperfections of our institutions...

...and in the four decades since the end of World War livo it has become obvious that educational courses, as Silber says, have little to do with education...

...A few people were aware of that fact from the beginning—when Teachers College of Columbia University, the most infamous of the pedagogic zoos, started up its boilers and began erupting smoke back in the heady days following the First World War...

...Such a proposal, he reminds us, "is no more extreme and far more benign than the legal reform proposed by Dick the Eutcher in Shakespeare's Henry VI: `First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.' " In his conclusion Silber goes back over the list of follies into which our society has fallen...

...But things get better in his chapters on "Education and Democracy in the Age of Television" and "Academic Freedom and Civilization...

...For the person who knows little about the world of academe, which is to say for almost everyone who is not either a professor or an administrator, these five chapters will be instructive, particularly the chapter on "Poisoning the Wells of Academe," wherein Silber recounts some of the more obnoxious antics of the "radicals" in the sixties and early seventies who in the name of Freedom helped transform the so-called halls of learning into something not far removed from monkey houses...

...We all know by now, for instance, that our schools of education have been an almost unrelieved disaster...

...We already expect them to be more intelligent than the average, and it would clearly be unreasonable to expect them to be more virtuous...

...And while on the clef note of humor (or the humorless), it seems to me apparent that only a humorist—someone with the bitter insight of a Swift, an Ambrose Bierce, or a Mark Twain, or the gargantuan waggery and iconoclasm of a Mencken—is capable of providing a just appraisal of the Great American Follies, of what one of our greatest poets referred to half a century ago as "the immense vulgarities of misapplied science and decaying Christianity" (but then Jeffers was describing Western civilization in general and not just America...

...This was a new experience for civilized mankind, especially for Americans...

...Along the way he takes the opportunity to pay off a few old scores against various of the Jacobins who pestered him in his early days as an administrator...

...road to empire...

...Then, neatly in place, follow the three "conditions," fleshed out in a rhetoric that, after all these years, still delights me: Here the business of getting a living, particularly since the war brought the loot of all Europe to the national strong-box, is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts, to that end...

...In fact, he is overly selective in his criticism of the professoriate in general...

...And to be happy, he noted (reducing the thing to its elementals), he had to be: a. Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion...

...Aside from a few remarks about the lowering of standards, the need for the faculties to correct themselves (which, needless to say, they will never willingly do), and the observation that resentment is "an academic vice, perhaps the academic vice," he seems almost oblivious to the fraudulence now endemic in higher education...

...After then pausing to admit that "a certain sough of rhetoric may be here," Mencken went on to examine the present and recent past of his beloved homeland with a wit and wisdom seldom approached by an American of his time...

...But I am too besotted with qualifications, with a schoolmarmish demand, if you will, for precision...

...To ensure that the myth be maintained it has of course been necessary to lower standards—to demand little or nothing from those who are able and willing to pay the enormous costs of what is referred to as "getting an education...

...Arthur Bestor created something of a stir with his Educational Wastelands (1953), but now the "educationist" joke is so stale that it hardly warrants retelling...

...It's hard to imagine that Silber, a man of wide learning, a trained logician who respects the language and has an abiding interest in distinguishing between fact and error, between the obviously untrue and what the rational mind perceives as truth—in short, not a man readily susceptible to buncombe of any sort—should have permitted, without protest, such an outrageously inflated claim to be printed on the dust-jacket and title-page of what is in fact a pretty good book...

...In a memorable poem, "Shine, Perishing Republic," written in the 1920s, Jeffers described an America settling "in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire . . ." Unlike the vast majority of the condemners of our second-rateness in that decade, much like the one now swirling to a close, Mencken reveled in what he revealed, adamantly refusing to allow bad news or his shabby surroundings to disturb his peace of mind...

...A flood of barbarism from below may soon level all the fair works of our Christian ancestors, as another flood two thousand years ago leveled those of the ancients...

...It seemed that this once Indian land may have left a curse on its conquerors...

...In any event, the old things and beliefs were now beginning to go very fast...

...The generalizations are not proved true by the examples given—or else I have forgotten my Aristotle...

...For a judicious (and juicy) examination of that fraudulence, one can do no better than consult Charles Sykes's ProfScany Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (Regnery Gateway...

...ut I forget John Silber and his LP Straight Shooting...

...Other writers of the period around the First World War were equally harsh and even more gloomy in their assessment not only of America but of Western civilization, which was depicted by Oswald Spengler, among others, as already far gone in its decline...

...What does he have to add to the chorus of lamentation now so loud in the land...

...We just differ in our tastes...

...In his third and final section, entitled "Lessons Out of School," Silber discourses on such varied topics as the War on Poverty (and how it has gone awry), on the abortion issue, on the failure of the Head Start program to rescue children from the disastrous factors, in particular television, that now condition them from infancy, on the need to restore the Kennedy Doctrine in Central America, on the need to maintain a powerful military force, and so on...

...In many ways the end of the Modern Age, of the STRAIGHT SHOOTING: WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA AND HOW TO FIX IT John Silber/Harper & Row/336 pp...

...In his secret heart he may agree with Thomas Jefferson that education is by its very nature selective, "the peculium of a well-sifted elite," to use the polished phrase of Albert Jay Nock, but for one in his position to espouse openly any such belief would be tantamount to committing suicide...